“Your friend lives around here?” the officer asked.
Casper nodded and handed him the temporary pass from the apartment building. “Just the other side of this block,” he said.
The officer turned to his partner for a moment, then handed the pass back.
“You want a ride?” the officer asked.
Casper knew that his normal reaction would be to recoil in fear, that he never wanted to be in the back of a police vehicle, that too many people never came back from such rides—but today it seemed more important to be friendly, to observe the cops closely. And acting nervous might make them suspicious, something he'd known since he was a kid but never tried to use; today, for the first time in his life, he was able to not act nervous if he chose.
“Sure, that'd be great.” He gave them a broad, disarming smile.
The rear door of the cruiser popped open, and Casper tumbled in. The cruiser quickly rounded the block and halted in front of Cecelia's apartment building. Casper thanked the officers as he clambered out, then ran up to the door. He noticed that the cruiser remained out front until he was inside.
Careful, those cops, he thought to himself. Good procedure. They hadn't said a word while he was in the vehicle, either. Disrupting the city force could be difficult.
Maybe they could be won over, though.
He stopped and shook his head. Won over to what?
He didn't know. He went on up.
Mirim was in the kitchen making breakfast, wearing a red and white striped robe, when he let himself back into the apartment. She looked up from her batter and smiled.
“Where have you been?” she asked.
“I had a lot of energy this morning,” Casper said, smiling back. “I was out running around the block. What're you making?”
“Waffles. Want some?”
“Sure.” Casper leaned on the opposite side of the kitchen's central island from where Mirim was working. “Celia still asleep?”
“As far as I know, yeah.”
Casper nodded. “Where's Leonid?”
“He went home early last night.”
“Oh. I saw the bedroom door closed and I ... oh, never mind.”
“I won't. What's the matter, jealous?”
“Of him? No. I just don't see what you see in him.”
Mirim stirred vigorously for a moment, then looked up again. “I'm not real sure any more, either.”
Casper met her eyes for a moment, then dropped his gaze to the countertop. “So when's breakfast going to be ready?”
“Have a little patience, huh? I just started. Go take a shower or something.”
“I'll take the shower. I don't think I'm up to ‘or something’ right now.”
Mirim threatened him with the spoon, and he fled, laughing, to the bathroom.
The day passed without incident. Casper took Cecelia to the art museum; they left Mirim reading at home.
The news that night reported that the investigation of the “Polnovick Incident” was progressing well, and that the clean-up of the wreckage was under way. All the buildings in the affected area had been inspected, and all but the Takeuchi Building had been declared safe; the evacuation was over. That meant that Casper, Cecelia, and Mirim could return to work on Monday.
The streets were still a mess Monday morning, with masonry and broken glass strewn across the sidewalks and into the street, and the police were allowing only pedestrians into the area. Motorists stopped at the barrier honked and shouted constantly, but Casper had problems of his own which kept him from having any sympathy for those people.
Between the time he had taken off for the imprinting and the ensuing recovery, and the lost time due to the evacuation, Casper's workload had become nearly unmanageable. What's more, the new software had been installed, despite the disruptions, and Casper found it virtually incomprehensible. He felt a growing certainty that the imprinting had not worked, which meant he would probably be fired. He had gone through all that agony for nothing.
He stared at the screen on his desk for several minutes before he even tried to sort things out. He was tempted to just forget about the whole thing and spend his day staring out the window, but even if he could get away with it the windows were covered with black plastic sheeting, and probably would be for quite some time. That rather limited the view.
Finally, he began to sort through the job list, ordering it according to priority and skill requirements.
When he had everything in order, and it was time for him to begin work on a file, Casper quickly discovered that he was simply unable to perform his job. As he looked at the information available to him his mind seemed to be filled with half-remembered tricks and shortcuts, but all were for use with the old software, and none of them applied to the new package.
By mid-afternoon he had not completed a single trace job; he could not get the software to do anything he wanted it to. When he got what he thought must have been his thousandth error message he gave up and blanked the screen.
The imprinting had not worked.
He leaned back in his chair, trying to think what he could do. While he thought he picked up a handful of thumbtacks, and without paying any attention to what he was doing he tossed the tacks at his bulletin board, one by one. When he finished, a dozen tacks were all stuck into the surface of the bulletin board, forming a nearly straight line, each tack about the same distance from the next. None had taken more than a single casual toss.
It occurred to him in a vague sort of way that that was good throwing for someone as uncoordinated as himself.
He got through the rest of the day somehow without anyone else realizing anything was wrong, and somehow, despite the imminent and inevitable disaster he faced, he didn't feel particularly depressed. Unemployment loomed ahead, probably followed by bankruptcy, confiscation, and a life on the streets, begging for hand-outs or eating in soup kitchens, maybe minus an organ or two—but somehow it didn't bother him.
In fact, he felt full of energy. A nervous, uncomfortable sort of energy.
He needed more exercise, he decided.
