by Lee Bond
There were more places to eat in Central than in any other city on any planet you’d care to mention. Everywhere you looked, there was a little hole in the wall selling homemade sandwiches or an upscale fancy restaurant cheek-by-jowl with a dive that catered strictly to blue-collar workers.
They were everywhere. Since he was in Central, everything was a smidgen more upscale than in Port City, but the relative costs associated with fine dining apparently weren’t affected by competition. Latelians ate like hobbits. Ten or twelve foot tall, especially healthy and energetic hobbits, but they ate often enough for the analogy to stick.
There were any number of reasons that someone could use to explain both the highly accelerated metabolisms and distinctly larger-than-average size Latelians enjoyed, but they’d be wrong. Those folks who’d use denser gravity or bigger planet sizes or just generally robust living would be dead, dead wrong. Garth wouldn’t be able to prove it without gaining access to restricted files, but he was confident that if he dug back far enough, he’d find scientists indiscriminately messing around with the genome. Maybe they’d made a mistake while trying to churn out the very first batch of God soldiers, maybe not. Either way, it was nothing more than an intellectual exercise. Latelians were big, they ate like mutated hobbits. Enough said.
Adhering to the ‘When in Rome’ philosophy, Garth decided to take some time out from his busy schedule of mayhem preparation to grab some linner; the ‘lunch’ he’d had with Naoko had ended with his actually being hungrier than before they’d started because he’d been too nervous to eat properly. Since one of his mission parameters turned out to be right across the street from a TGIFriday’s wannabe eatery, Garth couldn’t come up with one reason not to stuff his face full of food.
A pretty waitress in an indecently short pair of shorts asked if he wanted to sit near one of the big Screens so he could watch recaps of the Game’s progress so far. Garth declined with a shudder, pointing at one of the window booths. The waitress smiled graciously and hauled him along in her effervescent customer service net to the very one he’d indicated.
Garth sat down and tried to get a grip on his eagerness. If Guillfoyle was the kind of cat who could pull the right kind of strings to set up an illegal relay shop in the middle of downtown Central, then he wouldn’t balk at paying people to mention anyone ‘interesting’.
Nothing on the drink menu came even close to fulfilling his dreams for a Dr. Pepper, so he blindly chose one of the many carbonated beverages that the Latelians did like to drink.
The waitress -just call me ‘Missy’, another deplorable instance of non-futuristic naming rules- vanished in a swirl of perfume and short shorts, leaving Garth to his own devices. He took time to do a quick but thorough examination of the building. As local data stated, the structure was indeed undergoing heavy renovations so it could be properly rezoned for commerce. The exterior of the structure bristled with an almost proto-typically haphazard skeleton of scaffolding while men in bright red hardhats did whatever it was that they were supposed to do in the execution of their duty.
From his spot in the booth, Garth could see not only men working on the scaffolding, but people on several floors tossing junk out windows and up and down the street on both sides for about block in either direction. He had a perfect view of the entire operation.
Si Missy returned with his drink. It turned out to be a non-alcoholic apple flavored champagne. Rather than send it back, Garth made a big show of enjoying the effervescent drink by swallowing it so the crap wouldn’t touch his taste buds. He picked a few items from the menu at random, dropped a dazzling smile on Missy as she left and considered his next move.
From the look of the neighborhood and the type of reno going on, the relay station’s home was only semi-permanent. The area wasn’t super high-class, but the general lay of the land told Garth that even clinically disinterested citizens would eventually notice a building on the corner that was never finished. Most probable was Ashok owned the building under a dummy corporation hidden beneath layers of shell companies. When the construction was completed, he’d legitimately buy it under his own name or under a front man, and no one would be the wiser.
That was not a particularly happy thought, so Garth buried it under another mouthful of wretched fizzy apple-flavored crapola. Far better to imagine Guillfoyle was running a black op station and that the building in front of him was no tougher to break into than the average kindergarten.
