Got Thrills? A Boxed Set (A McCray Collection) (49 page)

At the entrance to the famed museum, Mia waved her pass across the holographic scanner and was dinged right in. She nodded at the virtual security guard—Selle, she thought his name was—as he looked down and frowned at her well-worn loafers. Even the holograms in France were pretentious. Shaking off his virtual disapproval, Mia walked up the steps to the first floor. From behind, a group of tourists shoved past her with little or no regard for her presence. They were like the Visigoths invading Rome, only without the manners.

The Mona Lisa will still be there, Mia wanted to shout, but it was the Louvre, after all.

She put her hand inside her purse to check that the device about to rock the world’s notion of art and man was still inside. The MedScan 4, supposedly a simple device to perform CAT scans out in the field had been modified to do so much more. The changes she had made to the program were working fantastically well. Too well. Like revolutionarily well. Through the grad student grapevine, Mia had heard stories of innovations of this magnitude being targeted by corporations and even hostile governments. It might be 2049, but greed was still alive and well.

As she dug around inside her purse, a postcard worked its way to the surface. A postcard she had meant to send to her family last week. At this point, it would be easier just to hand it to them. She was going back to the States to visit for Chinese New Year in four days.

Four days. 96 hours. 5,760 minutes. It was like an old-fashioned time bomb ticking down in her head. Now the tightness in her chest and feelings of absolute doom made sense. It wasn’t some nebulous international conspiracy to steal her scanner. It was plain ole family phobia.

Now if she were married, pregnant, and could present her Ph.D. degree to her parents, kind of like her two sisters, then Mia would be in the clear. However, there was no gold ring on her finger, and last time she checked her belly was unoccupied, and well, her doctoral thesis had hit a sticky patch.

“Excusez-moi, mademoiselle,” a kindly voice murmured as the woman tried to move past Mia.

“Ce n’est pas un problème,” Mia replied, grateful for her undergraduate minor in French. She scooted to the side, the brief encounter bringing her back to her purpose here. Yes, her thesis had basically been blown out of the water, but that was before the modifications to the scanner. Now? She could smell the job offers once she published the results.

Time to get some baseline scans. Mia felt the familiar rush of adrenaline as she pulled the device out of her purse and passed it across the head of a man trailing along at the back of the pack. She made the pass quickly, pulling the scanner down by her side as soon as she could.

Mia peered down at the reading. Impatience. Irritation. Exhaustion. Probably dragged along to the museum by his wife. He certainly was no art lover. Mia scanned another, this one an older woman. Excitement. Anticipation. Exhaustion. Well, they certainly had one thing in common. Perhaps it was the tour guide. The buttoned-down young lady at the front of the group did seem to be… determined.

As Mia studied her device, the group slowed and she almost bumped into her subjects. She stowed her scanner with some trepidation, glancing around to make sure no one had seen. She really didn’t want to get kicked out of the Louvre, too.

She circumvented the group, giving the tour guide a surreptitious scan as she passed. Aggression. Wait. Could that be right? Mia checked the scanner again. Definitely aggression, with little or nothing else. Mia stared at the guide, taking her in more fully. Tallish, blonde hair that was almost platinum, ice blue eyes, and a lean profile. What an odd thing. But so far the scanner had been precise in not just picking up brain waves, but quantifying them. Giving Mia an insight into not exactly what people were thinking, but how they were feeling. Sometimes a much more valuable measure of a person.

Leaving the group and its odd readings behind, Mia took the next set of stairs at a brisk pace. The morning would soon be over and she wanted to have at least a little bit of research to show for it.

As she exited the stairwell, she barely missed running into a large man in an army green coat. So much for her martial art skills keeping her out of trouble. Mia really needed to pay better attention. She turned to apologize to the man, but found his jaw clenched and his fists balled. She took a step back, then as quickly as the fury had risen, it faded away, leaving a look of apparent bewilderment.

“I to apologize, miss. I was not to know I standing in way.” The man’s heavy accent sounded French, with a hint of something else. Belgian, perhaps? His smile was strained, but at least he was trying to be polite. More evidence that he was Belgian.

