CHAPTER SEVEN

 

Anyone could take a tube from a freezone into the Flagge Quarter – even if you didn't belong there. Getting out was another story entirely.

Flagge's security made Kaze's look haphazard. As soon as the tube car crossed Flagge Quarter’s wall, two men in dark armorsuits and visors began moving down the aisle. They didn't search people, didn't come right out and ask them, Excuse me but are you a mime agent?

Tristan sat quietly among the others. They all had proper IDplants, maybe some work assignments...nobody was going to bother them.

But the Flagge Security men walked up and down the car.

Looking for the "tic?" Possibly. Stories had it that if you looked very carefully you could spot a mime...that upon close scrutiny, mimes acted just a bit "off."

Tristan admitted there might be something to that. In most cases, a mime agent had a work lifespan of maybe a decade and a half. After that many years of fluxing, strange physical and emotional residues began to accumulate.

That was the "tic." A way of sitting, a signal that said I'm not quite like the rest of you. And of course, just the possibility that something like that existed made it all the harder for a mime to sit here and be – normal.

As the two Flagge guards walked toward Tristan, he focused on the message center above him.

You have entered the private region of the Flagge Glom. Welcome to The Glom Of The Future – Flagge!

Each glom was The Glom of the Future. Each was the Shape of Things To Come. Corporate nations, fighting it out like – -

Tristan had seen old vids about a period in human history like this, with kingdoms, and castles, and peasants...so many peasants. Just the way it is now.

The Flagge Security guards were almost up to Tristan.

In those old days, knights went on great quests looking for something...the Holy Grail...a cup used by someone called the Savior. Another legend, another myth...

One of the guards turned and looked at Tristan as he followed a holobubble floating along the ceiling, running a 3-D ad for SynFood Snacks. A blonde whispered, "They're SYN-fully delicious."

Tristan lowered his gaze and smiled at the guard. It seemed like the natural thing to do.

I'm okay...and I'm glad to see you doing your job, sir.

The guards' eyes hid behind their visors. All the glom police were faceless.

And Tristan thought: the guard hasn't spoken to anyone, not a single person in this car. If one of them says something to me now, I'll know I'm in trouble.

Tristan shifted his gaze back up to the holobubble. He watched an ad for a new SensReal holovid in the Ocean. Martian Adventure–”The closest thing to being a Martian."

Probably part of the plan to suck more credits from the peasants for this new castle, a whole world away. Invest in Mars. Because there's nothing left here...

The guard hesitated another second, facing Tristan...and then moved on.

Tristan forced himself to show no sign of relief. No relief because he'd been in no danger, right? Everything's fine, everything's okay.

And he was able to make an observation about this masque... about the personality residues of this template: Very cool. Not easily rattled. Breathing steady, calm, relaxed...

The Flagge Security men moved on.

In minutes, Tristan would be inside The Glom of the Future.

*

As soon as he left the tube terminal, he was lost. He accessed his Roam Grid...and Regis.

"Lord Tristan, I'm afraid you took a wrong turn back – here." A portion of the grid, a transparent display across his visual field, lit up, and Tristan saw where he'd missed a turn. "The Flagge Isle directory lists your destination as a SynFood warehouse. I suggest that you take this route." Regis showed a path that brought Tristan to the front of the building.

Tristan blinked Regis and the grid away. Flagge Security was everywhere. He knew from his previous assignments that Flagge was the most paranoid of the gloms. This was war, and Flagge Glom was always on red alert.

Ahead, at a corner, a line of DNA adaptees walked by. Tristan stopped and watched at the strange-looking creatures. Adaptees used to be a rare sight Earthside. Their bodies were designed for off-world use, genetically customized for working extensive periods in variable G's. He'd once seen some with long arms and narrow bodies, designed for the tight cavern work on Mars.

But the gloms brought home more and more adaptees as their off-world ventures collapsed.

These particular adaptees were short, with powerful looking arms and tiny heads. They'd probably end up doing heavy work in a small confined area.

