The emcee was drowned out by more cheers. Dom was still fogged, but he could tell he was overhearing a holo broadcast.
“And now, our first criminal. He was caught by one of our roving patrols raping a teenage girl—
“So what are we going to do to him?”
“Fry him!”
“I can’t hear you.”
“FRY HIM!”
“And why are we going to fry him?”
“BECAUSE HE’S SCUM!”
The audience broke into applause.
“Well, we certainly hope so. But you know the rules. Our lines are open for pledges, and our target with this boy is a full kilogram.”
Whistles from the audience.
“If we don’t meet or exceed our target—we let him go!”
Boos from the audience.
“So, while the home audience is making up their minds, let’s roll the video of the attack—”
“You, CEO-man, you awake yet?”
Dom opened his eyes. The last voice was a lot closer.
He was on the floor of a small concrete cell, and a young woman was bending over him. Her age was somewhere between seventeen and twenty-two years standard. She was only one-fifty centimeters tall. She had straight black hair cut on an asymmetrical diagonal, almond-shaped green eyes, and a concavity in the flesh of her neck that was the sign of an electronic biolink.
“I’m awake. Where is this?” he asked as he got to his feet.
He looked around for the holo he heard in the background. The cell itself was empty, but one wall opened into a carpeted lobby. The room beyond was where the holo was playing.
“Prime time, that’s where this is. We’re going to be making money for the mother Church—”
The lobby was done up like an exec office, static holo landscapes on the walls, soft-white indirect lighting. A uniformed guard sat in a plush red-velvet office chair, watching a holo mounted on a receptionist’s desk. The desk must have faced the entrance to the room, but any exit was far to the right, out of his field of view.
The entrance to the cell was open, with the exception of a sphere mounted on a column, standing in the middle of the doorway. It didn’t take a genius to figure that it was an Emerson field generator, the same idea as the paladin’s stunner, a field programmed to raise havoc with human neural impulses. Walking through it would be painful, and you’d come out the other end unconscious.
Dom had a glimmer of an idea.
“The name’s Tetsami,” his cellmate went on. “Let me guess, you tried to shaft them on payment for their Samaritan deal.”
“How’d you know?” He kept his eye on the guard. The guard seemed intent on the holo broadcast and wasn’t even looking in their direction.
“The only way they’d end up with a corp type. They take tithing very seriously. They’re doing background checks on you now, to get something to put you on trial for. They need to recoup their costs.”
After an overlong pause she asked, “So what do they call you?”
“I’m called Dominic Magnus.” He debated with himself over what he was about to do.
Unless you pumped a hell of a lot of power into it, or it was tuned to a visible EM frequency, a static Emerson field was invisible. There’d be no way to see how the thing was tuned unless something passed through it.
He could make a few assumptions, though.
The Emerson effect’s peak absorption band was based on the power you pumped into it. Widening the band increased the power consumption logarithmically—if someone pumped an infinite power supply into an Emerson field, you’d have a black hole—but at normal power ranges the fields were narrow-band things. There was a good chance that the field on this door was keyed only to interfere with a biological nervous system.
Of course, like most defensive screens, it could have a processor ready to adjust the frequency of the peak absorption band based on the field’s own feedback.
In that case he would be in trouble.
Tetsami snorted. “Sounds like a corp name. You know, they’re going to put one hell of a price on you. An exec would pull hellacious pledges from the communes.”
“What’d you do?” There was also the small chance that the field was powered up to interfere with more things on the EM spectrum.
That would also be trouble.
“Same deal, bad luck to be saved before I got paid. Unfortunately, my normal employment is on their sins list.”
“So what do you do for a living?”
Dom ran his photoreceptors through the whole range of possible configurations. There was no visible sign of the field’s presence. Which only meant that, at the moment, it wasn’t interfering with any of the EM spectrum he could pick up.
“Software, industrial espionage, that sort of thing. Apparently that makes me a thief. But I’ll be better off than you will.”
Dom inched up to the edge of the field. It could’ve come off of GA&A’s assembly line. GA&A had a specialty in small-scale field jobs.
“Why do you say that?”
Tetsami seemed to realize something abnormal was going on. She kept her voice calm, but Dom felt her slide up next to him to watch his hands. “They told me the script. I’m the multiple-choice criminal today. Three pledge totals, the viewers are going to vote on whether I die, am maimed, or set free. I’ll be set free.”
“Why are you so sure?” Odds were it was just the neural field. Dom doubted there were any more fancy, or expensive, security measures. At least, that’s what he was hoping.
After all, if there were anything beyond the field, they’d dispense with the guard.
Dom gritted his teeth and stuck his left hand through the field. If he was wrong and the field was broader-spectrum than he expected, there was a good chance he’d fry the cybernetics in his arm.
Nothing happened.
He saw Tetsami wince; obviously she had tried this before. However, Tetsami probably had natural limbs, while Dom’s left arm was totally artificial.
There was a tingle, but no paralysis, no pain, and no alarms. He had to elbow Tetsami to continue the conversation; they couldn’t have the guard looking around now.
“You see,” she continued, “they’re giving me five minutes for my own defense.”
Dom felt along the other side of the central sphere. It was the obvious place for the control. There had to be a cutoff. Dom hoped it was within reach. “You’re going to convince the audience you’re innocent?”
Tetsami laughed. It sounded a little forced, but the guard didn’t notice. “Hell, no. I’m going to promise to fuck anyone who donates a kilogram to let me go.”
Dom found the switch.
He pressed the button, and again no alarms.
To test it, he put his right hand through the area where the field was. Nothing. The screen had dropped.
He waved Tetsami forward. “That’s a dangerous offer.”
Tetsami hesitantly stepped over the threshold. “My philosophy is to take things as they come. Get free, worry about the consequences later.”
Dom stepped through himself, releasing the switch. According to the readout, the field sprang back up.
Now he had to deal with the guard. “Are you sure that you want to promise something you might not want to go through with?”
The guard was still oblivious.