by Steve Cole
“Audio-visual?” Chen wondered.
“Or Alta-Vita,” breathed Adam. “The name of that Geneflow project you found—”
“The project that made me.” Loner tore his claw across the map, tearing the paper. “I shall lead the way.”
Adam watched him pad back across the storeroom to the doors and followed along with Harm and Chen, back out onto the stairwell. Then Loner stopped, his ear cocked.
The elevator was in use. Going up.
“Maybe someone’s grown tired of waiting for those guards to fetch me,” Chen murmured. “They’re coming to investigate.”
“Come on, then,” said Adam.
Loner again led the way down the stairs, his claws clacking on the concrete steps as he took them four at a time, the others hurrying close behind until they reached the bottom floor of the complex.
It was dark and deserted, musty and cold. Lights in the ceiling flickered on as they passed. The silence was all-pervading, broken only by their nervous footfalls and uneven breaths. The main lab—where Adam imagined Josephs must spend most of her time—was somewhere up above, but he was convinced they would run into her at any moment, or her guards, or—
That’s not helping. Come on, clear your head. He knew he’d need all his concentration to go straight into using Think-Send in a completely foreign program, but it was impossible not to feel danger lurking in every shadowy corner.
Loner led them through stuffy, half-lit corridors and communal areas built for the inmates who had lost their lives to Geneflow’s experiments. He seemed confined, too big for a place built with humans in mind. At one point he paused beside a row of tall metal lockers—the kind you might find at a swimming pool or gym—and tugged open one of the doors to reveal an orange jumpsuit.
“Prison uniform,” Harm murmured.
Loner touched the fabric cautiously, almost wonderingly. Then he tore it from the hanger and threw it to the floor.
“What’s wrong?” Adam asked.
“It is nothing.” Loner snorted softly. “We have almost reached the A-V Unit.”
Chen had moved on to yet another closed door. “Where does this lead?”
“Records are kept there,” Loner hissed. “The place where I learned about Geneflow.” He paused. “A computer I used to speak to Dr. Marrs. And leading on to the Alta-Vita Unit.”
“You sure did your homework on this place,” Harm observed.
Loner lowered his head. “I was here . . . many times.”
“So, what’re we waiting for?” Chen pushed at the door. It was unlocked.
Adam and Harm followed him through into a large, ragtag space where different media collided messily. Shelves and tables full of leather-bound books and journals sat alongside all kinds of equipment—Zip drives and Jaz drives and even reels of tape, as well as CDs and huge, old-fashioned floppy disks.
There must be masses of evidence against Geneflow here, thought Adam. Plans. Timelines. Membership lists . . .
“That computer,” Loner rasped, pointing to the far corner of the room. “I sent mail from there.”
Chen hurried to the PC.
Adam’s attention was drawn by some disks branded MINDCORP. “This is the company my dad works for in New York,” he said. “Making the most super-accurate computer model of the human brain in existence.”
“Another high-tech business Josephs was stealing secrets from,” Chen noted.
“But why?” murmured Adam.
“Hey, look.” Harm read the spine of a black binder leaning on a shelf. “Inmate Files. My dad will be in here somewhere. And Andy, and David’s sister . . .”
“All of these are inmate files,” Adam realized, scrutinizing a long line of binders. He picked one up and flicked through, but it was all charts and equations and in-depth psychological profiles, way over his head.
Chen took another and browsed it listlessly. “Whatever they brought them here for, it wasn’t just to be turned into raptor food.”
Adam looked at Harm. “Maybe you were right about the convicts putting thoughts into Think-Send, to be given to the raptors later on.”
“Guess the answers’ll be here someplace.” Harm turned a page of a file without enthusiasm. “But do we want to know them?”
“Exactly my business in coming here,” said Chen.
Adam nodded. “To beat Geneflow, we have to know what they’re doing.”
