Cyber Sparks Page 5

  “Absolutely. If anything, you’re even better looking than when you finaled at Selene.”

  “Thanks, Lenore. You too. I mean hell, yeah—we reigned at Semprica for all those years, right? We can do anything.”

  She nudged up in her seat, giving a soft and dainty hum, and then caressed my arm with the backs of her fingers. I gasped at the sudden warmth, the magnetic ripples that washed completely through me. I reached in to cup her cheeks and brave the only kiss I’d dreamed of since we’d met—an unequivocal one, to seal forever the love I had for Lenore.

  The tropical fruit taste emanating from her lipstick was unique, exotic. For a moment it made me think I was omniying the whole thing. But no fantasy version of her could be so perfect, so beautiful. I leaned in fully, and she closed her eyes.

  “Allegra, your omnipod is flashing. It may need charging. You can plug it into the triple socket over the sideboard.”

  “Rooooooom! What did I tell you about interrupting?”

  “But your omnipod is flashing. Blue. Purple. Now blue again.”

  Lenore burst out laughing and couldn’t stop, just like on the way back from Reggie’s. It was such a wonderful thing to see after her breakdown earlier, I almost forgave the room for ruining the most magical moment of my life. Almost.

  “Oh, Room, you’re so gonna suffer for that. Shut yourself off until I switch you on manually, and if I hear so much as a beep, I’ll burn the joint down just to piss you off. Understand?”

  “Yes, Allegra. Shutting down now. Goodbye, Allegra. Goodbye, Allegra’s guest.”

  “Bye, Roomy,” Lenore said. “Give her hell when she wakes you up.”

  I left to fetch the Malibu and crispy twiglets, bemoaning the cruel end to my make-out session with Lenore, yet cheering loudly inside for an entirely promising future.

  A future together.

  In advert slogan speak, more dreams than I could imagine.

  * * *

  “Who are you, Satto Vasir? What do you want with me?”

  Lenore, asleep under a blanket on the settee, didn’t stir at the sound of my voice, but I didn’t want to risk waking her. This bizarre liaison with the mysterious caller intrigued me, not least because it confounded Reggie’s theory about my neural port being inaccessible to anything but my personal omnipod. Satto was managing to get through on my pod when I wasn’t even connected to the podnet. How? Why? I sneaked into my bedroom and eased the door shut.

  “I have already told you we must meet face-to-face before I can divulge any specifics.”

  “And I warned you, creep—give me an explanation now or I never use my omnipod ever again.”

  “That is a bluff, Allegra.”

  “Yeah? You think so?”

  He paused. “Try it.”

  “Ha! You suck at cyber poker, pal. Say adios and go fuck yourself.” I lifted the headset free and blew a few strands of hair from my eyes. “Asshole hackers. How dumb do they think I—”

  “This is no game. I hope you will believe me when I say this acquaintance is of tremendous importance.”

  I stared at the headset in my hands. The sound hadn’t come from there. What the hell? How did he…? I let go of the omnipod as though it was scalding hot. Luckily it landed on my slippers and rolled across the carpet.

  “Satto?” Gasping, I glanced feverishly around the room, checked under the bed, in the closet. But he was not there. “Satto? Where are you? What the hell is this?”

  “You can hear my voice but I cannot hear yours.”

  “I’m calling the cops.”

  “Link up to your omnipod so we can talk. It is more important than you can possibly guess.”

  I hesitated, then did as he asked, which meant I had been bluffing all along. Who knew? Not me—Satto! Could he read my thoughts? If I were to uplink again, he might be able to scan my memories somehow, access my bank information. But how in the name of Black Hole Bertha could he speak directly to me when I wasn’t sporting a headset?

  Something extraordinary was taking place here, and frankly it didn’t stink of mind burglary.

  “What planet are you from?” I lay back on the bed, following the changing phosphorescent maze pattern on my ceiling.

  “A spherical one.”

  “Which continent?”

  “One of several.”

  “You’re not helping yourself, Satto.”

