‘Yes, sir.” Horatio pulled a paper-wrapped packet from his tunic. “This is a biochip that writes actions to living brains. A gargoyle under its orders tried to kill me. So far I’ve got three suspects.”
The corners of Thibodeaux’s mouth flexed. “The short version,” he repeated dryly and reached for the chip.
Horatio, stretched forward, then pulled back when he realized that he and Thibodeaux weren’t really in each other’s presence. “I’ll take the chip to the drop point.”
The finger and thumb on Thibodeaux’s right hand rubbed together as he stared at the chip. “Do that. Who are the suspects? Are they Teks?”
“One is. That’s why she’s a suspect. The other two—I don’t think they’re Teks, but they both have Globe connections.” He described Billy and Paulette briefly.
The old man shook his head slowly, “You don’t think the man did it—”
“The ghost saw Billy, but the walk was all wrong. Billy’s walk is unmistakable.”
Thibodeaux continued as though he’d never been interrupted, “And I don’t think the woman did it.”
Horatio said, “There are no records of her on Access. She has connections. She gets around Globe security, and her acting gives her a motive—not one you’d understand—”
“No,” Thibodeaux said suddenly in a lonely whisper. “Not one I’d ever understand.”
Horatio shrugged. “It’s good enough for her.”
Thibodeaux pointed at Horatio. “The motives I want come from the lab secrets Capek Accessed me about. If the murder isn’t part of those, forget it. Don’t bother the woman.”
“Whatever you say.” Horatio moved to break the connection, then stopped. “You know, you could make your simula image look like anything you wanted.”
Thibodeaux’s lips slipped above his teeth in a death’s head grin. “I look like I want. By the way, has your smart friend Hamlet figured out yet that you’re not a cop?”
“He’s not my friend,” Horatio said, only mildly guilty. “He’s curious about what kind of cop I am, but that’s all. And he’s the one that found you the chip.” He tossed it up and down on his palm.
Thibodeaux stretched forward spastically. “Don’t drop it. Quit farting around and bring me that chip; I’m paying you didj for this, not plaz.”
“Yes, sir.” Horatio stared critically at Thibodeaux. “Is your face getting worse?”
“Everybody always thinks that.” Thibodeaux gestured.
The white cylinder around Horatio suddenly disappeared, leaving him on Forty-fifth Street, in front of the Globe, surrounded by thousands of early evening moths who had been attracted to the white light.
Horatio brushed at them automatically and said to himself, “Hating him will be fun.” He hoped Thibodeaux was really off Access, but didn’t much care.
11
At the theater, Horatio barely had time to lean into the makeface (part thinkware, part makeup machine), accept a cookie from Gertrude, tell Osric to mind his own business, and make his stage entry.
Hamlet watched, fascinated, as Horatio covered his face, took several deep breaths, looked up and focused intently on the actors onstage, and walked on.
Before his own entry, Hamlet tried it, then gave it up. He walked on simply and easily, as in character as he had been when he was first made.
* * * * *
Offstage, Horatio watched Hamlet and marveled. Witty, thoughtful, laughing, and somber by turns, Hamlet was the essence and energy of the play. Horatio thought, I’m the last human actor, but he’s the best actor I’ve ever seen.
Claudius said genially, “Marvelous, isn’t he? Especially in the speeches to his father’s ghost. Something you two saw today inspired him.”
Horatio thought of Capek’s simula and Hamlet’s tears.
Gertrude said, “What did you do today? Was it safe?”
Horatio, glad his costume covered his bruises, smiled. “We went to a museum. Didn’t he tell you?”
Gertrude looked even more worried. “He said he was fine, and that was all. That’s so unlike him. Usually he goes on and on about everything. Look at him out there.”
“Look quietly,” Claudius warned her. “The audience may hear you. Horatio, are you ready for your entrance?”
Horatio pretended surprise. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“No reason.” Claudius smiled. Horatio felt a chill.
As the king moved away, Horatio called quickly, “Your Majesty? If you think Hamlet was good, tell him so. It would please him a great deal.”
