Idempotency (46 page)

“I’m trying, but he’s not making this easy,” Sindhu replied.

Lost in his own scrambled world, Dylan was rambling incoherently, almost in tongues. When his eyes did lock on to Sindhu’s, they were dark and cavernous, frightened and naive.

Sindhu knelt down and slapped him softly, back and forth, then asked helplessly, “Can you hear me, Dylan?”

He glanced at her momentarily before his head bobbed forward like a newborn.

“Where do we go, Grep?” She looked up at his holographic representation with trust.

“Back into the hallway, quickly. There’s a small army of holoPods and a few androids heading this direction, and even a few people.” He emphasized the word
people
.

Pivoting her weight underneath Dylan, she lifted him with all her strength. Though he was stocky, his stature was short enough to allow Sindhu to get him onto his feet. He still wasn’t showing any kind of awareness, but his legs held once he was standing, and as she urged him forward, his feet managed to move.

When they reached the hallway, denoted by a translucent outline where the door was, Sindhu didn’t stall, promptly hustling herself and Dylan through the door.

Simeon was hovering so close to Jay-san’s neck that the latter could feel the hot air of Simeon’s breath on his skin. Agoraphobic by nature and nurture, Jay finally spun around and shouted, “Please, Sim! Please move back. Please. Just a half meter. That’ll be enough.”

Simeon blinked hard. “Sure, Jay, sure.” As he moved back, his blond ponytail brushed against Jay’s shoulder, causing him to wince. Simeon pretended not to notice this and immediately followed up with, “So, am I reading this right? We should push Sindhu to the south?”

“Yeah. Ideally,” Jay replied. “Still, I’m not certain. There seems to be some random movement in that direction from the holoPods. I still think it’s the right choice, though. We have a lot of escape routes down there. If Sindhu can take out one of the androids, we can probably get her out of the complex.”

“I’d prefer to avoid that; she’s clearly hurting. Push her high, to the top of the complex. South, preferably, but north is fine, too.”

“That doesn’t make any sense, we need her on the ground—to the south—so she can get out.”

“No, that’s what they’ll expect. Push her high. And keep her on the border of the building. Worst-case scenario, we blow a hole in a window and have her jump out.”

Scoffing incredulously, Jay-san looked at Sim and retorted, “From forty stories up?”

“No, no—I’ve arranged for a graviCopter to pick her up. It should be in range within twenty minutes.”

Jay appeared surprised at this news, but he didn’t respond.

“What’s this area here, this . . .” Simeon hesitated “. . . blank area to the north? Labeled
Resource r_TK_1537
.”

“Uh, I don’t know. It appears to be a large room, but I can’t access that portion of the facility yet.” He gestured to a blank area of the hologram with his hand. “It’s locked with user-level permissions, rather than at the group level that I’ve managed to hack. I have no idea what’s in there. We’re running blind ”

Simeon shot Jay a suspicious glance and did not reply.

“Sim said to head south and up, but we keep being pushed north and down!”

“I know, Sin, but there are about five holoPods coming down the hallway we just turned from. If you want to take your chances, be my guest.” Grep motioned the other direction while floating backward. Sindhu simply scowled at him.

The trio had managed to stay a step ahead of their pursuers, but it seemed as though they were constantly being pushed in the wrong direction: toward the depths of the complex.

“They’re doing this on purpose, pushing us toward some specific location. We’re being led into a trap,” Sindhu guessed.

Grep’s silence led her to assume her guess was accurate, but she didn’t have a better idea and was far too exhausted to focus on anything beyond her next painful footfall, so she trusted her friend.

The pressure bearing down upon Sindhu’s shoulder seemed to be lessening, as Dylan’s legs functioned slightly better with each step they took. He had yet to utter a coherent word, however. For a brief moment, a sheen of recognition seemed to cross his eyes, and Sindhu assumed he was confused by her one-sided discussions with Grepman, whom Dylan would not be able to see. After this moment of clarity, Dylan’s head rolled forward again, bouncing painlessly against his chest, his curly hair following suit.

Stairwells led to grandiose hallways, which ducked into service corridors that led into study halls that wound back to doorways that opened up to stairwells. Circles had never been more circuitous. And while they hadn’t encountered any direct threat, escape seemed farther away than ever before. Grepman would shout one direction, but Sindhu would be forced into another. Sindhu would go the wrong way, only to be forced to continue. At one intersection, Dylan stumbled, causing just enough of a delay to require a change of direction: Down yet another staircase. Down and to the north they went, however hard they tried to do otherwise.