The adaptees moved on, and Tristan continued toward the warehouse.

*

He was surprised by the small size and old-fashioned look of the SynFood warehouse – barely a hundred meters long, the flat, shiny yellow plastic letters of the logo clashed with its mossy green surface.

The scancamera at the warehouse entrance regarded him. No need for him to say anything. It would either recognize him and let him enter, or it would watch impassively. If he should be foolish enough to try to break in, the camera would hit him with a pulse blast and knock him across the street.

But as the camera's eye finished assessing his physical data, Tristan heard a high-pitched tone, and the interlaced tendrils across the doorway unraveled. Tristan walked in.

The warehouse, or at least this part of it, looked deserted. A row of empty offices lined a hallway, ending in a door to what he assumed was a storage area.

He walked down the hallway.

The door slid shut behind him while another camera watched his progress.

Where is everyone? Kaze moles were supposed to have a datameister for him.

And then he heard voices...a man crying out in pain from behind the door. He heard a sound like a slap, then another. He reached the end of the corridor, opened the door –

And found the muzzle of a pulse pistol in his face.

"Who're you?"

Tristan found the weapon reassuring. He saw a red-headed man holding it, glaring at him. And beyond him, two other men flanking a woman tied to a chair. Tristan flashed on a line spoken by a detective from an old vid. ”The only thing she had on were the lights.” This one also wore a pair of pointed black boots.

"I'm supposed to meet some people here this morning. You, I assume."

The redheaded man held up a pocket holo next to Tristan's face, compared them, then nodded. "You assume right." He turned and pointed to the woman. "And there's your datameister. Name's Lani Rouge."

"Concentrate?" Tristan said as he stepped past him.

The man handed him a pressurized bottle. Tristan let the nutrients flow into his mouth as he walked up to the datameister. A female datameister...which meant he'd soon be female.

She stared at him with wide eyes, nostrils flaring over the gag that sealed her mouth, pressing herself back into the chair as if trying to seep into the plastic, as though he were some hideous demon about to eat her alive. Obviously she’d realized that she would not survive the morning.

Pity. She was beautiful, with dark, dark hair, deep blue-green eyes, and perfect skin. Nothing fashionably reptilian for this one. Just good, traditional human beauty. Like in the old vids.

Too bad she had to be a datameister – the datameister they needed. The trick of her brain that allowed it to be used as a living data terminal meant, in her particular case, an untimely end. Today.

But the sight of her breasts, her bare thighs…he was becoming aroused.

And then he noticed how a puffy area on her left cheek glowed red under the harsh light. And how both cheeks glistened with tears.

Suddenly he was angry. They were supposed to capture her, hold her for him...and dispose of her after he'd got what he needed from her. But she wasn't to be mistreated. Mute them to hell, they had no right–

Stop.

What was that all about? She was a Flagge datameister – a non-combatant, true, but she worked for the enemy and she was about to become a casualty of war. It happened every day.

He shook off the outrage. He couldn't wait to drop this masque – it was ripe with residues.

"You know what to do with her?" a squat men said.

Tristan nodded, still staring at her. He couldn't take his eyes off her. She struck him as uncommonly beautiful.

The man grinned. "Good, because otherwise we'd have to kill both of you."

The other two laughed, establishing the pecking order of the trio. So, the squat guy who’d just made the joke was the leader, and the other two were paid goons. Chances were Cyrill would have them all killed when this was over.

Tristan's gaze drifted back to the woman. He took a step closer to her. She looked as if she desperately wanted to say something, but the gag prevented her.

"I'm Casaluggi," the squat leader said, "and as promised, this datameister not only has access to the Citadel, she's cleared right to the heart of Flagge's datacenter."

Another step closer. "Looks like you've hurt her."

Casaluggi laughed. “That was Harkis.”

“She kicked me,” said one of the men. “Right in the–”

“So you hit a bound woman?” Tristan turned and glared at Casaluggi. "Was that part of your assignment spec?"

"No, but we were getting a little edgy...I mean, you being late and her taking a kick at anyone who got near.”

