city blues 02 - angel city blues (7 page)

I wasted the next two hours on the phone, trying to wrangle an appointment with Gary Thurman, Leanda’s producer at TransNat Telemedia. I managed to talk to his people’s people’s people, and finally to his people’s people. But I couldn’t get anywhere near his actual
people
, much less the great man himself.

“Jesus Christ,” I finally said to the fifth or sixth Administrative Assistant who showed her face on the vid screen of my phone: Ms. Rosen-something-or-other, a fortyish woman with tired blue eyes and deeply creased frown lines. “Who is this Thurman guy?” I asked. “The President of the United States?”

Ms. Rosen-something’s frown lines deepened. “Mr. Thurman is a very busy man—”

I cut her off. “I’m not asking him to have my children. I just want to talk to him. Fifteen minutes, tops.”

“I’m sorry,” Ms. Rosen-something said. “If Mr. Thurman gave fifteen minutes to everyone who asked for it, he would never get anything done.”

“You
do
understand that I’m a Private Detective, representing Ms. Vivien Forsyth?”

Ms. Rosen-something gave me a tired smile. “I understand that you have identified yourself as such to several of my colleagues. Which means precisely nothing. Unless, that is, you have some proof. A certified letter of credence from Ms. Forsyth perhaps?”

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I don’t have a letter from Vivien Forsyth. Nor do I have a note from my mother.”

“I see,” said Ms. Rosen-something.

I gave her my very best
I-hate-to-have-to-do-this
face. “I’ll go over this slowly,” I said, “since you obviously do
not
see. Point number one—Leanda Forsyth is missing. If she’s alive, which I have reason to believe, every second may count. Point number two—Between you and your colleagues, you have wasted over two hours of my time. That’s alright by me, because I’m getting paid no matter what happens. That may
not
be okay to Leanda Forsyth, whose life could well be hanging by a thread. Point number three—According to this morning’s newsfeeds, Vivien Forsyth owns thirty-one percent of TransNat Telemedia, and she controls an additional twenty-three percent through various proxies. Unless I’m very much mistaken, that means she owns your job, and the job of your Mr. Thurman.”

Ms. Rosen-something’s florid face went a shade paler.

I bulled right on, making it up as I went along. (In point of fact, I had no idea whether or not Vivien Forsyth owned so much as a single share of TransNat Telemedia, but I was on a roll now.)

“It’s possible,” I said, “that Ms. Forsyth won’t take it personally when she finds out that your Mr. Thurman was too busy to spend fifteen minutes to
help save her daughter’s life!
” My voice grew in volume as I spoke, and the last five words came out at a near shout.

Ms. Rosen-something’s jaw dropped open.

“Thank you for your assistance,” I said curtly. “I’m sure you’ll be hearing from Ms. Forsyth shortly. Or your replacement will. I’ve got a feeling that you won’t be around by then.” I reached out to hit the disconnect button.

Ms. Rosen-something practically came out of her seat. “No! No! No,
wait
!”

My hand paused in mid-air, halfway to the disconnect button. “Yes?”

“Just a second!” she said, fidgeting visibly. “Let me… Let me see what I can do…”

I smiled sweetly, my hand still hanging in the air. “Don’t go to any trouble on my account.”

“I’m going to put you on hold for a minute,” she said.

“Thirty seconds,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “Thirty seconds.”

Her face disappeared from the screen, replaced by a logo made up of several hundred tiny animated vid screens that spelled out the words
TRANSNAT TELEMEDIA
in flickering capitals. An accompanying sound track poured out of the phone’s speakers, computer-generated pseudo-classical music.

I leaned back in my chair and lit a cigarette.

Ms. Rosen-something’s face reappeared in about twenty seconds. “I can get you in to see Mr. Thurman at one-thirty. Will that do?”

“Thanks. That will do just fine.” I smiled and hit the disconnect button.

I glanced at my watch. I didn’t need to be at TransNat for nearly three hours. That left plenty of time to make a stop along the way.

I strapped on my shoulder rig and holstered the Blackhart. The heavy automatic rested comfortably under my left arm. I pulled on my old gray windbreaker and spent a few seconds adjusting the shoulder rig until the butt of the Blackhart didn’t print so obviously against the fabric of the jacket.

Satisfied that I was at least marginally presentable, I grabbed the strange triangular chip and dropped it into a side pocket.

Twenty minutes later, I eased my Pontiac into the parking lot of
Alphatronics
, a retail electronics store on Hudson Avenue, near the southern end of Dome 14. It was a small family business, and I knew the owners, Henry Mailo and his son, Tommy. They were of Samoan blood, and—true to genotype—both of them were built like bulldozers.

I touched a button on the control yoke and sent the Pontiac into parking mode. The car settled onto its apron as the blowers cycled down to a stop and the turbine began to spin down. With the soft whine of servo motors, the car’s computer rotated all of the airfoils to their neutral positions. The tattletales on the wraparound plasma display flickered from green, to red, to off as the computer brought the car’s internal systems down. After a few seconds, the display went dark, except for the Parking Mode tattletale, which shone a soft green.

I unlocked the door and climbed out.

