Silhouette (19 page)

“What the…?”

“That's what I was trying to tell you,” Paul said, grabbing the remote back and moving me along again down the street. I was too dumbfounded to resist. “I found the tech with the falcon and was coming close to him, and all of a sudden he seizes up like when he's diving the net, and like a zombie he throws himself under the front wheels of the trolley.”

“You're kidding me.”

“He might have just tried to make one last dangerous dive to escape, maybe tried to hack the falcon or something, and lost control of himself … but I think it was the old man, taking control of him.” Paul pointed to his head, and, as if by reflex, he looked all around and quickened his pace. “The tech's persistent attempts at searching for the black-ops project probably triggered something that the old man noticed. He didn't want us to find out whatever Kim knew, so he tried to help him escape, maybe. But then when we were closing in, he definitely had to do something.”

He stopped, took hold of my shoulders, and looked at me in earnest.

“Listen, Michael. We
cannot
use the net anymore tonight. Do you understand?”

“I don't bloody understand much of anything right now, Paul.”

“Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” He started walking fast again.

“What will you do about Kim?” I said, feeling shame again for using the man's name.

“It's a suicide,” he answered. “I'll just file the report.”

“But what if some peacers start looking into it?”

“They won't,” he said confidently. “I have the master keys, remember?”

“I'm feeling something in my head here,” I said, pointing to the general area. “Is that where the chip would be?”

“It depends on what kind of wetware it is,” he said, panting again from the brisk walk. “If it's specialized to take over your will, that would be the frontal lobe in the neocortex, because that's the mission-control center of the brain. Pain or discomfort might manifest from there in the spot you're talking about. But if it is a more global application, it would be in the corpus callosum, because that's the neural bridge that ties the different parts together. It borders the occipital lobe for visuals, the temporal lobe for sound, and the parietal lobe for touch sensations. The cyber-pleasure industry does implants for the parietal lobe.” He smiled briefly. “But I digress … If your chip is global, it's in the callosum, and that would be right where you were pointing.”

As he said this, the pressure seemed to increase in that part of my head.

“Or it might just be your imagination,” he said, smiling again.

“I wish.”

By the time we reached the car, the falcon had caught up to us. It retracted its wings and lowered itself into its resting place in the trunk, and we drove off to Chinatown Underground to find out about our window of opportunity to confront the old man without his lethal cyborg bodyguard present. I only hoped that by then, my mind would still be my own.

 

16

Before long, we reached the edge of the most colorful part of the city, where the rebuilt stores and restaurants of Chinatown glowed with overcrowded neon above the cramped streets. Paul pulled the car into the entrance to the Underground's parking structure, and the elevator began descending the levels to the one he wanted.

As soon as we left the car and stepped into the dim light of the garage, we were greeted by four armed guards and a beautiful Chinese woman, dressed like an executive. I instinctively raised my hands away from the boas—especially when I noticed that all the guards' assault weapons were pointed at my midsection. I took this to mean that Paul wasn't armed.

“Could we please see your clearance for those weapons,” the woman said to me, with only a small trace of an accent. I slowly reached for my card and handed it to her. After she slipped it into a handheld slot and suppressed her surprise at who I was, she gave it back. Then she handed me a silver grip, which I clasped briefly and returned to her. ID equipment like that prevented old tricks like severed fingers and skin grafts. She looked relieved after she read its display.

“We apologize for any inconvenience, Mr. Ares.” The guards lowered their weapons and they all retreated to an armored van parked nearby. Paul and I walked across the garage to a door, which slid open upon the wonder that was Chinatown Underground. The garage entrances, like the pedestrian ones accessed from the storefronts on the surface, had been cleverly positioned by the architects to impress the visitor with an immediate sense of awe at the scale of the massive subterranean town.

Inside the door was a suspended walkway running left and right, narrow enough that you could see most of the Underground from any spot on it. Paul didn't linger at the immediate view but proceeded to the right along the walkway. I followed him, and we continued to stare at the scene on our left as we traversed it.

In the center of the complex was a huge open space, stretching down to the bottom and up to the ceiling, twenty stories of underground atmosphere. I could see some birds circling in the middle of it—either real ones or some clever invention of the Chinese techs. I knew it wasn't Sabon technology, because they didn't have it yet, thanks to the old man's stinginess. I swerved closer to the short wall on my left and looked down, and was rewarded with a dizzying glimpse of trees and grass at the bottom of the open space, far below the circling birds. The park was only thirteen levels down, because we were on the seventh, but I was surprised at how far away it seemed.

On each side of the wide space were protruding concourses lined with shops and speckled with consumers. And on the far side from us, barely visible because of the distance and the haze from the atmosphere, was another series of walkways like the one we were on, providing access to and from the other parking garage. It occurred to me that most of the people in the mall must have walked in from the surface, however, because our walkway and the others I saw were sparsely populated.

The narrow walk dumped us out onto the broad concourse on this side of the level, and I continued following Paul as he moved purposefully toward our destination. The concourse was filled with various establishments, the temporary ones planted in its middle and the bigger, permanent ones along the outside edge. I couldn't read Chinese, and there were no signs in English, but I knew what the attractions were. Besides the usual restaurants and stores, there were numerous cyberware shops, where a trusting Chinese or a daring American could get anything from a relaxation implant to a birth-control device called a “switch,” which enabled its owner to allow or prevent conception at will by way of a neural interface.

I didn't need to be able to read the signs in order to identify the many virtual- and real-sex shops, either. China had experienced their sexual revolution late, like their technological one, but when it had finally arrived, it had done so with enough force to be referred to as the “Big Bang.” Just as the absence of a Judeo-Christian ethical hangover had given them a leg up on the competition in the cyber wars, so their lack of inhibitions had led them to pioneer a new form of the oldest profession, which had now become one of the Underground's biggest commodities.

