Brandt exited alongside my officer drone to the adjacent room, where the holographic projection of a man with lean, high-cut cheekbones and a lab coat waited.
"What is it, Langdon?" Brandt said, making no attempt to conceal his frustration at being interrupted.
Things got tricky when I shifted perspective between drones. The process was jarring like driving over a pockmarked gravel road.
BLINK.
I switched control to the lab tech on the other end of the line, letting Officer Kellogg idle in the back of my mind.
"Sorry to interrupt you, sir. There's been somewhat of a breakthrough on that device you brought in. You're gonna want to see this."
"Stream it to my queue."
"Actually, sir, it'd be better if you came in person. Transferring this information through the Stream might not be...uh...secure, if you understand."
Brandt paused for a long moment, studying me through the double-sided glass. Inside the interrogation room, I resembled a meditating Buddha, or a drunk on the cusp of blackout; sometimes there's a thin line between the two.
I considered poking around Brandt's cerebral jungle again, but operating two drones had me redlining. Taking a third would be overwhelming.
"I'll be right there," Brandt said before ending the call. "You stay here. Watch him. Under no circumstances are you to enter that room. Clear?"
"Yes, sir," I answered with Kellogg's voice box.
Brandt left in a distracted flurry. Before the door was fully closed I had Kellogg standing in the interrogation room, releasing the bindings holding my arms to the table. The cuffs released their grip with a click and a whoosh.
I leaned back, allowing my arms to dangle loosely at my side. My neck and shoulders were a jumble of knots I tried working through by rolling my head in circles. The skin around my forearms was an odd shade of purple-blue that burned as blood rushed back into them.
Officer Kellogg stared vacantly at me. He looked younger than he had on the rooftop of the Vault. Perhaps straight out of the Academy, but it was hard to say. People had bucked the evolutionary trend. They looked younger every year thanks to cheaper and better nanotech, aging with none of the physical signs to show for it.
Thanks to that tech, Kellogg could be older than me. I had no way of knowing. He'd probably go to his deathbed looking like a sprightly twenty-something.
By comparison, I'd be going to mine looking as if I'd been thrown off a building. A surprisingly accurate look.
I stood on legs that had turned into a pincushion of needles. I hopped up and down and tried stimulating blood flow by massaging my thighs. I glanced at my Life Tracker and surprise hit me like a jackhammer to the gut. Two hours had passed since the Vault rooftop.
Two hours with no forward progress towards catching Malcolm. I took the cuffs from Kellogg and threw them over my wrists without tightening them.
I briefly wondered if Kellogg's conscious mind was still in there, awake and privy to his circumstances. For his sake, I hoped not. With my hand on the doorknob, I told myself he slept in a state of peaceful oblivion.
It was irrelevant whether or not that was true, 'cause it made me feel better, and right then I was in the market for anything to make me feel better.
We exited the interrogation room with Kellogg's hand on my shoulder. Time Vice buzzed with more than the usual bustle of activity. Most of the faces were new to me, but there were plenty I recognized, and too many that recognized me. We traversed the bull pen like a couple runway models—all eyes on us.
One face held no love for me, only contempt. Another wore a mask of confusion. Another a mix of admiration and loathing—a unique conflict of emotions to be settled over a beer.
We exited the bull pen and the noise of work resumed behind us. Out of sight, out of mind. Already forgotten.
That was for the best.
Kellogg thumbed a button for the elevator, an old-time piece of equipment straight out of the dark ages. It was my understanding that law enforcement organizations have always been underfunded, hence the Precinct's outdated infrastructure. Something about giving the criminals a fighting chance, I guess.
A number on the wall indicated the elevator sat three floors above us on the thirteenth.
The knot of anxiety in my stomach added another convoluted loop and whorl with every passing second, afraid somebody might see me out of the interrogation room, and start asking questions. Questions I didn't have good answers for.
A bead of sweat trickled down my nose, which had picked up an offensive stale odor tainting the air. The smell of exertion and dried blood. It took me a second to realize it was me I smelled—a fact that didn't make the scent any less offensive.
