Jim Baen's Universe

Science Fiction Stories

Marklord Pete

Written by Wil McCarthy

Illustrated by Luis Peres

Take away their freedom? Gawd, man, when have people ever been free? We're not even taking their money, because ultimately that comes from the trademark holders anyway. But people go to work every day, right? And somebody's got to own the result. Administrative law is just a fancy word for not letting it all go to waste.

—Chief Justice Billy Grab Cashford III®, LLP

****

Once upon a time a young IP attorney named Pete, three years out of law school and bursting with enthusiasm, was surfing database reports with his equally young and doubly beautiful paralegal, Muffy.

IP: intellectual property. The traffic in ideas, the certified ownership of thought.

"Welcome to Cheese Information Center," their fleshtop chirped, just like it would for any ordinary subscriber logging on. "Please enter loyalty information and stand by for discount offers."

"Another day in the brambles." Muffy sighed, pretending resignation. But she was decked out in her finest typing thimbles, with an air mouse dangling from her earlobe like a drop of liquid gold, and a smile that simply wouldn't wipe off.

"I'll stay one click behind you," Pete offered gallantly.

"Hyah, so you can watch my cookies update," she snarked back.

"Muffin," he called her.

"Poot," she replied.

Her full trade name was Muffietta Litting Von Mausland™. Pete's was Pyotr Rao CompService®, but their licensing agreement expressly permitted looser forms of address, including parodies and pet names, so off they went, punning and ribbing and giggling.

This assignment was makework imposed by Pete's parents to keep him out of trouble, and he and Muffy were under no illusions about it. But the networks were unusually responsive today, the news sites alive with cheerful prattle, and the two of them would take almost any excuse to work together, especially at a chore no sane person would supervise.

And anyway, in another, deeper sense this was a critical task; how else could the status of dozens of subscriber demographics be assessed in real time? How else could the license limit enforcements be validated? While they enjoyed their surf together, Pete and Muffy skimmed user complaints, inspected keyword filters and defensive copyrights along the major portal sites, and otherwise saw that the CIC portfolio remained secure.

Portfolio: an itemized list of investments, securities, and intellectual properties, especially trademarks. Literally, a container for documents, from the Latin portare folium, to carry leaves or sheets. In practice, a service organization for delivering licensed content and protecting the interests of its users.

"Ho!" Pete would text to the logged-in subscribers. "How you doin', peeps?"

"We're peachy, you little trademark stinge," they'd text back merrily. Or anyway if they weren't merry, if they had actual problems to report, he piped them to his message queue for off-line analysis, because why spoil a perfect morning?

Though both were accomplished surfers, Pete and Muffy kept to the portals and pipes for the sake of browser stability. The folio's raw databases, while not actually encrypted, were thick with proprietary acronyms and self-referenced data fields, too twisted for automated probing. "Clutter," some of the rival marklords called it. "A navigation hazard and regulatory quagmire. Who owns what in this mess?"

Which missed the point entirely; the cryptic formats of the database obscured the portfolio's richest intellectual property from would-be infringers. They were a crude but important part of the IP defenses: you want to look in here? Surrender your credit report and open a subscriber account like everyone else. And unless you needed blindingly fast access times, bulk storage was still one of the cheapest commodities in the world.

"Ouch," said Muffy more than once, as the hyperlinks sent her to null pages, or flipped back on themselves, or popped some weird bit of data correlation across her screen. "The good news is, Good News downloads are up five percent! The bad news is, I'm lost." Even at the edges, the database could be tricky.

"You're doing fine," Pete assured her. "You wouldn't guess it, but the main portal is never more than three clicks away."

"And never less than two," she moaned in tones of ghostly doom, waving her arms like noodles. Meaning you could never get home, right. Muffy's humor was like that: funny if you thought about it.

Pete, whose humor was more direct, said, "Put a sock in it."

He liked these thickets, liked their sense of fractal vastness, the way they dripped and seethed with hidden order. IP defenses aside, this wonky database was a boon for the folio's subscribers, who could extract considerable value from manual searches when no other sort of billing credit was available. Data mining, yes. Manually, yes. Even subscribers without a dime to their names could stay privved if they really wanted to, and could find synergies and correlations no machine would ever dream of looking for. Just yesterday, a subscriber had uncovered hints of an exploitable, twenty-two-day cycle in cheese consumption patterns, and today the chat boards were humming about it.

