The girls join him.
“My name is Abel.”
“Nice to meet you. Nicole.”
“I am Victoria. How long have you been here?”
“For about an hour.” He hands a dish full of sweets. “Help yourself!”
They start chatting. He is a student in the last year of philosophy.
“I write poems too.”
He invites Victoria to the floor. She accepts. After all it is only a dance. She puts her arms round his neck, while the man seizes her by the waist. They start a slow dance. But after a few jokes, the man falls silent.
“What’s happened?” she asks.
“An awful day.”
Victoria rests her head against Abel’s shoulder. His heart is going like crazy. “You have to speak about it!”
But he remains silent.
“I will keep it secret.”
Still silence.
“I promise!” cries Victoria.
“I don’t know whether I can trust… But I want to believe you. There is too much noise here. Let’s use the neural chip.”
They begin a conversation made of thoughts.
"A few days ago, I promised a friend of mine, who lives the Space Agency town, that I would go and see him. We were going to visit the Museum of Exploration. This morning I contacted him."
His tone becomes excited: "Just before saying goodbye, a noise started. I couldn’t hear my friend any more, but other voices… They were talking about the Space Agency!"
Victoria opens her eyes wide. "Are you sure?"
"They were criminals! I have recorded the call on my neural chip."
"May I listen to it?"
"Victoria, I have only met you today. And then, I could get you into trouble…" He falls silent. Alone in his world.
The girl doesn’t insist. She slips her fingers through his hair, and caresses the nape of his neck.
But she must do something.
She connects to the chip. Impossible to enter. Then she asks for the identification code and obtains it. She stares for a few moments at the figures standing out in her visual field.
It is worth trying.
She begins a search in Net, skims through the results: this model has security problems!
Plunged into a surreal world, she behaves like an automaton.
She enters a hacker site, asks for a program to access the chip, and obtains it.
She starts the software, slips into the chip.
Recording found. She listens and copies it into her electronic memory.
She heaves a sigh.
How fast and simple!
Like in a dream.
Abel wakes out of his torpor. "What if they discovered me?"
Victoria looks him in the eyes, but doesn’t say anything.
All terribly real.
She may be in danger, too!
She must contact James.
He will learn about Sydney, the discotheque…
Her world may collapse.
But she has no choice: she will foil a crime.
That’s what matters, after all.
She transmits the help request. A few explanations, and the registration.
She has to wait, now.
Still in the middle of the floor. Without thinking.
Embracing the young man, who is gazing at her with a puzzled expression.
After a few minutes, a massage arrives. Top priority:
REMAIN IN THE BUILDING!
SECURITY SQUAD ARRIVING.
Meanwhile a maintenance van is parking in front of the skyscraper where the young man lives. Three workmen in blue overalls get out with a heavy load and walk into the building. They descend to the basement and when they have placed themselves at sufficiently distant points, extracting a few cylinders from their bags, they deposit them next to the load bearing walls. They return to the ground floor, at the entrance exchange a greeting with a young couple and get into the van in a hurry. They move to the end of the street, where they remain with their eyes turned towards the building.
In the meantime the aircraft sent by James Bogart to inspect Abel’s apartment, is landing on the roof. Its crew is going to collect the material for the most urgent checks. The soldiers run downstairs towards the thirtieth floor. Nearly there.
The alarm reverberates inside their helmets.
“Hydrogen, get out!” shouts the captain. The automatic pilot starts up the engines. The group rushes up, reaches the terrace. The aircraft is in the middle, hovering about twenty centimeters high. A rope ladder is lying on the ground.
A roar. The building wobbles. Three soldiers dive into the cabin, the others cling to the ladder attaching themselves with a karabiner. A rapid ascent, with the engines at full speed. Below, a gigantic dust cloud is rising threateningly.
Meanwhile Abel starts shivering, pants. He shouts he is suffocating. He begins to run towards the exit, the girls behind. At last on the sidewalk, with his back against the wall, he breathes in deeply. Little by little he calms down.
Victoria looks around. The Security arrival is imminent. Nicole has forgotten her handbag, and goes back into the discotheque.
Two of them remain.
Not far, mingling with the crowd, a woman with platinum hair and a black leather overcoat, is observing them. She approaches from behind, slipping between the passer-bys. As swift as a snake.
She takes out a silver pistol. A dull shot.
Abel’s head disintegrates. Hair, skin, bones and pieces of brain are scattered all around. Victoria is struck by fragments. She throws herself to the ground, her face covered with red pulp, next to her companion’s body.
The killer approaches. She is a few steps away, takes aim again…
Then she stops. The nightclub guard is pointing a maser (*).
Victoria records the stranger’s face in her digital memory and sends it to James. She tries to stand up. Paralyzed! She carries out a check. A splinter has pierced her aorta, she is bleeding to death! Feeling faint. It’s almost all over...
A buzzing. The auxiliary generator! She is lucid again, but her body doesn’t respond.
Meanwhile the attacker is moving an arm…
Using all her energy, Victoria connects to Net. "Transfer request, urgent!"