“It was completely my fault,” Mia said, inching away. “I wasn’t watching where I was going.” As soon as she passed the man, she swiped her scanner past his head, then kept moving.

Not until Mia rounded a corner and headed down the long walkway, passing by the Spanish paintings, did she stop to read the scan. Anger. Worry. Determination. Each one of those results was completely contrary to his words. But she was so new at this. Maybe that’s just how one acted in polite society. You were pissed off on the inside but kind on the outside?

Shrugging off the inconsistencies and deciding to scan only art patrons from now on—she did not want to explain these anomalous readings to her Ph.D. advisor—Mia continued down the long passageway filled with the Italian paintings, working her way from most recent to oldest. Rounding the next corner, Mia found herself in front of Véronèse’s The Wedding Feast at Cana. As luck would have it, there was a couple standing there holding hands, their backs to her.

Perfect. These were her kind of subjects.

Mia glanced around, making sure no one else there could see what she was doing, then pulled out her scanner and approached the happy couple. To get a full read, she had to get close enough for the scanner to pick up the brainwaves, but stay far enough away that she wasn't setting off anyone’s creep alert.

One advantage was Mia’s years of martial arts training. Moving quietly maybe wasn’t something that was taught to the white belts in most dojos, but if you spent enough time working with masters, you picked up a few skills along the way.

She scanned the woman first, moving in diagonally behind her, as if Mia were trying to get closer to a detail in the painting. Truth be told, this wasn’t one of Mia’s favorites, but you grabbed the scans where you could. Mia stepped back to read the results.

They were pretty standard for what Mia had been finding overall with fine art lovers. Increased dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine levels along with increased activity in the cerebral cortex. Peace and pleasure, along with a boost in the overall feeling of intelligence.

Another exploratory pass left Mia with information on the guy. The results were fascinating, if not outright hysterical. Sex. That was pretty much all the scan showed. Sex, heavy on boredom with a smidgeon of irritation. Apparently, this man was here at the museum only as a ploy to get the young woman into the sack with him. For shame.

Thinking this through, Mia realized this could be another application of the scanner. Use it as a dating tool. Scan your guy for sex thoughts. Is he there for love or for lust? The commercial copy practically wrote itself.

Then, finally, perhaps her parents would lay off. Maybe if she were financially successful enough, they’d forget she was single… and apparently, according to her mother, barren. Their feeling was if they were lucky enough to live outside China and its one child rule, you’d better make the best of it. At this point Mia was pretty sure her parents would totally embrace a grandchild out of wedlock.

Mia only had one thing to say to them. Not. Going. To. Happen.

Then the couple shifted and murmured, looking as if they were getting ready to move on. Time for Mia to go as well. She had learned this from painful experience. Staying in one area scanning patrons for too long was what contributed to invitations to never return to said institution.

As she started packing away her scanner, she saw another patron enter from the opposite side, moving toward de Vinci’s Mona Lisa, where Mia was headed next. The visitor was a man that looked to be in his late forties, dark hair peppered grey at his temples. He was wearing a black mock turtleneck with well-pressed Chinos and ebony loafers, the picture of aging European masculinity. The man was walking slowly, but with precision, his eyes directed straightforward rather than observing the artwork on either side. Maybe Mia had time for one more victim.

Perfect time for a walk-by scanning. Timing it with precision, Mia transferred the device from the hand on the far side of the patron to her closer hand just as she passed him. She then swiped the scanner up the man’s spine and around the back of his head before flipping it back into her purse. Mia picked up her pace, not slowing until she neared the Mona Lisa.

Ducking into an alcove, Mia checked the scanner to see what she had picked up. Should be another good baseline model for her to use for her “control group.”

Aggression.

This was getting weird. One strange reading like that in a day was not unusual. Even two wasn’t enough to raise Mia’s hackles. But that plus the guy in the green coat? Maybe there was something in the air. Mia had certainly woken up on the wrong side of the bed, but she doubted a scan of her brain would show that she was likely to engage in violence any time soon.

