The Credulity Nexus (7 page)

Shah smiled
again. “She's not there for your protection, Rik. She's taking you
back to the States for interrogation.”

“
And don't think I'm not glad of the
company.”

“
We couldn't have held you, anyway. Not
long enough to get you to talk.”

“
You're breaking my heart. Just one thing I
wanted to ask you before I go.”

The door
opened again and Fariba Freymann stepped in. “OK, Mr. Drew, let's
go.”

He glanced
briefly at her. “Just call me Rik.” Turning his attention back to
Shah, he continued, “I can see how you and the Germans managed to
trail me from Berlin to here, but how do you suppose the upload
managed to find me?”

Blake Bonomi
arrived home to find a car parked in his drive. It was unusual, but
not unknown for Brie's friends to still be visiting when he came
home. He did a quick check of the calendar in his cogplus for any
dinner dates or visits he'd forgotten about, but there was nothing
listed.

The car was a
muscular, new four-wheel drive. A European make, but that meant
nothing these days. He peered in through the windows as he walked
by it. There were take-away cartons on the back seat and coffee
cups in the front. Everything about it suggested it was a man's
car. He paused at the doorstep and took a look at the licence
plate. Local registration. He had his cogplus record the number.
Blake didn't like surprises, and he didn't like things that were
out of the ordinary.

He opened the
door and went in, moving quietly. Somewhere in his head, a voice
told him that some strange guy visiting his house while he was away
at work could only add up to one thing. The better part of him was
telling it to shut its dirty mouth, but he moved cautiously even
so, listening for sounds that might explain what was going on.

“
Oh, hi!” His wife walked into the hallway
from the kitchen. “I didn't hear you come in. I was just making a
coffee.” She lowered her voice. “We've got visitors. They said they
want to talk to you about Rik.”

“
Shit, Brie, you shouldn't have let anybody
in.” Brie didn't know that Rik had gone underground. She didn't
know that people were probably looking for him. He unbuttoned the
strap on his handgun. “You go back to the kitchen. Better still, go
round to Margie's place, and stay there 'till I come for
you.”

She was half
shocked and half amused. “Don't be silly, honey. It's the FBI.”
Before he could stop her, she pushed open the door to the sitting
room and walked in. “Sorry to keep you gentlemen waiting. This is
my husband, Blake.”

Two men were
standing in the room, one opposite the door and the other to the
side, on Blake's left. As soon as he saw them, he knew they weren't
FBI. And there was Brie, right in the centre of the triangle.

“
Let's talk about this outside,” Blake
suggested.

The man to his
left drew a gun and pointed it at Brie. “Let's not,” he said.

“
We're here for the package,” the one
opposite said. He too had his gun drawn.

“
It's OK, Brie.” Blake could tell from his
wife's open-mouthed gape and her shallow breathing that she was
petrified. “Just relax, honey. These men aren't going to hurt us.”
Which, of course, was a lie. Whether he told them where the package
was or not, there was going to be bloodshed. Brie looked around at
him, confused and disoriented. “Why don't you sit down over there,
Brie, while I tell them what they want to know?” He needed to get
her out from between the three of them. Out of the
crossfire.

“
Stay where you are, Mrs. Bonomi,” said the
man on the left. “You.” He waved his gun at Blake. “Start
talking.”

It might be
the best chance Blake would get. For that instant, neither gun was
pointing at Brie. He threw himself at the man who'd just spoken,
drawing his weapon and yelling at Brie to get down. A shot exploded
from his right, but it must have missed him because he was still
alive. He had barely enough time to get his gun free of its holster
before he slammed into the man he was charging at.

He felt a hot
pain as a bullet tore across his ribs. Then they were both on the
ground and he was rolling to his left, hoping to use the downed man
as a shield.

He fired a
shot into the struggling man beside him at point blank range, and
the struggling stopped. Almost at the same time he felt a
hammer-blow to the stomach. The other gunman had hit him. Gasping
with pain and shock, his vision blurring, he swung his weapon up to
return fire. The gun felt like lead, and his arm shook with the
strain of lifting it.

