He glanced at Eric’s wrist, then Monique’s. “Including those watches.” They removed them and laid them on the floor. Posner, who seemed to know this drill, hadn’t been wearing one.
With an “after you” gesture, the guard ushered them one by one through the double security gates and into the main enclosure, following close behind.
The interior was illumined by harsh overhead halogens strung on temporary wiring. There was a computer console with an assortment of standard keyboards, microphones, and speakers, and a single screen; a rig which impressed Eric as not only ordinary-looking, but, considering Ignatz and its multiscreen setup, even cheesy.
There were two ordinary swivel chairs in front of the computer, plus a third seat which reminded Eric of Eduardo’s antique dentist’s chair, or, fitted as it was with a clunky virtuality hood on a flexible stalk, more of an equally antique lounger from an old-fashioned public cyber arcade.
Beyond the computer console was a large rack of sat-link equipment and assorted electronic bric-a-brac. An untidy spaghetti bowl of wiring and cables taped to the floor linked everything to everything.
“This is it?” Monique muttered in a tone of disappointment.
And Eric fully sympathized with her.
He didn’t know quite what he had expected—a naked human brain in a jar of bubbling green goo? towering electrodes sparking away madly? Dr. Frankenstein and Igor?—but this wasn’t it.
This installation didn’t even seem to be up to what he had in La Reine. On the other hand, Eric knew that he was hardly an expert.
“Can you explain what this gear is?” he asked the guard.
The guard looked at him as if he had just arrived via transporter beam from the planet Mongo.
Avi Posner, though, was already poring over the equipment. He examined the keyboards, the front panel of the computer console. He stepped behind it, peered through a series of ventilation grilles at the interior, while Eric stood there like a display window mannequin wondering what to do.
Monique Calhoun seemed to be in the same quandary. She locked eyes with him. She raised her eyebrows. She shrugged.
Eric shrugged back, and went over to the front of the computer console, doing a disney of Posner’s inspection routine just to keep from looking stupid.
Monique went over to the virtuality lounger, apparently doing likewise, poking at the cushioning, peering up the hood, as if she were a customer in an antique shop contemplating buying the thing. Eric joined her for a bit, giving it the jaundiced and uncomprehending once-over of the twentieth-century husband likely to be stuck footing the bill.
Posner, meanwhile, had moved over to the rack of electronic equipment, peering closely at this and that, frowning, muttering to himself, all but scratching his head.
Eric moved behind the computer console, looked through the ventilation grilles as Posner had done. All solid-state circuitry and a couple of fans as near as his unschooled eye could tell. Certainly no object in there remotely large enough to contain a human brain, polymerized or otherwise.
Posner paced the floor following wiring. Eric and Monique pretended to do the same. On and on, seemingly to no purpose, as the guard stood athwart the entrance with his arms folded across his paunch, looking as bored, if not as puzzled, as Eric felt.
Finally, after a good deal less than their allotted twenty minutes, Avi Posner walked up to Eric, grimacing in puzzlement, shaking his head. Monique joined them.
“Well?” she said softly enough not to be overheard by the guard.
“Well nothing,” said Posner. It was hard to tell whether he was angry, puzzled, or relieved, and Eric suspected that he didn’t know either.
“A CJC 756 computer with no organic elements that I could detect, and certainly no human meatware central processing unit. Ordinary sat-link equipment. The whole thing seems designed to merely run software and broadcast the output. And maybe slave the display screen in the auditorium to it.”
He cocked an inquisitive, even imploring look at Eric. “Anything to add, Esterhazy?”
Eric shrugged.
“If there’s a human brain anywhere in here, it’s been sliced into tasty bite-size pieces,” he said. “It’s the Night Before Christmas, and all through this house, not a creature’s been circuited, not even a mouse.”
“MEET ME ON THE PONT DES ARTS AT ELEVEN,” was all that Avi Posner had said over the phone but the agitated tone of his voice and the fact that he was setting up another outdoor rendezvous away from possible bugging told Monique that the absence of a human brain in the Davinda climate model computer had not entirely restored his trust in the client.
The Pont des Arts was an old footbridge over the Seine between the upscale end of the Latin Quarter and the Louvre; wooden planking on a metal framework, the only bridge over the river that was pedestrian only.
It commanded a magisterial view of the Louvre, the stone-bound prow of the Ile de la Cité, the tropical gardens of the Tuileries, the Eiffel Tower beyond, and it had therefore been turned into a linear sidewalk café with tiny tables along both railings, the better to milk the considerable tourist traffic.
So it was crowded and noisy, ideal for secure conversation, and Posner had already taken a table and ordered two frosty mint juleps by the time Monique had arrived.
Though yesterday’s humidity was in the process of being burned off by the sun—or an orbital mirror adjustment—it was still turning into a scorcher of a day and there was no room on the narrow bridge for table umbrellas.
Nevertheless, to judge by his demeanor, something more than the heat and the fact that he had gone through half of his drink already was causing Posner to sweat profusely.
“It makes no sense, Monique,” were his first words to her as she sat down.
“Life, the universe, and everything?”
“That too, I’m beginning to believe,” Posner said morosely.