"Hello?" a voice behind me said.
I turned, but nobody was there.
Even on the most aggressive timetable it was too soon to be suffering auditory hallucinations from the Quick. It wasn't until the voice spoke again that I realized I'd heard it through a different set of ears.
BLINK.
Brandt stood in the lab doorway, arms crossed. Langdon, the tech, stared blankly back.
"Oh, sorry. I'm uh...cleaning," I said through Langdon, unsure how long Brandt had watched him idling in the center of the room.
Brandt didn't budge from his position at the door. His eyes locked onto mine in an ocular wrestling match to assert dominance. But I was playing the part of a lab tech, and broke the stare first, afraid if I held it too long he would see through the drone, beyond to the other side where I lurked in shadows, pulling the strings.
"What did you call me down here for?" His words were the verbal equivalent of checking his forearm for the time. They dripped with the implied meaning, You'd better hurry.
"Yes, of course...that."
I turned towards a large apparatus on the wall that, to my expert eyes, could've been an oven. While brainstorming a plausible story to feed Brandt, something chirped in the periphery of my mind. I transferred back to my own body as two uniformed officers exited the elevator. I lead Kellogg into the small metal box, pressed the button for the parking garage, and blinked back into Langdon.
"Are you okay?" Brandt's hands were a bruising vice grip on Langdon's shoulder.
These guys were zombies without me behind the controls. Their apparent lack of mental acuity would appear odd, but nobody would suspect a viral nanobot had hijacked their bodies, so in that respect I was safe.
"Uh...yeah. It's been a lo—" I said.
Brandt held up a hand, ending the sentence midway. "Show me what you brought me down here for. Now."
"Of course; do you have the device with you?"
Brandt withdrew the Hive Mind from his breast pocket and placed it in Langdon's hand. I squinted at the device, but surprisingly the tech didn't have optical implants, a useful upgrade for a man in his line of work. Because of his weak eyes I squinted that much harder.
Not that there was anything to see. The nanites that had once swarmed its smooth black surface had relocated themselves to the bodies of my slaves. But this was called misdirection, which was all about selling the act.
DING.
I craned Langdon's head up, expecting to see a bell floating somewhere near the ceiling before realizing I had again crossed my senses.
BLINK.
Kellogg ran in stand-by mode beside me as a short woman with the body of a pit bull, and the face to match, joined us in the elevator. Her badge said Lieutenant Sanders, another new face on the force. I didn't search her in the database, though I suspected she wouldn't extend me the same courtesy.
The door slid shut and the elevator resumed its ascent. Not sure who invited it, but an awkward silence joined us. An indefinable quality filled the air, and I knew the Lieutenant was about to become a problem. She wasn't being shy about mean mugging me. Her eyes flitted between myself and our destination illuminated on the wall of buttons to her left. Those same eyes glazed over with a morning frost, checking my file, I guessed.
Sanders'
posture tightened, almost imperceptibly, around the shoulders as the fog obscuring her pupils lifted.
"Officer Kellogg, where are you taking Mr. Mandel?" she said, positioning herself between us and the door. Her fingers melted over the butt of the pistol at her hip.
Can't catch a break.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Fighting Like A Girl
BLINK.
I redirected the highway of neurons in Kellogg's brain to form a reply. "Prisoner transfer, ma'am. Orders from the Director himself."
"Director?"
"Director of Division Security, Daniel Brandt."
Sanders frowned, quietly deciding my fate.
Things were falling apart. By now Brandt would know something was wrong with Langdon, which meant my window of opportunity was about to become a brick wall; there might still be a way through, but it would require a lot more force. Force I didn't want to use on my former colleagues.
I needed to get back to the lab and do damage control, but I couldn't leave my zombie bodyguard alone with Sanders.
The Lieutenant turned, without taking her eyes off me, and pressed a red button on the wall. The elevator jerked to a stop, stuck between floors nineteen and twenty.
"Ma'am?" I said through Kellogg.
