by Eric Brown
He headed for the Mantoni core site and sat in on their VR conferencing sessions. He learned that the conferences were daily and scheduled from two till four in the afternoons, and after that he made sure he was present every day for the next two weeks.
For the most part the business conducted was of little interest to Barney. What he could understand he found mind-numbingly tedious, and likewise all of the technical jargon he was unable to comprehend.
They did, however, occasionally discuss the Methuselah Project - and anything that worried the Mantoni high-ups was of interest to him.
The grey-haired vice chairman, Sellings, demanded regular updates from his security team, and it was these reports that Barney found most fascinating.
They had established a link between the anti-VR terrorist organisation Virex and the Methuselah Project.
‘A link?’ Sellings repeated. ‘What kind of goddamned link?’
‘We’re pretty sure,’ the head of security reported, ‘that they’re now one and the same. The Project have infiltrated the ranks of Virex and are using the organisation for their own ends.’
‘So where does that leave us?’ Sellings asked.
‘We’re trying to crack the Methuselah site,’ the head of security said.
Barney learned nothing more about the Methuselah Project for a while. He underwent tests in the mornings, and hurried to his tank every afternoon. For the next week, this set the pattern of his existence. Then one afternoon Sellings addressed the assembled management team.
‘If the Methuselah Project have Suzie Charlesworth in their pay,’ he said, ‘then I’m worried. I want to know where she is and what they want with her, is that understood?’
The head of security said, ‘Wellman’s hired a private eye to trace the girl, sir.’
‘Wellman? I thought that bastard was on his way out?’
‘That’s right, sir. Leukaemia. But he’s living in time-extension VR.’
‘So what has this private operative come up with?’
‘We don’t know. He makes all his reports direct to Wellman in VR.’
‘Have you tried vracking the site?’
‘That’s the first thing we tried. It’s secure.’
Sellings nodded. ‘I want to know what this operative knows, understood? What’s his name?’
‘Halliday, sir. Halford Halliday.’
The meeting broke up. Barney left the site and emerged from his tank. He spent the rest of the afternoon seated by the window, staring out across the block-graph skyline of Manhattan as he considered his next move.
* * * *
Nineteen
Halliday dreamed, and when he awoke later he recalled images of trees, stretching over the land for as far as the eye could see. In the dream he was walking with two people - and as was the nature of dreams he could not recall who these people were, only that they were friends. The wonder of the dream, which he understood while sleeping, was that the forested tract was not in VR. He was in Washington State, not far from Seattle. Last year his sister told him that scientists were sowing great swathes of land with genetically enhanced trees, and in a letter Anna had described the fledgling plantations that covered mountainsides in great patchwork quilts of sapling pines. In the dream he was filled with awe that he was walking among real trees in the real world.
When he awoke, reality flooded in on him. He was in New York, and there wasn’t a live tree within a hundred miles of the city. Except, of course, for his bonsai oak.
There was movement across the dome. As he watched, a figure materialised and approached the bed. Halliday sat up, smiling at Casey as she sat on the chair and lifted her shoulders in a quick shrug.
‘This is strange, Hal. I can hardly believe I’m here.’
He laughed. ‘No kiss for the patient, Casey?’
She smiled shyly. ‘Come here,’ she said, standing.
He stood and held her for a long time. She was the real Casey he knew from the real world, the skinny kid he’d held on the chesterfield days ago.
She looked around her in wonder.
Halliday smiled. ‘When was the last time you tanked?’
She shrugged, sat down again. ‘Dunno. A year back, I suppose. It seems, I don’t know ... better now. More real.’
‘Things have come on a long way in a year,’ he said. ‘Look.’ He moved from the bed and approached a control pedestal. He touched a red decal and the dome deopaqued, revealing the magnificent sweeping panorama of the Serengeti.
She joined him by the curving dome and stared out. ‘God, it’s amazing. I never realised . . .’
‘You want to go out?’
‘We can? I mean, what about the animals? There’re lions out there.’
Halliday laughed. ‘You can’t come to any harm in VR, Casey. The lions don’t really exist. They’re just constructions, clever computer animations.’
He made for the oval opening and Casey followed. They passed into the clean African heat and walked across the grassland towards a fallen tree trunk.
They sat down and Casey stared out towards the lake and the distant mountains. She looked at him. ‘The frightening thing is, Hal, that it’s impossible to tell this from real reality. I mean, if I didn’t know I’d entered a tank, I’d think I was in some foreign country. Where are we?’
He smiled. ‘You never seen lions before?’
‘India?’
He told her, and she shook her head in silent awe.
‘How did you find out about the shooting?’ he asked.
