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  “I’m sorry,” Ms. Rosen-something said. “If Mr. Thurman gave fifteen minutes to everyone who asked for it, he would never get anything done.”

  “You do understand that I’m a Private Detective, representing Ms. Vivien Forsyth?”

  Ms. Rosen-something gave me a tired smile. “I understand that you have identified yourself as such to several of my colleagues. Which means precisely nothing. Unless, that is, you have some proof. A certified letter of credence from Ms. Forsyth perhaps?”

  I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I don’t have a letter from Vivien Forsyth. Nor do I have a note from my mother.”

  “I see,” said Ms. Rosen-something.

  I gave her my very best I-hate-to-have-to-do-this face. “I’ll go over this slowly,” I said, “since you obviously do not see. Point number one—Leanda Forsyth is missing. If she’s alive, which I have reason to believe, every second may count. Point number two—Between you and your colleagues, you have wasted over two hours of my time. That’s alright by me, because I’m getting paid no matter what happens. That may not be okay to Leanda Forsyth, whose life could well be hanging by a thread. Point number three—According to this morning’s newsfeeds, Vivien Forsyth owns thirty-one percent of TransNat Telemedia, and she controls an additional twenty-three percent through various proxies. Unless I’m very much mistaken, that means she owns your job, and the job of your Mr. Thurman.”

  Ms. Rosen-something’s florid face went a shade paler.

  I bulled right on, making it up as I went along. (In point of fact, I had no idea whether or not Vivien Forsyth owned so much as a single share of TransNat Telemedia, but I was on a roll now.)

  “It’s possible,” I said, “that Ms. Forsyth won’t take it personally when she finds out that your Mr. Thurman was too busy to spend fifteen minutes to help save her daughter’s life!” My voice grew in volume as I spoke, and the last five words came out at a near shout.

  Ms. Rosen-something’s jaw dropped open.

  “Thank you for your assistance,” I said curtly. “I’m sure you’ll be hearing from Ms. Forsyth shortly. Or your replacement will. I’ve got a feeling that you won’t be around by then.” I reached out to hit the disconnect button.

  Ms. Rosen-something practically came out of her seat. “No! No! No, wait!”

  My hand paused in mid-air, halfway to the disconnect button. “Yes?”

  “Just a second!” she said, fidgeting visibly. “Let me… Let me see what I can do…”

  I smiled sweetly, my hand still hanging in the air. “Don’t go to any trouble on my account.”

  “I’m going to put you on hold for a minute,” she said.

  “Thirty seconds,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said. “Thirty seconds.”

  Her face disappeared from the screen, replaced by a logo made up of several hundred tiny animated vid screens that spelled out the words TRANSNAT TELEMEDIA in flickering capitals. An accompanying sound track poured out of the phone’s speakers, computer-generated pseudo-classical music.

  I leaned back in my chair and lit a cigarette.

  Ms. Rosen-something’s face reappeared in about twenty seconds. “I can get you in to see Mr. Thurman at one-thirty. Will that do?”

  “Thanks. That will do just fine.” I smiled and hit the disconnect button.

  I glanced at my watch. I didn’t need to be at TransNat for nearly three hours. That left plenty of time to make a stop along the way.

  I strapped on my shoulder rig and holstered the Blackhart. The heavy automatic rested comfortably under my left arm. I pulled on my old gray windbreaker and spent a few seconds adjusting the shoulder rig until the butt of the Blackhart didn’t print so obviously against the fabric of the jacket.

  Satisfied that I was at least marginally presentable, I grabbed the strange triangular chip and dropped it into a side pocket.

  Twenty minutes later, I eased my Pontiac into the parking lot of Alphatronics, a retail electronics store on Hudson Avenue, near the southern end of Dome 14. It was a small family business, and I knew the owners, Henry Mailo and his son, Tommy. They were of Samoan blood, and—true to genotype—both of them were built like bulldozers.

