Lethal Velocity Read online

  “Now what the hell’s he doing?” Allocco asked.

  Suddenly, John Doe glanced up, directly at the lens. He smiled and raised his hands to his tie, as if to fix the knot.

  “Cheeky,” Barksdale muttered. “Villain, villain, smiling, damnèd villain.”

  Unexpectedly, the picture sheered away violently, and the monitor filled with static.

  “What’s this shit?” Allocco shouted.

  Peccam’s hands darted over the keyboard. “Don’t know. Time code’s still running. Must be a software glitch.”

  Within a few seconds, the picture shivered back into place. The throngs of people continued to pass beneath the camera, oblivious. But John Doe was gone.

  “Bring up A-1905,” said Allocco, glancing at the listing. “Same sync.”

  There was the same storm of gray static that had appeared on the previous feed. After a moment, it, too, cleared.

  “A-1906. Come on, hurry it up.”

  Once again, no picture.

  “Christ,” Allocco grumbled.

  He moved toward the door, opened it. “Listen up,” he addressed the Hive in general. “Was there a problem with the digital feed five, ten minutes back?”

  The security specialists turned to look at him. One of them nodded. “Yeah, we lost signal for about ten seconds.”

  “What? System-wide?”

  “No, sir. A portion of A Level and Soho Square in Gaslight.”

  Allocco shut the door and turned back to Peccam. “Let’s follow the obvious routes he might have taken. Bring up A-1940. Sync it ahead ten seconds.”

  They ran through various camera feeds, fruitlessly, for a few minutes. At last, Allocco sighed and spread his hands.

  “What do you make of that?” he said.

  “Couldn’t be the tech,” said Barksdale. “It wouldn’t fail like that, not with the redundant clustering.” He glanced at Sarah. “Another glitch.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “The timing’s too convenient.” A new—and disturbing—thought had entered her mind.

  “Can we track his tag?” she asked.

  “We already tried,” Allocco replied. “He must be using a generic. Ralph, keep scanning. Let me know if you stumble across him.”

  Allocco turned away from the monitor. “What now?”

  “We wait,” said Barksdale.

  Sarah glanced at her watch. It was twenty-five minutes after one.

  TERESA BONIFACIO’S APPLIED robotics lab was perhaps the messiest private space Warne had seen since his MIT dormitory days. In an environment like Utopia that thrived on order and precision, it seemed almost belligerent somehow: a statement of independence. Thick technical manuals lay facedown, pages bent, spines broken. A skeletal-looking robot stood in one corner, arm raised in imitation of the Statue of Liberty, gowned in green-and-white-striped computer printouts. “Paradise City” was playing somewhere in the background. Unlike the rest of the Utopia Underground—which had been relatively scentless—there was a faint odor in the air: odd, rather fishy. Warne’s nose crinkled involuntarily as he looked around. Teresa’s office did not sport the usual shiny murals of key Utopia attractions or framed motivational phrases. Instead, garish posters of Guns N’ Roses were tacked to the walls. One was autographed “Peace, Love, Slash” with a large red marker. A postcard labeled Borokay Beach, Philippines was affixed to the inside of the lab door. Nearby, someone had taped a handwritten excerpt:

  When a task cannot be partitioned because of sequential constraints, the application of more effort has no effect on the schedule. The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.

  —Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., The Mythical Man-Month

  Teresa was sitting in a far corner, almost invisible behind stacks of trade journals and back issues of Amusement Industry Digest. She was soldering something, a thin curl of smoke rising between her hands. When she caught sight of Warne, she put the soldering gun to one side, pushed the eye goggles onto her forehead, and came around the stacks.

  “Andrew, it’s so great to have you here,” she said in her deep, uninflected voice, smiling widely. “I can’t believe it, after all this time, you’re—oh, Lord.”

  Warne followed her glance. Georgia had just walked into the lab, Wingnut at her heels. Immediately, the robot stopped, its sensor arrays scanning the landscape again and again, as if unable to process all the surrounding obstacles.

  “Don’t worry,” Georgia said. “It’s just Wingnut.”

