Neurolink (32 page)

The air chute dumped them into an employee residential area, and Dominic peered around with curiosity. He’d never seen one before. Traffic was sparse at this hour, midway through a shift. The short straight halls crisscrossed in a logical grid, and uniform metal doors lined the walls, bearing sequential numerals. He knew that behind each door lay a standard living cube, four meters deep and wide and high, equipped with graceless built-in furniture, mass-produced in molded plastic. He’s seen the items in catalogs.

As they passed a commissary, he paused to study the green-and-orange laser advertisements painted in the air, and he stood listening with one ear cocked to the lyrics of the promotional jingles. This commissary was the cheeriest place he’d seen. Here at all hours, employees could purchase everything life required—snacks, clothing, digital entertainment—at low, subsidized prices. There was no crime. No loud noise. No litter. All these blessings were the perks of Com protection. This was what the runaways gave up, and as Dominic gazed at a display of pizza-flavored powder in sealed foil packets, he began to understand why. This place had no living smells. Even the passing minutes seemed to have been sanitized, dehydrated and sealed in foil.

A few executives strolled among the employees, wearing badges and carrying notebooks. He watched one of them, a woman, stop a couple of juveniles and check their chips with her scanner wand. She was tall and narrow, with champagne-colored hair, and when she asked a question, she didn’t wait for the answer. In a pompous tone, she ordered the boys to go home. Home? Dominic watched their faces. With his one good eye, he saw their cagey mock respect. The woman strolled on, oblivious, but from the way they glared at her back, Dominic knew they hated her. He could almost hear the violence building behind their sullen young eyes. All at once, his executive blues bound too tight, like a skin he wanted to shed.

A little way down the corridor, Qi hooted softly and pointed to a recess in the wall. When Dominic moved closer, he came face-to-face with an automated teller machine. It was programmed to dispense the round copper coins used by employees, and high on its front panel gleamed the elegant gold Z of ZahlenBank. Its marble veneer reflected an image of a man Dominic barely recognized, lean and grizzled, with a twelve-day beard, a face half covered in scars, and one hungry, sea gray eye. He turned away.

A woman was hurrying past, and he brushed against her. She spun, red-faced, and started apologizing, and when one of her many tote bags slipped off her shoulder, three cans of synthetic meat rolled across the floor. Dominic scooped them up, and the woman opened her mouth in silent fear. She gazed at the cans as if he meant to confiscate them. Execs did that sometimes. She almost reached for the cans, then timidly drew back her hand. Dominic winced for her. He dropped the cans in her bag and laughed to cover the awkwardness. The woman backed away, and he laughed again, imagining what he must look like with his beard and bruises and ravaged eye.

Qi butted his chest with her shoulder. She nodded toward a camera swiveling on its mount, and they stepped behind another column to avoid its gaze.

“We’ll wait here till the shift changes,” she whispered. “When the halls fill up, we’ll move.”

“We have one day left. Can we afford the time?”

She elbowed him farmer into the recess. “We can’t afford to get caught.”

“Is there enough room to sit down?”

“No. Keep still.”

They were jammed tight together in the small space, and Dominic put an arm around Qi’s shoulder. “Cozy.”

“Yeah, too bad your girlfriend Gervasia isn’t here.”

He grinned and drew her closer. “You’ll do in a pinch.”

She kneed him in the groin. Her attack didn’t really hurt him, but he sprang back in reflex. “That was mean.”

She yanked him back behind the column. “The camera, remember? It picks up audio. Think of it as your Da’s eyes and ears.”

Dominic squeezed against her again, and when she turned her back, he smelled her hair. She had a wholesome smell, like a child. He’d noticed it before.

He whispered, “One minute you’re friendly. The next, you’re a bad-tempered pest.”

“Shush.” She pointed in the direction of the camera.

He put his lips to her ear. “Which one’s the real you?”

She pushed his face away with her hand.

