"Maybe . . . maybe we could just tell some of the fellows in security," Jerome said at last. "They're pretty nice guys, really. They could get it for you."
"No!" She softened her tone and tried again. "No, they would have to file a report, otherwise they'd get in trouble, see? Then the friend who took me up there would get in trouble, too. I don't want someone else to get fired because of a mistake I made."
"You're a nice person, Olga."
She winced, but tried to keep her smile. "Is there anything you can do, Jerome?"
He was clearly very distressed by the idea of breaking the rules, but she could see him thinking carefully. "I could try, but I don't know if the elevator will open. Which floor did you lose your wallet on?"
"The one with the machines."' It seemed likely to be the most sparsely occupied, and there might be a way to get to the other floors—didn't even the highest-security, most supervillainish buildings still legally have to have stairways and fire escapes? As for how to get rid of Jerome so she could investigate in peace, she would have to think of something on the fly.
Maybe you could club him unconscious when you get there, Olga, she thought sourly. Just to make the whole thing complete.
Jerome put the rest of his sandwich back in the vacuum bag and carefully sealed it. He seemed to have lost his appetite. "We can go up and see, Olga. But if it doesn't work, don't get mad at me, okay?"
"I promise." And may God forgive me for this, she thought.
Ramsey looked around the room, trying to take it all in. Even for a virtual environment, where gravity was not an issue and cubic footage was equally an illusion, it was insanely cluttered. A grisly pile of heads in transparent boxes, a collection of human and nonhuman trophies more like flash-freeze holograms than actual decapitations, dominated the multilevel space, but there was plenty of competition. Strange objects were stacked everywhere, swords and spears and complete sets of armor, gems the size of Catur Ramsey's virtual fist, huge skulls of animals that could never, thank God, have actually lived in the real world, even a banister that was a huge, immobilized snake with a head half as long as Ramsey was tall. The walls, where they could be seen between the leaning piles of memorabilia, showed two scenes whose complete disparity were the only reason Ramsey knew they were displays rather than what was supposed to be outside Orlando Gardiner's electronic home in the Inner District.
The Cretaceous swamp, where even now a mother Hadrosaur was chasing away a slender Dromeosaurus that had made a couple of halfhearted lunges toward her eggs, was a pretty obvious thing for a kid to be interested in; the other, a vast and seemingly lifeless landscape of red dust was a little less understandable.
All in all, it was a boy's room in a place with no limits, and these were the proud possessions of a boy who would never come back to claim them. Ramsey could not help thinking of the child-king Tutankhamen, his tomb stuffed with personal effects dug open and exposed to view millennia after his death. Would Orlando's room just remain on the net? He supposed the Gardiners would have to keep paying for it. But what if they did? Would someone stumble across it generations in the future and try to make sense of the mind and world of a forgotten child from the twenty-first century? It was a strange and pitiful thought, a life in all its complexity reduced to a few toys and souvenirs.
Well, maybe not a few. . . .
A hole opened in the floor and something like the head of a ragged black dust mop emerged, accompanied by a cloud of cartoon dust.
"Thanks for meeting me here," Beezle said.
"No problem. Is this. . . ." He wanted to ask if the place was special to the agent, but again found himself confused. It wasn't even like Beezle was a real artificial personality. He was a kid's toy, essentially. "Do you come here a lot?"
Beezle's goggling eyes rolled and then settled. His answer was strangely hesitant. "I know where everything is. So it's a good place. To do things."
"Right." Ramsey looked around for someplace to sit. The only obvious thing designed for human comfort was a hammock stretched in one corner.
"You want a chair?" Beezle reached down into the hole in the floor and, with a few strange sound effects, produced a chair three or four times his own size. "Si'down. I'll tell you what I found."
As Ramsey made himself comfortable, Beezle produced a small black cube, then flicked it so that it opened into a foggy three-dimensional shape that hung in the middle of the room. A moment later the fog inside dispersed, revealing a tall black object.
"That's the J Corporation building."
"Yep." Beezle tapped the transparent cube and the building opened like a paper book, revealing its interior. "This is from that guy Sellars' notes."
"You found them!
"Yep. What is this guy, anyway, a robot or something? He keeps his notes in machine language."
"He's not a robot, as far as I know, but it's a long story and I'm in a hurry. Can you put me back in touch with Olga Pirofsky?"
"You wanna see where she is?" Beezle waved a misshapen foot and a tiny red dot gleamed into view about one third of the way up the structure. "Sellars has a trace on her—she's got a badge or something, right?—and you can track it off the readers they got on all the floors. It's a weak signal, but it's enough to triangulate her."
As Ramsey watched, the red dot slowly began to move sideways. She's alive, anyway, he thought. Unless someone's carrying her. "Do Sellars' notes tell you what he planned to do? Something about tapping into the building's data stream, that's all I know."
"Kind of," Beezle said, cabdriver voice suddenly distracted. "Your friend—she's moving."
"I saw. . . ." Ramsey began, then suddenly realized that the red dot had stopped its horizontal movement and was now slowly rising. "Oh, my God, what's happening? What's she doing?"
"Service elevator. She's going up."
"But the top of the building. . . ! That's where Sellars said the private quarters were, and the security guards. I have to stop her!" He had a sudden thought. "Will her badge let her in up there?"
Beezle gave as much of a shrug as a creature with no shoulders and too many legs could manage. "Not unless she's done something to change it. Let me check." After a moment's silence, he said, "Nope. She could stop on the security floor, but if she tries to get out anywhere else above the forty-fifth she's probably gonna set off all the alarms."
"Christ. Can you put me in contact with her?"
"I haven't finished looking through all this stuff yet, but I'll try." Another hole in the floor opened next to Beezle. He made a move toward it, then stopped. "You know they got a whole army base on that island? Why the heck you wanna mess with someplace like that, anyway?"
"Just hook me up!" Ramsey shouted.
Beezle took a few shambling steps and dropped into the pit. Moments later the electronic cottage resounded with the clang of something being hammered and the earsplitting voopa-voopa of a wood saw.
"Good Christ, what are you doing?"
Beezle's voice echoed as it drifted up out of the hole in the floor. "What you asked me to do, boss. You wanna let me work?"
The red light was climbing steadily up the tower. Ramsey could not bear to watch. He turned to the rusty desert that covered one whole wall. He could see now that there were small beetlelike shapes in the sand, half-buried and as motionless as fossils. He dimly remembered reading something on the net about the MBC Project on Mars, how the little robots had stopped working.