It Looks Like You're Writing a Letter

Above a dog-trimming parlour that was actually a front for a prolific drug dealer, on the second floor of a nondescript brownstone in Tulsa, Oklahama, was a tiny office. The sign on the door read 'Henry Thorner - Consultant'.

Henry Thorner was in the business of finding missing things. Specifically, finding missing people. He had been in this business almost twenty years but trade was dwindling as it became more and more difficult for someone to disappear. Nowadays, if someone went missing it was either because they wanted to be missing or they were dead. Or both.

A reasonably long stint working as a bail bondsman had been curtailed by a series of poor decisions made a long time ago. Since then he'd freelanced, taken any job that came up, and kept on making poor decisions. He was 56 years old today. His hair was shot with silvery-grey, and every year of his life and every worry he'd ever had was etched deeply onto a face you would be kind to describe as 'weathered'.

"Happy birthday, Thorner." He raised a glass of artificially flavoured liquor to himself and drained it. Rain battered the window of his cheap, well-hidden office space. A fluorescent billboard advertising breath mints sporadically lit his cluttered desk.

It had been some months since his last job had left him with medical bills significantly larger than his fee. He was still walking with a slight limp. It turned out that the rich society brat he was charged with locating was only lost in a drug-induced stupor in some far-flung wing of the family mansion. Meanwhile, Thorner had traced his target's movements through hop joints, ladyboy parlours, peep shows and eventually a Federation drugs nest, where he caught a bullet while trying to make an exit. Only a chance phone call to one of the teenager's teachers finally took him to the prize. The parents didn't seem particularly pleased to get their little treasure back, but paid him anyway.

Martha used to badger him to advertise, "put himself out there" she used to say, but even when she was alive he never had any real interest in computers. Of course, he'd grown up with their ubiquitous presence, just like everyone else, but there was an old part of his soul that just didn't gel with the open source society of the new reality.

Some old Sec contacts fed him a lead now and then. Anything that was either too easy or too difficult for their computer boffins to wrap up on their lunch break generally came his way. Even those had started to dry up as his old colleagues retired or got killed protecting the rights of one of the three multi-conglomerates that, to all intents and purposes, owned the world.

Thorner's office was silent. It was the sort of silent that most people didn't even know anymore. On the rare occasions a client came up the narrow stairs to sit opposite him in the torn leather chair he offered, they couldn't fail to notice the oppressive quiet. No fans whirring, no conductive panels sighing, no notification chirps. No telephone, no Collaborator, no TalkRight.

Thorner wore an old digital watch - a piece from earlier in the century for which batteries had to be imported at great cost - but save that his left forearm was conspicuously naked. When budget allowed, Thorner made a point of having his left shirt sleeve altered by a tailor to be the same dimensions as his right, just like they used to be.

All this meant that if someone wanted to talk to - or hire - Thorner, they had to walk up the two flights of narrow stairs, knock on the door and if granted entry by the dilapidated speaker system, sit in the old chair that was as creased and antiquated as its owner.

Which is exactly what Sue did.

The bark of the speaker made Thorner jump. He couldn't work out if he'd just dropped off to sleep or some facsimile of it prompted by nostalgia. Either way, he suddenly found himself scrambling to hide his liquor glass, bottle, and old food wrappers, all the while stalling for time.

"Who is it?"

"Sue. My name is Sue, I was told you can uh... find people when the Grid can't?"

"Who told you that?" Thorner asked. He was flustered, darting around the tiny room.

"A friend. He said you used to be good but suspected you were dead."

"Is that so? Do I sound dead to you?"

"Huh? Can I come in Mr Thorner?"

BZZZZT. Thorner stabbed the door release button and it opened with an asthmatic wheeze. Sue walked in. She was around 19, at a guess. Small with a half-shaved head and a tribal tattoo of a dragon with a monkey's head snaking around her neck. She was dressed in countless layers of black lace and velvet, like a Victorian doll on its way to a funeral. A constellation of studs shone at Thorner from various parts of her anatomy.

"Won't you please have a seat Miss... Sue?"

