city blues 01 - dome city blues (24 page)

I left the Zone and caught a taxi to Dome 17.  Neuro-Tech Robotics occupied a five-story office block on Hawthorne Boulevard.  Almost exactly as wide as it was tall, the building was a nearly featureless cube of cement.  Its windows were small, widely-spaced rectangles of bulletproof polycarbon, designed for industrial security rather than beauty.

The overall effect was not just boring, but
industrial-strength
boring.  John had tried hiring an architectural firm to give the building a face-lift, but the simulations for every design proposal came out looking like a cube with fancy do-dads glued on.

John often cited it as proof of one of the basic truths of life: You can’t polish a turd.

Short of huge investments and major construction, during daylight hours, Neuro-Tech’s headquarters would remain a big, ugly cube.  After the sun went down, it was a different matter entirely.  Holographic-facades were cheap; once John had projectors installed, changing his building’s image became a simple matter of swapping software.  At night, it could become Cinderella’s castle, if he wanted it to.

Right now, though, the sun was up and John’s building was as ugly as a mud fence.

I walked through the front doors and into the lobby.  It was very nicely furnished: plush emerald carpeting, and teak furniture with brass fittings.  John’s attempt to compensate for the building’s dowdy exterior, I guess.

Ms. Carlen, the receptionist, sat behind a curved teak counter.  She looked up when I walked in, smiled, and waved me straight through to the elevators.  “Good afternoon, Mr. Stalin.  He’s in his apartment, if you’d like to go up.”

I nodded and smiled as I walked by.  “Thank you.”

I stepped into the elevator and asked it to take me to the top floor.

As expected, I was greeted by the flat mechanical voice of Mainframe, John’s AI.  “You have requested access to a controlled area.  Please stare at the black glass data plate set into the wall to your left.  There will be a brief flash of red light.  You will feel no pain or discomfort.”

I complied.

The burst of red laser light startled my eyes.  You can brace your body for a punch, but there’s no way to steel your pupils against a sudden change in lighting.

“Retinal imaging and pattern matching are satisfactory,” the computer voice said.  “Please place the palm of either hand against the glass.”

I put my left hand against the panel and the laser behind the glass flared again briefly.

“Mr. Stalin, my hard object scanner has detected a handgun on your person.  I must advise you that any attempt to discharge your weapon inside this building will bring an immediate and lethal response from installed security systems.  Please understand that this is a statement of security posture and is not intended as a threat.  Our insurance coverage requires a verbal acknowledgment.  Do you understand the preceding warning?”

“Yes.”

The doors whispered closed and the elevator ascended rapidly.  “Thank you for your cooperation.”

“You’re quite welcome,” I said.

The elevator sighed to a stop and the doors opened.  I stepped through into the foyer outside John’s apartment.

A sentry robot stood watch over the carved hardwood doors leading to John’s chambers.  The robot was an armored, industrial-strength version of one of House’s service drones, with some kind of air-powered Gatling gun thrown in for good measure.

The doors opened almost immediately.  I couldn’t see John, but I could hear his voice.  “Sarge, come on in.”

The carved doors swung shut behind me a second after I stepped through them into John’s suite.

The decor was distinctly modern.  Eggshell white walls, plush carpets in muted blues, and ergonomic furniture done in smoked glass, gray kid leather, and chrome.

“I’m out on the balcony.”  John’s voice came from an intercom speaker near the front doors.

I walked to the sliding glass door that led to the balcony and slid it open.

I was about to step out onto the balcony when I caught sight of a picture sitting on an oval glass table to the left of the sliding door.  It was a trid, a shot of Maggie that I’d never seen before.  I found myself staring at it.  Her chestnut brown hair was pulled around to one side of her neck and cascaded over her right shoulder gypsy fashion.  Her chin was raised ever so slightly, making her pug nose seem turned up at the end.  She’d been looking directly into the camera, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was staring at me.

Her wide almond-shaped eyes were a deep shade of brown that lightened to golden amber near the centers.  This gave them a beautifully feral quality that never failed to take my breath away.

It had been her eyes that I’d spotted first.  John and I had been carousing, alphabet drinking our way up the bars on Sunset Strip.  It was about three months after Argentina, and we were still war heroes and the lords of all creation.

We were somewhere around the
G’s
, or maybe the
H’s
, when I caught sight of the most incredible eyes I’d ever seen from across a crowded room.  I was fast approaching that critical threshold where not falling down becomes an act of concentration, but this woman’s raw animal gaze cut through the fog of my alcohol like a laser.  I felt my mouth go dry.

I could hear John staggering around behind me, the servomotors that powered his exoskeleton whining crazily as the microprocessor strapped to his waist tried to interpret the addled signals coming from his alcohol-soaked brain.

He had still liked the exoskeleton back then.  It was a symbol of his bravery, a dueling scar, something for bragging, and for raising the maternal instinct in women.  And best of all, it was temporary.  He was still confident that the Army’s bio-tech labs were just around the corner from repairing the notch that the perimeter laser had carved in his spinal cord.  It was still a joke to him.

That would change.

He lumbered up behind me and threw an arm around my shoulder.  “Sergeant Davey, what kind of drink starts with the letter
‘I’
?”

