Chapter 9


Rick ripped the carpet trying to barricade Bezarin's office with a trophy case. He used Orlov's high-powered radio to call Simansky. After sealing the stairwell, the commissioner had returned the elevator to the top floor, and found no evidence of the intruder.
  "I left Orlov's body in the lobby," Rick said. "He died instantly."
  "We know what happened," Simansky said. "My people wear body sensors, and there are dozens of cameras in the T-shaped hall. I don't know why you ran, since the corridor appeared to be empty. We did see you shoot Orlov in the head with his own gun."
  "You didn't see the flashing lights?" Rick asked. "I saw many reflections. Sometimes you can't believe your eyes. Orlov's gun has a sensor so only he could fire it."
  "Luckily we don't trust the cameras," Simansky agreed. "What really happened?"
  "An optical illusion fired a stun gun from inside the elevator."
  "We couldn't see inside the cabin. Can you describe this illusion?"
  "I think I saw a human outline aiming at Orlov's torso."
  Rick reluctantly sent the video. They saw glimpses of wall and carpet; moving limbs and the sound of heavy breathing. The elevator was a blur. No alien or bright lights, and a sharp noise at the end.
  "See?" Rick said. "The image should have been clear and steady. Something distorted the light, so the video elements can't be joined."
  "I'm more concerned about what it does show."
  "I had to use Orlov as a human shield," Rick explained calmly. "The attacker anticipated all our reactions. We were only actors."
  "Strange, I don't remember my lines," Orlov said as he appeared onscreen next to Simansky. His eyes didn't move, and he had a bandage on his head. A paramedic tried to pull him back.
  Rick realized he was in big trouble. The UN could be ruthless, but not careless.
  "My mistake," he admitted. "The light affected my judgment, and the injuries looked worse than they were. I never tried CPR."
  "Fortunately," Simansky said. "Orlov may have a brain injury. He has no memories of the past hour."
  Orlov sounded indifferent. The person he had been on the sixtieth floor was gone forever. "I don't remember a thing. They found me in the elevator, so I must have crawled inside. I've never seen you before in my life."
  "He will stay dead for now," Simansky said. "Apparently, the attacker was in Bezarin's office with you, trying to disable a UN Monitor. When you left, your VF-radar detected motion. The disguised human tried to escape, but you and Yas . . . Orlov blocked their escape when you summoned the elevator."
  "The downstairs guards missed him too," Rick said. "Illusions have to be planned well in advance. Maybe he designed this tower."
  "We think he's eleven floors below you," Simansky said. "I've sealed the fire doors. I would visit this apparition myself, but we must keep the top floor secure." He sounded more casual as the danger increased. "Backup will arrive in twenty minutes. Your blackened man may be gone by then. This makes us look bad. Let's try to stop him."
  Simansky explained his plan with a space/time script and fly-through graphics. "Win or lose, it will all be over in twenty minutes."

  Rick studied the seamless access panel. When he pushed, it retracted with a click. Robot spaces were neat and dark, with tiny, civilized reference lights. He crawled on his knees through the narrow tunnel, brushing the ceiling like the echo of a musical instrument. A hand-clap behind him was the access panel closing. He lowered his Mask and visor. Clipping the infrared flashlight was a challenge in the tight space. Another minute of history wasted.
  A sudden blinking light, and the tube ended in a black void. For he moment, he thought he was looking outside. Bezarin's office was connected to the Depot parcel system to deliver his luxuries. The rest of the system was 250 meters below him. Lying on his stomach, he couldn't see the bottom of the elevator shaft. He pulled back, and felt a breeze.
  A thump, and a small chamber terminated the tunnel. It took another minute to fit inside, knees almost touching his chin. He wasn't sure if he could get out again. The door folded shut, and the cabin started to fall, the floor softening until he floated. A new feeling between vertigo and claustrophobia. He felt a kick ten floors down. After five seconds in space, powerful magnets hummed, and his weight returned like a suit of armor. The corners seemed to contract like knives. He wasn't sure when it ended.
  When the door opened, he fell into a blue tube, a simple yet profound gradient. He resumed crawling. This time it was harder to stay on the bottom. Arrows pointed the way, but he felt like a trespasser.
