Silhouette

by Dave Swavely

  “Right,” I said, remembering how the tech had gone rigid in the net room at the castle. “Can you tell what he’s doing? Calling for help?”

  “He’s all over the place,” Paul said. “Trying avenues other than BASS, so that proves he found out something about the murder, and he thinks I’m in league with you … two big shots, so he’s not expecting any help from the company. He also probably won’t go in the stores, because he’s figured out by now that my junk may be good enough to access their security systems.” As he paused, I studied all the stationary figures on two streets, and then a third as I turned the falcon around and sent it around another corner. Then Paul added, “But he’s straining my ice, so we need to find him fast.”

  As if on cue, through the falcon’s view, I noticed a familiar male form flush against a pole. I zoomed closer and saw that it was indeed Kim.

  “I’ve got him,” I said.

  “I know,” Paul answered, and, guessing my question, added, “I’m plugged in to your glasses and falcon view, too. Only because I’ve practiced … I wouldn’t try that many perspectives if I were you. What street is he on? Either find a street sign or bring up the GPS.” Not wanting to take my eyes off Kim, I moved my pointer finger until the falcon’s location was at the top right of its screen, and told Paul where it was.

  “I’m northwest on Mason,” he said. “My bird can be there in a minute, me in five.”

  “We need to take him out now, while he’s under,” I said, then paused for a moment, realizing I was in a kill mode by default from the adrenaline and anger inside me, but wondering if I should be.

  “Suit yourself,” Paul said.

  “If I gas him or use stoppers,” I said, my mind firing in all directions, “what would we do with him?”

  “Lock him up somewhere, I suppose,” Paul said through heavy breaths, obviously running in my direction. “I just don’t see how that’s going to work with what we have to do tonight.” He then added, “Don’t use gas … BASS sensors might pick it up.”

  I tried to think harder, which didn’t work too well, but then my reverie was broken as Kim came out of his dive and saw the menacing black bird floating near him. He instinctively leaped in the direction his body was facing and raced into the tangle of slow-moving cars on the street. I jerked the falcon forward in the direction of his receding back, and when I had closed the distance to a couple of car lengths, I tried to put the crosshairs on his zigzagging form as best I could, squeezed my second finger twice, then held it down. I was expecting to see a stream of X-shaped projectiles raining down on the man, but instead I could tell right away that they were regular bullets slamming into the cars and road surface all around him. When I realized this, I abruptly stopped firing and braked the bird, watching Kim continue through the gauntlet of cars and then people on the sidewalk on the other side of the street. I was amazed that he hadn’t been killed, and wondered if he had been wounded. Either way, I knew he wouldn’t stop running from us now.

  “You said the middle finger was stoppers!” I yelled to Paul.

  “No, I didn’t,” he yelled back. “I said the middle finger was killers … think about it, Michael, it makes sense.” He chuckled. “Look at the control menu if you don’t believe me.… Are you okay, man? Is the stress getting to you?”

  Regardless of who was right about what had been said, the stress definitely was getting to me, to one degree or another. I realized that I had been leaning against an occupied car when the driver suddenly laid on his horn, startling me out of my reverie. After moving away from it, I said to Paul, “You tell me what to do.”

  “Just keep him from doubling back,” my friend said. “I’m heading him off.”

  I moved the falcon forward until I caught sight of Kim again, and then had to will my body to start moving forward itself, because it was much more natural to stand still when manipulating the flying machine and looking through its eyes.

  “He’s turning west on Sutter,” I told Paul a minute later.

  “Perfect. I’m almost at the other end of the block.”

  Both of our falcons turned their respective corners at about the same time, and then we ourselves arrived on each end of the street a little while later. When we did, I saw through my human eyes both falcons hovering in the air in the middle of the block, turning in every direction, seeking Kim from their bird’s-eye view. I couldn’t see Paul on the other end of the block because of the people, cars, trolleys, and ad holos, but I knew he was scanning his end of the street, like I was mine. None of this yielded any sign of Kim, however, even after a few minutes of searching.

  “Did he get past you?” I asked.

  “No way.”

  “The subway?”

  No answer initially … Paul was probably studying a map in his glasses. Then: “Nope. The nearest entrance is just beyond my position.”

  “Bloody hell,” I said. “Where is he? He must have gone into a building.”

  More pregnant silence as Paul’s monster software checked all the businesses on the block. “Not that I can see.”

  “Is he diving right now?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  I moved against the corner of the corner building, filled the glasses with the falcon’s view, and scanned the street again as thoroughly as I could, keeping some distance from Paul’s bird so that we didn’t overlap too much. After a few more minutes of this, I gave up and minimized the falcon’s view again, only to be startled again by Paul, who was now standing right in front of me.

  “Let’s check back this way,” he said, gesturing behind me with his head.

  “You think he got past me?” I asked.

  “Well, you’re not exactly in tiptop shape, buddy.” He patted me on the shoulder. “You go this way and I’ll go that way, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, and he left, his falcon streaking through the air from the middle of the block and around the corner to the street he had entered. I stood in place for a few moments, staring back down the street we had been searching, a feeling of defeat now added to my anger. My falcon hovered between the high buildings, and the crowd seemed to have thinned out a bit … perhaps some people had been creeped out by the black birds and migrated away or into the stores along the street.

