Versim (15 page)

A good Rend-V actor knew that the viewers were the least of her concern. EA offered another level deeper for paying customers. You could actually immerse yourself in the narrative as a rider. This was a simple as using VR equipment to login to whatever principal you’d subscribed too. Right now, people experiencing this very moment as if they were she. They were probably in a VR room, or lying sedated on an immersion couch. They were hooked up to an immersion system that allowed their minds to experience what she was experiencing, or what Hark was experiencing, or Frankie. The riders were the real driving force behind the success of a V. When they left their immersion session they were the most vocal fanboys and girls. She probably had her own booster coalition by now.
 

She had made the leap from a fully immersed individual living in-V to an awake principal. She had no idea how long they’d let her stay awake. Hark was awake. Frankie was coming to understand what he was, as was Celia. All the normal rules were being broken.
 

On the other side of the door, Hark began to laugh. Binda smiled. He’d seen his clothes. He had no choice but to wear them.

23

Hark and Binda rode an elevator to the top floor of the hotel.
 

He snarled as he glanced at the clothes she’d bought for him: a wide collared, long-sleeved shirt colored a glitzy bright azure with patterns repeated into endless fractals. The lean-cut denim pants were close-fit but flared at the bottom. The leather boots looked like something a country music fan might enjoy. His hands were bare, and the armor gone from his suit. He flexed them, just in case. In a moment, the suit could reform to full capacity

“What are we doing, again?” Binda asked.
 

He kept his eyes straight. Since she was so much shorter than him he’d be staring at her open cleavage, which—he knew for a fact—was much more on display now than before. She’d also bought a new skirt, this one tighter than the other, and had put two baby-doll clips in her indigo hair. He could tell she was staring at him, smiling even.

“You have a girlfriend, Specialist Cole?” she asked.

“You have a boyfriend?”

“No one special.” She inched closer to him. “You in the market?”

He grinned back at her. “So, Binda, you’re sweet and all that, and as much as I’d love to get to know you—”

She leapt into the air, wrapped her legs around him, arms snaked around his neck, and planted her lips on his. Hark kissed back, of course, because it would be rude not to. He held her with one hand, the other hand running fingers through his own hair as he figured out what to do next.

“Binda …”

She slapped her lips back onto his and began probing his mouth with her tongue.

And just before he thought he might have to give in to her amorous desire, she jumped off him with a smile. She wiped saliva from her chin. She turned to face the elevator door as it opened.

Hark watched her exit first. He stood riveted for a second, damned if he wasn’t staring at her with all the wrong intentions. That was the second time in two days he’d watched a woman walk away from him without doing anything about it. He exited the elevator into an empty corridor with evenly spaced hotel room doors and told himself to stay clear headed.
 

“We’re looking for a long drop,” he said. He led her to a stairwell doorway in a niche. He opened it and stepped in. Switchback stairs descended. “Fifty floors to the bottom.”

“I’m not walking down …”

“No need.”

Hark withdrew a few quarters from his pants pocket. He’d snagged them from Frankie’s bag.
 

Hark found the narrow open space between the flights of stairs that allowed him to see all the way to the bottom. It wasn’t even four inches wide.

But wide enough to drop some change …

“It’s so nice that you’re awake,” Hark said. “Not a problem for you to see this. It’s a trick of the trade, as we say. Like dialing home.”

He eyed the open shaft down the narrow well and dropped the coin. Inertia took it as far as it could before it banged off one of the railings.
 

“That was a big enough fall,” Hark said, stepping back. “It’ll work.”

A far away whistle sounded, like a train in the distance. It grew louder, and louder. Binda edged closer to Hark. Hark couldn’t resist and put his arm around her. A blast of carmine-tinged light exploded out of the opening between the flights. Before them, no bigger than a basketball, a globe of blood-red pulsing energy rotated.

“What is this?” Binda asked.

“Backdoor access.”

“Neato.”

“We’re automatically dampened when one of these arrives. So no one sees us access it.”

Hark approached the globe, then stuck both hands inside. The globe bulged. He then withdrew his hands, pulling tendrils of energy with him; like a painter flinging paint on a wall, he slung the energy into a rectangular shape. He muted his HUD to not mix signals.

