by Eric Brown
It came to him that he was still lying on the deserted street, that he was so close to death that his body had shut down, sluicing natural analgesics around his system as life slipped away.
But that was impossible. The surface beneath his body was not hard. He moved his right hand and felt the soft texture of linen beneath his fingertips.
Somehow, he had survived.
He opened his eyes.
The sight that greeted him was almost as surprising as awaking to find himself alive and in no pain.
He lay on a raised bed in a circular room. No, he thought, not a room as such, but a dome. The arching inner hemisphere of the dome was opaque, a milky hue shot through with iridescent threads of green and red, like opal. There seemed to be no entrance to the dome, and no other furnishings apart from a chair placed next to the bed.
He lifted a hand, stared at it and then at the material covering his arm. He was dressed in a pair of beige chinos, a blue T-shirt and sneakers. He sat up, expecting pain but experiencing none. He drew back the covers of the bed and swung himself into a sitting position.
He unbuttoned his shirt and stared down at his chest. There was no wound, no sign at all that a bullet had ripped through his back and exited through his ribcage.
He took a deep breath, and had to admit that he felt wonderful.
The bed was positioned in the middle of the room. He stood and walked across to the curving inner wall, to where a touchpad console was set into a waist-high pedestal. Experimentally, he reached out and touched a red square.
Instantly the wall of the dome deopaqued. He looked out on a familiar scene: ice-bound Tethys, with the gas giant of Saturn on the horizon.
He turned. ‘Wellman?’
‘Halliday.’ A head and shoulders vision of Wellman appeared in the air before him. ‘Just give me a minute while we adjust the programs. The sites are running at different time-scales. I’ll be with you shortly.’
Before he could reply, the vision of Wellman vanished.
He wondered how long he had been in VR, if his well-being was nothing more than a trick of technology to ease him through his dying moments. It came to him in a burst of panic that that was exactly what was happening. He was dying, and Wellman had inserted him into a time-extended site so that his last few hours might be prolonged.
What kind of compensation was that? To know that he was rapidly dying in the real world, but had been resurrected to live out a period of grace in VR?
It would be a torture he’d find hard to endure. Far from being in heaven, he was in hell...
Then he recalled what Wellman had said about the sites running at different time-scales. Wellman existed in a slowed-down site. Given that, then this site could not be time-extended, like Wellman’s. This must be a regular VR site, which meant that out there in the real world he might not be dying, after all.
An oval opening appeared in the wall of the dome diametrically opposite him, and the dapper figure of Wellman, dressed in a crisp white suit, stepped through.
‘Halliday, it’s good to see you up and about.’
‘What’s happening? Why all this... ?’ He gestured around him at the dome.
Wellman sat on the chair and indicated the bed. ‘Sit down, Halliday.’
He remained standing. ‘What’s happening in the real world?’
‘Don’t worry. I’m taking care of everything. You’re recovering remarkably, considering what you’ve been through.’
‘I’ll live?’
Wellman smiled. ‘You were lucky. An emergency team was a kilometre away when your call came in. They were there in three minutes. Any longer and...’ Wellman gestured. ‘Well, we wouldn’t be talking now.’
A sensation of relief swept through him. He crossed to the bed and sat down.
‘The bullet missed your heart by a centimetre. You lost a lot of blood. As soon as I found out what had happened I had you transferred to a private clinic. You’re doing fine.’
‘How long have I been in here?’
‘In VR? A day. But you were in hospital five days before we thought it safe to transfer you here. You were unconscious all that time, after the operation.’
He thought back to the shoot-out in the deserted street. It could so easily have been the end. For some reason he thought of Casey, and how she might have taken the news of his death.
‘We got you the best treatment that money could buy, Halliday. It was the least we could do.’
‘You said I’ve been in here a day?’
‘Just over.’
‘When do I get out?’
Wellman raised a hand. ‘One further day should be enough. We’ve found that around two days in VR greatly facilitates the healing process of trauma victims.’
Halliday shook his head. ‘I thought the safe limit was twenty-four hours?’
‘The legal limit for the protection of citizens who might wish to over-indulge is twenty-four hours, but the body can exist in suspension for three or four days before the first signs of adverse reactions. We’ve been working on extended immersions for the past year.’
‘Why, Wellman? You want people to live in VR permanently?’
Wellman laughed. ‘That wouldn’t be at all practical. Think about it. The economics wouldn’t work, for a start. Society would fall apart. Oh, I know there are doom-merchants who foresee a society of haves in VR and have-nots in the real world, working to keep the privileged in their safe dream worlds, but that’s not what we at Cyber-Tech are working towards.’
‘So why the research into extended immersion?’
