At least nobody shot at her as she crossed the street. And nobody yelled a warning or threat, either. She went into a crouch, low and slow. There were a number of different entrances, but even though the outside was dotted with a couple of dozen CCTV cameras, she didn’t fear them. The grid was still down, and if they’d gotten a few of the backup generators up and running, I was sure that we would see the red light blinking beneath their lenses.
But how was she going to get in? That’s the thing about hospitals, and one of the reasons that they’re so hard to secure. They’ve got more entrances and exits than a rabbit’s warren, and once you’re inside, you have to contend with all of those twisting hallways with clinically similar floor layouts. It wouldn’t take very long at all before everything started to look the same.
She hid between two parked cars, and I took the opportunity to go ahead and scout. I got in through the door, when I talked her into crouching. I don’t know if it was because of persistence or simple randomness, but I was beginning to believe that now and then I could influence her.
That meant that I owed it to both of us to get as much information as I could. I wouldn’t be much of an advisor if I had shitty advice…
In theory, just busting in the front entrance wasn’t an option. If there was a Guild in there and they’d set a guard, as they no doubt would have, she’d be dead in seconds. I ignored the sliding glass doors that were in front of me and instead ducked around the corner. Here was a smaller entrance, and above it was a sign that said Employees Only. That had promise, and it was made even better by the fact that it was a traditional door and not one that needed electricity to open.
Judging by the damage done to both the hinges and the lock, more than one person had already tried to get in this way. I didn’t see evidence of any repairs, which meant that either whoever owned the hospital now still considered this entryway secure or they didn’t know that the tampering had gone on.
Whichever one it was in, a secure location or one owned by a group too sure of their own abilities, I was fine with it.
I’d done all the looking around on my own that I could. Just as I was about to attempt to get Sasha over here, I turned around and saw that she was already on the way.
As she poked around and inspected the stuff that I had just looked at, I started to turn my mind to the problem of getting in. Another problem with hospitals is that they’re pretty much built from the ground up with the understanding that at least part of them will be open to the public at all times. That meant that they had a lot of doors that were hard to keep locked down. I was sure that, if a decent-size Guild were in charge of this place, they would want more than a few escape routes in case a bigger fish decided to come and swallow them up. And since most of the doors would be electronic, that meant they would’ve already forced them open. Nobody wants to have to blast their way through a bunch of obstacles when death is snapping at their heels.
Sasha was careful to stay flat to the building as she studied the possible ways in. Sturdy employee door, front entrance with an obvious chokepoint… Not much help here. She crept the length of the building and then slunk around another corner, which put her right in front of the emergency entrance. It was wide and would have normally been a well-lit hive of activity, since this was where people hurried off to when they needed treatment without the hassle of appointments.
I was ready to give up on the whole endeavor. It hadn’t been a bad idea, but that didn’t make it a good one, either. Sasha was still willing to give the hospital a try, and I figured now was as good a time as any to try out my influence again.
“Come on, Sasha. It’s useless. Let’s find something else, huh?”
I saw her shoulders stiffen. She was resisting.
Fine… Time for the big guns, then. “There’s nothing in there but more pain and misery. Let’s just find a place where you can get some scrap and level up a few of your skills. At least then, when Deep Dive shows up, you’ll have more of a fighting chance.”
I saw her flinch. She heard the logic of my words, but I was pretty sure that she was assuming that the argument was coming from her internal dialogue. “Fuck off,” she said angrily. “I’m sick of being scared of this place.”
Wait a minute. She knew this hospital? Little pieces started to fall into place in a trickle of recall. She hadn’t scouted the doors like I had, because she was familiar with their location. And the way she’d been driving the van… It hadn’t been random. She’d been making a beeline for this building the whole time.
A little flicker of white overhead dragged her attention away from the emergency entrance. We hadn’t seen it before because it had been tangled in a tree, but the wind had revealed it. Some enterprising soul had tied a string of bedsheets together. They led up to a window on the –
“Sixth floor,” she whispered, her voice thick with grief. “Room six nineteen.”
I looked at her, then counted the stories. She was right about the sixth floor part, at least. Someone up there had used the bedsheets as a ladder to escape. The end of it had been caught in a gust sometime between then and now and been tangled in some branches high in the tree.
Sasha started climbing.
This tree has granted you a climbing ability of 100% for the next 10 seconds. Use it well, Sash.
She didn’t squander the bonus, squirreling up the tree as if it were no different to something she’d do any other day of her life. But the look on her face told a different story. This was new, and she and I both knew right away that this wasn’t a message from Headshot.
It was from her dad, the one person in the world who she’d ever allowed to call her Sash.
Blake Redhook.
Ten seconds of a perfect climbing ability was more than enough, and she was up the rope and through the window so quickly that whatever was keeping me tied to her shuddered and stalled. My vision flickered, and the next thing I knew I was standing in the hospital room next to her, the end of the bedsheets tied around a heavy railing that had been mounted to the wall to help sick people get in and out of bed. She was pulling the rope in, making sure that nobody could follow us.