She held up a finger and said, "I've never heard of Director Brandt."
Shit, of course she hadn't. Nobody had.
"You know how those guys are. A bunch of cloak-and-dagger types, but if I keep them waiting, they're gonna rip me a new one. Brandt's meeting us in the garage. You're welcome to come with and talk to him yourself."
Sanders reflected on her options. Silence sat in the corner, the invisible fourth person bearing witness to the final moments before a duel.
Two gunmen baked beneath a blazing sun, fingers itching to be filled with a handful of metal. An extension of the arm bent on destruction.
The problem with this duel: only one of us had a gun.
Lieutenant Sanders' arm tightened, becoming a flexed ball of muscle. The tendon running down her forearm and into her hand twitched. Her finger tapped her holster.
So much for doing this quietly.
I didn't wait for Sanders to draw her weapon and put a round through my heart. Instead, I ramped my speed implants and burst forward. Kellogg and Langdon were torn from my mental grasp by the current of competing stimuli, but they weren't my problem at the moment.
Sanders was fast and ready, a bad combination that moved her straight to the top of my worry-about-this list.
She pivoted and deflected my fist with her left hand while drawing her pistol with the right. I ducked and swept her back leg with mine. The Lieutenant hovered in the air before the rules of physics got their act together and dragged her to the ground. Her head bounced off the wall.
Kellogg pawed the sleep away from his eyes. I reached for the pistol at his side, but something smashed into my knee, stopping me short, and dropping me hard.
Sanders lay on her side, leg extended in a pose accentuating the fact she'd just kicked my leg out from under me. I rolled back and thrust a foot at her face with all the grace of a newborn puppy. It wasn't a pretty maneuver, and she saw it coming.
The spasming kick went wide of her head, connecting firmly with the wall. Barbed spurs danced up my leg. Sanders snatched my exposed ankle between fingers more closely resembling vice grips than human digits. She tightened her grip and something in my leg cracked. I choked back a scream, and lashed out with my other leg. It didn't matter what I hit so long as it belonged to her.
Anything to break that inhuman grip pulverizing my bones.
My foot found a home six inches south of her armpit. She gasped, but the pressure on my leg didn't wane. I retaliated with another kick to her side. Bone fractured beneath the blow with a satisfying snap. Sanders released her grip with a grunt, and curled to one side, nursing her ribs.
Rolling to my knees, I brought my fist down in an overhead wrecking-ball punch learned only in bar fights. It was a maneuver adapted from our primitive ancestors insisting on using rocks to bash the skull of a gazelle.
Sanders was scrappy. She bucked like a fish out of water. Her arms shot forward, snaring my hand on its downward path while encircling my torso with her legs. The tables had turned so quickly, I didn't have time to consider what I'd done wrong.
From her back, Sanders pinned my arm to her body. When I tried pulling away, she loosened her grip and bucked a second time, compromising my balance and pitching me forward. Shifting her hips, she wrapped her legs around my head, and went full python on my throat.
Oxygen-rich blood, making the red-eye flight to my brain, was put on standby. The world smudged as if I were staring through a rain-freckled window. I punched desperately at her broken ribs with my free hand, but she wouldn't budge. Each punch was weaker than the last; seconds remained between me and blackout.
Flashbulbs popped as if paparazzi were hiding behind my eyelids. Last chance.
BLINK.
I jumped into Kellogg. The world cratered and puckered. My brain forgot how to operate a human.
Transcendental out-of-body experience for the evening: I saw myself lying on top of Sanders, her legs pretzeled around my head. Clumps of blond hair stuck to her sweat-slicked scalp. My body lay motionless in her grasp. Playing possum, or maybe just dead. Specifics were unclear. Everything muddled. Couldn't discern which.
Kellogg's hand responded slowly to my command. It moved clumsily toward his holster. The clasp gave way to his molestation and freed the pistol at his side with a soft click. In that final moment of lucidity, everything shifted and warped, expanded and contracted. I looked down the barrel of the vortex pistol with Kellogg's eyes, and fired a low-energy, high-dispersal round into Sanders' face.
