"If you leave without remedial work, you will suffer a great risk of serious malfunction, blackouts, hallucinations… Your pooled memories will begin to spill into your waking life," said Ekbaum. "There is a great risk of cerebral trauma, and that risk will only grow."
"I will come back," said Otto. "I've no wish to die, not yet. Now, I let you plug me in to your damn machines, tell me where I can find Lehmann."
"Give me your word you will return."
Otto exhaled shakily. "I give you my word. I'll be back." His shoulder told him he would. His dreams did, as little as he liked Ekbaum and his machines inside his head.
"Then I can tell you that your Conrad Lehmann friend is outside, waiting for you."
Otto looked up sharply. "That son of a bitch."
Lehmann stood up from the couch as Otto entered the waiting room. Even taller than Otto, and as heavily built, he wore an enormous smile. His smile was oddly boyish, out of character with his face, a smile that vanished when he was in the field, and he became cold and implacable. He was the best of Otto's old squad, both professionally and morally, but there was machine iciness in him too, as there was in them all.
"Otto." They embraced, slapping each other's backs hard enough to break the bones of normal men.
"That was a cheap trick, Conrad." Otto stood back. "I thought something had come between us. There's too few of us left for that."
Lehmann ran his hands through his hair and looked anywhere but at his one-time commander. "How else was I supposed to get you to come to see Ekbaum?"
Otto looked Lehmann up and down and grunted. He was in good shape, better than Otto. His filmstar looks unmarred. "What do you mean? I look like a potato farmer next to you, always have. Don't let it go to your head. I'm fine."
Lehmann was unconvinced. "You should look after yourself better."
"You got my messages then?"
"I'm here, aren't I? I got them not long after Ekbaum contacted me. I'm sorry about the deception. He talked me into it; it was too good an opportunity. You never could look after yourself. What was I supposed to do? We worry about you, Otto."
Otto grunted. " Genau. Lucky I got you to watch my back. Now do you want this job or not?"
Lehmann relaxed. "Yeah, naturally. Always."
"I haven't briefed you yet."
Lehmann grinned. "Since when has that made a difference?"
Otto nodded approvingly. He hadn't expected Lehmann to say no. "You noticed anything with the Grid recently?"
"A little jumpy, slow here and there, informational overload, they say."
"Not entirely true," said Otto. "A Five — k52?"
Lehmann shook his head. The name meant nothing to him.
"It's gone rogue, suborned the EuPol Five's choir, frozen up a lot of EU and USNA cyberspace. It's hiding in the old RealWorld Reality Realms, got a direct pipe into the EuPol Five's choir. It could bring down the entire network."
"Sounds serious."
"Biggest thing since the Five Crisis. Interested?"
Lehmann thought for a moment and pinched at his chin. "OK," he said. "Bit different to my usual line of work, but OK."
"Relax. We're not going after him, nothing Gridside, all out in the Real. We're to find someone."
Lehmann folded his arms. "Who?"
"I'll get to that. That's the hard part. My partner Richards-"
"The AI?"
Lehmann never did understand why he'd gone into business with an AI; they'd been made to fight the machines in a war that never came, and Otto figured Lehmann thought his friendship with Richards a small betrayal of their intended purpose. "He is inside, we're outside. What k52 is trying to do out here… that's what we're going to find out, when we find this guy. You, me and a couple of others. You in?"
"Sure," Lehmann said nonchalantly, and retrieved a kitbag from behind the couch, ready to go. He was never going to refuse Otto; dependable Lehmann, through and through.
"I've a car waiting outside. We're to rendezvous with a VIA heavy lifter tonight outside of New London."
Lehmann whistled. "The VIA? You running with them now?"
"Not really. It's complicated," said Otto. "And there's more. There's Kaplinski."
Lehmann raised his eyebrows. "Isn't he dead yet?"
Otto grunted a negative. "Three weeks ago, Kaplinski tried to kill me, and he nearly killed my partner. He's alive all right."
CHAPTER 2
Richards came online and wished he hadn't.
"Ouch," he said. "Ooh, ouch, that really, really hurts." He raised his hands to his face, but the movement tripped off a wave of nausea that nearly did for him, so he let them fall back onto the smooth, cold floor where he lay, eyes screwed shut, his senses spinning in precisely the opposite direction to his stomach. It was a most uncomfortable sensation. Once he'd gathered his thoughts, he decided to turn his pseudo-biological feeds off, take the meat out of his machine and run off pure numbers, so to speak.
When he found he could not was when he pulled himself together enough to sit up. The effort of it made him whimper, and he threw up all down his front. He sat there, quivering. It was indescribably revolting. As a Class Five, and a curious one at that, he was open enough to most physical sensations, but there were limits.
He looked down at himself. Legs, arms, the usual, if you were one of the real people, very different to his usual. He poked at his thigh experimentally. It felt like flesh. He looked at his hand; it was flesh. He groaned, the wash of pain from his head making him instantly regret it. "k52's idea of a joke," he said.
He'd been in simulations of the human body before; practically every day, in fact, because that's how he liked to relax in his virtual office, and how he liked to deal with people and other numbers on the Grid. When out and about in the Real the robotic carriages he rode were invariably anthropomorphic, but all these masks had something extra, or lacked something fundamental, sometimes both. Virtual or real, they were that little bit more and that little bit less than human. More importantly, they were all under his complete control.
This one was not. This one felt alarmingly like actual meat. He tried to reach to snag at the world's underlying code, but he might as well have been trying to telepathically communicate with a goldfish — nothing but deafening silence. This body he wore — this body he was, for it felt as if he and it were one, a feeling he had never had before — filled the place where the clickety thrum of the Grid ordinarily lived with weird little sounds, the shush-roar of circulation, the creak of joints as he shifted, the slither of wet, curled things in his abdomen. He began to feel ill again. Presently, he was.
"How do they stand it?" he groaned. He staggered up. He stood grasping his knees and gaping reflexively, saliva and bile dripping from his mouth. He made a few pathetic sounds and he surprised himself by feeling better, although it was long seconds before he could summon the will to wipe his chin and stand erect.
He took in his surroundings through eyes that only grudgingly focused.
The first thing he noticed was that there were no doors.
He was in the chilly hall of a stately home, flash with Victorian new money. A wide marble staircase swept up to a vulgar balcony, its banister fashioned from woods long since enthusiastically furnitured into extinction in the Real. Horrid touches caught his eye — panting gargoyles, tapestries of pale, rangy men with thinning hair and piercing eyes, stuffed animals possessed of far too much life. To his right a tree trunk smouldering in the fireplace provided the only light; something nasty, obscured in soot, decorated the fireback. A broad archway led out of the hallway to his left, polished black and white diamond marble floor tiles disappearing into the dark.
As for the doorways, there were the door jambs, framing familiar spaces with wood, but when it came to there being an actual door, the walls were plain as bone.