  Thinking about the stores drew my attention to the ad holos, which I usually ignored because they were so ubiquitous in the city. But something splintered in the back of my mind, so I studied the fanciest one in my vicinity, which was on the other side of the street and a short distance up the block. It was a big one protruding from the second story of a building, above the entrance to a travel agency, and it alternated between a seascape with a water-ski boat spraying virtual water onto the sidewalk, tuxedos crowded around a spinning roulette wheel in Monte Carlo, and a dusty high-powered jeep filled with adventurers on safari in Nevada. The genetically engineered lions they were hunting leaped down dramatically to the edge of the street, then disappeared. After a few moments, the sequence repeated itself.

  Next I looked on my side of the street at a seven-foot-tall hologram filling the air above an ad projector in the sidewalk, displaying real estate that was available for purchase or rental throughout the city. I moved out to the curb and farther so I could get a more unobstructed view of the holo, and saw that it was currently advertising a town home, presenting it in a lifelike yet shrunken three-dimensional reproduction. While I was staring at it, the image dissolved into another three-story for sale, and as it did, I might have seen the shape of a human figure inside the big ad, but thought that it was likely just my imagination. The holo did seem to be slightly distorted, however, so I glanced at the other big one across the street again for comparison.

  Then I noticed a similar real estate ad farther down the block on that side, so I brought the falcon down next to it to see if it looked any different from the one closer to me. I couldn’t tell in the falcon’s camera, which was one step away from reality, so I walked toward the holo house near me and brought
the falcon toward it from the other side. As I and the bird closed in on the big ad, people gave us a wide birth and watched from a distance. Soon the only objects on that stretch of sidewalk were me, the virtual building, and the falcon floating on the other side of it. I looked at it through my glasses and through the falcon’s view, but couldn’t tell for sure if it looked any different from the other. So I slowly stepped toward the holo and stretched my hand out. I moved my body forward gradually, and my hand and arm started disappearing into the ad.…

  Kim exploded into me out of the holo with both arms extended, sending me sprawling to the sidewalk, and ran off in the direction I had come from. I instinctively rolled sideways and came off my back into a crouched position facing that direction, my knuckles resting on the cement. But before I could spring up to pursue him, a violent crash behind me ripped my eardrums and pelted me with hot gas and shards of metal, sending me sprawling again, this time onto my stomach. I looked back to see the glowing, smoking remains of the falcon, then realized what had happened. Being inexperienced with the remote, I had held on to it too long, first sending the bird upward with wrists flayed back to stop my fall, then bringing it crashing down when I rolled and pointed my hands down on the pavement. If I had just let go of the stick, presumably the bird would have been fine.

  Now even more pissed and homicidal, I yanked out the killer boa and surged around the corner to pursue Kim.

  “Paul, I found him, he’s on…” I looked around for a street sign and had to crane my neck because the blank black window for the falcon was still showing in the right side of my glasses. I turned it off and could see much better, but then realized there were three ways the tech could have run from here, and I didn’t know where he was. “I lost my falcon. Paul, he’s somewhere near Bush and Taylor.” A few moments passed. “Paul?”

  I continued running straight up Taylor, because that was the most direct route away from where I was, and after a block or so, I thought I heard some screams ahead and to the left. “Paul,” I said again.

  “Yeah, buddy,” he finally said. “I’m on California, but don’t come over here. Nobody knows who I am because of this getup, but someone will recognize you. I’m leaving the falcon for right now to keep the gawkers at bay. Catch me on Taylor, on the way back to the car.”

  I slowed to a jog but kept moving up the street, now hearing Paul’s voice modified through the falcon’s megaphone, a way that we often cleared a crime scene. Almost immediately I saw him turn the corner, briskly moving toward me. He grabbed my arm and spun me around in the other direction, back to where we had come from.

  “What the hell happened?” I asked.

  “You won’t believe it,” he said. “This is worse than I thought, and you don’t want to see the results.”

  Now I grabbed his arm and pulled him to a stop. I said, “I do,” and wrenched the falcon’s remote out of his hand.

  “Okay, hold on,” he said, and synced his bird to my glasses.

  I felt the now-familiar rush of vertigo when the falcon’s view filled mine, and heard its looped announcement telling people to move on, stay back, etc. With the remote, I pulled the bird out of its autopiloted orbit and took it toward what it was circling, which turned out to be a macabre scene, to say the least. One of the retro trolleys was stopped on an empty patch of street, and next to the tracks behind it was the bottom half of Kim’s body. It took me only a moment to figure out that the top half was underneath the cable car.

  “What the…?”

