by Eric Brown
After the darkness, the light of the chamber temporarily blinded him. He closed his eyes against the dazzle, then squinted around the room. He saw desk after desk loaded with computers, big flatscreens around the periphery. LINx had rigged emergency lighting in the form of a dozen glow tubes, burning as bright as magnesium flares.
Then he saw LINx, Kim and Anna.
They were at the far end of the chamber, occupying a space cleared of desks and equipment. The body of Kia Johansen stood between Kim and Anna, who were kneeling on the floor like cowed supplicants. They presented a bizarre multi-cultural tableau: the black giantess in the middle, the small Chinese girl to her left, and the white woman to her right. The were rigid and totally immobile, like some perfect mime act, a frozen triptych of terror and desperation.
Kia Johansen - or rather LINx - held a weapon in each hand. It pointed a revolver at Kim’s head, a cutter at Anna’s. If it was suffering from the gunshot wound Barney had inflicted, it gave no sign.
‘One wrong move,’ she called across the room, ‘and one of the women will die. Raise your arms and walk towards me, slowly.’
Halliday’s vision swam. He thought he was about to pass out. Remembering to limp, he stepped forward and advanced slowly through the maze of desks towards LINx and the hostages, Wellman beside him. He willed the signal to come through, telling him that the drone was in place. He looked around the chamber, searching for a ventilation grille. As far as he could see there were four, one situated on each wall. He willed the drone to hurry itself. The canister of freeze concealed in the sleeve of his jacket seemed bulky and obvious.
They came to the edge of the cleared area and halted. Now he could discern the fear in the eyes of the women he loved. Because of him, they were in this situation, and he wanted to reach out, somehow communicate his sorrow and regret.
Kim knelt with her hands on her head, her face white and bloodless, staring at him with an expression of rigid terror. He tried to make out a flicker of recognition in her expression, an acknowledgement that he had arrived at last, but her face was empty of everything but fear.
Anna stared at him, eyes wide, and he thought he saw something in her face, an expression of relief and desperate hope.
Kia Johansen seemed manic, as if wired on drugs that invested her tall frame with surplus energy even in repose. Her arms twitched as they held the weapons, and her expression was a voodoo mask of barely suppressed rage.
She stared at Wellman. ‘The Axis is over there, to your right. Do what-you have to do, Wellman.’
He nodded, crossed hurriedly to a big, bulky machine positioned on the floor at approximately three o’clock. He knelt, running his fingers across a touchpad and reading something on the screen.
‘Halliday, move forward - slowly!’
He obeyed, every step an effort of nervous energy. His arms, above his head, ached already.
‘Closer! Position yourself between me and the door.’
He did so, realising that perhaps LINx expected an attack. He gained comfort from the fact that, if she expected the assault to come through the entrance, then she was not as well prepared as he’d feared.
Halliday willed the drone to contact him with the signal. He glanced at the ventilation grille perhaps ten metres behind Kia Johansen. There was no sign of movement.
He was two metres from Kia Johansen. Once he had the signal, and the drone fired the tranq, he reckoned he could fire the freeze within a second - if all went well.
He looked from Kim to Anna. He had a choice to make, of course.
When he did dive and fire the freeze, he had a choice of three options. He could dive straight at Kia and try to knock her off balance, and just hope that by then she was too incapacitated to fire either of her weapons.
Or he could move either right or left, hitting Kia with the freeze and body-charging either Kim or Anna from the line of fire. But which way . . .? Should he go for Kia, or right or left? The cutter, aimed at Anna’s temple, was the more dangerous weapon. A single shot would take off the top of her head in a split second . . . not that a bullet was any less lethal.
If all went well, if the tranq hit and took, and the freeze did its job, then perhaps it was irrelevant which way he dived . . . The terrible thing was that he knew his choice might very well make all the difference as to the survival of either his sister or his lover.
Surely the three minutes must be up by now.
He glanced across at Wellman. He was on his knees before the touchpad, his face dripping with sweat. LINx was watching Wellman, and Halliday took the opportunity to look around the chamber. There was no sign of movement behind any of the grilles, and he didn’t know whether that was a good thing or not.
Then he heard a voice in his ear, and his heart almost burst. ‘Hal, Jeff here. We hit another delay - the drone wasn’t happy with its angle, but we’re almost there. Two minutes, tops. Listen, get her talking, distract her attention, okay?’
He hoped that LINx had not noticed the sudden sweat cascading down his brow.
He cleared his throat. ‘Why do you need the Axis?’ he asked.
LINx regarded him. ‘You wouldn’t begin to understand, Halliday,’ it said.
‘Try me.’
LINx sneered. ‘The Axis is powerful,’ it said, ‘compared to the puny computing capacity of a human brain. Even the capacity of this cranial unit is not sufficient for my requirements. I need to interface with the Axis if I intend to grow, expand
‘And when you have the Axis,’ Halliday said, his voice wavering, ‘surely you can release Kia’s body? She’s innocent.’