A loud chime sounded the shift change, and the noise level rose. Up and down the corridor, protected employees emerged from their residences and trudged toward the east. Dominic watched their faces. Now that he’d really begun to see them, he realized there were no children. And no old people. Did dependents stay shut up all day in their monotonous cubes—or were they sent to group care areas? It embarrassed him not to know something as basic as that. These workers ranged in age from thirteen to about sixty. No one was smiling. Not a single smile in the whole crowd. Most had a sleepy look, as if they’d just gotten out of bed and thrown on their work clothes. Some carried sacks of cola and food, and they ate as they walked. He saw a man stumbling along, holding something in front of his face. A book! Like the one Djuju had. The man was mumbling, pressing his nose into the page, running his finger along the lines of text.

“Let’s go.” Qi’s voice snapped Dominic out of his reverie. They merged into the traffic and let it carry them to the train station. An hour later, they were standing outside his condo park in Trondheim, wondering how to get in.

“It’s my apartment. I should go,” Dominic insisted.

“You’ll walk straight into a trap,” Qi said. “I’ve been trained to break and enter. I’ll do it.” She kicked her bare foot against the curb and studied the building’s service entrance with a practiced eye. “What do you need in there?”

“Shoes for a start. Also, my personal node. It holds the passwords to my bank accounts. I need those passwords to get my money.”

“You don’t have them memorized?”

He made a face.

“Okay, wait here,” she said. “Hide under this green thing. What is this, a plastic bush?”

They huddled under the artificial leaves of the rose bower surrounding the condos, and amid the phony floral fumes, Dominic described the layout of his apartment. He gave her the password to his back door and told her precisely where to find his Net node. He also reminded her about shoes. “Get a pair for yourself. Your feet aren’t much bigger than mine.”

“Funny,” she said.

In perfect silence, she stole around the corner and disappeared from sight. Then he immediately regretted letting her go alone. To mark time, he watched the cleaning robots making their regular rounds. The robots had little to do in this rose garden because executives didn’t drop litter. Occasionally a bot would stretch out its arm and vacuum a bit of lint. Dominic had forgotten the vacant stillness of these lanes around his condo. Perhaps he’d never noticed. Every day, just like all his neighbors, he drove his car straight in and out of the garage. Had anyone ever walked here among the plastic roses? This area was secure. No workers were allowed here, only residents and guests. He waited half an hour, and not a soul passed by.

Distracted, he broke off a pink blossom and twirled it between his fingers. The petals looked genuine, but they were stiff and hard, not fragile like a living flower. He’d seen real roses, expensive hothouse clones valued as gifts. This bud had a stronger fragrance. At its heart, a tiny engine pumped waves of artificial scent, with a battery designed to last for generations. A century from now, buried deep in an urban landfill, this rose would still smell as sweet. He crushed it against his chest and ground the sharp petals into his uniform. Maybe it would mask his body odor.

Changing shadows told him too much time had passed, and he grew anxious about the major. He should have gone with her. True, she was trained for prowling in shadows and violating locked doors, but still he felt guilty. She was an odd one, Major Qi Raoshu. Moody, oh yes. Outwardly tough. Attractive in an erratic sort of way. He remembered how her lips moved when she was sleeping. Yes, attractive. But he knew her secret. Underneath that hard mask, she was as soft as any child. He was just darting around the corner to find her when they collided head-on.

“I got it,” she said, out of breath. She was clutching a pillowcase crammed full of bulky contents. “Let’s go. I tripped an alarm.”

They raced through the rosebushes, found the service entrance they’d used before, and took the stairs three at a time. At the landing, he lifted the pillowcase from her arms but didn’t have time to see what she’d packed. They shot out into the public corridor and melted into the crowd of weary employees. Hunched down to conceal their executive height, they kept glancing over their shoulders.

“Remember the cameras,” Qi whispered.

She grabbed his hand and pulled him into a denser group of workers, and he noticed she was wearing his best patent leather evening shoes.

“We’ve got exec insignia,” he whispered back. “Won’t this look strange, two execs slouching along with employees, one of them carrying a pillowcase?”

“Yeah, we gotta lose these logos. Your condo read my ID. You didn’t tell me you had a security camera in the toilet.”

“Oh.” Dominic’s forehead wrinkled. “I forgot that one.”

She tightened her lips and kept walking, glancing side to side without moving her head, and nudging closer into the employee group every time they passed under a camera.

“Nick-O, we severely need a place to hide.”