Wellman smiled, and Halliday thought he saw a light of sadness in his eyes. ‘Many reasons. To ease the plight of those with terminal illnesses, to aid post-surgical recovery, and of course - why deny it? - as a leisure facility. We’re working on ways to keep the body active in suspension, so that the disadvantages of immersion, muscle atrophy, post-VR fatigue and nausea, will be a thing of the past. We hope to be able to introduce safe week-long immersions to the world in six months or so.’
Halliday wondered what Kat Kosinski might have to say about that scenario, and its effect on society at large.
He considered his earlier reaction, when he thought that he might be dying in the real world, and that he was living a time-extended period in VR before the inevitable end.
He looked up at Wellman. ‘How can you live in here,’ he asked, ‘knowing what’s happening to you out there?’
Wellman said, ‘What’s the alternative? That I return to the real world, to my emaciated and pain-racked body, and die in a matter of days?’
‘I don’t know ... If I were dying, perhaps I’d rather go quickly than live out this ...’
‘This lie, Halliday?’ Wellman shrugged. ‘It’s a hell of a lie, my friend. I have everything I have in the real world, and more besides. Friends visit. I have the run of the most amazing sites ... I can’t complain.’
Halliday considered something Wellman had said earlier, about the sites operating at different time-scales. He asked him about this now. ‘Have you left your time-extended site to visit me?’
Wellman shook his head. ‘Your site, this dome, was running on a real world time-scale. We reconfigured the matrix just after you awoke so that I could step through without losing any precious time. When I return, the techs will adjust this site back to how it was.’
Wellman looked through the dome at Tethys, then touched the decal on the back of his hand. Instantly, the icy moonscape vanished, to be replaced by a sun-drenched stretch of grassland, with a lake to the right and a range of snow-capped mountains in the distance.
Halliday made out animals drinking in the shallows of the lake, rhinos and what looked like wildebeest, a herd of giraffes galloping with somnolent negligence perhaps a hundred metres from the dome.
Wellman moved towards the oval opening in the curved wall. He paused, turned and gestured for Halliday to follow him, and stepped outside.
Halliday stood and approached the exit.
He was immediately hit by the heat of the African day. A distinctive odour, sun-baked dust and the musky scent of wild animal, filled the air.
Wellman had seated himself beneath the awning of a khaki tent. Halliday left the dome and joined him at a table laid with a teapot and two bone-china cups.
‘Where are we?’
Wellman poured him a cup of Earl Grey. ‘Serengeti. What do you think?’
Halliday nodded, impressed. ‘Quite something. It looks so damned real.’ He accepted the cup and sipped the tea.
In the distance a herd of elephants, led by a magnificent bull, trundled past, harrumphing and bellowing with a good imitation of disgruntlement.
‘We’ve set you up with a new office,’ Wellman said, ‘a couple of kilometres south of where you were. So you won’t be needing to go back to your old place. We thought it wise, after what happened to you.’
Wellman paused, then said, ‘Now, I’d like to know what’s going on out there.’
Where to begin? Halliday tried to order his thoughts. He was in possession of so many facts, so much information. Trouble was, no matter how he arranged the details of what he’d discovered, he could make out no pattern to the series of events.
‘I wish I knew,’ he said. ‘All I can do is tell you what I’ve found out, and we’ll take it from there. I haven’t seen you since Nyack, have I?’
‘What happened at Nyack?’
So he gave Wellman the rundown, how he’d traced Anastasia Dah to the house in Nyack; he told him about Charles and the killing of Dah, his discovery of the graves.
‘So you think they killed Suzie?’ Wellman asked, his gaze fixed on the distant horizon of the Serengeti.
Halliday nodded. ‘Forensic found traces of blood matching hers.’
Wellman looked across at him. ‘And you’ve had no luck trying to track down these people, Charles and the others?’
‘The guy I winged at Nyack was known to the police: Andre Connaught. He was into big money scams. He was also behind something called the Mercury Project.’
Wellman looked at him. ‘He was? That’s interesting...’
‘You heard of it?’
‘My techs have been studying the holo-device you brought back from White Plains. Unbeknownst to anyone at Cyber-Tech, Suzie Charlesworth was doing some independent work for someone - we have no idea who - who was involved with the research and development of von Neumann machines. They’re—’
‘Self-replicating devices theorised by some physicist in the twentieth century,’ Halliday said. ‘I found that much out when I discovered who Connaught was.’
Wellman poured more tea. ‘According to Suzie’s holo,’ he said, ‘the Mercury Project aims to send an unmanned probe to Mercury within the next year. We can only theorise that they’ll be taking von Neumann machines along too.’
‘I thought they were still only theoretical?’
Wellman shook his head. ‘We’ve been hearing reports from various usually reliable sources that a couple of labs in Japan have succeeded in developing prototypes. If that’s so, then the technology is extant, and if Suzie Charlesworth was working on it, then I can only assume that someone somewhere in the US is onto something big.’