  “Sure.” Teresa stared at the oversize robot for a moment. Then she looked back at Warne and laughed: the rich, ironic contralto he’d heard so often, long distance. “You know, you’re something of a legend in IT. Nobody’s ever seen you. The only people who talked to you over the phone were Barksdale and me. There was a joke going around that you didn’t really exist, that you were just some invention of Nightingale’s. When word got around you were coming this morning, two people came by to ask me if it was true.”

  “You don’t say.” Warne glanced at Georgia, who was now standing next to him, looking curiously at the surrounding mess. With her nearby, he couldn’t tell Teresa what he thought of all this. Not yet. Even so, he’d be damned if he was going to buy into this flattery.

  The smell was stronger here, and Georgia wrinkled her nose.

  “It’s bagoong,” Teresa said, turning to Georgia and laughing again.

  “Baga what?”

  “Shrimp paste. What you smell. Fantastic on green mangoes. Nobody around here can stand it, though, except me.” The impish smile widened. “That’s why I usually eat lunch here, instead of the café.”

  Warne thought of the postcard of the beach. Then he reached far down into his memory. “Smells mabaho,” he said. “Right? Tastes masarap.”

  Teresa looked back at him. “You speak Tagalog?”

  “Maybe five words. I had a Filipino lab assistant once.”

  “Yeah. We’re infesting the halls of science these days.” Then she turned once again to Georgia, who was restless, clearly eager to get back to the Park. “I’ve got something you might enjoy. It’s the new Game Boy, ‘Archaeopteryx: Perfect Edition.’ ”

  “I’ve played it,” Georgia said.

  “Not this one, you haven’t.” Teresa turned away, opened a drawer, rummaged for a moment. When she turned back, she was holding a pocket video game. But it was unlike any Warne had ever seen: its plastic cover had been removed, and half a dozen alligator clips were affixed to its electronic innards, multicolored wires trailing away like tails.

  “Some of these games have remarkable AI,” she said. “I sometimes trace through their instruction sets in my downtime, looking for routines we could cannibalize. Working with this one, I stumbled upon a dozen secret levels the developers never made public.”

  “The master levels?” Georgia said, eyes widening. “I read about those on the Web. I thought it was just bullshit.”

  “Georgia!” Warne said in exasperation.

  “Well, it isn’t bullshit.” Teresa handed her the game. “Here, knock yourself out. Just don’t detach any of the clips, or I’ll have to rewire the whole thing. You can have a seat at that far table, there. Just push the stuff onto the floor.”

  Warne watched Georgia move away, hunched over the game, already absorbed. So Teresa spent her downtime cracking Game Boys. Perhaps if she’d paid more attention to the Metanet instead, he wouldn’t be here right now.

  He turned back to see the woman regarding him. “So,” she said after a moment. “How do you want to start this?” She smiled again. When Warne didn’t return the smile, uncertainty began to creep into her expression.

  “You tell me,” he said. “It’s your little party.”

  Teresa’s smile faded. “Look, Andrew,” she said in a lower voice. “I know how you must feel. And I’m really sorry about—”

  “I’m sure you are,” Warne interrupted in a rough undertone. “But save it for your report. Bring in your team, I’ll
get you started. But then we’re leaving. You can clean up your own mess.”

  This hung in the air for a long, uncomfortable moment. Then Teresa turned away. “I’ll get the incident reports,” she said over her shoulder. She walked to the door of the lab, opened it, and stepped out, not bothering to close the door behind her.

  Warne closed his eyes, expelled a long, slow breath. For a moment, the lab was silent save for the beepings of the Game Boy.

  “Dad?” Georgia said.

  Warne looked over. She was bent over the game, not bothering to look up. “Yes?”

  “Why were you mean to her just now?”

  “Mean?” Warne repeated, surprised. He’d had no idea Georgia overheard anything. Normally, she paid little attention to his work conversations. Then he remembered her asking if Teresa was Japanese. Georgia likes her, he realized with surprise.

  Teresa appeared in the doorway again, a sheaf of papers in her hand. She closed the door and walked quickly toward him, head low between her shoulders, mouth set in a straight line. She looked pissed.

