Stolen Lives
The past she was being asked about had belonged, in the nine weeks before she had burned it, to a different person. Not metaphorically — in the data systems of New Kowloon, identity was a commodity like any other, and it could be purchased, transferred, and overwritten with sufficient resources and sufficient motivation. The person she had been before had ceased to exist in any system that mattered, and the person she was now had been assembled from clean components with careful attention to coherence and consistency. She had not done the work herself. She had paid for it, at great cost, at a time when she had nothing to pay with but the information she was carrying, and the transaction had left her solvent in terms of survival and bankrupt in terms of everything else.
Finding the client took her forty-eight hours of methodical work, during which time she accepted the job, indicated progress, and gave nothing away. She worked backward through the escrow chain, which had been constructed by someone who knew what they were doing but who had not anticipated being worked from her end by someone who also knew what they were doing. The chain terminated, eventually, in a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a subsidiary of Axiom Dynamics — which was not a company in the ordinary sense but a structure that held assets for a consortium of interests so intertwined that no regulatory body had