“To find out …”
“If you’re very special.”
Surprisingly, he didn’t look intrigued.
“Why do you care?”
“I’ll explain later. For now, I need you to wear this to run my test. It won’t take long.”
I pulled the silver mask with the psychometric device from my pocket and placed it on the table. It gleamed in the dim light of the room.
Remir gave it a thoughtful look, then shrugged, sat down and put it on. I watched as he sat very still, his body frozen in a program-induced trance, his face looking like a blind sculpture. Kir was monitoring all of the room’s entrances, and all was well – everyone was still asleep.
After several minutes, the test result displayed in the center of my vision, and I mentally congratulated myself. Not only was Remir’s score above the necessary cutoff, it was also the highest I had ever seen. I multiplied it by the Beta Blue difficulty coefficient, and thought that this time my luck was exceptional.
“Done,” I said, and he took off the mask.
“What was that?” he asked, shaking his head.
The standard rule was to give him a break before going into detail. Not to mention that people would start waking up soon.
“You passed and I have a lot to offer you.” I stood up preparing to leave, “But I have to go now.”
“Wait.”
They always protested at this moment.
“You’ll have a wonderful sleep,” I told him before disappearing behind the door. “See you soon.”
The plan was fully formed in my mind by the time I stepped back out onto the sidewalk. Clearly, the best moment to suggest defection was right after Remir’s mandatory interview. His emotional state would be rather unstable, and my job to convince him to go with me would be the easiest.
There was nothing else for me to do in this shithole where I could attract too much attention, so I headed to the central station and took the first train to the city.
The next several hours were unremarkable as the sleek underground express whooshed past most of the local stops. The few people who shared the flexible tube with me were dozing. I glanced at my reflection in the window and had a momentary dreamlike feeling of participating in some strange dress-up game at home. A loose robe and plain suit set, which Kir printed just before I left my ship, was an average outfit here for my age group, but it suddenly felt too weird. Thinking that I must be tired, I told Kir to let me know when we were close to the main city station and shut my eyes.
Kir woke me up when the train had already stopped at the platform. Passengers started filing out of the car and I followed the line. The moment I stepped outside, the intense sunlight of the early afternoon, humid heat and unsavory smells of the big city simultaneously assaulted my senses. But I found all of it perversely pleasant after the weeks of living in the sterile atmosphere of the ship.
The city definitely wasn’t anything like Oren. Much wider streets weaved between asymmetrical high-rises; and the dense flow of pedestrians and heavy car traffic negotiated with each other at complex intersections. Curiously, there wasn’t a single straight line in view: the extreme biomorphic style, usually a brief and harmless period in other worlds, had happened to gain the status of official state architecture on Beta Blue.
I switched from onlooker mode and focused on the immediate plan. Both theory and my own experience dictated that my next step should be temporary assimilation; it was critical that Remir became as comfortable with me as possible. Normally I would have to rub shoulders with people on the streets for some time in order to study local behavior at close range. In this case though, there was a perfect shortcut; the feeds from police drones and cameras of personal communication devices effectively covered every nook and cranny in the inhabited areas of Beta Blue. I could hole up in some low-key place, tell Kir to run a program that fused them together, and a virtual copy of the world would literally be at my fingertips.
I checked in to a nearby commuter hotel, took the elevator to the tenth floor and found my room in a curved row of identical doors; the handle acknowledged my fingerprints and granted me access. I examined the interior and admitted that, as compensation for its shabbiness, it was mercifully simplistic. I closed the blinds of the narrow horizontal slit that looked out onto the bowed side of a neighboring building and lay on the single bed, propping up my head with a pile of cheap, spongy pillows.
“Give me an aerial view,” I ordered, closing my eyes, and found myself suspended in the air above the city.
The clusters of grotesquely elaborate buildings below made me think of a coral reef. I adjusted the viewpoint to eye level, and the scenery changed. Now I was standing on a very busy sidewalk. The world around me looked solid, with the exception of a few blind spots distinguishable by faded colors and blurry outlines – Kir filled in the missing details by extrapolation. The murmur of street noise captured by hundreds of personal device microphones added to the effect.
I focused on a random lovely girl hurriedly weaving through the crowd. Her face was flushed from running, visibly distressed. I told Kir to bring up her data. According to her home security video, she had accidentally let her cat out and spent almost half an hour luring it back in and now was on course to be late for her first job interview. Nothing in her personal files caught my attention except for a full collection of Remir’s music, carefully sorted and frequently accessed.
Her bus appeared from behind the corner and came to a halt across the street. She stopped at the pedestrian crosswalk; her expression now desperate. “Kir, change the signal,” I said, and the traffic light obediently switched. Cars stopped, and she darted across, just in time to jump inside the closing doors. I smiled and looked away.
