Still heading for Elizabeth at the Library

If anything, you're even more interested in checking whether Elizabeth has made any progress on her research than you were before. Except now, you're afraid you may be putting her, and anyone else you come in contact with, in danger.

Before leaving the nail shop manager's apartment, you disassemble your phone, taking out the battery and then dumping the open phone in the toilet. Even the little bit of time you spent with Carol listening to her tales of true crime convinced you that tracking a mobile phone is a piece of cake. It shouldn't be possible for a private corporation but you're not convinced MicroStuff doesn't have its fingers in the government.

Since you're in a 'Chinatown' area, it doesn't take long to find a little shop that sells phones and they're happy to let you pre-pay with cash... something you're desperately running short of.

One good thing about being a programmer... it's given you a good memory for numbers. You call Elizabeth and ask her to join you outside the library's back door.

She takes one look at you and puts her hands on her hips. "What the fuck, Mike?"

"Someone tried to run me down."

"Jeez, things are escalating. I thought you said they were giving you a few days to think it over."

"I think the earthquake persuaded them I'd made up my mind."

"Huh?"

"That earthquake last night. It was... a programming error."

"You're kidding. You think you made the earthquake." She looks like she's having a hard time suppressing her laughter.

Well, you can't blame her for being dubious. You'd be skeptical too if someone told you a programming bug created an earthquake.

"So, anyway," you continue, "I think we should limit our contacts to where we can't be observed, hence this alley behind the library rather than meeting in your comfortable chairs. I've changed my phone... you have the new number now, don't use the old one. And you might want to get a burner of your own so they don't track me by my old contacts."

"I will. And I'm glad you're taking this seriously." She fishes a handkerchief from her bra, wets it and brushes your face. "You can't keep getting banged up like this."

"Good advice."

"I'm being serious. Anyway, here's what I learned."

She reports on her investigation into MicroStuff. The founder, it turns out, is the biggest donor to a prosperity Christian church... the same one, coincidentally, you'd come across that drunken night in the hooker motel. You have to ask yourself why? Surely prosperity doctrine is close enough to the forbidden sim-hacking that they would want to suppress it rather than support it.

Elizabeth also runs you through MicroStuff's financials... which don't, from an accounting perspective, make a lot of sense. It seems that a lot of their funding comes from secret contracts.

"It looks like money laundering," she concludes. "I don't know why the IRS hasn't investigated."

Probably because they have fingers in the IRS, you deduce.

"Anyway..." she stopped dabbing at your face with the handkerchief but keeps stroking it. "You probably shouldn't go home. Why don't I take you to my place?"