“Three adults,” said Parrot. “Not sure what their abilities are. None of ’em speak English. He’s askin if it’s time for him to cast off.”
“Not yet. Tell him things are progressing as expected, and we’re in the final stages of preparation.”
“Aye, boss.” Parrot ducked out.
Aaron looked from the closing door to Archon, to Anna, and back to Archon.
“The Corporate territories consider psionics illegal and often execute them on sight. I maintain connections to some rebel groups in various parts of the world willing to smuggle gifted individuals to the UK in exchange for financial assistance. The little ones wind up being the easiest to transport.”
“Don’t sound so disappointed, James.” Anna frowned. “And don’t make it sound so much like you’re purchasing children.”
“Aren’t we?” asked Aurora. “Some of the resistance fighters are separating families to send the sprogs to us. They want the money, and the parents are either non-psionic, too difficult to smuggle out, or want nothing to do with their ‘demon children.’”
Archon stared at the ceiling, sighing. “They’re better off here. I would so adore a few more adults, however. I’m not about to arm schoolchildren and put them on guard.”
Anna gestured at him. “If you’re concerned about gangs, we can move our base of operations.”
“I selected that facility to avoid detection by the authorities.” Archon tapped his fingers on the desk. “I would rather not have to strip this city of its police to ensure our success.”
Aaron raised an eyebrow.
“He’s being melodramatic.” Anna squinted at Archon. “Aren’t you, James?”
“Of course.” He kissed the back of her hand before giving Aaron an expectant look. “Aaron, your telekinesis is most impressive. It would be an honor to have you among us. Shall we be off?”
“I’m not quite ready to commit to anything.”
“Leave the woman to the authorities. You’re not equipped to deal with someone like that.” Archon attempted a sympathetic smile. “In all likelihood, she’ll poke you with a suggestion that will set off your… bad reaction.”
“Aye. That’s what I’m hoping for. If I’m close enough, it’ll kill her.”
The face of the teen girl with a chip on her shoulder appeared in the window, glaring at Aaron. He exaggerated a smile and waved at her. Her eyes narrowed in a silent command to ‘die.’ She stomped along the window and burst in the door.
“He’s a cop!” She pointed.
“We know that, Melissa.” Anna made shooing gestures at her. “Ex-cop.”
“Oh, I remember you.” Aaron laughed. “That one ran away from the dorms twice. She’s got a problem with little things like laws, manners, and sobriety. You sure you don’t wanna go back to school, luv?”
Her pistols wobbled in their holsters.
Archon gave the girl a look that sent her sulking off. “The girl is concerned about you being a police mole.”
Aaron laughed. “The bastards didn’t believe I was compelled.” Anger and depression crashed into a blanket of apathy. “As you said, I should’ve been able to resist a command to kill my wife. Command thought I wanted to. To hell with them. They’re not going to find Talis. I doubt there’s even a hunt on for her. Everyone’s looking for me.”
“We can help you with that issue.” Archon smiled.
Anna edged forward; the pity in her gaze tilted him in favor of anger.
“Look, I appreciate your offer. Honestly, what you’re doing sounds rather appealing, but this is something I have to do. For Allison.”
“Oh, I almost forgot.” Aurora waved her NetMini at Aaron. His chirped. “I found your hacker friend.”
Aaron dug the vibrating device out of his pocket. White letters formed an address on the physical screen. “You’ve got a lot at stake here, mate. If what I need to do goes pear-shaped, better my mess not come back to ruin it.”
“You are not equipped to handle someone like her,” said Archon. “I can.”
Anna gazed at the floor, picking chips of plastic desktop away.
“Let me check this out.” He stared at Anna, trying to will her to make eye contact. She didn’t. “I, uhh… I’ll try to be careful. I’ll be in touch.”
Archon mumbled something unintelligible. “Kindly do not take all month. We are on a schedule.” He returned his attention to the terminal.
Aaron walked to the door, watching Anna fidget at the desk. “Care to join me, Anna?”
