by Eric Brown
‘But it’ll cost, right? I mean, you won’t be charging the usual rates for this service?’
Wellman cocked a finger at him. ‘You got it in one, my friend. Cyber-Tech isn’t a charitable institution, after all.’
‘So when will it come on-line?’
‘For businesses, we’re thinking about a year or thereabouts. It’ll be maybe eighteen months before the first time-extended site is open to the public. If, that is, some other VR company doesn’t beat us to the draw.’
The way Wellman was looking at him suggested to Halliday that this was where he came in.
‘And you think that might happen, right?’
‘We’re increasingly worried, after recent developments.’
‘Go on.’
‘I’ve had a team of programmers working on time-extension for the past year. We’ve always been on the verge of a breakthrough, without actually getting there. Then about six months ago I transferred a kid from the matrix division, on the recommendation of the matrix director. She was one hell of a brain; my assessment team bombarded her with problems, and this kid just came up with the right answers time after time. A child prodigy.’
‘How old.’
‘You won’t believe this, but she’s thirteen.’
‘Whatever next? Cyber-Tech exploiting child labour.’
‘She was doing a PhD at MIT when we discovered her last year. She worked part-time at Cyber-Tech, three days a week.’
‘Worked?’ Halliday said. ‘Past tense?’
‘Right. She vanished last week.’
‘I can smell the distinctive scent of déjà vu, Wellman.’
‘But I hope this isn’t going to end like the Sissi Nigeria case. No messy deaths and assassinations with this one.’
‘So what happened?’
Wellman shrugged. ‘One day she was at work, the next she wasn’t. She was due to come into the labs last Friday, and she didn’t show. She left the house where she lives with her mother in White Plains and caught the train south. Eyewitnesses saw her alight at Grand Central, but after that, nothing. She vanished.’
‘You’ve had people looking for her?’
‘We called the police in, naturally. They didn’t get very far. I’ve also put a company detective on the case.’
‘What’s the worst-case scenario?’
‘You mean, looking at this from Cyber-Tech’s perspective?’ Wellman sighed. ‘Well, of course we fear that she’s fallen into the hands of one of our competitors, either defected, or been forced against her will ... Then again, speaking as a concerned citizen, I simply fear that some schizo out there might have—’
‘But at least that’d leave you high and dry with the time-extension golden egg.’
Wellman stared at him. ‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that, Halliday.’
He reached out and took a manila envelope from a small occasional table. He drew a photograph from the envelope and passed it across to Halliday.
‘Susanna Charlesworth. She prefers Suzie. Thirteen last May.’
Halliday stared at the image of the teenager: she looked young for her age, but otherwise pretty typical of your average white American rich kid: blonde hair in bangs, braces strapped across smiling teeth. Halliday would never have guessed that she was a computer genius.
Wellman said, ‘You can’t tell from the photograph, but she’s autistic.’
‘She is?’
‘She has severe socialisation problems. She doesn’t mix, hardly communicates, other than with the other techs, and then only about work. She finds it hard to function on an interactive personal level, but give her a complex program to write ...’
Halliday considered what the exec had told him. ‘If she’s autistic ... I don’t know, would she be able to travel alone on a train?’
Wellman nodded. ‘She had a fascination about trains,’ he explained. ‘Timetables, specifications, the engineering ... You could say she was obsessed. She used them all the time.’
Halliday regarded the pix of Suzie Charlesworth. He looked up. ‘You said she disappeared three days ago, so why the delay in getting in touch?’
‘We called the cops in a few hours after she didn’t show up. Next day I thought of you. But you weren’t taking calls. It took my techs the better part of another day to trace you to the Virginia site.’
Halliday nodded. ‘You didn’t know I’d retired?’
‘That’s news to me.’
He recalled what the recorded image of Wellman had told him. ‘You said that someone I was close to is involved in the case, right?’
‘That’s right.’
‘You going to tell me, or you want me to guess?’
‘I’ll tell you, and I think you’ll be interested enough to come out of retirement.’
‘Try me.’
‘The night before Charlesworth disappeared, she was seen in Carlo’s, a restaurant in White Plains. She was with a silver-haired guy in his sixties—’
‘That doesn’t sound like anyone I know.’
‘Let me finish. With the guy was a woman, a young woman, about twenty-five. Eyewitnesses report she was Asian. The cops did some digging, learned she was known at the restaurant. She owns a string of her own restaurants in the city.’
Halliday felt his pulse surge. ‘Kim?’
‘The cops questioned her a few hours after the kid vanished. She said she didn’t know the kid, but she was friendly with the old guy. She said the guy was a writer, a scientific journalist, doing a story on child prodigies. When the cops tried to find this guy, they drew a blank. They went back to Kim and she played dumb, said she’d known the guy a week, and that the name she’d given the police was the name the guy had given her. She knew no more, or so she claimed.’
