“How do the mind cubes work?”
Eva shrugged.
“Okay,” I said. “What about the original Soviet agents? If they get their minds sucked into glass boxes, where does that leave them? Empty shells?”
Eva shrugged for a second time and said, “I don’t know.”
I paced around a bit.
“What is it?” Eva asked.
I stopped pacing. I looked at Eva. I paced a little more.
“Chip Rockwell is a problem,” I said. “His accident three years ago.” I tapped my chest. “That accident was me. I had a contract to kill him, so that’s what I did. And believe me, I made sure he was dead. Or at least I thought I had, until I saw him in the Temple basement.”
Eva pulled herself to her feet and stepped toward me. Her mouth hung open a little, maybe in surprise, or maybe because she was thinking the same thing I was.
I kept talking.
“So what if he is still dead. That thing in the basement didn’t look much like a person. So what if it isn’t?”
“You mean—?”
I nodded. “What if the only thing that survived Chip Rockwell’s death was his mind? A mind that now exists inside one of these radioactive cubes.”
The sign above us pulsed on as we stood there looking at each other. I turned and looked up at it.
HOLLY
So I had a handle on Chip Rockwell.
WOOD
Maybe, anyway. It seemed academic for the moment.
HOLLYWOOD
There was something a little more pressing going on.
HOLLYWOOD
Like phase three.
HOLLYWOOD
“Eva,” I said. “How many cubes were smuggled into the country in the phase two shipment?”
“We’re not sure, exactly. But it’s in the thousands,” she said.
“They’ll be taking up a lot of space. Where are they being kept?”
“We’re not sure of that either. Presumably a studio backlot. Storage space isn’t a problem.”
I looked up at the sign. “Phase three. Simultaneous transmission,” I said. “Nationwide. They’re not just beaming Red Lucky into movie theaters, are they? They’re beaming Soviet agents into the minds of the audience, right? Thousands of people, all taken over at once. Possessed by the enemy like that.”
I snapped my fingers, but all I got was metal sliding silently over metal.
“Yes,” said Eva. “Simultaneous transmission. The perfect invasion.”
It was enough to make a robot whistle, if a robot could whistle. Instead I let a circuit spark and I made a sound more like the failing brakes of a steam train heard from the next valley over.
Charles David’s suggestion that I put a stop to phase three sounded pretty good right about now.
How exactly, I didn’t know. I was just about to ask Eva if she had any ideas but it was around then that she yelled something. I couldn’t make out what it was, but it sure wasn’t English. Then she stumbled backward. She didn’t fall over but she nearly did.
The woman looking at me from those dark-ringed eyes wasn’t Eva anymore. It was the agent. The Soviet agent. Whoever she was.
Then the agent screwed those black eyes shut and she grabbed her bangs with both hands and pulled so hard I thought she was going to scalp herself.
Shouting something that might have been English or Russian or something in between, she spun on her heel and tripped in the dirt. I went to help but she was scrambling away from me already.
“Come on!” yelled Eva.
My Eva.
I followed.
30
We stood behind the Hollywood Sign, lit by the five-phase flashing of the bulbs. They were bright. Really bright. Bright enough that the two seconds between each part of the sequence plunged the whole hillside in darkness as deep as the ocean.
Eva stumbled around. She was fighting it—her—and it was a hell of a fight. I wanted to help but all I could do was stick close and grab her in case she took a fall. We were okay where we were but the hill was damn steep and that steepness was very close.
She was muttering under her breath while trying to hold her head onto her shoulders. I kept up. She was looking for something.
“What is it?” I asked. She kept muttering and she kept looking.
I looked up at the back of the sign. There were ladders on the back of the big poles and the whole thing looked so absurdly thin and fragile. It was just a set of thin tin panels set with the lightbulbs, those panels bolted to the back of a frame made of telegraph poles. The whole thing looked like it could have blown over in a breeze that you might not even need to call stiff.
Eva turned and fell onto her backside. She sat there, eyes closed, puffing like she’d run a marathon. I got closer but she waved at me with the hand holding the gun and then she waved the gun at the sign.
I looked back at the sign. I knew two things about it.
One, that it had been refitted for the premiere tomorrow night, practically rebuilt after decades of neglect, the lighting rig alive again after more than forty years of darkness.
Two, that the machine behind the screen at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre was connected to the machine on the roof of the same building and that machine was pointed right at the sign.
It didn’t take my rusting detective skills to put two and two together. The machines at the theater were part of phase three.
So was the sign.
I looked around. The back of the sign was home to ladders and it was also home to cables. Lots of cables, strapped to the poles with shiny metal cuffs. All those lightbulbs took some juice to light.
And all that juice was powering something else, too. Had to be.
I turned back to Eva. She still had her eyes closed and her chest still went up and down at quite a rate but she looked better. She pointed again without looking.
“The sign. Local-area effect only. Probably wide enough.”
She sighed and put her head on her knees. I wished her well in her own battle before I turned back to the sign.
There was my answer. The sign was an amplifier. It was meant for the signal, the one being broadcast from the theater. But local-area effect only? It was wide enough for what? And why only “probably”?