‘You said you’d be back at your place by six, right? So I called around seven and you weren’t there. I waited an hour or so then decided to call you. A nurse answered your com.’ She stopped suddenly, looked away and wouldn’t meet his eyes. ‘I was standing out on the street. When the nurse told me you’d been shot...my legs, they just collapsed. I sat on the kerb and tried to make sense of what she was telling me. You were shot bad and she couldn’t tell me for sure that you were gonna live. I got the name of the clinic and caught a cab. You looked pretty bad when I got there, Hal. All hooked up to machines, your chest a mass of synthi-flesh. I stayed all night and in the morning they said you were gonna pull through. I visited every day, then they put you in a jellytank to help your recovery.’ She shrugged. ‘This morning they said I could have one hour in the tank, visit you in VR, so I thought why not? They took me to a room where you were tanked.’
‘How’d I look?’
‘Not as bad as I thought you were gonna be. I mean, your chest’s all healed, but you’re awful thin and pale. You’re gonna have to start eating right when you get out, okay?’
‘Whatever you say.’
‘Hey,’ she looked up from her fingers, ‘guess what? They moved your office. Apparently this big boss called Wellman got you a new place just a few blocks south of my apartment.’ She hesitated, then said, ‘The guy who shot you, he was the same person who killed Kim, right?’
Halliday stared off into the distance. Here, New York seemed a very long way away. ‘He was one of the guys involved with the deaths, yeah.’
‘So they’re moving you so that when you get out, these guys won’t find you, right?’
‘Something like that.’
She said in a small voice, ‘I’ve been thinking, Hal... You know, when you get out, why don’t you quit detective work, find some other job? You know lots of things. You could find something else.’
He smiled. ‘Sometimes I think that’d be a great idea, Casey. Get away from it all. You know, I think I’d like to go to Seattle. Heard they’re planting trees again out there.’
She nodded. ‘That’d be something to see, wouldn’t it? Real honest to goodness trees.’ She paused, looked up at him. ‘So why don’t you quit the job?’
He reached out and took her hand. He sat looking at it as it lay in his, palm up, inert. ‘Maybe after I’ve found Kim’s killer, Casey. Maybe then I’ll think about settling down. Before that, I gotta get the bastard who killed her
.’
She shook her head, not comprehending. ‘But you could let the police do that, Hal. That’s what they’re there for—’
‘The police are overworked and corrupt and not very good at doing what we think they’re there to do. I couldn’t leave them to find Kim’s killer. Chances are after a couple of weeks the case’d get logged away with all the others, maybe one guy assigned to it for a month or so. Then he’d be transferred to something else, and the case’d be dropped. And Kim’s killers would still be out there, unpunished for what they did to her. Casey, look at me.’ He squeezed her hand, tugged it, until reluctantly she looked up at him. ‘Try to understand, Casey, I just couldn’t live with myself if I knew Kim’s killers were out there somewhere, jack free and enjoying life. You understand that, don’t you?’
It was a painfully long time before she replied. ‘I understand about wanting to get the people who did it,’ she whispered, ‘but I don’t think you should risk your life trying to do that, Hal. I don’t know what I’d do if they killed you next time.’
He pulled her to him, pushed her head into his chest and kissed the top of her head. ‘I promise I won’t go getting myself killed,’ he murmured. ‘Trust me, okay?’
She stood quickly and strode off, then stopped and stared out across the lake, fingers tucked into the back pockets of her jeans.
She pulled out her right hand and rubbed her cheeks with her fingertips.
He watched her, wanting to tell her that it was okay, that when he got out they’d be together. He wondered what it was that wouldn’t allow him to open up like that. He knew that once he got back to the real world, they’d be as they were before: friends who’d see each other occasionally ... and then she’d meet someone her own age, and she’d drift out of his life as she had done before.
She returned to the log. Instead of sitting down, she lodged a sneakered foot on the tree trunk and inspected the rubber-capped toe.
‘You know something, Hal? I don’t understand you.’
Something lurched inside him. He had the feeling, then, that their relationship was about to change, that she was going to tell him something, admit something about her feelings for him, that would require from him a response, some affirmation of commitment that he was not prepared to give, and his pulse quickened at the thought.
He said nothing.
The silence lengthened.
At last she went on, ‘What I don’t understand is ... you seem to be two people, Hal. One person’s this kind and thoughtful guy. He took me in off the street when I needed some place to stay. He looked after me, bought me things, clothes and things, talked all night. I feel like I know this guy better than I know anyone in all the world, and I ... like, I trust him more than anybody else, you know what I mean? Trust is the most important thing in the whole world, Hal. When you trust someone, it’s like this great feeling somewhere in here ...’