Everything was quiet. The linens that remained on the mattress had been disturbed, and the pillow had a splash of blood on the right and left side, leaving the middle with the disturbing outline of someone’s head.
The bed itself was surrounded by a swarm of equipment and monitors. The cabling alone was impressive, eventually coiling together into a python-wide serpent that ran through a custom connection set into the wall. Everything was dead, since the hospital didn’t have power either.
This was just another room to me, but not to Sasha. She moved around the room as if she’d been here a million times, which was exactly what I was beginning to suspect. Had she been injured as a child? There were a lot of her thoughts that I either hadn’t been able to access or hadn’t thought to try, but nowhere in there had I bumped into any memory of a hospital stay.
For the first time all day, she didn’t search the room for anything of value. Instead, she accessed her menu, brought up the app that let her use her phone from within the Absolute Reality Rig, and enabled a screening filter to block Headshot’s access to the conversation. A blank look fell over her avatar.
Sasha was barely in the game, and I felt her absence yank me back into her brain.
TWENTY-SIX
This is Blake Redhook’s phone. May I ask who’s calling?”
I shook my head and mentally rolled my eyes. Seriously? My mom had answered every call I’d ever heard like that, as if my dad’s phone was some helpless, sentient creature that had a robust social life and yet somehow was unable to communicate on its own behalf.
It was ridiculous, but so was the fact that she still refused to get her own phone, even after everything. And she still didn’t realize that you can look at the screen and work out who’s on the other end of the line before you answer.
I don’t think I’d ever heard anyone other than he
r use that fake telephone voice, because the rest of the world knew what they were going to get when they answered.
“It’s Sasha, Mom.”
“Oh, that’s nice.”
“What’s nice? That it’s me calling?”
My question threw her. She’s bone tired. I heard it in her voice, underneath the forced enthusiasm that has been a part of her script for so long that I don’t even know if she’s aware that she’s faking it anymore. “No. Or yes. I don’t know… It’s just turned into a very long day. I’m happy to hear from you, though.”
I frowned. She was even more stilted and formal than normal, which meant that either something was wrong or someone else was in the room with her. Or both. “Is everything okay?”
I can picture her in my mind. Red hair going gray at the temples. New crow’s nests touching the corners of her eyes. Lips pursed so hard that I can hear them part when she speaks. “Of course things are fine. I’m here with him now.”
“Can I speak to him?” It’s the same request I always made, though there have been times when she’s refused it. Never outright, but every now and then told me that she was ‘on her way out the door’ or ‘just about to speak with the man in charge’ and I hadn’t gotten my chance.
Whatever. The opportunity to talk to him was the only reason I traded words with her these days, and she knew it. I understood why my mother had pulled away from me. It was her way of coping, and I didn’t begrudge her the distance. We were never close anyway, and I knew that I was nothing more than a painful reminder of the good times.
I wanted to tell her that this wasn’t any easier for me. If anything, I pretty much constantly had to fight the urge to vomit my emotions right down the line at her. I dreamt of letting the bile burn her up. I wanted it to fill the room she was standing in right now, the same one my avatar was currently occupying.
The Good Samaritan. I’d been looking for this hospital for months. It was never where it should be. Even now, it didn’t belong in the city block it had decided to occupy. It was an architecturally-aware white whale, as tricksy as they came.
And now I’d finally found it.
But my Mom was still stalling. “Are you sure? Now might not be the best time.”
It was the last straw. This gatekeeper bullshit had gone on for too long. I snapped, and even though I’d regret it later, I couldn’t stop myself from going off on her. “Put my father on the phone, god damn it!”
She didn’t ruffle easily, though. “I’d love to,” she told me, ever the one to try and make the waters appear calmer than they were. There was a couple of moments of silence. Just long enough for her to take a few steps and press the phone to his ear.
It lasted for an eternity.
“Daddy? It’s Sash. I’m here.”
I paused because I didn’t want to overwhelm him with my voice. A few years ago I might’ve been optimistic enough to pretend that I was expecting an answer, but those days are long, long gone.
“I’m trying. I really am.” But is that the truth? Probably not. I can hear him breathing, but that’s a lie too. The reality is that I can hear the machines breathing on his behalf. “I’m going to make you proud, though.”
Silence.
Maybe I should shut up there, but I was so damn alone. I needed to vent, at least a little. And who better to complain to than a man who couldn’t interrupt? “It’s getting crazy in here. Deep Dive is in the game now. They’re trying to track me down, and -”
“Is that Sasha! So good to hear your voice, my dear. Tell me, how long has it been since I have been given a chance to lay my eyes upon you?”
I mentally recoiled. The heavy South African accent was unmistakable, but my brain made me blurt, “Who is this?” as a way of giving me a moment of space.
He clicked his tongue at me, the annoyed elder chastising the child. “It is Desmond, of course. But perhaps you do not remember me. I work with your father.”