As he sat there, Garth counted fourteen dusty laborers wandering in and out and around the building unimpeded; there were more inside, but those fourteen apparently had free reign. Either security was very lax because they thought they had nothing to worry about or the entire area had a blanket of spEyes like Guillfoyle Plaza.
Garth took a sparing sip of his champagne knock-off and did a spEye search. Other than five regular Eyes in the restaurant and a few spEyes hovering at intersections a block away on either side, the entire area was free of surveillance. So. Guillfoyle did occasionally put all his eggs in one basket. That was refreshing.
Whistling the theme to Mission: Impossible under his breath, Garth logged on to one of the million public servers and began a casual search for Public Domain documents pertaining to buildings in the area. A few times, he was asked for personal information concerning his reasons for the material. No doubt there were crooks out there who’d already thought of using a netLINK to steal blueprints for potential targets, so every time he was impeded by a security net, Garth used his massive fortune as either a pry bar or a bludgeon to inveigle his way in deeper. Every now and then, he ran into an avatar that wouldn’t budge no matter what. Those he glad-handed off to Sa Herrig’s prote in the hopes that the banker turned PA would fob them off with stories about an Offworlder’s crazy interest in Conglomerating; the level of interest he was displaying in the neighborhood was too exact to simply back out.
Just when Garth managed to dig his way into a server that had the blueprints he sorely needed, Missy arrived with his randomly picked food and an amused look on her comely face; obviously she felt her only customer was mildly insane to have ordered two full entrees and a dessert all at the same time. To her credit, she said nothing. Missy delivered her edible payload and vanished.
Garth, hungrier than he’d realized, immediately dug into the ice cream. A firm believer in the ‘waste not want not’ philosophical school of culinary delights, he could no more let ice cream spend a third of a second melting than he could ignore Naoko Kamagana’s eyes.
Funneling the cold desert into his mouth, he realized Missy stood just out of range, watching him tunnel into his food, a look of rapt amazement on her face. He shrugged, belched softly, and shoved the empty bowl out of the way. He moved on to the steak and veggies next, cutting into the enormous slab of meat with the grace of someone who didn’t want to try and shove the whole thing in his mouth but wasn’t overly concerned with any individual piece, so long as he could fit it in without choking.
Another waitress sprouted next to Missy and they began chatting behind raised hands. Soon after that, the bartender joined, only he had no interest in pretending to be doing anything other than blatantly staring at The Eat Machine. Another waitress and one of the chefs arrived on the scene and they quickly began making small bets on when the weird Offworlder was going to choke to death and who was going to give him mouth to mouth when it happened.
Garth made a big show of finishing off the steak and veggies quickly before moving directly on to the salad. Ordinarily, he wasn’t a salad guy, but the Latelian diet was pretty heavy on the proteins, so he needed extra roughage to shake things up. The salad went down almost as quickly as the ice cream had. Garth rested his head on the back of the padded booth and let out a slow rumbling belch that shifted all the food in his gut down a level. Now that his attention wasn’t devoted to stuffing his face, Garth could hear but not quite understand the frenzied, whispered conversation ten feet away. He heard Missy tell the group that she had to ‘se
e to her customer now, she would find out, shut up’.
Missy moved up to the table, eyeing the scene of epicurean devastation before her. She’d never personally seen someone eat like that in her life, though some of her co-workers had God soldiers in their families and claimed the Offworlder ate like one of them.
“Hi.” Garth smiled at Missy again, this time feeling as if he was an adult speaker invited to a preschool class. Missy was staring at him with this sincere look on her face. “Something wrong?”
Missy felt like running away. Her friends were stupid. This sa wasn’t Latelian, so he couldn’t be a God soldier, and even though the bartender, Demarcus, thought he’d seen the man in the highlights, he had to be wrong. “A…are you in The Game?”