After work he found himself walking the city streets for no particular reason, studying the people passing by, noting how they reacted to each other, to him, to the occasional cop car that prowled by.
He knew he should be worrying about his job, worrying what he could do about the faulty imprinting, but somehow it didn't seem as important as studying lines of sight through Rittenhouse Square.
Finally, around ten, he headed home—a bit uneasily. Travel at this time of night was not always a pleasant experience, even in the best neighborhoods.
Casper did not live in one of the best neighborhoods.
The worst part, he thought, was the wait at the station, staring at the spray-painted concrete walls layered with gray dirt. He waited on the platform, fidgeting nervously, looking in every direction constantly, until finally his train roared into the station and he allowed himself to relax.
Unfortunately, four street toughs, resplendent in chip-studded silver jumpsuits, stepped off the train right in front of him. Casper stepped back to let them pass, but they formed a semi-circle blocking his path.
Purple glowtubes on their suits spelled out SOULSUCKERS; Casper had heard of that gang. What he had heard was not encouraging.
“Hey, man, gimme fifty,” said the one just right of center, who might have been a pale black or a tanned white; he was tall, with black hair shaved bald at the top and worn long at the sides, and a laddered scar drawn on his cheek in purple glowpaint. Electrodes protruded from his scalp, but Casper was unsure whether they were connected to anything or were just for show.
“Sorry, friend,” Casper said nervously. “I haven't got it.”
“I'll take twenty,” the youth said, bantering, trying to sound reasonable.
“I haven't got anything to give you,” Casper insisted.
“I think he's lying,” one of the other gang members said belligerently. “What's he got on him? Don
'cha think we oughta search him?”
“Yeah,” the spokesman agreed. He reached towards Casper while his three companions moved to more completely surround their intended victim.
Beech wasn't sure what to do, and afterwards he wasn't sure what he had done. He brushed his hand against the gang leader's arm, with an impact that seemed much harder than it should have been; the gang leader stumbled to the side, knocking into the shortest member of the gang, and they both fell to the platform. Casper ran past them and jumped aboard the train.
The doors started to close, but one of the toughs grabbed them and held them open. While the gang boarded the train Casper ran into the next car, slammed shut the door between cars, and braced himself against the door to keep it closed.
As he pressed up against the warm metal he realized for the first time that back on the platform he had somehow knocked down two of the hoods. He marvelled. He had absolutely no idea how he had done it.
The train started to move again. Above his head, Beech heard the door begin to fracture as the gang pounded on it.
There were several stops before Casper's destination, but station after station was empty. Fortunately, it didn't occur to any of his pursuers to get off the train and go around to the next car.
When the train finally reached Casper's stop, he abandoned the car and raced for the exit.
He could hear footsteps behind him as he pounded up the stairs. Emerging at street level, he turned in the direction of his apartment building and skidded to a halt. A police officer, his body armor and visored helmet gleaming dully in the lamplight, gazed curiously at him.
Beech had difficulty believing his eyes. A cop? In his neighborhood? But there he was, as big as life. “Am I glad to see you!” Casper gasped.
“Is there something wrong?” the officer asked suspiciously.
Casper gestured towards the entrance to the subway as the first of the gang members emerged. Seeing the officer, the gang turned and raced back the way they had come, their metal-heeled boots clattering on the steps.
“I'll take care of this.” Grinning wolfishly, the officer reached for his holstered shotgun as he started down into the subway.
Casper watched him go. He felt no inclination to follow, or to see what was going to happen—he wasn't interested in revenge, and his curiosity wasn't that morbid.
Or that reckless.
Party hacks on TV sometimes still talked about criminals being coddled, but Casper had never seen any evidence of it, not since the Crisis and the emergency decrees. Criminals weren't paroled when the jails got crowded any more; they were “shot while trying to escape.”
Sometimes the cops didn't bother with the intermediate steps of arrest, trial, and jail.
And sometimes witnesses got “caught in the crossfire” if they saw the wrong thing. Casper had no desire to see anything that might be wrong. Feeling shaky, he walked the rest of the way home without incident.
It was after eleven, but he was more keyed up than ever. After a few moments of uneasy pacing around his apartment he decided he needed still more exercise. Just running or walking wasn't enough, and he didn't want to risk damaging himself, so he sat down at his computer and pulled up a webfeed, entered a few search terms, and found a catalog of exercise videos. He chose a few almost at random, and downloaded them.
As soon as the first download was complete he shifted the others to the background, and began playing this new acquisition in fullscreen video.
The title was Basic Stretching, and he followed the lead of the girl on the screen carefully.
It was fortunate that he started with this file, because the next three, Aerobics for a Better Life, Modern Dance at Home, and Calisthenics, had no warmup period, and he probably would have injured himself. As it was, none of the programs did more than tire him out.
He ran through all of them without stopping.
The last file, however, was different. Self Defense for the Common Man struck a chord within him. Watching the first demonstration he felt an electric excitement. He followed along, clumsily at first, but with rapid improvement. It was as though this was what his body was waiting for, and when he had finished, he felt relaxed and at ease for the first time since the imprinting.
