city blues 01 - dome city blues (14 page)

I walked to the barricade and caught a hovercab to Dome 11.

Nearly half of the dome was dedicated to corporate enclaves.

The Gebhardt-Wulkan Informatik enclosure was a carefully landscaped park.  At least thirty acres of meticulously manicured grass were spread like a lush green blanket over a half-dozen gently rolling hills.  Evergreen trees were sprinkled here and there with a carefully calculated randomness.  The air had a sweet headiness about it that was rich with natural unfiltered oxygen from the trees and grass.  It smelled like the forest eco-modules in Dome 7, only more so.

At the center of the park-lawn stood the Gebhardt-Wulkan building, a towering pyramid of gold-tinted glass that reached nearly to the underside of the dome.  The outer skin of the twenty-five bottom floors was photo-active, making the lower half of the building an enormous electronic video screen.  I’d seen that kind of thing before: animated billboards around town, crawling with commercial vid clips for everything from Italian sports cars to Asian herbal tea.  The technology was superior to holographic facades because it was unaffected by daylight.  It was also a lot more expensive.

Gebhardt-Wulkan Informatik wasn’t using its giant photo-active surface to sell sports cars.  Instead, each side of the pyramid was plugged into a live video-feed from the opposite face, showing what you would have seen had the building not been there.  The effect was stunning; the lower half of the building was invisible, or nearly so.  If I really tried hard to focus on it, minute distortion of scale made it possible to spot the edges of the building, but I really had to work at it.  As soon as I stopped concentrating, my eyes would glide over the minor discontinuities in the image, and the building would vanish again.

The fact that the upper twenty-five floors were
not
invisible made the image even more powerful.  The visible half of the pyramid appeared to hang in the naked air.

Just looking at it gave me a touch of vertigo.  Intellectually, I knew how the trick was done, but on a gut-level, my instincts insisted that it was impossible.  A tiny part of me held its breath and waited for gravity to pluck the golden pyramid out of the sky and hurl it to the ground.

The entrances to the pyramid were marked by a pair of triangular archways, made of the same gold-mirrored glass that covered the upper floors.  People moving into the building appeared to vanish as they passed through the archways, while those leaving the building apparently materialized out of thin air.

There were several smaller buildings in the enclave, all hidden from casual sight by strategically positioned hills and trees, to avoid marring the park-like scene that showcased the pyramid.

According to Sonja, Michael had worked in 6-B, one of the outbuildings.  I had the cabbie drop me off out front.

Building 6-B turned out to be one of those single story prefabs assembled from cubical modules like a child’s building blocks.

It was a low security building, so I didn’t have a lot of trouble swapping a few crisp
€
m
20 bills for a guest pass.

I wandered up and down a dozen identical modular hallways until I found a door labeled, “DATA PROTOCOL RESEARCH.”  Under the engraved plastic label, someone had taped a hand-lettered sign reading, “HOME OF THE DATA SQUASHERS.”

I shouldered the door open and stepped into a large room full of computer work stations, matrix generators, holovid projectors, and racks of memory modules, all connected by about fifty kilometers of optical cable.

Eleven programmers were working at computer terminals, six women and five men.  Each of them wore an elastic headband set with neural sensors.  Slender loops of ribbon cable linked their headsets to matrix generators.  None of them reacted to my presence; they were all jacked into the DataNet.  They were operating on another plane of reality, one in which I didn’t even exist.

Except for the movement of fingers on keyboards, they were practically motionless, giving the scene a sense of lethargy.  I knew that it was a false impression.  Behind their vacant eyes, their minds were blurring through logic matrixes at speeds I couldn’t even imagine, shooting down corridors of shifting data, making thousands of decisions a minute.

I wove my way through a maze of equipment and cabling until I found a man and a woman huddled around another computer workstation in a back corner.

The man was thin, balding and fortyish.  He waved a length of hardcopy around and jammed a finger at it.

“You’re crazy,” he half-shouted.  “If you try to tokenize the seed variable, you’re going to end up with a whole series of cascading encryption errors.”

