“Hold on a second.” Kaylie’s hand traced an ominous arc, pointing to the table. “What. Is. That.”
Cindira didn’t have a chance to conjure fresh annoyance at being interrupted yet again. Instead, she followed her step-sister’s eyes, to where the mysterious box had been left for later inspection.
“That? It’s nothing.” Cindira’s head quirked to the side as she took in the baffling sight. Not only had the box magically grown a lid; it was open.
“I know what that is.” Kaylie managed to cross the room before Cindira could create an excuse to call her off.
“You do?”
“Yes, only... What the hell? Cindy, what are these?”
As Kaylie reached into the box and pulled out the contents, Cindira found herself asking the same question. At first glance, it appeared to be some sort of bowl or figurine. Whatever it was, it was mostly transparent. Only by relaxing her eyes and not focusing on it did Cindira come to understand the object balanced on the end of Kaylie’s finger was a shoe.
A glass shoe.
Her step-sister laughed. “Somebody sure punked you good.”
“They did?”
“Yes, they did.” One corner of Kaylie’s mouth rose in a lopsided smirk. She palmed the shoe for just a moment before tossing it across the room. Cindira shifted – managing to snatch it from a certain cracked fate – and landed on the couch with her hair lashed across her fate. “I saw a prototype of this last year in Bangalore. It’s supposed to be a docking station for mobile jacking.”
Cindira blew a raspberry. “Mobile jacking? It’s a myth, not to mention, impossible. The energy and bandwidth required just won’t allow for it. Even if they were real, the last thing I’d shape it as would be a glass shoe.”
Product design wasn’t Cindira’s specialty, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out the materials didn’t adapt well to a form worn on the feet and crushed to the street.
“The guy in India only had the base. He had schematics for the wearable he said he’d designed for it, shaped like – get this – a crown.” Kaylie picked up the box, turning it. A swish-clunk-clunk as she did so suggested the sister shoe lay within. “Flattery will get you a lot of places, but not into our product portfolio. This is probably something like that. People have been trying to design them for years, but like you said, it’s just not possible. Anyways, as I was saying: dress.”
“I can’t. I’d have to go back to Tybor to—”
But Kaylie was already heading toward the door. “Don’t forget, I’m your boss now. That can be a good thing, or a very bad thing for you.”
“I could quit, you know.” Cindira crossed her arms as Kaylie paused at the door. “Lots of other places would love to have me. Tangentry would love it.”
Kaylie paused to turn. “We both know you’d never leave the company your parents built from the ground up. What would Omala Grover say if she found out her only daughter went to work for the competition? The dress: in my Kingdom closet ASAP. Don’t forget shoes, necklaces, etc.”
“Fine, but I can’t design one from scratch that quickly. All I could do would be to modify.”
“Whatever. Just make it different enough to piss off Maeve and teach her a lesson about trying to copy me.”
5
By the time Cindira arrived back at the office, only the night guards and a few people in the complimentary customer service suite were still in the building. The former knew Cindira on sight and didn’t bother to ask why she was at work at this time of night; it wasn’t Kaylie’s first time being a diva. The latter were jacked into the vreal world and weren’t even aware of her existence as she passed their offices.
Cindira threw down her bag on her desk and called up the Kitchen’s AI assistant.
Pele’s soft feminine voice filled the space. “Good evening, Miss Tieg. How may I be of service?”
“I’m here by myself.” Again. “I’m going to need help running the ops while I work inside the simulator. Open a port into The Kingdom and take me to Kaylie’s room.”
In the center of the Kitchens, the cylindrical chamber, some five feet in diameter, called the Sink served as both their sandbox when developing new elements for the vreal world, as well as a semi-jacked environment where products already deployed into The Kingdom could be tweaked without taking them completely offline. Cindira stepped into the chamber, a small thrill running up her spine as the tangible-light diodes, or TLDs, embedded in the floor, ceiling, and walls fired up.
Pastoral landscapes whisked by, the image dodging people—other clients inside the environment—panning over cobble-stoned streets and around the VAPORs until, at last, it reached the front of her family’s Kingdom residence, Alsace. Styled after a picture Kaylie had once seen of a baroque French chateau, the two-story brick home with narrow turrets on its left and right flanks looked out of place in the heart of The Kingdom’s urban center, with its rows of grand townhouses pushing out from either side. Cindira knew Kaylie hadn’t been happy about its humble scale; it could barely sleep ten. For once, Johanna had put her foot down on her own daughter’s vanity for the reason that ever motivated her beyond spoiling her children: money. The profits to be made from the lots closest to the markets and the palace district were far too lucrative to waste on self-indulgence, even of her children.
Pele’s voice filtered through a speaker above. “Authorization required to enter. Please state passcode for user Kitchen316 to enter the premises of Her Majesty, Queen Johanna Tieg.”
Cindira’s fingers flexed and tightened as a wave of disgust curdled her insides, both because of her password, and for the reminder that her step-mother had done one old-fashioned thing by taking her father’s name when they’d been married. “Cinderella.”