In a market analysis page, Pete and Muffy came upon a lone subscriber repeatedly downloading the same header, scraping select bits of data and discarding the rest. "You're breaking me, dude." Pete texted affably. "You're going to find something, and I'll have to comp your bill."

"I could use it," came the reply, gruff with emoticons.

"Good!" said Pete. "That's what commerce is all about!"

Of course, this kind of subscriber empowerment made Cheese Information Center attractive to the poor and downtrodden and thus lent (some said) a gloomy, shabby air to it. But the sort of people who said that were the sort who overcharged their own subscribers and eventually drove them off. That was just bad business. In Pete's opinion you couldn't make scratch without scrounging, and the cash-starved working classes made loyal subscribers if you just treated them with probity and respect. So where was the problem?

Still, the brambles did make for hard surfing. "I'm lost," Muffy said again, and this time even Pete needed a minute to work out where she'd clicked to. So went the morning, and after two exhausting hours Pete and Muffy parked themselves in a high-level summary page with a view of all the major stats and knocked off for an early lunch. Thai pizza, delivered right to their cube. Privileges of rank, oh yes.

"It's certainly a fine group of assets," Muffy said, scanning through the portfolio highlights. She'd only been here eight months, and was still saying things like that. In fact, she was saying them more and more often—"dropping hints," Pete's 'rents had noted dourly on more than one occasion. She was sniffing around for a marriage proposal, they insisted, and though Pete was willfully dense about things like that, even he had to agree.

"We've talked about this," he said to Muffy now, in mildly warning tones.

"What?" she asked innocently. "Can't I sit up here and admire the stats?"

No, Pete wanted to say. Not like that you can't. Not without breaking my heart. "The 'rents say our portfolios are incompatible."

"Incompatible?" she snarked. "Incompatible? My family makes cheese, Poot! Or owns the process, anyway."

"A process. One of thousands."

"With high peer ratings," she countered. She was blushing now, and on the brink of real anger. This was a sore subject, clearly. But it was sore for Pete, too, and she was the one who'd brought it up.

"Let's not fight," he said, holding up his hands. "Okay? Let's not. I'll feed you a slice."

For a moment she just glared. Then she sort of shrugged it off and settled back with her elbows on the desknic blanket, looking up at him with those big, blue, trademarked eyes of hers. She was smiling again—thinly, tentatively—and he was dangling a wedge of the pizza just out of her reach, making her snap for it. Then, seeing the metaphor in this and thinking better of it, he actually let her take a bite. He wanted to be her knight and shining lawyer, not some stingy marklord slapping late fees on her bill.

"I could up your privileges," he suggested. "Comp your bill, make you my personal assistant or something."

"Could you really," she said, losing her smile again. The subject no longer amused her. "Do you think this is about money, Pete? Or privs?"

Well, damn. He knew it wasn't, but what did she expect him to say? Her folio was respectable enough—the patents had mostly expired, but she did have a stake in some trademarks, copyrights, secret formulae, and whatnot. Her name and face weren't exactly in the public domain, right? Her family had license agreements through damn near every sector of the economy!

What she didn't have, though, was a subscriber base. As far as Pete knew, she didn't have one single subscriber anywhere in the world. To put it simply, she was a ™ kind of gal, where he was a full-fledged ®. Even her name was owned by, and licensed from, the Mausland portfolio, whose holders were her distant cousins. Really, if not for the billing credit she earned at Cheese Information Center—credit that could be swapped at a loss for goods and services from other portfolios—he wasn't sure she'd have any income at all. Not that there was anything wrong with that, but his 'rents did have a point: if he was merging at a loss and she at a gain, then their marriage would be so swathed in prenups that they might as well live in separate houses, on opposite sides of the planet.

