CHAPTER EIGHT

 

Tristan stared up at the looming Citadel. Its ebony spires towered above the surrounding high-rise offices and government buildings, jutting from their midst like a black spearhead. The largest structure on the planet. Jabbing the gray sky, the Citadel proclaimed Flagge’s power.

He'd easily passed the routine checkpoints since entering Flagge Quarter. But now the security got serious.

He willed his thumping heart to slow. He'd be scanned time and again before he reached the Datacenter. He didn't want to be stopped because of an unexplained anxiety state.

He felt his pulse rate falling off. As it should. He could do this. No problem. He'd entered the Datacenter hundreds of times in Kaze's virtual model. This would be no different ...should be no different.

Unless the model was incomplete, or Flagge had added something new. He couldn't think about that, couldn't allow himself to worry about what he couldn't control.

Taking a deep breath, he walked up to the Citadel gate and stepped into one of the scanning booths. The lasers swept over him, searching for evidence of holographic enhancement or disguise. He thrust his hand into the IDplant reader. Here was the first place something could go wrong. If his IDplant was an even slightly imperfect copy of the datameister's, pulsers would stun him and he'd be carted away for investigation.

And then he'd have to explain. Codes could become corrupted – it happened all the time – but the security officers would want to know how. Especially when the faulty IDplant belonged to a datameister. He would have no good answers.

Termination would soon follow.

The lasers blinked off and the inner door of the booth slid open.

So far, so good...

Tristan repressed a smile as he stepped into the Citadel. This was going as smoothly as a session in the VR simulator.

He followed the corridor to his right as if he did this every day – which he had for the past month. He felt right at home. No surprises here, everything seemed very familiar.

He marveled at the precision of Kaze’s VR simulation. How had the glom's moles smuggled out such an amazingly accurate model? They had to be highly placed, with top security clearances.

The traitors, whoever they were, probably realized that Flagge's star was in descent...and were assuring their own futures by speeding its slide.

A few turns and he came to the central chutes – the only ones that dropped nonstop to the Datacenter. When he got the clear signal, he stepped off the edge and floated down. He maneuvered to a corner of the shaft, keeping to the slow lanes at the periphery, letting those in a rush zip past through the center.

No hurry to get to the final checkpoints.

By the time he reached level S-25, Tristan was alone. He grabbed one of the handles and swung onto the floor. Out of the influence of the gravity attenuators, his full weight returned. He'd reached the Datacenter level. Another scanning booth identical to the one at the Citadel gate awaited him in the vestibule.

No turning back now.

He stepped inside and submitted again to the laser and IDplant checks. But when the door slid open this time, he found himself face to face with two security guards.

One of them, a beefy blond woman with a jutting jaw, said, "Running a little late today, Rouge."

This grim-faced guard hadn't been part of the VR mock-up.

Tristan shrugged. "One of those mornings, know what I mean?"

The guard shook her head. "No." She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. "What're you waiting for, an escort?"

Tristan moved past her and hurried through the corridor of the Security post that sat between the chutes and the Datacenter.

Retracing the path he'd followed so often in the simulator, he found the tiny elevator – a real elevator with a car – down to the Datacenter proper.

"Rouge," said a tech stationed at a desk just outside the door. "Three's ready. Have a good session."

Tristan nodded and stepped into the booth. The door slid shut behind him, and then the ceiling began to glow, revealing a platform cot jutting from the wall. He stripped, pausing only briefly to run his hands over the wonder of Lani Rouge's breasts. He felt a slight, unfamiliar tingle, a ripple of pleasure.

He reclined on the platform. As the venipuncture unit slid out of the wall, he slipped his arm through the ring and let it tighten around his elbow. He felt a sharp prick as the catheter pierced his skin and threaded into a vein.

The venipuncture unit wasted no time. He closed his eyes and tried not to sweat as the machine began its analysis. Fingerprints and retinal prints could be faked, so it came down to this: matching genotypes. The test would detect a nanomorph or DNA adaptee trying to pass as a datameister, and their foreign genotypes would set off alarms throughout the Datacenter.

Maybe that nice Security guard from the vestibule would come in and stun him herself. She looked like the type who’d enjoy that.

But thanks to his Goleman chromosome, Tristan's genotype now perfectly matched Lani Rouge's. The Goleman itself had assumed all the characteristics of one of her X chromosomes...and no yet existed for a masqued Goleman.

As far as Flagge knew, a mime template took at least six days to create. If Lani Rouge was out of contact for as much as a single day, Flagge security would want to know why.

No indication yet that they knew about writable templates.

But they will, he thought. Very soon.

He opened his eyes with a surge of triumph as he felt the warm rush of virucide infusing his vein and flushing through his system along.

The writable had worked. He'd passed. Flagge Glom's Datacenter was convinced he was Lani Rouge. He couldn't cheer, couldn't even sigh with relief. All he could do was extract his arm from the wall unit and swing off the cot.

The inner door slid open and, still naked, Tristan walked into a Datacenter antechamber.

He stopped at the assignment console and let the unit read his assigned chip. 72649K flashed on the screen. Too bad Lani Rouge wasn't working 87342J today, but that would have been too much to hope for.

He stepped over to the cat's eye incubator/storage area and punched in 7-2-6-4-9-K. After double-checking his IDplant, the incubator internal carousel whirled, then spit out a silver globe. Tristan retrieved it from the tray and carried it through the rainbow curtain that walled off the accessing chamber.