  When the lights went out like a dark flash, he began to slide on his back, pushing against the floor. His map showed the parcel center just outside the tower's footprint. As he coasted, his mind contracted, and he seemed to float through a room as big as the sky. Sliding sounded like breathing.
  Emerging into bright light, the illusion became real. He saw a remote ceiling, boxes stacked sky-high for worldwide shipping. Nothing moved. He climbed out and stood up. The parcel room was a webwork of plastic tubing, conveyors and shining gantries.
  A box slid down a conveyor belt made of rubber fingers. He removed the wrapping, and lifted a heavy plastic rectangle with a Monitor watermark. The Depot specialized in everything.
  When Rick called Simansky, the weak signal flattened their voices. He over-enunciated. "This isn't a laser scanner, it's a sonar." And where were the million tiny mirrors?
  "Your 'ninja' disabled the parcel network. We're rewriting the plan as we speak."
  Rick's camera spotted another error. On a far wall was an open access panel, plugged with foam.
  "I can see how the intruder entered."
  Simansky talked to someone else. "Motion detected, hold still. We're turning off the lights."
  It was shocking to see a giant room turn dark. Rick held his breath and listened. Metal moved and something fell, the echoes merging with the airflow. The infrared view made no sense. Could he hide in the chaos?
  "Follow the arrows! Go . . ."
  His earphone died, but a floating arrow led him around a corner, under a framework of lattices that pinned him to the floor. His hands and knees hurt, and he kept hitting support rods. It was like crawling uphill, maybe backwards. This might be the strangest minute of his life.
  A motorized bug on a row of tentacles crossed his infrared beam. Relays clicked, and robot arms swapped greetings. This was the land of the machines, forever improving itself. Ahead was a fine grid of magnetic rails, and swarms of floating components. The factories of the future had no moving parts.
  He smelled oil as the floor heated up. He studied the map, and crawled through a laser net tickling his eyelids. He hoped his visor filtered the light. Behind him, equipment crashed to a noisy standstill. He heard a distant thump. No one would follow.
  Ten meters further, the arrow pointed down. He approached the rim of a deep crater, glad to let Simansky do the thinking. Rick lowered his legs down the pipe, guiderails against his side as his face met cold plastic. He spiraled down the curving tube, under constant pressure as the sounds receded, relaxing until his feet hit a mat.

  In the cavernous main lobby, a panel detached from the wall, and rumbled onto the floor. Rick's camera emerged at the end of a stick. It turned, panned, zoomed - the only movement in the cathedral hall. Even lying down, his knees hurt, and the light was too bright.
  He crawled another twenty meters to the access port where he should have emerged, a museum-like hall filled with display cases. The three-color ceiling lights changed from red to yellow to blue, shadows turning inside out, an almost audible change.
  Two lieutenants had been assigned to the stadium-sized outcrop at the foot of the tower. Rick still couldn't reach Simansky.
  Back on solid ground, he took five minutes to cross a succession of empty showrooms, normally a busy trading and training center. It operated on world time, where every day had forty-eight hours. Many customers used their own calendars. One religion, celebrating the millennium of its founder's reincarnation in advance, had a year minus zero.
  He checked each corner with his camera stick. The display cases could make tractors and sewage filters seem elegant. He didn't recognize the smaller machines in their jewel boxes, intricate as sponges or gold dust.
  The lights dimmed for a deadly moment, before returning as steady as the sun. A sound from behind made him spin around. Nothing stared back, but the white light revealed many things he'd missed before. Everything here was at room temperature, but there were plenty of hiding places. Cases with fluid valves, VNImolds that converted a tank of molten plastic into a working engine. It took another five minutes to walk back.
  Looking more like soldiers than police, both federal lieutenants lay dead on the carpet under the open access port where he had emerged earlier. One had his finger on the trigger guard of his assault rifle with the safety still off. Rick stopped, and described the scene for Simansky, hoping he could hear. NBC-sensors were green. He studied the room before closing the access port with a plastic chair.