He ran the file through again, and burned all five to disk.
It was just after four a.m. when he finally stumbled into bed and fell into an exhausted sleep.
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
Chapter Five
Once again the NeuroTalents executive boardroom was the scene of a late night meeting. This time, however, Mr. Yamashiro, looking somewhat subdued, sat halfway down the table. At the head of the table, in Yamashiro's usual seat, was an angry man in a black suit and old-fashioned red tie.
“I can't believe you people screwed up like this,” the man in black said. “Those files are classified!”
“Your people ordered us to keep them available,” Yamashiro protested weakly.
“But not in with the everyday business!” the man in black said. “You could have kept the disks to one side, ready to plug in when we told you to!” He glared for a moment, then said, “Oh, hell, it doesn't matter any more—the damage is done. I hope you realize that your carelessness may have endangered not only NeuroTalents, but the very existence of the entire parent corporation. This could get us kicked out of the Consortium!”
“I think you're making too much of this,” Yamashiro replied uneasily.
“I don't doubt you think that,” the man in black said, his tone flat and deadly. “That opinion is just another example of your incompetence.” He frowned. “I'm afraid that extraordinary measures are called for, Yamashiro—there is simply no longer a place for you in this organization.”
“What?” Yamashiro stared in disbelief.
“Your services are no longer needed, Yamashiro.” The man in black spoke with quiet intensity, more effective than shouting would have been. “You're fired.”
Yamashiro pushed his chair back and rose unsteadily. “You can't do this to me,” he said. “I have friends, contacts—I'm a major stockholder! I'll make trouble for you. I'm not someone you can treat this way.”
“I'm afraid you are. You're not active in the Party, and this is a political case.” The man in black touched a button on his wrist unit, and two silent men in impeccably tailored suits entered; they had obviously been just outside the door, awaiting their signal. They walked silently down the length of the table and stood behind Yamashiro.
“These gentlemen will be escorting you out of the building,” the man in black explained calmly. “You will not be allowed back. Your personal effects will be sent to you by courier.”
Yamashiro tried to protest as the two silent men seized his arms and led him from the room, but the others all sat utterly motionless, totally ignoring him, until the sound had been cut off by the closing of the heavy conference room doors.
The man in black looked at the woman who had been seated next to Yamashiro. “Ms. Kendall, henceforth you will carry out the duties of the executive director. We can regularize the title later, if you like. Do you understand?”
The woman nodded.
“Good,” the man in black said. “Now let's see if we can find a solution to this problem.” He turned to the man seated to his left. “I appreciate your coming up, sir, especially considering the short notice you were given.”
The man he addressed nodded. “My pleasure, Mr. Chairman.”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the chairman explained to the others, “this is a representative of the Homeland Security Department, knowledgeable in covert activities and a coordinator of the programs NeuroTalents has undertaken in that area. You may refer to him as Mr. Smith.”
Smith nodded. “Thank you,” he said. “Of course you all realize that, officially, the Covert Operations Group has no involvement in this affair, any more than any other branch of the federal government or any part of the Democratic-Republican Party does. Officia
lly, those optimization files do not exist, NeuroTalents has no connection with Covert or any other part of Homeland Security, and I am not here. That's official, and you'd all do well to remember it. However, on a practical level, we must keep on top of this matter.”
The chairman nodded his agreement. He looked at NeuroTalents’ new executive director. “A team of ours has been working with your people. You have a report from them?”
“Ah, yes.” The woman shuffled nervously through pages on her PDA.
The others eyed her expectantly. She cleared her throat and began, “First, the technical failure. It appears that when the system was installed, no one bothered to arrange a maintenance schedule; instead it was left up to the users to judge when to check over the system. It appears...” She hesitated, then continued, “It appears that the users, the technicians running the system, were unaware that any maintenance was called for, ever. The system has been running non-stop, uninspected and unmaintained, for more than six years. It's a miracle we haven't had a breakdown before this—or at least, as far as we know we haven't. Steps are being taken to ensure that regular maintenance will be done from now on.”
She paused, then went on. “The next question is the classified files themselves. The current software uses a single master program to access everything in the system. Until this can be altered, we have removed the files in question from the system. New software is being written that will handle this all in better fashion, requiring human intervention at certain critical points in any non-standard procedure.”
The new executive director took a sip of water as her display brought up the next page of her report. “The next item is the identification of those individuals who were affected by this operation. We were very fortunate; as far as we can determine from the records, only two people were inadvertantly optimized—other clients who were imprinted while the faulty instructions were in place were not found to be suitable subjects for any of the available optimization packages, and the program reset the missing variable accordingly, which allowed it to proceed properly.” She frowned. “The second of the two was Lester Polnovick, who received the Godzilla File. The other, imprinted the day before, was a man named Casper Beech; my people have prepared a report on his optimization.” She handed a document to Smith.
The Spartacus File Page 4