  “The Metanet control terminal is over here,” she said without looking at him. She walked toward a desk in the far corner of the room, Warne following. Two wooden stools, one piled high with printouts, were set before a large computer monitor. Teresa grabbed the chair and shook it with a sharp, angry gesture, knocking the papers to the floor. She took a seat, pulled it close to the terminal. Warne sat on the opposite chair. Teresa leaned her head in close to the terminal, black eyes glittering, and with a crook of a finger motioned Warne to do the same.

  “All right, Dr. Warne,” she said in a low voice. “It’s obvious that you’ve got—how can I put this scientifically?—a major bug up your ass. And I know what species it is.”

  “Then describe it to me,” Warne replied, keeping his voice equally low.

  “You think I’m to blame for this somehow.”

  “Well, aren’t you? You, or somebody on your team?”

  “My team!” Teresa said in a voice of mock surprise.

  “We’ve been working together, you and I, for almost a year. Sure, it’s been by phone, but I thought we’d developed a good relationship. A friendship. You know the Metanet isn’t capable of this kind of misbehavior. I’ll bet you didn’t even put up a fight for it. Hell, you didn’t even warn me about this. You let me walk in like an idiot, with my pants down around my ankles.”

  “My team!” Teresa repeated, as if still unable to believe what she had heard. She sat back. “Oh, my God. You’re a smart guy, I thought you’d have figured it out by now.”

  “Figured what out?”

  “Who have you ever spoken to about the Metanet besides me?”

  Warne thought a moment. “There was that lab assistant, Clay—”

  “Barnett? Clay’s been working in Imaging Technology for the last five months.” She leaned closer again. “I have no fucking team, Andrew. There’s only me.”

  “What?” Warne said in disbelief. “You’re the only person assigned to the robots?”

  “There’s a maintenance staff that does the blue-collar work: servo replacement, diagnostics. But I’m the only tech.”

  There was a brief silence. Warne struggled with this fresh surprise.

  “As for warning you, I was forbidden to say a word of this to anybody. I mean anybody, especially you.”

  “Dad?” came Georgia’s voice from across the lab. “What are you talking about? Why are you whispering?”

  “Nothing, sweetie,” Warne said, straightening up. “We’re just—working on a little problem here, that’s all.”

  Then he leaned back toward Teresa.

  “You think I didn’t fight for the Metanet?” she whispered fiercely. “I did, tooth and nail. It’s my bread and butter. Especially now.”

  Warne looked at her closely. “All right. Tell me about it.”

  She pulled the goggles from her head, ran her fingers through her hair. “It started shortly after the park opened. At first, I was told we were temporarily in maintenance mode. That we’d be expanding the robotics staff as soon as the Future Attractions Committee issued a report. Well, the report came out, but I never saw it. The new hires budgeted for robotics were funneled elsewhere: imaging, acoustics. And then, a couple of months ago, they started scaling back.”

  “Scaling back?”

  “Taking nonessential bots off-line. Replacing them with humans, or simply detasking altogether. In fact, the only bots we’ve added aren’t real, autonomous bots at all. They’re just animated machines, like the dragons and mandrakes in Camelot. And the World line managers, not me, take care of those.”

  Warne passed the back of his hand over his forehead. “But why?”

  “Can’t you see why? It’s the bean counters in the head office. Robots aren’t sexy enough. Too academic, too high-concept. Sure, it’s nice to keep a few around for eye candy: wow the tourists in Callisto, give the PR types something to write about. But they don’t sell tickets. The home office thinks robots are passé. Barksdale told me himself. They had a lot of promise, just like AI did, but it’s not panning out. Every kid has a robot toy these days, little brain-dead things that give the genuine article a bad name. Nobody cares whether it’s bots or mouth-breathers that clean the floors on C Level.”

  “Eric Nightingale cared. He told me so himself.”

  Abruptly, Teresa sank back. “Nightingale was a visionary. He saw Utopia as something more than just a New Age theme park with fancy gadgets. He meant it as a crucible for new technology.”

