Neurolink

by M M Buckner

  When they reached its base, Qi frowned at the glossy annealed metal. She activated a cybernail in her glove and tried to scratch it, but her claw didn’t leave a mark. Next, she checked it with a magnet.

  Karel giggled. “Didn’t I tell you?”

  Qi nodded and dropped her heavy gear bag between her feet. “Okay, guys. Time for the crampon mags.”

  Crampon mags turned out to be battery-powered electromagnetic boot attachments—standard gear for edifice climbers, a sport Dominic had never heard of until today. The magnets attached not to the soles but to the sides and toes of the boot, so that theoretically, the climber could position an ankle or toe against an edifice, and by leaning into the wall and clinging to small flanges and irregularities, he could stand upright and shin his way up. Dominic was greatly relieved to learn his gloves would have magnets, too.

  Karel and Qi both demonstrated how to twist the boot quickly up and out to break the magnetic lock and take a step higher. Dominic never got the hang of it. For two hours, he slithered up the spire, sliding his appendages along like some incompetent reptile, still diapered in his bright orange climbing harness. Twice the air cops circled in and spotlighted them, and twice, Karel waved them off with a big toothy grin. The young man was right. Cops didn’t seem concerned about juvenile thrill seekers penetrating the ZahlenBank spire.

  As Dominic approached the summit, the winds picked up, and when the tower swayed, he told himself it had to be an optical illusion. Smog closed in, but he could see a bright spot glowing directly overhead in the sky, and that meant it was already noon. They’d left the colony two days ago, and Millard said they only had two days! Or maybe less. Clots of smog whipped past and slammed into Dominic like pillows, beading his faceplate with oily moisture. His breath rasped.

  “You okay?” Qi’s voice buzzed through the helmet radio, reminding him of another voice that once buzzed through his head.

  He didn’t answer. With every magnetic lurch up the spire, with every step closer to his father’s private entrance, Dominic’s uneasiness increased. He could feel the NP’s will to ensnare him like the heat of an approaching fire. What preposterous egotism made him think he could elude a supercomputer! But no, the NP was more than a computer. It had a complete record of Richter Jedes’ life experience, with all the cunning that implied. Dominic shuddered when he recalled how the genie tried to possess him. It craved some twisted merger. Dual minds sharing a body. “Two heads are better than one,” he whispered unconsciously.

  “And three are meta-stellar,” Karel chirped. “We can’t lose.”

  Dominic hadn’t realized he’d spoken aloud. He rested his helmeted head against the building, and muscles all over his body twitched with tiny electric bursts.

  “There’s a tube in your helmet beside your right ear if you need water,” said Qi, ever practical.

  Dominic sucked a long drink, but his mouth was still dry as sand. He peered up the gleaming amber wall to where it terminated at a vanishing point. Far overhead, a white strobe light blinked like a ticking clock, radiating the smog around the summit He started creeping upward again.

  When they reached the top, he couldn’t disconnect his magnetic boots and throw his leg up over the rim. Karel had to push from below while Qi hauled him up. Wind whipped him sideways when he tried to stand, so he followed Qi’s example and crouched low.

  He remembered this landing pad, square and smooth, with its slender beacon tower at one corner and Richter’s private residence at the other, a glass-roofed turret jutting up two stories above the pad. Each time the beacon strobed, the turret’s hexagonal roof sparkled like a diamond. Cop cars growled in a slow circle over their heads, and in the turret’s entryway, the airlock light was on.

  That’s a good sign, Dominic assured himself. Richter always left it on. He realized he was shivering with nervousness and took a slow, calming breath. “This is where we part company.”

  “But we’re a team,” Karel said.

  “We stick together,” Qi said. “You’re gonna need us.”

  “This is my deal. You wait here.”

  “Dominic—”

  “No.” He cut her off. “Think it through. Karel could lose his career. And you—what would your Org bosses do if they caught you here? Besides, there’s the colony to think of. If I don’t make it, you have to try something else. This is not a sure bet.”

  She clutched his shoulders with her gloved hands and shook him. “You couldn’t even climb up here without our help.”