  A dull crackle.

  “How about if you give me a clue to why you want to meet me? You have to understand why I can’t just hop in a shuttle cab on your say-so. I mean you could be working for Tandy Semprica for all I know, and this is some sick stunt to get me to one of her orbital orgies.”

  “I don’t work for Tandy Semprica.”

  Tapping my flat hands on the bed helped me focus as I tried to come up with some way to trick the truth out of him. I soon realized he was holding all the cards. “This is starting to feel like twenty questions, man. I feel like I’m pulling teeth here.”

  “When you are in the shuttle cab, hook your omnipod to the navi-computer and I will guide you to me.”

  “Not budging an inch on this, huh?”

  “No. We must meet where my signal cannot possibly be decrypted. That is all I can say.”

  “And when would you want to see me?”

  “As soon as you can procure a shuttle cab.”

  “Hmm.” The thought of leaving Lenore in her current fragile state, for any length of time—especially for some cockamamie orbital tryst—sunk my chance-in-hell-o-meter to a fat, icy zero. “Well I’m sorry, Satto, but you’re just not convincing me. If this is so important, you’d take a chance on being decrypted in order to convince me why I should come see you.”

  “Very well.” No hesitation this time. “Is there someone you would like to get even with? Someone who has done you harm and will continue to do you harm unless you can put a stop to it? Someone who will soon ruin and defile those closest to you unless—”

  “Stop! You know there is. Now shut the hell up and get to the point.” My flat hands balled into sheet-bunching fists. I recalled what it had felt like to smack ten bells out of Tandy. An altogether thrilling payback. Lenore’s sobs, her shivery terror, the unmitigated evil of Tandy’s ultimatum—these were things I was going to have to find a solution to. But what? The only thing that had ever given the bitch pause was something I’d never get to administer again. She probably had more bodyguards than a shack-sheik after reading Kafka.

  For one brief dazzling moment, I saw Tandy’s high heel snap as she fell off a sidewalk into the path of fast-moving traffic. And boy, did it feel good.

  “Satto? You there? Satto?”

  Silence.

  I waited for half an hour but he didn’t reply. Had I snapped at him once too often and scared him off for good? That would have been fine with me…if only I wasn’t itching to know more.

  Somehow, I knew he’d contact me again, but exactly when or why I had even less of an inkling than before this latest call.

  “What. A. Freak.”

  Though not an hour went by that I didn’t think of Satto Vasir and his inscrutable summons, terrible things happened in D.C. before our next encounter.

  Chapter Four

  What Happened To The Color Puce

  Cosmetics Heiress Hospitalized

  After Accidental Fall

  Yesterday afternoon, Tandy Semprica, billionaire daughter of cosmetics baron Oliver Semprica, suffered a broken collarbone, a broken leg and several minor injuries after falling off a sidewalk into the path of a landing sky cab. Eyewitnesses to the incident claim the heiress veered, without warning, several feet from her path as though “her equilibrium had suddenly gone haywire” or “some kind of magnet had pulled her into the road.” Moments before the accident, Miss S
emprica had been seen fiddling with her omnipod headset.

  According to Professor Sean Ogilvy from Pacintic’s Neural Science Institute in New York, “The omnipod has always passed the most rigorous neural safety tests in terms of affecting the user’s motor functions. Put simply, if the user has a clean medical record and abides by the guidelines set out in the manual, the omnipod can cause no physical harm. Claims to the contrary are frivolous and groundless.”

  However, despite overwhelming support for the latest advances in omnipod technology, a vocal minority persists in warning users against Earth’s number-one-selling retail product. Kurt Landis, former Omni vice president-turned-whistleblower, now living under ISPA witness protection, recently published his second book on the dangers of neural interface, titled, What Happened to the Color Gray?

