“Should I be open about your fears of the organization being attacked?”
He frowned. “If they bring it up, by all means please discuss it. But they probably all think I am a paranoid, out-of-touch old man.”
I could see how they’d get that impression.
“Is there anybody I should avoid in my questionings?” I asked.
He thought for a minute, then shook his head.
Brian knocked on the door and cracked it open. “Val said she’s too busy to come up here,” he said. “Should I escort Mr. Waverly to the dungeon?”
“Yes, thank you, Brian.” Archie looked at me. “Let us meet tomorrow morning at nine.”
eight
“The dungeon sounds ominous,” I said as Brian and I headed for the elevator. “You’re not going to torture me, are you?”
“No, Mr. Waverly, we only torture on Fridays.” Brian flashed a thin smile. “It’s a windowless computer lab in the basement of a musty old building. What else would you call it?”
We reached the elevator and he pushed the button. “You don’t need me to go down there with you,” he said. “Tell the attendant to take you to the basement. The dungeon’s on your left.” He turned and walked up the hall.
The elevator door opened. James sat on his stool, and I smiled as I got in. “Does your train make a stop in the basement?” I asked.
“Of course it does,” he said. “All aboard!” James threw a switch and the elevator dropped.
Where the third floor was marble and chandeliers, the basement was vinyl and fluorescents. My sneakers squeaked on the floor as I walked down the hall. I smiled at a video camera in the corner, then rang the doorbell at the end of the hallway.
A kid with greasy long hair, large glasses, more than a few pimples, and a dirty light green lab jacket poked his head out from behind the metal door. “You need something?” he asked.
“I’m here to see Val.”
He pulled the door open. “Come on in.”
I followed him down a hallway. He paused in front of a small office. “Some dude’s here to see you, Val,” he said.
“Thanks, Forty,” she said without looking up.
Forty left, and I stepped into the office. “Your guys go by numbers here in the dungeon?” I asked.
“He once won the Nintendo championship in a record forty seconds.” Val had a slight Eastern European accent, and she spoke as she typed on her laptop. “The name stuck, I guess.” She looked up and smiled at me for the very first time.
I don’t remember much about what Val and I discussed that first hour. Later she reminded me that she gave me an overview of the system and showed me its architecture and implementation plan. She said that I even asked some questions. But all I saw were her locks of auburn hair and her big blue eyes that grabbed my gaze and held it until I felt dizzy. All I heard was her soft accent and her magical laugh. And all I thought was how lucky I was to spend a few minutes in her presence.
Usually I’m fine talking with pretty girls. But usually these girls aren’t geeks like me. Just thinking about the possibility of having meaningful conversations with somebody so attractive turned my mind to mush.
I stood up, right in the middle of her explanation of some item on her Gantt chart. I had to clear my head and start focusing, because for the last few minutes I had daydreamed about how nice it would be to spend a summer weekend with Val on the bay. I had no clue what she was talking about, and I desperately wanted to impress her. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I need to take a quick break.”
“Come back soon,” she said as she swiveled her chair around to face her laptop.
Damn, the lady was all business. I found the bathroom, and I brushed my hair with my fingers and made sure my teeth were clean. I exhaled into my cupped palms and sniffed it to check my breath. I even made some faces in the mirror: eyebrows up in a questioning look, bedroom eyes while smiling. Why did I feel like a high school student out to impress the new girl?
I stopped in the pantry. Forty was sitting with some other guys at a table. He smirked and walked over. “Is this your first meeting with our goddess manager?”
I nodded.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll survive the experience. The first time Val visited the dungeon, I fell off that chair. Spilled my Coke all over my lab coat.” He nodded at my black shirt and jeans. “We don’t get many contractors in the dungeon—what are you here for?”
“Mr. Morgan wants me to audit the security controls on your new system. Val’s been explaining it to me, but honestly, I’m having a hard time paying attention.”
He nodded. “Here’s my trick. Look at the papers, the wall, the white board, the clock. Anywhere but into those big blue eyes. Once you fall in there, you can’t climb out. Think Medusa, man. You’ll turn to stone if she catches your eye.”
“Good advice.” I walked into the hallway.
“Remember, avoid the eyes or it’s game over,” he called.
I stood at the door of Val’s office and peeked inside.
She looked up. “Ready to continue?”
“Um, Val, would you mind if we rewind fifteen minutes or so?”
She frowned. “What’s wrong?”
I took a deep breath. “I’ve never met anybody like you,” I said. “And I can’t concentrate on what you’re showing me. You’re so gorgeous, and yet you’re speaking geek language.” I slumped against the door. “I can’t believe I just said that.”
Val walked over and stood in front of me. She was just about my height. She wore a serious, almost shocked, look on her face. I winced and closed my eyes and waited for the slap.
Then I felt her hand softly caress my cheek, and before I could react, it was gone.
I opened my eyes, and Val smiled at me. “You’re so sweet,” she said.
I stuck out my hand. “We need some proper introductions. Scott Waverly, software security guy.”