“I shouldn’t.” She didn’t look up. “I’ve some things to do here.”
Aurora poked at her game. “She doesn’t want to miss the match. Man U is playing in two hours.”
“Right. I’ll try not to get killed, like Manchester’s going to.”
Anna’s head snapped up. The lights faltered.
The game hologram above Aurora’s NetMini swirled from a landscape of tiny gem-like animals into a blur of ascending numbers, accompanied by a triumphant musical score. She looked over a rain of golden coins at Aaron, wearing a winner’s smile.
aron missed hovercars. More to the point, he missed the Division 0 patrol craft, a super-high-performance hovercar he didn’t have to pay the insurance for. Fingertips thumped upon the thin plastic bench of the PubTran taxi. As if sitting in crawling ground traffic wasn’t bad enough, this ride had flung him out of his seat twice when the little car stopped to avoid clipping errant pedestrians. Evidently moving people ranked high enough in the car’s AI to be avoided. Unconscious or dead people, not so much. He had hoped his destination would be free of annoying traffic given the affluence of the area, though somewhere in the back of his mind he had a vague recollection of an old environmentalist movement. Someone with a wild excess of money and time started raving about how hovercars were bad for the planet.
To ‘stay trendy,’ the well-to-do locals all ran out and got land cars. Aaron stared up at the regular ebon obelisks passing by at a pace that made him want to walk. Aurora’s information led him to Sector 18935, close to the northern end of West City and thirty miles in from the coast, where the same repeating pattern of identical, black century towers full of high-end apartments spread over a number of adjacent sector squares. The sort of home frictionless star Aaron Pryce might have lived in―if such a man still existed.
It had taken him forever to get used to the UCF NavMap system after arriving from Britain, and no sooner had he’d gotten the hang of it, everything went to hell. The city reached an approximate 260 miles in width, and 1880 from end to end. Sector 1 sat in the lower left corner, the first city plate. They counted to the right, with Sector 53 being the bottom right corner and Sector 54 the westernmost grid square in the second row. Of course, the legal city extended past the elevated portions, though the lower parts didn’t exist on the sector map. Down there, things didn’t look much different from how they’d been before the war, a rustic combination of Mexico-meets-Badlands, without all the genetically-engineered war machines or raiders.
The function of it remained a matter of obliviousness to most citizens. Travel, for most, entailed telling a computer what sector number they wanted, and an automated vehicle would bring them there. With so much of the city looking like every other part of the city, one could easily lose track of where they were in relation to the actual land.
After a laborious forty-minute ride, the little car jammed to a stop in front of his destination, flinging him to the floor for a third time. It made a faint whirring noise before sliding sideways to the right until it bumped the curb. Cold air rushed into the cab, carrying the scent of metal and glass. He ducked out of the impatient car, which eased away and zipped off before he’d gotten all his weight on his leading leg. Aaron had half a mind to flip the bastarding thing over, but decided against drawing attention.
His dark suit did not feel as out of place here as it did in his new ‘home.’ Everyone in sight wore similar attire in either grey or black and walked fast, as if late for a meeti
ng. Silver walkpaths between the onyx columns contained only wealthy adults. The lack of children, beggars, or anyone in anything even approaching a good mood struck him as eerie.
Oh, right. At this hour, kids would all be plugged in to school. He took a deep breath of freezing air. These people have money. He debated the advantages of online primary school compared to his childhood in the UK, being required to attend a physical classroom.
Makes for better character! shouted the headmaster out of his memory.
Parents routinely complained of the hassle, but the Crown agreed with Mr. Collingsworth. Truth be told, all the entertaining trouble he’d gotten into as a schoolboy would’ve been impossible by virtual reality. With a nostalgic smile, Aaron reached for the gloss black door, but it opened before he made contact. The lobby was quite a bit warmer than the outside, a velvety curtain of comfort hung at the entrance. Music lurked in the background of notice, only loud enough to remove silence, but faint to the point of being unrecognizable.