  When he sat down to check the cops, he suddenly knew what he would find. Motionless under their heavy body armor and helmets, both were breathing regularly. They appeared to have strange bruises, as if they had thrown themselves against the wall. One cop groaned, tried to get up, and promptly passed out again. Rick clumsily pulled him in a sitting position against the wall.
  He tried to imagine what had happened. Every system had its limits. There were certain problems it could never handle. However (it was claimed), nothing could stump the human brain. People could always "see" the truth, whether something was the case or not. They could step back, transcend ordinary logic, and view the big picture.
  The debate could be settled with just one idea the human mind could not handle, an unsolvable puzzle or paradox. The UN knew of no such thing. Some people could visualize the fourth dimension, or the phenomenon of awareness, but not both at once. There were optical illusions that changed as fast as the mind absorbed them, inducing a brief coma, but these required constant feedback. A rare mental illness caused the neocortex to control its own input, seeming to infect reality itself. Had the lieutenants seen a shape or a pattern so confusing it literally drove them insane?
  Most UN speculations were absurd. The even stranger alternative was that the attacker could control light. A perfectly transparent object would have the same refractive index as air. He would still see its outline, since the air pressure was always changing. In fact he felt a draft right now. Solid matter was too dense anyway. Maybe a magnetic field of 10 to the 14th Gauss could make objects invisible.
  ". . . this the right code? Parkland stand up!" Simansky's voice crackled in his ear.
  "I'm in room 153," Rick said. "Send ambulances."
  "We see you, but we've lost your signal. Wave at the ceiling! Thank you. The tower is being used as an antenna to jam our radios." Rick wasn't sure he'd heard that right. "The attacker is on your floor. Back-up expected in nineteen minutes."
  Rick gestured at the camera. Where was the attacker?
  "You're the only moving object," Simansky said. "All outside doors and windows remain sealed."
  The sonar hung from a strap around his neck. Rick gave a thumbs-up, and put on the sound-canceling earphones. His Box made all the connections. Walking to the main hall, he checked the battery.
  He held it far from his body, but his head throbbed when the sonar began to vibrate half a million times per second, and the plastic rectangle seemed to turn into heavy metal. It emitted almost a kilowatt of noise in frequencies he couldn't hear, comparable to all the mosquitoes in the world. Variable sonar could see around corners, up stairways, and through ceilings in an inverted cubist perspective. The UN used it to check sealed warehouses. This was only the emitter; the echo detectors weren't even calibrated.
  "Stop!" Simansky shouted like a gunshot. "There's something in corridor three." A door slammed.
  The sonar's battery expired, and the numbness in his arms was replaced with sudden weight. He almost dropped the thing.
  "The entity is gone." Simansky reported.
  "It's still there." This situation was so unnatural Rick felt no fear. He was simply adding to the knowledge base. This time, he hurried through the showrooms, stopping only when he saw part of corridor three behind a glass door.
  Simansky had sent help. A robot manipulator arm hung from ceiling tracks like a steel sculpture, controlled by a technician upstairs. The glass door opened in pieces, and the arm rode through. Big but agile, it made a fist entering corridor three. Through his Mask, Rick saw the long hallway. Empty, of course.
  No, not quite: several spots hung one meter above the floor. When the arm moved, the air shimmered like a desert highway. The fixed security cameras couldn't see the distortion, but the two lieutenants should have.
  The manipulator slowed and circled the floating stains, which vanished and reappeared. After some partial revolutions, Simansky ordered the arm to rise. Near the ceiling, a dark line widened into a hole in midair. The manipulator folded up, and slid into the opening.
  Expecting to see a shaft, Rick instead saw a mirror image of the hallway. The arm descended past the stains. Seen from behind, they looked about head-sized.
  The camera allowed microscopic close-ups. When it scanned the stains, all became clear. For Rick, it brought back an old memory.

  Decades ago before a worldwide multimedia audience, the famous magician Porpolini was bound, gagged, stapled inside a rubber bag, and dragged to a painted "X" below the main engines of space shuttle Zarathusthra five minutes before lift-off. Muffled cries could be heard from within. A technician securely tied the bag, as if he did this every day, before running away as fast as he could. The camerawoman's hands shook as she followed the announcer through the blast tunnel to the bunker. From there, they watched the kicking and struggling bag, until launch pad 39C vanished in an eruption of white smoke lit by the rising rockets. A flock of seabirds took wing.
