Lesser Gods (14 page)

“That fries it,” I said, getting onto feet that seemed to be connected to my body by two rubbery legs. Without permitting myself to argue me out of my decision, I picked up the bottle of jet, and staggered over to the sink. “I know I’ll hate myself later, but I’m going to do this before jet cravings cloud my judgment.”

I dumped the liquid down the drain, watching until the last of the liquid was out of the bottle and then rinsing it. After that I ran lots of water through the sink so I wouldn’t be tempted to tear it apart and suck on the drain later — something I had little doubt I’d do when the cravings returned in a few hours.

“There,” I said, wondering if I’d lost my mind or committed the first act of sanity in some time.

Either way the deed was done.

Time to get on with it, I told myself. I still had a job to do and now it was going to be harder.

I settled into my moth-eaten recliner and pondered my next move.

Running away sounded good. Tahiti was nice any time of the year.

Yet trying to escape would eventually fail because I didn’t have enough e-cash or anything of real value that was easily hocked. Sooner or later I’d have to try for a score and then chances were good that some citizen would put a bullet through my carcass, Death’s goons would track me down, and/or the police would catch me in the act. I knew how the kid felt when he wanted to run away but couldn’t because he didn’t have permission to cross the street. Helpless and trapped, I knew time was running out.

I rubbed a hand across my chin, trying to sort out my predicament in a rational fashion. Several things were apparent:

1) I no longer felt any need to protect Huntington from Death or the government. After seeing his savage behavior, I would be happy to lead a parade with his head on a stick.

And…

2) Death would be happy to carry my head on a stick if I failed to come up with Huntington’s hard address by the end of tomorrow.

Time to roll up my sleeves.

I sat for a minute.

A desperate idea formed in my mind.

“Computer?”

“Waiting.”

“Clear the decks. We’ve got some serious searches to conduct.”

Ralph Crocker

I’ve always been amazed at how most people remain clueless when searching for information. Oh, sure, the automated search algorithms do all the work with umpteen commercial super computer search engines. But they often fail to find those little clues that are key to a successful search, or that point to those minor hints that can pay off in big ways. And people like Huntington could pay to have their info hidden from the engines.

So a really good search on someone keeping a low profile wasn’t easy — but I won’t complain since if it were easy, I’d be out of a job, right? I didn’t go around spouting off my trade secrets, either; a good magician makes even the easiest illusion appear hard to accomplish. So when it came to selling the knowledge, I hacked and hijacked, and did pretty much whatever was needed, and I remained tight-lipped and even exaggerated the difficulty of the work when I did talk about it.

The fact that Death lacked the finesse to obtain the information I might turn up came as no surprise. Criminals like him operated by brute strength with a minimum of strain to any gray cells they might possess.

That the government hadn’t found Huntington either was worrisome. Sure, some of the best net engines were coded to cripple searches by government agencies when the telltale footprint of a bureaucratic snoop was discovered; the net had remained government unfriendly since the Privacy Wars that led to the destruction of the United States of North America.

But any government hacker worth his salt could get around the traps and exploit the systems just like anyone else. Not to mention the government super-systems that could be, and undoubtedly were, smuggled online to brute attack data banks before protective algorithms could respond.

I doubted that the government would need to employ me for searching, so if they were involved, it probably meant they had expected me to jet until I found him or blew out my brains. If so, that meant once they knew I was no longer jetting, they might be knocking at my door.

If they weren’t in the loop at all, then Death must have been lying about the buy-off contract on Huntington — bringing me back to the possibility that Death simply wanted Huntington to gain control over the jet market. Maybe Death even knew about the new form of jet that Huntington must be using.

That had to be it.

That meant the government would be in the equation before long, because the Powers wouldn’t sit around if a whole new, and very dangerous, form of jet was about to hit the streets.

Which was another reason I had to hurry and locate Huntington. If the government got into the whole thing, my job would only get harder. Maybe fatally so, since they played just as rough as Death. Time was running out, In a very serious way.

Within ten minutes I’d launched a flotilla of the stealth agents I’d designed, directed my MC to hit the usual search engines, and also initiated several searches with three renegade systems most people aren’t aware of and which sift through the gray areas operating barely within the law as well as within the data pirate sector. Today I was in luck since only one of the latter group had been taken offline due to the almost daily government raids on zombie hideouts. And of course I worked through an anonymous server from a bogus and discardable account. As an added precaution, I used my illegal and almost untraceable tap into the fiber optical cable next to my apartment. So while I wasn’t completely safe, the odds of being successfully backtracked were within acceptable limits.

Within five minutes, the MC announced, “Your agents are returning results and I’m filtering all the search data, and stripping out ads and press releases.”

“Let me have it,” I ordered, lowering my VG. As the view screens covered my eyes, I found myself surrounded with piles of glowing data files. Within two minutes I had brought the information into the system’s virtual hardware to weigh the data. The IIS was modeled after the grayware between my ears — which most agents and thugs like Death didn’t have the first inkling about. And often those IIS circuits worked like magic, chugging along even independently of intellect from time to time.