She shook my hand. “Valentina Nikolskaya, software girl.”
We shook for a while, smiling at each other. Then I reluctantly pulled my hand free. “Back to your design. But I have a few questions first.”
“What about?”
“When I went to the depositary with Archie—”
Val raised her eyebrows. “You two are on a first name basis?”
I nodded. “Anyway, he showed me his soul line collection—”
She leaned forward. “You saw his collection? What does he have in there?”
I shrugged. “He only showed me his soul line proof sheets. Then we left.”
She sat back.
I continued. “To get to his collection, Archie had to put on these goggles. I’m guessing that they authenticated him.”
“Not him—just his soul identity.”
I thought about that. “I’m trying to understand why you build your systems around soul identities instead of around people.”
“Because that’s how everything is tied together. Mr. Morgan, for example, shares his soul identity with three previous overseers.”
“So he claims.”
She rested her chin in her palms. Her fingers played with some free strands of her hair. “And now I know you’re not a believer,” she said.
Yikes. Anybody else, and I would have laughed and said, “Of course not.” But how could I say that to this beautiful angel sitting in front of me?
I laughed and said, “Of course not.” Hopefully the angel was a big girl.
“This has got to be tough for you.” She frowned. “You must wonder how anybody can be crazy enough to believe their soul can be identified.”
“And that it gets recycled in the future. I’m sorry, Val. I don’t believe.”
She shrugged. “You’ll get there. We all do, sooner or later.” Then she smiled, and I felt a flush spread across my shoulder blades. “Maybe I can help.”
“Wow.” All sorts of ways she could help flashed through my mind.
“But first I can explain why we use the soul iden
tity to tie our applications together,” she said. “Let’s say Mr. Morgan wants to collect all the lessons he’s learned, bundle them up into a big book, and pass them on to his next self. He checks his book into the depositary, and it goes into his soul line collection.”
I nodded.
“After he dies, we find the next person matching his identity. This new person won’t know anything about Mr. Morgan until he opens the collection.”
“And finds the big book of lessons,” I said. “Only then will he know about his soul’s past lives.”
“You’ve got it—we identify people by their soul identities so we can thread the lifetimes together.” She smiled. “Make sense?”
I nodded again. “Have you ever had two people simultaneously share a soul identity?”
“Never. It’s not possible.”
I scrunched up my face. “’Not possible’ sounds more like a faith statement than a scientific fact.”
She chewed on that for a minute. “I suppose it does. But so far all the empirical evidence we’ve collected throughout the ages supports my faith.”
It sounded a lot more plausible when she said it.
“Okay, let’s talk money,” I said. “I’m assuming that you keep track of each time something’s checked in and out of the depositary.”
She nodded. “We preserve the items and invest the money. And at the end of each year, we tally up the value of each account and keep one percent as our fee.”
I decided Val could help me nail down the financial side. “Let’s say I deposit one thousand dollars—what happens next?”
“First of all, your recruiter gets a one percent commission on your deposit.”
“There goes ten bucks. What’s next?”
“We invest the remaining nine hundred ninety. Let’s say we have a good year and raise the account’s value to one thousand twenty dollars by the end of the year.”
“Soul Identity takes their fee of ten dollars and twenty cents, right?”
She nodded.
“Do that for a few hundred years, and my future carrier will be rich,” I said.
She smiled. “That’s the idea.”
“Can I get my account balance from the depositary?”
Val nodded. “All members get an account transaction report each year, personally delivered to them.”
That explained Bob’s job. “Now let’s say it’s two hundred years later,” I said. “I’m long gone, and some soul seeker finds my identity hanging out inside of somebody else. Does the soul seeker get a commission?”
“They get one percent of the account value.”
“That could be quite a lot of money.”
“I’ve seen commissions in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and I’ve heard that they’ve gone into the millions.”
Talk about a temptation for the overseers and whoever works in that depositary. With funds like this floating around, and the chances of getting caught so low because most of the clients were dead, how could they possibly expect to prevent fraud?
I shook my head. “This could easily turn into quite a racket, Val.”
She sighed. “It can only become a racket if the systems don’t work. My job is to make sure they’re perfect.”
“And my job is to make sure they’re secure. That makes us partners.”
She flashed me a huge smile, and I felt a tingle rush through my body.
“If you keep smiling like that, you’re going to have to keep on repeating yourself,” I said.
She cranked up her smile’s volume, then glanced at her watch. “It’s seven thirty—you want to get some dinner?”
Yes yes yes! “I’d love to,” I said. “Do you want to ride in my limousine?” I don’t know why I thought that would impress her.
Val shook her head. “I have wheels, so you can come with me. Where are you staying?”
“The guesthouse.”
“Okay. I need a few minutes to wrap up. What if we meet out front of the building in a half hour?”
I walked backward out the door, keeping my eyes on her as long as I could. I backed right into Forty, knocking him over.
“Dude, watch where you’re going!” He scrambled back to his feet. “Hey, Scott.” He peeked into the office and dropped his voice to a whisper. “Did you avoid the eyes?”