  The shuttle was liquid fueled, so there was no need for the fumes to clear. They were back under the pad before Zarathusthra reached orbit, the concrete soaked by two million liters of water (double the usual amount). Their voices sounded flat amid the gray stone and metal. Apparently, the illusionist's remains had been washed away. The announcer faced the saddest duty of her career (the stunt was presented as a news event).
  Wait, there were the remnants of the bag, still steaming! Porpolini emerged triumphant, covered in soot but otherwise unscathed.
  For an hour, Rick's overactive imagination had spun in circles, wondering how the guy had survived the flames. The answer came during a political ad: the camerawoman, by definition unseen, was actually Porpolini himself.
  To make the switch, he had probably used a primitive version of the device in corridor three. Once again, the camera operator was the only suspect. Rick was relieved. He'd worried about new technologies with long names, things that made the air glow or deleted his memory. He could still pretend these things didn't exist.

  He opened the glass door, and turned the corner. As expected, the manipulator was gone. After a short walk, everything jumped into place. The distortion was an upright cylindrical screen, projecting a view of the hallway behind; a disguise made of light.
  He was already closer than planned. The attacker had abandoned the screen, so this was probably the safest place to be. From one meter away, the hall looked blurry.
  "We've lost environmental controls and lights," Simansky announced. "Electrical systems overheating. I've decided to evacuate the tower."
  Rick's nose almost touched the damaged screen, the edge of a new reality. He'd seen this so often in fiction he couldn't accept it in real life. It was too obvious.
  The screen had erased his shadow, making him invisible too. The light-emitting mesh had four layers of tiny holographic domains, lens and retina. The alien image had been so perfectly focused at his eyes that his shoulder cams saw nothing. The sonar had caused a piezoelectric effect in the crystal, briefly making the screen visible.
  He found the hairline seam, and pressed a hidden button. The cylinder opened like a great wing, flickering violently as the perspective changed. The manipulator arm was revealed, suddenly dangerous. He lifted the heavy hand without resistance.
  The manipulator had carried the cylinder along a pre-determined course at uncanny speed, its images calculated in advance. The screen had also blocked the arm's collision sensors. Confused by the changing lights, the two lieutenants couldn't react in time.
  Rick pushed with one finger, and the curving wall fell with a crash that rang down the halls.
  Time was running out. On the radio he heard shouts, as the workers came down the stairs in a single column twenty stories high. Simansky gave orders from the rear. His officers and armed Depot guards checked every floor, but couldn't begin to search them all. Several fire doors closed, and had to be broken down. A fire alarm rang in the sky. The column began to spread out, and people had to learn how to shout again. His Box translated "injuries", "smoke", "trapped".
  "Parkland calling Simansky!" he told his deaf microphone. "The man in black escaped through the parking garage." All underground levels were still dark.
  The radio shouts continued. "I'm using my Override Authority to unlock all emergency exits."
  He approached a wall control panel, activated his UN key, and followed the simple instructions. It asked for his handprint. "DAY MODE 000" Thousands of doors unlocked at once.
  Rick had chosen the easy way out. The attacker needed his help to escape the sealed tower. If Rick had been forced to do this at gunpoint, the stress sensors in his uniform might have revoked his UN clearance. Sacrificing himself wouldn't stop the man in black. He would only retaliate. By letting him escape now, it would be easier to catch him later. Rick would have some explaining to do.
  The evacuation was obviously fake: the one-way radio messages sounded like Simansky, but the commissioner would never have let him leave the injured lieutenants.
  He didn't see the outside lights dim, but Rick's ears popped. Somewhere in the building, a door or window had opened. A red light appeared on the map. As expected, the fire door led to the empty parking garage. The attacker probably didn't want to be shot from the top floor. Two tunnels led out of the garage.
  After a few seconds, the outer seal was restored. Still no cops, but they might be near. Sirens were as obsolete as barcodes and pixels. "You win this round," he said loudly.