In purely legal-economic terms, anyway. Lately Pete had begun to suspect there was more to life than legonomics; you couldn't trademark a feeling, after all, though many had tried. And yet, these fleeting, ephemeral feelings were some of the most important things in Pete's life. That was a heresy he shared with no one—not even Muffy—but it drew his mind the way an aching tooth attracts the tongue. If intangible things could be desired, then couldn't they, in principle, be packaged and bartered as a sort of IP? Quid pro quo; could the best things in life be free? Really?

"I love you," he said simply. "I do. I just don't know . . . how to act on it without hurting you. Or myself."

And there might just be something to his theory after all, because that pulled the plug on Muffy's anger. A simple voice message, that primal ancient medium, seemed to give her what she needed. But it deflated her, too, leaving nothing else to talk about. With a melancholy air settling into the cube, the two of them took up their pizza in silence.

Damn.

"My grandfather built this folio himself," Pete offered by way of topic change. He gestured at the screen, where the properties were summarized by category and the categories were color-coded by market value, net cash flow, number of active subscriptions, et cetera. "The data weren't laid out so neatly for the early marklords, before the full power of IP had really sunk in. They were more worried about schedules and budgets than they were about ledger sheets and subscriber rolls. They were like gentleman farmers, breeding and counting their sheep but forgetting to, you know, shear them."

Muffy's laugh was uncertain, quivering between the professional and the intimate. Pete felt a rush of sympathy for her, for the awkward position he'd just put her in. I love you. Hell, even he didn't know what he meant by that.

"That's not a criticism," he pressed on, trying to bury the issue in words. "Without the managed flow of human capital, their world was kind of fogged in. Who controlled information? Back then it was all about authority: Bachelor of Arts, Master of Sciences, MBA, and Juris Doctor. There was no cheap way to measure skills and no polite way to measure wealth, so the schools and universities did the sorting for you. The transcript agencies told you what social class people came from, where they ranked in it, how much they knew. That was supposed to tell you how far they'd go in life, how much value you could extract, and how much you should pay them in return."

"Reverse subscribers," Muffy snarked, "selling labor and blackmailing employers with the threat of idleness." It was a fair analogy, made ironic by the fact the Muffy was, herself, a paid employee of sorts. And hardly idle.

"Right," Pete said, pleased by her wit. "But unless there was a labor shortage, the threat cut both ways. Employers could fire without warning or cause. Oh, Granddad looked good on paper, as they said back then. At my age he had all the right parchments on his wall, all the right bullets on his résumé. But he was powerless. I've read his diary, and he used that word: powerless. He had no assets, no cash flow except what his bosses chose to pay him. In those days, believe it or not, intellectual property lawyers were the hirelings of the merchant class. Like doctors."

In spite of everything, Muffy giggled. It was a cute observation, her tone suggested, but she wasn't buying it.

"No, I'm serious," he told her. "IP ownership and IP defense were completely separate issues back then. Until that changed, the marchival age was just a business plan. Ours may be a minor portfolio in the grand scheme of things, but Granddad was one of the first to see the writing on the wall. His colleagues laughed when he opened his own portal site. About cheese! That wasn't something a respectable attorney was supposed to do. But piracy and litigation were rampant in those days, and the people who dealt with cheese all flocked to him for information, and eventually for formal licensing and protection agreements. And with subscriber money coming in, he started buying up content, hiring writers and designers, copyrighting recipes . . ."

"Becoming a mark holder . . ." Muffy offered. She'd never heard this side of history before, and it clearly intrigued her.

"Well, yeah, but you could only trademark words and pictures back then. Of course, if you knew the system really well, if you trademarked the right words and pictures, you could end up owning a molecule. Patents expire, right? But a trademark is forever. And from there it was just a matter of buying up the regulations so that, for example, making cheese without your molecule would be a violation of the health code. Pretty soon, anyone who wants legal access to cheese is going to have to pay you for the rights. To subscribe to your portfolio."

"Poot, I think I'm passingly familiar with that part of it," she snarked. Oh, right. Because as a paralegal and game theoretician, she administrated it for a living.

Something shifted in Pete's brain. Maybe a bit flipped, or a quantum uncertainty collapsed and untangled. Maybe he just made up his mind. "I'd like to be passingly familiar with you," he said, grabbing for her, burning with sudden desire.

