by Lisa Smedman
As she approached the entrance, she resisted the urge to reach into her pocket, yet again, to doublecheck that the datachip Corwin had prepared was still there. The security guards would spot the nervous gesture instantly. They wouldn’t know what it meant, and they probably wouldn’t find it threatening. But their attention would be drawn to Carla just the same. And she wanted to remain as anonymous as possible. She’d disguised herself, just in case anybody recognized her from the KKRU newscasts. She’d styled her hair differently and tied a scarf over it. The heavy-framed fashion glasses she wore gave her eyes an entirely different look.
A few steps ahead of Carla, Corwin’s girlfriend Nina and little brother Trevor ambled along with the other tourists. Trevor was just eight years old, but every bit as bright as his brother. And the girl, despite the fact that she was still in her early twenties, looked old enough for her role, especially in the clothes Carla had asked her to wear. Both had readily agreed to help out with this bit of subterfuge. The thought of doing something daring, just like his brother, had especially appealed to Trevor. His part would be a small one, entirely without risk. Carla just hoped that the kid had the brains and nerve to carry it off. He certainly had the acting ability; he’d appeared in ten commercials already as the token metahuman kid. He had a fetching smile, despite his oversize canines.
Trevor was pretending he didn’t know Carla. As instructed, he walked beside Nina, making a point of smiling and talking to her. The other tourists would automatically assume she was his mother.
Carla followed the others into the building. They bunched up at a second set of heavy glass doors that blocked access to the lobby proper. This inner entrance was manned by two more security guards. One stood on this side of the doors, directing the visitors to an automated flatscan camera that took each person’s picture, then spat out a laminated badge bearing the words VISITOR’S PASS and the date and time of the tour group’s arrival. The other guard stood on the far side of the glass door, looking on with a bored expression as visitors who were leaving the building dropped their passes into a machine that automatically scanned and counted them. Eventually it would strip the digital photographs and dates from the badges so that they could be reused.
When it was her turn, Carla smiled for the camera, then attached the pass it spat out to the lapel of her jacket by its metal clip. She followed the others through the inner doors and into the lobby itself.
The lobby had a floor of silvered metal that was etched with black in a pattern that resembled the circuitry of an old-fashioned silicon chip. Banks of escalators at the back of the lobby led up to the second and third floors, which housed the Byte of the Future displays. Each had a balcony from which visitors could look down at the patterned lobby floor.
The other floors of the skyscraper—and the offices they contained—were accessed by entrances elsewhere in the building, rather than from this lobby. Mitsuhama encouraged the general public to view its displays, but took a dim view of them wandering through its office space.
As she stepped onto the escalator, Carla could hear Trevor, behind her now, talking excitedly to Nina about the new SimSea exhibit. She allowed herself a small sigh of relief. The kid was playing his part to the hilt, making sure everyone noticed that he and Nina were together, and frequently calling her "Mom."
Carla had been on this tour two years ago when doing an entertainment feature on a new series of games Mitsuhama had developed. It had been a fun piece; she’d strapped on the headset and was instantly transported into the cockpit of a fighter ship that was rocketing its way between the stars. They’d even gotten the feeling of zero-G right.
On that occasion, Carla had been an invited guest. This time, she would be a trespasser—no better than a shadowrunner. And Mitsuhama would be doing its best to evict her—by any means necessary.
The Byte of the Future display was tucked into a series of rooms that opened onto the second-and third-floor balconies. Dozens of adults and children moved back and forth from one display room to another, filling the air with their awed laughter. Behind the babble of voices, games beeped and chimed, automated announcements described the static displays, and robotic vehicles whirred and hummed.
The three Mitsuhama employees who’d been assigned to guide the 5 p.m. tour were waiting on the second floor. They did not wear formal uniforms, but all were garbed in corporate colors: blue slacks and a white shirt. Carla wore the same thing under her jacket.
Out of the three guides who would be leading the five o’clock tour, two were Asian. Mitsuhama might talk about being an equal-opportunity employer, but when you scanned the employee records—as Corwin had done earlier—the truth became clear. The corp showed a clear preference for hiring humans of Japanese descent.
As they split the tourists into three groups, Carla joined the group that would be led by a woman who was of approximately the same build as herself. Thanks to the cosmetic surgery that had given Carla’s face a Native American appearance, she could pass for Japanese—or, at least, for a Eurasian of Japanese descent.
She’d be a close enough match for the picture on the woman’s employee ID badge.
Carla kept to the back of the group as the hour-long tour began. The first stop was an exhibit of oversized, boxy computers from the late twentieth century. All of the machines were in working order, and each had an adaptor that allowed it to access the Matrix in a clunky, glacially slow fashion. The exhibit showed the gradual advances in the computer industry, and concluded with an exhibit of the latest direct neural interface technology—all of it, naturally, designed and built by Mitsuhama.
