city blues 02 - angel city blues

by Jeff Edwards

  Everything is occurring within my brain. Inside of me. In the gray neural matter that resides in my skull.

  I have not been transported out of my body to the endless beach. I’m still inside my body. I haven’t gone anywhere.

  I lay down on the imaginary sand, assuming the posture of my actual body on the table.

  I close my eyes and lie in darkness, blocking out all false visual inputs.

  There are two sets of sensory signals entering my brain. The weaker set comes from my actual physical senses. The odor of the room where I’m being held. The pressure of the table’s surface against my spine, the back of my head, the backs of my arms and legs. The temperature differential between the table top and my body. The constriction of the straps that hold me to the table. The motion of air currents across the tactile sensors in my skin. The red-tinged glow of the bright overhead lights penetrating the thin membranes of my eyelids.

  All of these signals are flooding into my brain right now. They’ve never stopped, because the human body never ceases in its quest to perceive and evaluate the world. These signals, these real sensory messages, are currently being drowned out by the more powerful artificial signals of the SCAPE software.

  But weaker or not, the real signals are still coming in. Maybe I can pick them out over the torrent of bogus SCAPE messages, like straining to hear a friend speak at a concert where the volume is cranked up to the roof. You want to hear what your friend has to say, so you focus on his words, letting your brain listen past the louder sounds of the over-amplified music.

  I don’t try to ignore the SCAPE construct. That would be impossible; its signal strength is simply too high. Instead, I concentrate on finding the weaker signals. The real ones.

  I’m not in some far away non-place. I’m right here, in this strange and unknown room—feeling the straps that bind me—hearing the sound of my own breathing—smelling the air…

  And I was smelling the air. There was a chemical odor in my nostrils, a whiff of some kind of industrial cleaning solvent, barely perceptible alongside the powerful sea spray aroma of the SCAPE beach. My first glimmer of contact with reality.

  This was working! This was…

  …gone.

  I’m back on the beach, lying in the sand, smelling nothing but the virtual salt air of the virtual night. I scramble desperately to recapture the mindset, find that fragile tendril of connection before it slips away.

  I waste ten or fifteen minutes trying to force my way into reality through sheer power of will. It’s no use. I’m stuck in this other world.

  No! There is no other world. There is only reality. No beach. No Christmas ornament moon. Just me in all my naked glory, lying strapped to a table.

  I relax, eyes closed, and allow my nose to explore the air. Not forcing anything. Feeling the slow movement of breath through my nostrils. Allowing myself to acknowledge the pervasive aroma of the salt wind, but broadening the bandwidth of my olfactory senses to take in that other odor. That barely discernable trace of cleaning solvent.

  There it…

  …was, hovering at the lower limit of my detection threshold. It was almost (but not quite) imperceptible against the olfactive static of its more powerful SCAPE counterpart.

  I laid there for an unmeasured period of time, slowly and deliberately widening the receptivity of my other senses. I allowed the imitative SCAPE stimuli to continue registering, while reaching past them for the much subtler cues coming from my actual sensory organs.

  The coolness of the virtual sand still found its way through the fabric of my virtual clothing, but the less insistent impressions of the table top began to gradually attract my notice. The tactile pressures were feeble but unmistakable. The surface of the table was colder and more unyielding than the soil of the imaginary beach.

  I left things at that for a while, not yet wanting to push my luck by moving too quickly. Letting myself recognize the scents and feelings of the room around me, and accept these inputs as anchor points in reality.

  When I was ready, I opened my eyes into a weird sort of double-vision. The dark sky of the SCAPE construct, overlaid by ghostly images of a ceiling hung with bright lights.

  My brain was parsing inputs from two completely different sensory planes. One insubstantial and true. The other persuasive and false. In the false plane, my body was comfortable and satisfied. In the real plane, I was ravenously hungry and I needed to piss like the proverbial racehorse.

  The sense of dueling realities was more than unsettling; it was nauseating, and it was giving me the mother of all headaches. Well, I wouldn’t have to deal with it for very long.

  I looked down the length of my body, seeing my clothed form on the darkened beach, faintly overlapped by the image of my nakedness under brilliant light. I searched the faint but real image, concentrating on the straps holding me to the table.

  As I hoped, they were not actual restraints. They were safety straps. The kind used on hospital gurneys to keep incapacitated patients in place during transport. No locked cuffs, and not even separate straps for individual limbs. A strap at chest level, covering my upper arms. Another at the waist, covering my wrists. A third at knee level, to keep my legs in place.

  They were cinched down pretty tight. It took me about fifteen seconds of determined effort to wriggle my right hand free. I lost some skin in the process, but I didn’t stop to examine my strap burns.

  I reached up, found the tangle of hardware taped to my scalp, and began peeling off components as quickly as my fingers could locate them. The SCAPE headset—as a one piece unit—came away quickly, taking my dueling sensory planes with it. I was back in the here and now.

  The tape took hair with it. I didn’t care. I didn’t stop until the last electrode pad was gone from my head.

  Then I paused to get my bearings and do some reconnaissance.