The image dove forward again, through the front door, past the luxe entryway and the chandelier overhead, up the stairs, and into Kaylie’s private suite. Once the image settled inside Kaylie’s room and in front of her wardrobe, Cindira set about her work.
The microscopic sensors embedded the glass around her read each movement, translating real world actions into vreal world manipulations. Though she knew there was no actual brass handle within her grasp, Cindira’s mind created faux sensations, telling her that she indeed held something. The wardrobe the length of a king-sized bed held gowns. Dozens of them in a rainbow of colors and a caravan of materials. Clients made certain agreements when they paid to play inside this virtual landscape, one being that, in order to maintain the esthetic of the fairytale world, they must dress appropriately. For women, this meant complex layers of petticoats, chemises and corsets – all designed and sold for a tidy profit by trendy designers. But even the most talented of the dress designers in New York or Hong Kong couldn’t do what Cindira could with code. Kaylie might not know the extent to which her step-sister could read and rewrite this world without equal, but she knew that none other matched Cindira’s etailoring skills.
In short order, Cindira located the dress in question, one she had coded just a week or two ago for Kaylie to wear to yet another ball.
There was always another ball.
A trail of chiffon and lace danced over the floor as she pulled it from the closet. It was indeed one of her better creations. The secret to its appeal, the tiny twinkling diodes coded into the fabric that made it shimmer in even the dimmest light. Technically, the conception of such a thing would have been flagged by the team in charge of observing and maintaining The Kingdom’s esthetic integrity. This was one instance where Kaylie being Kaylie helped Cindira push the boundaries. No one was going to flag something worn by a high-ranking Tybor executive and the step-daughter of Rex Tieg as non-compliant.
Cindira took a moment, studying the gown, conceptualizing its iterations.
“Pele, give me an interface up here.”
“Acknowledged.”
Like some sort of technical wisp-o-the-willows, a soft glow emerged, a floating tablet filled with numbers, letters, and genius. The code. Most saw
only the rudimentary meaning behind the series of symbols, picking out the sections that served to express the augmented representation of each element of the dress floating in the air before her. Cindira saw form, shape, beauty. A few changes, including moving the color from green to yellow and shifting about the pleats and diodes, and the only thing remaining was to follow the template change with the accessories. After which, she hung her creation on the door of the closet, admiring it. It really was quite a gorgeous piece. Elegant, luxurious, yet simple in its form. Kaylie would turn every head in the Palace when she entered wearing it. Cindira reached out, running her fingers over the fabric, imagining the sensation of silk on her palm was real.
“User approaching,” Pele announced.
Kaylie must have jacked in early to check on Cindira’s work. Which meant it was time to go. Not that her step-sister would see her if she came in. Though Cindira could interact with Kingdom artifacts in the Sink as if she were jacked in, she remained invisible. She instinctually turned to witness the look in her step-sister’s eyes when she saw the refashioned dress, the closest thing to appreciation she’d get, when a very unexpected thing happened.
It wasn’t Kaylie. It wasn’t even Cade or Johanna. Hell, it wasn’t even her father, though after two months of the silent treatment, she’d actually welcome that for once.
Who did enter instead was Detective Frank Batista.
“What are you doing here?”
He couldn’t hear her. Cindira hadn’t engaged the intercom that allowed someone in the Kitchens to be piped into the section of The Kingdom framed in the Sink. If he could have heard her, she’d deliver an inquisition. The Tieg vresidence had been set up with the strictest security protocols. Just because Batista was a member of GAIA’s security forces didn’t mean he had any special privileges outside of it. With a warrant, he could compel his way in, but there’s no way Cindira wouldn’t have heard about that. For reasons she didn’t understand entirely, she found herself suddenly on the defensive for a family that in turn felt it owed her nothing.
“You should leave,” she commanded to dead air, before remembering she had her AI assistant at the ready. “Pele, remove user Frank Batista from this zone. Move him, oh, let’s say, fifty feet from the property boundary.”
“Cannot comply.”
Cindira bit her tongue, reminding herself it was illogical to get angry at something that lacked sentience. “And just why can you not comply?”
“No user with that name is in the current zone.”
“But I’m looking right at him.” Maybe his profile was somehow listed under another name? “Pele, identify the client who is currently in the room with me.”
“There are currently no users in this space.”
Impossible. “You just told me that a user was approaching. I—”
“User approaching.”
Before Cindira could finish talking, the door to the bedroom opened. Vesuvius would admire the way her blood pressure blew up. The form of the condemnation coming her way took shape in her imagination: Kaylie was going to see Batista and point an immediate finger at Cindira’s messy security code. There’s no way her step-sister would ever believe it had been mere coincidence and being anything but would mean something sinister was afoot.
But as Cindira spun, shouting pointlessly to the detective to leave before he was seen, she discovered the officer had beaten her to the punch.
She was alone.
A smile stretched across Kaylie’s face as she saw her remodeled dress hanging on the door of the wardrobe. Cindira’s wayward relation walked right through her, oblivious to her presence, her arms held out to embrace the latest creation.
“Perfect!” Kaylie said. “Take that, Maeve. We’ll see who Shapur goes home with tonight, won’t we?”