“We gotta write to old Marrs first. Even if Geneflow catches us, no one can haul back an e-mail. I should be able to route a message through to the Pahalu while I’m at it, if Rich hasn’t lost his satellite phone. . . .” Chen started searching through applications on the PC. “Adam, get your butt down to this A-V Unit and start Think-Sending those guard dog monsters to the bottom of the sea where they can’t hurt anyone. Then you and Harm can take some files out through the tunnel to Brute Beach and wait for me to get back from talking with Josephs.”
“You said”—Adam hesitated—“you said you weren’t counting on coming back.”
“I’m not checking out while Doc Stone might still be alive up above,” Chen assured him. “Go on. Go.”
Adam turned to Loner. “Will you come with me?”
“I’ll go too,” said Harm.
Wordlessly the raptor padded off down the corridor to a dull green fire door. It wasn’t marked “Alta-Vita” in any way. A sign proclaimed it a game room.
Adam was seized by a moment’s disquiet. “I knew things were going too easily.”
“Sure this is the right place, Loner?” Harm asked.
Impatient, Loner pushed roughly at the door.
The room inside was dark and spacious, the light that spilled in from the corridor falling far short of its corners. Adam’s eyes tried to make sense of the repeated shadows he saw, and then Loner reached up and hit the light switch.
Fluorescents flickered on to reveal row after row of wooden chairs and desks, the kind you might find in an old classroom. On every desk there was a sleek black console connected to a metal headset by several wires. The headsets were crudely made, with chips and circuit boards soldered to the outside. There were about thirty in total.
“Ultra-Reality consoles,” Adam breathed. “Must be what they meant by games.”
“There aren’t any screens,” Harm observed, crossing to another fire door on the other side of the room. “How can you see what you’re playing?”
“The screen’s in your head,” Adam told her. “You see what the characters would see, and your thoughts control their every movement.” But what games have Geneflow been using Dad’s system and my brain waves to develop? He opened a drawer below one of the desktops and pulled a scrunched-up bundle of wires and electrodes. “Ultra-Reality uses Think-Send tech. There are no controllers.”
“Think to click,” Loner hissed behind them.
Adam felt cold quiver through his bones. “Yes.” He looked over at the raptor, suddenly intimidated by his size and presence. “That was one of Dad’s pet phrases for selling U-R. How could you know it?”
Loner stared at the consoles, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “I read it in a file.”
Harm had been peering back through the door. “If that map was right, this corridor should lead to the cave system.” She sighed. “I can’t wait to get out of here.” She turned back to the room.
Adam was about to agree when someone ran up behind them. He swung around, heart jumping up his throat—but it was only Chen. “Loner, did you get Doc Marrs’s e-mail address out of one of those files? I need to double-check I got the right one.”
“I . . . I will try to find it again.” Nodding, Loner followed him from the room.
Harm looked at Adam. She still had pasta sauce on her chin. “Can I help you here?”
“Not really,” Adam admitted.
She shrugged. “Then I guess I’ll make like I’m useful by helping Loner look for that file.”
Alone in the quiet game room, Adam wondered which of the consoles wo
uld give him access to the seacreature-control program. If the system’s on a network, maybe they all will, he thought, and fired up the nearest U-R set. The green light flashed, then shone at him, unblinking. Heart beating faster, he plugged in the tangled wire to the sensor port and placed the special pressure pads on the backs of his hands and just below each ankle with the speed and skill of an old pro—because with this system, that was exactly what he was. He’d been the test subject for all the early versions of Think-Send, and a lot of the Ultra-Reality hardware and software had been built exclusively for Adam to test. That was me, he thought, the cheapest guinea pig in town—playing the coolest demos in the world.
As soon as he closed his eyes, he felt the familiar digital darkness swamp his senses as a new set of rules for reality asserted themselves in his brain. He felt the start-up system literally jolt through him, testing the Think-Send connections—a tap on the hand and a tickle on the feet—and then, with no further ceremony, he was into the console’s world.
And there was no menu.
The title of the game that came screaming through his head in huge, bloodred letters was: ALTA-VITA—A LIFE EXTREME.
