The six o’clock tour made it all the way to the photon slide before the spirit struck. The first sign that it had entered the Byte of the Future computer system was when the music and holograms in the transparent tube faltered to a halt. Next, the overhead lights began to flicker. In rapid succession, a number of displays blinked out. The ventilation system blasted out a jet of overheated air, then made a grinding noise as its rotors shut down, and the speakers began to hiss with static.
No more than a second or two after the whole chain
of glitches began, the second-and third-floor display areas were plunged into darkness. As a babble of frightened voices filled the air, Carla made her move. She’d kept a careful watch on the tour guide, who now was shouting at her group to remain calm. Carla headed straight for the voice and deliberately jostled the woman in the dark. At the same time, she snatched the tour guide’s employee badge. Given the mob of confused and frightened people the woman had to deal with, Carla doubted she’d miss the badge for some time. If she did discover it was gone, she would probably assume it had fallen off and was lying somewhere on the floor of the display area.
Carla shed her jacket and pinned on the employee badge. Then she made her way by feel to the photon tube-slide. It would be the fastest way to put some distance between herself and the tour guide. Just as she reached it, a handful of emergency lights—those powered by battery and thus independent of the main computer system—started to flicker to life. But these only dimly lit the area; there were still enough shadows—and enough confusion, among the milling visitors—for Carla to jump into the tube and escape unnoticed.
The slide down to the second floor took only a moment or two. Reaching the bottom, she clambered to her feet and headed toward an employees-only exit she’d noted earlier. A winking red light showed that the door’s magkey was still functioning. It was a simple slide-through pad, operated by its own battery system. Carla aligned the magnetic strip on the employee badge, then slid it through the slot. When the light flashed green, she yanked the door open.
The corridor it led to was well illuminated; it must have been on a separate control system. Carla pulled the door shut behind her and hurried down the hallway. A security guard rushed toward her, heading for the door she’d just come through. Giving him her most earnest look, Carla jerked a thumb at the door behind her. "We’ve had a systems crash!" she shouted. "The power is down and we can’t use the telecom system. I’m going to see if I can reboot the lights."
The guard grunted out a reply as he rushed past. "It fragging figures. Whenever there’s a system glitch, it’s on my shift." He obviously didn’t yet realize the extent of the "glitch."
Carla slowed to a brisk walk as she rounded a corner. Unwilling to risk the elevator, in case the spirit had wiped its programming as well, she entered the first stairwell she found. She climbed eight flights, paused to catch her breath, then emerged onto the tenth floor, which housed a number of office units. Now it was just a matter of working her way to the building’s outermost corridor and finding the skywalk that connected it to the next tower.
Aside from the few security guards who rushed past her, few of the employees on this floor seemed to realize the chaos that had broken out several stories below them. The corridors were filled with the usual hum of conversation and background office noise.
After a few minutes of searching, Carla found the skywalk that led to Tower C—the "
The guard was a young fellow with sharp features and cratered skin. Japanese, judging by his surname. An oversized pistol hung in a holster at his hip. Carla had been prepared for that; she’d expected to have to bluff her way past an armed guard or two. But when she saw the retinal scanner that was built into the badge-recognition unit, her heart sank. There was no way she’d get past that.
In another moment, the guard would realize that she wasn’t the woman whose name and scan code were on the badge. He’d demand to see some authentic ID, and would call his superiors to deal with the attempted
intrusion. Things would be tense for a moment or two,
but eventually, once somebody saw her press pass, they’d be forced to let her go. She was simply too well known, too public a figure, to rough up. The mythical "power of the press" would protect her. But it was still fragging disappointing to have come this far, only to have her plans fall apart.
Then Carla noted the way the guard was pacing back and forth in front of the gate. His manner suggested intense frustration. He reminded Carla of the security guard she’d encountered earlier in the hallway, and that guard’s grumbled comments. And that gave her an idea.
The young guard waved her toward the gate. When he read her employee badge he showed immediate interest. "I hear there’s some trouble in the display hall." he said eagerly. It was obvious he wished he could be seeing a little of that trouble himself.
She kept her eyes on the ground, trying to work up some tears. As she slid the employee badge through the scanner, she dug a manicured fingernail into her other palm, deliberately cutting the skin. That did it. Tears welled in her eyes.
"Hai." she said, giving the head bob that was the equivalent of an abbreviated bow. She’d decided to play the role of the demure, eyes-downcast Japanese woman to the hilt. She could do the accent perfectly, but she was taking a gamble, hoping he wouldn’t switch to Japanese. With luck, he’d be a nishi or sanshi, with only a poor grasp of the language. She’d only remembered enough of her high-school Japanese to order sushi, recite her name, and count to ten.
"Two members of my tour group were seriously injured." she told the guard. "I have been called to give a personal report." She sighed heavily, and let a tear trickle down her cheek. "Everything always happens on my shift."
The guard nodded his sympathy and lifted the retscan unit from its cradle. Carla buried her face in her hands, pretending to be ashamed of her tears, and uttered a series of short, hiccuping sobs. "I never asked to be reassigned to the display hall. I should be in Accounting. That’s what I’m trained for. And now I’ll be fired!" She kept wiping tears from her eyes, deliberately getting her hands in he way of the scanner.
After one or two attempts to lift the ret-scan unit to Carla’s eyes, the young guard gave up. "Go." he said to her at last. "Make your report. And good luck."