Henry looked up from behind the counter when I walked in. His face lit up. “Dave! How’s it hanging?” His hair was getting gray around the temples, but I’d have put even money that he could have bench pressed my car without breaking a sweat.

I shook his outstretched hand. It engulfed my own hand entirely and I reminded myself for the hundredth time to
never
try the old bone-breaking handshake trick with either generation of the Mailos.

I grinned back at him. “It’s damned good to see you, Henry. It’s been too long.”

“It has indeed, my friend,” Henry said.

I looked around the shop. “Is Tommy in the back?”

“As always,” Henry said. “Trying to resurrect Mrs. Kendrick’s old Sanyo holo-deck for the eighty-seventh time.”

“Can I go on back?”

“Of course,” Henry said. He pulled the curtain to one side, revealing the doorway to the rear of his shop.

I stepped through the curtain and into the back of the store. The front three-quarters of the room was devoted to metal shelves stacked with stock. At the far end of the room was Tommy’s work shop, a steel workbench stacked with electronic test equipment, boxes of electronic components, and rolls of cabling.

Tommy was perched on his favorite stool, poking around in the guts of a partially disassembled holo-deck with what I assumed to be an electronic test probe of some kind. He looked up when I walked in. “The Prodigal Gumshoe returns,” he said with a grin. He was about nineteen now, and the spitting image of his father.

I countered with a grin of my own. “The bad penny in the flesh,” I said. I pointed toward the disassembled holo-deck. “Any idea what’s wrong it?”

Tommy cocked an eyebrow. “Would you believe cat hair?”

“Cat hair? From a real cat?”

“Of course not,” Tommy said. “Mrs. Kendrick can’t afford a real cat.” He wrinkled his brow. “I don’t think I know
anybody
who can afford a real cat. At least, not without mortgaging their house. It’s one of those Japanese electro-mechanical jobbers. It’s supposed to be programmed to act like a cat, but I’ve never seen a real one, so I can’t really say. Mrs. Kendrick’s cat ignores people most of the time, licks itself a lot, and sleeps about eighteen hours a day.” He grinned again. “If that’s how real cats behave, then I guess it’s pretty realistic.”

“So how does it manage to get its hair into Mrs. Kendrick’s holo-deck?”

“It has a favorite sleeping spot,” Tommy said, “just like a real cat is supposed to. This one likes to curl up on the shelf, behind the holo-deck. It’s an old cat, and its fur is coming out. The stray hairs get sucked up by the deck’s cooling fan, and wind up in the optics.”

He shrugged. “I’ve tried to talk Mrs. Kendrick into getting a new deck, maybe one of the Toshiba’s, with sealed optics. Either that, or a new cat. She won’t do it. She’s a stubborn old gal.”

“Yeah, but a loyal customer,” I said.

“You’ve got a point there,” Tommy said. He laid the test probe on the workbench. “You didn’t come here to talk about Mrs. Kendrick’s cat.”

I rummaged in my pocket for the triangular chip and held it out to Tommy. “I’m trying to find out what this is.”

Tommy accepted the chip and gave it a cursory glance. “SCAPE,” he said.

“What?”

“SCAPE,” he said again. “Sensory Capture, Assimilation, Playback, and Emulation.”

“What does that mean in English?”

Tommy gave me a sideways glance. “You’ve got to climb out of your hole more often, Dave. This crap is
everywhere
now.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’m an idiot. Just take it for granted that I sleep under a rock, and tell me what the hell this
SCAPE
thing is about.”

“Wire head stuff,” Tommy said. “A digital recording of human sensory experiences. I got a chance to try out a demo-version at the LA Tech-Expo a couple of years ago. The data chips were clunkier than this. They’ve slimmed down the design, and smoothed out the interface, but this is the same general technology.”

“Sensory experiences? What kind of recordings are we talking about?”

“Anything,” Tommy said. “I could put on a headset, and record my experiences. Later, you could put on your own headset, and play back the recording. See what I saw. Feel what I felt. Hear what I heard.”

“Like a new wrinkle in Virtual Reality?”

Tommy shook his head. “This is a thousand times more powerful. Comparing SCAPE to VR is like comparing a fifth-generation AI to an abacus.”

“And you’ve tried one of these things?”

Tommy nodded. “An older version. The demo I played with was a recording of somebody eating a ham sandwich. I know that doesn’t
sound
impressive, but it was actually pretty damned amazing. It was
real
. I could taste the mustard, rich and spicy, like you get at a good deli. The ham was that honey-cured stuff that melts in your mouth. I even got a little piece of bread crust stuck between my teeth.”

“Sounds like you know all about this stuff,” I said.

“Not really. I know that it’s out there, but it’s not my kind of tech.”

“Really? A gadget freak like you? I’d have thought you’d be all over a tasty new toy like that.”

“I’m into vid,” Tommy said. “Vid is an art form, or at least it
can
be. With the right eye looking through the camera, vid can express things that no other field of art can even
begin
to touch.”

“So, SCAPE isn’t art?”

“Not to me,” Tommy said. “Except for a few specialty applications—like training pilots, or surgeons, or something—I can’t think of a single use for this technology that doesn’t amount to sensory gratification. It’s basically electronic masturbation.”