Sue eyed the place dubiously - something that wasn't lost on Thorner.

"I'm having renovations done."

"This century?"

Thorner gave her a blank stare. He wasn't really in the mood for sassiness, or for anything really. If the rent wasn't already four months overdue he probably wouldn't even have opened the door.

"How can I help you, Miss?"

"You find people, right? You're that guy?"

"I'm that guy."

"You're not what I was expecting."

Thorner raised an eyebrow and asked a question he already knew he was going to regret. "And what, may I ask, were you expecting?"

"Somebody... younger. A computer whiz I guess? Shit, it's quiet in here. What is that? I can hear the blood running through my brain!"

"Yes, well. I'm as old as I am through no fault of my own Miss."

"Yeah, sure OK. Listen can you help me or not?" Sue's arm lit up and began chirping. She made no apology as she tended to it like a needy child. Thorner found himself quietly grinding his teeth as he stared steadily at her, his face getting hotter.

"Miss, I can help you but I must ask that you mute your TalkRight."

"It's not a TalkRight, it's actually a Xenius. This year's model if you must know. Well, last year's but you know the 8b only got released a month ago and it's pretty much the same." She gabbled the description, almost as a reflex. He couldn't even pretend to be interested.

"Either way, I don't want it bleeping and flashing in my office, so if you want to talk, shut it off."

Sue rolled her eyes so hard Thorner was afraid they might leave her face and end up under his filing cabinet. Nonetheless, she complied with a sullen waft of her hand. The arm piece glowed a muffled blue and was silent.

"It's my brother, Mr Thorner. He's missing and I'm really worried."

"OK, what can you tell me about him?"

"He's like - a freelance data acquisition operative."

"A hacker."

"No. People pay him to get things for them - just like they pay you to get things for them." She was amusingly indignant in the way only teenagers can be.

"The difference is, I return things to their proper place. People like your brother steal for the highest bidder and the owner never gets their stuff back."

"Whatever, Mr Thorner. I wouldn't have thought someone in your... situation," she looked around disparagingly, "would be in a position to let morals get in the way of a job. I can pay you. I have money."

He had to admit she had a point. Her brother could have been giving corporate secrets to the Federation for all he cared. Nonetheless, he felt compelled to appear aloof.

"Alright, let's get down to specifics. When did you last hear from him?"

"His avatar was last seen in Wichita late last night. He fuzzed out and never came back. That's not like him. It's so weird."

"He fuzzed out? What does that mean?"

"Fuzzed - he was using a Fuzzer, probably from his employer, to hide himself while he worked. He's such a pro, best in the business, you've probably heard of him? His name's Tanner Griffen."

Thorner briefly considered bluffing but just didn't have the energy. "Nope. I don't really run in those circles." Sue looked a little crestfallen.

"So you don't know what he was stealing while he was fuzzed?" asked Thorner.

"No. He never told me anything about what he was doing work-wise. He said it was safer for me that way."

"Probably was. Is. Anyway, I'm going to need a recent photograph, list of known contacts and current address. My fee is 30,000 credits, payable half now, half when I find him."

Sue's face screwed up into petulant ridges. It wasn't attractive.

"You can get all that - just search him on the Grid?"

"Miss, I'm not on the Grid."

Sue could not comprehend this. Thorner saw a million questions shoot across her doll-like face, jostle for priority and collapse under their own weight.

"But how do you... live?" she asked incredulously, eyeing him like a sideshow curiosity.

"Miss, I live just fine. Better than fine, actually. Nobody knows where I am, what I'm doing, who I'm doing it with or why. My thoughts are my own and my space is my own."

Sue shook her head and laughed humourlessly. "How do you think you're going to find my brother, a genius hacker and technical mastermind, without the Grid? Do you - do you even have an arm piece? An office computer?"

"No Sue, I don't. And I've been finding people for twenty years - even before everyone just showed up as a little smiley photograph stuck on a map. We somehow managed it then and I manage it now. Do you want to employ me or do you have a friend with a computer you'd like to ask instead?"