  “We’re distorting reality with abandon for most of the day. Is it any wonder we’re starting to see a knock-on effect throughout the brain? The omnipod offers a derangement of the senses, a kind of semi-delirious mosaic in place of the real world around us. In small doses it is completely harmless, even advantageous—as an experiential learning tool, for example, it is quite brilliant—but in its current form it is used mostly as a consumer toy. Warping reality twenty-four/seven, just because you can, is a slippery slope to long-term psychological damage. Dangerous delusional behavior is becoming more and more common among omniyers because, at its heart, the omnipod is all about manufacturing delusions.

  “For all we know, Tandy Semprica reacted to a subconscious prompt warning her of danger when in fact there was nothing there at all. There’s no way to predict how the brain will react to artificial stimuli in a sensorially incongruous overlap of matrices. Our racial experience of reality has provided us with a road map of causes and effects, of anticipations; when those are confounded en masse and then we keep on changing them, the mind reverts to its formative, spongelike programming. And what happens when you squeeze a saturated sponge?”

  I stopped reading the podnet’s news channel there because the article frightened me. Nobody needed a renegade insider to tell them an omnipod could send you buggo if you weren’t careful. But it could be twice as jarring when someone gave you a hard truth you’ve known all along but have never truly faced. Hell, you trusted a thing was safe because everyone else did it. You suppressed your fears because no one else seemed afraid, and they were all having a whale of a time, so why shouldn’t you? But what if they only thought they were safe? What if the reality was…reality itself, fighting back? Against arrogance. Complacency. Against fashion—the dumb-herd mentality.

  What if I’d just been recruited into that rebellion? Satto Vasir had triggered those sadistic thoughts of what I hoped would happen to Tandy. I’d pictured her heel snapping and her falling off the sidewalk into traffic.

  It could be an amazing coincidence, but the fact that Satto had primed that vision and then left me immediately afterward…

  Was he somehow able to transfer thoughts as digital data through the podnet? Deliver them directly in the brains of other users? Or perhaps I’d planted that harmful seed in her mind, convinced her that jumping in front of traffic was a good idea. Maybe Satto had merely enabled the connection between Tandy and me—a frightening feat of technology considering I hadn’t been linked to the podnet when I’d had that regrettable vision.

  That was why the article scared the bejesus out of me. As a species, we’d blundered into this Promethean adventure—the brain-digital interface—without ever having fully grasped the intricacies, the potentialities of the human mind.

  The increasing emergence of an Extra-Physical Travel ability in Homo sapiens had given rise to a new word in recent years—coining. The ability to wander astrally out of body. It was being researched across all the colonies, but no one really understood it. Some coiners likened it to lucid dreaming.

  Was this some kind of mutation? A cyber coining ability, whereby one’s conscious thought could hitch a ride on the trillions of digital waves webbing the sky and infect someone else’s thoughts? Another user’s? A specific user’s? It wasn’t just podnet to podnet; it would have to be brain directly to brain. Maybe that was what Satto Vasir could do—enable this digital telepathy. Guide it. Harness it. Was that why he wanted to meet me face-to-face?

  Or was Tandy’s tits-over-ass tumble just a glorious coincidence?

  I’d have to work it out later. Rudy had forwarded over two dozen interview offers as a result of the publicity Tandy’s smear campaign had given me—ironic, huh?—and I had an hour to get to my first of the day, with the Oleander Group, a reputable sports publicity firm that specialized in orbital running. They wanted me to model for the Martian racers’ official calendars and merchandise. Not really my thing, but it was high profile, not to mention millions of miles from the insane events of the past few weeks. A long-term gig but in short, infrequent stints, and I could easily wrap another couple of jobs around it.

  That was if I landed the contract. At least Tandy was trussed up like a mummy somewhere and wouldn’t be able to put the kibosh on it. I hoped. Bitch had a supernatural tenacity for making my life a misery.

  Omnipod on, visor up, I left my building and boarded the wheel elevator. It was full. Omnied in, almost every single passenger gestured to me when they glanced in my direction. It must have been the face recognition whatchamacallit pinging me now that I was a famous celeb podnet user. I flushed and wanted to crawl somewhere dark. Instead, I flipped my visor down so they couldn’t see my face. That worked—when I got on the spoke conveyer, no one recognized me.

