Fifty Degrees Below by Kim Stanley Robinson

faintly but distinctly. It reminded Frank of the light in the NSF building on the night of his abortive b-and-e, and he shook his head, not wanting to recall that folly; then he recalled that that was the night they had met, that he had broken into the NSF building specifically because he had decided to stay in D.C. and search for this woman.
    And there she was, sitting on the park bench. It was 3:34 A.M. and there she sat, on a park bench in the dark. Something in the sight made him shiver, and then he hurried to her.
    She saw him coming and stood up, stepped around the bench. They stopped face to face. She was almost as tall as he was. Tentatively she reached out a hand, and he touched it with his. Their fingers intertwined. Slender long fingers. She freed her hand and gestured at the park bench, and they sat down on it.
    “Thanks for coming,” she said.
    “Oh hey. I’m so glad you called.”
    “I didn’t know, but I thought. . . .”
    “Please. Always call. I wanted to see you again.”
    “Yes.” She smiled a little, as if aware that
seeing
was not the full verb for what he meant. Again Frank shuddered: who was she, what was she doing?
    “Tell me your name. Please.”
    “. . . Caroline.”
    “Caroline what?”
    “Let’s not talk about that yet.”
    Now the ambient light was too dim; he wanted to see her better. She looked at him with a curious expression, as if puzzling how to proceed.
    “What?” he said.
    She pursed her lips.
    “What?”
    She said, “Tell me this. Why did you follow me into that elevator?”
    Frank had not known she had noticed that. “Well! I . . . I liked the way you looked.”
    She nodded, looked away. “I thought so.” A tiny smile, a sigh: “Look,” she said, and stared down at her hands. She fiddled with the ring on her left ring finger.
    “What?”
    “You’re being watched.” She looked up, met his gaze. “Do you know that?”
    “No! But what do you mean?”
    “You’re under surveillance.”
    Frank sat up straighter, shifted back and away from her. “By whom?”
    She almost shrugged. “It’s part of Homeland Security.”
    “What?”
    “An agency that works with Homeland Security.”
    “And how do you know?”
    “Because you were assigned to me.”
    Frank swallowed involuntarily. “When was this?”
    “About a year ago. When you first came to NSF.”
    Frank sat back even further. She reached a hand toward him. He shivered; the night seemed suddenly chill. He couldn’t quite come to grips with what she was saying. “Why?”
    She reached farther, put her hand lightly on his knee. “Listen, it’s not like what you’re thinking.”
    “I don’t know what I’m thinking!”
    She smiled. The touch of her hand said more than anything words could convey, but right now it only added to Frank’s confusion.
    She saw this and said, “I monitor a lot of people. You were one of them. It’s not really that big of a deal. You’re part of a crowd, really. People in certain emerging technologies. It’s not direct surveillance. I mean no one is watching you or anything like that. It’s a matter of tracking your records, mostly.”
    “That’s all?”
    “Well—no. E-mail, where you call, expenditures—that sort of thing. A lot of it’s automated. Like with your credit rating. It’s just a kind of monitoring, looking for patterns.”
    “Uh huh,” Frank said, feeling less disturbed, but also reviewing things he might have said on the phone, to Derek Gaspar for instance. “But look, why me?”
    “I don’t get told why. But I looked into it a little after we met, and my guess would be that you’re an associational.”
    “Meaning?”
    “That you have some kind of connection with a Yann Pierzinski.”
    “Ahhhhh?” Frank said, thinking furiously.
    “That’s what I think, anyway. You’re one of a group that’s being monitored together, and they all tend to have some kind of connection with him. He’s the hub.”
    “It must be his algorithm.”
    “Maybe