A familiar excitement raced through Adam as he found himself invited to select a dinosaur—just as he might have been asked to choose a car in a racing game. Some quite impressive graphics depicted the choices available: Z. Utahraptor or Z. Velociraptor.
After his experiences on Raptor Island, the feel of the dinosaurs in his head was almost too intense. He felt lost in his own body, cut off, and all he could feel was the presence of the raptors waiting to be chosen. The Brute offered more power. The Velociraptor promised higher intelligence.
Adam decided on the Vel option. Think to click.
“Sure?” asked a soft, synthetic voice in his head.
Another firm yes—and Adam gasped as a bolt of electricity seemed to smash through him. He was suddenly taller, looking down on a vivid jungle. His vision wasn’t quite right; he couldn’t focus in the usual way.
“You now have both binocular and monocular vision,” the synthetic voice advised. “Experiment with focusing only one eye at a time. Note you will find a blind spot in your vision of approximately twenty degrees unless you turn your head behind you.”
Queasily he tried to focus on a nearby tree. He soon could see well enough to know only one type of leaf had been rendered and duplicated, but a thought like that was hard to hold on to—there was so much else to take his attention. Adam almost stumbled; his body shook as he did so, as though he weighed a ton. And there was something pulling and dragging at his lower back from behind. A tail, he thought, I have a tail.
Oh, God. It’s like I’m . . .
Like I’m Loner.
It was getting too much. Quit. Now. Adam thought to exit the application. Nothing happened. He was trapped in the body of a virtual Velociraptor, and now someone was striding into view. An ordinary man in an ordinary gray suit. Adam felt a twinge of hatred.
“Target sighted,” the voice said.
Get me out of this. Adam closed his raptor eyes. Quit!
The jungle was blacked out, but he could hear the man screaming in terror, could feel a surge of fury twisting his emotions and his Z. raptor body stumbling forward almost on instinct.
Quit!
But his tail was helping him balance and his steps were getting faster . . .
“Kill the enemy,” said the voice, with relish. “Kill with freedom. This is the Alta-Vita. Kill your prey.”
QUIT! QUIT!
And suddenly Adam was falling through space, landing with a thump back in his own body again. He panted for breath, an awful nausea buzzing in his stomach. U-R had always been way more than just a game—everything in it was heightened. But that simulation . . .
It’s like the game controls you.
He shuddered to feel the shadow of his dinosaur self still lurching about in his brain’s backwaters. A high-score table had started rolling over the virtual blackness, and Adam tried to focus on the list of names and numbers to bring himself back down from his dislocation and leave him better prepared to try again to find the sea monster program.
An earsplitting alarm tore violently through the game room, like a Brute’s roar in Adam’s ears. He sat bolt upright, yanked away the headset, sweat prickling through every pore. As he peeled off the pressure pads, he realized he could smell burning. The console? No. ...
The smoke was seeping in from outside.
The next moment, Loner smashed through the door, soaking wet. Adam jumped up in alarm. Sprinklers in the ceiling were filling the smoky corridor with fierce showers of water, but the acrid stink of burning plastic still carried from—
“The records room?” Adam stared at Loner in confusion, still tugging his mind from the last grips of Ultra-Reality. Which raptor will you choose? “What . . . what happened?”
“Don’t know,” Loner barked over the alarm. “Chen sent the e-mail, Harm tried to load a disk and—”
“A fire started?” Adam jerked properly awake and staggered across the room. “Are they all right? We’ve got to get them. This alarm, it’ll bring everyone in the building running.”
“Wait.” Loner flicked out his tail, curled it around Adam’s arm. “Chen called his ship. Did you stand down the defenses?”
“I . . . I haven’t found the interface yet,” Adam told him. “Come on, first we’ve got to get Harm and Chen out of—”
A torrent of crackling blue energy smashed into Loner from the doorway and held him helpless in its bonerattling grip. Adam, jolted clear of the raptor, smashed into a desk. He stared helplessly as a guard pushed into sight with an electroshock gun; Loner shook like a doll in the grip of an angry toddler, panting with pain as he curled into a ball.