  I touched a button on the control yoke and sent the Pontiac into parking mode. The car settled onto its apron as the blowers cycled down to a stop and the turbine began to spin down. With the soft whine of servo motors, the car’s computer rotated all of the airfoils to their neutral positions. The tattletales on the wraparound plasma display flickered from green, to red, to off as the computer brought the car’s internal systems down. After a few seconds, the display went dark, except for the Parking Mode tattletale, which shone a soft green.

  I unlocked the door and climbed out.

  Henry looked up from behind the counter when I walked in. His face lit up. “Dave! How’s it hanging?” His hair was getting gray around the temples, but I’d have put even money that he could have bench pressed my car without breaking a sweat.

  I shook his outstretched hand. It engulfed my own hand entirely and I reminded myself for the hundredth time to never try the old bone-breaking handshake trick with either generation of the Mailos.

  I grinned back at him. “It’s damned good to see you, Henry. It’s been too long.”

  “It has indeed, my friend,” Henry said.

  I looked around the shop. “Is Tommy in the back?”

  “As always,” Henry said. “Trying to resurrect Mrs. Kendrick’s old Sanyo holo-deck for the eighty-seventh time.”

  “Can I go on back?”

  “Of course,” Henry said. He pulled the curtain to one side, revealing the doorway to the rear of his shop.

  I stepped through the curtain and into the back of the store. The front three-quarters of the room was devoted to metal shelves stacked with stock. At the far end of the room was Tommy’s work shop, a steel workbench stacked with electronic test equipment, boxes of electronic components, and rolls of cabling.

  Tommy was perched on his favorite stool, poking around in the guts of a partially disassembled holo-deck with what I assumed to be an electronic test probe of some kind. He looked up when I walked in. “The Prodigal Gumshoe returns,” he said with a grin. He was about nineteen now, and the spitting image of his father.

  I countered with a grin of my own. “The bad penny in the flesh,” I said. I pointed toward the disassembled holo-deck. “Any idea what’s wrong it?”

  Tommy cocked an eyebrow. “Would you believe cat hair?”

  “Cat hair? From a real cat?”

  “Of course not,” Tommy said. “Mrs. Kendrick can’t afford a real cat.” He wrinkled his brow. “I don’t think I know anybody who can afford a real cat. At least, not without mortgaging their house. It’s one of those Japanese electro-mechanical jobbers. It’s supposed to be programmed to act like a cat, but I’ve never seen a real one, so I can’t really say. Mrs. Kendrick’s cat ignores people most of the time, licks itself a lot, and sleeps about eighteen hours a day.” He grinned again. “If that’s how real cats behave, then I guess it’s pretty realistic.”

  “So how does it manage to get its hair into Mrs. Kendrick’s holo-deck?”

  “It has a favorite sleeping spot,” Tommy said, “just like a real cat is supposed to. This one likes to curl up on the shelf, behind the holo-deck. It’s an old cat, and its fur is coming out. The stray hairs get sucked up by the deck’s cooling fan, and wind up in the optics.”

  He shrugged. “I’ve tried to talk Mrs. Kendrick into getting a new deck, maybe one of the Toshiba’s, with sealed optics. Either that, or a new cat. She won’t do it. She’s a stubborn old gal.”

  “Yeah, but a loyal customer,” I said.

  “You’ve got a point there,” Tommy said. He laid the test probe on the workbench. “You didn’t come here to talk about Mrs. Kendrick’s cat.”

  I rummaged in my pocket for the triangular chip and held it out to Tommy. “I’m trying to find out what this is.”

  Tommy accepted the c
hip and gave it a cursory glance. “SCAPE,” he said.

  “What?”

  “SCAPE,” he said again. “Sensory Capture, Assimilation, Playback, and Emulation.”

  “What does that mean in English?”

  Tommy gave me a sideways glance. “You’ve got to climb out of your hole more often, Dave. This crap is everywhere now.”

  “Fine,” I said. “I’m an idiot. Just take it for granted that I sleep under a rock, and tell me what the hell this SCAPE thing is about.”

  “Wire head stuff,” Tommy said. “A digital recording of human sensory experiences. I got a chance to try out a demo-version at the LA Tech-Expo a couple of years ago. The data chips were clunkier than this. They’ve slimmed down the design, and smoothed out the interface, but this is the same general technology.”