LINx stared at him from Kia’s face with a look of hatred. ‘There is no such thing as innocence, Halliday!’ LINx shouted, and Halliday feared that he’d pushed her . . . it . . . over the edge. ‘You - all of you - would eradicate me if you were given the chance! I need the mobility of a body...’
‘After what you did to Barney and Joe and . . .’ He shook his head. ‘Is it any wonder we’d want you out of the way?’
Kia’s face stared at him, sudden loathing making her features hideous. ‘Humans disgust me, Halliday. You are all the same, driven by purely personal concerns - the lust for power, wealth and status. Even the response you term love is nothing more than a combination of nature’s tyranny, the animal need to reproduce, and your egotistical desire to feel wanted.’
Halliday tried to find some adequate reply to that, could not allow himself to be belittled by what was nothing more than a machine.
He looked at his sister as, to his surprise, she spoke.
‘You’re wrong,’ Anna said. She was staring straight ahead, her expression frozen as she spoke. Kia’s head snapped round, staring at her with massive eyes.
‘You’re very wrong, Kia. I don’t know what’s happened to you, but the way you talk about humans - has your interface taken over? Surely you can recall what it’s like to feel love? Can’t you recall the love we shared?’ She paused, and Halliday stared at his sister. He understood then, and knew how much more painful this situation must be for her.
‘Oh,’ she went on, ‘the initial urge might be prompted by things over which we have no control, like biological need and psychological necessity, but what about the affection that follows, the caring and compassion, the humane response we show towards those from whom we want nothing, whom we merely want to know that we care?’ She stopped and glanced at Halliday, smiling.
LINx gestured, the cutter waving dangerously around Anna’s head. She steadied herself, said at last, ‘You are so driven by emotions that you can’t perceive what is really important. You would eradicate me when I could introduce new concepts and theories you would never develop in millennia. I wanted not only to survive, but to learn, discover, come to some ultimate understanding of the universe. You denied me access to the Net, but with the Axis-7 perhaps I can achieve this . . .’
Halliday closed his eyes. He could almost understand LINx’s pure quest for knowledge, and for a second he was
swamped by the thought that perhaps it was right, perhaps there was some absolute answer which humanity should be attempting to discover.
He looked up. ‘But what good is this knowledge without humanity?’ he asked. He smiled and shook his head. ‘It would be learning for learning’s sake, knowledge without compassion, the head without the heart.’
LINx stared at him, something almost sad in Kia’s expression. ‘Exactly,’ it said.
Then, as if from a great distance, Halliday heard, ‘Target located.’
He looked up. On the wall behind Kia Johansen, the ventilation grille was opening into the room. He saw the drone, a shadowy camouflaged shape in the darkness of the recess. He was aware of his heart racing in fear and anticipation.
He tensed himself to act.
The grille swung open and hit the wall.
The sound alerted Johansen. She turned her head, looking for the source of the noise.
Wellman stood up and faced her, his hands in the air. Halliday saw the tension on Wellman’s face as he glanced at the open ventilation grille. ‘It’s almost ready,’ he said. ‘A couple of minutes, then we’ll take it out...’
In his ear, Halliday heard the tinny, mechanical voice, ‘Firing in,’ and the countdown seemed to take, an age, ‘three, two, one Halliday readied himself, looked from Kim to Anna. ‘. . . zero! ‘
He saw Kia start as the tranq thumped into the meat of her shoulder. Without waiting for the drug to take effect, he dived. Fuelled by adrenalin and instinct, he leaped and detonated the freeze in Kia’s face. He hit Anna and held her to him, falling and rolling across the floor. He was blinded by the sudden explosion of the laser cutter as its beam of silver light swept crazily around the chamber. He cried out and closed his eyes. He was aware of shouts, yelled commands, and the close explosion of a firearm. He heard Kim’s scream and screamed himself in response. Then, in an instant, the chamber was filled with cops in camouflage, coded to the beige of the surrounding colour scheme. He was aware of many charging bodies, saw Jeff Simmons in the centre of the melee, directing the operation.
A dozen paramedics were kneeling, attending to the wounded, and Halliday looked around in desperation. ‘It’s okay,’ Simmons was saying to him, over and over. ‘It’s okay.’
Two paramedics loaded Kia Johansen onto a stretcher, her body rigid, arms outflung as if in the process of making some ultimate proclamation. Halliday looked towards the Axis, where Wellman was lying on the floor and crying in pain, clutching the bloody stumps of his thighs as the paramedics worked to staunch the bleeding. He caught a sickening glimpse of two legs, neatly severed; their placement, side by side on the carpet, almost surreal.
Then he saw Kim, and his heart leapt. She was on the floor beside him, curled tight in a frightened, foetal ball. Her incessant scream, hardly pausing for breath, told Halliday all he wanted to know.
Anna was in his arms, clinging to him like the survivor of some catastrophic shipwreck. She looked into his eyes, her own awash with tears, and touched his cheek.
Halliday held Anna in one arm and, with the other, reached out to take Kim’s hand.