A pointed remark – Tristan nodded.

The leader continued: "You are late, you know."

Right. And time was important. This assignment was important. Selfhood, freedom, they were all important.

But the woman's eyes didn't leave him.

"Let's get on with it," Tristan said.

He walked close to this datameister, this Lani Rouge. She stared at him as if he were death itself. And then her foot lashed out, missing him by a hair.

Casaluggi raised his hand to smack her again, but Tristan grabbed the man's wrist and squeezed. Casaluggi winced.

"Hit her again and I'll kill you."

Oh, yes. He had to drop this masque.

She looked at him strangely now, wonder mixing with the fear in her eyes.

“You’ve copied her IDplant?” he said.

Casaluggi handed him a fist-sized cylinder. “It’s all in here.”

Tristan fitted his right little finger into the slot and activated the device. It took only a few seconds to transfer all the identity and pass codes from the datameister’s IDplant to his.

That done, he handed the cylinder back to Casaluggi, then pulled out his wardrobe case and popped it open.

“All right, remove her gag and open her mouth.”

Casaluggi released the strap and the gag ball popped free.

"You're a mime?” she cried, her face contorting into a snarl as Harkis steadied her head. “You filthy–! Where’d you get–”

The rest was garbled as Casaluggi grabbed her jaw and forced her mouth open.

Tristan lifted the buccal scraper from his kit and ran the flat tool along the inner surface of her cheek. Then he wiped the collection of saliva and cells onto the surface of the writable template.

She stared at him in shock that chilled into contempt. "You think you're going to make a template from me? Forget it. By the time you get those cells back to wherever you came from – Kaze, isn't it, you've got to be Kaze agents – and make a template from them, and then get back here as me, I'll be reported missing and my security access will be wiped. You try to get in pretending to be me and you'll be pulsed to red slime."

"I know," Tristan said.

"Just tell me one thing–”

Casaluggi reinserted the gag – and none too soon – as Tristan downed the rest of the nutrient concentrate. He glanced around for a place to flux. Casaluggi seemed to know what he was looking for.

"Over there," he said. "Behind those crates."

Tristan took his wardrobe case and walked around to the rear of the vaulted space until he found the datameister's clingsuit and two extra containers of concentrate. He checked to make sure he was out of sight. These people were nothing to him, and might all be dead before sunset, but still, to flux in front of them...unthinkable.

Tristan opened the slit in his abdominal wall and removed the template. Its genetic code would remain activated within him for a while, but then, lacking a steady stream of data, his cells gradually would revert to the neutral state.

Unless they were told otherwise.

Tristan picked up the writable template and stared at it. New technology… revolutionary. He knew it had been tested and retested and found capable of instantly copying a genome from a single sample.

But what if something went wrong this time? Nothing so dramatic as the corruption of an entire chromosome or gene...but what if a single amino acid sequence got jumbled in the digital translation? Odds were the effect on the Lani Rouge phenotype would be insignificant, but it could be devastating. He could wind up physically deformed or crippled, or worse yet, mentally crippled, so profoundly retarded that he wouldn't be able to reinsert a functioning template.

He couldn't let himself think too much about that. He took a deep breath and inserted the writable, sealed his pouch, and waited.

For a few seconds he felt nothing, then the familiar ripple as his m-DNA began to receive the first messages from the new template. He felt his arm muscles quiver, then tighten as the cells shifted madly to keep up with the demands of new instructions.

Then the new genetic code hit bone, heralded by a deep, explosive pressure, like steel rods being driven the length of his marrow. He braced himself. The worst was yet to come.

Tristan looked around for somewhere to sit, where he could curl up and howl while his body pulsed and constricted.

He had...to...lie down.

He clenched his teeth as bone mass liquefied and drifted off to be transformed into other material or stored along the bone axes for some flux yet to come.

He curled up on the cold floor as his jaw began to ache, a dull pain at first that grew until he felt as if someone had smashed him in the face.