I slipped into a power glove and shuffled through the data matrix, at first tossing information into loose groupings then carefully sorting through the stories and data that were more likely to lead to Huntington. Then I started to study what I had.

One news story I’d actually seen before: The report about the mall panic. How did that relate to what I needed to know? Or was it just an IIS blind alley. As I studied the other stories retrieved by the system, I realized my IIS hunch circuits were onto something.

There was a pattern; the stories all had one important thing in common: Large crowds had all seen the same basic, but impossible, happenstance.

The last of the group of stories chilled my blood: A dragon-like creature had chased a young woman who had apparently thrown herself from a rooftop.

Alice.

For a moment I felt a pang of guilt; what had happened to Alice? More importantly, was she — or had she been — real? Or had she simply been a complex computer simm that was part of the SupeR-G?

But the whole thing seemed insane. How were innocent bystanders who weren’t using jet somehow being sucked into the games. How could non-players be hallucinating visions from the SupeR-G?

Impossible, I told myself. Or, at least, it should be. Something in the water? Doubtful. Even those who’d poisoned drinking supplies had discovered the sheer volume of water running through a city system diluted the most deadly of concoctions to the point they were harmless.

Some sort of mass telepathy? Science had disproved such things a century ago. Well, except for the quantum shift of the brain to anticipate things by a few seconds in some people. But…

I made a mental note to find out what the girl who’d fallen to her death looked like, should I ever get out of the mess I was in.

But what was the connection between all the stories and Huntington? That was the key question.

Or maybe the answer was that there was no connection. Things get complicated with intuition-ware, and sometimes too much thinking on top of that only makes things worse. Yet I felt there had to be a connection.

I manipulated the stories in my data pile onto a grid, masking them over maps pulled from the net. I studied the star pattern cluster that much of the data formed, with long tendrils branching from it into stars located at distant points.

The dragon/Alice hallucination fell into the center of one of the clusters, and it lay not far from my neighborhood. In fact, the Vietnam helicopter escapades had happened just blocks from me. If Huntington was capable of controlling both the SupeR-Gs and causing hallucinations among groups of people, then it would make sense that it was happening in my area.

Yet there were clusters of stories in Vietnam and New Florida. How did that tie in?

Something occurred to me: Suppose Huntington were creating peripheral hallucinations. That would be a reason for the government to be interested in capturing him. Being able to control people’s minds across a large area would be a very valuable capability.

Only if that were true, then why would they hire Death who, in turn, hired a small fry like me to search for Huntington? I was good, but not that good. There were better hackers and searchers. And if the government was, or shortly would be involved, they could afford to hire the very best, too, without working through a scab like Death. It hurt my ego to admit it, but there was no reason to hire me if there was that much riding on finding Huntington.

Unless….

Unless no one had yet linked Huntington to the events.

If knowledge is power, then I was sitting on a suitcase nuke. Finding Huntington first and learning his secret might put me ahead of the rest. Or get me killed. The stakes were getting higher by the minute and I realized I was in even greater danger than what Death presented — if that were possible. That I needed to be extra careful was an understatement.

Trying to remain calm, I pulled in peripheral data that might or might not be connected, having the computer plot their locations and drop them over my cluster map. I then filtered the results against my old data.

Bingo!

The data intersected in one area, and at a place not that far from me. And it was only miles from Huntington’s original address.

It seemed too easy. Yet it made perfect sense that he might still be around. Sure, as rich as he was, he could have gone anywhere in the world. But with this address he wouldn’t have had to go far and it was still a good hiding place, because few sane people ventured into the area.

But the dangers it presented made it a possible location for someone with money who needed to hide.

So it seemed I had a good idea where Huntington was. I could give the address to Death and be done with it. But there was a catch. By the time Death’s men got into the area — if they survived — my time would be up. And if they failed to find him, my time would not only be up, I’d be dead, too.

So I had no choice but to do the searching myself to be sure it was done right. And to do that, I had to go into the really bad part of Topeka where no one in their right mind went without an armored limo with machine guns mounted in it. “A treacherously bad part of town,” I muttered, shaking my head after I’d removed my visor.

I wanted to go right then. But I was dead on my feet. I decided to get a good night’s sleep before going. But after tossing for an hour, I realized that I was only wasting precious time. I got up, cleaned my weapons, replaced the broken plates in my body armor, and headed out the front door.

Right into the arms of two government-issue thuggites.

So much for the Powers-aren’t-involved-in-the-search-for-Huntington theory, I told myself as they began beating me with their government-issue blackjacks.

They beat me unconscious. Or so I thought — I awoke disoriented, in the middle of what appeared to be a SupeR-G world. The worst kind, too, with artificial memories of a wife, job, the works, all somewhere in the mid-twentieth century.