‘But how does that tie up with the deaths of Dah, Kim and Suzie? I can see why opponents to the Mercury Project might want Suzie out of the way ... but Connaught was behind the damned project. Why the hell would his accomplice, Charles, kill her?’
‘You’ve come up with nothing on this Charles character?’
‘Nothing - except, I did come across him in the VR site.’
Wellman lowered his cup in surprise. ‘You managed to access the site?’
‘With a little help from a friend, yes.’
‘I had a team of techs working round the clock trying to get in there. They finally managed it, for about three seconds flat. Then they were ejected. You say a vracker got you in? Would he like to come and work for Cyber-Tech?’
Halliday smiled at the thought of Kat’s reaction to the job offer. ‘It’s a she, and she’s strictly independent.’
‘So ... what happened when you got in there?’
‘There was a construct of Kim. She tried to tell me to leave the site, that I was in danger.’
‘And you took her advice?’
‘I couldn’t quit,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t get out of there.’ He told Wellman about the appearance of Charles, the burning attic, Charles’ threats.
‘Thing that gets me is, how the hell did they know this? How did they reproduce the attic, right down to the pattern on the damned carpet?’
Wellman looked at him for a second or two before speaking. ‘Good God, Halliday, we’re certainly not dealing with amateurs.’
‘You know how they did it?’
‘When you entered the site, they mapped the contents of your mind, charted your memories.’
Halliday stared at him. ‘They can do that?’
‘Believe me, they can do that. They dug into your memories and found the attic fire and used it to try to frighten you off the case.’
Halliday sipped his tea. The clean heat of this ersatz Africa was refreshing after the polluted humidity of New York.
‘So anyway, when I got out I checked up on a guy called Tallak, Edward L. Tallak. He was Suzie’s psychiatrist or whatever. I asked about Suzie, showed him some pix I’d made up of Charles.’ He shook his head. ‘Should have known something was wrong, Wellman. I should’ve been more alert. It was his hands. See, this guy looked about fifty, maybe older, but his hands were the hands of a guy twenty years his junior.’ He smiled to himself. ‘I should have worked out he was wearing a chu, that he had something to hide. I should have been suspicious when he gave me his card, a flash metal job. He traced me with the damned thing.’
‘You got the guy, Halliday. You did enough to save yourself.’
Halliday shook his head. ‘It wasn’t professional. Barney would never have fallen for that.’
He stopped, looked up at Wellman as a thought occurred to him. ‘Hey, if Tallak was wearing a chu, and working for the people who ran the site ... maybe he was our mysterious silver-haired Charles?’
Wellman shrugged. ‘I had someone run a check on him. He operated under a number of aliases. In reality he was one Benedict Stevens, a psychiatrist. I suppose it’s possible that one of his guises was Charles.’
‘I hope not,’ Halliday said.
Wellman looked across at him, an eyebrow cocked in query.
Halliday smiled. ‘I want the satisfaction of finding Charles and having him know that there’s no way out.’
There was a silence from the executive. ‘You wouldn’t kill him?’
Halliday considered. ‘In the heat of the moment, perhaps I would, and I’d feel no guilt about it either. But I don’t want the satisfaction of killing Charles, just nailing him.’
‘I wish I could be there with you, Halliday.’
A silence developed between the two men. Wellman refilled Halliday’s cup, then his own.
At last Wellman said, ‘What are your plans when you leave here?’
Halliday considered. ‘I’m not too sure. The leads’ve dried up again. You know, there I was thinking I was getting somewhere ... If I’d managed to get Tallak alive, or tail him back to some place, maybe I would’ve had something big. Now he’s dead, it’s back to square one. I’ll just keep on digging, trying to turn something up. I’ll come across something, sooner or later.’
‘Don’t forget, if you need anything, anything at all, just contact me.’
Wellman stood and made to enter the tent, then hesitated. ‘Oh, if you lie down and rest awhile, when you wake up you’ll have a visitor.’
‘A visitor? Who—?’
Wellman smiled. ‘I’ll keep you guessing. Good luck with the case. I’ll see you later.’ He gave a wave and hit the decal on the back of his hand.
Halliday watched as the executive vanished, then he returned to the relative cool of h
is room. He opaqued the dome and lay on the bed, considering who his visitor might be.
Within seconds he was asleep.
* * * *
Eighteen
The day after Barney was informed that he was to be downloaded into a nano-cerebral interface wired into the head of a brain-dead corpse - a cyber-zombie, as he thought of it - Lew Kramer materialised on the beach.
Barney had spent an interesting last day in paradise - or rather surfing the cyberverse via the basal rent in the virtual matrix beneath the pine tree.