For a moment, she looked ready to deflect him. She was still mad; her emotional shields were up. "Pete," she said warningly. But then a catty expression flickered on, cool and measuring and ever so slightly playful, and before Pete could fully parse the look she was leaning in toward him, too close and too fragrant for abstract study.

And who knows where that might have led? For better or worse, they were interrupted by the jangle of a telephone. She sighed and picked it up.

"Yes? Oh."

She covered the receiver with her hand, and said to Pete, "It's a user complaint."

"Escalated all the way to me?" Pete asked, blinking in surprise.

She was listening to someone on the other end, but she nodded at Pete, too. Yes, escalated all the way to you.

"Uh-huh," she said into the phone, glancing at the screen and tapping her way down to individual subscriber records. "Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Well, the system appears to have all your information, ma'am. I'll raise the issue with counsel, and you should hear from us sometime in the next few hours. You . . . what? Well, yes, he is available. Shall I put you on speaker? Hold on."

She pressed a button.

"Counselor Pete," said a woman's voice on the phone, sounding frantic. "They jacked my account! Somebody. I didn't . . . These aren't my charges!"

"Slow down," Pete tried. Then, when the woman continued yakking, "We have your data right here, ma'am. You're clearly upset, so I'm going to transfer you to customer service for appropriate counseling. But you—"

"I can't afford this! My charges are always—"

"Ma'am," said Pete, "I haven't studied your case file, but you have my personal guarantee we'll figure this out. This is Cheese Information Center; no one pays for services they haven't received. Have a nice day if you can, and thank you for calling."

He gestured to Muffy, slashing a hand across his throat, and Muffy dutifully took the woman off speaker and punched in the transfer codes. Damn, she would make a good personal assistant. Or more.

"Now that's what I call probity," he said, in a moment of self-congratulation.

Probity: the legal doctrine of moral obligation. From the Latin probitas, meaning honesty or fairness. He wasn't obligated to speak personally with the plaintiffs he represented; most mark heirs wouldn't bother, even fleetingly. "What is this, a billing dispute?"

Muffy nodded. "Strange one. Apparently there are phantom charges on her account."

"I'd gathered."

But it was strange, because in this day and age it was difficult indeed to steal an identity or to stick another person with your bills. Phantom charges were rare, and phantom charges that couldn't be cleared up by first- or second-tier tech support were rarer still. This woman's credit bureau had somehow cleared the transaction, had somehow believed that she actually owed the money. Which meant it was probably a royalty charge of some kind, generated and billed from within the portfolio itself.

But the charges couldn't be legitimate, either, or tech support wouldn't have escalated the issue, and the browser screen wouldn't be full of blinking red numbers.

"Pirates?" suggested Muffy. "Operating inside the license limits?"

"Bandits in our borders?" growled Pete. "For their own sake, I certainly hope not."

But when they sat down to follow the data trail, it quickly became obvious that that was indeed going on. That or worse. In fact, over the past several hours four different subscribers had been phished and scaled so thoroughly that they couldn't afford the network charges to log on and complain. As far as Muffy could tell they weren't bankrupt yet—that would take time, and the intervention of courts with bigger nuts to crack—but they'd been left out to rot nonetheless. She of course sent a financial response team to, at the very least, waive their late fees and stabilize their cash flow until an executor had a chance to audit their losses and, if possible, reverse them.

The woman on the phone was within her rights to be frantic; she'd been lucky to escape with her privileges intact.

While Muffy was thus engaged, Pete set about rounding up a crack legal team to take the billing—and if necessary, the litigation—directly to the pirates. Within the portfolio he found Esquires Heimbecher™ and Hattenbach™, Hall™, and Hensley®, and from the outside world he pulled in two others so famous that this magazine can't afford to print their names.

"Cheat my subscribers," Pete muttered to the screen.

Said Esq. Hattenbach through a chat window, "I found a journal reference that clearly infringes. They'll argue fair use, but any court would rule they're a commercial enterprise operating within our mark definitions."

Pete grunted his acknowledgment. "Does the subject matter match the subscriber charges?"

"It does. I've drafted a cease and desist . . ."

