Tunnel Rat

Chapter 210: Connections

Hide! Seen. Trapped. Can't run. Gang=me? Gang seen? Belinda? Belinda=Belinda but Belinda=Victor! Run. Trapped. Seen. Hide? Fix?

Fix.

Fix!

Milo's mind whirled, several trains of thought screaming at once. He had pushed himself too far. The fatigue of social interaction had been building up all day, as had the stress of thinking so hard in SC6 and the video game tournament. He loved the feeling of pushing himself to think faster and devise strategies, but it came at a price. He was paying it now as the connection between Victor and Belinda sent his paranoia into overdrive.

Part of him was screaming that they never should have left the tunnels. A year ago, he'd been safe, and no one had known about him. No one had even suspected that he existed. If no one knew you existed, then no one came looking.

Now he was exposed. And it was by his own actions. He knew that. He'd triggered events, and failed to recognize all of the consequences.

He recognized that the temptation to do new things and taste new food had been traps that the world had set for him. But food was tasty!

The pod was the first trap! It tempted him, showed him he could get better, showed him the game, and allowed him to get petty revenge on Kaminski. Stealing the pod had triggered everything.

The game was a trap! It showed him cheese! And tasty food. It made him want more things in the real world. It led to being noticed by Sidney and then Wally. Wally knew where he was. But he needed the game! He needed the escape and the friends he'd made. He needed a place he could go where no one knew who he was.

The money was a trap. Money solved problems. It was a tool. He took someone else's money. Victor's money. There was no guilt. No guilt at all. Victor and his people had made him a slave, killed his family, killed so many people. Now Victor was an enemy, and Milo had to hide from him.

He had friends in the habitat. He was learning to be near people. But they made him vulnerable. Just like the Hollow. Were friends a trap? Family? He couldn't run if people were threatened.

Then the Belinda problem. She knew him in Genesis. Knew he had a pod. Now she had seen him in this world. She was smart. Would she know Milo= Milo in the hab? If she found out about his special race and class, it tied him to a missing pod. Victor would put things together.

Victor was dangerous. Why did Belinda = Victor?

Round and round, his thoughts looped, examining the traps for a way out.

For 17 minutes and 35 seconds, Milo lay in a near-coma, in the dark, running from traps.

And then he woke up and got to work.

The first task was a review of all the data his systems had recovered. Some had been gleaned from historical archives, newscasts, and what remained of the internet.

The last provided a mix of truth and lies; the information often had poor documentation and had a non-zero chance of being entirely false. But it gave clues about where else to look. Tax records from the time period that CHARLIE, the A.I. tasked with overseeing corporate taxes, were very useful. They clearly explained who was making money and where it had come from. Those years abruptly ended and access to further data was blocked behind many walls. But Milo had been created to break those walls and dig for secrets. After a day of reviewing, he started breaking the protection on national data banks and into corporations, looking for answers. He wasn't always happy with what he found.

The Seimovich family had a long history, all the way back to when the Czars still ruled in their part of the world. The family was minor nobility with aspirations to be more. As the world changed, so did the family. They became money lenders and merchants, always involved in the lucrative trade of selling weapons. They branched out and moved to where the world needed guns and explosives. After the second world war, they moved from buying and selling weapons to manufacturing them. As technology became more complex, so did their business. Information and biotech were added to the manufacturing and selling of more traditional weapons.

In the early part of the 21st century, the extended Seimovich family was controlled by two brothers, Victor and Andrei. The two were the faces of two very different business methods. Victor operated like the family always had, selling arms, hacking and ransoming information, smuggling, and trafficking in human lives. If anything, his half of the family grew worse, keeping only enough legitimate business dealings to provide a cover to fend off the authorities.

Andrei took his half of the family in new directions, evolving with the times. Reorganized as the Seimovich Technology Corporation they moved as far from the old family business as possible. Money was invested in new technologies but never weapons tech. There were reports of Andrei, or people working for him, actively aiding the authorities in investigations into organized crime. On the surface, this seemed to be evidence of a split between the brothers. But the cartels that were weakened made room for Victor to move in and expand his empire.

Whether or not the split between the two brothers was real was debated in news programs and law enforcement offices. One story Milo found gave a supposedly first-hand account of a tense family reunion when the old patriarch, Boris, was on his deathbed. Vodka and harsh words filled the days before his passing, and the split between the family became permanent.

Victor married four times, but only one produced a child—discrepancies in the child's genealogy after a paternity test led to his third divorce and the disappearance of that wife, child, and a bodyguard. An accident while boating was blamed. Local authorities in the small town closed the case quickly.