Monique took a sip of her julep. The sun was nowhere near its zenith and she too was starting to sweat.
“So my fears about human meatware in the computer were mistaken, paranoid perhaps, even,” Posner babbled as if this were already the middle of a conversation. “So ersatz white tornadoes seemed what the Catholics would term merely a venal sin under the circumstances, the contract with the client was still valid, and as a matter of course I passed along your information that I had withheld—”
“That Lao was the code designation of some Siberian operation against Davinda?”
Avi Posner didn’t even bother to nod. He just went on as if he were talking to himself. Perhaps in effect he was.
“And it was like poking a stick in a wasps’ nest! Screams! Howls! Find out what it is! Put a stop to it! By whatever means necessary! Do it yesterday!”
“I don’t get it, Avi,” Monique said calmly. “Why the agitation? Isn’t that the sort of thing they hired Mossad for in the first place?”
“Think, Monique, think!”
“About what?”
Posner took a long sip of his julep, then a slow deep breath, and seemed to have succeeded in calming himself.
“That Bad Boys is in possession of recordings that can prove they’ve faked the white tornadoes, they take too calmly,” he said. “As if they know they are holding a card which can trump it. I am led to believe, or perhaps I lead myself to believe, that the trump is a human brain in the computer. But that turns out not to be so. So it can only be—”
“Davinda’s climate model itself.”
Posner nodded, and his expression, if it did not relax, at least expressed a reassurance at the acknowledgment that she was now following his logic.
“So you do see?” he said.
“Uh . . . look Avi, I appreciate the compliment, but I really am an amateur at this stuff. . . .”
“What are they afraid of?” Posner exclaimed in exasperation.
Monique squinted at him uncomprehendingly.
Posner made a visible effort to truly calm himself, to get professional, and di
dn’t speak again until he had succeeded.
“What do they have to be afraid of?” he said evenly. “Davinda’s climate model has already been loaded into the computer, and the computer is under guard.”
“So . . . ?”
“So what harm can the Siberians do by eliminating Davinda now, or even turning him?”
“Nothing,” said Monique. “Unless . . .”
“Unless?” Posner said eagerly. He leaned forward and peered across the table at Monique intently, hopefully, or so she thought. “You have an unless?”
“Unless they got to Davinda a long time ago,” Monique told him.
“My god!” Posner exclaimed. He looked as if he had been bonged on the head with a mallet. “He’s a mole! And Lao isn’t just a designation, it’s an activation signal!”
He frowned. “But to do what?”
Monique shrugged. “Don’t ask me, Avi, I’m an amateur,” she said. But then an obvious and unsettling thought did pass through her mind. “Unless . . .”
“You have another unless?” Posner asked avidly.
“Unless the Marenkos were prompting Davinda for confirmation of something he’s already done,” Monique told him.
“Already done? Like what?”
“What’s all of this been leading up to?” Monique said. “Isn’t it obvious?”
“The demonstration of Davinda’s climate model. . . .”
Monique nodded.
“There’s your Siberian mole, Avi,” she said. “Not John Sri Davinda, his climate model.”
“Merde!” Posner exclaimed, whacking his forehead quite hard with the heel of his hand.
And then he actually reached across the table, grabbed her hand, and kissed it.
Eric Esterhazy had never pondered the technical prowess of his syndic beyond his appreciation of its manifestation in Ignatz, had never even imagined that Bad Boys maintained facilities like this or that there were citizen-shareholders who worked in white lab coats.
But when he had informed Eduardo Ramirez of what he had apparently not seen in the Davinda climate model computer, Eduardo had not been satisfied by his inexpert verbal report or even the confirmation by an experienced Mossad operative.
“It wouldn’t have been possible to slip inside with a camera,” Eric had pointed out.
“Yes and no,” Eduardo had replied enigmatically, and Eric had found himself being whisked out here into the suburbs northeast of Paris in Eduardo’s limo.
Here being a little late-twentieth-century faux-Bauhaus factory building indistinguishable from the half-dozen other such rusty aluminum and faded glass boxes in a crumbling so-called industrial park inside the chain-link fence of which not so much as a blade of grass was evident.
The sign on the side of this “factory” read BOUTIQUE SPECTRE, S.A., and it double-took Eric a few moments to get the joke, which, like the operation, was hidden in plain sight, “Boutique Spectre” being an awkward literal French translation of “Spook Shop,” the initials of which, appropriately enough, were generally understood to indicate “bullshit” in English.
Eduardo pressed a buzzer at the outer door. What had appeared to be a simple old digicode pad slid upward and a peeper extruded itself. Eduardo looked into the eyepieces for a moment. The peeper retreated, the panel slid shut, and a minute or two later the door opened and they were met by a gray-haired black woman in a white lab coat.
“Monsieur Ramirez . . .”
“Dr. Duvond . . .”
No further greetings, no introduction, as Dr. Duvond led them down a series of climatized pastel-green corridors far cleaner than the grimy exterior past mostly closed and peeper-locked doors to one that seemed no different than the others.
If the inside of the Davinda climate model enclosure had disappointed Eric in terms of proper mad scientist decor, this room went a ways toward making up for it.