  “I’m not afraid, sir. I know you’ll succeed.” Karel was visibly shaking, either with enthusiasm or fear, possibly both.

  They crouched close together on the bare pad, and wind sliced between them, whistling around the turret. Above, the cop cars circled, and the beacon flashed as steadily as a metronome. Dominic puffed his cheeks and blew. “This is one case where I will not bargain. I go this alone. You agree, or we shut down the project Which is it?”

  Qi punched him hard in the shoulder. “You are so freakin’ stubborn!” Then she unhooked her gear bag and shoved it at him. “You don’t even know how to use this stuff.”

  “Right. You keep it. Once I’m inside, I know my way around. This is my turf, Qi.”

  “At least, take a pistol.” She pulled a dark heavy handgun partway out of the bag.

  He shook his head. “That’s not the weapon I use.”

  Then in a rapid move that surprised him, she circled her arm around his waist and hugged him. Just as rapidly, she pushed him away. “Go on, then.”

  “Wait one hour. If I’m not back—”

  “We’ll wait two. You always piddle around.”

  “Sir, they’ve changed some of the pass codes. You need me.” Karel fidgeted beside the airlock, too excited to keep still.

  “I’m the bank president, Folger. I can override the codes. But thanks. Thanks for all you’ve done. You’re a good friend,”

  “Yes, sir.” The young assistant stood at attention, and Dominic half expected a salute.

  Once that was settled, he turned his attention the ID pad. It was an unfamiliar type, and Karel showed him how it worked. It used magnetic imaging to scan his palm right through the glove. Dominic was fairly sure his father had never wired this entrance into the bank’s central network. Richter liked his privacy too well. So, theoretically, this palm scan would not light up any security screen. The signal would travel no farther than the door mechanism. With a hammering heart, he placed his right hand in the slot. A small green light flashed, and the airlock’s outer door slid open.

  Dominic let out his bream and checked the watch Qi had strapped to his wrist. “Twelve hundred thirty-two hours.”

  “Yeah, close enough.” Qi adjusted her own watch.

  He rolled his shoulders and felt bones pop. Then he stepped inside and pulled the ring to start the airlock cycle. Just as the outer door was sliding closed, Karel dashed in beside him.

  “Sir, I can’t let you go alone. They’ve changed the codes. I really can be of help, sir.”

  “Folger, we had a verbal agreement! A banker never goes back on an agreement!” Dominic was furious with the young man and relieved at the same time. He had half a mind to open the airlock and push Karel outside.

  When the all clear signal chimed, Karel popped off his helmet at once. He was grinning like a fool, showing off his healthy pink gums and raking his stringy hair back with his glove. He was so eager. Dominic had felt that way once upon a time. He remembered standing with his father outside the door of some important meeting, anticipating the clash of wills and thirsting for blood. Yes, he understood Karel’s exhilaration. And with a little jolt, he realized he was feeling that way himself. After so many tedious years, the old predatory thrill had returned.

  All at once, he felt a renewal of Confidence. ZahlenBank was his home turf, his stomping ground. He knew this place inside out. Yes, he could do this. He could be master again. He tugged off his helmet and pulled his rakish blue eye patch into place.<
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  Karel pointed to a second ID pad, a standard interior one this time, and Dominic wavered only a second, trying to decide what to do about Karel. He could pull the ring, reverse the airlock cycle, and send the junior clerk outside to wait with Major Qi. Or he could let the young pup come along and learn something. He slipped off his glove and flattened his palm against the inner pad.

  Another green flash. A silent sliding door. He stepped into the quiet semidarkness and smelled his father’s cologne. How well he remembered this private apartment, with its elegant decor and its glass roof faceted like a diamond. Richter used to bring women here. He didn’t often admit his son, but Dominic had seen it enough times to remember. There was the huge round bed, and there the holographic stage that could imitate a crackling fire, and—

  Bright lights flooded the room. Dominic saw bank guards, and other men in black uniforms prowled near the door. There was a face he knew. Klas Lorn. The man squinted at him with an ugly smug smile. A second later, Dominic noticed who was leaning beside him, wearing the same ugly grin. It was Karel Folger.

  CHAPTER 21

  * * *

  CODICIL

  “WELCOME.”

