by Ron Collins
This was the moment, she thought, the test.
While she waited for his connection, she slipped a part of her conscious thought even deeper into her space than others would know about. Something others knew as Free Think, but that she called her True Space, a place overlooked, a place she owned and no one else could touch. If Bexie turned out to be the person Kinji was beginning to think he was, she would need to be in True Space to create a new link for him.
She sat, waiting.
There was an awkward pause, then his essence came in so hard it was almost disorienting.
Bexie felt the invitation as deep red flash in the back of his mind, much bolder than the last time.
Expecting a simple transfer, he latched onto it.
This time, though, the connection was like plunging his face into a sink full of water. One moment he was fine, the next his breath was taken away. His vision swam, and sound condensed to a single pop.
Then he blinked and he was fine.
“You’ve never ridden a wire down this deep, have you?” Kinji said through their connection. He noted the tips of her fingers were pressed against the countertop as if to keep her stable.
He blushed. “You could tell?” he said out loud.
She laughed.
“Follow me along here,” she sent him.
This deep, he liked how her voice felt, but before he could luxuriate in its calmness, she was moving on, showing him the graceful flow of something that was part tabletop and part sculpture, but also an elegantly conceived service center.
Design documents came to his view as he felt her fingers roll over the surface.
It was a strange sensation, operating in the physical world and being in Think Space at the same time.
“It’s wonderful,” he said through his link, though he wasn’t sure if he was commenting on the soup stand or simply on being able to feel the softness of her hands. With time to assess, the connection she’d given him was strong, different from his own. The sensation of her hands, for example, was delicate. He felt their warmth against his. If he concentrated hard enough, he thought he could feel the soft hairs on the back of them.
Was he imagining it?
She continued around the station.
The system was a smooth extension of the floor, its pedestal rising with a flow that felt like something made of evolutionary erosion rather than built by a human’s hand. The base was a simple black composite twined with a rose plant that ran its height to warp over the edge of the counter. The stools around it were soft and elevated. On one side, for people who wanted to loiter, was a pair of beige couches embroidered with a rose pattern that matched the station’s accent.
“Feels … like you just need to have a seat, doesn’t it?” he said.
“I’m glad you like it,” Kinji said, a sense of appreciation in her tone. “The materials are stored in a kitchen component under the floor. See how it works?”
The floor disappeared from his view, and now the lower portions of the delivery mechanism were visible — inventory bin, matter converters, mixing stations, and the heating unit.
He watched raw materials flow into the mixer, water get added, and each individual bowl of soup heated to the proper specification. The final product was poured into a holding compartment and moved along a conveyor to the station that had made the order, where it was presented to the requestor in a bowl that was configurable per each type of soup.
Growing more comfortable being in her link, he felt the movement of her hand as she operated hidden compartments to present a menu for people to make requests from, and then showed him dispensers for serving the soup.
“You present the soups in different bowls?”
“Of course,” Kinji replied. “Porcelain for a broth, compound for a soup, stoneware for a stew.”
“Well done,” Bexie said.
He pointed to the gap between a sofa and a side table.
“What if you extended the table out to the edges of the sofas, then deliver the soup to their side tray?”
“That would make sense, too,” Kinji said, her voice notching up a bit. “I like it. That way the clients wouldn’t need to turn away from each other to enjoy their soup. I’ll put it in a design note for the next installation.”
“Thanks.”
“I’m thinking of making the center gap display rose bushes as if they are waving in the wind,” she said.
“I like that,” Bexie replied.
They were both silent for some time, then. Through Think Space, Bexie examined the system further, then took in the crowd that gathered around in the physical. They were just people, here, chatting and laughing, or relaxing. They were just having soup.
The farther he was into Kinji’s Think Space, the more comfortable he felt.
No. Comfortable was the wrong word. Intimate was better. Or exposed.
Not in a physical way, though. Not intimate as a sexual thing, or exposed as in vulnerable, but closer and safer, like they were simply alone in the most intense way it was possible to be alone.
“Can they hear us here?”
Kinji’s face betrayed a moment’s uncertainty.
“Yes,” she said. “We are all modified to be born with TS links inside our head, and the connections grow deeper in our first years so that they are a part of us. They are all we ever know, so we grow comfortable with them, but if the Central Inspector’s Office is watching, it can see everything about all the people you see here.”
Bexie did his best to hide his disappointment, but he wasn’t dumb enough to kid himself that he hadn’t failed miserably.
Kinji touched the back of his hand.
“I’m not sure about you, though.”
“What do you mean?”
Her expression was guarded, but it also registered an uncertainty of some kind. A question, maybe, or a warning. He wasn’t sure what message she was sending, but for a moment he felt something dangerous.
“You mean …”
He glanced to the nearest escort, taking in its unlined face. As he watched, the security guard pursed his lips in a way that was very human.
