Binary Storm Page 4

  But this evening had provided more than a fair share of edginess. He needed to wind down.

  “Go to sleep,” he ordered. “Butterscotch pencil.”

  The final words were a command phrase for overriding Sosoome’s standard responses. The mech leaped off the armrest, belly-flopped on the carpet and squeezed back under the sofa.

  Nick sipped his drink and reviewed Ektor Fang’s information, in particular that last disclosure. Because it wasn’t actionable intelligence, there was no pressing need to pass it along to Director Witherstone. Yet he acknowledged a strong urge to do so, to swap ideas with the man about the intel’s ramifications.

  Still, that was easier said than done. He couldn’t exactly put the information in a memo or risk making a call that could be overheard, or worse, that the line was tapped. And although he was well known on the forty-ninth floor and among the sublevel nerds, getting serious face time with executive level personnel, let alone the E-Tech director himself, could be a challenge.

  He tapped the side of his neck, activating his attaboy. He thunked E-Tech’s directory; it appeared as a cerebral readout in his mind’s eye. Locating the number for the director’s office, he thunk-dialed.

  The husky female voice that answered through his implanted earpiece identified itself as an AI. “Sir, you’ve reached Director Witherstone’s office. How may I help you?”

  “Nicholas Guerra,” he said aloud, adding his security code for verification. “I have urgent business that requires a meeting with the director.”

  “Sir, I can schedule you for a five minute presentation with one of the director’s assistants on the twenty-third at 4:50 pm.”

  An assistant wouldn’t do. Not to mention the date was two weeks away.

  “My urgent business requires an immediate face-to-face meeting with the director,” he clarified.

  “May I inquire as to the nature of your urgent business?”

  “It’s for the director’s ears only. I require a private meeting.”

  “The director does not schedule private meetings with non-executive personnel. Representatives from Legal and Operations would have to be present.”

  Nick sighed, knowing it was a lost cause but pushing on through sheer inertia. “And when could that happen?”

  “The next available slot for a private meeting with the director under the conditions outlined would be October the eleventh at 11:15 am.”

  “That’s months from now. Does the word urgent ring any bells?”

  “Urgent is a relative term, sir. The director receives many such requests.”

  Nick hung up. The bot was clearly under orders not to deviate from an established protocol. There were probably code phrases known by the director’s friends and associates for penetrating the protocol and reaching a more useful level of the bot’s awareness. He considered calling back and slamming the little pencil pusher with a program he’d created for ferreting out such codes but quickly decided against it. There was a chance that E-Tech Security would be alerted, infinitely complicating matters.

  It was disheartening that the nonprofit Ecostatic Technospheric Alliance, an organization less than half a century old, had grown increasingly hierarchal in the nine years he’d been involved with it. Dedicated to the idea that putting the brakes on unfettered science and technology would produce a more rational world and a saner populace, E-Tech should have been a guiding light for transcending traditional, hidebound organizational structures. For one thing, it should have tasked humans to field calls, even late night ones.

  But that was nitpicking. The real problem with E-Tech, the way it seemed to have fallen into the same trap that dominated the majority of corporations and agencies that ruled the urban sanctuaries of 2095’s bisected civilization, was adherence to a bureaucratic mindset. In E-Tech’s case, an ever-growing list of arcane rules as to what technological devices were permitted and which ones outlawed seemed the height of irrationality.

  Nick wasn’t allowed to bring his mech to work or use his attaboy. He could step onto a shoeplate and have smart footwear fit itself to his lower extremities, but only if the shoeplate was manufactured prior to 2088, and by companies that followed certain tech-limitation guidelines. Unfortunately, such nonsense went hand in hand with having to pole vault over a series of hierarchical fences just to have a private meeting with the boss.

  He sighed. Bureaucracies. Everywhere they seemed increasingly pervasive.

  They had certainly existed during the three-plus decades encompassing Nick’s first earthly stint, from 1977, the year of his birth, to 2010, the year he’d volunteered for an early, experimental form of stasis. But when he’d been awakened in 2086, the world had grown complex to the point that such bureaucracies often interfered with what should have been a natural flow of communications within an organization. The more strident media doomsayers touted that fact as yet more evidence of an imminent apocalypse.