I didn’t answer; I couldn’t.  I was hypnotized.

John struggled to locate the object of my stare.  He spotted her and made a show of craning his neck to get a better look.

“Good eye,” he said, and elbowed me conspiratorially.  “I think I’m going to get me some of that.”

No, I thought.  No, you’re not.

“Hey Sarge, are you lost?”  John’s voice came in from the balcony.

I wrenched my eyes away from Maggie’s picture and stepped through the sliding door.

The balcony was a huge sundeck stretching across the west face of the building: John’s only real addition to the exterior architecture.  It was bright out there; I stood squinting until I found my mirrored sunglasses and slipped them on.

John’s chair was stationed about three meters from the railing, to the right of the door.  He wore a blue kimono made of raw silk.  His gold-rimmed mirror shades looked a lot like mine, only his frames were probably real gold.

I walked across the balcony and stood by his chair.  “Okay Wise Guy, what’s this miraculous thing that you can’t wait to show me?”

John handed me a trid.  “Check this out.”

The trid was a digital artist’s conception of a dark castle: a shadowy stone fortress, complete with crumbling walls and twisted battlements.  It was a dead-on rendering of the haunted castle from a B-horror vid.  All that was missing was the werewolf or mad scientist of your choice.

I handed the trid back to John.  “What’s this?”

“It’s my new holo-facade.  I just got the software this morning.  That ought to give this place some atmosphere when the sun goes down, don’t you think?”

I shrugged.  “Beats the hell out of that Taj Mahal thing you’ve been running lately.”

I pulled out a cigarette and lit it.  “That’s not really what you called me up here to see, is it?”

John tried to look hurt, an attempt made unsuccessful by the fact that his grin was almost as big as his head.

“Come on,” I said.  “Out with it.  What’s the big surprise?”

John stood up and walked to the railing.  “No surprise,” he said.  “I just wanted some company.”  He raised his hands in a depreciative gesture.  The blue silk of his kimono stood out in sharp contrast to the pale skin of his legs.

It took a second to hit me.  When it did, the cigarette fell out of my mouth and bounced off the floor of the balcony.  His legs...  They were bare.  No carbon-laminate ribbing.  No exoskeleton.  He was standing without his exoskeleton!

“Holy shit.  You’re...”

“Walking?” he asked.  He nodded vigorously.  “That is a fact.”

“What happened to your exo?”

“The Beast is in the closet, where it belongs.”

“This is great.  This is
fantastic
!  Jesus.  I don’t know what to say.”

John laughed.  “You don’t have to say anything,” he said.  “But I get to say, ‘
I told you so
’.”

I grinned back at him.  “You go right ahead and say it.”

“Proves what I’ve been telling you all along,” John said, “If you throw enough money around, Medical Technology can accomplish
anything
.”

He walked to the edge of the balcony and leaned on the railing.  “I told you I had something to show you.  What do you think?”

“I’m overwhelmed!  You should have told me, I’d have brought a bottle of champagne.”

“Funny you should mention that,” John said.  He looked toward the door and whistled.

The door slid open and a service drone rolled out onto the balcony.  It glided silently to a spot a meter or so from John.  Cradled in its tubular alloy arms were an ice-filled champagne bucket and two slender fluted glasses.

John reached into the bucket and fished out a dark green bottle swaddled in a white linen napkin.  He held the bottle up and read the label.  “Dom Perignon twenty-two.  A good year, I think.”  He went to work on the cork.

“Since when do you know anything about champagne?”

“I don’t,” he said.  “But that’s what the kid at the wine shop told me.”

“I’ll bet it cost a bundle.”

“It did.”  John grimaced, as though opening the bottle was strenuous work.  The cork popped loudly and sweet-smelling white foam gushed from the neck of the bottle and splattered onto the balcony.

I plucked the glasses from the drone’s manipulators and tried to maneuver one of them under the bottle to catch the foam.

John moved the bottle away.  “You’re supposed to let that go,” he said.  “It’s part of the champagne ritual.”

“Really?”

He cocked one eyebrow theatrically and shrugged.  “Hell if I know, but it sounded good, didn’t it?”

When most of the foaming action had died down, John poured champagne into both of our glasses and set the bottle back into the bucket.  He looked at the drone.  “Don’t go anywhere with that.”

I handed John a glass and we both raised them in salute.  “You get to pick the toast,” he said.  “After all, you paid for the bubbly.”

“I did?”

“Yep.  I had the bill sent to you.  I knew you wouldn’t mind, considering the occasion.”

“I had no idea that I was such a generous guy,” I said.

John nodded.  “You are, old buddy.  Trust me on this.  You
are
.”

I thought for a couple of seconds and then raised my glass a few centimeters higher.  “To dreams,” I said.  “And to miracles.”

“Dreams and miracles,” John repeated.

I don’t know much about champagne, but this seemed unbelievably rich and smooth.

John lowered his glass and nodded.  “Not bad.”  He leaned close and whispered out of the side of his mouth, “you should have brought beer.”

“I don’t know what came over me.”

John reached for the champagne bucket.  “Next time you’ll know better.”

I grinned.  “God, I can’t believe this.  I am so happy for you.”

“Me too,” John said.