Metafire

"Did you check out their records in Washington?"

"I have a subpoena in process. We have to get a judge to approve taking out personal employment records and the like. There is nothing in the FBI files except clearance reports. Nothing particularly interesting. One of them, a 'George Davis, ' had lost his entire family in a fire when he was sixteen. He was top of his class and glided through a Ph.D. in Physics at the University of California, Berkeley. The only strange report was that he had a tendency to threaten suicide if he didn't get his way. "

"Wonder if this was the guy that Erisa was talking to last weekend. You know, on the space station." That guy said they would be willing to die.

"I don't know. We can find out."

That afternoon Ferguson got the reports from the agents that visited Metafire Systems, Inc., in Sante Fe. He was stunned when he read about their business. He was even more taken by the fact that they freely showed off their frozen-in-time copies of the blasted cities.

This is not at all what he had expected to happen. These guys either were guilty and utterly contemptuous of the law, or they weren't guilty, and just used the blasted city data to show off their prowess to customers. They did, in fact, have customers. A lot of customers. By all accounts, they probably were individually worth tens of millions of dollars. There were only about a dozen of them, and they had been making over twenty million a year in software sales and contract projects. They were the recognized experts, worldwide, in reconstructing information on the Internet that had been deleted or thought lost.