“We’re being herded! We’re their damn cattle!” Sindhu shouted.

“Simeon has a graviCopter coming—if we can just find a window—”

“A window? We must be in the middle of the building by now. We’ll be lucky to find a bathroom. Which I could really use, by the way.”

“What’s that noise?” Chicklet asked quietly.

As usual, everyone ignored him, neon-radiating Mohawk be damned! He sighed obnoxiously, loud enough for anyone within earshot to hear him, but no one noticed. He glanced to his right and saw Mitlee looking over Kristina’s shoulder as she perused various holographic code readouts. Chicklet rolled his eyes; his sister didn’t have a clue what any of that stuff meant, she was just trying to impress her new best friend, Kristina. To his right he saw Grepman’s virtTripping body; it twitched slightly as its ghostly representation floated somewhere else, a thousand miles away in the middle of Mexico. Chicklet then looked at the hub of the action: Nimbus stood anxiously, her arms locked around Simeon’s right bicep, while glaring over Jay-san’s shoulders. Around all of them, the heavy tenting of the yurt flapped from a dull, hot desert wind.

“Guys!” Chicklet whined. “What is that sound?”

“It’s just the wind, Chick,” Simeon barked back without turning to look at him.

Chicklet slumped back onto the dusty brown couch and crossed his arms. His Mohawk began to pulsate with an angry red.

Wind doesn’t sound like . . . graviCopters
, he said to himself.

A subtle portion of Nimbus’s brain registered Chick’s comment. Her head tilted up slightly, and she slowly turned around.

“Is that what you’re hearing?” She pointed in the direction she thought the sound was coming from, outside of the yurt. Chicklet nodded. She twirled back toward Simeon, yanked his arm and said, “Sim, those do sound like graviCopters. NRS? PubSecCorp?”

Simeon tilted his own ear to the sky. After a beat, the quietly dancing image of a flame upon his arm began to rage.

The trio of Sindhu, Dylan, and Grepman’s floating virtGhost ended up at a crossroads. An enormous pair of wooden doors stood towering over them. Behind them, several androids were gaining ground, now visible over several hundred meters down a long hall, their
clickity-clackity
footfalls just now reverberating into range. To the right and left of the trio, smiling holoBots and frowning people were heading toward them. The group was trapped, and they knew it.

Grepman ducked his head through the door and promptly brought it back out. Before he could report, Sindhu asked urgently, “What’s in there?”

“Can’t tell. I can’t access it. It’s restricted from the vidFeeds that Jay and Sim opened for me. I’m going to check in with Simeon, I’ll be right back.”

“Wait! Don’t leave me—“ Grepman blinked out of Sindhu’s ocImps. “Damn it! Why can’t I do that?”

Back in the yurt, a holographic image of Grepman blinked into existence about two feet away from his virtTripping body.

“Guys, what’s in there, what do we do? I don’t know what to tell her.”

Nimbus stood by the opening to the yurt. She spun around and spoke first. “They’ve found us, Grep. Multiple androids have been spotted in the Laughlin slum; they’ll be on us in minutes. GraviCopters are circling. I’m sorry, Grep, I don’t know what to tell you. This is not going well.”

Grepman looked around helplessly. He pleaded with Jay-san, but Jay just shrugged. All access to the mysterious room was blocked and, if anything, the Titus security technicians seemed to be gaining back portions of their system.

“I’m going back—at least I can help her fight if she stays outside. She shouldn’t go in to a blind room.”

“Too late,” Jay-san said as he swiveled around in his chair. “She just went inside.”

The thud
of the door closing echoed around Sindhu, and it didn’t stop reverberating until she had taken five deep breaths, each of which she could hear with chilling clarity. Several anachronistic steel locks lined the door, and she flipped each one shut, though she doubted it would do much good. As she turned around, her eyes adjusted to a gleaming light that streamed through and off of several stained-glass windows. The light entered from all directions. Above her, making up the ceiling, veins of crisscrossing red arches framed angelic white alcoves. This stark contrast in color, coupled with the drastic change in location and the echoing acoustics, served to place Sindhu in a near-vertiginous trance, and she became quite dizzy.