Could the escorts sense him? Could they see through his eyes? Could they feel the touch of Kinji’s hand on him? That was what Kinji was implying, wasn’t she? She wasn’t sure if Bexie was connected yet. And if he wasn’t connected, then…
He reached for the escort through TS.
The escort didn’t respond.
Bexie felt his eyes grow wide. Did that mean they couldn’t feel him? Couldn’t trace him like they traced others?
Was that why they’d sent three escorts rather than just one? Why, perhaps, he’d been able to follow Julia down the hallway without being sensed or followed? If they could have known where he was during his escape, they would have stopped him, but he’d only been caught by Julia herself, and, even then, only by happenstance. If he’d gotten away, could he have run forever?
The escorts were here specifically because they couldn’t track him.
“There are some people, very few in number, who have no links,” Kinji said in an offhand way.
“Really,” Bexie said.
“They consider themselves rebels,” she continued, speaking to him as if she were merely passing conversation. But Bexie felt more going on under the surface. Kinji Hall’s voice was perfectly expressionless. “They live outside, you know? And…” She hesitated in a way that seemed important. “I’m also aware of people who can build a TS wall so tight not even the CIO can get in.”
“I see.”
And he did.
Or at least he was starting to.
“Does it go the other way? Can anyone talk to the Central Inspector?”
Her expression mixed bemusement with sarcasm, and her gaze scanned the area around them in a way that amped his already high sense of unease.
“Maybe that’s a topic for another time.”
“That’s a cop-out.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You’re being evasive,” he said.
She nodded. “Yes, I am.”
He prodded her with a raised eyebrow.
“Some people say there’s a way.”
“To get to the CIO?”
“Yes. I’ve heard rumors. But that’s all. If there’s really a way, I don’t know it.”
“How about tracking?” he asked, recalling the security files his businesses kept. “Do they keep logs of what they find?”
“Some,” Kinji replied. “I can’t say for sure how in depth they are, though. No one really knows.”
Bexie considered the information he’d just gotten dumped on him.
Thought about how certain things worked.
Or maybe didn’t.
Jesus, this place was a mess, wasn’t it? Free as free could be in one way, but uncomfortably dystopian in several others. The whole thing made the back of his neck itch. Now more than ever, he wanted to figure out who he was in this new world. And he wanted to spend time with people like Kinji. He wanted to be free — or at least out from under the eyes of the medical center. Wanted to meet these rebels she spoke of.
Another quick scan of the area convinced him he could pull it off.
He may not understand the world at large today but he understood a few things about doing business, and the first rule of doing business was that you could gain a lot of distance if you got people focusing on one thing while you were really doing something else.
Something about Kinji’s comments piqued his attention, something in the way her voice rose made him think there was more to her than met the eye and made him think about his second rule of doing business — that life got easier when you were a monopoly.
That’s what the Waker process was, after all: The excessive studying, the logging his Think Space into their modules. He’d been looking at his learning modules as indoctrination, which, while true, was only part of their reason to exist. Bexie and the rest of the Wakers had not been born during the time of Think Space. Their DNA was “pure.”
The truth of the matter is that he’d never had to learn anything more than a few simple basics: how to use Think Space, how to request things, a few bits of etiquette, and maybe how to find places to sleep. Food was free for the asking, after all. Clothes, too. It was valuable to have a sense of the public, but mostly that was a learned practice, anyway.
But the training was serving a purpose.
Brainwashing.
Or, if not brainwashing, at least control.
Was there a difference?
This whole process was designed to buy time for their technology to eat its way through his mind — as it did through the heads of every child born over the past hundred and fifty years.
The idea struck him so hard that Kinji felt his reaction.
She grabbed his hand and stared hard into his eyes.
Slowly, she sketched a pattern on his arm with the fingers of her other hand. It was writing, he realized. She kept her eyes riveted on his. He felt his breath quicken, and adrenaline flooded his brain.
We have a place that is ours, she wrote. Look for the blue in your Think Space.
Then she let go, and her gaze dropped.
He glanced at his escorts. They shifted feet but did not appear to react. He stared back at her, feeling like time had stopped in both places at once.
They couldn’t feel him.
He felt Kinji’s gaze.
“So,” Bexie said to her in the physical, rattled but not obviously so. “How do you submit a final design?”
“It’s simple,” she said, pushing a common channel to him and adding a comment that noted five locations that had already requested the system. While he watched, she marked the change Bexie had suggested, and put a notice in several other bins, then released it. “That lets the others know the design is available. Planners at any site can simulate it for safety and determine if unintended consequences might occur. If they like it, they will approve, and request the design be made.”
“By robots, right?”
“Sure. Autonomic entities, anyway.” She joked, “The term robot is so twenty-first century.”
“And robots even make the robots.”
