by C. J. Hill
The laser box’s stun setting sent out a pulse that tightened a person’s muscles, making them unusable. Once a person passed out from lack of oxygen, the tightening relaxed enough that their heartbeat returned to normal and they could breathe again, but it generally kept the person stiff and unconscious for a couple hours. The only way to get muscle function back sooner was to use a restorer box. Its beams relaxed muscles, freeing them.
Three hours later the group was close enough to Traventon that Mendez blindfolded Taylor and Joseph. Ren and Lee led them by the hand toward the DW’s secret entrance. Logically, Taylor understood the reason for the secrecy. The fewer people who knew the whereabouts of the DW’s entrance and bases, the better. If she and Joseph were caught, they wouldn’t be able to give the Traventon government any information. But it still irked Taylor. She was risking her life on this mission, and everyone was keeping secrets from her.
Chapter 8
Taylor let her eyes adjust to the light. The team stood in a large wardrobe room. Mirrors lined the walls, and bright lights shone down from the ceiling. A counter stood against one wall, filled with makeup pens, hair dye, face dye, brushes, combs, and hair shapers. Eyelash extensions lay in trays, looking like rows of sunbathing spiders. All sorts of hair ornaments were pinned to a black velvet panel.
An older woman with pink, wispy hair fussed with a pile of overalls, dividing them out by size. “After you take off your camouflage dye,” she told the group, “change into the clothes I’ve laid out for you. They’re made from laser-deflecting material, which means they’re stiff. Try to move as naturally as you can, so you don’t attract attention. You’ll put on your Scicenter overalls in the car. That way it won’t seem suspicious that five scientists are all in the beauty district together.”
Scicenter personnel were required to wear blue overall uniforms now. This change had come about after Taylor and Joseph’s break-in a month and a half ago. You had to love bureaucracy. That was what the building administrators had come up with to fight crime—blue overalls. Like no one would be able to think of a way around that regulation.
The woman with the pink hair gave out a few more instructions. Taylor sat down at the counter in front of the dye extractor, only half listening. She already knew what to do. She’d practiced the mission dozens of times in the VR center.
The team would go to the Scicenter during the first shift change. So many people would be coming and going from the building that the security guards—even if they were watching their monitors—wouldn’t notice that five people in the crowd didn’t have crystal signatures. The Time Strainer and its computers were all on the fourth floor, but since Joseph and Taylor’s last break-in, the whole floor had been changed to restricted status. The elevator wouldn’t take anyone to the fourth floor unless their crystal had been given clearance to be there.
Taylor, Joseph, and their bodyguards would get into elevators with the rest of the incoming scientists. If no one was getting off on the fourth floor, the team would go to the closest unrestricted floor and use laser cutters to cut their way through the stairwell. The walls and doors had an electric current running through them, and any break into the current would normally cause the building’s alarm to go off. Santa Fe had developed a special type of laser cutter, though. While it cut, it rerouted currents in order to circumvent the alarms.
Once the team made it to the fourth floor, they’d use their scanners to find an empty room with computer access. If the team couldn’t find an empty room, they would put on their gas masks, break into a room, and put the occupants of the room to sleep. Then the team would lock themselves in and run the program. Once Taylor destroyed the QGPs, the building’s alarms would most likely go off. The group needed to escape quickly.
The team had sleeping gas to take care of pursuers in the hallway. At least the human kind. When sensors in the building detected sleeping gas, all doors in the area would automatically lock, and compartments in the walls would open to release gasbots, wolf-sized droids. Gasbots were programmed to shoot anything that moved.
In the training programs, the gasbots always freaked Taylor out. To get away from them, she had to throw out concealing gas that darkened the air and reflected the gasbots’ sensors. It always made her feel panicky to grope blindly through a hallway while vicious machines whirred after her.