The weight of all religions seemed to be crashing down upon her until she realized the weight was simply from Dylan. He was breathing harder now and leaning nearly all of his stout self on her shoulder. She realized she had to move—if for nothing else, to get Dylan to walk and carry some of his density on his own. They began walking forward, though Sindhu had no idea where she was headed. Even the rubber soles of her sneakers falling gently upon the red diamond-shaped tiles below her feet seemed to squeak out interminable echoes in the expansive hall.

They had entered the cathedral through the transept, the narrow alcove that made up the cross-section of the church. Sindhu walked ten paces forward, and the long nave of the cathedral came into view on her right. Rows of pews initially ran parallel with the nave, then turned perpendicular halfway toward the back. Looming above the pews was a grand pipe organ, the crafting of which was so engrossing that it distracted her from an equally decadent marble pulpit. Below the pipe organ, another set of doors seemed to be the fastest way out.

Sindhu quickly glanced to her left and noticed a particularly long presbytery, its walls lined with ancient paintings of saints and men, but no doors. At the far end, below an archway of tall stained-glass windows, stood a flat altar of nine gold images painted on carved wooden panes. The middle pane depicted a bearded man holding a sword. Sindhu wondered: Was the bearded man Christ? If so, why was he brandishing a sword?

Getting ahold of her wandering psyche, she quickly turned back to the end of the church and started to make her way toward the doors under the organ. Dylan wasn’t cooperating, however, and after twenty paces her throbbing leg forced her to sit him down. He slumped into one of the parallel pews, facing the aisle of the church.

“Dylan, please, please, do the needful and wake up!” She again slapped him gently on the cheek.

His head rose and his eyes locked onto hers. She then cupped his cheeks with her hands and said, “Yes, that’s it, can you hear me? Dylan, can you hear me?”

“Who . . . who are you?” Dylan mumbled as his eyes became clearer.

“Dylan!”

“Why don’t you try calling him by his new name? Maybe he’ll respond to that.”

The gravelly voice came from the pulpit directly above Sindhu’s head. She reflexively jumped back a few paces, and looked up at a haggard Rev. Edward Lee Coglin.

“I am truly sorry, you’ve been nothing less than impressive. We’d love to have a dedicated employee like yourself here at NRS, but you already turned down our recruiter a few years ago. Several times, in fact—” A violent cough erupted out of Coglin’s body, causing him to lean heavily on the marble railing in front of him. Sindhu thought momentarily that this might be her chance, but as his right hand rose above the rail to steady himself, she saw the old gun it was gripping. The cough abated as fast as it had come on.

“Are you looking at this? My old-timey six-shooter?” He laughed. “Yes, to answer your question, of course it’s real. Even down here in Mexico these have been outlawed for decades, but it ain’t that hard to find one. You know—everyone favors stasis inducers these days, but I still like these things. They’re heavier—more density and permanency. Their output is far less . . . ambiguous, wouldn’t you agree?” He smiled as he pointed the gun directly at her head.

Sindhu measured her opponent. With one long stride she could be underneath the pulpit, beneath him and out of his reach. If she could take him down, perhaps she could still find an exit.

As if reading her mind, Coglin said, “Every door is now blocked, Sindhu. You aren’t getting out. Dylan is my property. While valiant, your attempt to rescue him has been an abject failure. Moreover, your SOP colleagues in Laughlin—” Sindhu’s eyes fluttered slightly as he mentioned SOP’s location. “Laughlin, that’s right, I know precisely where your friends are. They’re in the process of being apprehended—rounded up—at this very moment. I’m hoping to finally meet the fabled Simeon, if he truly exists. He’s been a thorn in my side for so many decades now that I’ve anthropomorphized him into a giant of a man. I do hope he’s—”

Without warning, Sindhu dashed toward the cover of the pulpit and Coglin immediately fired his gun. The sound was encompassing, and for a moment Sindhu hadn’t realized that she had been shot. It wasn’t until her second step that her ankle gave way and she stumbled to the ground. She let out a whimper and glanced down. The bullet had gone clean through the back of her left foot; streaks of blood from the bottom of her sneaker smeared the tiles behind her.

“I never was a very good shot, even when I used to get to the range once a week. Oh, well,” Coglin said dismissively. He descended the small marble spiral staircase leading from the pulpit to the floor.