  A quick look around revealed a smallish room, maybe three meters by five, with scarred walls of white plastic and a mesh metal floor. A storage room, possibly. Sometimes used to house heavy portable equipment, if the dings in the wall panels were anything to judge by.

  I froze when I spotted a man sitting in a chair by the door. Broad shoulders. Dark suit. Asian features. The kind of guy who probably knows forty-seven ways to kill you with a folded candy wrapper.

  I relaxed as my ears detected the soft rhythm of his snores. Apparently, the excitement of guarding an unconscious body had been too much for him.

  That was fine by me. He was welcome to sleep as long as he wanted. In fact, the longer, the better.

  I made a concerted effort to be quiet as I located the cinch points for the straps.

  Ninety second later, I slid silently off the table and stood on the floor grating in my bare feet, my knees a bit wobbly from prolonged disuse.

  My guard snorted, shifted position slightly, and resumed snoring.

  Good boy.

  I thought briefly about slipping out of the room, and leaving him to guard an empty table. I discarded this plan quickly. I had no idea what was outside that door, and I wasn’t ready to go exploring dressed only in my skin.

  Instead, I began a rapid scan of the room, looking for anything that might be useful. It didn’t take long to confirm that there were not a lot of options. My arsenal included such formidable items as: a table with safety straps, a SCAPE deck and headset, a Magic Mirror with sensor net, a few meters of connective wiring, a half-used roll of surgical tape, and no clothes. There was also a napping guard, and the chair he was currently occupying.

  Some of the wires seemed like they might be strong enough to serve as a garrote, should I want to take the guard out of the equation. But I had no desire to murder a complete stranger, and I doubted very much that he would sit quietly while I choked off his air supply with a length of electrical conductor.

  If this were an old Mike Hammer vid, the room would contain some conveniently sized and shaped blunt instrument, with which our intrepid hero could whack the guard into concussed s
tupor with a single perfectly-aimed blow. Unfortunately, there was no such object, and I knew from experience that it usually takes a period of prolonged bludgeoning to produce the desired effect. Again, not something the guard would endure silently. Not to mention the fact that he really might be able to kill me with a folded candy wrapper.

  I looked around the room again, hoping that I had missed something useful on my first inspection. No luck.

  Then my eyes lit on the SCAPE headset again, and I got a wonderfully nasty idea.

  I repositioned the SCAPE deck a couple of meters away from the guard’s chair, careful to set the unit down quietly. The status light was still on, telling me that the software was doing its thing, happily generating all the bogus neural stimuli that anyone could want.

  I held the headset in one hand, and positioned it carefully in the air a few centimeters above the head of my sleeping jailer. When I was sure I had the alignment correct, I brought my hand down quickly, shoving the headset onto the man’s scalp—pressing down to hold it in place in case he struggled.

  His body jerked once, his hands coming up quickly, then going limp just as suddenly, and dropping into his lap. He was gone now. Off to the moonlit beach, and the endless kilometers of SCAPE-generated shoreline.

  I used the remainder of the surgical tape to secure the headset in place. Afterwards, my former guard’s head looked like something between a mummy and a bizarre fashion accident.

  The tape held the SCAPE rig perfectly as I pulled the guard out of the chair and laid him on the mesh metal floor.

  About five minutes later he was naked, except for his undershorts, the SCAPE headset, and numerous windings of surgical tape.

  His clothes were at least three sizes too large for me, but I felt better when my ass was no longer waving in the breeze. His shoes turned out to be a pretty good fit. I got things tucked and belted into what I hoped was a semblance of respectable dress. I let the suit jacket hang open, counting on the drape and swing of the fabric to at least partially draw attention away from the poor fit.

  Then I spent a few seconds examining the sidearm that he had so thoughtfully bequeathed me. It was a 10mm semi-auto, of a make I’d never seen before. The markings were in Kanji, and the overall build reminded me vaguely of some of the short-barreled Glock models.

  I ejected the magazine, shucked the round out of the chamber, and verified that the weapon was clear. Then I dry-fired it a couple of times, getting used to the mechanics, the layout of the sights, the position of the safety, and the ride-point of the trigger.

  When I was fairly comfortable with the gun, I examined the ejected round. The case was some kind of darkly anodized alloy, and the nose looked like hardened plastic. Possibly a sabot with some kind of flechette or impact load inside. Or maybe just a variety of frangible ammunition that I hadn’t encountered before.

  I popped the loose round back into the top of the magazine, and shoved the magazine into place.

  By this time, my back teeth were floating. My bladder was full to the point of being painful. If there had been a floor drain or a sink, I would have forsaken my upbringing and peed in it. But my discomfort level wasn’t quite high enough to piss on the floor. I’d have to hold it in for a while longer.

  I racked the slide of the automatic, flicked the safety on, and tucked it into my borrowed belt where it was covered by the voluminous jacket.

  I was as ready as I could make myself. Time to get the hell out of here.

  CHAPTER 30

  The door opened onto a lighted corridor with a metal mesh floor identical to the one in the room. An industrial area then. Floor structure reinforced for the movement of heavy equipment. The ceiling was a confusion of color-coded piping and electrical conduits, most of it running parallel to the direction of travel. The air thrummed with the low vibration of industrial machinery.

