The Facilitator (4 page)

That, in and of itself, was pretty damn weird. Maybe it had just been too long since she’d taken a man to bed and let their bodies do the wild thing. Or maybe her brain was telling her she needed a real vacation, one that featured handsome guys with big cocks and lusty appetites on nude beaches.

Urgh.
Sand
.

Amused at her own ramblings, she chuckled and stepped from the elevator into an area she’d not visited in a while. Dream-John’s words stayed with her every bit as much as the memory of his touch. He’d spoken a series of words, a code perhaps or a file number. She didn’t know, so she was going to take an hour or so on a slow day and find out. The place to start was the only place she could think of with associations to the past—the data-storage division.

Having a forty-floor building to oneself eliminated any worries about space. Eternal Tranquility was obviously not staying awake nights wondering where to put that new vid screen or data readers. Same thing with the data-storage division. It wasn’t a closet or a suite, it was five floors of quietly humming archival units.

When Martine stepped from the corridor into the user room, dry air pricked her lungs and her neural interface shifted under a barrage of static electricity. Quickly she moved to the rack of desensitizers and clamped one around her wrist. The equipment was invulnerable. Martine wasn’t. Charges could build up in this environment that were a damn sight worse than a zap from a door handle, and she did not want to fry her circuitry.

That would lead to a whole bunch of nastiness, including questions about what she was doing here in the first place—something she herself wasn’t quite certain about. And she knew that
following something I dreamed of
wasn’t a solid defense.

Her legitimate excuse, offered earlier when she’d requested a pass, was a direct result of her time with Taber. Antin’s Syndrome was, as yet, not fully understood. As a facilitator, it was logical—and sensible—for Martine to back up her recent experience with more knowledge, hence the research into the history and current medical status of the condition.

There’d been no problems whatsoever obtaining a pass. She’d filled out the forms, pressed her fingerprint into at least seven documents and passed two retinal scans. One more in the elevator at this floor.

And now she was here, safely guarded from static shock and ready to find herself a comfortable cubicle to begin her research. As she looked around the large room, she saw one area light up. Everything else was pretty much turned off.

She was alone here, the only warm-blooded creature on the floor, most probably. Everything else was digitized and filed. The knowledge of centuries lying dormant. It was ironic in some ways. All these files were memories of humans and their past. And yet they were not human, just tiny collections of molecules and electricity.

She shook her head at herself. She was little more than molecules and electricity as well. The fundamental stuff life was made of. And
her
life was passing while she stood and thought about weird Zen shit.

The lighted cubicle beckoned and she sat in the comfortably upholstered chair, pulling it nearer the desk until she was happy with her position. Then she lifted her arm and placed her right hand, palm down, on the smooth plate built in to the surface in front of her.

“Good morning. Please confirm your identity.”

“Martine TwoSeven. Authorization 4921 dash 27 dash ET.”

“Authorization confirmed.”

Various lights flickered, there was a quiet chirp, and then a face appeared on the screen. It was deliberately
not
a human face, more of a symbol of the machine’s abilities than an attempt to put users at ease. Martine thought it looked a bit like an old mask she’d seen while researching masquerade costumes for a party. Rigid and neutral, it was more a logo than anything else.

But she spoke to it anyway. “Morning. I’m looking for information on Antin’s Syndrome.”

“Very well.” There was a pause while the screen presented a few nice swirling clouds of color for the entertainment of the user. “You are Facilitator TwoSeven.”

“Yes.” Martine waited.

“This division is currently beta-testing a new interface. You are equipped to participate in the testing process. Would you like to be incorporated into the procedure?”

“Um…” She blinked, surprised at the request and unaware of any new interfaces. But then again she never used this facility, so what did she know?

“Participation in beta testing is encouraged and rewarded by the sum of one hundred credits per user.”

“Oh. Well hey.” Not that a hundred credits bought much anymore, but since money seemed to keep rolling her way, Martine wasn’t about to turn it down. “Okay. I’m game. What do I do?”

“Please place your hands on the arms of your chair. Since the neural interface will involve simulated motion, the user must be gently restrained to avoid personal injury.”

“Uh…I…”

Before she got any further, two locks snapped up from the arms of her chair to secure her and one encircled her waist. The chair itself shifted, and she felt it go rigid as it too was locked down tight.

“This is for your protection only and should you decide not to participate, you have only to say
cease beta test
and the system will end the run.”

Martine took a breath. Logically she doubted anyone would try and dispose of her while she was clamped to a chair in what was little more than a virtual library. She wasn’t real comfortable and being restrained was
unsettling
. But overall? Hell, why not? She didn’t have a damn thing to do today. Might as well get strapped in by a computer and whisked into a beta test.

“Go for it.” She settled herself as comfortably as she could.

“Please close your eyes.” The voice sounded incredibly polite as Martine obeyed. “The system will now establish neural connection.”

It kept its word. The back of her chair vibrated, and Martine could sense connectors emerging and moving, linking up with the endings of her interface, tangling themselves into a fluid river of information.

And she was in. But in
where
?

It was disorienting at first, and she quickly realized that being restrained was probably a damn good idea. There was no up or down here, no gravity to tell her which was which. Every direction was possible and accessible. A free-fall of visual strangeness that threatened to turn her stomach inside out.

She drew in a breath, held it for a count of five, and then hissed it out, pushing away the inner-ear disturbances and focusing on what she could see.

It was, in its own way, magnificent. A brilliant mélange of hues for which there were no names, and shapes she couldn’t begin to describe. It was moving, alive, a pulsating vibrant environment beckoning her to come inside and play.

She discovered that she had a virtual presence, luminous blue limbs that were closer to tentacles than arms but worked equally well. She experimented, reaching out and touching the nearest cluster of what she guessed might be information cells.