  He didn’t entirely disagree with those appraisals. The world did seem to be heading for some sort of Armageddon, especially in light of what he’d learned tonight from Ektor Fang. Still, by nature he was a glass-half-full kind of guy, incapable of looking at things solely through a lens of doom and gloom.

  He concentrated on the problem at hand, came to a decision. There were ways to circumvent even the most rigid bureaucracy. In the morning when he got to the office, he’d make a personal appearance on the executive level, try a more direct approach to gain face time with the director.

  He was about to take the last sip of vodka and tonic when Sosoome squeezed out from beneath the sofa. His collar pulsed red, which meant that somewhere in the world, there was big trouble. The mech scanned and monitored the net 24/7.

  “Quezon City in the Philippines,” Sosoome announced. “The newsphere is reporting a biological attack, toxin or toxins unknown. Early reports indicate a minimum of ninety thousand dead. You want video?”

  “No. Have the perpetrators been identified?”

  “Paratwa assassins representing the Awasta breed have claimed responsibility. According to a statement released to the media moments before the attack, it was meant to punish the city for the recent effort by the Philippine National Police to arrest and deport all binaries, even noncombatant ones engaged in law-abiding activities.”

  Nick recalled the incident. It had happened last week. A peaceful group of Paratwa musicians and performance artists in Quezon City had been caught in a police dragnet. Accidentally swept up in the arrests and subsequently killed in a long and costly battle with the authorities was an Awasta assassin.

  The French-Arab breed was known for hiring out as mercenaries and for being generally apolitical. As a rule, the Awasta steered clear of taking formal positions in the unofficial war between humans and binaries. But now it appeared that their neutral stance had ended.

  He suspected that many of the breed, like all too many others, had fallen under the Ash Ock’s spell. This level of mass murder wouldn’t have been carried out without at least the tacit approval of the Royal Caste. And, he realized grimly, it also happened to fit perfectly with Ektor Fang’s news.

  Ninety thousand dead. He sighed. It wasn’t just bureaucracies that had changed for the worse. However warlike the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries had been, the Earth of 2095 had left it in the dust. Similar mass-casualty events seemed to occur across the globe on a weekly, if not daily, basis.

  He swallowed the rest of his drink and asked Sosoome for tomorrow’s ToFo. If the Toxicity Forecast was seven or above he’d have to take his meds.

  “Gonna be a bitch,” the mech answered. “Eight-point-five minimum. Bio pollutants will be exceptionally high with infectious bacteria leading the way. Carbon monoxide and particulate matter will also be pushing the envelope.”

  The planet’s atmosphere was worsening by the year. But a number of decades-long geoengineering projects to eliminate the pollution were scheduled to come online over the next twelve to sixteen months. Nick still nursed
some optimism that the global degradation could be reversed.

  “Glad I don’t have to breathe that shit,” Sosoome added. “You ought to move us to a respirazone.”

  “I have a job here, remember?”

  “Oh right, like you need the money.”

  “Go to sleep. Barium rainbow.”

  The mech again returned to its hiding place and shut down. Nick headed for the bathroom. It was after two in the morning and he was due at work by eight.

  Sosoome’s comment about moving to a respirazone was tempting. There were a dozen of them scattered across the planet, relatively small areas of fifty thousand square kilometers or less ringed by obscenely expensive atmospheric detoxers that on most days kept the pollution to a minimum. But E-Tech Philly was where he needed to be. Clean air was a secondary concern.

  He stripped, showered and dialed his ToFo bottle to the eight-point-five setting. The container mixed and dispensed the proper amount of meds to enable him to safely breathe for the next twenty-four hours without having to wear an air mask. He downed the sour liquid with a glass of water.

  He trooped into the bedroom and set the inducer on his bureau for a five-hour slumber. Chime-like tones filled the air as he climbed into bed. The inducer’s subliminal rhythms and sedatives collapsed Nick’s cerebral functions. In less than a minute, he achieved temporary respite from a world that seemed madder by the day.