  “A crucible for new technology. I heard him give that speech just this morning.”

  “And I believed in it!” she countered defiantly. “I still do. That’s the reason I signed on here. But Nightingale’s dead now. And the Park doesn’t run on his vision any longer. It’s run on exit polls and demographics. All the attention’s on the superficial. Bring in art history scholars, make it look more real. Add bigger and better holograms. Speed up the rides.” She lowered her voice again. “And nobody was prepared for just how much those casinos would bring in. The whole attitude of the place has changed.”

  Warne watched as she lapsed into silence. She had a most un-Utopian candor. Here he’d burst in, full of righteous indignation, chip firmly on shoulder, only to release Teresa’s own pent-up frustration.

  “Dad?” Georgia called again. “You ready? Let’s get back to the Park.”

  “Hold on a sec,” Teresa called over. “We’ve almost got it worked out.”

  There was a brief moment in which the two exchanged glances.

  “Sorry, Teresa,” Warne said. “I guess I jumped to the wrong conclusion.”

  “It’s okay. Like I said, I know how you must feel. I feel the same way. And call me Terri, please. I hate ‘Teresa.’ ”

  “Named for the saint, I suppose?”

  “Of course. I must be the only non-Catholic Filipina on earth. Haven’t been to mass in ten years. My parents would roll over in their graves.”

  There was another brief silence. Warne felt confused, uncertain of what to say or do next.

  “Well, Nightingale would be pleased by the holograms, at least,” he said at last. “They’re truly amazing.”

  “You’re right.” Her expression seemed to change. “You’d better take me with a grain of salt, Dr. Warne. Some of it’s just jealousy talking. There’s plenty of new technology here. It’s just that, after their big discoveries, the hologram staff got all the goodies. And the budget to match. Originally, Imaging Technology was assigned eight people. Now they’ve got forty.”

  “What big discoveries, exactly?”

  “Figuring out how to make holographic images life-size, instead of the size of a cigarette pack. That was first. But the biggest breakthrough came after Nightingale’s death. The Crucible.”

  Warne looked at her quickly.

  “Ironic, isn’t it? I suppose they named it after his famous little speech. I don’t know the technical details—they’re still keepi
ng it under pretty tight wraps. But it’s a system for creating fantastically complex holograms using computers. Of course, it takes massively parallel CPU power to work. But there’s no more need for lasers, photopolymers, anything. It’s almost like the 3-D modeling programs used for computer-animated movies. Except instead of creating two-dimensional figures, the Crucible can create full-motion holographic projections.”

  “Jesus.” Warne fell silent a moment. “Imagine the potential.”

  “You’re telling me. But those particular patents aren’t being licensed. They’re keeping the magic to themselves, making it Utopia’s signature. It’s been building ever since the Park opened. The first holographically enhanced attraction was Ripper, over in Gaslight.”

  “Don’t know anything about it.”

  “At first it was more like a trial balloon than anything. See, the audience is in this theater, supposedly to watch some Victorian revue. Then somebody yells that the bobbies are chasing Jack the Ripper, they’ve cornered him outside. Then somebody else yells that the Ripper’s run into the theater. And then the lights go out.”

  “Sounds effective.”

  “Try sphincter-slackening. Incredibly realistic holograms of the Ripper, running through the theater, popping up behind your seat, bloody knife raised. People screaming.” She shrugged. “It developed an immediate buzz. The powers-that-be pricked up their ears, saw the potential. So next, they decided to add holograms to Event Horizon, which was still being developed.”

  “That’s the roller coaster in Callisto, right? I saw it on the guidemap.”

  “Try next generation after coasters. Completely dark. A bank of seats bolted to a platform, synced by computer to lurch up, down, side to side, in time to images hurtling by you. Except here it’s not just a flat screen you’re staring at—it’s three-dimensional comets and meteors, hurtling right by your face. No need for trick glasses. You’re basically inside a hologram.”

  Warne shook his head wonderingly.

  “Then somebody got the bright idea of leveraging the technology. You see the Mind’s Eye galleries in Callisto and the Nexus?”