They were, and suddenly her mind was filled with music, and she absorbed everything contained in that data set. She now knew more than she’d ever need about the Russian genius Rimsky-Korsakov and his compositions.

Not, she reminded herself, what she was there for, although “The Flight of the Bumblebee” thing was interesting…that run of chromatic sixteenth notes…

Tugging herself away, Martine absorbed more of her newly discovered environment. She could, if she chose, open her mind to the knowledge of the universe. Or whatever was stored here, at least.

Of course, that might take a couple of millennia. Neural interfaces were good, but still lagged way behind the speeds these kinds of cyber-servers took for granted. She’d fry her synapses if she tried to soak up too much too fast.

With a regretful sigh at the fact she was still a human in a digital realm, Martine moved on, following what seemed to be a path, gliding more on the power of a thought than anything else.

She “thought” herself forward and there she was. A neat trick. She quickly got the hang of it and headed toward the medical databases gathered in a nicely arranged sheet of blue-white spheres. Very clinical.

She wondered if there was a reason for that. If, in fact, even though this was all nothing more than electrical impulses, there was something that transcended the practical and wandered a little too close to the whimsical.

Again she pulled herself out of that drifting train of thought. It was scary in some ways, the ease with which she could lose herself. And she had a goal. She “thought” Antin’s Syndrome, and several spheres popped up a level.

Refining her search, she “thought” patients and symptoms, then decided to start with patients.

One sphere glowed brightly in front of her, and she touched it with her phantom cyber-hand.

It burst into data, streaming sparkles that immediately entered her brain and flooded it with everything she’d ever wanted to know about Antin’s Syndrome patients. It wasn’t much. There had been fewer than two hundred recorded cases.

Immediately, she ran a review of the patient files. Not one was named Taber.

Okay, this was getting freaky.

She moved away from the medical spheres and “thought” herself toward more mundane information. People files. Information files. The minutiae of everyday life that never seemed to become unimportant, no matter how humanity evolved.

She let the name “Taber” float to the surface of her consciousness and watched as a ream of data blocks rumbled her way. Mentally filtering them, she thought about male, early forties, Caucasian and in good shape.

That thinned down the pile a little. She wrinkled her digitally created nose and tried another approach. Skilled with weapons. No discernable tattoos.

She pulled an image of him from memory to see if that got a response, and a red light blinked on one side of the data cubes. Aha. This might be him.

She moved that way, ignoring the rest of the cubes. The light was surrounding one cube, and excitedly she reached out to touch it. It had a number on it.

12-19 B.

Holy fucking shit
.

Several things happened at once. Her memory of John’s voice telling her to remember that number leaped into her mind. In front of her the data cube vanished, to be replaced by a solid door that should have featured in a vault belonging to the gods, not a cyber-data storage server. It was barred, sealed and bore the symbol for a security classification that was so far out of her realm she’d not even been certain it existed.

And she was jerked out of the interface with a rapidity that made her eyes roll.

“Thank you for your participation in the beta test currently operating throughout this system. We appreciate your interest. The appropriate credit reward will be deposited to your account within twenty-four hours.” The voice was silky, smooth and completely expressionless. “We will be forwarding a short questionnaire, and we would appreciate your taking a few moments to complete it. All information will remain confidential, but your input will be of assistance to our developers. Thank you again. Have a nice day.”

The locks unlatched, the screen dimmed and Martine was left with a brain that still felt seriously scrambled, a whole bunch of unanswered questions and a really strong urge to pee.

She figured the last one was the easiest to deal with and left the data-storage division as easily as she’d entered it.

Much later, she sat alone at one of the employee café “windows” and watched the electronic representation of a flock of fat birds flying over jagged mountains someplace that probably no longer existed.

Her fingers toyed with her coffee cup, her lunch sat half-eaten and ignored.

There was something really weird starting to unfold. And it seemed like she was part of it. Along with a dead guy named Taber.

And a dream man named John.

Chapter Four

Eternal Tranquility eased her back into facilitation, giving her calm and prepared patients with poignant memories, final moment fantasies that required very little ingenuity and departures delicately tinged with emotions.

They made it clear she was a valued asset and that they’d treat her as such, giving her plenty of time to regain her equilibrium after the Taber experience.

It would have been frighteningly easy to slip into that diva mindset…the one that expected such treatment and behaved accordingly, making demands matching her elevated status, pissing off people around her with her attitude and generally living down to her worst personality traits.

But being Martine, she tended to do the opposite. Instead of demanding more perks, she stayed nearly silent. Instead of flashing her credits around, she spent hardly any of them and then only on necessities.

And she always had something nice to say to the techs and nurses she interacted with during her work. She laughed with the guys who eyed her legs lasciviously, and gave a couple of nurses her code for the leather tunic they both admired.

Life—and death—went on pretty much as usual for facilitators and clients.

She told nobody that she’d begun dreaming, or that those dreams featured one person.

John
.

She’d occasionally wondered how far the level of surveillance went on Eternal Tranquility employees. Of course there was security. And that would go double for facilitators, since there were very few of them.

God forbid another company should try and woo her or her peers. It hadn’t happened up to now, so she figured security was solid. At what point security became intrusive-and-invasive monitoring was still an ongoing debate and probably always would be.

But she’d been dreaming for several weeks now with no interference or questions. Thus she arrived at the conclusion that her routine well-being was indeed observed, but that the dreams either didn’t register or were no problem to those who watched her.

They didn’t seem to be affecting her work nor was she dozing off in the middle of the afternoons. No, John’s increasingly regular nocturnal visits seemed to be something only she fully appreciated.