Taylor wiped a dye-extractor cloth across her face, making the patchwork of greens and browns disappear. It was odd to see Ren, Lee, and Xavier without camouflage. Ren and Lee, for all their jabs and mistrust, looked enough alike that they could have been brothers. Both had black hair, olive complexions, and strong, handsome features. At least they did until they redyed themselves. Then Lee had a palm tree painted in the middle of his face so that his mouth disappeared into the trunk and the palm fronds feathered across his eyebrows. Ren went for simplicity. He painted black and silver diagonal stripes from the corner of his temple to his jaw.
Xavier was attractive too. Most people here in the future were. In every city but Santa Fe, the governments chose what genes to pass on, and they chose attractive ones. But Xavier was handsome in a softer way. He had observant brown eyes, the kind you expected on scholars. He seemed like the type of man Hollywood would have cast as somebody’s best friend or big brother.
Could he really be an assassin, as Ren had suggested? If Xavier was, what did he have to do with Joseph? Taylor had asked Joseph about it as they walked to Traventon, trying to get more information from him.
“Why can’t you tell me?” she’d prodded.
All Joseph had said was “You didn’t tell me the QGP data.”
“That information is too important to share with anyone else.”
“So is this.”
Taylor doubted that, but had no way to argue with him about it. She could have demanded answers, threatened to abort the whole mission, except she knew the QGPs had to be destroyed. The issue was bigger than her or Joseph or whatever side deal he was running with some council faction.
When Taylor finished taking off her camouflage dye, she changed into her new outfit. People in Traventon decked themselves in bright, outlandish clothes, and hers were no exception. She wore tight-fitting spring-green pants that looked like they were made of individual silk leaves. Pansies peeked out here and there among the leaves, and glittering butterflies fluttered around the stitching every time she moved. The matching leaf, flower, and butterfly top also fit snuggly, and it had sleeves so long that the material came to points over the backs of her hands.
The wardrobe woman hadn’t been kidding about the stiffness. Like the armor the Enforcers wore, the outfit was rigid everywhere except at the knees, elbows, and small sections of the waist. Those parts used normal material so that she could move. Corsets were probably more comfortable.
Next she put on green shin-height boots. The soles were thick due to the concealed speed boosters, and they made her a couple inches taller than she normally was. After that, she glued an image scrambler to her wrist. It looked like the crystals everyone in Traventon wore but actually sent out signals that distorted the images picked up by nearby surveillance cameras.
Although the council had promised Taylor a disguise, the DW wardrobe woman vetoed adding molding cream to change the contours of Joseph’s and Taylor’s faces. “The Dakine always use it when they commit crimes,” the woman explained. “So the government has recently installed sensors in high-security places that detect molding cream. We can’t risk you being caught that way.”
Taylor felt the first flurries of dread then. She had to go into the Scicenter undisguised?
“I doubt anyone will recognize you,” the wardrobe woman assured Taylor. “Drastic changes in hair and face dye can mask most people, but to make sure, I’ll give you an irritant shot in the neck. It causes mild facial swelling.”
So much for a high-tech cover. Her disguise would consist of puffiness.
Taylor decided to go heavy on the face dye. She circled her eyes with ready-made
tattoos of pansies and leaves, then put trailing vines that grew up her neck, twisting along her jawline and onto her cheeks. For the finishing touch, she painted her lips pansy purple.
Men and women in Traventon both shaped and stiffened their hair in such odd arrays, Taylor could have formed her hair into a replica of the Statue of Liberty and she wouldn’t have stood out. Instead she dyed it forest green and used hair clips to put it in a simple bun.
When she finished, she stood back and surveyed herself in the mirror. Butterflies glimmered on her shirt, fluttering up and down her torso. The flowers nestled between the leaves seemed to stretch and sway in an unseen wind. Basically she looked like Mother Nature in action.
The wardrobe woman came up beside her. “You’re beautiful,” she proclaimed with satisfaction. “Or at least you will be with this.” She held up a white badge with a row of electronic numbers: 4,258. “As they say in Traventon, no one is ever truly attractive without the right rank.”