"Send it," Pete told him. "There's no sense being polite."

And when that letter was rebuffed, Esq. Hall remarked, "Injunctions are ready when you are, sir."

"File."

"Injunctions away. The defendants are filing a protest, obviously, and . . . here come the counterinjunctions."

"Object."

"I have, sir. Sustained."

Said Hattenbach, "I've got a lien on their assets."

"Foreclose," Pete grimly instructed.

"But sir, if we can read their arguments into the record, we may discover their funding source."

"Funding source? Funding source! They're bloody pirates, Brad, we're their bloody funding source. I said foreclose! I don't want these bastards drawing another nickel out of my subscribers. Out of anything!" Pete was young. Bright and skilled and gallant, yes, but still impulsive. He hadn't consulted his parents—the portfolio's actual mark holders—about any of this. It simply didn't occur to him.

"Bankrupt," said Hall, watching a display somewhere in his own browser space. "Bankrupt. Bankrupt. B—whoops! The fourth defendant has sheltered his remaining assets and been found not liable. He may be a bystander."

Bystander? That brought Pete up short. Had he—a member of the holder class—just filed legal action against an uninvolved third party? Against a victim of the pirates, even, maybe a subscriber from some near-linked portfolio? Someone too poor to afford his own justice? That was a damnably modern thing to do, in all the oldest, foulest meanings of the word, and here in the marchival age the code of probity—encompassing everything from fair use to customer satisfaction to equal protection under the law—would condemn him for it. And right in front of Muffy, too, giving her one more victim to attend to. Damn!

"Assess his court costs and offer him double," said Pete. "Along with my apology. Tell him his subscription is always welcome at Cheese Information Center."

"Pete," said Hattenbach, "I've found something in the escrow holdings."

"Eh? What's that?"

"A funding source. I'll be damned. It's a license agreement with the Chaos Home portfolio, sir, asserting ownership over cheese recipes as a subclass of spoken-word poetry. This isn't piracy at all; it's the opening salvo of a full-scale infringement."

"Oh. Crap. Somebody get my mother on the line."

But Pete was too late; his mother was already looming in the cube's entrance, sucking up all the light and heat and oxygen.

"Ho, Moms," he tried, sensing her there, turning and smiling weakly.

Whereupon she favored him with the two words he dreaded most in all the world: "Explain yourself."

****

"I acted within my authority," Pete said firmly. "The defense of our license limits is realtime, online, for keeps. You want me to slack?"

"We want to be informed," Pete's father replied dryly, "before the red ink starts spilling. Especially the ink of subscribers, m'boy. Gawd, I can hear the bloggers already: Cheese stinks! Butter beware!"

"An honest mistake," Pete said, trying to walk the line between apology and wounded innocence. "The infringers were agents of Chaos Home, and his username and activity profile were congruent with theirs. You'd've done the same in my place, I think."

"He was standing nearby?" said Pete's mother archly. "He looked funny, so you filed on him? Young man, probity demands a subtler pen."

Pete refrained from snarking at that; his mother was not a subtle woman. They were in the corner office, top floor, with a view of the city sprawling below. From the low visitors' chair, his parents' twin desks seemed to loom over him. But there was a Sourcer here as well, clad in the age-old uniform: blue canvas trousers and a black T-shirt adorned in cryptic text. Sysadmin, they'd've called him in days gone by. The man hadn't insinuated himself into the conversation—yet—but he'd showed up at just the right time, claiming a cable fault or something, and was on his knees in the far corner, muttering, pinging the network over and over through some sort of packet-jack pendant slung around his pudgy neck.

Mother's words had been for the Sourcer's benefit, to soothe any appearance of improbity in the portfolio's management, because any slide in CIC's reputation scores right now could be disastrous. The 'rents themselves were standing at the windows, pacing, looking troubled. If she could say what she really felt, it would have come out a bit differently.

Seeing his opening, Pete stoked their quite reasonable fears: "What does Anthony Walking Chaos® know about probity? Can he just stroll in here whenever he likes? His daughters are famously haughty. Do we let them poach our IP? Maybe I should marry one, eh?, and turn over all our assets with a single click."