Pretending to examine one of these state-of-the-art computers, Carla fished the datachip out of her pocket and slotted it into one of the multi-ports at the back of the deck. The program on it had been hurriedly designed, that very afternoon, by Corwin. Precisely one hour after it was installed, it would write itself onto the virtual memory of this computer. It would then execute in the background, uploading itself to the display hall’s central processing unit while it was running its batch maintenance programs. The system’s operator might notice a slight stutter in the computer, but would probably pass it off as a hardware sequencing problem.
From there, the program would find its way onto the slave nodes that served the Byte of the Future display and would drop, without a trace, the name Lucifer. It would then be only a matter of time—hopefully no more than a few minutes, but certainly no more than an hour—before the spirit dove into the Matrix again and was drawn like an angry hornet to those nodes, corrupting the programs as it sought to eliminate the files containing its name. When that happened, the system that ran the display area would crash. Every computer-controlled display, lighting panel, and climate-control device in the Byte of the Future exhibit would shut down. And that would provide just the distraction Carla needed.
After exiting the display of antique computers, the group wound its way through a variety of exhibits: autonomously guided vehicles currently being used in the Mars exploration program; war simulators used to train monotank drivers; simsense walk-throughs of CAD/CAM do-it-yourself architectural programs; animated-cartoon holograms that described the development of ASIST (emphasizing the minor role Mitsuhama had played in its development); and a gigantic, two-story-tall mockup of an optical data-storage and retrieval system. The kids loved that one; they got to slide through strobing tubes, pretending they were individual photons of light. By either bunching together or going singly, they could duplicate the pulses by which data was encoded and could trigger different sounds and holo images. Each group of children erased the data of the group who’d preceded them, writing their own combination.
Carla smiled. It was a bit prophetic, somehow.
The final stop on the tour was a large room that held a wide array of booths that displayed Mitsuhama’s latest simsense games. Here, the members of the tour group were first warned that they had to meet back at the bus at six o’clock, sharp, then were turned loose to spen
d the last fifteen minutes of their tour playing with the interactive displays.
It was time for Carla to make her move. Winding her way through the people who crowded the room, she nodded at Nina and stepped into one of the simsense booths. It was a multi-user display; there were enough headsets for six people to interact with the program at once. Fortunately, no one else joined them in the booth.
Carla handed Nina her badge. "You remember what to do, don’t you?"
The ork girl smiled. "Null perspiration, chummer. I just gotta drop it in the box."
Carla winced. Like her boyfriend, Nina had the habit of using street slang, despite her education. She took Nina’s badge and slipped it into her pocket. "Good." she said. "Off you go, then."
As Nina stepped out of the booth, Carla focused on the digital display in the corner of her cybereye’s field of view. It was nearly six o’clock. Time for her tour group to make its way back to the bus. And for Corwin’s program to start doing its thing.
Trevor was watching her from a few meters away. As she passed him, Carla gave him the thumbs-up signal they’d previously agreed upon, then slipped him Nina’s visitor pass. He smiled and winked at her, then waited while Nina headed for the escalators.
Carla took a deep breath to steady her nerves. This part was out of her hands.
She made her way to the balcony that looked down onto the lobby. She tensed as Nina approached the desk where they had come in. But the guard didn’t even look at Nina as she dropped Carla’s badge in the return slot, where a scanner automatically processed it. So far, so good.
Carla let a full minute pass after Nina had exited the building, then signaled to Trevor. He descended on the escalator, then rushed up to the guard who stood just inside the lobby. Carla couldn’t hear what he was saying, but she knew the script; she’d written it. He was tearfully asking the bored-looking guard who manned the scanner if he’d seen his mother, whom he had lost at the end of the tour. As proof, Trevor showed the badge his mother had "dropped" during her ride down the photon slide.
The guard would probably remember that an ork woman had just left the building, and might even match that woman’s face with the one on the badge. But because several other visitors had passed through the gate in the interim, he was unlikely to remember whether or not she had turned in a visitor’s pass on the way out.
Trevor’s act seemed to be working. The security guard pointed outside, took the two badges from him, and dropped them in the scanner. Trevor gave him a tearful smile, then jogged out the building after his "mother." As instructed, he didn’t look back at Carla and give the game away. Later, when security did a count of the returned badges, they would assume that all fifty-six members of the 5 p.m. tour had exited the building.
Now Carla just had to wait for her distraction to hit. When it did, the building’s security would get much tighter; the guards would immediately ensure that all visitors safely exited the Byte of the Future display. They’d be sure to retrieve a visitor pass from each person as he or she left the area, and to compare the number of passes collected with the number of visitors who entered the building that day. Assuming that none of the visitors actually did go missing when the spirit crashed the exhibit’s computers, all of today’s visitors would be carefully accounted for—probably within a matter of a few minutes. And by the time they were, Carla would be well on her way to the research lab.
She looked around for her tour group leader. The woman had gone back to the escalator to meet the six o’clock tour. As she assembled the group and gave them her memorized introduction, Carla followed discreetly behind, careful not to let the woman spot her. There was always a chance she’d recognize Carla as a member of the last group and would start wondering why this "tourist" had missed her bus. Or that she would notice Carla wasn’t wearing a visitor’s pass.