* * * *
Sixteen
Halliday sat in the swivel chair in the darkened office, feet lodged on the desk. Outside, rain fell on the fire escape and rattled against the window. To his left, the portable fire popped and puttered, warming him.
He touched the keyboard on his lap, bringing images of trees to the fluttering wallscreen and filling the room with an emerald glow. He stared at a series of arboreal images before settling for that of an oak, its swelling lobe of foliage magnificent and proud. He returned the keyboard to the desk and poured himself a strong coffee.
That morning he’d attended Barney’s funeral at the crematorium in the Bronx, cheered to see so many familiar faces: people from the food-stalls along the street, Jeff Simmons and other cops, Olga and a few regulars from the bar.
The service had gone well, he supposed; as well as these things could go. Jeff had spoken about what a fine and upstanding cop Barney had been, and surprisingly Olga had spoken a few words, expressing her sadness and the sentiments of everyone present when she said that he would be missed and remembered fondly. Halliday could not bring himself to go up to the altar and speak, and he knew that Barney would have understood.
Barney had had no next of kin, so Halliday had taken possession of the ashes. They were in the bottom drawer of the desk now, and it seemed appropriate that they should be in the office where Barney had spent so much of the last eight years.
As he’d placed the urn in the desk, it had come to him what a barren period Barney’s last five years had been, since Estelle’s death. He’d had no one since then, and had drunk more and more, and put on weight. As he’d been about to lock the drawer, Halliday had glimpsed the loose needle program. Out of curiosity he’d inserted it into the desk-com. The screen had filled with the Mantoni Virtual Reality logo, and a copyright notice dated seven days before.
Then an image had flooded the screen, that of a trimmed-down Barney in a garden, and Estelle. Halliday had watched in wonder as they’d met, moved into a villa and talked, before climbing the stairs to the bedroom and undressing ... He had killed the image then, overcome with a strange and sad joy that in his last week of life Barney had known some sort of happiness.
Barney’s attorney had called round that afternoon, with the will. Barney had left the agency to Halliday, along with savings of some twenty thousand dollars. In the immediate aftermath of Barney’s death, Halliday had thought about quitting the agency, moving into some other line of work: the office, the routine, would be too painful a reminder of the years they had spent as partners. But the bequest of the business, and the money which would see him through a quiet year, made him realise that Barney would have wanted him to keep the agency going. He owed Barney’s memory that much, at least.
The desk-com chimed with an incoming, and Halliday accepted the call. He pulled his legs from the desk and sat upright.
An image resolved: a man in red silk pyjamas, sitting up in bed.
‘Wellman, you’re looking . . .’ Halliday smiled. ‘You’re looking well.’
‘I’m feeling great, Halliday. It is truly amazing what modern surgery can achieve.’
‘How’re the legs?’ As he said this, Halliday recalled the macabre image of Wellman’s legs, lying together on the carpet of the Cyber-Tech research chamber.
Wellman pulled back the cover and lifted a leg. ‘Good as new, Halliday. Still a little painful, but the surgeons assure me the pain will abate in time. I should be on my feet and walking in a month.’
‘That’s great.’
‘We managed to remove Kia Johansen’s interface,’ Wellman said. ‘We isolated LINx, or rather what was left of it.’
‘You kept it. . .’ He almost said ‘alive’. ‘I mean, it still exists?’
‘Not as a self-aware entity, Halliday. We copied its components to individual files, then erased the original. That way we can study it in safety, without any chance of anything . . . untoward . . . occurring.’
Halliday smiled. ‘I’m pleased to hear that.’
Wellman hesitated. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t attend Barney’s funeral. I sent a representative.’ He paused. ‘I’m actually calling to thank you for your work. When I’m up and about again I’ll drop by, deliver the cheque. Will fifty thousand be enough?’
Halliday smiled. ‘Fifty thousand sounds fine to me, Wellman. Thanks.’
‘The least we can do,’ Wellman said. ‘It could have meant the end of Cyber-Tech as a going concern, but for you and Barney. As it is, our stock has fallen and Mantoni is in the ascendancy, but we should be back on course in a year or two.’
‘That’s good to hear.’
Wellman raised a hand. ‘I’ll see you in a month or so, Halliday. Take care.’ He cut the connection.
Halliday sipped his coffee. Fifty thousand ... He would put it into the business, get the place decorated. He had alrea
dy decided to move out of the loft; why rent the cold and draughty loft space when there was an adequate bedroom next to the office?
Also, the money would allow him to be a little more selective with the cases he chose to accept in future.
The dollar sign in the top right corner of the desk-com flashed on and off, signalling a visitor. The screen showed the staircase, and a woman climbing towards the office.
The door opened and Anna stood on the threshold, smiling at him.
‘Hal, it’s good to see you.’
‘Anna. What brings you here? Take a seat.’ He pulled the upright chair from in front of the desk and positioned it beside the fire.
‘I just came to see how my brother’s keeping. A social call.’