‘You think otherwise, right?’
Wellman spread his hands. ‘Come on, Halliday. Kim’s seen dining with Mr X and the kid, and the following day the kid vanishes, and Mr X can’t be found. What do you think?’
Halliday nodded. ‘You’re right - about the retirement. Premature. I’ll see what I can do, okay?’
‘You don’t know how pleased I am to hear that.’
‘And since last time, my rates have gone up. I’ve got a VR addiction to pay for, after all.’
‘Name your price.’
‘How about five grand per hour and two hundred thousand when I find the kid?’
Wellman nodded. ‘Very well. I think we can see our way to footing the bill.’
Halliday tried not to let his surprise show. ‘How do I contact you?’ he asked.
‘Roberts will give you my private code when you detank. He’ll also have photographs of the kid.’
‘You were pretty confident I’d accept the case.’
The executive smiled. ‘And another thing, Roberts will equip you with a few state-of-the-art devices you might find useful. You wouldn’t believe some of the technology developed over the past year.’
‘Can’t wait.’
He meant it sarcastically, but Wellman just smiled, stood up and held out a hand. ‘It’s good to have you back on the team.’
Halliday took the executive’s hand in a firm shake, and a second later the plush lounge, and the panoramic view of Tethys, dissolved like a dream.
* * * *
Three
Kat was haranguing customers entering the VR Bar on Fulton Street, TriBeCa. The nightly monsoon downpour had just quit, and the tarmac was slick with rain reflecting smears of neon light.
‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘Do you know that by patronising this bar you’re directly contributing to the social decay of America?’
The couple hurried past her towards the brightly lit portal of the Bar. She ran over to a group of young girls. ‘Hiya, there! Look, don’t go in there, okay? You might think it’s a great laugh - but psychologists’ reports confirm that even as little as six hours’ immersion every other day can be enough to undermine your social skills.’
The girls looked at each other and giggled
, pushing on past her.
She tried a single white male. ‘You ever thought about what VR’s doing to you in here, pal?’ she jabbered, matching his stride as he approached the Bar. She tapped her head. ‘Think about it. You get everything you want in there, it’s all so easy. There’s no hardship. Then you emerge into the real world, and you know what, pal? You can’t function. You’ve lost all your social skills—’
The guy turned on her, grabbed a bunch of her black T-shirt and said, ‘Fuck you, bitch!’
He pushed her away. She lost her footing and fell on her butt in a puddle. Scrambling to her feet, she yelled, ‘Bet you overdose on the sex-sites ‘cos you can’t get any in the real world, motherfucker!’
There were no other customers in sight. She paced up and down the sidewalk, her stride manic and fidgety. A thin, white-faced woman dressed in black leggings and a matching T-shirt, talking to herself. She might have been pretty once, but she was haggard now through stress and spin addiction.
A police drone turned the corner and approached her at head height, beacon flashing blue.
It paused before her, bobbing. ‘Hiya, pepperpot,’ she said. ‘How’s things?’
Its single lens regarded her, matching her retinal prints with those on file. ‘Katherine Kosinski,’ it purred. ‘You are in breach of public order statute 27, sub-section 5a. If you do not move on, I will issue a warrant for your arrest.’
‘No kidding?’
‘This is your first warning, Katherine Kosinski.’
Another warning, and the drone would summon a flesh cop, and she’d be lucky to get away with a beating, as well as a fine.
‘Hey, pepperpot,’ Kat said, pushing her nose up against the drone’s staring lens. ‘See me? I’m outta here! See this Bar, it stinks. They can all go fuck ‘emselves. All the fucking morons who use the ...’
She turned on her heel and strode away furiously, her words turning to tears.
She walked north-east towards Chinatown through the cloying heat, her wet leggings uncomfortable. She often spent the nights on the move, restless, unable to sleep. She left her apartment at midnight and walked the streets of lower Manhattan, every damned street there was. She knew them all, every sidestreet and back alley, every passageway and short-cut. She was out so much she had a map of the area imprinted on her neo-cortex.
Everyone knew her, the woman in black, high on spin, fast and furious, ripping into the sheep queuing outside the VR Bars ... Except they didn’t queue any more. Came in ones and twos. Trade was bad for the Bars. Most people had their own tanks now. Could you credit that? Just eighteen months ago the first VR Bar opened for business and now most people had their own jellytanks.
She hit Canal Street and strode into the Jade Garden. She banged the counter with a flattened palm. ‘Hey, chicken rolls and French fries. Service here!’
Mr Xing peered at her. ‘Spinning, Kat? Calm down, okay? You make yourself ill.’
‘Just give me some damned food, huh, Mr Xing?’