"I already tried that. Of course I already tried that. I got Tanner's crew to search every corner of the Grid but he's not there. No banking, no music, no check-ins, nobody's tagged him. That's why I'm so worried. Usually, after a job he's all over the Grid, spending big, bragging, rubbing Sec's nose in it because he knows they can't touch him without a digital marker. This time it's different."

"OK, alright. I get it."

"Please find him Mr Thorner."

"I will. Can you get me hard copies of the information I need?"

"I'll try. It'll take a few hours - I don't even know really how you'd get something onto whatever - paper, I guess?"

"Paper will be just fine, thank you."

Sue scurried out, automatically turning her arm piece on before she'd even stood up. Thorner leant back in his chair and started to think. People never just disappeared - not really. Their body, their physical form, had to reside somewhere in space and time. He counted on this to get paid and so far he'd never been wrong, although there was one job where the subject's physical form was located in multiple geographical locations at once.

The interesting thing about this job, he thought, was that if the missing kid was such a big shot in his field, whoever hired him to do the theft must have paid a hefty sum. It wasn't uncommon for large-scale buyers of stolen merchandise to 'clean up' after the fact by disposing of all hired personnel, but this felt different. The girl said this Griffen was a braggart, and whoever hired him must have already known he was likely to be a liability. Whether he got caught or not, the theft would be followed back eventually to the buyer. There just weren't that many players in this game. It followed that if he'd been murdered, the brains behind it would be traced all too quickly.

Thorner paced his office, which consisted of three steps each way, the second of which required him to dodge the overflowing wastepaper basket.

He didn't mind waiting - about 90 per cent of his job involved waiting and he was good at it. It was an unusual skill these days. Nobody waited for anything anymore. It usually meant the person who was prepared to wait the longest would have the upper hand. Patience. A virtue, they used to say.

Sue returned much more quickly than he expected - huffing and puffing indignantly as she burst back through his unlocked door.

"This was such a pain in the ass. Do you know how hard it is to get Grid data onto hard copy these days?"

"Yes. Yes I do. Disappointing, isn't it? "

"It's completely ludicrous. You're making everything so much more difficult Mr Thorner. I hope you're as good as they say."

"Miss," Thorner started, trying to contain his growing irritation. "I work a certain way. You don't have to like it, and you didn't have to hire me. But as you have, I ask only a few things from you. If anything is too much of an inconvenience, well I'm sure there are some great on-Grid consultants out there who you could retain without ever even having to meet them."

"Spare me the high and mighty act Mr Thorner - I may be young but I'm not an idiot. I don't care how quirky or alternative you might think your choice of lifestyle is, to me you're just an old man who's stuck in his ways. Find my brother." She dumped a thick sheaf of papers on his desk. "I've transferred the credits. Now, how do I keep in touch with you? Smoke signals?"

"No Miss Griffen. Kindly give me your email address and cellular ident and I can get in touch with you if necessary."

Sue was about to transmit it from her arm piece but stopped herself. "Do you have a pen or something?"

Thorner passed her a rollerball from his inside pocket. She eyed it as a Sec trooper would eye a flintlock rifle. Bending over the papers, she awkwardly scrawled some letters and numbers on the topmost sheet. It struck Thorner that she was not comfortable holding the writing implement.

"OK, thank you Miss Griffen. I'll be in touch."

Sue flashed Thorner a final frustrated glance and took off down the stairs in a rustle of petticoats. Thorner sighed and closed the door until the deadbolts slammed shut within it.

Sitting back at his desk, he retrieved the shot glass and liquor, poured himself a modest helping and pulled the paperwork towards him.

They were bad quality outputs from the Grid - printed, most likely, at the 24 hour gas station down the street. He knew they still had some old printing equipment. He sometimes tried to use it for invoices before giving in to the inevitable and emailing a digital scan from a PayCube. The paper was thin and greasy, unpleasant to the touch. All paper was like this now, unless you wanted to pay out for expensive hemp paper from an arts shop, but that wouldn't run through any of the antiquated printing machines still in existence. The Grid kept getting more and more high resolution and reality kept getting cheaper.