"Thank you."
Carla waited until she was around the corner to break into a wide grin. She was inside! She focused on the icon in her cybereye’s field of view that would activate the file containing the map Corwin had downloaded on his most recent run into the Mitsuhama mainframe. The datalink to her cybereye let her read information uploaded to it. Now all she had to do was follow the map to the elevator that led down to the research lab. And hope that everything was going according to plan. Everything could still come unglued if she ran into any more security roadblocks. Or if Corwin ran into any ice. Or if the guard who’d just let her slip through his post without a retinal scan learned that an employee from the Byte of the Future exhibit had lost her badge. Or if...
Carla shook her head, chiding herself for letting her worries overtake her. The only thing now was to get as far as she could. And to keep the camera in her cybereye rolling. The chip she was using had plenty of memory, but if need be she had plenty more to spare.
Carla walked down the hallway, trying not to stare at the security cameras. The thirtieth floor of the
Since it was Saturday, only a few of the offices were occupied. The occasional office worker passed her in the hallway, but the normal hustle and buzz of a busy office complex was missing. Although Mitsuhama followed the Japanese tradition of expecting its employees to work copious amounts of overtime, few actually came in to work on a weekend in person; most put in the extra hours at home-based work stations.
According to the map in Carla’s cybereye, the elevator that led to the research lab was just ahead, around a bend in the corridor. She stopped midway down the hall and pushed open the door to a washroom. As she’d suspected, the room was not monitored by camera—at least, no obvious monitors were in evidence. It was probably wired for sound, however, so she went through the motions of flushing the toilet and washing her hands in the sink.
Carla pulled out her cel phone, switched off its visual pickup, and dialed a number. She heard a ring, a brief pause, and then another ring again as the call was routed through a series of telecommunications grids. If Mitsuhama security was monitoring this call by picking up its frequency from a remote scanner, they’d log it as being made from a rented cel phone to an auto body shop in Renton. In fact, the call was only being patched through that number—and from there, through telecommunications grids in Vancouver, Hong Kong, Seoul, and San Francisco—and back again to a Seattle residence, where the young decker Corwin answered the phone.
"Albert’s Auto Body." he said. "Don’t get bent; we’ll fix that dent."
Despite her nervousness, Carla smiled. She used the rough code they’d prearranged. "Hello. I’m calling about the car I dropped off this morning. The Mitsubishi Runabout with the dented side panel. Has it been fixed yet?"
"It’s fixed." Corwin answered. "And the paint job is perfect. You can’t even see where we made the patch."
"That’s wonderful." Carla answered brightly. "I won’t be able to pick it up tonight; I’ve got a backlog of work to clear up. I have to be back at work in less than a minute. I’ll stop around tomorrow morning, instead."
"Good luck clearing up that backlog. I hope you don’t have to work too late. See you in the morning."
As she hung up the phone, Carla nodded. So far, so good. Corwin was inside Mitsuhama’s computer system and had successfully cracked the node that controlled the security cameras on this floor. The "paint job" he was referring to was a direct feed of a digitized image of Evelyn Belanger. Using the trid that Carla had shot of the wage mage yesterday, he’d stripped away the background of the garden and used only the cropped image of Evelyn walking. Feeding this back into the security cameras, he used KKRU’s sophisticated Movement Match graphics program to paint it over the image of Carla that the hallway monitors were picking up. If anything had gone wrong with the splice, he would have warned Carla just now. But everything was going perfectly. Anyone watching the security monitors would be unable to see the patch.
For her part, Carla had warned Corwin that she was less than a minute away from reaching the elevator that led to the research lab. Folding shut her cel phone, she tucked it in a pocket. Then she took a deep breath, braced herself, and stepped out into the corridor. She turned and headed for the elevator, keeping her hands by her sides, walking smoothly and not making any sudden or exaggerated gestures that the graphics program would have to compensate for.
Reaching the elevator, Carla stood so that the monitor cameras would be able to capture a clear shot of her as she pulled Farazad’s credstick from her pocket and plugged the triangular tube of plastic into the key slot that called the elevator. It was essential that Corwin get a good look at her, that this be timed perfectly.
As the credstick clicked into place, a pleasantly modulated voice came from a speaker mounted just to the left of the elevator doors: "This elevator is for the use of authorized personnel only. Please provide a voice sample." It then repeated the instructions in Japanese.
This was the tricky part. Farazad’s security clearance would have been purged, immediately following his death. But Evelyn Belanger’s would still be on-line. And if Corwin was as whiz a decker as he claimed, he’d be able to squirt in a digital sample of Evelyn’s voice, pair it with the lock combination encoded on the credstick, and effect a match.
Carla waited, tension knotting the muscles between her shoulder blades as the seconds ticked by. If anything had gone wrong at Corwin’s end, an alarm would be sounding, somewhere deep in the bowels of the building. Mitsuhama security guards would be racing through the hallways, even now, with their guns drawn.. .
A soft chime sounded and a light above the elevator doors winked on. "Voice sample accepted." the automated system told her. "Please remove your key-strip.
Arigato
"
Carla let out a long sigh of relief as the elevator doors opened. She hadn’t heard it arrive—either it was very silent or it had already been waiting on this floor. She hoped for the latter—if the elevator had been on the floor that housed the research lab, that would have meant that someone had gotten off it there and not returned—there was only one exit from the research lab, as far as Carla had been able to determine.