And he could see that hitting home behind his parents' trademarked eyes. Ouch, yes! Chaos Home had once been a wood pulp company, then an information company, and finally one of the wealthiest 'folios in the marchival world. Mark holder didn't begin to cover it; Anthony Walking was a mark jacker and subscription slammer whose litigation skills were legendary and whose docket was perpetually full. He didn't always win, but he did always press the point. Hard. Crossing paths with him was unlikely to leave any of them richer or happier.

"Your point's taken," Pete's father conceded. "Consider yourself indemnified for the error. But let's keep our heads, hmm?"

"Oh, dear," said Pete's mother, recognizing that tone in his voice. That tone, which meant litigation if it meant anything at all.

Father was brusque. "Spare me the hand-wringing, darling. It's quickest if we take this straight to the top. Injunctions and restraining orders, not against the portfolio but against Anthony Walking himself. Make him sweat for his trouble."

But now it was Pete's turn to play the cooler head. "That's just the 'sponse he's looking for, Dads. It gives him the pretext for a full-fledged class action on behalf of his poor, beleaguered subscribers."

"Class action? I'll show him class action. I'll strip every asset and throw him out naked in the public domain!"

"And his subscribers will rally around him," Pete countered. "They'll have to. If he's smart, he'll offer billing credit; if he's cheap, he'll threaten rate hikes and service cuts, with crippling disconnect fees for anyone who tries to defect. And who defects from Chaos Home, anyway? They control all the major storage formats. Lose your license agreement with them and you might as well be off the network! So either way, the subscribers will be throwing themselves in our path in a million petty lawsuits, and we'll be forced to counter. Then you'll see innocent ink on our hands."

Both parents glowered, having nothing to say to that and nowhere to direct their anger except at Pete himself. But here the Sourcer rose from his knees, dusted them off with a swipe of his hand, and said, "Baseless lawsuits are a violation of your open-source license. You know that, right?"

"Obviously," Pete replied, with all the civility he could muster. The last thing they needed was to add the open-source community to their enemies list. But really, the Sourcer's comment was (a) condescending, and (b) a blatant threat. If Cheese Information Center lost its Open-source Public License it really would be off the network, sending out—gawd!—paper billing notices by bike messenger or something, with all the subscription content burned onto optical disks and passed hand to hand in the ancient modern way. At prohibitive cost, yes, until the slush funds ran dry, and the folio was forced to raise its rates, driving away more and more subscribers in a suicide spiral.

The Battle of Desktop had settled it long ago: you simply couldn't do business without a nod from the Sourcers. They didn't control the network's fiber or its servers; these were owned by legitimate portfolios and a smattering of regional monopolies. They didn't even assert ownership of the operating systems and transport protocols, claiming these were somehow "free" and "open." They didn't have any sort of mark holder or CEO to hear out grievances, mediate disputes, or provide any semblance of marchival civility. Individually they didn't have to own or buy or be anything to become Sourcers; coding skill, knowledge, and mutual acknowledgment were all it took. "The Headless Sourcemen," they were sometimes called, mostly behind their backs.

But a license was a license, and the Sourcers were quick to rally around their own and to punish abusers. As a result, they could pretty much shake you down whenever they felt like it. They weren't a greedy bunch, but gawd, if you didn't take a few of their mendicants in for at least the three I's (insulation, income, and interesting work), if you didn't tithe to their foundations and pay lip service to their ideals, life could get very difficult indeed.

On the other hand, at heart their ideals were not so different from the code of probity itself. They were on the side of the angel investors, and if you played ball with them, they really would save your data. Guaranteed.

So just for good measure Pete added, "It's nice of you to remind us, Admin, before we do something we can't retract."

"Hyah," the Sourcer replied with characteristic inhumility.

But Pete's father was having none of that. "What about Anthony? Is he, what, exempt or something? We can't file a preemptive motion, but he can? 'Sup with that?"

The Sourcer spread his hands. "Man, I've got a full plate right here. You want me to monitor other intranets on the side? He's probably skirting the limits, endangering his privs, but if he'd actually busted license, I think I'd know about it. I think we all would."

"I smell corruption," Father insisted.