For the next several hours, I wandered through the complex ecosystem of stores, restaurants and other ground level venues, observing nuances of local habits. People were going about their daily business in a manner typical for all big cities in all Mirror Sectors. For the most part, they looked reserved, even sullen and didn’t smile or make frequent eye contact with each other, but they didn’t look like a population on the verge of war with a super civilization. I wondered how many actually believed in that.
Deciding that I had enough information from the street level, I used drones to look into windows on the top floors. The crowd was left far below, and I hovered in space between the twisted pillars of high-rises. The data coming from one of the offices piqued my interest, and I told Kir to zoom in.
The stakes were high here. This group was trying to reverse-engineer Earth technology by studying a recently discovered artifact, an actual piece of an ancient energy generator, somehow missed by the nanobots.
“Kir, how far along are they in their research?” I asked.
The world around me suddenly froze.
“Kir?”
He didn’t reply.
I opened my eyes and made a hand signal to turn off all external feeds. There was no response. My vision was blocked by the same still image of the room with motionless figures staring at their displays. For the first time in my life, I was blind. I sat up and tried to stop the cold wave of panic rising from my stomach. It simply wasn’t possible. Kir never malfunctioned. I didn’t have time to consider all of the possible ramifications when the picture started moving again.
“Nick, there was a problem. Their progress was stalled, but I couldn’t determine the reason.” Kir’s voice was calm as usual. “The analysis overloaded my computing resources.”
“But … Kir …” It didn’t make sense.
“I ran the emergency diagnostics on all my systems. Everything is in order.”
“Pause all programs,” I said.
I never imagined how elated I’d be to see the dull interior of a shabby hotel room. Now I had to find out what happened. I couldn’t afford glitches like that – Kir was my only advantage on
this planet.
“Let me look at your logs,” I said, and a system interface window opened.
I winced at the complicated tangle of pulsing surfaces, took a deep breath and began troubleshooting.
The results didn’t make me feel any better. I could see that Kir had run into some logical inconsistency that sent him into recursive loops, but try as I might, I kept losing the thread. After some fruitless digging, I finally had to assume that it was one of those almost zero probability events that were mentioned in the implant liability contract. Nobody, including me, ever believed that they could actually happen.
There was a simple test to prove this theory by repeating my steps. I braced myself and said in an upbeat voice, “Kir, resume all programs. Check the research status again.”
This time nothing strange happened. Kir positioned me next to a woman that was staring at her computing screen and twirling a strand of blond hair around her finger.
“Nick, they are stuck because of this person’s error.”
I wasn’t sure if I should feel relieved or more worried.
“Why were you unable to identify this before?”
“Nick, I can’t tell you. I don’t know.”
I decided to conclude that the statistics caught up with me on this one.
“Kir, let’s go to a private location. But this time, intercept only hidden camera transmissions,” I said.
Only one feed was available – it seemed that the government wasn’t interested in the private lives of its population at large.
I looked inside the monitored apartment. An unhealthy-looking middle-aged man stood in the center of the room staring at his computer from a distance as if he was afraid to get any closer. I checked the recent network activity and saw that someone from the Homeland Safety Department had remotely accessed his system and purposely left the folders messed up, files randomly opened, their order rearranged. I checked the content and almost whistled with surprise; the man had been saving media images that claimed to capture sightings of Earth’s military fleet. And there were pages and pages of his calculations and design drawings.
“What does he do for a living?” I asked Kir.
“He works as a commercial aircraft engineer,” he answered.
“Why are they watching him?”
“The security services received a recording submitted by a nearby pub bartender.”
“Let’s listen to it,” I said.
The lively music in my ears sounded completely out of place in comparison with the dead stillness of the man’s apartment.
“Another round, please,” a man said, sounding a bit shaky, “listen I have to tell you something about these Earth spaceships. I’ve done the calculations backwards and forwards. I can’t get it out of my head.” There was a rustle of paper, “See, there is an aerodynamic flaw. I don’t care what technology is used to power them.” He switched to whisper, “Keep it between us, but these things just can’t fly.”
I thought that the government was relatively humane. The man in the apartment had accidentally gotten too close to the truth, but he was still alive, just warned for now.
I took a sip of water from the plastic glass on my nightstand and told Kir to move to another random point in the city. After several more hours, the overall picture of a benign totalitarian state gained color and detail, and the city started to look familiar. I turned off the external video streaming and felt that the reconnaissance was more or less done.
I got up from the bed and stretched. There was one place that I had to visit in person: the Media Center where Remir’s interview was scheduled. It would be center stage for the next step in my operation, and I had to check its surroundings properly.
I felt rather hungry by now, and it was dinner time here, but I never trusted local cuisines. I ate one of the nutrition bars that I brought from the ship and left the hotel in very good spirits.
°°°
The sun was already setting, westward walls of the buildings were touched by the warm orange light, and the afterwork crowd slowed, having lost their midday energy. Women were openly checking me out as we passed one another, but I was used to this kind of attention on the closed Mirror Worlds. Centuries of human DNA improvements on Earth had done their job. Women aside, standing out was a major inconvenience for my stealth operations, but there was nothing I could do about that.