Brie was still
standing where she had been, screaming at him in horror. The gunman
had grabbed her by the shoulder and was pulling at her, trying to
put her between himself and Blake's gun. Blake had maybe another
second to finish it, or he and Brie were both dead. Another shot
from the gunman hit Blake in the left shoulder and jerked him
sideways just as he squeezed the trigger with his last scrap of
strength.

Falling back,
ablaze with pain and barely conscious, he waited for the shot that
would finish him.

-oOo-

Omega Point
was nothing special until you looked inside. On approach, it looked
like a thousand other space stations: a big, puck-shaped metal
shell swinging on the end of a long, long tether attached to a lump
of asteroid. Inside, it was something else.

Beyond a huge
docking bay, big enough to hold half-a-dozen standard service
shuttles, were meeting rooms and luxuriously-appointed guest rooms.
Beyond these was nothing but a maze of narrow, unlit corridors,
tunnelling through a solid block of computational matrix. Omega
Point was, without doubt, the most powerful computing grid in the
Solar System.

Within that
mass of circuitry ran dozens of climate models and economic models,
the analyses of hundreds of massive data sets from Earth- and
space-based physics labs, the crunching of vast biological models
at quantum resolution, and the data mining of records on billions
of individuals on behalf of hundreds of government agencies. This
was one of the ways Omega Point earned its keep, hiring out its
massive computational resources to whoever could afford them. The
other way was through the rent fees paid by its
twenty-thousand-plus uploaded inhabitants.

When the
fabulously rich died – as they still did, no matter what treatments
and augmentations they had – most of them opted to be uploaded into
a computer somewhere. Some had their own facilities, built just for
that purpose, but many chose to join one of the transhuman
communities and to live in virtual worlds among their peers. The
biggest, most expensive and most powerful of those communities was
Omega Point.

Expensive, so
that it could keep out the riff-raff. Powerful, because the Life
Extension by Cerebral Upload Act of 2045 gave the power of attorney
over a person's assets to “any mental construct that was an unique
and exact replica of the mental state of that person at the time of
death.” Twenty-thousand-plus uploads of the world's wealthiest men
and women constituted a massive accumulation of money and
influence. The most concentrated bloc of power in the Solar System,
in fact.

Fortunately
for everyone else, the inhabitants of Omega Point never spoke with
one voice. If they ever did, it would be a deafening roar that
would be heard from the cities of Earth to the most distant
research outpost on the farthest Kuiper Belt object.

Instead, the
scene being played out in this particular virtual world within
Omega Point was far more typical of the state of affairs among its
magnates.

“
Stop flapping about and come down
here!”

The great
monster furled its feathered wings and plunged towards the ground.
Missing it by a talon's length, the beast rose again in a
controlled stall, its enormous wings spread wide to hold the air as
it gently stepped out of the sky onto the rocky hillside below. The
human head on top of the multi-hued bird's body tilted down to look
at the man who had commanded it.

Martin Lanham
scowled back with an expression of distaste. He presented in human
form – not the overweight, ageing form he'd had when truly human,
but a leaner, taller, more handsome, and very much younger version
of who he had once been. He wore a well-tailored business suit, the
kind he had worn since starting out in the motor industry back in
the 1980s.

“
What the hell are you supposed to be?”
Lanham demanded.

The gigantic
bird with the human head answered him. “I'm a ba,” it said,
sounding offended. “I like it.”

“
Well, you look stupid.”

“
It's something I found in the Egyptian
Book of the Dead. It represents the divine part of the human soul.
The ba can leave the deceased's body and fly to the netherworld, or
it can return to Earth. It inhabits a new body when it is
reincarnated. I thought it was a rather nice metaphor for what I
have become.”

“
And what have you become,
Celestina?”

The monster
raised one wing in a languorous, dramatic gesture, and morphed into
a beautiful woman. “The same as you, Martin: an unfettered
soul.”

