Digital Venous (6 page)

Hunt

SHANE HEARD ABOUT the escape, and it was minutes before he saw his boss’ name, Magellan, flashing on his eye. Magellan liked to use Electro Telepathy when talking tactics. It was silent, secure, and left no room for misunderstanding.

Shane breathed deeply before responding to Magellan:
Of course I know about it. They went missing from a building site—from a ten-story building.

Magellan was uncharacteristically hostile:
This is the fourth breach in as many months. How does this happen, again?

Shane:
There were three guards. The couple just vanished. But there’s no problem—there’s nowhere for them to go.

Magellan:
I’m aware there is a good deal of trade on your watch.

Shane:
A little bit of healthcare stuff is all I allow.

Magellan:
I know. That’s fair; it acts as an equalizer. But this is different, Shane. These workers have been missing for nearly forty-eight hours, loose in the northern precinct. Do I have to remind you what this means?

Magellan was referring to the fact that this was the most important area in Napea, adjacent to the lofty mountain laboratories containing all N.E.T. production materials and facilities, various mortet funnels for processing dark matter and creating axion—and it was less than a kilometer from the space elevator, a hundred miles above which, sat Magellan himself.

Shane:
No, sir. No ,you don’t. The fact is there was a bungle with SCID. Those two workers officially left yesterday—they were scanned out, yet our head count was down two. But the whole crew was released before anything was done about it.

Magellan:
How do you explain that?

Shane:
We’re having trouble with some of our guards—we just can’t get the quality. There are too many distractions for them, too much else for them to do up here… there’s no commitment to the vocation anymore.

Magellan
: Shane I’ve been tolerant. Far more tolerant than other Service officials ever would have been. I’ve asked you all the logical questions I can. Now I report to my colleagues, and the answers you’ve given me will not satisfy. You will be asked to retire.

Shane:
But I’ve kept security tight in the south since we started laser building! I’ve cleaned up sixty serious security breaches in the last year! I know how it all works.

Magellan was measured, even suave:
Exactly, Shane. You know a little too much. So when I say retirement, I mean from everything. The Service will want you.

Shane:
I’ll deal with it. I’ll see to them personally—tonight.

Magellan:
Please do.

Shane knew that he would be impossible to replace and, as had happened before, the Service were in panic mode as they worried about their facilities. They wouldn’t force him to retire. They couldn’t. Shane had maintained a trade relationship with one of the escapees, an Evan Wilson. But now, rather than being motivated by purely mercenary concerns, Wilson had moved into a bigger league. The other person was someone with the surname Bokovski—not a name he was familiar with.

Shane explained that he had been called into work, left home straight away, and made the high-speed journey through the heart of the Napean metropolis and up to the modernist precinct. He didn’t like giving explanations about the nature of his work. It drove Mia crazy. Yes, she knew his body could be repaired in case of injury, but it was nonetheless a painful and drawn out experience. Best not go into detail, thought Shane.

Using the network, he sourced more information on the escape. The two workers had disappeared from the top of the building. That was a new one. In his hundred-plus years of security experience, he had never heard of that before. There had to be one of two possible explanations: abseiling or base jumping, and neither were particularly plausible; where did they get the equipment?

Shane’s advantage was a combination of experience, instinct, and superior technology. All he had to do was get to the area and do what he’d done a thousand times before.

Buildings were so easy to produce and Napeans had few other demands on their resources; architecture was booming. Architectural design fashion went from sublime to ridiculous, and that was within five hundred meters. But it meant that buildings were often abandoned for a period, providing ample protection for those wishing to elude the law.

Shane was well-armed. He had a heat, magnetic density, CO2 and movement sensitive applications, all available through his Iris Navigation system. Shane also had a device that measured organic material at a distance. It was a scanner that sent out a signal and pinpointed living organic material. Napeans showed up as a silver shimmer. Plants tended to light it up a little, but a human body glowed orange.

It was now dark and, although it was a full moon, only a small amount of its brightness filtered through the tinted Napean roof. Will they be blending in or hiding out? he wondered.

Occasionally Subs tried to hide out in Napea indefinitely. If they could master “the look,” they could go unnoticed for as long as they had their own food supply.

Shane assumed these people, like many before them, were aiming for the medical facilities near the Greenhill gate. Stealing N.E.T. was the usual motivation. No one had ever reached the elevator—not even him.

On the street Shane passed several nightclubs. Some of them operated twenty-four hours; Napeans were good at partying. They could take drugs, yet be free of adverse physical reactions. A group of bohemian individuals alighted from a private magna-car. Three couples slid out of the vehicle and made their way toward the door of a club obscurely called “Lakeside.” The women were all in black latex of varying cuts. Their hairstyles were huge; their jewelry itself must have weighed twenty kilograms. They moved as one, like the limbs on the shadow of a black cat.

The men were decked out in tight-fitting dark suits, short in the arm and leg. They wore no shirts and either had Cuban heel boots or gym shoes. They all looked intent on having a seriously good time—or maybe it was day three of a seriously good week.

Some “fashionistas” came out of the club; there were two of them—a male and a female. They stood at the corner waiting for two other females approaching from further down the street. The four greeted each other as Shane passed them on the street. Their physical alterations were so pronounced that Shane’s suspicions were aroused. Were they actually Napean? He was an expert eavesdropper.

“Love your button nose,” said the male to one of the approaching women.