  “Sensory experiences? What kind of recordings are we talking about?”

  “Anything,” Tommy said. “I could put on a headset, and record my experiences. Later, you could put on your own headset, and play back the recording. See what I saw. Feel what I felt. Hear what I heard.”

  “Like a new wrinkle in Virtual Reality?”

  Tommy shook his head. “This is a thousand times more powerful. Comparing SCAPE to VR is like comparing a fifth-generation AI to an abacus.”

  “And you’ve tried one of these things?”

  Tommy nodded. “An older version. The demo I played with was a recording of somebody eating a ham sandwich. I know that doesn’t sound impressive, but it was actually pretty damned amazing. It was real. I could taste the mustard, rich and spicy, like you get at a good deli. The ham was that honey-cured stuff that melts in your mouth. I even got a little piece of bread crust stuck between my teeth.”

  “Sounds like you know all about this stuff,” I said.

  “Not really. I know that it’s out there, but it’s not my kind of tech.”

  “Really? A gadget freak like you? I’d have thought you’d be all over a tasty new toy like that.”

  “I’m into vid,” Tommy said. “Vid is an art form, or at least it can be. With the right eye looking through the camera, vid can express things that no other field of art can even begin to touch.”

  “So, SCAPE isn’t art?”

  “Not to me,” Tommy said. “Except for a few specialty applications—like training pilots, or surgeons, or something—I can’t think of a single use for this technology that doesn’t amount to sensory gratification. It’s basically electronic masturbation.”

  I nodded toward the triangular chip, still lying on Tommy’s broad palm. “Can you get your hands on a SCAPE deck? I need to find out what’s on that thing.”

  Tommy said, “It won’t be cheap. The technology is just filtering down into the consumer market, so it’s still pretty pricey.”

  “Don’t worry about the cost,” I said. “It’s a business expense, and my client can certainly afford it. You can invoice me for your time, and don’t cut me any old-friend discounts. You do honest work, and my client will be glad to pay for it.”

  “You working for somebody who won the lottery?”

  “Let’s just say that money isn’t an issue.”

  “Works for me,” Tommy said. He stood up and we shook hands. “I’ll get back to you when I find a deck. And then, we’ll see what’s recorded on your mystery chip.”

  CHAPTER 4

  The TransNat Telemedia building looked like an architectural knock-off of the famed Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Sixteen hexagonal stories—each one progressively smaller than the floor beneath it—were stacked on top of each other like the layers of a geometric wedding cake. The design gave each floor of the building about twenty-meters of open terrace around its perimeter. Except for the roof of the very top level, the terraces were planted with grass, trees, and about every species of flower and bush imaginable, interspersed periodically with cozy little rock gardens and tiny waterfalls. The side walls of the various stories were mirrored glass, reflecting the greenery and water, and making the roof top gardens appear even larger than they really were.

  The roof of the uppermost floor was home to about three hundred antennas, from huge satellite dishes, to rail-thin vertical bean stalks, to skeletal pyramid shapes that I couldn’t identify.

  Overhead, the afternoon sun had hit one of those angles where its image is caught and reflected in the faceted polycarbon panels of the dome. The effect was painfully bright, but too beautiful not to look at. For a few seconds, the sky seemed to shimmer and sparkle with a hundred miniature stars. And then a cloud passed over the sun and the magic was gone.

  After the exterior of the building, the lobby was a bit of an anticlimax. It was impressive in scale, but not particularly imaginative in design. The floors were ferroconcrete, molded to simulate weathered stone. Corinthian columns (more fake stone) supported the ceiling at ten meter intervals. Indirect lighting left the ceiling in shadow, and created occasional pools of somewhat brighter illumination. Predictably, each little oasis of light was furnished with a circular arrangement of chairs and couches.