“How did you get inside, Specialist Cole?” The face in the window looked like a high-level Voxyprog official. He was clean-shaven with a button-down shirt and tie.
 

“Listen,” Hark said, “I’m not trying to screw anyone here. I’m trying to help. I’d like to report a critical danger to the integrity of this Rend-V.”

“What operation?”

“No operation.”

“You’re acting on your own initiative? That’s what we thought.”

“Yes, but it’s complicated. I’m being manipulated here. Who are you?”

The man in the window continued to glare. “I’m the guy who’s been waiting for you to contact us and who’ll decide if your ass is retired when this is over.”

“I want to talk to an EA rep.”

“You talk to me.”

“Look, you Voxyprog suit. I don’t work for you. Tell your Sersavant cogno-pricks that if they don’t want to see this work of technoart go down in flames, to listen to me. And let me access Magdalena.”

The slightest hint of trepidation rippled across the man’s face. He glanced up, as if others in whatever communication room he sat in were listening.

“You’re doing fine without your AI. This is a retro environment. You having your suit and kit already breaks ten versim rules, not to mention your physio enhancements. Besides, you’re illegal. No way you get her back in that state. Now, explain what you mean by ‘going down in flames.’” The man grinned as if used to hearing silly threats to the integrity of the Mindworlds.

“I believe we have a major bleedover insertion affecting this Rend-V. A complex horror scenario. I think it’s designed to try to kill the host—and do it in a spectacular fashion.”
 

He saw the man’s eyes widen a tad, but he was too seasoned to show more. “Horror in this Rend-V? Specialist Cole, people immerse in
Collides
for drama and romance. They watch principals bickering and arguing, making love and breaking up, circles within circles of silly intrigue. Nothing more. Granted, your stunt is an anomaly we’re benefiting from, but when it’s over our regulars will return to what they want. Did you really say horror?”
 

“Do a scan. It’s right there.”

The man looked up, as if giving a command. “What’s your role, exactly?”

“EA has a special relationship with me that I can’t tell you. But I have to wake up your host.”

“Wake her up?”

“I have to do it for EA’s own reasons.”

The man glared. “EA has no authority to wake up a host. They hire you guys and market what we build. That’s it.”

“I know. It’s complicated. Bottom line: I need help stopping the intrusion elements, otherwise you won’t have to worry about me waking her up. She’ll die in narrative and so will everyone inside.”

“Help?”

“Arrest Director Miesha Preston. Find out where her illegal host is that’s tunneling Ervé Wrighter and shut it down. That’s a starter.”

The man smiled. “That would be nice, if we could touch her. Her mother is the host—”

“I know who she is. Just arrest her.”

“What else?”

“Goddamn it. What do you think? Get everyone out. Evacuate the V.”

The officious prick smiled as if he’d just stolen someone’s lunch money. Hark saw the man’s inability to empathize as his teeth glittered in the light. Hark stepped forward, wishing he could pull the man through the window into this world where millions would die.
 

How many high-paying customers led to believe their insurance policies would save them would be maimed, or killed? Those who lived would be pulled from their stasis vats only to be damned to a life as a vegetable or as a schizophrenic—or, in the best-case scenario, haunted for the rest of their lives by the person they had been.
 

The neural scrubbers didn’t work when a Rend-V just shut down like that. The reorientation of a person’s cognitive mapping was always damaged. And since a person was experiencing life in a Rend-V, you couldn’t just rehusk a body for them. You’d have to kill them first, and there were strict laws about that.

“We can’t just evacuate,” the official said. “Your little stunt, I hate to admit, has tripled our quarterly revenues in one day. Pull everyone out? I don’t think so.”

“You’re a Voxyprog producer for
Collides
, aren’t you?”

The man tilted his head slightly, a sort of bow. “Specialist Cole, do … whatever it is you want to do to thwart this horror flip. But don’t further encourage our host to awaken. We already have operatives on the way to … restore her equilibrium. Can we count on you?”

Operatives.

“Contact your lead tech team and have them do a basic scan on intrusions. You’ll see what’s coming.” Hark swiped through the image, destroying the connection.