Over seven million people lived in this city. A rank of 4,258 meant there were only 4,257 people who were wealthier, smarter, more powerful, or more popular than her. Automatic elite-class status.
The woman took a step closer to Taylor. “Use this rank if you need to pretend to be someone important, and use this one”—she pressed an unseen button on the top of the badge, and the number changed to 5,328,121—“when you want to be ignored.”
Lastly, the woman got out the irritant shots. Joseph got his first. He wore an outfit that resembled a tuxedo with fringed shoulder pads and golden cording wrapping his chest. His hair was black, slicked at the sides so that it came to a sharp point at the base of his shoulders. He’d dyed the area around his eyes like a bandit’s mask. Fitting, considering what they were doing.
A minute after Joseph got the shot, he seemed to gain thirty pounds. Well, at least his face looked like the face of someone thirty pounds heavier. His jawline wasn’t as square, his cheeks weren’t as defined. His eyes appeared smaller while his nose looked bigger and rounder.
The wardrobe women then turned to Taylor and poked her neck with the shot. Taylor glanced in the mirror and winced. Right before her eyes, all of her baby fat from fourth grade turned up again. She would have made a joke about it, would have teased Joseph about his appearance too, but she was still mad at him for his secrecy. If he wanted to act like they weren’t friends, fine. She would too.
The group put their packs and overalls into large shopping bags. Then the wardrobe lady led them out of the room and into an expansive, brightly lit corridor. Life-size pictures of models covered the gleaming marble-like walls. As the group passed by them, the pictures moved, murmuring things about sales on youth treatments and specials on body sculpting.
“Have the calves you’ve always wanted,” a lavender-haired girl cooed at Taylor.
Taylor rolled her eyes. “I’ve never even thought about my calves before.”
She hadn’t expected a response, but the lavender-haired girl turned and eyed Taylor with disdain. “You should. Trueness, everyone else thinks about your calves as soon as they see you.”
The words startled Taylor so much that she stopped and gaped at the wall. The lavender-haired girl shook her head mournfully at Taylor’s calves. “They don’t have a perfectly smooth shape. Too muscular. For nine hundred credits the experienced staff at Glamouria can fix that.”
Joseph took hold of Taylor’s arm and pulled her forward to catch up to the rest of the group. “Come on,” he said. “We don’t have time to watch advertisements.”
Taylor went with him, her mouth hanging open in indignation. “Did you hear that little trollop? She said my calves weren’t smooth.”
“It’s just a computer program.”
Taylor looked down at her legs anyway. Too muscular? Really? Then she groaned, angry at herself for checking. This place could give anyone a complex.
The wardrobe lady spoke in a hushed tone. “If you run into problems, you know who to contact.”
Taylor nodded. They had all memorized Mendez’s comlink number.
“It won’t do any good to come back here,” the wardrobe woman told them. “We only rented the room for the day. It’s being packed up right now.”
“We know where to go,” Joseph said. Their contact place was the Fisherman’s Feast restaurant. It was part of a mall-like area in the Traventon Plaza Recreation Center.
The group walked past a doorway that led to a beauty salon. Men and women were standing in front of mirrors that reflected what they would look like with different hairstyles.
The wardrobe woman kept going down the corridor. “You know where to find your specials?”
Special was the code word for mobile crystals. The team couldn’t take an unauthorized crystal into the Scicenter without setting off the building’s alarms, so the DW had hidden mobile crystals in various places near the Scicenter where the team might end up. They would need a crystal to work a getaway car. In Traventon cars were government property, things you summoned when you needed and left by the side of the road when you were done. Anyone could signal a car with a comlink and the nearest available one would come, but in order to give the car directions, they needed a working crystal.
“We know where they are,” Ren said.
Satisfied, the wardrobe woman led them out of the building. A white opaque dome stretched across Traventon where the sky should have been. It made Taylor feel like she was inside a gigantic mall. All sorts of stores clustered around the courtyard, and crowds of vividly arrayed people milled in between them. No bushes. No trees. No insects buzzing around.