She gives the killer a sideways look.
"Quick!"
Suddenly, darkness.
(*) Microwave generator.
SUSPICIONS
@ Security General Headquarters, one o’clock in the morning.
The conference room is deserted. In the middle, stands a crystal table illuminated by spotlights that concentrate their beams on the central inlay of a golden snake. One after the other six senior officers appear. They talk in low voices and when their president appears at the head of the table, they fall silent.
“Maybe you don’t know yet about the Sydney slaughter. A skyscraper collapsed. Over a thousand dead,” begins Bogart. “Officially, the explosion was caused by a gas leak in the basements. But the reality is different. Just before the accident, some witnesses saw three technicians going down to the basement. They carried some bags over their shoulders which, judging by their walk, were quite heavy. Ten minutes later, they left with the same bags, but without any effort.”
Bogart inspects the group, while drumming a pen on the table. “Those bags were empty! The CCTV recordings confirm the unloading of cylinders. The entry logs show that no maintenance team intervened.”
Silence, for a moment.
“Why?”
“In the skyscraper lived a witness. They killed him the same evening, at the exit from a discotheque. I have the recording with me. I will explain at another time how I got it.”
At the beginning strong interferences make the dialog incomprehensible, but half a minute later all noise disappears.
“No one noticed as you entered the information system of the Space Agency. How did it go?”
“We have…”
“At this point the criminals
realized they were being spied on,” explains Bogart.
“The Space Agency... Did I hear it correctly?” asks an officer.
“They have informers. We couldn’t identify the authors of the message, because at the time of the attempt in Sydney, an attack of unprecedented violence upset Net: communications blocked, data banks cancelled.”
“At what point is the comparison with the population’s voice patterns?”
“They utilized voice synthesizers.”
Concentrated looks.
“The encryption center and the Space Agency have the same security level… They are the authors of the theft of the ciphering system!”
“They killed the witness and blew up his apartment and the whole block almost at the same time. Perfect organization…”
“Make a list of the criminals with these characteristics,” orders Bogart. He turns towards C573Y. “Can you bring us up to date on the investigations?”
The virtual being stands up. In the middle of the table, appear three faces. He points at the man on the left with a laser pen.
“The first suspect is Paul Widman, the Space Agency deputy manager. A very good record of service. The natural successor to the present director who is retiring within two years. An irreproachable life till a few months ago, when he got involved in bad speculations.
Linnh Yung, the New Technology manager. An appointment in information security. They were all convinced she would be entrusted with the management of the Alpha Centauri project, but at the last moment the choice fell on an outsider. She confided to a colleague about being quite embittered. She is Widman’s closest collaborator. During her university studies, she took part in hacking. This came to our knowledge during the interrogation of some hackers.”
C573Y stops. At the last moment, just before the meeting, he had added a last name. No evidence, only his intuition. “Eve Dirac doesn’t have any relationship with the Agency, but she was Linnh Yung’s roommate at university and she is among the few people with the technical expertise of the criminals. After a short period in the army, she devoted herself to research, excelling in the artificial intelligence field. She was a member of the committee for the certification of the soul programs till a scandal broke. She had favored software producers. Then her suicide, about thirty years ago. After entering Net, she disappeared.”
He straightens himself, looking at the officers. “Widman and Yung are under surveillance. It won’t be easy to find Eve Dirac.”
HELP!
@
For two days Victoria has not been herself. Lying still on the bed, she stares at the ceiling.
Sydney, a nightmare impossible to forget.
The interrogation. Mind analysis. Three hours, during which the Security agents penetrated her brain, seizing every minute of her memories.
Images, thoughts and sensations reproduced in real time by their neural chips. Recorded in the computers, for analysis. They went through every photogram, to study any detail.
All the time James stood apart, staring at her, his eyes reddened, without saying a word. Finally, he had her seen home.
Victoria gets up, wanders about the room. She reaches the bathroom, and looks at herself in the mirror: pale face, hair straight in the air. She takes a lipstick and revives her lips. She powders her face with pink, and then adds a darker shade on her cheekbones. Now she looks better. Back in the bedroom, she puts on a jean miniskirt and a white blouse with full pleated sleeves.
In front of the door, Nicole’s hologram blocks her. “Thank heaven you are alive! I have been looking for you for two days.” Without waiting for a reply, she approaches with her eyes starting out of her head. “Yesterday a friend of mine fell onto the railroad while we were waiting for the train to university!”
Victoria listens in silence.
“She was pushed, I am sure! I was the target,” continues Nicole. She collapses onto a chair, gazing into space. “That morning it was drizzling and I lent her my green raincoat. The one I wore when we left the discotheque…”
“Did you see the killer?”
“A blonde woman.”
Without saying anything, Victoria stretches out her arm. The life-size image of a woman with a black coat appears.
Nicole can hardly speak. “Why… Why do they want to kill us?”
“Abel was a troublesome witness. We spoke to him.”
“A witness?”
“He confided something to me before dying.”