He turned to Binda. “We have to hurry.”

24

Hark activated his HUD as he sprinted down the corridor. Without Magdalena’s help, everything at speed was more difficult. He said the commands to trigger his enhanced audio as fast as he could. He felt his ear canals bulge as they filled with pressure. Then he activated his heat sensors. His HUD tiled data as the world around him blossomed into red-and-orange registers. He waited for it to finish scrolling. Magdalena would have done all of this for him in an instant.
 

When he arrived at his floor, he was as ready as he could be. He focused on the door handle.
 

Sure enough, a recent heat signature of a hand in a bright yellow patch.

Very recent.

He heard whispering coming from inside. A female talking to Celia. Two heavy breathers. Probably males. Frankie just burped. Hark doused his heightened audio and visual.

“Binda, go wait for me in the lobby.”

She must have seen the concern on his face. She backed up without a challenge.

Hark ramped up his AbSys to attack mode, felt the energy envelop him in warmth, and kicked the door so hard it slammed into the wall.

Frankie was sitting up on the couch, smiling again, no longer looking like road kill.

Celia was also sitting, talking to a woman.

Two Voxyprog personal-security thugs stood to the side. They were large men, both in suits, both with augmentation Mirrorshades. Their expressionless faces meant they weren’t used to being inside.
 

Hark strode forward. “Get away from her.”

Both women looked up. By the ache of concern on Celia’s face, Hark could see that she hadn’t been reversed. The other woman was tall, lean, and gorgeous—the sort of perfected human the Consortium loved to parade around as the face of enhanced society. She wasn’t Vox, for sure. Too pretty. Then who, he wondered?

“Specialist Cole, what timing. I was hoping we could avoid this.” The woman stood and began edging away, as if she might be interested in something on the other side of the room.

“Frankie, grab our stuff and wait in the lobby.” Hark saw the woman’s transmission to attack ping in his HUD. The Voxyprog thugs began to round the coffee table. “Celia, go with him.” She didn’t move. “Fine with me. You get to watch.”

“Specialist,” the other woman said, “we can talk—”

Both thugs’ carapaces activated with a snapping electric flash that would have alerted someone a mile away.

Amateurs
.
 

Hark kicked a chair at one, forcing the man to sidestep while he deflected. At the other Hark launched himself ten feet through the air like an arrow. He crossed over the couch Frankie had been sitting on, over the coffee table, and into his target.
 

The explosive sound of two carapaces nullifying each other made Celia jump away in fright.
 

Without protection, it was time for Hark to shine. He smashed his forehead into the man’s nose, breaking it, blinding the man in tears and blood. The volley of strikes he threw were so fast and well timed, he heard six bones break: the man’s jaw, his orbital socket, a clavicle, a radius, an ulna, and, maybe, a cracked skull.

The man crumpled to the floor, nearly lifeless as his partner charged, pulling some strange device from his jacket pocket.

Hark stood still, waiting for his carapace to reactivate. The one thing these temporary Rend-V thugs never understood about the professionals was that specialists like him lived in the Rend-Vs. The Sersavant hackers could give these two thugs magical powers but they had to use them on a regular basis for them to work well. These guys looked like private security way in over their heads.

Hark stepped to the side, triggered the glove to form over his hand, and punched three fingers through the man’s throat, tearing out the carotid on one side in a fan of salty crimson. The device fell to the floor. It looked like it was some fancy, one-shot vaporizer.

“And that’s how it’s done in the big leagues.”

Hark faced the mysterious agent, who was now up against the far wall, eyes wide, mouth open, nostrils flared.

Celia was just exiting the apartment at a run, Frankie now by her side, escorting her.

The agent breathed deep, her chest heaving. She was definitely someone enhanced from birth with an aesthetic package. Hark stood toe-to-toe with her, and she stared into his eyes, the shock of such violence triggering something animalistic in her. Most of the time, lucky paying customers dropping in for a quick immersion took something chemical to heighten their brief trips inside. Most people couldn’t handle the intensity of seeing a specialist at work. Most women he’d encountered, especially, responded in a primal way.