What I want, right now, is to understand the Andrews case, but there’s no mod in my head which can grant me that.
Karen says, ‘Okay. So you have no idea why Laura was kidnapped. Fine. Stick to the facts. Wherever she’s been taken, someone must have seen her along the way. Forget about motives for now—just find out where she is.’
I nod. ‘You’re right. As always. I’ll put an ad in the news systems—’
‘In the morning.’
I laugh. ‘Yes, okay, in the morning.’
With her familiar warmth beside me, I close my eyes.
‘Nick?’
‘Yes?’
She kisses me lightly. ‘Dream about me.’ I do.
2
‘Hallelujah! I can see them! I can see the stars!
I turn, startled, to see a young woman on her knees in the middle of the crowded street, arms outstretched, gazing ecstatically into the dazzling blue sky. For a moment, she seems to be frozen—transfixed, enraptured—then she screams again, ‘I can see them! I can see them!’ and starts pounding her ribs, rocking back and forth on her knees, gasping and sobbing.
But that cult died out twenty years ago.
The woman shrieks and twitches. Two embarrassed friends stand beside her, while the traffic smoothly detours around the scene. I watch with mounting dismay, as childhood memories of ranting, convulsing street mystics start flooding back.
‘All the beautiful stars! AH the glorious constellations! Scorpius! Libra! Centaurus!’ Tears stream down her face.
I fight down a sense of panic and revulsion that’s growing out of all proportion. This is just one woman, just one freak. The very fact that she’s such a spectacle only proves what a rarity this is, proves that most people have adapted, have accepted The Bubble and moved on. What am I afraid of? That every last form of Bubble hysteria, every last obscure religious sect, every last bizarre mass psychosis, is destined to be revived?
As I turn away, the woman’s companions suddenly burst out laughing. A moment later, she joins them—and belatedly, I think I understand. Astral Sphere is back in fashion, that’s all. A planetarium in the skull. A gimmick, not an epiphany. I’ve read the reviews; the mod offers a variety of settings, ranging from a realistic view of the stars ‘exactly as they would be’—complete with accurate diurnal and seasonal motions, masking by clouds and buildings, and convincing fade-ins at dusk and fade-outs at dawn—through to the dissolution of all obstacles (the sunlit atmosphere and the Earth beneath your feet included), and the option of moving the point of view millennia into the past or the future, or half-way across the galaxy.
The trio are falling in and out of each other’s arms now, laughing. The cult is being mocked, not revived; these teenagers must have seen it portrayed in some old documentary. I walk on, feeling slightly foolish—and greatly relieved.
When I reach my building, I take the stairs slowly, reluctant to face an empty calls log, again. I’ve had ads in all the news systems for four days running, and they’ve yet to attract even a hoax call. The New Year should have helped; news-system readership increases on public holidays, when people have nothing better to do. Maybe ten thousand dollars isn’t a large enough reward, but I doubt that my client would appreciate me doubling it. Not that I’m any closer to knowing who my client is. The Hilgemann’s patient records listed no one with family ties to spectacular wealth or fame—and in retrospect, I’m not surprised. The very rich would, at the very least, take care that the records were meticulously falsified, and the obscenely wealthy would keep their demented relatives right out of harm’s way, in soundproof wings of their own impenetrable mansions. I’m tempted to dig deeper, but I won’t. I may suffer the (purely aesthetic) urge to incorporate my client into the Big Picture, but as yet I have no good reason to believe that it would help me find Laura.
No calls.
I resist punching the sofa; the upholstery has already split to the point where further damage yields diminishing satisfaction. It’s getting close to the deadline for lodging the ad for one more day; I display the copy on my terminal and stare at it glumly, wondering if there’s anything I could change that would make a difference, short of adding a zero or two to the reward. I’ve used a picture of Laura straight from the Hilgemann’s patient records; it closely matches my own received mental image, suggesting that my client’s knowledge of Laura’s appearance was based on the very same shot. Her face is distinctive, but who knows what she looks like by now? No need for plastic surgery; a good synthetic-skin mask is all that’s required.
I lodge the ad again, for what it’s worth. If Laura was taken by accident, she’d be long dead by now—and I doubt that I’d ever find the body, let alone the people responsible. My only real hope is that, not only did her kidnappers have some obscure reason for deliberately abducting her, but whatever it was, it required them to do something riskier than merely locking her up, or slaughtering her.
Like smuggling her out of the country.
Getting Laura onto a plane would not be difficult. Her imbecility would be almost as easy to conceal as her face; there are dozens of illegal mods which could transform her into the walking puppet of a travelling companion, or even a semi-autonomous ‘robot’, capable of such rudimentary tasks as laughing and crying at all the right moments during the in-flight movie.
Faking an exit-visa record in the Foreign Affairs database is no big deal. It would vanish an hour or two later, and the airline’s files would also be appropriately amended. Foreign Affairs, Customs and the airlines are all being screwed blind, twenty-four hours a day, by a hundred different hackers—and, ironically, that’s what makes it possible, if you’re lucky, to trace an illegal traveller. Hackers may run rings around the target systems’ own archaic security, but they can’t avoid making their presence known to each other. In the process of capturing data essential for their own work, they can’t help capturing details of other violations in progress. Like all information, this is for sale.
Bella is acting as a broker for me, as well as providing some data of her own. I call her and download another batch. The relevance of any one heap of raw data is a matter of luck; the more you buy, the better the odds, but there’s no guarantee of success when the event you’re trying to trace took place (if at all) at an unknown airport, at an unknown time in the last five weeks.
Finding the fake exit visas is easy; the very fact that they have to be wiped to avoid (sluggish) official scrutiny betrays their existence in any time series of illicit snapshots of the database. The problem is finding Laura in the crowd; there are over one hundred illegal exits per week, nationwide. From the Hilgemann, I have her DNA signature, fingerprints, retinal patterns and skeletal measurements. DNA isn’t used by Customs (there are too many complications, legal and cultural, in sampling international travellers en masse), but the other three are always checked, and must match for pre-departure clearance. After that, though, the common practice is to change these details in the fake visa record, precisely to make things harder for people like me. Although the record itself must persist for the duration of the flight, with the name and photo unchanged (to avoid triggering various anti-terrorist checks carried out by the airlines), the biological ID data isn’t accessed again until the passenger goes through Customs at their destination. So, there are only two brief periods when the visa record needs to contain anything truthful; in theory, these times could be measured in milliseconds, but in practice things can’t be tuned that finely, and the windows have to be several minutes long. However, fingerprints and retinal patterns are relatively easy to alter by nanosurgery, leaving only the bone lengths to be trusted. They can be modified too, if you’re desperate, but nobody walks onto a plane straight after that kind of reconstruction, puppet or not—and travelling as an obvious invalid would be like carrying a sign around your neck.