by Zoe Sharp
He paled a little and suddenly found the need to give his full attention to wiping the gunk off the sensors and coiling them into a sterilisation tray. For a few moments, the only sound was the immersion tank draining like the last of the bathwater disappearing down the plughole.
We were in a small room with soundproofing material covering the walls. Apart from the tank, the overhead umbilical feed, and a steel trolley like you’d find in an operating theatre, it was empty of other equipment. I supposed that having spent a good chunk of his considerable fortune developing this VR technology, Asher wanted the brains of it kept well away from prying eyes or fingers.
“Speaking of the boss,” I said at last, “where is he?”
“Oh, um, I guess his nurse has taken him back to his quarters. He’ll be OK in a half-hour or so,” Sherwin said cheerfully. “It always takes him a little while to get over being dead.”
Showered, dressed and feeling almost in touch with reality again, I found Brant, Asher’s head of security, waiting for me in what I’d heard referred to as the den. It was more like the library of a very upmarket gentleman’s club, complete with a mahogany-beamed ceiling, clusters of wingback chairs, and flock wallpaper so deep you could wade in it. All that was needed to complete the picture was for some elderly colonel to quietly snuff it behind his copy of the Financial Times.
Brant did not seem entirely at home in such surroundings. He was an ex-Navy SEAL—a fact you could tell just by looking—but it was not his job to blend. Brant organised the highly visible security around the mansion on the edge of Falls Lake, just north of Raleigh in North Carolina, and the ten acres of grounds and gardens that went with it.
From what I’d seen on the way in, he was doing a damn good job. The surveillance gear was high grade and well positioned. His team of former military or law enforcement personnel knew what was expected and could be relied upon to think on their feet.
And beneath the more noticeable patrols of men with guns and dogs were layers of covert electronic security that meant a mouse would have a hard time sneaking through. The only extra I could think of was real-time satellite tasking, and I wouldn’t put it past Brant to call in a few favours if he felt the need.
All this to protect a man who hadn’t set foot outside the property for sixteen years.
As I strolled towards Brant, I reminded myself not to limp from the phantom gunshot wounds. Wasn’t so long ago I was trying not to limp from the real ones.
“Handled yourself OK in there,” Brant said by way of greeting, and although he didn’t add the words ‘for a woman’ I heard them all the same. “Not your fault the boss can’t take orders.”
“Is today typical of the kind of thing that’s been happening?”
He nodded. “Just about every visit to La-La-Land over the past month, he comes out in a virtual body bag.”
“Has the system been hacked?”
“Sherwin’s the guy you’d have to ask about that. He starts talking schematics and I understand maybe one word in ten.” He ran a frustrated hand over his close-cropped hair. “What I do know is, the whole system’s standalone, completely unplugged from the ’Net. Only way anyone could insert a virus would be from inside the perimeter.”
“Getting in is as close to impossible as makes no difference,” I agreed—flattering, but true. “You’ve got this place sewn up tighter than a fish’s armpit.”
He showed his teeth briefly in satisfaction. “Watertight.”
“So, what do you think is going on here?”
“It would be speculation on my part, but I’d guess somebody knows they can’t get to him out there in the real world, so they’re trying to take away the only thing he’s got left.”
A low hum preceded Asher’s arrival, his electric wheelchair moving fast enough across the tiled floor that the uniformed nurse at his shoulder had to move briskly to keep pace.
“Hey Charlie,” he rasped, “how’re you feeling?”
The irony of having my ‘dead’ principal inquire after the health of his bodyguard was not lost on me.
Asher Campbell Cooper III was still a force of nature regardless of the circumstances of the meeting. According to the background dossier I’d read before heading down from New York, back when Asher was nineteen he’d inherited a modest amount from his father. He used the money to launch himself into the rapidly expanding world of the Internet in the early ’nineties and within ten years was running one of the largest service providers of wireless, satellite and cable on the Eastern seaboard.
From the file, the appearance he’d chosen for his VR avatar was based pretty much on the way he’d actually looked in younger days. Something of a playboy, he’d married a beauty queen and taken up motorsport. Had his cake, eaten it, licked up the crumbs and gone back for more.
The pessimists would have said it couldn’t last.
It didn’t.
A high-speed freak racing accident, a structural failure, a high-temperature engine fire and a methanol explosion. They all combined to produce the man in the wheelchair with an irreparably damaged spinal cord and third-degree burns that covered more than half his body. He’d lost the fingers of his right hand as well as his right eye and ear. Because he no longer had a recognisable nose, a permanent oxygen supply had been tubed into his chest to boost his seared lungs. Despite enduring years of surgical procedures, his face still had the appearance of an ice sculpture left out in the sun.
Yeah, the irony of him enquiring after my health was definitely not lost on me.
“I’m fine,” I said now. “A great improvement on the last time I was shot—or stabbed for that matter.”
He laughed. It sounded like a handful of grit thrown into a blender.
“Not many people get their head around it so fast. Nice job.”
“It would have been better if I’d kept you alive in there,” I said. “At least to the end of the first day.”
“Well, at least you got to experience the craziness first-hand.”