She replied, “Hey! Thank you!” They all kissed. “Crazy beak!” said Button Nose. She was referring to the nose job he must have had done. Fashionistas were characterized by their surgical alteration to bones, skin, and cartilage. Shane could see obviously that the male with the “beak” had also had major surgery on his chin and nose, the latter now being so large and aquiline as to resemble the hooked beak of one of any number of now extinct parrots. The male was also well over one hundred and ninety-five centimeters tall and extremely angular, indicating thigh extensions and subcutaneous elbow and shoulder caps.

Shane also noticed the “button nose” woman had no fingers. Her hands had been sculpted; even the stubs of her fingers had been taken so that her hands looked like fleshy paws. Her protruding cheekbones and enlarged eyes gave her the look of some nocturnal creature. Shane thought her very cute. The other female from the club had the vampira look which also spiked his interest. They—the blood sucking sect—were one of a number of groups who hunted Subterraneans. If news escaped that a Sub or Subs were at large in Napea, Shane had to rush to get there first, or there would likely be little left of the intruder. They had a network; if anyone knew about the presence of Subs, it would be her. Shane pretended to be involved in some ETP conversation so that he could keep listening.

The male from the club was talking about the music going on inside. Like most Napean nightspots, the “music” was generated by the thoughts of the people using ETP in the room. A particular music application was visible on the iris, and by selecting certain images, colors, numbers, and patterns while dancing, each person contributed to the sound being produced. There was not necessarily a particular rhythm or melody just a wash, a mélange of sounds that evolved to the mood of the group. It was very popular. It sounded awful.

The Napean man who’d been in the club, the one with the beak, was talking to Button Nose. They were all very animated, hyper, talking frenetically and gesticulating madly. Shane watched and listened.

“I’ve been researching ancient music—it’s so weird,” said the tall beak man. Somehow he was playing the music through his body. Shane realized it was coming through his mouth. The others in the group stopped their conversation, intrigued.

“Oh, I just had this done—with the nose! There’s a micro-speaker in my throat. It amplifies my voice…” He activated the speaker and his voice came out as if through a megaphone: “HELLO LAKESIDE!” It was deafening. They all fell about laughing.

Shane allowed himself a moment to examine each of them. They were typical Napeans—good storage fodder for the space program, they did their duty in that regard. But they lived utterly oblivious to events outside their direct sphere. In a way, they had to.

“Or,” continued the beak man, “it plays music. It uses my skull as a soundbox. Noise escapes here and here,” he said, indicating his ears. “This song is…” He looked at the playlist on his eye. “It’s Gary Glitter. Twentieth century!” The song came out crystal clear and loud.

“What is that noise?” asked the large-eyed woman, punching the air backwards and forwards.

“I just said. It’s old music.”

“No, I mean that ‘boom boom boom’ thing. What is that?”

“It’s the beat,” replied Beak-face, nodding heavily.

“It sounds… mechanical,” she said. “Robotic,” added Vampira.

“It used to get them dancing. They’d move arms and legs around at the same time as the beat.” Beak-face was a real ethnographer.

“All together?” asked Button.

“All at the same time,” confirmed Beak. “How horrible,” said Vampira.

“Moronic,” agreed the other, fourth woman.

“That’s what happens when one person makes the music—before the music actually starts,” said Beak-man.

“What?”

“Someone would sit around and just make up a whole lot of different noises, with a beat…”

“So one person did all that?”   “Yes. They would write the music.”

“That’s insane,” said Button Nose, laughing. “Selfish!” added Vampira.

“And… that person would then put the music on a memory disc. A big round, black, flat disc. And then everyone would buy it.”

“How long did the music on the disc go for?” she asked. “A few minutes.”

“And that was one sound?” Button Nose loved music.

“Just one set of noises—and they’d listen to it over and over and over.”

“So they all hold up their discs…” she asked.

“Records,” corrected Beak-man.

“Records… and that made the sound?”

“Well, yeah,” he confirmed.

“How awkward,” she said. “I know.”

“It’s so much better, what we’ve got now.”

“Oh, there’s no comparison.” The others nodded their approval. “Frickin’ Freakoids,” said Shane disparagingly under his breath.

He pushed on, making his way to the front wall and gateway of the research facility and saw everything locked and under twelve-camera live surveillance. He decided to begin at their destination and radiate outwards.

Using his scanner, he began on the Eastern side, moving slowly west, but in a north-to-south zigzagging pattern. Nothing. The bioscanner couldn’t see clearly through Lunatex, so Shane had to carefully enter every disused building in the area. He was sure he would find them, and if they weren’t in this area, he at least had a breathing space.

Shane was within five hundred meters of the facility. The three major apartment blocks in this area dominated the skyscape. Done in a historical architectural style called modernist, the buildings seemed to be melting, or made from some type of fluid, or soaring overhead at impossible angles.

The structure closest to the Bauhaus Service building was deserted. No one had wanted to live so close to an area where there was twenty-four-hour live surveillance. Napeans figured they were under surveillance enough already.

Shane wondered—and it had happened before—if someone was harboring the escapees. He turned south from the vacant building, deciding to survey some of the modernist apartments in the area.

The honey-glaze glow from the moon was now gone, and it had grown very dark. The group of buildings on the northeastern side of the modernist precinct looked like flowing pleated white skirts, being quite slim at the top and then billowing at the ground floor. The windows were set into the creases that ran all the way from top to bottom. He entered the ground floor of the apartment. There was music, a dance area full of people swaying and gyrating, and a swimming pool—all popular. Shane strolled around the pool and saw a man standing watching the dancers.