Necropolis (20 page)

It hauled me up so fast that I had a blast of vertigo. I could only close my eyes and hang on while I rocketed upward. Then I was swinging myself over the lip of the roof and retracting the cable, wondering at what floor I’d left my stomach.

The access grill was reinforced steel, bolts and straps. I passed the palm-sized device Armitage gave me over the thing. Two metal tendrils shot out and insinuated themselves into the output nodes of the panel.

“Hacking building AI,” the device said. “Please wait.” A couple beeps later, the access grill’s locks detached with a muted
thunk
. “Security overridden,” it said. “Have a nice crime.”

I consulted a GPS router loaded with the building’s schematics. I lowered myself through the hole. A maintenance shaft. A couple twists and turns later, I found the connection to a ventilation duct. It ran over the main hallway. The duct’s aluminum grill had screws, so I cut through them with a tiny laser torch. I dropped down into the corridor.
 

Now it would get tricky.

I edged down the hall. The proximity unit strapped to my thigh would alert me before I tripped any security sensor, and before any human guards got too close.
 

I turned the corner and ran smack into Maggie.

She shimmered at the contact. I fell back into a defensive position.

“Plasmagram,” she said nasally.

I put a hand over my heart. “I youthed a year! What the fuck are you doing here?”

“I can run interference.”

No time for a debate. I pointed a gloved finger at her, letting her see in my eyes just how serious I was. “You’re going. Now. I don’t need your help.”

“Then you know that a guard is about to turn the corner.”

Sure enough, footsteps could be heard, getting louder, and my thigh was vibrating urgently. I spotted a utility closet, and pulled Maggie in behind me.

It was tight. We found ourselves body to “body” amidst the brooms, buckets and shelves of toilet paper. I could feel her trim form pressed against me.
 

Her eyes wandered my face. “Wish I could smell.”

“Dummy up,” I said.

“Bet you smell good. Musk, clean sweat, lingering soap…”

“Will you be quiet?”

Then we heard the guard approach outside.
 

The door handle jiggled.
Shit
. I closed my eyes, a statue. The guard tried the door again, testing the lock. If it opened, I’d have to move on him. Come at him low, take him off his feet, then finish him. Knocking someone out in real life was messier than the movies. Causing enough trauma to shut down a brain risked a concussion, a fractured skull, or outright death.
 

Maggie brought her hands to my face, touched my skin. Her fingers pulsed as plasma met flesh. They roamed the curves of my face. The danger of the situation, combined with her touch, was suddenly and intensely erotic.
 

Finally, the guard’s footsteps diminished down the hall. I exhaled, sweat beading my brow. Maggie was still touching my face, cheeks, lips.

“What does this feel like?” she asked.

“Okay, c’mon. Stop it.”

Her tone hardened. “What’s wrong, tough guy? Afraid to get turned on by an artificial girl?”

Christ. Her timing was amazing.

I slid past her, opening the door.

***

There were two sets of main doors to the genetics lab with a sterile foyer between. Each had its own security apparatus, a redundant set-up to annoy staff and burglars alike. Both sets were constructed of industrial security glass, framed in metal Xs that allowed a view of the lab beyond.
 

As we approached the outer doors, my leg sensor vibrated again. I put a hand up and we froze. I clicked my flashlight to infrared and cursed under my breath. Laser beams crisscrossed the hallway a meter in front of us, floor to ceiling. An impenetrable web of light.
 

“I thought I already overrode security.”

“Must be a dedicated program,” she replied.
 

“What is it? Motion detector?”

“Worse. It’s a DNA alarm. Those lasers analyze any organic material above a certain weight. They’ll ignore a mouse or a dust bunny but a human will instantly set it off.”

I cursed colorfully. “I can’t exactly hide my DNA.”

Maggie nodded. She was chewing her lip.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“There’s that inept lying again.”

Maggie looked at the floor a moment. “There may be a way, but I’m not sure I like it.”
 

I opened my palms.
Try me.

“You wondered before how I become physical, right? Well, the short version is that I download myself into a small receptacle… call it my heart, whatever. This device projects the plasma and nanobits which collectively form my body.”

“This receptacle actually rides around inside its own projected body?”

“Right. If I were to dematerialize, my software construct would return to the device or be transferred to another unit, another computer. The particles would be re-absorbed into the device.”

“How does this help us?”

She hesitated. “If you hold my heart close against your body,” she said, “I might be able to reset my physical parameters to rematerialize around you. Sort of like a second skin.”

“Around me? You mean I’d be
inside
you?”

“I’d be like a shield around you.”

“Would I be able to breathe?”

“That’s exactly what we don’t want—no flow of molecules across the membrane that could trigger the sensors. You’d have to hold your breath.”

“Have you ever done this?”

“Are you kidding? How would you like someone to have your living heart, your very life, in their hands?”

“Don’t you have a backup file somewhere?”

“Would you want a backup of
you
stored somewhere? Some clone? So if you died, an exact copy, but not really YOU, could be put in your place? When are you going to get it?”

“Yell at me later.”

Her resolution dimmed a moment. “So are we doing this? That guard’ll be back soon.”

“Okay, what do I—”

“Hold your hands out, palms up.”

I did. She stepped toward me, so the tips of my fingers were pressing against her abdomen just below her breasts. We locked eyes for a moment, and I realized how afraid she was.

She trusts me
, I thought.
With her very existence
.

