Lethal Velocity

by Lincoln Child

  Warne half listened, still a little numb with surprise. This was the man who had sat in his own Carnegie-Mellon lab two and a half years earlier, outlining his dream for Utopia, asking for Warne’s help. This was the man who had so affected Warne’s life: first for the better, then—unintentionally—for the worse.

  Nightingale had been dead for more than a year. And yet here he was. Staring at the image, Warne felt the affection he’d had for the man—nurtured over so many cups of coffee, so many brainstorming sessions—return abruptly, almost painfully. He hadn’t realized how much he missed the intellectual vigor of their friendship, the unspoken mutual respect. Nightingale had been entranced by Warne’s theories of robotics and machine intelligence. The very fact they were so controversial had energized him, and he’d become Warne’s most powerful advocate: precisely the kind of advocate he could use, right about now. Warne felt both sad and slightly uncomfortable, as if he were in the presence of a ghost.

  He knew a little about holography. 3-D video systems producing images only a meter in size took outrageous amounts of computing horsepower. And yet the figure before him was full-size, full-color, devoid of processing artifacts or tricks like emulsion swelling. And it had none of the ghostly, indistinct quality of first-generation holograms. Warne glanced around the dark walls, looking unsuccessfully for the display system. Then he turned back to the holovideo in the chair opposite him and tried to concentrate on what he—what it—was saying.

  “Close to 500 million people will visit an amusement park this year,” the Nightingale-image was saying. “But I’ll let you in on a secret. I have something better than amusement parks in mind for them. You see, I want them all to come to Utopia instead. If we can provide a fully immersive experience—that utopian experience, which educates while it delights—we can achieve our goal. And we can achieve it without gimmicky rides or cheap amusement park thrills. That’s where you come in.” Nightingale smiled—the broad, excited, almost conspiratorial grin that Warne remembered so well. “You have come here because of your own special skill. And that skill, whatever it may be, will help make Utopia a more realistic place. Or a place that runs even more smoothly. Or a place that pushes even harder at the boundaries of the imagination. Because Utopia is all about challenges. If we don’t challenge ourselves, we won’t evolve.”

  The Nightingale-image stood up. Warne noticed that, somehow, the hologram had the same kind of physical energy—abrupt, lithe, electric—that the living magician had always displayed.

  “When I first described my concept of Utopia, the pundits told me I was crazy. Nobody would drive miles into the desert to visit a theme park. Las Vegas was a terrible location, they said. It was an adult playground, not family-oriented. People didn’t want themed environments that would challenge their imaginations. They just wanted roller coasters. But I know Utopia will live up to its name. It will become the most successful theme destination in the world. And with the skills of such offsite experts as yourself, we will continue to grow.”

  Nightingale removed his top hat, turned it upside down. “You will find that Utopia is all about illusion. We don’t shy away from artifice here. Instead, we strive to immerse guests in illusion. Drown them in it.” He dipped his hand into the hat. When the hand came back into view, a white dove was perched on the index finger, head cocked, beady eyes staring. “And if they leave with some of the best, most vivid memories of their lives, aren’t those memories just as real as any others? And that is precisely how we create reality out of illusion.” With a flourish, he lofted the dove into the air. The bird raised its glossy head, stretched its wings wide. As Warne watched, the white feathers began to glow with an almost metallic shine. Then, abruptly, it morphed into a small dragon. A jet of fire shot from between parted jaws, and Warne ducked instinctively. The dragon whirled above Nightingale’s head, then vanished in a puff of blue smoke.

  The Nightingale-image was looking directly at Warne, still grinning broadly, as if enjoying the effect he was having on the listener. No doubt he had carefully crafted this as a performance, not knowing it would become a self-administered eulogy.

  The image’s black eyes glittered beneath notched brows. “Since the Utopia project first broke ground, we’ve already made many of the most important innovations in themed entertainment. Highly realistic, consistent environments. Subliminal mood stimulus. Breakthrough technologies for holography and other video systems. Intelligent, autonomous robotic agents.”

  “Thank you,” Warne murmured to the image.