  The NP’s voice reverberated through the glass-roofed apartment, and Dominic spotted the source—a notebook perched on a carved table. Four bank guards stood ready to pounce, and two men in black uniforms lurked near the door—his father’s former bodyguards. The traitor, Karel Folger, leaned and whispered to Klas Lorn, his new mentor. Dominic dropped his helmet and pressed back against the airlock, forcing himself to breathe.

  Klas Lorn pointed. “Take this man into custody. Handcuff him.”

  The guards hustled forward, but the NP said, “Don’t be absurd, Klas. You’re addressing our president. We should celebrate his safe return.”

  The guards halted. Lorn stopped smiling, and his face splotched pale lavender, like the start of bruises. “What about our agreement? You said—”

  “In time, Klas. In time. First, let me enjoy this happy reunion.”

  Above the notebook, a ghost image swelled rapidly to man-size and gained definition. There stood Richter Jedes, swaggering in the bloom of holographic health, flaunting his manly beauty, as real as life. His bright gray eyes flickered as he raised his arms for an embrace. “Welcome home, son.”

  Dominic pressed against the airlock. “We agreed to drop the father-son crap.”

  Richter lowered his arms and sighed. “Something happened to you in that submarine. You’re damaged.”

  Dominic touched his eye socket and contemplated methods of suicide. The guards carried rifles. Could he get his hands on a gun long enough to put a bullet through his brain before the NP invaded his body again? Maybe he could hang himself with his orange climbing harness.

  Overhead, the smog broke, and a dazzling sun blazed down through the hexagonal roof. Its radiance blotted out the flashing beacon, and its light gleamed along the rifle barrels pointed at Dominic’s head. Instantly, the glass darkened to block its rays.

  “He can be fixed, sir.” Klas Lorn slunk closer to the NP’s hologram and gave a squinty fawning smile. “The surgeons are waiting outside to run him through cell hygiene. They’ll replace his eye. He’ll be as good as new, sir.”

  “It’s not his fuckin’ eye that worries me.” The hologram strode right through Lorn and faced Dominic toe to toe. “He’s a flawed copy. Analog, what can you expect.”

  They stood exactly the same height, but the NP’s meaty physique and clean-cut good looks made a sharp contrast with Dominic’s hard, hungry thinness. Still, the genie’s presence was so palpable, Dominic could almost feel its hot breath in his face.

  He adjusted his eye patch and feigned self-assurance. “Richter taught me—”

  “Richter Jedes was an overconfident windbag!” The hologram shouted with such wrath, it sprayed virtual saliva through the air, and Dominic almost felt the wetness on his cheek. “You’re the only son he made. The only freakin’ one!”

  “Our new backups are gestating nicely, sir,” said Karel. The junior clerk edged closer to his mentor’s side, a picture of meekness.

  “Thirty redundant genetic copies. Perfect reproductions of the master,” Klas Lorn bleated.

  “Freakin’ embryos. I can’t wait twenty years!”

  For an instant, Dominic envisioned thirty little brothers tumbling in an incubator, but he didn’t have time to pursue that thought. His negotiator instincts kicked in, and he grasped for bargaining straws. “Why are we still talking? You must need something from me.”

  The hologram opened its palm, then slowly made a fist. “Richter raised you by hand. He programmed you personally. What went wrong?”

  On inspiration, Dominic tried a risky bluff. He smoothed the eye patch over his socket with a show of nonchalance and said, “If you want my flesh, call your surgeons and take it.”

  “Yes!” Klas Lorn sprang forward, but the NP waved him back.

  Seeing that, Dominic felt sure he’d guessed right. “You’re afraid to use force because I fought you off before. I killed that copy you put in my eye.”

  “My agent. If you hadn’t fried the little bugger, we could’ve hot-linked and saved a lot of time.” The NP rolled its head till its holographic neck made a cracking sound. “Listen to me. The bank’s in serious trouble. Our idiot shareholders wanna see Richter alive and in charge, or they’ll withdraw their capital. This holographic illusion isn’t good enough.” The genie slapped its luminous chest, and sparks flew.

