Heaven is a Place on Earth (20 page)

“
Sure, but the system won't mind because it will think we're legitimate Chastity Mining employees.”

“
But our tags...”

Della spoke up. “Obviously tag data isn't as secure as us old folk believe it is.”

-oOo-

“
Do you know what the third biggest cause of death is for under-twenties?” Della asked as they chewed on printed steaks.

Ginny shrugged. “Drugs?”

“Nope. Thrombosis.”

“
Oh my God. Really? But they put additives in the drips to avoid that, don't they? And the tanks monitor you.”

“
Yeah. They feed tiny amounts of aspirin into your blood unless you stay in for more than twenty-four hours, then it switches to warfarin. But there's only so much the tanks can do. Some of these kids stay in their tanks for two or three days at a stretch. Sometimes longer. Top of the range models have good medical systems that alert you if they detect blood clots, and parental overrides to limit their use, but we're talking lots of money. The kind of tanks poor kids use don't have medical monitoring at all, and the poorest families are the very ones that spend most time unlatched. It's a big problem.”

Ginny looked a little queasy and Della supposed she was thinking about her own tank and its limitations. Della had never seen it, but she guessed the tank she had in her spare room was several grades better than Ginny's.

“Sorry,” Della said. “Not really a topic for mealtime.” But she couldn't stop thinking about it. Kids in tanks, choosing to be there rather than in the world, unlatched and unchained, living their comic-book fantasies. Sorenssen's outburst had upset her. It had actually scared her. Was this the world they were building? A world where kids died in their tanks, immersed in pleasant deceptions, preferring to live and die as gods and heroes, than to step out into the real world even for as long as it took to stretch their legs?

She recalled Ginny's story of visiting Cal's house, and Tonia's, of riding through the streets on a bicycle, riding in planes, staying in hotels. “Everything is so daggy out there!” Ginny had said, apparently amazed by the revelation. “It's all so scruffy and neglected when you turn your aug off. I suppose that's why we all stay latched.” Della tried to remember when the last time was that she had looked at the world – even her own apartment – with minimal aug. She couldn't. She remembered the last time she had left her apartment. It had been two years ago, when she got her last promotion and moved out of her old one-bedroom place and into this new one. She had made the whole trip latched. Why wouldn't she? She grunted with surprise to realise she had never seen what her unit actually looked like.

“Maybe Sorenssen is right,” she said. “Maybe we're all, gradually disengaging from the world, slowly disappearing into our own minds.”

Ginny looked at her for a long time then said, “Which way did you vote?”

After meeting Odin, Father of the gods, they had taken a few minutes to vote in the plebiscite. Oddly enough, Sorenssen had reminded them before they left. “Vote 'No',” he'd said, earnestly. “Keep artificial reality real.” Della had treated his injunction with sneering contempt. As if she'd listen to a dickhead like that. But Ginny had questioned him closely about it, listening carefully to his reasons. Of course, she would, being so tangled up with September 10 and the cyberterror legislation. To Della's ears, the boy's maundering about trust and government sounded like he'd been reading too many S10 slogans and not actually thinking about the true purpose of the legislation, which was to keep people safe from lunatics like the ones that had nearly killed her friend.

“
I voted 'Yes', of course.”

Ginny nodded, looking troubled. “Yeah, me too.”

-oOo-

Della met Inspector Chu at the usual pavement café the next day. The news feeds were full of the plebiscite: a sixty-eight per cent vote in favour of the new legislation, lower than the polls had suggested, but a decisive victory for the government. Talking heads from the Cabinet were already promising that the Government would press forward with all speed to fulfil the wishes of the people, to honour its new obligation, exercise its overwhelming mandate, and bring the legislation before the lower house in a matter of days. It gave Della a queasy feeling to think the terrorists would be watching these same feeds, perhaps saying to one another, “OK, the time has come to act.” It was some comfort to know the police were across it, keeping tabs on what was happening, but Chu had always seemed a little too relaxed about it, and he had lied to her about the Rice Consortium.

Seeing him lounging in the café, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, blatantly checking out a curvy, long-legged waitress construct, did little for her confidence.

The slogan on his shirt said, “Big Brother has better things to do than watch you.” She nodded towards it as she took her seat. “Cute. You undercover?”

He grinned. “It's Sunday. Even cops get a day off.” There was something different about him. He seemed cheerful, more cocky.

She ordered a coffee and the leggy waitress construct simpered at Chu, no doubt sensing his interest. “Two hundred years of the struggle for women's rights,” she said, “and we still get this shit everywhere we go.” It didn't usually bother her but her transformation into a comic-book goddess yesterday still rankled.

Chu kept grinning. “Hey, if you like, we'll call over one of the waiters and he can flex his biceps at you. If you want equal treatment, nothing's stopping you from having it.”

“
Yeah, I know the argument. We all have the right to behave equally badly.”

He shrugged. “Anyway, she's a construct. Where's the harm? Don't tell me you've never taken a construct to bed.”

“I didn't come here to talk about my sex life, Detective.” Which begged the question of what she had gone there to talk about. Sorenssen had called that morning to say he'd reviewed the security set-up at Chastity and was ready to go when she gave the word. The imminence of the intended crime had panicked her. She'd called Chu without thinking and set up the meeting, intending to tell him everything. But, since then, she'd had time to rethink her intention. Did she really want the police to know she was about to commit a crime? That Ginny was? Surely the police would have no option but to stop them, or inform Chastity, or something? Did she even want Chu to know that she was helping Ginny dig into the Rice Consortium when it was clearly something he'd tried to steer her away from?

“
So?” Chu asked. Again there was that difference in his tone. Until now, he'd been ultra-polite. Now there was a kind of insolence in his tone. It was as if something had happened to change his whole attitude. It made her wary.

