The man says, in English, ‘Please keep very still.’
The woman moves in front of me, holstering a gun. From a pouch on her belt beside the holster, she produces a small hypodermic capsule. Stepping over Laura, she takes hold of my jaw in one hand — I lower my heart rate—slides the needle into a vein in the side of my neck — I constrict blood flow to the area—then squeezes the capsule.
Reduced circulation will buy me a few seconds, at best, but that should be long enough for PI to make an assessment. If this is a substance that the mod can neutralize, then now is the time to move; unless the plan is to incinerate me when I slump under the drug’s effects, the laser must be off auto. If I feign loss of consciousness, stumble, swing the woman around as a shield, take her gun…
But PI gives no report. I try to twitch a finger, and fail. A moment later, I black out.
4
I wake, lying on my side on a concrete floor, naked. My arms are aching, but when I try to move them, cool metal presses against my wrists. I look around; I’m in a small, narrow storeroom lit by a single high window. My hands are cuffed behind me to a shelving rack, packed with laboratory glassware, which runs the length of the wall P5 has lost track of my location; it relies on a mixture of perceptual cues, balance sense and proprioception, which is accurate to the millimetre when you’re conscious and moving on foot, but totally useless when you’ve been knocked out and lugged somewhere. It does claim to have kept the time, though: 15:21, January 5th. The clocks in several other mods agree, and I doubt that a drug would have screwed them all up identically. In fifteen hours, I could have been moved anywhere on the planet… anywhere, that is, judging from the light, where’s it’s mid-afternoon or mid-morning at 15:21 Central Australian time. Belatedly, it occurs to me to scan the layout of the building in my head for any rooms with matching dimensions, and I find one on every floor. Culex saw nothing worth photographic snapshots in any of them, but the wireframe outlines it recorded indiscriminately are detailed enough to place me on the fourth floor.
I’m wearing two pairs of handcuffs; one pair has been threaded through a slot in one of the shelving rack’s vertical supports. The shelves aren’t anchored to the wall and just shifting my weight slightly sets the glassware rattling. I could try working the chain of the cuffs against the edge of the slot, but even if I’m not under surveillance, all that’s likely to achieve is an avalanche of glass.
Okay, I’m stuck here. So who am I dealing with?
It’s still possible that BDI are exactly what they claim to be: contract biomedical researchers. Who happen to have no qualms about kidnapping. Hired by the drug company whose product damaged Laura, in utero, thirty-three years ago. Company X would be taking a risk by involving outsiders, but maybe less of a risk than trying to deal with Laura in-house. Company X may have plenty of loyal staff, but presumably only a few of them are criminals—whereas BDI might specialize in just this kind of thing.
It all sounds as plausible as ever, even if the list of facts it fails to explain is growing longer. Casey’s testimony. The architecture of the basement room. Laura roaming the gap between the walls of her custom-made prison. All of which suggest an alternative which might explain everything—and which doesn’t sound plausible at alclass="underline"
Laura really did escape from the Hilgemann. Unaided. Twice. That was why she was abducted; somebody found out, somebody who believed they could make good use of her talents. That was what the double-walled room was all about; a test for an idiot escapologist. And when I ran into her, she was half-way through passing that test.
What brought the guards down on us last night? Obviously, I triggered some kind of alarm—but unless the chameleons screwed up, the room wasn’t under surveillance by any device linked to the building’s security station. If Laura was being treated, not as a routine security problem, but as the subject of an experiment, it wouldn’t be surprising if she was being monitored by a different system entirely.
Why are BDI making neural maps? It has nothing to do with disputing liability for congenital brain damage; they’re trying to identify the pathways that make Laura the greatest thing since Houdini, in the hope of encoding her talents in a mod. Why did they smuggle her out as a corpse, not a passenger with a puppet mod? Because they didn’t want to screw around with her brain, and risk destroying the very thing that made her worth abducting.
It all fits together perfectly.
The only trouble is, I just can’t swallow it.
What hypothetical talent could Laura possess that would enable her to break out of locked rooms,without tools of any kind? Postulating an intuitive grasp of security devices is dubious enough—but what could anyone, however gifted, do to a lock, or a surveillance camera, with their bare hands? Two hundred years of research says telekinesis does not exist. The human body’s minute electromagnetic fields—even if they were controllable—are about a million times too weak to be of the slightest use in picking an electronic lock. No amount of fortuitous brain damage could change that—any more than reprogramming a computer in some novel way could give it the power to levitate. So how did she get out?
I’m still pondering this when the door opens. A young man tosses a bundle of clothes onto the floor beside me, then draws a gun and a remote control, and aims the latter at the handcuffs. I quickly activate RedNet, in the hope of capturing the exchange. The cuffs fall open, but I pick up nothing; the frequency used must be outside the range of my transceiver cells.
The man stands in the doorway with the gun trained on me. ‘Please get dressed.’ I recognize the voice from last night. The expression on his face is matter-of-fact, with no trace of smugness or belligerence; no doubt he has behavioural optimization mods of his own.
The clothes are brand new, and fit perfectly. P3 vetoes anything but stoicism at the loss of all the equipment I had stashed in hidden pockets; even so, for a moment after I’m dressed, some part of my brain flashes redundant warnings at the absence of the usual inventory of reassuring lumps.
‘Put on one pair of handcuffs. Behind your back.’
When I’ve done this, he blindfolds me. Then he guides me out of the room, walking beside me, gripping the chain of the cuffs with one hand, holding the gun to the side of my chest with the other.
I hear little along the way; snatches of conversation in Cantonese and English, passing footsteps on the carpet, equipment humming softly in the distance. I catch a faint scent of organic solvents. P5 tracks my location precisely, for what that’s worth. When we come to a halt, I’m pushed down into an armchair, and the gun is shifted to my temple.
Without any preliminaries, a woman says, ‘Who hired you?’ She’s a couple of metres away, facing me directly. ‘I don’t know.’
She sighs. ‘What exactly are you hoping for? Do you think we’re going to jump through all the technological hoops for you? Truth drugs, truth mods, neural maps—all in pursuit of memories that may or may not have been falsified, or erased? If you think you’re buying time, you’re wrong. I have no interest in spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, pissing around with your brain. If you tell us the truth, and your story checks out, we’ll be lenient. But if you don’t cooperate, here and now, we’ll kill you, here and now.’
She’s calm, but not mod calm; her tone of pained condescension sounds like a failed attempt to be coolly intimidating. Which doesn’t necessarily mean that she’s bluffing.
‘I’m telling you the truth. I don’t know who my client is; I was hired anonymously.’