Orpheus - Haunting the Dead.pdf - Dice

HAUNTING THE DEAD
SETH LINDBERG
He read and read, late into the night. Tom had long
since nodded off, though he had probably wanted to
stay up. His body was failing him.
As far as Anders could tell without getting into
those locked files, a large majority of the projects
seemed to be about combating Terrell & Squib’s “technological
advantage.”
Anders leaned back in his chair and frowned. His
brain felt dry from all the computer work, almost wrung
out. He looked at his watch. Nearly 5:00 a.m. In a few
hours, people would start filing in to start the day’s
work.
Nothing to be gained here. Might as well go home,
get some sleep. He jumped to Frick’s home directory,
was about to log off, then stopped. He shouldn’t go
through Frick’s personal projects. But he knew they’d
be open to him, or at least some of them.
He thought of Lila briefly, wondering where she
was. Then he leaned forward again and started rooting
through his friend’s files. As he suspected, most of them
were also locked, but Frick’s notes weren’t.
A lot of them had to do with some kind of “recovered”
Terrell & Squib device. Frick used the word
“attunement” a lot, spent a lot of time analyzing it,
pulling his hair out. Notes about field tests, notes about
deadlines, pressure from on high.
Then he came across a note that sent a chill up his
spine:
If this attunement device does what I think it does, the
applications are tremendous, if chilling. Farquand suggests
the luring of hostile PLEs away from field operatives, but
I personally think that is far too simplistic an application.
If field operatives projecting as PLEs—and PLEs that
are field operatives themselves—represent nearly the ultimate
in espionage, this Terrell & Squib device represents
the first steps in attempting to combat it. Simply put, when
the device is attuned to a hostile PLE, it’s essentially a
( 130 )
6