  “It is with your help that we will continue such innovation. And Utopia will continue to build on what it already is today: the vanguard of a new era in family entertainment. And a crucible for new technology. Enjoy your time with us.”

  As he spoke, Nightingale had been holding the top hat between his hands. Now he spread his hands apart, and the image began to waver slightly. The outline shimmered gold and silver, glittering strangely in the muted light of the room. The shimmering spread quickly inward, until what had been Nightingale now appeared as a hollow, human-shaped coruscation of magical dust. The glimmering cloud seemed to bow slightly. “Until we meet again,” Nightingale said, but already the voice was growing as thin and insubstantial as the image itself. The glittering outline brightened suddenly, firing into countless pinpoints of light, and then with the faintest sweep of strings it was gone.

  Warne stood staring, immobile, at the place where Nightingale had stood, torn uncomfortably between present and past. He blinked away the sting that had come to his eyes.

  “Good-bye, Eric,” he said quietly.

  ANDREW WARNE WALKED alongside a white picket fence, blinking in the bright sunlight as crowds streamed past him. The sidewalk was a broad expanse of wooden ties, worn and bleached as if from years of salt and sun. Nearby, a hurdy-gurdy man cranked his music box, tame monkey squatting on one shoulder. On the far side of the thoroughfare was a small jewel of a city park, full of landscaped walks and wooden benches. At its center stood a gazebo, where a ragtime band in straw boaters and red-and-white-striped jackets belted out an irresistibly cheery version of “Royal Garden Blues.” And over everything loomed the huge roller coaster named the Brighton Beach Express, its intricate spiderweb of wooden supports and vast ski jump of a first drop like an old postcard brought magically to life.

  This was Utopia’s Boardwalk, a painstaking re-creation of a turn-of-the-century seaside amusement park, authentic down to the cast-iron streetlights and even—Warne realized with some surprise—the faintest touch of horse manure in the air, oddly pleasant in this context. And yet it was not authentic, of course, because no real boardwalk of 1910 had been this perfect. It was like a fondly remembered nostalgic confection, a past sanitized of its imperfections, buttressed by an arsenal of hidden technology. Warne worked his way through the crowd to the border of the little park, pulled a guidemap from his pocket and consulted it, then started down the nearest pathway.

  Ahead now he could see the blue oval of the pond. The smooth bright curve of the glass dome far overhead lent a sense of unreality to what was an already exotic setting. Children and adults knelt along the pond’s marble lip, trailing hands in the water, gazing out at the small sailboats that leaned and fluttered their way across the placid surface.

  Warne winced inwardly. It had seemed like an obvious spot to meet: centrally located, probably not too crowded. It hadn’t even occurred to him there would be sailboats. He wondered how Georgia would react.

  And then he tried to dismiss the thought. It was instinctive, automatic, this desire to shelter her. Though nearly three years had passed since Charlotte’s death, it never seemed to go away. And the more he allowed it to show, the more Georgia seemed to resent it. I’m a big girl now, her look would always tell him. I can handle myself. She never said it aloud—just as she never spoke much about her mother—but he knew it, anyway, with a kind of paternal sixth sense. Funny: despite how much closer they’d grown in the last three years, there was
still this pocket of terra incognita into which he was not allowed to venture.

  And then he saw her, standing between two knots of Asian tourists at the far end of the pond, gazing out over the water.

  For a moment, he just stared, love and pride mingling within him. Most fourteen-year-olds were a little awkward, gangly, dangling precariously between the child and the adult. Georgia was different. She stood slender and tall, poised unconsciously, like a thoroughbred. There was so much of her mother in her every movement: in the way she drew the chestnut hair away from her face with a finger, the way her dark eyebrows knitted together as they stared out into the pond. And yet she was beautiful in a way Charlotte had never been. Warne often wondered where Georgia got her looks. Not from him, certainly. He looked down into the water at his feet: a thin, tall man with a dark complexion and a lantern jaw stared back up at him. When he went places with Georgia, Warne usually felt both gratified and a little alarmed. The girl turned heads.