Shaking off the negative trend, Mia moved on to the Mona Lisa display. As usual, there was a fair-sized crowd surrounding the mystery woman with the provocative smirk. While the crowds would normally make her life more difficult, Mia found she had much most of her success around the more famous paintings. Since everyone there was busy with their vid-discs and camera drones, one more unidentified device amongst them didn’t usually raise anyone’s guard.

It was also possible to get much closer to someone without looking like a stalker. The only issue in spaces like these was getting a clear scan on one individual. It required some innovation and creative posturing at times.

Once she gathered enough beauty, peace, and universal love readings to rescue her faith in mankind, she headed up to the second floor where the French paintings were housed.

As she entered the older part of the Louvre, Mia passed through the area where the temporary exhibits were housed. This month’s exhibit was the world’s largest collection of star diamonds. Mia rolled her eyes at the crowds that were gathered to peer at the tiny shards of rainbow-colored mineral. Seriously, they were like a murder of crows, flocking around a shiny object.

Mia had heard that a star diamond chip that measured less than a twenty-fourth of a carat had just sold for a million and a half US dollars. What kind of insanity was that?

Even the way they had to be mined by hand seemed barbaric. Star diamonds could be found only up on the moon, where asteroids filled with the shiny crystals had struck on the dark side. They were undetectable by any kind of location technology tested up to this point. In order to find the little suckers, diamond hunters had to pan for them the same way miners had done back two centuries ago during the Gold Rush, with the addition of spacesuits and oxygen tanks.

Stepping through the crowds, Mia was jolted with another thought. What if she scanned the brainwaves of the patrons here? She could demonstrate that the star diamonds were invoking a more primitive animal response, versus the more elevated cerebral cortex activity that paintings and fine art caused. That would be an interesting addition to her findings.

Mia pulled out the scanner and moved in closer to the mob of people, who she could now see, was the group that had bumped her upon entering. Up front was the icy blond with the determined eyes. The woman spoke to her group with an accent that sounded Swedish or Finnish… something Nordic, anyway.

As Mia passed one of the plasteel showcases housing the diamonds, her scanner vibrated in her hand, indicating a completed scan. Strange. She hadn’t thought she was close enough to pick up a reading on anyone.

Searching the crowd to make sure no one had noticed, Mia locked gazes with the tour guide. Steely blue eyes bored into her own, causing Mia to flush and duck away. She shoved the scanner back into her purse, trying to make the action seem as natural as possible.

Mia scuttled off to one of the corners of the exhibit, waiting for a harsh voice of a virtual security guard to ask her what she was doing. When nothing happened, she leaned against the wall, allowing her heart rate to return to something resembling normal. That had been close. And more than a little strange. Her scanner had never done anything like that before.

A quick check of the system revealed nothing out of order. The battery was charged, the scanner seemed to be working, and all of the other scans appeared normal. Maybe there had been some sort of interference from a nearby vidphone. Or maybe there was something in the security measures the museum was using on the star diamonds. They had to be keeping close tabs on those little glass chips. All told, they were probably worth close to a billion dollars. That had to be it.

Reassured, both by her hypothesis and the fact that no one had come to search her purse, Mia prepped the scanner and got ready to step out of her darkened corner. Just as she was about to rejoin the group and start collecting data, the crowd around the exhibit started moving toward the nearest exit. Mia guessed the tour group was on its way toward whatever else was coolest this month at the Louvre.

As the tour guide followed the group, herding them forward like so many sheep, Mia wondered at the woman’s tactics. Didn’t tour guides normally lead from the front? As the guide passed through the doors of the exit, she took a moment to pull them closed behind her.

Mia started to move out of her alcove, but was stopped by movement from the opposite direction from which the tour group had gone. Two men entered through the doorway and closed the doors behind them. Mia felt a shock of recognition. One of the men was the older man that had scanned as aggressive. The other was wearing an army green coat.