Then she became less solid and stepped forward. My hands slipped into her. I felt tingling. I could still see them within her sparkling iridescent form. Above floated a grapefruit-sized globe. It was silver, a giant ball bearing. It settled gently into my palms. I took a breath and pulled my arms back towards myself and cradled her heart against my chest.

The lights went out.

Suddenly my body was moving. My legs lifted, went down, ambulating by remote control. I felt smothered and for a moment bucked inside her. She fought for dominance. It took enormous will to relax and let her move me.

Time slowed. I felt strange, dislocated. I imagined that I could hear her thoughts, below the level of consciousness. They were shimmers of electricity, whispers in a grove of cypresses, the knowledge of circuit and sky. I didn’t know if it was real or not. But they danced around me, fireflies of thought, and I was delighted to find that there was much in her that was made of joy and kindness. I wondered how I could have suspected her of throwing Hector out the window, and my hardness made me want to cry.

I came back to myself a little. The heart felt delicate in my grasp. I could crush it, and that would be it, no more Maggie. Despite how Elise and I had loved, neither would have permitted such a vulnerable moment, so complete a surrender. Survival instinct, maybe. Or the calluses of city life. This was as intimate with someone as I’d ever been.
 

The realization was like ice water. Guilt streaked through my head. But the whispers continued. I wanted suddenly to truly abandoned myself to them, give up my pain and simply merge into…
 

And then, like that, we were beyond the laser web, and I was myself again. I looked down at my own body, surprised to be separate. We glanced shyly at each other, and I felt absurdly like a kid who had just stolen his first kiss.

“Guess we didn’t set off the alarm,” I said.

“Guess not.”

A silent moment. “That was… wild.”

She nodded. “I felt you. Were you saying things?”

I didn’t answer. I stepped forward and the outer doors hissed open. We entered the foyer, and they smacked closed behind us. No way back to the hall. Our choice was to satisfy the second lock and continue into the lab or be trapped here.
 

I examined the inner lock. A gene sampler. There was a button below three small icons: a drop of blood, a strand of hair, a bit of saliva.

This time I was prepared. I pressed the button. A tiny receptacle whirred from the wall.
 

“Please spit,” it said.

“Gross,” said Maggie.

“Would you settle for some hair?” I whispered. From my bag, I withdrew the tube Nicole had given me, extracted a few hair follicles and dumped them into the receptacle. They were sucked away and there was a whir.

“Thank you, Dr. Crandall.”

The interior doors parted.

***

The lab was painted a bland beige meant to stay out of the way of any great thoughts. My flashlight played across smartscreens, centrifuges, quantum tunneling microscopes. A science geek’s Disneyland. Computer servers big as Frigidaires sat in a row, blinking stupidly.
 

I threaded through the work stations. Opened drawers beneath the Formica tables. Nothing of value. Pens, notepads, accoutrements of the scientific method.

Maggie’s hands were wrapped around her elbows.

“Cold?” I whispered.

“Terrified,” she answered.

We moved to the back. The offices for the senior staff were glass cubes. The one labeled with Crandall’s name was the biggest. It still had a yellow strip of police tape across the door.
 

The inside was spartan but disorganized. A plastic chromosome model hung on fishing line like a mobile. Books and papers were vaguely organized in tottering heaps. Data pebbles were strewn like M&Ms. This workaholic was a slob.
 

I rifled through papers on the desk. They all contained the same indecipherable jargon. I wondered what I had hoped to find without Maggie’s help. “Can you access the database?” I asked. “We’re looking for a journal, calendar, diary, anything personal.”

The smartscreen came to life, bathing the room in blue. “Searching,” she said.

I hated the fact that every piece of evidence in this world was on the inside of a computer. Even in my era, I’d been a dinosaur to the younger CSI guys. I was from the school where you searched with your hands, your eyes, your wits. When your case-breaker was a greasy fingerprint, dried blood on an andiron, a kilo of cocaine in a false-bottomed drawer. Not some data file in cyberspace.
 

As I waited, I looked around. The rear wall was dominated by an enormous dry-erase board system. When one of the four rectangular boards was filled, it could be lowered out of the way and a fresh one rotated down. Currently, all four sections were covered in equations dense enough to give Stephen Hawking a migraine.

“Whoa,” said Maggie, behind me. “What’s this?”
 

Imprinted in nasty red letters across the screen was:

SURAZAL CORPORATION

LEVEL ONE EYES ONLY

PLEASE ENTER PASSWORD

“Damn,” I said. “I’d hoped personal stuff might not be protected. Can you hack it?”

Maggie chewed her lip. “It’s a risk. I don’t know their security architecture. If I try, and set off alarms, we won’t know it until we see them pointing their guns.”
 

I could feel the Dean looking down again. When faced with the choice of extra risk or leaving empty-handed, pros also took the cautious route. Patience and control was how you stayed on the street instead of playing checkers in lock-up. But I wanted something for my trouble, even if it was a computer file. “Crandall told Nicole about a breakthrough the night he disappeared, right? It could be here.”

“Even if it is, we might not be able to make heads or tails of it.”

“What else do we have?”

“Bupkus.”

“So do it.”

Maggie broke apart into a firestorm of glowing embers. Her nanobits swarmed her metal heart, lowering it onto the desk. They flitted away, dissolving. The globe just sat there, looking inert, and I almost panicked. Then her voice issued from the computer’s speaker:
 

“It’s going to take a while. Hang loose.”

Right. Hang loose. I eyed the doors.