The first sheet was a stream of data. Poring through the values between the nodes Thorner recognised it as a dump of Griffen's social profile information, all voluntarily supplied over the past 22 years to a variety of on-Grid services. Of course Griffen was smart enough to only supply what he thought he wanted others to know and could even have been smart enough to lie but it was unlikely. Nobody had a problem with telling everything to everyone on the understanding that they would reciprocate in kind. This mutual transparency was a given these days. Home address, cellular idents, contact list, last known location, political preferences, groups he was a member of, affiliations, musical taste - it went on and on. Almost too much information. It was difficult to get to something that looked to Thorner's experienced eyes like a clue.

He carried on wading through the sheets. A gritty image of Griffen - gaunt, spiked hair, multiple piercings and a neck tattoo of an ethernet cable scrawling up the side of his face and entering his temple. A date stamped list of the last 1,000 check-ins - each automatically triggered every time Griffen entered a building. A date stamped list of his last 1,000 social tags, perhaps the most invasive of all - another automatic connection made and broadcast every time he was in the vicinity of another contact. Many years ago it had been possible to disable this function, until pressure from the big advertisers eroded the privacy settings until they were pretty much meaningless. By this time the few remaining protesters had been distracted by some attractive new features and fell predictably silent. It was just a fact of life now unless you were one of the few, like Thorner, who never had a social profile and remained invisible to the Grid.

Thorner never intended his off-Grid status to be a statement. He didn't originally subscribe to any of the many social networks that were eventually swallowed by Ora, the network that turned out to be the largest of them all. The longer he went without it the less it seemed to matter. It also helped that he'd never really had many close friends in real life, so peer pressure wasn't an issue.

Over the years, his off-Grid status had excluded him further to the point where he could no longer take commercial flights, enter certain gated communities or eat at certain restaurants because the only way to access them was to transmit your ident from your arm piece, and he had neither.

Nobody knew exactly how many people lived like Thorner. There was no central hub through which they could communicate, and a good number of those who hadn't signed up had done so for militant, anti-establishment reasons so if they were still in contact, nobody on the Grid would ever know - if they even cared.

You had to be on-Grid to vote, to qualify for free healthcare or to own a pet. You had to be on-Grid to adopt children. After Martha passed away it was difficult to meet new people because it was generally considered rude to start a conversation with someone before they knew who you were by checking their arm piece. Thorner didn't mind particularly, and didn't remember ever feeling lonely after Martha died. He missed her of course, but he had his work and his collection of old paperback books that he read on rotation and mostly that was enough.

The only benefit to being off-Grid, as Thorner saw it, were a vague set of principles he was too stubborn to give up. He knew that when he died it was very unlikely anyone would notice, let alone care. There was no unmoving avatar and flatlined biometrics to trigger an automatic alert to the emergency services, and his subsequent removal from the few databases he appeared on wouldn't cause anyone else's contact count to diminish and therefore flash an urgent warning on their arm. Somehow he was OK with that.

In exchange he was truly free. His data was purely his - no advertiser would ever have it, or leverage it into an algorithm to make him buy their brand of whatever crap they were peddling. That data was him: his views, his memories and his preferences. The sad byproduct of this protectiveness was an unwillingness to share his thoughts or feelings with the few people he spoke with face-to-face. Everything he said or did could be picked up by their on-arm tracking devices and attributed to an anonymous ident, which over time would grow to represent him, like a giant, unstoppable fungus. Ora's huge servers had become adept at mapping behaviours and patterns until every human in the western world was a series of both.

It seemed that Tanner Griffen was a very complete set of behaviours and patterns. Regardless of his technical knowhow, he seemed as much a pawn in the game as the stay-at-home mom who watched the same soap operas every day because her TV would serve them up almost before she knew she wanted them. This kid, who thought he was rebelling against the big corporations, was really feeding their machines with the thing they wanted most - data.

So that was what Griffen must have been stealing when he disappeared. Anything else would be trivial; it had to be a big haul of data. But who from, and for whom?

Thorner would have to make his way down the narrow stairs to the street and start asking questions.