Behind many of these storefronts, some of which I was passing on my way, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of men and women (and perhaps some children) who were paid to give up their bodies while their minds were elsewhere in cyberspace. I remembered someone's explanation of the popularity of this almost necrophilic version of prostitution: the customers are torn between needing someone and wanting to be alone at the same time, which has always been the name of that particular game.

I glanced at Paul to see if he noticed these places, but he was consumed with looking for a certain storefront. I didn't like some of the feelings bubbling up within me, which probably arose from the fact that I might never see my wife again, so I turned my attention to the people we were passing. And I noticed immediately how “cyberized” this culture was, reflected even in the fashions worn by a majority of the denizens, especially their youth. Hoods, hats, and headbands equipped with trodes and jacks were everywhere, allowing the wearers to have one foot in the real world and the other in a virtual one. I imagined that they were viewing music, talking with friends across town, or even experiencing pornography as they shopped or loitered in the mall. And I thought of the frightening potential of mind control for these masses, now that I knew the technology had passed the threshold of mere communication and entertainment.

Abruptly, Paul sat down on an empty bench and patted the spot beside him. When I took it, he put his arm around me and leaned over to my ear like a lover.

“You need to go in, because I don't want to have to retire this disguise,” he said, then looked at one of the storefronts, which was walled in and much more plain than the rest. He leaned back over.

“Tell them you want to know how long of a window we have to cover, for security purposes.”

“Okay,” I said, and stood up and walked to the door in the center of the storefront, which displayed a small group of Chinese letters. Though I can't read Chinese, I knew they translated to “Cyber Hole,” because that was the name of this mecca of wetware, the unlikely corporate home for a group of Chinese supertechs who could have played the Silicon Valley like a harp, had they had any such inclination.

The door was open, so I tugged on it and walked in. Ahead of me was a brown hallway that did indeed look like a horizontal hole in the ground. I walked forward in the hall, which was empty except for the small piece of scanning equipment that followed me silently along its track in the ceiling. I recognized it as one made by BASS, too expensive to be afforded by most small countries, or any corporation with fewer than a hundred thousand employees. Cyber Hole had only eight, so that meant we were very appreciative of the fine work they had done on Min.

I assumed the little machine had identified me, since I wasn't cut to ribbons by lasers, so I opened the door at the other end of the hall and stepped into the next room. It was empty except for a few used beer cans, a cardboard box, and a pair of sneakers. The walls were also bare, except for some little black squares of holo equipment and a dried brown splash that I guessed had come from one of the beer cans.

The door on the other side of the room opened with a jerk, and a nervous tech in a yellow smock stumbled in.

“Mistah Ahhris,” he said, rubbing his hands together and blinking. Then he said something in Chinese that from his expression I guessed meant “sorry.” He giggled anxiously, then shrugged and pointed to himself. “English, no.” He smiled at me apologetically.

“You can speak Chinese,” I said, pulling out the glasses and pointing to them. As I began to put them on, the poor fellow suddenly realized that we were standing in a blank room. He let out a yelp and backed through the door, bowing repeatedly. Through the still-open door, I heard him barking at someone, and a few moments later I was standing in the observation room at the top of the Statue of Liberty, looking out upon New York Harbor through the slats in her crown. It was a nice holo, but the effect was ruined by the door, which was still half open. The tech appeared in it soon, only to yelp, retreat, and bark at someone again. Soon the room changed into a polished corporate lobby, and the tech appeared one more time, his face bright red. He started talking again, in Chinese, and I flipped through the glasses' menus until I found the translation program.

“… You not expecting!” Laughing again. His lips were moving one way, but I heard something different through the glasses, like one of those dubbed foreign holos. “Our English man is here only in day. No night horns atlas.” The translation program was obviously going to have some trouble with his dialect.

“Can you understand me?” I asked, slowly and clearly. He nodded.

“Yes, but tiny.”
A little
—I got the gist.

“Good,” I said. “What I want is very simple.”

“Yes, yes,” he said through the translator. “I am very sexually aroused.” He was smiling, and I smiled, too. He must have said a word that meant “very excited.”

“Mr. Rabin's bodyguard, Min, is coming here tonight.”

“Yes, yes,” he said. “He no home young. He is our best … produce.”

“What
time
is he coming?” I pointed to my wrist, though my only “watch” was in my glasses.

“Yes, yes.” He nodded, then looked puzzled. “Why is you ask this?” I was caught off guard for a second, but then I remembered what Paul had said. So I told him about the “security window.” He made clucking noises that seemed to convey understanding.

“Four hour, in the morning,” he said, holding up four fingers.

“And when will he be done?” I asked.
“Finished?”

“Difficult to say.”
That was a good translation,
I thought. “He will urinate easily or he will require adjustments.”
That wasn't,
I thought, but then I figured it out. In the etymology of the dialect, that concept must have developed into the terminology for “checking out okay” or requiring no treatment. The tech continued, but I stopped him.

“When would be the
earliest
that he would leave here?” I asked, then realized that this was probably not the best thing to ask, in case the man was suspicious of me. He didn't seem to notice, however, or maybe he didn't understand. So I asked if Min would be done before the sun rose, at about 6:00
A.M.
He said no.

“Thank you very much,” I said, and shook his hand.

“Yes, yes,” he said, smiling again. And then, as I turned to walk back through the door, he bade me well by saying, “May you grow obese on your rice!” As I walked back through the brown hallway, I took the glasses off.