Claudius nodded. “I will, then—and it’s thoughtful of you to remind me. But of course you would,” and his smile was back, “since you two were created to be friends.”
“We were,” Horatio said and made his entrance.
* * * * *
Much later, after the audience had applauded, made its assignations for the night, and left, Hamlet stepped out from backstage. “How do you feel the play went tonight?”
Horatio stepped from the wings; he had been staring disappointedly at the empty seats. “What did you think?”
He patted Horatio’s shoulder. “You learn quickly.”
“Thanks.” Horatio caught his own irritation. “Sorry, my lord. I was hoping someone would show up tonight.” He added unnecessarily, “She didn’t.”
Hamlet said neutrally, “So Paulette is your friend?”
Horatio shook his head. “I don’t have friends.” He saw Hamlet’s face. “Except you, of course.”
Hamlet looked serious. “That’s awful. How can you live so many years and not have friends?”
Horatio stared at the empty seats. “I move around. It happens.” He added, “I had some questions for her.”
Hamlet said, “She’ll come back another night. And others after that. Come with me. I know a secret.”
They stepped backstage. Hamlet gestured near a wall panel; the flylights locked into the ceiling and dimmed.
Horatio looked at the pipe-covered walls, the graffiti, and the screenjets. He had pictured backstage as bustling and romantic, not quiet and like a public toilet.
Hamlet said, “I Accessed the theater system today.”
Horatio said, “What did you ask it for?”
“To tell me about Capek’s death.”
Horatio said, “And it asked you for a password.”
Hamlet frowned. “You knew about those?”
“Everyone does. Some are words, some codes. Most of them are voice-pattern coded, which makes them hard to break unless you have a voice simula of someone—”
“Or,” Hamlet said softly, “unless you have Access for the silent.” He tapped the empty rear backstage wall.
An old-fashioned monitor, nearly as deep as it was high, slid from the wall between the stage-left exit and the hall. It rested on tracks. Underslung from the same tracks was a typewriter keypad with blank keys, one of the multi-layout models of the two-tens and two-twenties.
In a building full of Teks, screenjets, Access, and thinkware, the bulky terminal looked quaint and ridiculous.
Horatio said, “Is it real?” He touched the steel and plastic, pulling his hand back sharply.
Hamlet said, “You’re learning and teaching me. What you can’t touch isn’t real.” He showed Horatio the barely visible scar from his healed sword cut.
Horatio said, “This terminal’s a museum piece.”
Hamlet moved Horatio aside and touched a key. The unit disappeared into a blank wall that looked like all the rest, except for a scrawled graffiti “Think.”
“The terminal is real. The wall is not.” Hamlet touched the period after “Think.” The terminal slid out, the same key as before under his finger. “Clever.”
“And Access told you where it was?”
Hamlet shook his head proudly. “I found it.”
“How?”
Hamlet leaned on the terminal, pretending to be casual. “I knew that the system would want a password. So I asked if there were Access
for people who couldn’t talk out loud.
“Access said, ‘Yes, backstage,’ and told me to ask a FirstTek for entry permission. Since I couldn’t, I came back here and felt the wall” Hamlet was grinning, barely pretending anymore to be modest. “I’d wondered who had written ‘Think’ on the wall. Once I tried to touch it, the rest was easy.”
“But why have it at all?” The anachronism bothered Horatio.
“For work backstage, during performances,” Hamlet said. “Say one of your lines, Horatio.”
Horatio said obediently, “Why, what a king is this,” faltering as Hamlet made a two-fingered drop gesture like an old-fashioned baseball catcher cuing a pitcher.
“See? Now try it again.”
Horatio said, “To consider so was to consider too curiously.” All he saw was Hamlet’s back, but when Hamlet stepped aside, the monitor was activated.
“See? The user blocks the screen and the keyboard. The ventilator hose behind it—it needs a ventilator; you can imagine how old it is—sucks the hot air through the wall. No sound, no light. There’s one in the breakfast room, too, though we don’t really rehearse there.” Hamlet smiled. “The Teks must think us easily distracted.”