A single desk attendant looked at him. Her black flare-shouldered suit matched the status quo of the area as well as her raven-colored hair, gathered into a neat coif. Pink-tinted overhead lights caused her Marsborn-white skin to glow and added thin stripes of glint to glossy dark red lips. For a moment, she distracted him from his mission with a bout of mental math at how easily he could talk her into something more fun than sitting behind a desk. The idea faded when a telepathic poke found no surface thoughts.
A doll.
A good one, too. Maya-6 most likely. The quality of her motion coupled with the faces she made gave him the impression he ogled a self-aware AI, not one of the cheap ‘human-shaped-computers’ so often relegated to menial jobs. King William despised such machines, banning dolls from entering London. They told the public the ban had been enacted to preserve jobs for the under-educated, but most believed him a paranoid fool who took to heart a story told by a fortuneteller claiming a doll would kill him. After some of the things he’d seen in Division 0, the idea of it seemed less farfetched.
He couldn’t suppress the chuckles at the thought on his way to the elevator. The ‘girl’ at the desk smiled at his polite wave.
“Visiting a friend.”
Bright green light flared within the woman’s eyes, shining out from her expanding pupils. He hadn’t noticed how blue her irises were until then, a shade of rich, luminous cerulean that no human possessed naturally. The glow faded in seconds.
“I’m not armed. No implants.” He smiled.
“So I see,” said the woman.
Her piercing gaze and coy smile lingered in his mind as a wall of metal slid in front of him. The elevator was a large cylinder, which rotated clockwise to close. Aurora described Shimmer’s home existing in a space removed from the building’s map, with no official entry. Semitransparent plastisteel where the opening had been reduced the lobby to a blurry haze before it lit up with numbers and a wireframe model of the tower.
Aaron touched the display for the 89th floor and waited as the capsule shot upward. He went over the graphic Aurora sent to his NetMini. For an hour that morning, he’d sat in bed and stared at the schematics, trying to work out how to get into the place. Floors 50 to 89 contained what passed for ‘middle of the road’ apartments in this area. Each had more square footage than an average single-family home, and occupied one quarter of the entire floor. Two of the apartments on the 88th floor were smaller than their neighbors, though not by so much that someone inside one would notice without measuring. Shimmer lived in the stolen space, a modest, concealed chamber.
Aurora’s digital sketch depicted two ways in. A narrow shaft from the hidden apartment straight to the roof, and a small corridor accessible from the elevator tube. The ‘luxury’ apartments had six dedicated elevators that expressed from the lobby to the fiftieth floor and up, bypassing the cheaper dwellings below. On the upper floors, a central neutral space existed between the four apartments, de facto front yards, complete with artificial grass. The access to her home was hidden in the elevator bank, at an angle the capsule would never face during normal operation. He figured she had a special code to get in, but Aurora said she couldn’t obtain it without being detected.
Hyacinth scented air greeted him on the 89th floor courtyard. A space fifty meters square, with truncated corners, occupied the center of the building. Each flattened corner bore the façade of a house, and a door with an apartment number. Polished metal formed a circular walkway around the elevator building and led in straight lines to each dwelling. Fortunately, the only occupant of the chamber aside from him was a small schnauzer dog frolicking in the artificial grass by 89-2.
The capsule rotated closed with the faint squeak of a pneumatic seal. Once the sound of its return to the ground floor faded, he studied the door. For the first time since his life fell apart, he missed carrying the official authority (and equipment) of a police officer.
An override code would be lovely here, wouldn’t it?
He rubbed his left forearm, grumbling to himself about how much easier this would be if he still had his gear. Alas, without it, he had to resort to more basic methods. It took him a moment to telekinetically probe out the shape and mass of the rotating cylindrical elevator shaft door. Once he felt confident, he concentrated on his desire to twist it out of his way. Gumminess in its motion suggested magnetic actuation rather than gears, which worked in his favor. He could force it open without breaking anything; hopefully, it wouldn’t set off any kind of alarm. After tentative pushing got nowhere, a spike of irritation torqued it to the side. He grunted with the effort necessary to hold it open, fighting a magnetic field that presented constant opposing force.