An especially attractive young girl gave me a smile, and I imagined her with tiny beads of sweat on her upper lip in my hotel room, her body next to mine on the wrinkled sheets of my bed.
Not now, I said to myself, business came first. I would have all the time between checking the Media Center neighborhood tonight and meeting with Remir the day after tomorrow. I quickened my step, thinking about the Game, as I referred to my main entertainment during working trips.
It so happened that my personal life was rather bleak until I’d started my headhunting career. Women from Earth were beautiful, intelligent and easy to get along with, and I had nobody but myself to blame for my failed relationships. I had tried everything, even conjoined cyber-mode, which made implants share their external feeds, but it didn’t help. Instead of providing the desired effect of intimacy, I would feel choked. I was at a loss.
And then I met the women of the Mirror Worlds. The vast majority were of no interest to me, even ones whose looks were on a par with Earth’s standard. There were some, however, that had a quality that I couldn’t quite define, but it made all the difference, and it made the Game extremely exciting.
Everything usually began from a moment of explicit eye contact, after which I would instruct Kir to suspend any communications with me until further notice or in case of an emergency. I wanted a fair challenge and needed to level the playing field. Then the thrilling part would start. After the first cautious steps, the boundary breaking process would speed up, the wordplay would become treacherous, body language ambiguous, and, finally, the entire pretense was dropped and there would be an open acknowledgment of attraction. The sex that followed was incomparable to anything I’d ever experienced back home.
Unfortunately, the end was inevitable. My brief crashes had never had a sufficiently high Dark Triad score, and random people weren’t allowed on Earth unless they were brought by the outliers. So, the Game had to end when I left the planet, well before any negative issues had time to surface, and the sadness at parting only added to the overall effect.
But it had to wait just a little longer, I repeated to myself. I was getting very close to my destination – by now I was already at the border of the Government District, the hilly area adorned with the spiral of the presidential palace at the top. I stopped at a convenience store, and, using the bank account set up by Kir, bought a set of props – a local communication device, sunglasses and headphones with a conspicuous microphone bead.
The streets here were significantly emptier since the state employees had already gone home, and awe-inspiring buildings appeared abandoned for the night. It was getting darker but the overhead lamps weren’t on yet, which added to the feel of the evening desolation.
The Media Center, a relatively easy on the eyes imitation of a partially melted iceberg, was located on a plaza with a breathtaking panoramic of the city. I walked around the grounds until I knew the layout by heart, and again thought how exceptionally smoothly everything was going. And then I remembered the strange incident with Kir. It was a random glitch, I said to myself and pushed it out of my mind.
I was ready to go back, but before leaving I decided to stop at the observation deck for a quick view. I reached the edge, placed my hands on the rails that were still warm from the heat of the day, and looked at the cityscape below my feet. The flickering high-rise lights made downtown look unexpectedly alive, and it was the first time that the local architecture didn’t annoy me. It was a good thing, given that there would be no escape from it until I left.
>
I gave the city one last glance and started walking downhill along a completely empty alleyway. The bright light of the night’s illumination suddenly flooded the streets, and for a split second I didn’t understand what had forced me to leap off the road. I pressed my back against the nearest wall and only then realized what triggered my reaction; there were two human shadows on the ground the instant that the lights went on. One started at my feet, and another, a longer one, stretched parallel to it.
In an almost inaudible whisper, I asked Kir for the full digital coverage of the area provided by the dense net of security cameras. Except for my lonely figure, the street was empty.
“Kir, replay the last two minutes of my eyesight,” I said, trying to slow my pounding heart. I paused the recording at the moment of the flash and reviewed the snapshot. There was a clear image of two long shadows on the ground – the only good news was that I wasn’t hallucinating.
“Show the location of second shadow’s origin,” I ordered in a low voice.
“Nick, it’s a blind spot.”
Keeping my back to the wall, I slowly inched to the area where the shadow’s owner had hid. Of course, there was no one there now.
“Kir, increase the radius,” I somehow knew that this would be futile.
It was. According to Kir, there were no people in the neighborhood.
Trying not to succumb to fully justifiable paranoia, I decided I’d run an analysis in the relative safety of my hotel room. Not relying on Kir anymore, I painstakingly cleared every sector around me visually as I started making my way towards downtown. However, all was still and quiet in the Government District, and there was nothing suspicious in the livelier Central City neighborhoods either.
I closed my room door, sat on the edge of the bed and tried to put things into perspective. Somebody had hidden in a blind zone when I passed and then disappeared without leaving a trace. I checked the detailed digital layout of the area once again, and in the end established that the video coverage had enough holes to allow for some non-nefarious explanation. There was some probability, however negligent, that a person happened to walk in my vicinity accidentally avoiding surveillance cameras. Fully unconvinced, I jacked up Kir’s security settings to the maximum and went to sleep.
Fire of the Dark Triad Page 5