Bullshit. Desmond claiming he worked with my dad was like Herod saying he worked with Jesus. I hadn’t even met him until after dad had his accident, which goes to show how little time Desmond had spent in his orbit.
My father was adored by each and every one of his staff. I knew them all, since they were constantly eating dinner at our house, and when they weren’t doing that, they were burning the midnight oil at the computers in the basement or showing up unannounced at our door with a new problem that they needed his brain to help them solve.
But Desmond? He wasn’t a coder. I’d heard his name amongst my dad and his employees, and never once had it been said in anything other than frustration. Desmond Jae was responsible for clearing the red tape, and giving birth to an Artificial Intelligence that could keep Headshot going was making a mountain of it. There weren’t laws to stop them from doing what they wanted to do, not really, but that was only because the guys that write them had never so much as turned on a computer, let alone stepped into Absolute Reality.
As soon as the doctors had put dad into the rehabilitative coma though, Desmond was everywhere. He claimed that the two of them had made a major breakthrough together on the tech that would later become Headshot. He was nothing more than a snake oil salesman. He wanted my mom and me to buy into the story that he and dad had ended up as equal partners in the discovery, with both of them facing the dangers and wonders of this brave new world together.
It wasn’t true, but Desmond had used enough influence in the upper echelons to put himself in charge of Deep Dive Studios. He was nothing more than a thieving conman, but he was too good at charming the average stockholder for them to see through him.
“Are you still there, my girl? I said I work with your father.”
“Leave him alone. He needs to get better. He isn’t working with anyone, not while he’s comatose.”
Desmond chuckled. “So you say. Listen, I can only imagine how hard all of this has been for you and your mother. I thought maybe it would be a good idea if you came down here to his room and we could have a little chat, just the three of us.”
“You mean the four.”
I heard him hesitate as he tried to work out who the fourth was. “Right,” he said, after far too long. “Your dad, too. Four… When would you like to be here?”
I tried not to dwell on the irony of what he’d just said. I was standing in a virtual representation of the same room he was in right now. “Probably never,” I told him. “Not for a while, at least. I’ve got big plans, and not a lot of time to make them happen.”
I thought that he would get the hint, but if Desmond were capable of catching hints or feeling shame, he wouldn’t be the person that he was. “I wouldn’t be so certain if I were you. Big plans, as we have seen firsthand, have a way of blowing up in your face.”
“Thanks for the advice.”
“Anytime.” He laughed warmly. “You know Sasha; you’re a talented coder in your own right. And you’re a gamer, as well. I keep waiting for you to log in to Headshot, but my techs tell me that you haven’t. You don’t even have an account, which I admit to finding very strange indeed.”
“Too busy, like I said.” I needed to steer him away from this, and fast.
But Desmond didn’t steer easy. “What would you think, if you were me? The daughter of the man who made it happen won’t even play the game he built from the ground up. And more importantly, what would the press say about it, if they found out?”
“They won’t.”
He sighed, though it still sounded like he was smiling. This guy was just about unflappable. “Please see that they do not.”
Who did this guy think he was? He had zero right to ask me for favors. It was long past time to put an end to this, so I fired a shot across his bow. “I think the press has a lot more to talk about regarding Headshot, particularly at the moment. Your launch is anything but smooth. Server crashes and login issues in your first week? Pretty sloppy, Desmond. Dad would never have dropped the ball like that. Then again, he was the one saying the g
ame wasn’t ready, right up until he stopped saying anything. Hell, Deep Dive didn’t even have a working AI, back then.”
“But we have one now.”
This wasn’t going anywhere. I couldn’t help but think that he was learning more from me then I was from him. I felt my fear rising, and like a terrified little girl of four or five, I wanted to stomp my feet and demand that he hand the phone back to my mother. Desmond was a lot of things, but stupid wasn’t one of them.
I was too close to ending Headshot. If I messed up now and made him suspicious of me, this would all come crashing down on my head at the last second. Time for the Hail Mary. “Desmond, it’s just…” I didn’t have to feign the emotion. All I needed to do was finally let it out. “It’s just so damn hard to imagine playing that game. It’s too close to my heart. Sometimes I want to set up an account and, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. I don’t think you get it, honestly. My whole life was spent with him dreaming up that game. We’d be driving, and I’d have to help him find a parking spot because he was so lost in his own head. I’d stay up late and watch him practically bleed the code into the computer.”
It was as open and honest as I trusted myself to be, even though the core of it was obviously a lie. I was in Headshot every single day. He’d confirmed that he was watching my connection, which meant that I’d have been tracked from the very start unless my countermeasures had held up. Their last attack had done something to me, though. The fact that I may still be wearing the face of someone else’s avatar was proof of that.
I needed to be careful. Toward the end, dad had been unbelievably paranoid about his work, locking it down under asymmetrically morphing passwords and custom-crafted biometric protocol. I didn’t have his intellect, but I made do. So far I’d stayed out of their reach, but so far wasn’t going to count for much if they nabbed me.
Two in the Gut Page 19