“No!” yelled Adam. But his vision was blurring. Blackness was slipping into his pounding skull. As he blacked out completely, he was glad he couldn’t see Loner’s death throes any longer.
20
BEING HUMAN
Adam woke with a splitting headache. It was cold. A rushing hum of power pulled at his ears—air-conditioning or hard drives whirring, he wasn’t sure. Memories tumbled through his mind like hot coals, and he just barely dared open his eyes. It was like being trapped in a nightmare, when you know the horror of what you will find before your eyes meet it.
When he did look, he caught movement just meters away—a Brute striding toward him. He flinched, then realized the beast was only an image on a massive TV screen set into the wall opposite. Six smaller screens were ranged above it, but they were turned off. The main image was shaking as if the camera was swinging about, but with a start, Adam recognized raptor eggs at the Brute’s feet, lying in piles of sand and dirt.
Looking away, Adam took in his own surroundings. He was in a large rectangular room, painted white and painfully overlit. As he recoiled from the glare, he found he was sitting on the floor, leaning up against a wall with his arms tied behind his back.
Straight ahead of him lay Loner, curled up on a huge steel slab. From the circular lamps arranged above, Adam guessed it was an oversized operating table. The raptor was just barely breathing. A guard in a hazard suit, cradling his shock gun, watched as a woman and JJ’s friend Dr. Haskins—both dressed like surgeons in scrubs and plastic aprons—hooked Loner up to a half-dozen high-tech monitors. With a stab of fear, Adam saw trays full of medical instruments had been ranged around the beast’s body.
Must be the labs on level two, he thought helplessly. This is so not good.
“I hadn’t expected to see you again, Adam. From your physical condition, I assume you washed in on the wreck of the Hula Queen?” A short, neat, petite woman stepped in front of him, her skin just a shade lighter than Harm’s. A sad little smile creased her unblemished face. “You were touching the raptor when my guard shocked him, so I’m afraid you received a little of his punishment.”
“Samantha Josephs,” croaked Adam. He watched her as warily as he would a Brute. �
��Where’s Harmony? And Chen?”
She nodded beside him. Adam saw Chen and Harm were tied up just as he was. Chen was beginning to stir.
“Your father’s not with you,” Josephs surmised. “I wonder who you’ve turned to for support in his absence. Agent Chen? Or the too-clever raptor here?” She shook her head. “Neither choice is a good one.”
“Josephs?” Chen’s voice sounded like his throat had been sanded down. “Glad . . . I found you.”
The woman turned to him primly. “I can only assume you’re here because someone has learned about the money I paid you to stop your investigation into Geneflow’s affairs. Had I known then what an incompetent you obviously are, I would have paid you a good deal less.”
“I got past your guards and all the way down here without your knowing a thing about it,” Chen said smugly. “Though I guess you’ve been kind of busy this morning.” He looked at the guard. “Was it you who took the elevator up top to see why your buddies hadn’t come back? If you’d only taken the stairs, you might have run straight into us.”
The guard said nothing but gripped his gun a little tighter.
“Don’t let our prisoner rile you, Ford,” Josephs told him coolly, then turned her attention back to Chen. “What is it you want, I wonder. More money to keep your mouth shut? I’m afraid our plans have come on a little too far for that to seem attractive.”
“I want to know what you’ve been doing,” Chen said.
“Then perhaps you shouldn’t have set fire to my research center.” The look in Josephs’s brown eyes had hardened. “If my team hadn’t already scanned and archived the data—”
“I don’t know how that fire started. But, you know, you seem kind of angry, Sammy,” Chen needled her. “Did we spoil your morning, stirring up your pet dinos?”
“Promising specimens have been destroyed.” Haskins spoke like a doctor giving bad news. “Not one of the Velociraptor eggs survived.”