  While the NP talked, Dominic slid his hand along the airlock door behind his back, feeling for the switch plate. “Your agent and I were out of sync from the beginning,” he said. His hand was sweating. He couldn’t find the door switch. He eyed the guards’ rifles and knew he couldn’t reach them in time. He glanced around wildly for any kind of weapon or escape. Why hadn’t he taken Qi’s pistol? At least he could put a bullet in his brain.

  The hologram loomed centimeters from his face, and when it tapped his blue eye patch, electric current made his jaw muscle jump. “Don’t resist. Join me,” the NP whispered. “Our partnership could foster the beginning of a new race.”

  “Another ground-breaking innovation,” raved Klas Lorn, “in a long tradition of ZahlenBank advances.”

  “Meta-stellar,” Karel seconded in a meek voice.

  Dominic swung his arms and pushed through the hologram—it was nothing but light after all. He kicked over the table holding the notebook, and the NP bounced up the wall like the artificial projection it was.

  “Get him!” Klas Lorn snarled. Karel hid under the table.

  The guards lifted their rifles, and Dominic rounded to face them. Two of them, he noticed, were women. They circled him, and he spun, balancing the way he’d learned in gym class, but he couldn’t face them all. When one of the women closed in with handcuffs, he hesitated. He’d never hit a woman before.

  “That’s right, show ’em what your made of,” the NP said.

  He glared at the genie, and the guards seized him. The woman with the handcuffs wrenched his arm behind his back. When he struggled to sling them off, his eye patch slipped down around his neck.

  Klas Lorn sneered. “You’re revolting.”

  The NP spilled down the wall, landed on the floor and marched toward him. “We can’t let ZahlenBank fail. It props up our whole economic system. I need your cooperation.”

  Before Dominic could answer, a loud crack rippled through the glass roof overhead. They all looked up just in time to see a thin white fissure split halfway across the glass, then branch in a hundred directions, then a million. Two seconds later, with a shattering noise, the entire roof crashed, and glittering beads exploded through the air. Dominic crouched to cover his face, expecting the glass to slice through his skin, but the beads only stung and bounced off. On the floor around him, the small nubby pebbles collected like snow. It was tempered safety glass.

  “Up here, Nick!”

  He saw Qi crouching at the edge o
f the ruined roof with about a kilometer of lightweight climbing rope looped over her shoulder. Hot yellow billows of smog rolled into the room with a stink of burnt sulfur.

  “Poison! We’re going to die!” Klas Lorn screeched.

  Karel popped out from under the table, covered his nose and sprinted for the door. When Lorn got in his way, Karel elbowed him aside. Then Lorn snatched at Karel’s coattail, but the junior clerk was stronger and slung him off. They disappeared together, racing each other down the hallway.

  The guards gawked at the dingy smog, then at each other, and almost as one, they leaped to their feet and followed in Lorn’s wake. But the men in black uniforms didn’t leave. They pulled small masks from their pockets and slipped them over their faces.

  “Get the prote spy! I want her,” the NP commanded.

  Qi tossed Dominic the rope and yelled, “Climb!”

  Dominic pulled himself up, hand over hand, clenching his legs around the rope for support. He wouldn’t have believed he could do that, but fear gave him strength. Qi hammered the last shards of glass away with her fist and helped him climb out onto the turret’s ledge. She tried to haul up the rope, too, but the men in black were already climbing it. Two stories below, a cop car landed on the pad, and three surfsuited cops emerged with rifles. They moved quickly toward the base of the turret, sighting Qi and Dominic in their scopes.

  “We’ve gotta rappel,” Qi said.

  She’d switched on her helmet speaker, so her voice sounded amplified. Dominic had lost his helmet, so he couldn’t ask what she meant by “rappel.”

  The cops played a prerecorded message through their loudspeakers: “Stop. Put your hands behind your heads.”

  As the cops knelt on the pad and aimed their rifles, Qi rapidly clipped carabiners to the front of his orange climbing harness. He watched her rig an anchor around the part of the broken roof structure. Would that hold? “What’s to stop them from cutting the rope?” he asked, but she couldn’t hear him through her helmet. With stupefying speed, she spun and started clipping him to the back her harness like a sack of gear.