I moved around and stood between the letters and looked down into the valley. From up here you could see nearly all of Los Angeles. Hollywood, certainly, and downtown LA, and a lot more besides. And from down there, with the sign lit like it was, you’d be able to see it for miles and miles.
And miles and miles and miles.
Local-area effect. Probably wide enough.
I looked up at the sign and said something that I was sure Ada wouldn’t have approved of.
I turned back to Eva. She was a bundle of nothing lit in a flashing sequence.
“The broadcast isn’t just going to movie theaters,” I told her, although I had a feeling she already knew what I was about to say. “They’re going to flood Los Angeles with the signal, too. Broadcast from here. It’s the sign itself—big enough to take in the valley, but not much more.”
Eva wasn’t talking so I turned back around. I looked at the backs of the panels and at the cables. That’s why the sign had been re-electrified. The whole thing was a local-area transmitter.
It seemed phase three—or at least a part of it—was going to be a little easier to solve than I had first thought. Because I was up here alone with Eva and the sign and all I had to do was cut the sign’s power. The premiere wasn’t until tomorrow but if I could find the power box, maybe the transformer, and do as much damage as possible, that would put the kibosh on this part of the Soviet mind-control plan.
Easy.
Except I wasn’t alone with the sign and Eva.
I turned around. Eva was standing up. She had the gun pointed right at me.
Only it wasn’t Eva, not anymore. It was someone else driving Eva’s body around while Eva’s own mind swam around in the pool, looking for the ladder out.
The Russian agent barked an instruction I didn’t understand but got the drift of. I stepped away from the sign as she stepped closer to it. I didn’t know what that gun was but I didn’t want to test it out.
While we danced I scanned the sign. I was looking for junction boxes, fuse boxes, anything I could tear out with my bare steel hands. That was why my Eva had brought me up here, after all. She needed me and those hands to do what she couldn’t and sabotage the sign. With the local-area transmitter disabled we could then focus on the works at the theater.
“Hey, Eva, you in there?” I asked.
The Russian agent crinkled her nose. I didn’t like the expression. Eva wouldn’t have pulled it. It made me sick to my stomach to think there was someone else in charge.
If I had a stomach, of course.
Then the agent wearing a movie star’s body rocked on her heels. She closed her eyes. The gun went down.
I saw opportunity knocking so I opened the door. Diving fast, I almost got it, too, but the agent was faster.
The Russian agent looked out at me with a firm hold on her piece. She screamed and then I saw it in her eyes: Eva was back. Back and fighting but not winning that fight.
“The top!” she yelled. “There’s a master control box. Come on!”
She turned and headed for the ladder nearest and began climbing up the giant letter O that stood next to the giant letter H. She climbed fast. By the time I hit the bottom rung she was nearly halfway up and then soon enough she disappeared from view as she reached the summit ahead of me. I kept climbing.
I stopped once I was at the top. I could hardly go any farther because there was nothing for me to stand on, just a narrow wooden pole that formed the top of the letter.
Farther along that letter, Eva crawled on her hands and knees. She was making good time toward a big box I could see at the other end of the letter. I had to figure out a way of helping her but crawling along the sign didn’t look like much of an option for a robot of my proportions. I looked back down the ladder. Maybe I was better off killing cables at ground level.
“Eva! I’ll go back down and see what I can do—”
Eva stopped crawling and managed to rotate herself around without falling off the sign. She got herself up onto her haunches. She looked at me. Then she closed her eyes and she rubbed her forehead. There was pain there. Real, physical pain. Her fight with the Soviet agent trying to wrestle permanent control of her body had pushed her to her very limits.
I didn’t like the way she looked. The breeze picked up and she swayed in it. She looked out across a view that was to die for. The wind gusted and her body moved with it. Anything more and this movie star was going to have just the wrong kind of Hollywood ending.
I had to get her back to safety so we could smash something up at a safer altitude.
“Okay, just hold on,” I said, all the while calculating the possibilities. The top of the letter O was narrow, but maybe if I crawled like her I could get across. I adjusted my footing on the ladder and got ready to move.
Then she snapped out of it and she nodded and turned back to me. She returned to her hands and knees and took a slow and careful movement toward me.
I waved her an encouragement. “That’s it, back you come. Easy does it.”
Eva stopped crawling and curled her head into her chest. Then she looked up at me and she snarled, her nose and forehead creasing in anger. The Soviet agent was back in charge. She yelled something at me and then she fumbled with something in the pocket of her dress.
She lifted out Special Agent Touch Daley’s special gun.
I assume she fired it too, but I don’t remember that part. What I do remember is a flash of light that seemed brighter than the blaze of the lights of the sign and when I tried to move I found there was nothing for me to move against—no ground, no ladder, no sign. Nothing but thin, thin air.
Then I saw shapes that looked like giant letters spelling out the name of a famous place as they flashed in a sequence of bright light.
HOLLY
The word seemed to get smaller and smaller
WOOD
and it was then I realized I was falling
HOLLYWOOD
and quite a long way too
HOLLYWOOD
and I had a feeling this was going to hurt
HOLLYWOOD
and probably hurt quite a lot.