  He came up to her and she caught sight of him, rolling her eyes in mock exasperation. “It’s about time,” she said, tugging the headphones out of her ears. “Come on, let’s get going.”

  “Going where?” Warne asked, falling into step behind her as she led the way back out to the boulevard. He was surprised that, with such an abundance of choices around them, Georgia could be so single-minded. But she was striding forward, snaking her way through the crowds, a girl on a mission.

  “To that, of course,” she said without looking around, poking a finger into the sky.

  Warne looked up. “That?” he asked. Then he understood: the vast wooden ramparts of Brighton Beach Express towered over them, the sinuous lines of the track bed rising and falling like a massive ribbon.

  “Oh, that,” he said. “You…you sure you want to go on that?”

  Georgia didn’t bother to answer. “I’ve got it all mapped out,” she said. “I visited a ton of websites, got all the attractions rated, best to worst, for each of the Worlds. So we’re going on that first, then the Scream Machine, and then—”

  “Hey, slow down!” This was not how Warne had envisioned his first visit to Utopia: dashing madly through the crowds, so busy concentrating on where he was putting his feet that he barely had time to take in the surroundings. “What’s the hurry?”

  “Well, you haven’t told me how long you’re going to be tied up. There’s a lot to see, and I don’t want to miss anything. Jennifer from my homeroom class was out here in February, and they liked it so much they stayed on an extra day, just so they wouldn’t miss anything. Cost them five hundred bucks to change their tickets, she said.”

  “I don’t know how long I’m going to be tied up, princess, but it couldn’t be for too long.” They were passing the Enchanted Carousel—famous, Warne had read, for sporting the most wooden horses of any single carousel—and the languid waltz strains floated toward them over the cool, perfumed air. “The meeting with Sarah’s at eleven. I’ll know more then.”

  “What’s the big secret, anyway? Why couldn’t she tell you what it’s about?”

  “There’s no big secret. I think it has to do with expanding the role of the Metanet.” Actually, Warne hadn’t spoken directly with Sarah Boatwright; the eleven o’clock meeting had been arranged through her administrative assistant. Although he didn’t say it, Georgia’s questions were once again echoing his own. He changed the subject. “Hey, guess who I just had a talk with? Eric Nightingale.”

  At this, Georgia slowed a little. She looked at him, as if trying to fathom the joke. “Come on, Dad. That’s bullshit.”

  “Watch the mouth. Actually, Nightingale did all the talking. It was a hologram, life-size, amazingly real. It was geared to all the visiting specialists. Kind of a pep talk.”

  “Like you need one! You gave him half the ideas for this place.”

  Warne laughed at this exaggeration. “Just some of the early AI stuff, the robotics.”

  “Hey, where are all the robots, anyway?” Georgia looked around as she walked. “Haven’t seen one yet.”

  “They wouldn’t really be in character here. Wait until we get to Callisto.”

  The entrance to Brighton Beach Express was a large brick building, decorated as a nineteenth-century amusement hall, just beyond the Aquarama. Flags hung like bunting from its upper stories; handbills and ancient-looking broadsides were plastered to the facade, peddling everything from dance-hall revues to patent medicines in heavy-bottomed script. Three vaulted archways led into the ride, each bearing a different signboard: Panopticon, The Burning Ruins, Metamorphoses. Lines of visitors snaked away from each archway.

  “We just studied metamorphosis in biology,” Georgia said. “It was boring.”

  “Maybe, but the line is shortest.” Warne eyed his watch. “Let’s go.”

  The line moved quickly—Warne had read about the Park’s ability to keep guests entertained, even when queued—and within a few minutes they were in the shadow of the building. Beyond the archway, the hall was dark. The line split in two, and a woman in a severely tailored gown directed Georgia to the right. Warne followed, letting his eyes adjust to the dim light. The air seemed chillier in here, more humid. Up ahead he could hear laughter, subdued ooohs. He could make out people lining up single file, staring at what appeared to be tall panes of glass set into the wall of the corridor.

  Within moments, Warne and Georgia took their places in front of the first two panes of glass. Warne looked at the pane facing him, saw himself staring back. So it’s a mirror, he thought. Big deal.