He took her to his gym. The doorkeeper was not a computer scanner but a pretty blonde named Sharon, whom Dominic knew on very intimate terms. Sharon balked at his altered appearance, and she asked a lot of questions, which he suavely vowed to answer at a later date. After some finagling, she let them come in without demanding the usual palm print.

At the back of the weight room, behind the stationary bikes, there was a small sauna hardly anyone used. It was the old-fashioned kind made of genuine, antique wood, and the water bucket had to be lifted manually to wet the heated rocks and make steam. Most members found this inconvenient, but Dominic preferred the privacy. In the larger spa rooms at the front, execs met to talk business and to impress each other with their body enhancements.

Just as he’d hoped, the small sauna was empty. He led Qi inside, closed the door and set the thermostat as low as possible. The heat reminded him of the miners’ colony, and it felt almost welcome after the frigid Trondheim air. In the pillowcase, he found his node, his oldest pair of down-at-the-heel house slippers and a box of snack mix.

Qi brushed a stray rose petal from his chest. “Take off your uniform. They’ll be watching for Lapp.Com insignia now. I have to kill that logo chip.”

“I should have asked you to get me some underwear.”

“Relax. I won’t look at your little pecker.”

Dominic started to say something but changed his mind. When he handed her the uniform, she spread it flat on the sauna floor, then picked up a heated rock, using his sleeve as a mitt. Half a dozen times, she smashed the logo emblazoned over the breast pocket, thrusting the rock down with such force that it finally cracked in two. “That should do. You can get dressed now.”

He pulled the uniform up to his waist and tied the sleeves in a knot over his belly. Beads of sweat rolled down over his bare chest. The sauna was too hot to dress completely. He sat on the wooden bench and settled his Net node across his knees, trying and failing to keep his eyes off Qi as she stepped out of her uniform and squatted nude to pound her own logo with a rock.

“I have a feeling the NP knows exactly where we are,” he said, stuffing his mouth with snack mix.

“Maybe.” She rolled her lean naked shoulders, then dipped her hand into the water bucket for a drink. “He hasn’t arrested us yet.”

Dominic spoke with his mouth full. “That thing is not a ‘he.’ It’s an it.”

“Aw, don’t be so testy.” She faced him with a smile and wriggled back into her uniform.

The full frontal view made him fumble a node command, and he had to mumble “Undo” three times.

Qi sat beside him and poured snack mix straight from the box into her mouth. About a third of the box disappeared down her gullet, and when she closed her lips, her cheeks puffed out like balloons. She crunched noisily and grinned. Dominic spoke to his Net node in clear, even words. “Full encryption mode. Call Karel Folger. At home.”

“YES
, sir, um. Where are you, sir? We’ve been max worried. Um, are you in disguise?” Karel’s face warped unnaturally on the flat screen. His nostrils gaped like a pair of dark caves, his pink gums glowed, and his teeth thrust forward wolfishly. As usual, he was leaning too close to the camera lens.

Dominic touched his scarred, bearded face and winked at Qi. “Right, Karel. I’m traveling incognito on a mission for the bank. You’re surprised to hear from me, I suppose.”

“We thought those terrorists were holding you hostage, sir. I’ll call Mr. Lorn and let them know you’re safe. Would you like me to send a car?”

“No, Karel. Don’t call anyone. This is top secret. Do you understand?”

Karel’s eyebrows twitched. He turned his head for a second, and Dominic saw a voluminous red ear, grooved with dark declivities. Then Karel’s gaping nostrils reappeared. “Not anyone, sir?”

“I need your absolute promise of secrecy, Karel.”

“Yes sir. Nondisclosure. Count me in, sir. What’s the deal?”

Dominic relayed the necessary facts. In the sultry sauna, with the Net node balanced on his lap and sweat rolling down his chest, with Qi resting against his knee and munching snack mix, he said he needed to break into the Ark. He wanted to reroute his personal funds into an alias account without anyone knowing. Since the money belonged to him, it wouldn’t be illegal, no more illegal than some other transactions they both knew about. As he continued explaining, Karel’s buckteeth protruded in a smile.

“You once found a back door in the Ark’s firewall,” Dominic said. “Did you ever report it?”

“Negative, sir. A secret like that’s a negotiable asset. You taught me, sir.”