Andrei married once and had two children, Nicki and Ekaterina. Twenty-five years after Boris's death, the deaths of both Nicki and Andrei brought what was left of the family closer together. Father and son were killed when a freak storm forced their private jet land at a small airfield. The icy conditions and short runway led to a bad landing and an explosion as the airplane shot past the barriers at the end of the runway. A somber Victor attended the double funeral. He and Ekaterina reconciled. If not close, they at least spoke often, and he served on the board of trustees for the Seimovich Corporation as an unpaid advisor.

Ekaterina met Vigo Johansson at a technology conference. She was fresh from University with dual degrees in International Business and Finance. Vigo was there showing off the latest products from his company, Bio-Solutions. They met when both of them were talking on the same panel. They had drinks and dinner three times and began dating. The picture of the two of them holding hands had sent a ripple through the tech industry.

Vigo's official biography said he had started with nothing and studied computer programming and information systems early. At ten, he coded his first small video game. Smashy-Dwarf was a cute little phone game where players selected a troll or ogre as their team and took turns hurling other races at a rack of ten pins. He made enough money to attend a better school and then college at the age of fourteen. Vigo attended four colleges over the next eight years while simultaneously building his first company. Computers were the first step; his end goal was cybernetics, human/computer interfaces, and working artificial limbs. Bio-Solutions was, first and foremost, a research lab. Vigo and his employees created, patented, and sold the technology to other people.

After the two married, Seimovich Technology bought Bio-Solutions for the price of 127 Billion dollars. Belinda Seimovich was born seven years later. News reports said the birth had been complicated by birth defects. The family refused to discuss her medical problems and asked for privacy. During this time, protests and riots culminated in the removal and imprisonment of all but one A.I. Technology companies saw a huge drop in their stock, protests held at their factories, vandalism, and acts of terror.

Bio-Solutions was the target of one radical group, Never Skynet. Ironic because artificial intelligence was not something the company had delved into. A bomb was set off, severing a fuel line and engulfing the labs in fire. Twenty-seven researchers died, including Vigo Johansson. Ekaterina attended his funeral on the arm of her Uncle, Victor, and then dropped out of public life altogether. Milo saw that within a year, Ekaterina remarried, choosing a childhood friend, John Sabbatino. He was immediately named CEO of the company and made the guardian of Belinda. Within a year, Victor was no longer on the board of advisors. Eight years later, when Belinda was ten, Ekaterina died of 'undisclosed medical issues.'

Milo could find no record of Belinda's name being changed to Sabbatino. In court documents, she was always referred to as Belinda Seimovich. Nor did he find a record of adoption. But what financial information he did find was interesting. Nearly all of the corporation had been sold piecemeal during the years after Vigo's death. A large amount of money was invested conservatively, and a corporation was set up to manage the funds, ST Investments. Seimovich Technology was a shadow of what it had been at the time of her death, but the investment group held a staggering amount of money. All of it was put in trust for Belinda when she turned eighteen.

Exact numbers were unknown, but financial experts conservatively estimated the value of the trust fund at over a trillion dollars with the possibility of up to quadruple that amount. John Sabbatino did not have access to that money, except to care for Belinda. He continued to manage the corporation and renamed it Manpower Inc. Victor Seimovich was not involved in either Manpower or ST Investments.

That sounded like a lot of money to Milo. Far more than he had. With that much money, you could buy all the SC6 machines left in the world and all the cheese you could ever eat. Manpower was a powerful corporation, but nowhere near what it would be as soon as Belinda turned 18. That worried him. Who would control it?

Milo liked the idea of Victor never having money ever again. He wasn't happy with John Sabbatino having it, either. With that much money, he could tear the hab apart faster than Milo could fix it. What would Belinda do with it?

He shook his head, clearing the speculation. He had things to do. Next on his list was upgrading the security system. The whole thing was a mess. The habitat system was nearly defunct and unusable. Manpower had replaced part of it and upgraded other parts, but in a piecemeal fashion that upset Milo as being highly inefficient. On top of that, Milo had found cameras installed by the engineering firm that had done work in the hab. And, of course, Milo had added his bits to the jerry-rigged system. He needed something better. It would be a lot of hard work, but he would upgrade and replace most of the systems and cameras so that only he had complete access to all of them. If people were moving around in his habitat, he needed to know. Manpower wouldn't know what had happened, and would enjoy a security system that worked all the time, and didn't need repairs.

As he placed orders with thirty-seven security specialists, his brain tossed out a chilling scenario. Who was Belinda's heir? Her only living relative was Victor. Was Victor looking for a way to get past Belinda to her money? And if so, had Milo triggered this event by stealing all of Victor's money? He needed to know more. Either Belinda was working with Victor, or she wasn't. If she wasn't, then Milo may have put her in danger. He had planned to stay far away from the girl, but now he needed to do the opposite, and get to know her.