Crap.

Before Pete could stick his nose in further, Mother cut in with, "Let the Sourcers police their own, dear." By which she meant, don't pick a fight you can't win, when someone else is picking a fight with us! "Our response should be firm but measured. We want the press on our side."

But that was a dumb thing to say, and Pete could see she knew it before the words were even out. Because where did the press reside, if not in Chaos Home? Oh, sure, there were free media all over the place, but if they didn't own the rights to a press release—a judge's ruling, say, or rumors of a portfolio merger—how much could they really say? Reformatting and original commentary could only get you so far; even in a world of probity, the indies lived under constant threat of libel and infringement suits.

"Truth is always in the public domain," the Sourcer quoted, falling back on stale doctrine.

Pete's father laughed sourly. "Is that all you have for us, you and your feeble priesthood? Truth has to be expressed, Admin, through ownable words and pictures. That's the hand we cuff it by. This is high court, I tell you: class action, full scale. Assemble my legal team."

But with all this going on, Pete had hatched an idea of his own—or the chick of an idea—up there in his noggin. He said to the three of them, "We could appeal."

That brought down immediate silence and attention.

"We could query the director," he pressed, "to broker an out-of-court. Quietly, on the side. Good for business, I would think."

They were all just staring at him.

"You think I'm kidding? I can pick up the phone as soon as we're done here." Hyah, like it was that easy. But it almost sounded plausible. Almost.

Suddenly the 'rents were both laughing, and it wasn't sour at all. They were indulgent, proud of this silly, idealistic boy they had somehow managed to raise. Where did he learn that, they seemed to be asking themselves.

Then, his chuckle quieting, Father looked out over the city in a thoughtful brood and said, "Well. Well. We lose nothing by trying, eh? My boy, I'll give you five business days. But if it doesn't work out, I'll expect you to coordinate the litigation yourself."

****

Not surprisingly, the director wasn't reachable. From the main switchboard it took Muffy five hours of runaround just to be connected with the Directory Rolodex, which primly told her, "You'll have to submit your request in writing, along with a full-presence biometric signature."

"In person?" Muffy asked, blinking.

"Of course," the Rolodex answered. "For IP security reasons."

Which made a kind of sense, Pete thought, because biometric data sent over a compromised network might as well have been sketched in crayon. Still, it was an odd hurdle to throw in a plaintiff's path.

Through the speakerphone he said, "Can't we just mail you an Authorized Face?"

"With whom am I speaking?" the Rolodex inquired.

"Pyotr Rao CompService®, Counselor Esquire and Mark Heir of Cheese Information Center."

"Ah. Well, my apologies, sir, but I think you know the answer to that."

"Hmm," he said. "Well, I suppose we can hire a two-seater dragonfly or something. Can you fax over a physical address?"

"'Fraid not," answered the Rolodex.

"Eh? Why's that?"

"Trade secret, sir, in the interests of IP security. If you were authorized to know it, you'd have no need to ask."

"But that's . . . that's . . ." Ridiculous, yeah. He tried, "Is there someone else we should speak with?"

"Oh, counselor, I really am sorry to have wasted your time." The Rolodex was impeccably sympathetic. "I'll set the screening parameters a little higher, OK? So next time you won't have to speak with me. Have a nice day!"

The phone clicked and toned, and Muffy hung it up. "You too," she snarked at it. Then, to Pete she said, "Now what?"

"Now we surf," he answered, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. He pulled on his typing thimbles one by one, patiently checking each contact and sensor. "Outside the 'folio subnet, someone in this great wide directory must know the way. We'll ask around until we find that person, then we'll get persuasive."

He was partly joking, but Muffy didn't laugh or even crack a smile, because by now she knew him as well as anyone ever had. And hyah, he could be very persuasive when it suited him.

Still, as they glanced from portal to portal, leaving the folio's pages behind and surfing out into the wider network, his first real move was a blunder.

"Ho!" he said on a public chat. "Anyone here less than six degrees sepped from the director?"

To which a subscriber replied, "Up your pipe, Chumlord. We're having a conversation, here."

And so they were: a whole gaggle of them were swapping ancient music files, steganographically embedded