They sink into deep silence. Prisoners of a world populated by monsters ready to tear them to pieces.
“They blew up the skyscraper,” says Victoria in a very thin voice. “Abel lived there. You must have yourself protected by Security.”
Sydney, an hour later.
“We will pick you up with an ovoid not far from where you are now, on the Observatory hill, in the lawn just in front of the building. We will be there in half an hour.”
Nicole arrives in advance, she sits down under an oak.
Sun.
A little girl in a blue dress rolls against her, while following a balloon. Nicole puts her back on her feet and returns her to the game.
At the end of the path, a group is enjoying their lunch, in the shade of a porch. The table is adorned with a flowery tablecloth. Chatter. A burst of laughter. Someone suggests a toast. A gust blows some yellow napkins over the lawn. Here and there, young and old lie in the sun, dozing.
A Sunday like many others. Not for her.
Abel’s murder, the skyscraper reduced to a heap of rubble, her university friend’s death. What is happening belongs to a world of violence and death, that till a short time ago she didn’t know about. Now it has taken possession of her life.
She can’t cry. She is paralyzed.
An ovoid with the Security symbol, an S-shaped golden snake, lands on the lawn. The day trippers rush around. Someone calls his friends. They exchange comments. A hatch opens. From the interior full of lights an officer in a blue uniform appears. He leaps out and looks around standing still in front of the aircraft. Nicole runs towards him.
LINNH
The light filtering through the synthetic linen curtains projects bright and dark spots on the walls. Linnh opens her eyes and turns sideways. Near sleeps a young man with muscular physique and thick black hair. The woman stretches over and kisses him gently on a shoulder. Then she makes the time appear in her visual field. Eight o’clock! In the excitement of the night before, she hadn’t commanded the neural chip to wake her up.
Linnh jumps out of bed and, from the chair, gets the blue suit she had prepared the day before. She goes into the bathroom. A quick shower, she dresses. Black patent-leather, high-heeled shoes. Pressing her flat stomach to the sink, she leans towards the mirror. She colors her eyelids with light green, powders her cheeks and forehead with just a touch, moistens her lips with glossy pink. She rummages in the locker, takes out a pen and a piece of paper. Leaning against the wall, she scribbles two lines, apologizing for leaving, and completes the message with an affectionate sentence. Back in her bedroom, she leaves it on his bedside table.
After a last tender look at her partner, she tiptoes along the corridor, opens the main door slowly and closes it behind her gently. She rushes downstairs. The noise of her shoes echoes in the entrance hall.
He opens his eyes.
The previous evening, when he got into the pub, she was sitting in a corner all by herself, while drinking a stout with a pensive expression.
He came up smiling. “We are the only ones who haven’t gone to the stadium!”
Linnh raised her head, with a puzzled face.
“May I sit at your table?” he continued.
She nodded, without taking her eyes off him. “I’ve never seen you before.”
“I moved recently. I work for M&K.”
“What was your previous job?”
The man started talking about his life. She straightened herself on the chair. From time to time she drew back her silky hair t
hat kept falling onto her cheek-bones. She sipped her beer, while listening in silence. An enigmatic smile on her thin lips. Only at the end she presented herself: “I’m Linnh.”
They ordered two more beers and a pair of sandwiches. Smoked salmon and mayonnaise. Every now and then, the neural chip updated them about the match.
“With my new work, I have doubled my salary,” he confided. “As for you, how are things?”
Linnh clenched the tankard in her fingers, till they turned pale. “Space Agency. I’m the New Technology manager. I have a hundred researchers under me.”
He cast a glance of admiration. “How wonderful! A well-paid job, I imagine.”
“Seeing the results is really satisfying. But one’s sacrifices do not always receive a just reward…”
A detail to go into. He tried again and again to make her pour out, but she avoided every question with a disarming smile.
They ended up speaking about their hobbies, parents and holidays. Linnh’s black eyes flickered insistently over the man. After a while, she stretched out her arm on the table. Fiddling with his hand, she drew it towards her. And finally she entwined her thin well-kept fingers with his powerful ones. They stopped speaking, and looked into each others eyes.
Intimacy grew all evening.
An hour later, when the result of the match arrived, he punched the table. “What a defeat!”
The woman directed him an unequivocal smile. “You have won, though. Pay the bill, at once.”
Out of the pub, she rested her slender arms on her companion’s shoulders.
“I live there,” she said with a coquettish air, pointing at the one-storied house in front. She opened the small wood gate with a little push. They followed a paved path, between sweet-smelling rose bushes. For about twenty meters, up to the steps. They ran barefoot along the corridor with the lights out, chasing each other like children.
Linnh’s bedroom. Her dress folded on the chair, ready for the next day. The half-open window. The curtains fluttering in the breeze, filtering silvery glimmer of moonlight. The calm and reassuring night whispers.
They tumbled down on the large soft bed.
Loud bursts of laughter, in semi-darkness.
Her fresh and heady scent,
moist lips, and skin as smooth as marble.
Her sighs, like those of nature.
Dreaming Immortality Page 5