As Kaylie began to strip off her Kingdom avatar’s default wardrobe, Cindira couldn’t get away fast enough.
“Pele, close the window.”
In a blink, she found herself looking back at the kitchen through glass much clearer than what she had just seen.
6
The guy did not exist.
Strictly speaking, Cindira knew that wasn’t true. Of course, Detective Batista existed. She had seen him, watched him talk with Kaylie, found herself blushing when, for the slightest moment, their gazes had met. He had been real, but the story he’d conjured? Anything but.
Three nights of scrapping through public records after work, and nothing. She needed a break.
She shook the milk carton, relieved to find that there was just enough left for her cup of tea. As much as people liked to joke she was her mother’s copy, Cindira differed from Omala on that. Chai must be taken sweet and blond. “Like I like my men,” Scotia had once quipped. The hot drink rushed down her throat, a liquid version of meditation that cleared her mind and set her at ease. Cindira crawled under her blanket and pulled the computer on to her lap, determined to find out who in the hell this Batista character really was. More time only brought more frustration.
“How in this age does a person not exist online?” Whatever trick he’d used, she wanted to know it. More concerning was why someone would want to hide who he really was. The list of motivations that populated in her mind’s eye made her shudder.
Maybe if she went to Tybor and scoured the systems directly? Cindira deposited her teacup on the table next to her bed and shuddered again. Okay, so the guy wasn’t who he said he was, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t a potential threat to the company somehow. Creating a trail tied to her employee login investigating his particulars might look like trying to dig up dirt to an outsider. Ironically, it was better to stick to the public places of the web.
She wracked her brain for every bit of information she could remember from her brief observation. Hadn’t he said his father had been one of the early representatives to the first GAIA congress? She scoured records, cross-referencing the list of male members with those who also had sons working in the security forces. The few hits she got resulted in profiles that didn’t match the interloper’s appearance. Just to be fair, she repeated the process with the second and third congresses. Still no match. A fourth search turned up empty as well.
Her fingers hovered over the keyboard, poised but directionless. What else could she do? She’d taken Batista at his word, had no reason to suspect that the man Johanna Tieg referred to as a detective could be anything but.
Johanna. Cindira didn’t credit her step-mother with very many positive traits, but one thing she would say of the second Mrs. Tieg was that she ran a tight ship. System integrity and security were paramount items of concern at Tybor, both because The Kingdom’s profitability demanded it, but more so because their clientele did. The affluent and the wealthy counted on the platform to be their private playground. Long gone were any innocent notions that participants in the vreal world merely enjoyed the fairytale pageantry, even if that was the way it was marketed. While guidelines and liability considerations led to rules dictating the types of behavior clients could engage in “in public” while jacked in, behind closed virtual doors, anything and everything was game. How, then, had Johanna let an unknown entity into their midst?
Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe Johanna was perfectly aware of who Batista really was.
He’d been interested in the architecture behind Tybor’s worlds, hadn’t he? He’d been young, attractive, open to Kaylie’s flirting, even one-upping her to a point that had Cindira herself envious. Batista did everything that was needed to get Kaylie to lower her defenses. Kaylie wasn’t Johanna, and she’d let herself be played like an antique synthesizer.
But how did that connect with what she’d witnessed? How had Batista gotten into Kaylie’s room? Even if he was Johanna’s minion, there was no way Kaylie would have agreed to that intrusion. Not unless they had arranged a clandestine meeting, anyway. Given that the man had mysteriously disappeared the second Kaylie had come into her room, that didn’t seem likely.
Cindira threw down her
pencil and took to her feet. Maybe the place to look for answers wasn’t online, in the great big world, or in a database. Maybe the answers she sought were sitting in the big corner office at Tybor.
She had to know. Not because she cared a lick about what went on in The Kingdom. Frankly, she didn’t even really care if the platform disappeared tomorrow. But since it was a clone of GAIA, whatever threatened it, threatened her mother’s true legacy as well. Johanna certainly wasn’t about to go to bat for it.
Which left Cindira on deck.
She put away her computer, vowing that she’d get her answers when she got to work in the morning.
7
Johanna Tieg held the same opinion of rain that she did of her step-daughter; it was a necessary inconvenience that ultimately did a lot of good if she could tolerate its occasional appearance.
Over the edge of her display, Cindira’s hands crossed in front of her as she walked into the room. Johanna tapped the button on her headset so she could switch from dictation to manual keying and keep the tail end of the message she was writing private, pausing a moment to hold up one of her long, ringed fingers to request silence. Say what she would about Omala Grover, her predecessor in both the boardroom and the bedroom, at least she had raised Cindira to be compliant. She’d never admit aloud that her own children could have done with a bit more of that in their rearing, but then, she’d rarely admit it to herself either.
Finally, after she’d sent the message requesting an update of tomorrow’s plans, she sat back, steepling her hands before her. “Is there something you need, Cindy?”
Cindira assumed a seat across the desk. “Since Kaylie is busy getting a handle of her new position, I thought I could be the one to tell you about the detective’s visit to the Kitchens last week.”
City of Cinders Page 4