“
So, there isn't much to tell. We went to see that reporter, Rafe Morgan, yesterday, but it looks like he just wants to drop the whole thing and hide under a rock.” That much was true, and if the police had been tracking Ginny, they'd know where she'd been. “Then I took Ginny out – to take her mind of things.”

“
That's it? That's why you asked to see me?”

“
You said I should report regularly.”

“
Yeah. If something happens. Are you sure that's all?”

Della couldn't blame him for being suspicious. She decided a sudden change of mood might provide a smokescreen. “Hey, I don't exactly enjoy spying on my friend, you know, even in a good cause. I'm not asking for thirty pieces of silver, but you could at least show a little gratitude. Or are you pissed off because I interrupted your day off? What's the matter with you today, anyway? Did you win the lotto last night? You sound like you couldn't give a stuff one way or the other.”

He laughed. “Yeah, something like that. You're pretty sharp. I – ” He stopped talking and stared, wide-eyed over her shoulder. “Shit.” He jumped to his feet, knocking his chair over and pulled a gun out of the back of his jeans. Della watched him raise the weapon, open-mouthed before turning to see what he was so scared of.

Standing in the doorway of the café was a tall, handsome man, square jawed and broad shouldered. He turned towards them at the sound of Chu's chair clattering across the polished wood floor. Immediately, he reached into his jacket, almost certainly for a gun. Explosions crashed overhead and Della had instinctively curled up and shut her eyes before she realised the sound had been Chu shooting at the newcomer. There were more shots, joined now by screams and smashing crockery. She forced herself to open her eyes.

The café had become a disaster movie. Tables and chairs were thrown everywhere and people were screaming and yelling and running for their lives. The man at the door was standing like a statue in the chaos, firing back at Chu. She turned to the policeman but he had gone. She spotted him sprinting down the street, gun in hand and, even as she watched, the other man pushed past her, throwing furniture aside, and raced off in pursuit.

Her heart was hammering and her breath came in ragged gasps. The two men disappeared around a corner and the panic around her slowly abated. People were talking loudly, excitedly. A woman was sobbing. Someone shouted, “Call the cops.” People were looking at her. An anxious voice said, “She was with one of them.”

Frightened and dazed, Della stumbled clear of the wrecked café and opened a portal. “Hey, you! Wait a minute!” a man shouted. Without hesitating, she stepped through and was gone.

-oOo-

She spent the next hour on the beach, a lonely stretch of broad white sand in the far north of Queensland, the ocean churning and roaring on one side and pandanus trees on the other, fringing the low hills and rain forest beyond. She walked barefoot through the surf, trudging for several kilometres along the gently-curving shoreline. Far ahead of her, everything was shrouded in spray. After a while, her heartbeat slowed and her thoughts began to unscramble themselves.

Della knew who the stranger had been: Dover Richards, the man Tonia had said killed her brother, the man who had pretended to Ginny that he was a policeman, the man who had tailed Rafe. According to Ginny, Richards probably worked for the Consortium. And Della had just seen him walk into a crowded street café and try to shoot a federal police officer.

Just reviewing the bare facts of it started Della's heart pounding again. She splashed on through the cold water until she was calmer.

She couldn't tell Ginny. The fact that she was there in that café meeting Chu was a betrayal she couldn't admit to. So what could she do? Go to the police? Perhaps, but Chu was the police. One way or another, they'd know by now. And if Richards had shot the cop, there would be a dozen people from the café happy to point her out as having been involved. If Chu was injured or dead, the police would be coming to her soon enough. If not, then Chu could contact her if he liked, but she wouldn't be meeting him again. It was pretty obvious that Richards was hunting him down and the safest place for Della to be was as far away from the inspector as possible.

And wasn't that weird? The criminal hunting down the cop? Is that how things worked these days. Had criminals become so powerful that they could attack cops on their day off in a public place, in broad daylight?

And why hadn't Richards shot her? She had been with Chu. She might have been another cop for all Richards knew, although – and the memory filled her with shame – an exceptionally cowardly one. But Richards had run right past her. He'd had plenty of opportunity to shoot her but he had ignored her completely.

And the guns...

She had no doubt they were deadly. Guns were used in all kinds of interactive adventures in VR. People played out every kind of battle from the Civil War to imaginary space wars. The guns they used wouldn't hurt a fly – just knock you out of the game. But she knew that the police and criminals had guns that would hijack a worldlet's software and deliver dangerous feedback through a person's neural implants. The gun and the bullets – like everything else when you were unlatched – were merely metaphors. They helped the gunman direct the software to the target whose cognitive implants they intended to fry. She'd seen a documentary about it once. Worldlet builders were forced to include mandatory security layers to prevent such attacks – except by the authorities – but criminal hackers could always get around them, and so many proprietors failed to keep their worldlet security up-to-date. The documentary had shown people with severe brain damage, living their whole lives in hospice worldlets, needing twenty-four-seven care.

It could have been me.

She stopped walking, waiting for her breathing to settle, before moving on.

So the Consortium was hunting the cop who was keeping an eye on Ginny. They probably knew where Ginny was. They probably knew all about Della. She felt panic rising in her. What the hell were they playing at? And what was she going to do, if even the cops couldn't keep her safe?

She didn't like the fear. She didn't like being helpless. She felt a sudden irrational resentment that her CEO knew something about the Rice Consortium that she wouldn't tell. Della's life was in danger and no-one seemed to care. It hadn't seemed quite real when Ginny had told her about it. It had been behind glass, somebody else's problem. Now she had seen too much of it, all first-hand, hackers changing their identity and appearance, gunmen shooting at the police. It felt as if everything she had known and trusted had been a lie. Like the wet sand beneath her feet, shifting and oozing and sucking her under...