A woman passed by them wearing a hat shaped like a miniature merry-go-round. Another woman had two mechanical birds dangling from her ears. They chirped out a tinny melody.
Don’t stare, Taylor told herself. Act like you belong here. The group strolled into the courtyard’s parking garage, out of sight of most of the shoppers. No one paid much attention to their group, and the people who did glance at them lost interest quickly. With rank badges set in the five millions, they were social pariahs. The only people with worse ranks were probably old, poor people.
There was something vaguely unsettling about parking garages in the twenty-fifth century. Granted, they were clean and well-lit, and had designs on the floor that reminded Taylor of kitchen floors. But all the identical beige, egg-shaped cars—rows of them, staring back at you like an evil car clone army that was waiting to spring to life—Taylor could do without those.
The group climbed into the nearest car, and once they were seated, the wardrobe woman leaned inside and pressed her crystal to the car’s control panel. “The Scicenter,” she said, and leaned back out quickly before the door shut on her. She mouthed a farewell to the group, then turned back the way she’d come.
A map of the city appeared on the car’s control panel, showing their location and their route to the Scicenter. The car headed out of the parking garage, humming along the rails that ran down the middles of the streets.
Cars didn’t move fast here, only around twenty-five or thirty miles an hour. The cars still got places quicker than the ones from the twenty-first century though. They never stopped at intersections. The cars’ programming timed their crossings to avoid collisions with other traffic.
Taylor pulled her overalls and pack from her shopping bag. She felt like she should be humming a James Bond theme song with all the gadgets she had in her pack: a lock disabler, a laser disrupter, a restorer box, a zip-line shooter, a laser cutter, gas vials, and a gas mask. The gas masks from Santa Fe weren’t bulky like they’d been in her century. A small flexible bowl fit over a person’s nose and mouth with a snoutlike filter in the middle. The edges had gel that stuck the mask to the face, creating an airtight seal.
After Taylor had pulled on her overalls, she put the mask in her front pocket and clipped her electronics onto the underside of her belt. Carrying everything there made her waist look thick, but she supposed it would match her face . . . and her ca
lves.
Stupid advertisements.
Ren and Lee had more equipment in their packs. Besides the things Taylor carried, they had holographic cameras, syringes of tranquilizers, and comlink jammers. They also had canisters that shot out sticky black goo to cement an Enforcer’s armor joints, and knives with moving serrated edges to slash through armor. The last two items were for protection in hand-to-hand combat. Other Enforcers carried them in case they had to deal with Dakine, who wore laser-proof armor.
Ren and Lee both clipped their packs around their middles and put their overalls on over them.
Xavier had the biggest pack. From it, he pulled out four already-filled smaller packs. He handed two to Joseph and strapped the others to his waist and stomach. Joseph did the same. When they pulled on their overalls, both of them looked overweight.
Ren shook his head at them.
“What?” Xavier asked.
“When was the last time you saw a fat person in Traventon?”
Xavier tapped his rank badge. “My stomach explains the reason my rank is in the five millions. I’m too poor to buy fat reductions and not vain enough to exercise. What’s your excuse?”
Ren snorted. “I ride around with low rankers like this guy.” He gestured to Lee.
Lee switched his badge to display a high rank. “Oh? Now I’m too superior to talk to any of you. So I’ll ignore you and amuse myself by listening to the city announcements.”
As soon as the car had started, a woman’s silky voice came over the car speakers, spouting city propaganda: “Friendships can end in a moment, but your government will always support you. Always support your government by reporting any suspicious behavior your friends display.”
Taylor looked out the window. They were nearing the government headquarters sector. Each building had a digital display on the upper walls that flashed mottoes and videos of happy workers contributing to the city. Driving through the streets made Taylor feel like she was winding her way through a forest of gigantic TVs. The Birth Department building showed a white-clad worker supervising monitors on tanks of growing embryos. The words underneath the video stated, “We create perfect children for a perfect society.”