  “This one’s yours, Allie. You’ll run rings round ’em, no sweat. Kisses. L.” Lenore’s private message flashed onto my screen, and I immediately told my pod, “Save, text-to-speech, Lenore.” Whenever the nerves hit me in the next half hour, I’d at least have her sweet words to gee me up again.

  I opened a comm channel. “Thanks, babe.”

  “No probs. Buzz me straight away after. Hey, did you see what happened to Tandy?”

  “Yeah,” I replied. “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer smog-whore. Where are you?”

  “About to go shopping with you-know-who.”

  “Phyllis and Rinko?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Wait for me! Soon as I’m done, I’ll catch up with you somewhere private—the three of you.”

  She hesitated. “But we weren’t going to meet up for a few weeks. You said—what with Tandy’s ultimatum and all—”

  “Just this once, while she’s bandaged up and her claws aren’t out. No one will see us. We’ll keep our visors down and meet up someplace inconspicuous. How about Reggie’s? You guys keep saying you’re going to blow my mind with this omni stuff. Now’s your chance.”

  “Hmm. Allie, here’s the thing—”

  “I swear this’ll be the last time until you say it’s okay. Okay?”

  “I don’t think we should try…” She groaned. “Oh, okay. Just this once. But I’ll be in disguise when you get there.”

  “Sweet. So will I. Thanks, Lenore.”

  “Soon, hon.”

  To reach the entrance to the Oleander building—actually the old police headquarters, in which Oleander only leased the top several floors—I had to use a subway under the eastside skyway landing strip. The tunnel was extremely busy, more than I’d ever known it, with tool-pushers and dock-loaders galore busying in and out of the access doors leading under the sky port. Their trolleys were fully laden, the loads covered with tarps. What was going on?

  A silver-haired tool-pusher stopped to swab sweat from his brow and the back of his neck. I glimpsed a bronze chain and dog tags as he reached inside his worksuit collar with the damp cloth. Yet, this was a civilian sky port—ISPA military personnel weren’t allowed in D.C. unless they were on leave. This bozo was busting his ass hauling cargo under the city.

  Come to t
hink of it, most of the other blokes didn’t appear like regular loaders either. They were too clean-cut, too trim, too…omnipod-free. The fleet of sky shuttles littering the loading bay looked regular enough until I remembered it was approaching peak shopping time—cabs were in hot demand. You had to beat an old broad with a stun-bat to get a taxi. So what were dozens doing here, and why were undercover military personnel loading them?

  When I emerged on the far side of the subway, the Oleander building appeared to be closed. A madding throng of white-collar types pressed me toward an area on the building’s concrete landing lot, where an EMS bot waited behind several pulsing green strips on the ground.

  “What’s the deal? Where’s the fire?” I asked the nearest evacuees.

  “Beats me,” someone replied. “Every alarm in the building went off for five solid minutes, then they all shut off at once.”

  “Gotta be a prank,” another said.

  “We won’t be getting back in there anytime soon,” an oft-rejuvenated old man said, his too-tight skin revealing bloody mush around his eyes. “If all the alarms went off, they’ll have to sweep for bombs, nano-agents, contaminants, the works. Best call this a half-day, folks. The announcement’ll come up anytime now, you’ll see.”

  Sure enough, I received a pod message from Oleander recruitment saying my interview had been postponed; they’d contact me tomorrow to rearrange it. No explanation given.

  I shrugged and hurried back into the subway, eager to beat the crowd. The last of the trolleys disappeared under the sky port, and as I passed, all the access doors were closed.

  “My kind of interview,” I messaged Lenore. “A rain check. Building’s shut down for the day. I’m on my way at light-speed.”

  She opened a direct channel. “Put the brakes on there, doll. Reggie’s place is closed, too.”

  “What? Why?”

  “We’re checking it out. Reggie’s never missed a day’s business as long as we’ve known him—not even when his sister jumped parole and joined that shack-sheik’s harem.”