  A low-level flunky met me at the reception desk. He introduced himself as Caldwell Drake. He looked to be something just short of thirty, and his face had the unremarkable handsomeness of computer-optimized cosmetic surgery. The design probably even had a name, like Rugged Guy #6 (a registered trademark of New Look surgical boutiques). He wore black jeans and a translucent synlon jacket over a collarless black shirt of synthetic satin. The jacket was imbedded with strands of fiber optic wire that pulsed with luridly bright colors as he moved, creating the impression of animated neon pin stripes.

  He moved with a strangely artificial grace that almost seemed to be choreographed. Following him across the lobby, it came to me that Mr. Drake was either a dancer or a martial artist. I decided that—whichever it was—he would be skilled in the movements and forms, and totally helpless if he ever had to improvise.

  He led me to a row of elevators, the nearest of which opened automatically as we approached. We stepped inside.

  “Floor, please?” The voice was pleasant and feminine. If it was computer-synthesized, as I suspected, I certainly couldn’t tell.

  Drake looked up at the ceiling, as though the owner of the voice was actually up there somewhere. “Five.”

  “Thank you.” The doors slid shut and the elevator began to rise. I was instantly puzzled. I had been expecting one of the upper floors, where a mover and shaker like Thurman would undoubtedly keep his office.

  I mentally shrugged. Okay, a conference room, then. Probably something huge and impressive, and just reeking of corporate wealth and influence. Some place where Thurman’s home court advantage would be glaringly obvious.

  The elevator opened, and I followed Drake down a long hallway to an unmarked gray door. He laid his hand on the door but didn’t open it. “I should explain about Mr. Thurman,” he said in a quiet voice. “He’s not exactly an ordinary guy.”

  “I’ve already heard it,” I said. “Mr. Thurman is a very important man, and he’s busy as hell. I promise to make this a quick as possible.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Drake said. “Mr. Thurman is a… prodigy.”

  He said the last word with particular emphasis, as though it should mean something special to me.

  I nodded. “Meaning what? He’s a genius?”

  Drake shook his head. “Not a genius. A prodigy. Mr. Thurman has been… genetically optimized.”

  I felt myself frown. “Genetically optimized? For what?”

  Drake tilted his head a fraction to the side. “Creativity. Multi-modal cognitive association. Synergistic thought construction.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You’ll have to see for yourself,” Drake said. He opened the door. “I just didn’t want you to be totally unprepared.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I wondered how he thought that confusing the hell out of me was supposed to equate to preparation.

  I walked through the door into a narrow hall
way. The walls and ceiling were tiled with hundreds of hexagonal cells of white acoustic foam. The floor was covered in a thick gray carpet that swallowed the sound of my footsteps. The door swung shut behind me with a click that was rendered nearly inaudible by the acoustic insulation.

  At the end of the strange hall, perhaps ten meters away, was another door, tiled in the same honeycomb cells that covered the ceiling and walls. I walked to the door and opened it.

  The room was hemispherical in shape, a gently curving dome that reminded me of the 3D surround-vision screens that had been popular before vid technology made the leap to holographic imaging. And, like one of those old 3D screens, every centimeter of this one was alive with video. But this was not just one giant movie. The inside of the dome was sub-divided into several hundred vid screens, each showing a different movie, or program, or commercial. The air was a solid wall of jabbering sound; the audio track for every one of the video feeds was playing at the same time. It was not uncomfortably loud, but the unrelenting babble seemed to confuse my brain. I began to feel slightly dizzy.

  “It helps if you look at the floor,” said a man’s voice.

  I turned my head toward the center of the room and the source of the voice. A man sat, or rather reclined, in a chair-like contraption that looked like a cross between a dentist’s chair and the contoured acceleration couch of a suborbital shuttle.

  “Either that, or concentrate on one or two screens,” the man said. “It is difficult for an unconditioned mind to assimilate large quantities of simultaneous and conflicting optical and audio stimuli.” He reached for the arm of his chair and made some sort of adjustment. “I can turn the audio down a little. It should help.”

  The babble faded to a murmur, still audible, but not nearly as difficult to deal with.

  I walked closer to him. “Thanks. It does help.”

  I stopped about three meters away from his strange chair. He touched the armrest again and the chair swung about twenty degrees to his right and reclined itself a little farther.