“Right.” Hamlet pushed an arrow key, then typed,
“ACCESS”
and pushed the arrow key again. The screen printed in archaic block letters:
“READY”
“ENTER PASSWORD”
Hamlet and Horatio looked at it, then at each other, and said at the same time, “Well?”
Horatio said defensively, “It’s your secret.”
Hamlet said in the same tone, “You’re human.”
“You’re as human as I am.”
“Not quite. I’m doing my best.”
“Maybe we could watch a Tek use it.”
Hamlet said, “They don’t use Access in front of us.” He added thoughtfully, “What are they hiding?”
“Not all secrets are guilty secrets. I have mine.”
Hamlet said, in his prince’s voice, “Not all guilts are secret; I have mine. Let me think… Right.” Hamlet tapped the keyboard edge sharply. “A common entry password would be simple—a few letters or a few syllables—”
Horatio said impatiently, “You can’t guess it.”
“Not in one try.” Hamlet thought. “A name, maybe?” He typed,
“CAPEK.”
“INVALID PASSWORD”
“Two syllables,” Hamlet said, “But it was possible. Let’s try another. Perhaps they’ve changed it already to the new FirstTek.” He typed in,
“GOODE.”
“INVALID PASSWORD”
“My lord, this could take all night—”
Hamlet ignored him. “We’re not being general enough.” He typed in his own name.
“INVALID PASSWORD”
Horatio said, “You’d think that would be it.”
Hamlet put his fist to his chin, in the trite pose for soliloquy recitals. “Why wouldn’t they choose it?”
“Too obvious.”
“A low level password would probably be obvious.”
“True—though that means the password isn’t secure. Well, maybe ‘Hamlet’ is already a project name.”
“Possible,” Hamlet conceded. “Though I’d like to know where…’’He slapped the side of the terminal. “All right, then: I’m damned if this isn’t the word.”
As Hamlet typed “GLOBE” the screen dissolved into a graphic representation of the original Globe Theater. The familiar tilted circle with flags and thatch materialized, with a title:
“GLOBE: THE PROJECT.”
It was replaced by a globe of the world, with bright lights winking and fading near the world’s major cities.
Hamlet said satisfiedly, “A hit, a palpable hit. Well, Horatio?”
“Good my lord—” Horatio, startled, fell into the style of the play. “You did well.” Hamlet had broken entry level security inside of two minutes. How bright was he? Was Hamlet right about his being made for some higher purpose?
Horatio nudged Hamlet aside and asked Access for a project directory. “There’s money. That’s a good murder motive—no, wait, it’s the public documents justifying the research here. This is a government grant. That explains the size of the investment.”
“But not the reason.”
“I’ll keep looking.” Horatio stiffened, thinking his own search was over. “Here’s a section on patents and copyrights. It’s no use. The documents are general, and details left out. The signators—” He stopped.
“You have a line to finish.”
“Right. The designers of record for you include a BioTek, Dr. Mulvaney—”
“She stirred my thoughts when I met her. Evidently, she stirred me twice.”
“She won’t get a third chance.” Horatio turned from the terminal. “Nobody at her hiring level gets design rights.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that she helped think you into being, but signed herself out of the profits. Probably nobody gave her the option.”
“That doesn’t help us find anything on Goode.”
“Right.”
“Meaning?”
“What the hell do words mean but themselves? Meaning, ‘right’. There’s nothing on Goode, and there’s a potential motive for Mulvaney.”
“But she didn’t gain from the murder. Goode did.”
“And he wasn’t seen after the murder. Billy was.” Horatio hesitated, then added, “And Billy has biochem and knows how to use it.”
“Explain.”
Horatio did. Hamlet said, “You don’t think he did it.”
“No, I don’t. He doesn’t walk like the figure the ghost saw—and if we say the walk was a simula, why would he wear a simula of himself?”
Hamlet said determinedly, “We’ll have to learn more about the murder, as well as the motive.”
Hamlet said stubbornly, “The motive is all. Some guilts are still secret, but we’ll find them out.”
“You still think Doctor Goode did it, don’t you?”