She stopped, gave the log a kick. ‘And then, there’s this other guy, same guy really but different. He has a strange way of looking at things. It’s as if he hates the world and himself, he doesn’t know what a good guy he is and always does the wrong thing. Like he gets hooked on VR because he hates reality, and then he has this death-wish about trying to find some killers...And it’s all because really he wants to punish himself for something. I don’t know what, and I don’t pretend to understand it all. But...’ She shrugged and her voice almost cracked, then, ‘but I wish he could see this other side of himself that others can see, and then he’d see what a good guy he is, and he might be a little happier. Or is that too much to hope for, Hal?’
She would not look at him, just stared down at her sneaker as it rocked back and forth on the camber of the log.
He could have come up with a dozen cheap lines then, but the last thing he wanted was to alienate her.
What hurt him the most, what hurt even more than being unable to tell her what she wanted to hear, was the knowledge that she was right.
But how could he tell her that, even so, there was nothing he could do change himself?
Instead, he did the cowardly thing, the only thing he could do in the circumstances. He said nothing, and stood and moved behind her and held her to him.
The moment seemed to last for ever.
At last, as if remembering herself, she looked at the back of her hand, then raised it to Halliday. ‘Look, my hour’s almost up. I’d better get going.’
‘I’ll see you out there in the real world, okay?’
She nodded, still facing away from him. She turned then and smiled.
She stood on her toes and kissed his cheek. ‘See you later, Hal,’ she murmured, then hit the decal on the back of her hand and vanished in an instant.
Halliday returned to the dome, sat on the bed for a while, and finally lay down. He stared at the curve high above him, at the cloudless blue sky beyond.
Somewhere, deep within him, he had always hated himself; he did not know why, but only that it manifested itself in a kind of quiet despair that allowed him no satisfaction with his life, his achievements. Even when he had Kim, and told himself that he was at his happiest, he had always wondered what she saw in him. Her leaving had been inevitable, and something within him at the time had experienced a strange and masochistic sense of fulfilment.
He closed his eyes and slept.
* * * *
Twenty
Over the course of the next three days, since learning of the security team’s interest in Hal, Barney made preparations to escape from the Mantoni headquarters.
The only way he could see of getting away, other than via the drastic measure of climbing through the window and scaling the side of the hundred-storey building, was to walk out through the front entrance. To get past the security guard in the foyer he would need an identity card. The only way he could think of obtaining a card was to take one from a member of the Mantoni staff.
Also, it would help if he had the disguise of a chu - and Lew Kramer still had not made good his promise to get him one.
The next time he saw Lew, during one of the lab sessions on the 90th floor, he took the opportunity of a coffee break to draw Lew to one side.
‘You know, every time I look in the mirror and stare into this ugly mug, I feel like I’m in the wrong body.’
Lew put an invisible pistol to his temple and pulled the trigger. ‘The chu! Look, it clear slipped my mind, but I’ll fix you up with one asap, okay?’
‘I’d really appreciate that, Lew.’
‘Otherwise, everything AOK? You settling in up there?’
‘Everything’s fine. The suite’s comfortable, the food’s great.’
‘You taking the opportunity to tank, Barney?’
The question was asked, it seemed, without ulterior motive - but Barney was wary. He didn’t trust anyone who worked for Mantoni.
‘I get along to the California site most days,’ he said. ‘You know, drop by, see how Estelle’s doing.’
Lew grinned. ‘Sure, Barney.’
‘Say, when I’m in there with Estelle, you don’t go snooping about, watching me?’
Lew clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Word of honour, Barney. What you do in VR is your own affair, okay? Trust me on that one.’
He nodded. ‘Fine, Lew. Just thought I’d ask.’
‘Anything else I can get you?’
‘As a matter of fact...’ He’d need money, out there in the big bad world. He had no need for it in here; the meals came courtesy of the Mantoni organisation, and the drinks at the bar were free.
But there was a candy machine in the corner of the bar that took five-dollar coins.
Lew laughed when Barney said he’d developed a sudden sugar craving. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll bring some coins up after lunch, okay?’
If Lew made good with the promise of the chu, and the cash, then he was halfway there. All that would remain would be to get hold of an ID card - which would be easier said than done. Most of the Mantoni staff he came into contact with wore
their passes clipped to their clothing, reducing his chances of stealing one to virtually nil.
One morning in the lab, while he lay face-down on a padded couch as the techs rammed jacks into his occipital console, he noticed that a couple of the scientists had dispensed with their lab coats. As far as Barney could see, they weren’t wearing their ID cards, either. As he made his way from the lab, after the session, he saw a couple of white coats hanging from pegs on the wall. On one of them he made out a card ...