She had an arrangement with a few take-out places in the area. She fixed their com-systems and they supplied her with all the food she could eat. It was an okay deal, kept her from starving.
A tray bearing three chicken rolls in a Sargasso of congealed vegetable oil appeared on the counter. She stood and ate, stuffing food into her mouth with quick fingers.
She found herself running an entertaining fantasy number almost every hour or so. Her mind just slipped into it. She imagined the best way to end it all. A gun in the mouth in a crowded subway train, blasting the top off her head and covering all the moronic commuters with her brains. Or slitting her wrists in a busy street and spinning, spinning until the shoppers were drenched in the spray of her blood. Or better still, but impossible, she’d erect a jellytank in Times Square and die a tank death, and then the tank and her body and all would be freeze-dried and become a public monument to the folly of the technological age.
She often considered these fantasies in her more lucid moments. She might have been mad, but she wasn’t stupid. All her dreams consisted of killing herself in public, not ‘cos she wanted to die that much, but because she wanted to make a statement, shake all the brain-dead fuckers out of their tunnel-blind complacency.
She was reduced to fantasising about making the ultimate statement because that seemed increasingly like the only way to make any impression at all.
She gagged down the last of the chicken roll, pushed the tray away, and quit the Jade Garden. She walked, no destination in mind, just walked to work off a lot of surplus nervous energy. She found it impossible to sit at home, the four walls closing in on her, suffocating her with claustrophobia. Her thoughts would become maudlin, and she feared that one night, when her head was really bad, she might do something stupid like kill herself, all alone. So she hit the streets and walked. In the streets there were distractions, taking her mind off things, most of the time.
Eighteen months, and she’d lost three men. Her brother went first. Joe, a cyber-fucking-scientist for one of the big three. He was fried good in some kind of freak jellytank accident. They’d been close, despite their opposed views of the VR industry. He’d worked for it and she worked against it. How opposite could you get? But, fact was, despite that, she loved him. Simple as that. He was ... had been ... her kid brother, and she’d always looked out for him, always protected him from the bullies at school, and she hadn’t been there when he needed her most. She should have leaned on him more, tried to convince him of the inherent evil of the industry he worked for.
And then there was Sanchez. She’d only know him a couple of months. They’d been cell-partners for Virex. He was a weak kid, a loser, a cyber-nerd who’d turned against the company he’d worked for, and against VR in general. They’d been just about to get close, mean something to each other, when a fucking hired assassin working for Mantoni took him out with a laser ...
Kat walked. She saw the Mantoni VR Bar across the way on Bowery. She thought about crossing the street and telling the fuck-wits entering the place to wake up ... But what was the point? They wouldn’t listen to her.
Sometimes it seemed like she was a lone voice, crying into the wind.
She walked on, shoulders hunched, staring down at the sidewalk and seeing only the face of her third guy, Colby, staring back at her.
Colby ... He’d been another weak, weasel-thin, hairy little geek assigned to her by the Virex controllers. They’d worked well together, vracking into some important sites, burning some big names. They’d made a great team. As was the way of things, seeing as how they agreed on most everything - and shared a passionate hatred of modern life and VR - it wasn’t long before they hit it off in the sack, too. She was head over heels, like a schoolgirl again. What did it matter that he was an ugly, gap-toothed little runt? What mattered was what was in here, in the heart.
What was that nasty, invidious advertisement some VR Bar had used a month back? ‘Image is all!’
Well, fuck ‘em! Image meant nothing.
She’d loved Colby.
Every so often, every six months or sometimes every year, Virex did a shuffle for security reasons. They didn’t want their cells getting too cosy, too settled. They liked to shift their members around the city, so in theory the assassins gunning for ‘em would have a harder time.
So, as she knew would happen, she and Colby were assigned new cell-mates. The protocol was that they couldn’t make contact again, for security reasons. Kat was so stuck on Colby that she wanted to flout the unwritten rule. Colby, for whatever reasons - maybe it was true what he said, that he believed in Virex, and wanted it to work - took himself off somewhere uptown, and she’d never seen anything of him again. And that had hurt like hell.
And Kat was assigned a stuck-up bitch of a cell-mate, some Harvard-educated know-all, except she knew fuck all, and around that time the bombing campaign, the last resort to shake the complacency of the masses and the VR companies, had been put on indefinite hold. Just when Kat had been
cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof-eager to get out and start bombing.
She’d had a God Almighty bust-up with her cell-mate about that, and they’d ended up fighting, and when they next met their controller they were parted.
Kat had never had a partner since.
She’d seen little active service for Virex for the past few weeks. They seemed to have given up trying to burn the big three VR companies with viruses. In frustration, Kat had taken to the streets, arguing with whoever she could, harassing total strangers outside VR Bars.