There was a wall of slick-looking computer equipment. There was a cabinet full of glass vials and syringes and an autoclave. There was what looked unsettlingly like an operating table surrounded by electroencephalography gear, gas tank with face mask, some kind of virtually helmet, a large video monitor, though at least no surgical instruments were in evidence.
There were two male technicians in the room—or doctors, or nurses, or whatever they were—and Dr. Duvond didn’t bother to introduce them to Eric either.
“You will now please lie down supine on the table, Prince Esterhazy,” she said instead. “No need to undress.”
“How kind of you,” Eric smarmed, then turned to Eduardo. “Now would you mind telling me what’s going on?”
“There’s a twentieth-century literary work called I Am a Camera,” Eduardo said. He laughed. “Well you have been.”
“We all are,” Duvond said. “Human visual memories, like all memories, are, after all, stored in the meatware of the brain. Much the same technology that allows us to use rat brains as processing and storage components allows us to read them.”
“But those are polymerized brains!” Eric protested. “You have to kill the animal to use them, don’t you?”
“Only to use a mammalian brain as a RAM chip,” Duvond told him. “But using it as ROM, as read-only memory, is a physiologically and psychologically nondestructive process. It’s not like using your brain as a processing unit. It’s simply the reverse of using computer input to generate a virtual reality sensorium in the brain in question. No need to remove it from the body. No danger of cerebral overload because your brain isn’t installed as a circuit component. We’ve tested this device with living rats, even dogs, and the personalities of the animals survive with no significant observable deterioration. To the extent they may be said to have personalities.”
“I am not a rodent or a dog, Dr. Duvond, perhaps you’ve noticed?”
“But I do believe you are a mammal,” Duvond said, “and the operating system is not species-specific.”
If this was some sort of dim medical humor, Eric did not at all appreciate it.
“Lie down, please,” Duvond repeated impatiently. “I assure you, this will not be significantly unpleasant.”
“Significantly?” said Eric. But he bowed to the inevitable.
As one of the technicians went around turning things on, the other went to the medicine cabinet, extracted a vial of something, and, thankfully, loaded it into a pneumatic injector rather than some hideous old hypodermic needle, so that it was painless when he injected whatever it was into the pit of Eric’s left elbow.
Duvond then fitted the “virtuality helmet” over Eric’s head. But there were no visuals, 3D or otherwise, just complete blackness and the feeling of a wire mesh pressed close against his skull. Then another painless injection.
After a few moments, Eric felt his bodily sensations beginning to dwindle, a sense of his flesh dissolving. He tried to say something, but the muscles of his mouth and tongue didn’t seem to be working.
“Don’t worry, Prince Esterhazy,” said a disembodied voice that began to fade away even as it spoke, “we’re merely putting your non-visual sensory and non-autonomic motor functions off-line the better to . . .”
Then silence.
Darkness.
Panic.
And not a damn thing he could do about it. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t scream. He couldn’t feel. All he could do was think.
And what he was thinking was that this must be what it would be like to be a disembodied human brain installed in a computer. This was what it would be like to be one of the rat brains in Ignatz if the polymerized brain of a rodent had sufficient consciousness to ponder its horrid condition.
Wrong.
Not quite.
That, he learned a few moments later, had been the resting state of computer brainware, for then he was “booted up.”
Suddenly the darkness was flooded with silent visual images. Flashing before him with unnatural washed-out brightness, faster than his consciousness could assimilate, in no coherent order, as if a lifetime
of visual memories had been transferred to old-fashioned celluloid film, cut into individual frames, shuffled like a deck of cards, and then blasted into his eyeballs with a laser-driven stroboscope.
On and on and on it went until—
—he was looking through a ventilation grille at boards of solid-state circuitry—
The image froze.
It grew larger and larger, as if he were a zoom lens on a camera, until it faded away into an indistinctness the reverse of video pixelation—
—then the image-strobing began again and—
—froze on the interior of a green canvas enclosure lit by overhead halogens—
—became jerky slow motion as he moved into the enclosure, looking around, which—
—froze on the computer console, zoomed in—
—to a slow motion pan, which became normal motion, which became high-speed stop motion, as he scanned standard video screen, microphone, speakers, chairs—
—and froze on the “virtuality arcade lounger.” Zoomed in. Moved along it in extreme slow motion up its length to the helmet-hood on its flexible stalk—
—pulled back to a still image of the hood itself—
—zoomed in and in and in until the image lost detail and definition. Repeated the process from different angles on different parts of the hood four times: the surface, the stalk, a part of the interior which seemed to be a mosaic of tiny blunt metal pins, another part of the surface—
—more speeded-up motion as he skittered randomly about the enclosure—
—freezing on an image of the rack of sat-link and assorted other electronic components—
—panning across it in the medium distance very slowly, freezing to zoom in on every component before continuing, pan, freeze, zoom, pan, freeze, zoom, pan, freeze, zoom . . .
—a sudden blindingly fast shuffle of the whole sequence backward to the virtuality lounger—
—the pan along it again, this time in agonizingly slow motion, seeming to stop every few centimeters for a zoom—
—the same tedious process applied to the hood alone—
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