“Uhuh.” Garth took a sip of his bubbly bevvie, instantly deciding that he would never drink anything that tasted like horse ass again, especially if it was apple flavored horse ass. Garth didn’t think he’d ever be able to look at an apple in quite the same way ever again.
“A…are you fighting in the first rung of Ultra?” Missy asked.
“I sure was, I mean, I am, yeah.”
“Oh, Ok.” Missy flushed scarlet, scooped the empty dishes into her arms and hurried away as quickly as she could without breaking into a run.
Shaking his head at the average level of weirdness around him, Garth went back to work. He paid for the privilege of accessing the blueprints for all the buildings in a two-block radius, and spent a minute or two looking each over before retracing his steps, as though he wasn’t really sure what he wanted. Planning to spend another ten going over each of the blueprints carefully, he dumped most of the buildings off the list. Midway through the second set, Missy came back to see if he wanted anything else, so Garth ordered a pot of coffee and a sandwich.
Once Missy disappeared, Garth narrowed his accessed blueprints down to the building across the street and one a block and a half south. Both were very similar as far as location and foot traffic. Any bored Regimist snoops coming across his access logs wouldn’t see anything except a rich guy who wanted to buy himself a building in a heavily trafficked area.
Coffee and sandwich came, and rather than break his concentration this time, Garth thanked Missy absentmindedly without stopping.
Never one to take offence, Missy nodded politely and made to leave when she realized that her strange Offworlder customer was so absorbed in his prote that he didn’t even know the table carried Sheet functionality. Rather than interrupt, she tapped a few buttons on her own proteus to activate the table.
Feeling stupid, Garth shoved his coffee cup out of the way and watched the data pour onto the table’s glassy surface; Missy was going to get one hell of a tip. Moreover, if it weren’t for the fact that all other women had ceased to exist because of Naoko, he’d’ve probably made a pass, to boot. Things were the way they were, though, so with a shrug, Garth turned his full attention back to the waiting blueprints. Working through the small display of his proteus was always slow going; using the large table as an up-close-and-intimate Screen enabled Garth to show both sets of prints at the same time, and in no time at all, he’d completed the laborious task of committing both buildings to memory.
The limited information from public servers concerning the building’s state of repair was verified and expanded upon by the realtor’s office. The structure was going through more than simple renovation; they were gutting it from the inside out. Everything except the super-structure, air-conditioning and elevator shafts was slated for removal. Better news there could not have been.
There’d be chunks of plaster, walls, partitions, old office furniture and all manner of crud laying around, providing excellent cover should an actual fight break out. With the forecast for his evening involving a massive hail of bullets followed by a one hundred percent chance of exploding spaceships, the less he got shot at before then, the better. The blueprints suggested that the best way to get up to the third floor and all the way in the back without running into people was by crawling through shafts and air ducts, so that was what he was going to do. Garth knew he wasn’t as handsome as Bruce Willis was, but he was down with the whole deal.
Garth had his plan, he had a full stomach, and soon, he’d be doing what he was born to do:
Kick up shit and cause trouble.
Garth took another mouthful of coffee, located the computerized bill, paid it and tipped Missy a solid thousand credits. She was involved with another table, which was nice; when the big gratuity came through on her prote, Missy wouldn’t be able to chase him around the restaurant.
xxx
There no way of knowing if any of the construction workers were the sort of guys who would develop a scorching case of Spontaneous Heroism until after the fact; where regular citizens were concerned, it was impossible to even guess who might decide to pull a Johnny Bravo and get into the mix. Nine times out of ten, everyone did the usual thing, which was duck and run. But that tenth time … Garth had seen skinny dinks weighing no more than thirteen pounds get up the courage to stand up to the ‘bad guys’. Never once had he seen things go right when that happened.
Garth hoped any brain damaged construction workers so afflicted would be easily convinced that their choice was the wrong one.