31
I opened my eyes. It was dark but the darkness was moving, like it was raining at night. A real hurricane, the kind that blew palm trees clean out of the ground when the wind made landfall on small islands. The rain was sideways, which made sense given the wind, which roared like a jet engine in my ears. There was light from somewhere because the raindrops were glittering in red and blue.
There was a flash of lightning. I tried to move and found I couldn’t. I was lying on something and I was strapped down. Something must have been up with my gyroscope because it felt like I was, if not entirely upright, then leaning back only by degrees.
The lightning flashed again and then the rain seemed to change direction and color. There was a click in my audio receptors, loud enough to be heard over the storm, and then the storm was gone as that part of my sensory input array reset itself.
I checked the time. I checked it twice and I still didn’t believe it.
It was Friday night.
Except it couldn’t be. I checked again. It was. Maybe my chronometer had taken a knock because if it was Friday, that meant I’d been awake for a long time. Too long. Beyond my battery life. Beyond the length of the memory tape in my chest.
Both impossible.
Maybe I was deactivated and dreaming in my electric sleep.
What I heard next was the sound of a crowd in a large room with great acoustics. It was a steady mumble, soft and not unpleasant to listen to.
Then the lightning flashed again as my optics came back online.
I opened my eyes and I looked around and I said, “This is quite the welcoming committee.”
They were standing in a semicircle in front of me and I figured out what my gyroscope had been trying to tell me. I was strapped to something made of three separate pieces, padded but only thinly. My feet were sitting on a rest. There was a big leather band around my legs, and each arm was likewise attached to an armrest.
A super-duper dentist’s chair, like the one in the honeymoon suite of the Ritz-Beverly Hotel. It was folded out and tilted up so I was nearly but not quite standing.
From my left to my right stood the A-listers, the big guns of Hollywood, the rich and the famous. The crowd was three deep and while all of them were done up to the nines, they were all also wearing the big, heavy, protective glasses. The black smocks were absent.
The first row was full of stars I recognized. Alaska Gray with her long white hair blending into the silver furs draped around her shoulders. The one and only Rico Spillane and his two friends, Parker Silverwood and Bob Thatcher. Behind them were others I didn’t know but I had a feeling were probably on display at the ice cream parlor. Only Charles David didn’t seem to be there, on account of him being dead.
But I did know the two celebrities standing front and center. One in a long red dress, her black hair bigger than ever, the eyes behind the dark glasses I knew to be circled with thick makeup like two black shotgun barrels. Next to her, a man with a stiff wave in his hair and a jacket you could see from space and it still wouldn’t be far enough away. He was smiling so much it pushed the big glasses up his face.
Eva wasn’t holding the gun anymore. It had packed quite a punch, although I guessed the fall off the Hollywood Sign hadn’t done me much good either.
Fresco Peterman fiddled with a cuff link and he was looking at me with his head tilted in a way that told me he was acting out the grand finale of his latest picture. Once an actor, always an actor.
I ignored him. I looked at Eva. She didn’t speak either, which was a shame, because I wanted to hear if she had a Russian accent o
r not. Her expression was hard but it was difficult to tell if it was her or not. If I’d ever really been able to tell anyway.
I pulled on the straps holding me to the chair but it was no use, which was a surprise given a leather strap, even a fat one with a big buckle, shouldn’t have been much of a problem. So I pulled again and was rewarded with an alarm ringing somewhere inside my head that told me to sit still while my system ran through an emergency diagnostic. For my own safety, said the alert, my primary motor units were disengaged. I couldn’t have moved even if I had wanted to, which was really quite a lot.
Something else had happened to me, something after being shot with the weird gun and falling down a mountain. Something unexpected.
Because when I queried the emergency diagnostic I was told that my battery was at 100 percent charge. And when I queried the reading again and asked for voltage and capacity, I got back numbers that were different from what they should have been.
I was at running at full power from batteries with twice the capacity as before.
New batteries.
Someone had been busy.
I looked around. The room was big, the ceiling too high. It was all black and lit with fluorescent strips that seemed to be straining. The rumble of the audience was somewhere behind me.
Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. I was backstage, behind the cinema screen itself. The premiere was due to start in—
Thirty minutes.
Oh boy.
My diagnostic continued to fly and there was no way I could override it. All I could do was sit tight. At least I was still awake. Awake and thinking and—
And I could remember yesterday. I remembered it all. Where I went. Who I spoke to and what I said.
The ride up the hill. Eva McLuckie fighting the parasite inside her mind.
The fall off the letter O.
My batteries weren’t the only thing that had been replaced.
Ada. I had to talk to Ada. She would be looking for me. I had a built-in tracker and I hadn’t got back to the office, so she would be looking for me. She would have organized something. A search party. She had contacts. Plenty of them. Hell, she could just call the authorities. Thornton might have been long dead but there must have been some part of the government still keeping an eye on us, even if Ada had to hide what we were up to. Someone had to keep her maintained. Me, too.
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