3
into a membrane set in one of the neural cables and injected a neuropeptide mix. Gonzales was transported.
----
It was the final day of Gonzales's three week stay in Pagan, the town in central Myanmar where the government had moved its records decades earlier, in the wake of ethnic rioting in Yangon. He sat with Grossback, the Division Head of SenTrax Myanmar, at a central rosewood table in the main conference room. The table's work stations, embedded oblongs of glass, lay dark and silent in front of them.
Gonzales had come to Myanmar to do an information audit. The local SenTrax group supplied the Federated State of Myanmar with its primary information utilities: all its records of personnel and materiel, and all transactions among them. A month earlier, SenTrax Myanmar's reports had triggered "look-see" alarms in the home company's passive auditing programs, and Gonzales and his memex had been sent to look more closely at the raw data.
So for twenty straight days Gonzales and the memex had explored data structures and their contents, testing nominal functional relationships against reality. Wherever there were movements of information, money, equipment or personnel, there were records, and the two followed. They searched cash trails, matched purchase orders to services and materiel, verified voucher signatures with personnel records, cross-checked the personnel records themselves against government databases, and traced the backgrounds and movements of the people they represented; they read contracts and back-chased to their bid and acquisition; they verified daily transaction logs.
Hard, slogging work, all patience and detail, and so far it had shown nothing but the usual inefficiencies--Grossback didn't run a particularly taut operation, but, as of the moment, he didn't seem to have a corrupt one. However, neither he nor SenTrax Myanmar was cleared yet; Gonzales's final report would come later, after he and the memex had analyzed the records at their leisure.
Gonzales