Garth kicked up a heel on the corner up from his target and rested his back against the wall. Before committing to the venture, it was of overriding importance to keep anyone from shouting for help across the netLINKs. The untimely arrival of Guillfoyle security teams would be merely unfortunate, but the appearance of the God soldiers predestined to follow would be hazardous. In order to prevent that, Garth logged directly into the nearest relay node’s operating system using the same hack-avatar he’d used to find Guillfoyle’s hole-in-the-wall. As usual, much of the node’s processing power was controlling the tide of data traffic without letting the bandwidth become swamped by a single greedy user. It took some time to locate a tiny block of unused space for his hack; essentially, the little devil was programmed to identify ‘help’ calls and cycle them through a well-defined bogus emergency operator dialogue. The hack was good enough to convince callers that everything was being taken care of, but all it’d take was an unhappy camper walking a block in any direction and placing the call again; their protes would log onto a different netLINK server and there was nothing in his armamentarium to prevent that without busting Lady Ha’s work wide open.
Using the surreptitious route-bot on a single relay server was deadly dangerous as it was; if it was discovered, no amount of lying would protect him from Terrance, no amount of lying would save him from Doans. Garth pushed moody thoughts away and jogged across the street. The last thing he wanted to do before actually committing all the way was to get a feel for the place by walking right in front of it.
He stopped at the next building and sat on the stairs. The plan needed a major overhaul, and quickly. The construction workers were going about their chores in virtual silence. Beyond the occasional ‘coming through’ or ‘watch out, pal’, the dozens of men did their jobs with fascinating precision.
How was it possible that on the planet where The Game was rocking on steadily that thirty gruff looking men covered in plaster and the sweat of a hard day’s work had nothing to say about the first trials in Eliminations? Even without his own epic ass kicking –which was still burning its way through the netLINKs-, it was unthinkable. Even in the restaurant, there’d been a continual buzz of ‘did you sees’ and ‘I couldn’t believe it’s’ as patrons and employees shared their personal views on how the Game was going. This made the guys working on the building either a statistical anomaly of such bizarre proportions that all the laws of probability were violated in such a way that the Universe was soon to detonate or they were hardcore agents doing one hell of a job in pulling a fast one.
Of the two, the death of the Universe was more appealing. It was too big to go all at once, which would give him enough time to figure out a solution. In the now, shit needed solvin
g ASAP.
“Shit.” Garth muttered. He checked the time. Six o’clock was hurrying its way along, and that meant a replacement crew was also probably on the way.
“What to do, what to do?” Garth quickly logged back on to the different real estate sites he’d perused and paid another extortionate amount of money to look at the blueprints for the buildings on either side of his target. He was looking for anything that would help him out; adjoining ventilation shafts, forgotten secret passageways, interdimensional doorways, magical wardrobes. Anything that’d help him into the building unnoticed –at least temporarily- by that ‘work crew’. Once inside, he could easily avoid most people by crawling through the shafts. It was just the getting there that was now complicated.
He found his answer in a smaller gap between rooftops on one side than the other. Garth killed the search, walked back down the way he’d come, and when there was a momentary pause between workers milling around out front, dodged up the stairs leading into the building on the left. Afraid to waste even one single precious second, Garth grabbed the doorknob, twisted it savagely open –breaking the lock in the process- and slid in just as he heard the noisy clatter of someone exiting. He stood just inside the doorway, heart hammering, ears straining. No one shot at him.
Garth located an elevator and rode it all the way to the top, dismayed to hear that the quality of Muzak had actually succeeded in deteriorating over thirty thousand years. He exited the elevator at the top floor, took a sharp left, a right, went down to the end of the hallway and then took another abrupt left.
He loved having a near-perfect memory. Right in front of him was a huge –for him- ladder leading up to a heavily bolted trap door leading to the roof. Garth stuck his head back around the corner to see if anyone was coming; whatever sort of office building he’d broken into didn’t seem to care much about security. Garth sat down, back against the wall. He tried to find any interior servers in the building and found none whatsoever. The building was absolutely, utterly cold.