  I was about to step into the corridor when a group of six or eight men turned a corner down to my left and began walking in my direction. From the brief glimpse I caught of them, about half of them were dressed in business suits, and the others wore yellow coveralls and hardhats.

  I ducked back into the room and stood inside the door with the automatic drawn. If those guys were coming here, things were about to get ugly.

  The door remained closed, so apparently their destination was somewhere else.

  I counted to ninety and opened the door again. The corridor was clear in both directions. I stepped out of the room, turned right and began walking.

  I’d already decided to follow the old right-turns-only method that supposedly works for navigating mazes. This place might not technically qualify as a maze, but I had no idea where I was, or how far I might be from an exit to public areas. So it would do for a maze until the real thing came along.

  I checked every door I passed, partly in the hopes of finding something useful (like a way out), and partly in search of places to hide in case the need suddenly arose.

  After four of five locked doors, I came across two in a row that opened at my touch. The first was stacked ceiling high with shelves of pipe joints, valves, and various gauges of metal tubing. I could duck in here if I had to, but the room was so crammed with hardware that I couldn’t create a useable hidey-hole without moving a cubic meter of hardware out into the corridor. If anyone opened the door, they’d find me standing right inside.

  I must have been due for a stroke of luck right about then, because the next door led to a communal washroom with an attached locker area.

  I made it into the first stall and then had several seconds of intense fumbling when the fly of my stolen pants didn’t want to open. I was a half-second from ripping the fabric with my bare hands when the pants decided to cooperate. My first stream of urine hit the toilet so hard that I thought the porcelain was going to shatter. The fixture emitted a weirdly musical gargling noise, like someone with superhuman lung capacity trying to play a clarinet at the bottom of a swimming pool.

  Some blissful number of seconds later, my bladder was reduced from the diameter of a snare drum to something that could reasonably be expected to fit inside of a person.

  With the most urgent order of business taken care of, I was now free to move on to the next item on my agenda: ransacking the lockers.

  A fast excursion to the storage room next door yielded a meter-long stretch of steel pipe with a diameter of about two centimeters. Before I could test out its effectiveness as an impromptu crowbar, I had to duck into a toilet stall and close the door while two Japanese men came into the restroom to use the facilities.

  They kept up a continual stream of chatter in their own language. I didn’t know if that was good Japanese restroom etiquette, but it grated on my Southern California sensibilities.

  Then again, they weren’t hiding in a bathroom stall with a stolen gun, wearing stolen clothes, ready to bash somebody’s head in with a steel pipe.

  When the door closed behind them, I went to the lockers to test out my meter-long steel master key. It took me a few tries to figure out the technique, and then I worked my way down the line, prying locks off as I went.

  A few minutes later, I was wearing yellow coveralls over the guard’s shirt and pants. His oversized suit jacket was stuffed in a locker, taking up the space formerly occupied by the hard hat and safety glasses that completed my ensemble.

  I hadn’t found any work boots, so I was still wearing the guard’s dress shoes. With luck no one would check me out closely enough to examine my footwear.

  The guard’s automatic was now riding in the right hip pocket of the coveralls. I carried a data pad in my left hand as a prop, and the steel pipe in my right hand in case I needed to get someone’s attention.

  I checked myself out in the row of mirrors over the sinks. My hair was dark brown rather than black, but I wore it short and the hard hat cast a rim of shadow over it, making the color somewhat more indeterminate. The safety glasses did a bit to conceal my lack of epicanthic folds, and there was a lanyard around
my neck bearing an ID trid. I didn’t resemble the face in the three-dimensional image very closely, nor did I look particularly Japanese. But at least I wouldn’t look distinctly un-Japanese at first glance. And that was probably the best I could hope for.

  My disguise was put to the test in very short order. A group of men and women in lab coats were walking past just as I opened the door to the corridor. My instinct was to duck back into my restroom hideaway and wait for them to go by. But the best way to avoid attention is to look like you belong exactly where you are.

  I stepped into the hallway, edging past the tail end of the group, and scrutinizing the screen of the data pad as though it contained vital information about my next work assignment.

  Move along, folks. Nothing to see here. Just another happy grunt worker, doing whatever the hell it is that we do to earn our pay around here.

  No one gave me a second glance.

  I walked three or four meters, and then turned on my heel as though I had suddenly thought of something I needed to take care of back in the other direction. I fell into step behind the gaggle of lab coats, matching my pace to theirs so that I seemed to be with the group, but lagging a little behind.

  It was the convoy principle. A man tagging along with a crowd is always less conspicuous than one guy walking alone. So much for my right-turns-only theory of navigation...

  We passed other people, singly and in small groups. Most in coveralls or lab coats, but a few in business attire. As far as I could tell, none of them seemed to pay particular attention to me.

  Even so, I kept waiting for the alarm to be raised. For uniformed security men to appear, shouting in Japanese for me to freeze. Or for strong hands to grab me from behind as I walked.

  I trailed along in the wake of my lab coated convoy through five or six turns into different corridors. I was still completely lost, but at least I was putting some distance between myself and the room where I’d been held hostage.