Soon pain shot along every nerve fiber in his body, a hundred mad surgeons working on him with needles and blades.

A moan escaped him as sweat flowed from every pore. It was one thing to flux from a neutral state into a masque. But to trade one masque for another, with no down-time, was excruciating. Only fighting mimes whose nervous systems were so burned out by repeated changes could handle it easily.

He gave out another moan.

"You – you okay?" someone asked from the far side of the crates.

Tristan tried to respond...and that was when he felt the breasts begin to form.

This wasn’t the first time he'd fluxed into a female phenotype, but the sudden swelling always felt odd. The breasts continued to rise as the rest of his body slowly molded itself into an exact copy of Lani Rouge's.

Tristan shivered on the ground, his eyes shut, waiting until it ended.

Finally the pain receded.

Shaky, in a fog, Tristan rose to his feet and stood naked, wavering back and forth like a drunk. He grabbed another container of concentrate and greedily sucked it down. As his mind cleared, he looked down at his new body – the white skin, the jutting, pink-nippled breasts. Everything looked complete, and he was thinking clearly. He smiled. The writable had worked perfectly.

Slinging the datameister's red clingsuit over his shoulder, he strolled back to the front of the storage area.

The awed expressions that greeted him almost made the flux pain worthwhile. The datameister's wide-eyed stare was the best.

The wonder in those eyes as she gazed at herself made her even more beautiful.

"Magic," he said, answering her unspoken question.

As he slipped into her clingsuit, Casaluggi said, "You through with her?"

"I think so."

"Good." He pulled out his pistol. "We'll do her then get back to our–”

"Wait!" Tristan said without intending to. "Don't."

"It's orders," Casaluggi said. "Too risky to keep her alive."

It took Tristan as few seconds to understand the sudden panic that clutched him in an icy fist, but that didn't help him overcome it. The writable had worked perfectly, but it had yielded an unscrubbed template – a genome rotten with Lani Rouge seep.

And Lani Rouge didn't want to die.

Try as he might, Tristan could not bring himself to order her death. Maybe in an hour or two he'd be able to overcome her self-preservation instinct, but at the moment his mind was racing to find an alternative.

"No," he said, turning to Casaluggi. He wished he had his old template in – he'd be much more imposing than this slim, pretty woman. "Orders are changed. She might have a vitality sensor implant that will set off an alarm if she dies. Besides, I may run into a problem...and she might have the solution. If she's dead, she won't be telling us anything."

"So what are we supposed to do?"

"Stay here. Stay here, and wait until I come back." He looked back to Lani. "And then you can do what you want with her."

His insides quailed at even the implied threat, the limit set on her lifespan. But hours from now he'd be able to give the command. At least he thought he would. What a shame to waste all that beauty.

Would the men do as he’d said? He turned back to them. The leader hesitated a moment, perhaps wondering whether he might challenge Tristan.

Tristan added, "You wouldn't want the bosu to learn that an assignment this big failed because you didn't listen to me."

That hit home. Casaluggi said, "All right. We'll stay here until you get back."

Tristan turned and crouched close to the datameister.

Like looking in a mirror he thought. Except for the eyes...something strange behind those eyes...

"I'm you now," he said.

She struggled against the gag, her expression desperate. But all the pleas in the world, even from him, wouldn’t save her. She’d seen the writable template in action. She couldn’t be allowed to leave alive.

"You have to go, mime,” Casaluggi said. “They’ll start hunting for this datameister if she doesn’t show up soon”

Tristan backed away from Lani.

"Don't hurt her. You hear me?"

Lani Rouge's captors nodded.

Tristan turned and hurried from the room. Outside, he stopped and looked north at the ebony spires soaring above the warehouses.

The Citadel...

Months of training would pay off with either Selfhood or...death. And the latter was assured if Flagge Glom had somehow learned of the existence of the writable template. They’d have altered all their inner security protocols.

And they’d catch him.

All that training for nothing...

He shrugged off the tension gripping the muscles of his shoulders and neck and began to walk north.

Too late to turn back now.