The shimmer of bacterio/viruscidal radiation washed over him and tingled against his bare skin as he passed through into the tiny chamber. Lani's body was clear of any foreign agents, ready for the encoded virus inside the globe.

He stopped to let his eyes adjust to the lower level of illumination. Directly before him sat the padded recliner where he'd spend the next few hours. This was the part he'd been dreading.

And he had to smile at that. At any point during his trek through the Citadel he'd risked being pulsed, paralyzed, revealed as a mime, and terminated – but those fates paled before the prospect of exposing his brain to the virus swirling within the little silver sphere in his palm.

Yet Lani Rouge did it almost every day and she'd seemed to be physically and mentally sound. Still, some claimed it wasn't so safe. He'd heard rumors of breakdowns, or datameisters snapping, going berserk. The gloms, quite naturally, denied it.

And the very idea of subjecting himself to a form of controlled encephalitis...

He shuddered. Do it. Get it the hell over with and get out of here.

He forced himself to step forward and drop the cat's eye into its receptacle at the head of the recliner. Then he stretched out on its cool polymer surface. He listened to the whisper of the scalp unit as it rose out of the top of the recliner and, preset for Datameister Lani Rouge, snugly enclosed his head.

But the next step was the one he most dreaded. And it came only seconds later – the cool moisture of a transdermal injection, laden with the virus from the 72649K cat's eye, infusing it through the skin of his neck.

He clenched his teeth as he imagined the viral particles slipping past his epidermal cells, piercing the walls of his capillaries, coursing through his bloodstream – free now of any competing viruses – toward his brain cells...invading them... infecting them...multiplying...

I'll be fine, he kept telling himself. Datameisters do this every day. This virus is custom tailored to Lani Rouge, modeled on her own RNA so there's no antigenic response. Nothing to worry about...

Unless the virus somehow exposed the Goleman chromosome.

Cyrill said that wouldn't happen – couldn't happen. They’d tested. But could they be sure that Flagge glom hadn’t altered the virus to trap a mime spy? Too late for such questions now…

His eyelids grew heavy. Slow waves, induced by the datahelmet, undulated across his cortex. Instead of giving in to their sedative effect like a good little datameister, Tristan fought to stay awake.

And he fought panic. He'd been told that the flood of raw data released by the virons as they multiplied in his brain cells was disorienting to the point of madness, but he didn't want to sleep here. To lose awareness was to lose control, to be vulnerable in the heart of enemy territory.

His vision blurred as the room began a vertiginous spin. He squeezed his eyelids shut and locked his throat against a surge of nausea. All normal, all part of the process – still he was unprepared for the violence of the feeling.

Bright lights strobed and swirled against the inner surfaces of his lids, brilliant images streaked past, elongated, distorted, increasing in number and speed until they merged into a blazing void that engulfed him and took him down head first with one long, slow swallow...

*

Tristan came awake with a start. No gradual easing from sleep, no yawning, no stretching...simply awake in the accessing chamber.

And aware of another dose of viruscide coursing through his veins as the datahelmet retracted from his head.

Apparently the powers that be were through with 72649K for today. They'd used Lani Rouge’s brain as a processor to access and modify their database or inventory or formulae or whatever 72649K held, then stored the changes as base sequences along the viral RNA, and cultured the modified strain in a new cat's eye. And now they were eradicating the virus from his system.

Easy in, easy out.

How long had that taken? How long had he been out? He wished he could access his neuronet and find out, but he didn't dare do it, not here in the heart of Flagge's Datacenter.

He rolled off the recliner and stepped toward the anteroom – empty-handed this time. He knew it was SOP to leave the cat's eye behind. At this moment, the data on the new Lani Rouge strain was being backed up onto other datameisters' strains. If something untoward should happen to Lani Rouge, the revised data could be accessed via another datameister.

No one was indispensable...not even datameisters.

Alone in the anteroom, he immediately stepped to the incubator and quickly tapped in 8-7-3-4-2-J. Another check of his IDplant, a whir, and then a cat's eye popped into the tray. Tristan smoothly peeled a clear membrane from his inner thigh, popped out a tiny canula, thumbed the eye slit to expose the access port, then inserted the canula. He didn't hesitate in the slightest.

Practice makes perfect.

He waited a count of exactly three seconds, then squeezed off the canula, leaving it to dissolve inside the eye. He placed the cat's eye back into its tray, then smoothed the pouch back onto his thigh.

Nice and neat.

As the incubator reclaimed cat's eye 87342J, Tristan straightened and quickly looked around. Pure reflex. He was alone here.

How long had that taken? Fifteen seconds? Twenty? No matter, it had been enough. He had a sample of 87342J in a shielded pouch – proof against any viruscidal radiation – and Lani Rouge's genotype on a writable template that would allow Kaze Glom to access the sample’s secrets anytime it wished.

Couldn't have been easier.

For a moment he permitted himself to think of his goal in all this...one more step closer to Selfhood, closer to a real life. Closer to integration, indistinguishable from anyone else in the Kaze Glom.

Not that he’d want to stay in any glom. As soon as he was free, he’d go see the world he’d dreamt about, and never think about gloms or freezones again.

He was almost there.

Now all he had to do was get out of the Flagge Glom alive.