“Before we went in, you said it would be ‘dinner with some old friends’,” I said. “I assume the cabaret wasn’t part of the plan?”
“Marilyn Monroe going postal on my ass? No, ma’am.”
I paused. “How far do you trust your tech guy, Sherwin?”
“All the way,” he said without hesitation. He swivelled the eye that worked in Brant’s direction.
“Sherwin passes all the regular polygraph tests,” Brant said. “His financials are clean and there are no threats to his family.”
“Who else has the expertise to engineer that kind of scenario?”
“Maybe a handful of people in the world. But you forget—I use the technology for my own…diversion. I’m nobody’s competition. They gain nothing by sabotaging my system.”
“So, who might gain something?”
Asher’s shoulder gave a convulsive twitch that might once have been a shrug. “I have no idea.”
“What about the staff? Friends, family, business associates?”
“Brant vets everyone who works for me.”
I didn’t ask who vetted Brant—probably the CIA.
“Plus everyone who enters the house undergoes a covert scan for weapons, bugs or other electronic devices,” Brant put in.
I didn’t rise to that one. “You hired me for personal protection and that means cure as much as prevention. I’m going to need to talk to everyone, including your family.”
“Yeah, well. Good luck with that.”
Having struck out with the staff—as I’d known I would but still had to go through the motions—I moved on to the family. And working on the theory that sibling rivalry can be the most vicious kind I started with Asher’s younger brother, Michael.
On the surface, he seemed a viable suspect. Ten years Asher’s junior, not as good looking, not as much of a go-getter. Michael was a solid kind of guy who would have been the pride of his parents…had his parents not also had a son like Asher to invite unfair comparison.
>
But after the accident, Michael got promoted to the number-one spot. He was now in command of the Internet giant his brother had started. The reports showed he had the smarts to know his limitations and surround himself with the right people. The business was sound, showing steady growth and the ability to innovate without overreaching itself.
Asher made the introductory call, and Michael’s PA squeezed me in between meetings at their offices in downtown Raleigh.
“I’m sure you’re anxious to get to the bottom of this,” I said carefully as we shook hands. “Thanks for seeing me at such short notice.”
“Well, Ash still has some pull around here,” Michael said.
Rather than returning to his desk, he guided me to a cluster of low sofas overlooking the skyline. The building was impressive without being flashy, set in the heart of the city amid wide tree-lined streets.
I sat and raised an eyebrow. “I thought he was out of the company?”
“Oh, he is, don’t get me wrong. He’s a majority shareholder but draws no salary and he doesn’t interfere with the direction I want to take things. Even so, he was the boss for a long time.” He gave a shrug. “Old habits.”
“If anything should happen to your brother, who gets his shares?”
“The family.” He flushed. “I get some, if that’s what you’re driving at. The rest is split between our sisters—one in West Virginia, the other in Paris, France. And Mother, of course.”
“But you would have a controlling interest?”
It took him a moment to answer that. The flush regrouped around the collar of his shirt and put up a second wave.
“Look, I realise you have your job to do, but please be assured I am not trying to kill my brother—in this world or any other.”
Behind us, the office outer door opened and Michael’s PA hovered expectantly in the gap. He nodded to her and rose, buttoning his jacket.
“Like I said, Ash doesn’t interfere. I can’t say that would be the case if my sisters took control of his shares.” He shook my hand again, held on a moment longer. “I’ll level with you, Miss Fox. I cannot imagine what it must be like for my brother to be the way he is, but I hope I’ll be forgiven for praying the poor bastard lives to a grand old age.”
“I stayed by his side and nursed him as far back as he was coming, then I left,” said the former beauty queen. You could still see it in the arrangement of her features, the slant of her bones.
“Why no divorce?” I asked.
She smiled, causing a dimple to appear in her right cheek. “Partly to spite his mother,” she admitted easily. “And partly because we’re Catholics and, old-fashioned as it may seem in this day and age, we don’t hold with divorce. Besides, there’s no need. Ash and I already live our separate lives and he was more than generous.”
She waved an elegant hand to indicate the corner penthouse condo in the PNC Plaza building—one of the tallest in Raleigh. It was airy and modern, with cherry-planked floors and high ceilings. Worth a fraction of the Falls Lake mansion, but well outside my price bracket.
“And if your husband should die?”
To her credit, a flicker passed across her features that I didn’t think was faked and the smile turned wry.
“Then our arrangement ends and I get zip,” she said. “Mommy dearest saw to that.”
“A most unsuitable match,” Mrs Campbell Cooper sniffed, sitting rigidly upright in her chair. “I said she would never stay loyal to my son and I was not disappointed.”
Looking at the old woman, her face deeply etched with decades’ evidence of disapproval, I could believe it.
“Can you think of anyone who might wish to disrupt Asher’s forays into virtual reality?”
She was too ladylike to snort, but it was a near thing. “Video games,” she uttered with icy contempt. “All he has left is a first-class brain and he’s rotting it playing video games. It’s a shameful waste of his talents.”