Her body rag dolled. Out cold before her head clanged against the metal floor.
BLINK.
I gasped for air. Clarity seeped through the cracks formed by ruptured capillaries in bloodshot eyes. I breathed through the roar of fresh oxygen-laced blood being delivered to my skull.
It wasn't over yet. With the aid of the handrail I hoisted myself up, and tentatively weighted my ankle. Molten lava soaked into my marrow at the spot Sanders had crushed bone.
Shit.
I collapsed to my knee and rummaged through Sanders' pockets until I found her police-issued vial of stimheal. I popped the lid and stabbed the needle into my calf. Liquid ice flowed into my veins, an iceberg breaking off exponentially until everything below my knee was numbed by the prickles of nanobots working to mend broken tissue and bone.
Hobbling to my feet, I reached for the button that would resume our ascent to the parking garage, but stopped when I remembered Brandt.
My finger floated in dead space, calculating our odds of making it to the garage if I set the elevator into motion again. They were not good.
Escape became an ever more remote possibility with each passing second. The silver lining, on an otherwise piss-soaked day, was there hadn't been any alarms. Yet. When somebody got privy, that would be that. Lockdown. Nothing in, nothing out.
BLINK.
Langdon stood where I'd left him. Brandt was gone.
An officer stood at the door, presumably to keep my drone inside.
He saw me moving and said, "You feeling alright? Kinda went catatonic."
"Yeah, I'm fine. I uh...I installed some new upgrades the other day. Still haven't adjusted to them, I guess."
"I hear ya, nearly lost my mind when I got my cochlear implants. Flies buzzing around the room were like jet engines. Terrible times. But you'll be alright, there's a medic on the way up to check you out. Make sure there's no damage to your thinking muscle," he said, tapping his temple.
"Thanks, but that's not necessary. Sometimes I kind of...drift off. I'm feeling better now."
"All the same, that guy—Brandt, was it?—wanted you to get checked out," he said. "By the way, what upgrade did you get? I wanna know what to avoid."
"Proces
sing speed." I scanned my surroundings, hoping something would spark a moment of inspiration, but the room was full of tools and instruments I knew nothing about.
"Man, that must be nice. I mean, when you're not locked out of your own brain, that is."
"Yeah, being locked out suc—"
Bingo. The answer had been there, but I hadn't made the connection.
"Hey, I'm sorry, but I have a couple tests I need to finish up," I said. "Let me know when that medic gets here, yeah?"
The officer quirked an eyebrow and said, "Sure."
I dipped a toe into the Stream through Langdon's mind before committing to the full plunge. It was a third-party experience unlike any I'd felt before. Not necessarily a bad thing, but certainly not good.
The Stream felt wrong; a numb handshake offered out of obligation, indifferent to the recipient. If that's how the Stream felt to Regulars, no wonder they hated Intuits. Even with my Stream Intuition, guiding Langdon's mind through the hyper-reality interface was like driving a forklift in reverse through a field of sludge. His mental fingers fumbled through firewalls in search of our destination: the Precinct's security system.
To make the illusion of digital code manageable, I projected the imagery of a castle. We crossed the lowered drawbridge, wooden boards squeaking underfoot, and entered the inner sanctum of the building's security.
Once across, I raised the bridge, and took control of the building.
The universe responded to my touch.
I was the system's god.
And then the high-pitched shriek of the building's alarm pierced my inner zen.
Lockdown.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Crossing Lines Drawn In The Sand
The sterile white lights of the lab morphed into strobing red, casting the world into long, distorted shadows of blood. I'd braced for the alarm, but hearing that tooth-numbing wail through three sets of ears nearly overwhelmed me.
I bit my lip and broke the skin. The pain pulled me into its focusing embrace. Somehow I maintained control of my drones despite the exodus of thoughts fleeing my skull. I partitioned sections of my mind, reducing auditory feedback in myself and Kellogg, so I could continue operating through Langdon.
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