I shook my head, smiling.
“And you’re still alive?”
I shrugged, smiling even wider.
“Head over heels, huh?”
I nodded.
“Poor bastard. Let me know when you need rescuing. I have some experience in these matters.”
I shook my head. “Not in a million years.”
nine
Bob brought me to the guesthouse we saw in Archie’s video. The smiling couple, George and Sue, showed me my quarters. Bob was right; it was better than a hotel. I had a bedroom, office, bathroom, and a huge flat panel TV screen in what George called the gadget room. I wanted to rush back and meet Val for dinner, and I disappointed George by not letting him show me each gadget. After I promised to go through a demonstration session in the morning, I got them to leave, and then I hurried and changed out of the black contractor uniform and into my normal blue jeans.
Bob drove me back to the main building. I would have walked, but he wanted to make sure I knew the way. “Did you have a good day?” he asked.
“I found out more history. Soul Identity’s almost twenty-six hundred years old.”
“That’s twice as old as my own soul line.” Bob shook his head. “People with lines that long must be the luckiest people in the world.”
“Thirteen hundred years seems like nothing to sneeze at,” I said. “Does that make you luckier than those just starting their lines?”
He seemed to ponder this. “I don’t know. I sometimes feel less important around those who have longer lines.” He glanced over at me. “One of the delivery people in Baltimore has a soul line dating back two thousand years. You wouldn’t believe how much attention he gets at our monthly meetings.”
“Everybody listens to his advice?”
Bob nodded. “Nobody dares make a decision unless he agrees with it.”
“How old is this guy?”
“He’s twenty-eight. He’s been with us for only two years, and his line has only thirty years of total service.”
“Is yours the next oldest soul line, after him?”
“No, sir. There are other delivery people with older lines than mine. Why do you ask?”
“I thought maybe you had lost your position as top dog and you weren’t quite over it yet.”
Bob looked at me. “Sir, I am the best delivery person in the Mid-Atlantic region. They’re all pretty much jealous of me.”
“Even though your soul line is shorter than theirs?”
Bob didn’t answer right away. “I suppose they are jealous,” he said, “even with my shorter soul line.” He was silent again. “But I still wish mine was longer.”
The Soul Identity headquarters was in front of us. “I’ve got a ride home, so I’ll see you some time tomorrow,” I said.
Bob drove off and left me in the dark. Twilight had ended; the half moon still shone, but it sat low on the horizon and threw long shadows off the evergreens. The air was cooler and drier than back in Maryland, and I enjoyed the pine-scented breeze as I stepped up onto the porch and sat on a wooden rocking chair.
The wind carried the faint sounds of a man’s voice. I stopped rocking. The man was talking on a cell phone, and as he got closer, I could make out what he said. “Yes, he’s here. Bob dropped him off this afternoon.” Then, “He’s currently at the guesthouse…No, he doesn’t seem to know.” A long pause. “Yes, sir, I’ll do it just like you said…No sir, he won’t know. I’ll be very careful.” Another pause. “Yes, sir, the same time tomorrow.”
I heard gravel crunch on a pathway next to the porch, and I sat still. The man snapped his phone shut. I tried to make out any identifying features, but it was too dark. H
e walked around the corner toward the underground garage and out of my sight.
So the games had begun. I smiled. This contract had started off pretty interesting; throw in a potential problem from some bad guys plus a little spice from Val, and I was going to have a lot of fun.
A minute later, a motorcycle rolled up the front driveway. The driver pulled off a helmet and shook out a mane of dark red hair.
I stepped off the porch. “When you said wheels, I assumed you meant four of them.”
Val unhooked a black helmet and tossed it to me. I got on behind her. I looked for some handles, and decided her hips looked more inviting. I hooked my fingers into the belt loops of her jeans. “You changed at work?” I asked.
“Yeah, it’s better than driving in slacks.” She patted her bag slung around her shoulder. “This is big enough for my laptop and a pair of pants.”
We cleared the main gate and screamed down the back roads. I leaned forward and shouted, “Where’re we headed?”
“I’ve been thinking about a grinder all day,” she shouted back. “Is that okay?”
“Sure, but what’s a grinder?”
“You’ll see!” We drove past a ‘thickly settled’ sign and weaved down a hill and into the center of Sterling.
Val pulled up to a sub shop. We clipped our helmets to the sides of the bike. “We’ll get our grinders to go,” she said.
We walked into the shop. The guy behind the counter smiled. “Hey, Val.”
“Hi Jerry, I’ve been craving one of your everything grinders.” She glanced at me. “Make it two, Scott needs to experience this.”
“Two everything grinders coming right up.” Jerry smiled at me. “They’re wicked good.”
“So a grinder is a sub?” I asked.
He nodded.
“What’s in it?”
He gestured at the various meats, cheeses, and veggies under his glass countertop. “Everything.”
“And it’s wicked good.” Val winked at me.
“I can’t wait.” I grabbed two bottles of iced tea. “You want anything else?”
Soul Identity Page 9