Lanham sighed.
“Some of us are more fettered than others. I need to know what's
going on. Your reports have been somewhat sketchy.”

The woman
walked over to the chaise longue which had incongruously
materialised nearby. She sank into the couch, arranging her long
limbs. A light, warm breeze started, delicately lifting her hair
and stirring the chiffon dress she wore. When she was happy with
the effect, she smiled at Lanham. “Theft is an art-form, Martin,
not an exact science.”

“
I don't need to tell you what is at stake.
Do you want a war with the humans?” He didn't move, yet he was
suddenly standing over her, angry and perhaps a little larger than
before.

“
Oh, you worry too much. It will never come
to that.”

Lanham gritted
his teeth and tried to control his temper. Celestina might look and
act like a silly, pampered air-head, but she was a dangerous and
powerful woman. Before her death she had been an organised crime
boss, a rich and cruel man who commanded armies of killers,
thieves, extortionists and thugs. Since her upload she had changed
her sex, and now spent her days in obscure and incomprehensible
fantasy worlds. Yet she still maintained her old business
interests, still ruled her old, dark empire. He needed her on his
side. There were forces Celestina controlled to which he otherwise
had no access.

“
Just tell me why it is taking so long,
Celestina, and then I'll leave you to your...” He waved a hand at
the barren desert landscape, unable to find a word. The chaise
longue and its voluptuous occupant were the only splashes of colour
in the wide, rocky wilderness.

Celestina
turned her big eyes towards Lanham and looked up at him from under
long lashes. “Cordell's wife had someone with her, a private dick.”
A display opened in the space beside them. It showed Rik's picture
and a potted biography. “He's a nobody,” she said. “Some ex-cop
loser Cordell hired as a courier. But he's been very lucky. He now
has the package, but he's been picked up by UK security services.
I'm taking steps to ensure that holding onto what we want will cost
him more than Cordell is able to pay.”

Lanham scowled
at Rik's data sheet, not scrolling through the dismal facts of the
man's life, but looking at the face in the picture. He didn't like
what he saw.

“
Is your agent down there up to the
job?”

Celestina
smirked. “She's very highly motivated. I'm sure she'll be fine.” An
image of the woman appeared beside Rik's data sheet, a
three-dimensional model which rotated slowly in the air.
“Beautiful, isn't she?”

Lanham
regarded the hairless robot body. The black skin had a carbon
sheen, and the long fingernails looked like steel talons.
High-breasted, wide hipped and with a face sculpted from onyx, she
could have been beautiful, if you liked your women to look like
sophisticated killing machines. Lanham's tastes were less
extreme.

“
Keep me posted on progress,” he said, and
was gone.

Celestina
continued to watch her model for a moment, then spoke to her.

“
Hello, Rivers,” she said. “Do you have it
yet? I'm growing impatient, and you don't want that, do you dear?
I'm placing my trust in you. Please don't make me regret it. Call
me when you get this.”

From Omega
Point's orbital position at the L4 Lagrangian point, the message
signal would take eight minutes and nineteen seconds to reach the
Earth. The distance made conversation impossible.

Celestina
stood up on the chaise longue and spread her arms wide, luxuriating
in the touch of the gentle breeze on her body. She leapt into the
air, transforming as she did into the great and brilliant ba of the
ancient legends. With a mighty beat of her rainbow wings, she
soared into the sky.

Rivers
Valdinger clung to the retracted landing strut of the Virgin
Galactic VG3000 suborbital hopper. Ice powdered her robotic body
and the air pressure was virtually zero, but neither of those facts
bothered her much. Her new body was as comfortable working in hard
vacuum as it was in the Earth's atmosphere. What did bother her,
very much, was the message that had just come through from
Celestina.

Rivers knew
she was in trouble. She'd bungled the robbery at the lab. But the
package should have been in the big, refrigerated cupboard where
they said it would be. She wasn't supposed to have to tear the
place apart searching for it.