  Suddenly, Georgia dissolved into laughter beside him. “Oh, my God!” she squealed, staring at her own pane. “Gross!”

  Then Warne’s mirror abruptly went blank. What the hell? That’s no mirror. A moment later, his reflection reappeared. But something seemed wrong; the image was off somehow, unsettlingly so. But he couldn’t put his finger on it and, with a shrug, moved on to the next pane, which Georgia had just vacated.

  Again, he saw a mirror image of himself. Again, it vanished. And again, it reappeared. Only this time it was obvious what was wrong. He had abruptly grown fat.

  The Andrew Warne that stared back at him appeared to have put on an instant two hundred pounds. His belly protruded alarmingly, his prominent Adam’s apple was obscured by a double chin. It was a surprising, shocking image. And yet it was unmistakably him: or rather, him as he might have been. At the next pane, Georgia was pointing and snickering at herself.

  Metamorphoses, indeed, he thought. How the hell do they do it?

  He moved on to the next pane. Now he went from being fat to alarmingly thin. The eyes, sunken within a fleshy face in the prior frame, stared out at him from gaunt hollows. His jaw, large to begin with, now seemed far too big for the chicken-bone neck.

  Abruptly, he realized how it was done. It was holographic technology, like the image of Nightingale he’d seen before. There must be an imaging camera behind the glass. It scanned in his image, then used morphing software to change that image—make it fatter, skinnier, whatever—and reproject it. Like the wavy mirrors in a fun house, only light-years more advanced…

  He realized that Georgia had been standing at the adjoining pane longer than usual. He glanced over, saw her looking intently at the image. Curious, he leaned over. What he saw made him catch his breath.

  It was an image of Georgia, computer-aged by about twenty years. The same chestnut hair, thoughtful eyes, rosebud mouth, striking features. But there was somebody else in that face, too: the image of his dead wife, Charlotte, faint but unmistakable. It was like a specter, looking out at him through his daughter’s eyes.

  They stood silently for a moment, staring. Then Warne licked his lips, placed one hand on Georgia’s shoulders. “Come on,” he said. “We’re holding up the line.”

  Beyond the gallery, the queue snaked toward the boarding area for the coaster. The space around them was built to resemble a turn-of-the-century subway station. Brighton Beach Express was set into the tiled wall
s in squares of black. Boarding straight ahead. Mingling with the queued guests were men and women in period dress, laughing and chattering. A peanut vendor stood against one wall, hawking his wares in a loud voice. Nearby were concession stands, vaudeville acts. Warne shook his head. The illusion was remarkable. If it wasn’t for the other guests around him, he’d have sworn they’d traveled back in time, to the Coney Island of a hundred years before.

  Beside him, Georgia was uncharacteristically silent. He thought back to the mirror image he’d just seen. “Your mom and I took you to an old-fashioned park like this. When you were seven, maybe eight. Kennywood. Remember?”

  “No. Hey, why do we have to wait with all these people, anyway? Can’t you get us to the head of the line? You’re a big important person here.”

  “Sweetie, that was a long time ago. By the way,” he said with a teasing smile. “I meant to ask. How was Child-Care Services?”

  Georgia wrinkled her nose at the emphasis. “Actually, pretty cool. You could watch any old Atmosfear rerun you wanted, and they had tons of computers and games. But I really didn’t spend much time on that stuff. I was busy doing this.” And she dug into a pocket of her jeans, pulled out a folded sheet of paper.

  “What’s that?” Warne reached for it automatically.

  Georgia held it away from his grasp. “It’s a list. Of qualifications.”

  Warne waited.

  Georgia shrugged. “You asked what kind of girlfriend I’d approve of. So I wrote it all down.” She looked at him. “You want to hear it or not?”

  He returned her gaze curiously. “Yes, I do.”

  The line moved forward, and Georgia followed it. She unfolded the list, began to read. “Number one: does not wear high heels. Number two: not a vegetarian. Three: plays hearts, chess, and backgammon, but not too well.”

  At this, Warne chuckled to himself. He was an ace at backgammon, but sometimes forgot to let Georgia win the occasional game.