If I squinted hard I could just about see her point. Before this job, the only contact I’d had with computer simulations was tactical weapons training. But for someone with Asher’s permanent injuries, I reckoned she could have shown a little more compassion. First-class brain or no.
“What would you rather have him do?” I asked. I did my best to keep my voice neutral, but she heard the implied censure even so.
“Do? What do you mean what would I have him do?” she demanded. “What is he fit for?” She refolded her hands in her lap, the upper gripping tight to the one beneath as if to prevent it yanking at her own hair.
“So why not let him spend his time however he chooses?”
“Do you honestly think I have any say in the matter?” she shot back. She paused, but I’d succeeded in poking her with a sharp enough stick to provoke an outburst. She rose, preparing to sweep out of the room in that wonderful state known as high dudgeon. At the last moment, she hesitated just long enough for me to see the genuine anguish through the cracks in her formidable facade.
“We called him Asher. It means fortunate, blessed, and for a long time it seemed he was,” she said. “But there isn’t a day goes by when I don’t wonder if they were gravely mistaken to pull him from the wreckage of that crash.”
“Just about anyone could upload some kinda virus if they were told how to go about it,” Sherwin said a shade defensively. “And hey, it was me took this whole thing—the glitches that kept occurring in the program—to Brant in the first place. You’ve met the guy. Why would I go poke an angry bear with a stick if I didn’t have to?”
I hid a smile at the outrage in his voice. “How real a danger could Asher be in from these ‘glitches’?”
He shrugged. “Kinda hard to say. I mean, if somebody really had it in for the boss surely they’d just find a way to override the safety protocols instead?”
“Which would do what, exactly?” I asked.
He cast me a slightly disbelieving look that I had to ask. “Well, when he gets shot, or run down by a train, or trampled by wildebeest, or pushed off a cliff—all of which have happened recently. There was this one time—”
“Focus, Sherwin!”
“Oh, um, yeah. Well, it would be theoretically possible to induce such physical shock to his system that it would send him into cardiac arrest.”
“But that’s not the way the system’s been hacked?”
He shook his head. “It’s just the scenarios that are totally messed up.” He looked about to say more but flicked me an unhappy glance instead.
“This whole thing is totally messed up,” I said, “so if you have anything you want to share, however bizarre, please go ahead.”
“Well, it’s almost like whoever’s doing this is not trying to kill him,” he said unhappily. “This is more like…torture.”
“I think I have a handle on what’s going on,” I said. “We need to meet.”
“You have? That’s great,” Asher said, the damage to his voice making him hard to read over the phone. “I have just the scenario. You’re gonna love it.”
“Real world, real time, Asher.”
“My dollar, my call,” he responded. “Besides, you’re in North Carolina. You can’t leave without seeing the best it has to offer.”
I bit back a pithy retort. “Well, you’re the boss.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Have Sherwin get you kitted out and I’ll see you on the other side.”
The grit of sand against my teeth this time was driven by a biting northeasterly rather than a gentle Saharan wind. I stood alongside Asher on a vast open stretch of dunes with a grey Atlantic ahead and a grey sky above. Both of us wore overcoats, hats, and gloves.
“Any of this seem familiar?” Asher asked.
I glanced around. The land rose steadily behind us. The only buildings nearby were wooden shacks, their timbers bleached silver by the elements. What appeared to be a bed sheet flew from one of them like a huge flag.
Then, from the far side of the largest shack, a group of
half a dozen men appeared, hauling a contraption that looked both heavy and flimsy at the same time. It was half hang-glider, half children’s kite, held together with string and bicycle chains and mounted on a pair of wagon wheels.
“My God,” I murmured. “The Wright brothers. We’re at Kitty Hawk.”
Asher nodded. “Kill Devil Hills on the Outer Banks, to be precise. Kitty Hawk is a couple of miles further up. It’s December seventeenth, 1903 and we’re about to witness the dawn of the aviation era.”
I didn’t point out that this was a mere virtual reconstruction, no more real than watching a play.
“You wanted to talk, so talk,” Asher invited. “Don’t worry, they won’t do anything momentous until we’re ready.”
It was hard not to be fascinated as we strolled closer. The men wrestled the machine onto a narrow wooden rail in the sand and lifted the cartwheel bogeys out from under each wing.
“I talked to your family,” I said. “Your mother has taken your condition hard.”
I caught no glimpse of emotion on the smooth features of Asher’s avatar. His eyes were on the two brothers, Wilbur and Orville, fussing around their craft. Wilbur was the taller of the two, clean-shaven and balding. They shared only a passing resemblance.
“Mother was always my greatest supporter and my sternest critic,” Asher said at last. “I know how difficult it’s been for her to see me as I am now—on the outside.”
“She thinks you might have been better off if they’d left you in the burning wreck.”
I watched his face as I spoke and saw he’d heard this all before—probably from the lady herself. She didn’t strike me as the kind who’d keep a grievance silent.
He glanced down at me. I’d noticed before that he’d programmed himself with extra height. Either that or made the rest of us shorter.
“She’s never had any trouble speaking her mind. Mostly, it’s refreshing. Besides, you must have thought the same thing, the first time you laid eyes on me?”
