Chapter 45: Transfer
Jack watched as Mr. Gefen unlocked the door to his office. Since he had templatized Mr. Gefen, he had also gained the ability to replace the real Mr. Gefen for a template instance inside a simulation. So, instead of memorizing codes and combinations extracted from Mr. Gefen, he figured, it would just be easier to have Mr. Gefen himself, in the form of a loyal and obedient template instance, gather all the evidence needed to incriminate himself.
Jack sat on the leather couch in Mr. Gefen's office while he watched him unlock his safe. It was two in the morning and no one was in the building except the two of them, so he didn't need to worry about explaining his presence to anyone. Not that it would really matter, being a simulation and all, but he wanted to avoid interruptions.
Mr. Gefen turned and sat at his desk while placing several thumb drives on the desk in front of him.
"Sir," he said respectfully, "These contain all the sensitive data on my clients that are engaged in illegal activity. It's not enough for the district attorney to bring a case against them, but it is enough to give investigators many threads to pull. With this data, the feds can make life very uncomfortable for my unsavory clients."
Jack tossed a thumb drive onto Mr. Gefen's desk. "Copy all the data onto that drive, then write up a detailed readme that explains the contents as well as a short summary description."
The detailed readme would be placed in the root folder of the thumb drive so that the feds would be able to quickly understand and make use of the drive contents. The short summary would be printed and included in the envelope along with the drive, so whoever opened it would understand what had been given to them. Without the printed summary, the feds might sit on the drive, unexamined, for years. The summary would provide the incentive they needed to examine it immediately.
As Mr. Gefen booted his desktop and got to work. Jack templatized the printer sitting in one corner of Mr. Gefen's large L-shaped desk. He had read that printers included special hidden codes on every page they printed so that law enforcement could track a piece of paper back to the printer that printed it. It was mainly so that printer companies could avoid changes of aiding and abetting forgery, but it was also used to solving other cases. Jack didn't want any of this being tracked back to him, so he needed to make sure the forensics trail led back to Mr. Gefen.
Once Mr. Gefen finished, Jack exported the changes to the thumb drive, then ended the simulation. Back in his soul space, he instantiated the printer, a portable power supply, and an unopened block of printer paper that was the same brand as used by Mr. Gefen. Then he linked printer and block of paper to their originals in the physical world.
Putting on nitrile gloves, he opened the brick of paper and loaded the printer. Then he powered it up, connected it to an instance of Mr. Gefen's laptop, and printed the summary page. Once the page was printed, he exported the changes to both printer and the brick of paper. Just like with the pen and paper test he had done, he expected that when he left his soul space, he would find that the first piece of paper in the still sealed block of paper would now have Mr. Gefen's summary printed on it, and kilometers away in Mr. Gefen's office, his printed would be just a few milligrams of printer toner lighter. All forensic evidence would point to Mr. Gefen.
Back in the physical world, he looked at his improvised isolation chamber. It was just clear plastic sheeting over a wood frame, with rubber gloves taped to two holes in the plastic, but it was sufficient to ensure that none of his genetic material would make it onto the final item he intended to drop in a mailbox.
Inside his isolation chamber was the block of paper, an unopened box of envelopes, an unopened thumb drive, and a pair of scissors. He had already sprayed bleach liberally inside the chamber and wiped down the outside of everything to ensure that his fingerprints were erased and any dead skin was non-viable for DNA extraction.