The six o’clock tour made it all the way to the photon slide before the spirit struck. The first sign that it had entered the Byte of the Future computer system was when the music and holograms in the transparent tube faltered to a halt. Next, the overhead lights began to flicker. In rapid succession, a number of displays blinked out. The ventilation system blasted out a jet of overheated air, then made a grinding noise as its rotors shut down, and the speakers began to hiss with static.
No more than a second or two after the whole chain of glitches began, the second-and third-floor display areas were plunged into darkness. As a babble of frightened voices filled the air, Carla made her move. She’d kept a careful watch on the tour guide, who now was shouting at her group to remain calm. Carla headed straight for the voice and deliberately jostled the woman in the dark. At the same time, she snatched the tour guide’s employee badge. Given the mob of confused and frightened people the woman had to deal with, Carla doubted she’d miss the badge for some time. If she did discover it was gone, she would probably assume it had fallen off and was lying somewhere on the floor of the display area.
Carla shed her jacket and pinned on the employee badge. Then she made her way by feel to the photon tube-slide. It would be the fastest way to put some distance between herself and the tour guide. Just as she reached it, a handful of emergency lights—those powered by battery and thus independent of the main computer system—started to flicker to life. But these only dimly lit the area; there were still enough shadows—and enough confusion, among the milling visitors—for Carla to jump into the tube and escape unnoticed.
The slide down to the second floor took only a moment or two. Reaching the bottom, she clambered to her feet and headed toward an employees-only exit she’d noted earlier. A winking red light showed that the door’s magkey was still functioning. It was a simple slide-through pad, operated by its own battery system. Carla aligned the magnetic strip on the employee badge, then slid it through the slot. When the light flashed green, she yanked the door open.
The corridor it led to was well illuminated; it must have been on a separate control system. Carla pulled the door shut behind her and hurried down the hallway. A security guard rushed toward her, heading for the door she’d just come through. Giving him her most earnest look, Carla jerked a thumb at the door behind her. "We’ve had a systems crash!" she shouted. "The power is down and we can’t use the telecom system. I’m going to see if I can reboot the lights."
The guard grunted out a reply as he rushed past. "It fragging figures. Whenever there’s a system glitch, it’s on my shift." He obviously didn’t yet realize the extent of the "glitch."
Carla slowed to a brisk walk as she rounded a corner. Unwilling to risk the elevator, in case the spirit had wiped its programming as well, she entered the first stairwell she found. She climbed eight flights, paused to catch her breath, then emerged onto the tenth floor, which housed a number of office units. Now it was just a matter of working her way to the building’s outermost corridor and finding the skywalk that connected it to the next tower.
Aside from the few security guards who rushed past her, few of the employees on this floor seemed to realize the chaos that had broken out several stories below them. The corridors were filled with the usual hum of conversation and background office noise.
After a few minutes of searching, Carla found the skywalk that led to Tower C—the "Chrysanthemum Tower." This was the heart of the beast; unlike the other five skyscrapers, which rented space to a variety of different businesses, Tower C was occupied solely by Mitsuhama Computer Technologies. For this reason, it was under much tighter security than the rest of the office complex. Not only was there a gate and a monitor system at the point where the skywalk joined the tower, but a live guard as well.
The guard was a young fellow with sharp features and cratered skin. Japanese, judging by his surname. An oversized pistol hung in a holster at his hip. Carla had been prepared for that; she’d expected to have to bluff her way past an armed guard or two. But when she saw the retinal scanner that was built into the badge-recognition unit, her heart sank. There was no way she’d get past that.
Then Carla noted the way the guard was pacing back and forth in front of the gate. His manner suggested intense frustration. He reminded Carla of the security guard she’d encountered earlier in the hallway, and that guard’s grumbled comments. And that gave her an idea.
The young guard waved her toward the gate. When he read her employee badge he showed immediate interest. "I hear there’s some trouble in the display hall." he said eagerly. It was obvious he wished he could be seeing a little of that trouble himself.
She kept her eyes on the ground, trying to work up some tears. As she slid the employee badge through the scanner, she dug a manicured fingernail into her other palm, deliberately cutting the skin. That did it. Tears welled in her eyes.
"Hai." she said, giving the head bob that was the equivalent of an abbreviated bow. She’d decided to play the role of the demure, eyes-downcast Japanese woman to the hilt. She could do the accent perfectly, but she was taking a gamble, hoping he wouldn’t switch to Japanese. With luck, he’d be a nishi or sanshi, with only a poor grasp of the language. She’d only remembered enough of her high-school Japanese to order sushi, recite her name, and count to ten.
"Two members of my tour group were seriously injured." she told the guard. "I have been called to give a personal report." She sighed heavily, and let a tear trickle down her cheek. "Everything always happens on my shift."
The guard nodded his sympathy and lifted the retscan unit from its cradle. Carla buried her face in her hands, pretending to be ashamed of her tears, and uttered a series of short, hiccuping sobs. "I never asked to be reassigned to the display hall. I should be in Accounting. That’s what I’m trained for. And now I’ll be fired!" She kept wiping tears from her eyes, deliberately getting her hands in he way of the scanner.