The woman shook her head.  “You’re not listening to me, Frank.  We can’t tokenize the entire data stream and leave the seed variable unencrypted.  We’d never be able to retrieve.  We
have
to tokenize the seed.  All we have to...”

Frank shook the printout.  “You’re the one who’s not listening.  You can’t pull an encrypted variable out of a five-deep compression wafer and decode it in real-time.  You can’t do it!”

The woman snatched the printout and stomped in my direction.

I turned sideways to let her squeeze past.

Frank looked up at me.  “Who the hell are you?”

I stepped forward, grabbed his empty hand and shook it vigorously.  “Bertram Tyler,” I said.  “True Crime Video.  We’re thinking about shooting a piece on Michael Winter, the Aztec Killer.  I understand you used to work with him?”

“True Crime?”  Frank snatched his hand away.  “If I didn’t talk to the legitimate media, what makes you think I’m going to spill my guts to the tabloids?”

I smiled my best snake-oil smile.  “Because the legitimate media doesn’t make it worth your while.  If
we
decide to shoot this piece...  Well, let’s just say that we know how to reward our sources.”

Frank turned toward his workbench.  “Whatever you’re offering, I guarantee you don’t pay enough to make it worth losing my job.”

“We can quote you off-camera as a confidential inside source,” I said.  “Mind you, it doesn’t pay as much, but the money still isn’t bad.  Or...”  I snapped my fingers a couple of times.

“Or what?”

“We could do an on-camera interview, one of those things where we electronically disguise your voice, and distort the picture to hide your face.”

I nodded quickly, as if I was warming to the idea.  “People love that sort of thing. 
Brave Citizen Takes on the System to Bring you the Truth!
”

“Takes on the System?”  Frank didn’t look crazy about that idea.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.  “It’s all hype.  It pushes the ratings up.  There wouldn’t be any real risk at all.  When our camera boys get done monkeying around with the signal, your own mother won’t recognize you.”

Frank rubbed his left earlobe between thumb and forefinger.  “What would I have to do?”

“That depends on whether or not there’s even a story in this,” I said.  “First, we kick around a few easy questions, and see if we have anything to work with here.”

Frank nodded cautiously.

“Let’s start with the basics,” I said.  “How long did you know Michael Winter?”

“A little over two years, I guess.”

“From the time he came to work here until the night he committed suicide?”

“Yeah.”

“How would you characterize the quality of his work?”

Frank sneered.  “His work?  His work was a
joke
.  Winter was supposed to be some shit-hot code jockey, but you sure couldn’t prove it by me.”

Frank’s voice got a little louder as he warmed up to the idea of criticizing his former co-worker.  “Winter was unreliable.  Some days he wouldn’t even bother to show up, and I’d have to cover for him.  I carried my workload and his too.  I’ll characterize the quality of Winter’s work…  It
sucked
.  Everybody knows that Winter was hired because...”

“Because what?”

Frank looked away.  “Never mind.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” I said.  “I can’t get a camera crew in here for ‘never mind.’  Why was Michael Winter hired?”

Frank lowered his voice.  “Because of Rieger.  The Board of Contract Indenture would have turned Winter’s application down cold if it weren’t for Rieger.”

“Why?  What was wrong with Winter?”

“He had some kind of brain rot.  A tumor or something.  The Board wanted no part of that shit.  Rieger stepped in and personally approved the contract.”

“Who is this Rieger, and why did he approve Michael Winter’s indenture?”

“Kurt Rieger.  He’s the head of Information Systems Research.  He approved the indenture to get at Winter’s sister.”

“Sister?”

“Yeah.  I’ve never seen her, but she’s supposed to be some kind of hot.”

“What does that have to do with Kurt Rieger?”

Frank coughed nervously.  “The word on the work-floor is: Rieger tried to hire Winter’s sister a couple of years ago.  She turned him down.  I guess she’s some kind of call girl, but apparently she’s choosy about her customers.  Anyway, Rieger wants her.  If she ends up indentured to Leisure Division, he plans to requisition her for his personal use.  She better hope that doesn’t happen.”