“Autonomic entities make…”
“Yes, yes.” He cringed, trying to split his thought processes to assess Kinji’s command to look for blue in his Think Space at the same time as they held this conversation. “And who does the simulation of Kinji Hall’s latest design?”
“Anyone can, really. But if nothing else, there’s always a wing element of the Central Inspector’s Office.”
“And where is that? Can we talk to them?”
“Never tried. Results of the simulation get released in a day or two. It just happens.”
Bexie nodded.
His searching found nothing blue, though, which gave him a sense of panic because the urgency in Kinji’s expression said more was going on here than met the eye. He had to be missing something but had no way to ask without arousing suspicion.
He stood and watched a group on the platform. Two were up there now, but he realized that it wasn’t really them. Instead, they were a projection of a couple who sat on the sofa.
“You can do that?” The words slipped out of his mouth before he thought to hold them back. He watched the couple, though, and saw they were using the process to see themselves in whatever fashions they were interested in — helpful, especially if you didn’t have a group of people to tell you what was working for you or not.
“Sure,” Kinji replied.
They went back to the platform. “Join my TS again. I’ll show you.”
He followed her invitation.
“Add yourself to the stream for this location, and project yourself.”
An image of Kinji appeared on the stage. He saw how she did it, and a moment later, Bexie joined her.
Kinji left to sit on the sofa again, but rather than follow this time, Bexie jumped onstage with his holo double. “This is freaking insane,” he said. “Now there’s two of me.”
“Yes,” she said. “We can’t keep it up forever, though. It takes a lot of energy.”
He passed a hand through his double. It was an opaque image. Yes, he thought. Opaque. Like the boxer who had nearly gutted him with a punch.
“Very fresh,” he said, laughing aloud, and noting the escorts were watching closely. He held his hand out to his double’s hand, pressing his thoughts into it, pressing his hand into the double’s hand, feeling its counter pressure as he gave it more attention. And, at the same time, understanding something else. The projection worked on a public channel — he could see the other’s projections because they were casting into his TS, and others could see his projection because he was casting into theirs.
He turned to his double and made him dance.
Taking great joy, he turned his own body around.
“I’m dancing with myself!” He laughed, turning a strange step into something that might be called a do-si-do.
People gathered around him, and the stage became his.
A few minutes later, Bexie came back to the sofa where Kinji had returned, perspiration gleaming on his sternum. The double was gone, and others were already modeling themselves.
“Are you ready to go back?” Kinji asked.
“In a moment,” Bexie said still gasping for breath. “Just a minute.”
Kinji stared slack-jawed, staying in her True Space as best she could.
Until the moment Bexie had made the swap, she hadn’t known for sure if he could do it. But she’d seen that slick moment — that brilliant piece of art within itself — when Bexie Montgomery had literally changed places with his double, projecting himself into TS so fully that his double responded to touch.
Until that moment, she could have backed out, could have stolen back into Bexie Montgomery’s TS and disassembled the construct she had left behind earlier. In that moment, though, she made her final decision about this strange man from the past.
At least it seemed that way to her.
He had every right to live.
So, when he cast his hologram to sit next to her she played it straight. And when it was asking to wait a moment so it could catch its breath she let it happen, knowing the real Bexie Montgomery needed to find a place to be alone, a place to stay away from prying eyes and ears and sensors — knowing how unlikely it was he’d succeed, but knowing he needed his chance.
Then, finally, she rose and took his hand, which was so firm it impressed her. Even better, she knew, it gave her a free pass. She’d been duped, she’d be able to say, and as long as they didn’t pry too deeply, as long as they didn’t presume too much, she could prove it.
Kinji led him away, security falling in step beside them.
As they got a dozen or more steps away from the stage, Bexie disappeared, just fell away as if he had never been there in the first place, as if he were a hologram that had gotten too far away from its source — which is exactly what it was.
The escorts reacted immediately.
One grabbed Kinji by the wrist, the other shut down barriers to the shop. The action registered on every person in the mall, and they each drew up sharply. The third escort reported the situation, and in only a few seconds more security arrived — clone controllers, police bots, and other mechanical devices focused their attention on the area.
But it didn’t matter.
Bexie Montgomery had escaped.
CHAPTER 19
Security scanned the area for several minutes, finding nothing, before calling in the Global Police. They, too, were unable to find Bexie Montgomery.
Kinji was actually surprised at this, though maybe she shouldn’t have been.
She had given him such a small entryway into the fold that she was certain he would miss it, and the time to flee had not been extensive. But Bexie Montgomery was apparently more adroit at picking up patterns than might first appear, and, somehow, he’d gotten out.
It only served to make her more certain of her decision.
They took her to the Zone 98 Central Inspector’s Office, where she waited for an inspector to arrive. The room they kept her in was stark — which made sense.