“He’s still a suspect.”
“He’s not the only suspect anymore.”
Hamlet tapped the keyboard again. “So far we haven’t found his name.”
“Or Capek’s,” Horatio agreed.
For the next two hours they scanned directories, menus, antiquated and old-fashioned ways of retrieving information. All of it was indexed, all of it was abstracted and described. All of it, while surely of interest to someone, reminded Horatio of the long hours he had spent writing letters for jobs.
Finally Horatio caught himself falling forward. “My lord? I need to sleep.”
“I’ll stay and search more. We’ll work together another night.”
Hamlet added after Horatio exited, “Not all guilts sleep secretly.” He signed off the password system, then cleared the screen and entered Ophelia’s name and no password.
Immediately the screen flashed,
“I THOUGHT YOU WEREN’T COMING.”
“I WAS BUSY. ARE YOU IN THE BREAKFAST ROOM?”
“YES. I DID JUST WHAT YOU SHOWED ME. I’VE BEEN WAITING EVER SINCE.”
“THANKS FOR WAITING.”
He added,
“AND I THOUGHT YOU’D ENJOY GETTING A MESSAGE FROM ME”
The screen flashed quickly,
“DON’T YOU ENJOY GETTING ONE FROM ME?”
“IT’S FOOLISH. WE COULD SEE EACH OTHER. WE COULD TALK, TOUCH—”
“STOP.”
He did, waiting. Finally the screen said,
“I HAVE TO GO NOW. WILL YOU WRITE IT?”
Hamlet smiled to himself and wrote,
“WRITE WHAT?”
“WE BOTH KNOW IT BY HEART. PLEASE.”
He smiled to himself as he typed:
“DOUBT THOU THE STARS ARE FIRE,
DOUBT THAT THE SUN DOTH MOVE,
DOUBT TRUTH TO BE A LIAR,
BUT NEVER DOUBT I LOVE.”
After
a pause Ophelia’s message came back:
“I LOVE YOU, TOO. GOOD NIGHT.”
“GOOD NIGHT.”
Hamlet shut down the terminal. He left quickly and energetically, as he did everything.
Behind him, in the shadows, Claudius looked thoughtfully at the wall where the terminal was hidden. He glided across the deserted stage and disappeared.
12
At breakfast, Horatio barely listened to the gossip of last night, to Osric’s tidbits from simulas (which he adored) and from Newzak and EZNews (which he pretended to despise, but relished), and to Gertrude’s tender and usually off-target teasing of her son. Hamlet set up the previous night’s performance notes; the two of them were out almost before Barnardo swore.
In the hall, Hamlet said eagerly, “Have you thought about Theater Access since last night?”
Horatio said too quickly, “Doctor Goode. What can we do for you?”
“Ah, Horatio.” Goode looked at him steadily. “I dropped by to see Hamlet’s wrist.”
Hamlet rolled his sleeve up quickly. Goode turned Hamlet’s wrist back and forth, then dropped it. “I was concerned.” He added casually, “Besides, since your visit to the Cloisters’s labs, I thought you might like to see something in the labs here.”
During the silence that followed, Goode stood in front of them, staring indifferently. His hair was tidy and immaculate; his smile vacant and inoffensive. Hamlet looked at him carefully.
Finally Hamlet said, “Is something unusual happening?”
Goode pursed his lips. “The labs should all be unusual for you. Doctor Mulvaney tells me that you have a reason for touring them.” He smiled. “She won’t say what. I ought to be angry. Are you coming or not?”
Horatio hadn’t liked being spoken to as a child the first time, and he didn’t enjoy it now.
Hamlet, unoffended, said, “We’ll be there.”
* * * * *
Rather than a solidsign, the lab door projected a two-dimensional image of a human silhouette with a question mark inside its head. Hamlet looked at it sympathetically. He, too, felt blank and filled with questions.
Inside the lab, they saw wallscreens replacing the usual omnilight banks. Nearly a dozen people in white coats moved back and forth, passing chips, making hand signals in the air in front of screens, talking into their rings.
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