Bereft of light, a dark metal shaft six feet in diameter ran the length of the building. Shiny silver-grey walls reminded him of raw silicon, with the exception of four hand-wide strips of white enamel. Aaron figured those rails contained the magnets that propelled the capsule up and down.
He leaned into the space, smiling at the half-height hatch a few inches below the level of the floor, as described in the hand-drawn wireframe model he’d spent the morning studying. Given the absence of ladders in the smooth shaft, a normal person had no way to get to it without knowing the code to force the elevator to face it. Aaron levitated himself, juggling effort on the capsule as well as his body as he glided in and down a few feet. Once he reached the shaft, he released the outer door. It flung itself closed with enough force to spin all the way around twice before wobbling back and forth with a dull hum.
A simple mechanical wheel lock secured the hatch. He nudged the mechanism around and pulled the metal flap open. Beyond it, a dingy black-walled shaft four feet square led about thirty meters to another door. He crawled in, pulling the door closed behind him to avoid a crash in case the elevator went by. Here and there, missing panels exposed pipes where thick cables spliced into the building wiring, carrying either data or power. He pulled out his NetMini to use as a flashlight and duck-walked to the end.
The ceiling over the last four feet of shaft expanded enough to allow him to stand. Two metal rungs jutted out from the wall below a thick, armored door that looked like she’d stolen it from a military starship. Shadows crept around as he moved the NetMini over an unlit keypad.
Feck. It would’ve been nice if she warned me about this.
With no idea how long a code it wanted, four, five, six, maybe ten digits, he turned his attention to the door itself. In a stroke of luck, a chromed locking bar glinted from his improvised light source. Aaron didn’t need to use much power to slide it aside, freeing the door. The hatch glided inward with a faint squeak, revealing a chamber almost as dark as the crawl shaft. A matte-black coating, like the skin of stealth combat aircraft, covered the floor, ceiling, and walls. Stagnant air swirled around him, thick with the scent of a person and cheap ramen.
Ribbed hoses and smooth wires crisscrossed the floor like an explosion of technological plant growth, some as big around as his leg, others as
thin as a lightpen. Despite the apparent chaos, they all wound their way to an island of technology in the middle of the dim room. Here and there, LED lamps, the handheld kind used by construction workers, lay scattered about, creating pale spots on the ceiling.
A ring of space heaters surrounded three folding tables and a huge, cushioned chair tilted back so far it became more of a bed. Stacks of cyberspace decks on the tables blinked and flashed with holographic panels. One looked like a feed from a low-flying drone sailing over desert scrub, another had text scrolling by too fast to read, the rest contained windowed readouts of stats for various programs.
Aaron tilted his head, appraising the slender body of a young woman lying on the chair in a ratty tank top and panties. Her olive skin displayed an obvious lack of muscle tone from many hours spent in a virtual world, and more than one skipped meal. Fluorescent blue hair draped over the headrest, hanging to the floor. He thought it long enough to reach her knees were she standing. At a guess, Aaron put her age around twenty. Two wires came out from behind her ears, draped over her chest and along the chair between her legs to a central interface box on the table at her feet. Patch cables ran from there to the seven or eight decks.
Aside from being full size and lacking wings, she looked like Shimmer’s holographic faerie avatar.
It struck him odd from Aurora’s notes how the girl had reacted to her visit. Despite Aurora remaining in the astral world, the woman had looked around and called out asking if someone was there. Shimmer―this time he felt certain he’d really found her―showed no reaction whatsoever to Aaron’s presence. Her notice of Aurora hinted at possible psionic ability.
Plastisteel shipping cartons stacked everywhere, mostly against the walls, overflowing with circuit boards, wires, cyberspace terminal parts, and random junk. Techno music pounded behind the wall in the far left corner from the legal apartment on the other side, rattling the autoshower door with the bass. A few feet to the right, an exposed toilet sat by an opaque green plastic curtain bunched up against the wall on its track.
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