“Why?”

Frank looked around.  “I thought you were doing a shoot on
Aztec
.  What do you care about Winter’s sister?  I knew the man, the killer.  When are you going to ask me about
that
?”

I pulled out a cigarette.  “Mind if I smoke?”

He shook his head, so I lit up.  “Who might have wanted to kill Michael Winter?”

“He killed himself.”

“Humor me,” I said.  “Who had a motive for killing Michael Winter?”

Frank looked thoughtful and shrugged.  “Nobody that I know of.  Maybe the parents of one of those little girls he killed.”

“Okay, let’s table that for now.  I’m going to ask you for a gut reaction.  Do you believe that Michael Winter was a killer?  Do you truly believe that he was capable of butchering little girls?”

Frank shook his head slowly.  “No.  He pissed me off, and his work wasn’t what it should have been, but Mike was a good boy.  I know that he must have killed those girls.  He
did
confess, didn’t he?  But I sure have trouble seeing him as a killer.”

There was a wistful, faraway look in Frank’s eyes.

I took a hit off my cigarette.  “Did you ever see Michael smoke?”

“Uh-uh.  He hated cigarettes.”

“Hmmm... Do you smoke?”

“Gave it up years ago.”

“Have you ever heard of Ernte 23?”

“Ernie what?”

“Ernte 23.  It’s a brand of German cigarettes.  Does anybody around here smoke German cigarettes?”

Frank turned and started fiddling with a data keypad.  “Probably half the people here; this is a German company.”

“Does this Kurt Rieger smoke?”

“Yeah,” Frank said.  “I think so.”

“German cigarettes?”

Frank shrugged.  “I have no idea.  And just to save time, I don’t know what brand of toothpaste he uses, or what kind of starch he puts in his shirts.”

“Did Michael ever talk to you about his social life?”

“No.  He made it pretty clear that it was none of my business.”

“Did he ever...”

“I’ve got work to do,” Frank snapped.  “If you guys decide to shoot a piece on Winter, you come see me.  I could use the money.  But that’s all the freebies you’re getting out of me.”

“Okay,” I said.  “Thank you Mister...”

“Franklin.  Arthur Franklin.”

“Thank you Mr. Franklin.  You’ve been most helpful.  If we decide to shoot the piece, we’ll be in touch.”

“Aren’t you going to leave me your card or some shit?”

I patted my pockets.  “Sorry, I’m out of business cards.”

I could feel him staring at my back as I walked out.

The woman caught up with me as I was crossing the neatly landscaped lawn.  She was overweight and breathing heavily when she fell into step beside me.  “Frank’s an ass,” she said, “but most of what he told you is true.”

I stopped walking and stared at her.  She was dressed in a baggy black pantsuit that might have been intended to make her look thinner.  A name tag pinned over her left breast identified her as Lisa Caldwell.

She looked toward the evergreen trees that concealed building 6-B.  “When I stomped out, I didn’t go very far.”

She looked down at her feet, then looked back up at me and grinned.  “I stood on the other side of the power supplies and listened.  I heard every word.”

I lit a cigarette.  “Which part was a lie?”

She frowned.  “Just about all of it was true.  Except about Michael’s work.  Michael was good, I mean he was
really
good.  Frank’s not bad either, but he’s not as good as Mike was.”

“Would you say that Frank was jealous of Mike’s work?”

“Not really,” she said.  “Frank’s ego wouldn’t let him see that Michael was a better coder.  Frank was...”

She fixed her gaze on the floating pinnacle of the GWI building.  “Mike was an attractive man.  Frank was...”

“Attracted to him?”

“Well, yeah.”

“And Mike rebuffed his advances.”

Lisa scrunched up her pudgy little nose like a rabbit as she tasted the idea.  “It wasn’t really like that.  Michael didn’t actually shoot down Frank’s advances.  It’s more like he didn’t even notice them.”