  “That’s what I was trying to tell you,” Paul said, grabbing the remote back and moving me along again down the street. I was too dumbfounded to resist. “I found the tech with the falcon and was coming close to him, and all of a sudden he seizes up like when he’s diving the net, and like a zombie he throws himself under the front wheels of the trolley.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “He might have just tried to make one last dangerous dive to escape, maybe tried to hack the falcon or something, and lost control of himself … but I think it was the old man, taking control of him.” Paul pointed to his head, and, as if by reflex, he looked all around and quickened his pace. “The tech’s persistent attempts at searching for the black-ops project probably triggered something that the old man noticed. He didn’t want us to find out whatever Kim knew, so he tried to help him escape, maybe. But then when we were closing in, he definitely had to do something.”

  He stopped, took hold of my shoulders, and looked at me in earnest.

  “Listen, Michael. We cannot use the net anymore tonight. Do you understand?”

  “I don’t bloody understand much of anything right now, Paul.”

  “Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” He started walking fast again.

  “What will you do about Kim?” I said, feeling shame again for using the man’s name.

  “It’s a suicide,” he answered. “I’ll just file the report.”

  “But what if some peacers start looking into it?”

  “They won’t,” he said confidently. “I have the master keys, remember?”

  “I’m feeling something in my head here,” I said, pointing to the general area. “Is that where the chip would be?”

  “It depends on what kind of wetware it is,” he said, panting again from the brisk walk. “If it’s specialized to take over your will, that would be the frontal lobe in the neocortex, because that’s the mission-control center of the brain. Pain or discomfort might manifest from there in the spot you’re talking about. But if it is a more global application, it would be in the corpus callosum, because that’s the neural bridge that ties the different parts together. It borders the occipital lobe for visuals, the temporal lobe for sound, and the parietal lobe for touch sensations. The cyber-pleasure industry does implants for the parietal lobe.” He smiled briefly. “But I digress … If your chip is global, it’s in the callosum, and that would be right where you were pointing.”

  As he said this, the pressure seemed to increase in that part of my head.

  “Or it might just be your imagination,” he said, smiling again.

  “I wish.”

  By the time we reached the car, the falcon had caught up to us. It retracted its wings and lowered itself into its resting place in the trunk, and we drove off to Chinatown Underground to find out about our window of opportunity to confront the old man without his lethal cyborg bodyguard present. I only hoped that by then, my mind would still be my own.

  16

  Before long, we reached the edge of the most colorful part of the city, where the rebuilt stores and restaurants of Chinatown glowed with overcrowded neon above the cramped streets. Paul pulled the car into the entrance to the Underground’s parking structure, and the elevator began descending the levels to the one he wanted.

  As soon as we left the car and stepped into the dim light of the garage, we were greeted by four armed guards and a beautiful Chinese woman, dressed like an executive. I instinctively raised my hands away from the boas—especially when I noticed that all the guards’ assault weapons were pointed at my midsection. I took this to mean that Paul wasn’t armed.

  “Could we please see your clearance for those weapons,” the woman said to me, with only a small trace of an accent. I slowly reached for my card and handed it to her. After she slipped it into a handheld slot and suppressed her surprise at who I was, she gave it back. Then she handed me a silver grip, which I clasped briefly and returned to her. ID equipment like that prevented old tricks like severed fingers and skin grafts. She looked relieved after she read its display.

  “We apologize for any inconvenience, Mr. Ares.” The guards lowered their weapons and they all retreated to an armored van parked nearby. Paul and I walked across the garage to a door, which slid open upon the wonder that was Chinatown Underground. The garage entrances, like the pedestrian ones accessed from the storefronts on the surface, had been cleverly positioned by the architects to impress th
e visitor with an immediate sense of awe at the scale of the massive subterranean town.

  Inside the door was a suspended walkway running left and right, narrow enough that you could see most of the Underground from any spot on it. Paul didn’t linger at the immediate view but proceeded to the right along the walkway. I followed him, and we continued to stare at the scene on our left as we traversed it.

  In the center of the complex was a huge open space, stretching down to the bottom and up to the ceiling, twenty stories of underground atmosphere. I could see some birds circling in the middle of it—either real ones or some clever invention of the Chinese techs. I knew it wasn’t Sabon technology, because they didn’t have it yet, thanks to the old man’s stinginess. I swerved closer to the short wall on my left and looked down, and was rewarded with a dizzying glimpse of trees and grass at the bottom of the open space, far below the circling birds. The park was only thirteen levels down, because we were on the seventh, but I was surprised at how far away it seemed.

  On each side of the wide space were protruding concourses lined with shops and speckled with consumers. And on the far side from us, barely visible because of the distance and the haze from the atmosphere, was another series of walkways like the one we were on, providing access to and from the other parking garage. It occurred to me that most of the people in the mall must have walked in from the surface, however, because our walkway and the others I saw were sparsely populated.

  The narrow walk dumped us out onto the broad concourse on this side of the level, and I continued following Paul as he moved purposefully toward our destination. The concourse was filled with various establishments, the temporary ones planted in its middle and the bigger, permanent ones along the outside edge. I couldn’t read Chinese, and there were no signs in English, but I knew what the attractions were. Besides the usual restaurants and stores, there were numerous cyberware shops, where a trusting Chinese or a daring American could get anything from a relaxation implant to a birth-control device called a “switch,” which enabled its owner to allow or prevent conception at will by way of a neural interface.