  Four

  Annabel Bakana wondered who the little man was. This was the second time this morning she’d come across him in the outer hallways of the executive level. The first time he’d been chatting with some staffers from Operations. And now as she headed to the break room to grab a slice of birthday cake someone had brought in, he’d worked his way up to cornering Rory Connors, the chief assistant to Director Witherstone.

  “Who is he?” Bel asked Rory as she watched the little man amble off in the other direction.

  Rory, a thirty-something with spike-teased blond hair and an engaging demeanor, shrugged. “Didn’t catch a name. But he’s up here lobbying for a one-on-one with the director.”

  “Not likely, I imagine.”

  “Not in this lifetime,” Rory said with an impish grin.

  Bel continued on to the break room and retrieved a small piece of chocolate cake. Returning to her office, she ran into the little man again. This time he was leaning against the wall outside her office module, presumably waiting for her.

  She guessed he was older than her by five years or so, which put him in his early forties. His blond hair was slicked back and he wore a cobalt-blue suit that looked a size too large and hung loosely on his frame. An aesthetic choice, she concluded, not sloppiness. He had a handsome face with intense blue eyes suggestive of either a man filled with deep inner pleasure or a slick hustler.

  “Howdy,” he offered, stepping forward and blocking her path to the door.

  “Good morning.” She smiled pleasantly and moved to step around him. “Excuse me, please.”

  “Nicholas Guerra,” he countered, reaching out to shake her hand. “My friends call me Nick. I’m told you just might be the person I should see to solve my little problem.”

  His drawl hinted at the American Southwest, maybe Texas. Yet there was something false about the accent. Bel had a good ear for languages and his words sounded cultivated, as if he’d been born elsewhere.

  “Nice dress, by the way,” he said. “Is that a restoration of an original Oscar de la Renta?”

  “A reproduction,” Bel said, impressed. Only the most exclusive style circles would know that the famed twentieth century fashionista was making a comeback.

  “Love those old A-line brocades. More women today should wear them. And that shade of green not only matches your eyes but contrasts nicely with the way your hair drapes across your shoulders.”

  A hustler and a charmer, Bel thought.

  She considered giving him the brush-off. She had a busy morning: three meetings before lunch and a host of fresh reports to analyze, including new details on the carnage in Quezon City. The casualty total had already climbed past a hundred thousand and likely would go higher. As Associate Director, Media Relations, it was her job to coordinate and issue E-Tech’s official response to the attack.

  “I won’t take much of your time,” he promised. “I know you’re busy. Meetings galore, reports to analyze, coordinating our PR statements about that tragedy in the Philippines.”

  She didn’t believe in mindreaders, which meant he was reasonably well informed about the nature of her job. She glanced at the visitor’s pass hanging from his lanyard. It was only a D authorization, which allowed him access to one of the executive floors for a maximum of one hour. Considering she’d first spotted him at least forty-five minutes ago, it wouldn’t be long before his pass expired. At that time, Security would be automatically notified and escort him to the nearest elevator. She supposed she could spare a few minutes. Besides, there was something oddly intriguing about him.

  Bel ushered him through her outer office and past the half-dozen desks occupied by her youthful staff. Their median age was twenty-four, young enough not to have had all their enthusiasm and positivity trampled on. They were dedicated to E-Tech’s mission and fiercely passionate about making a difference. Still, in her less upbeat moments, she wondered how long it would take for the stark realities of the world to rub away their idealism.

  She motioned Nick toward her private offices.

  “Why don’t you go in and make yourself comfortable. I’ll be right there.”

  Bel waited until he was out of sight before turning to her chief assistant, Maria Jose. Dark complexioned with generous hips and a pretty face, she was the oldest member of her staff at thirty-three. Today she’d done her nails in chroma gloss and every time she moved her hands, her nails changed hues and released whiffs of cheap perfume. Bel knew that Maria Jose didn’t have the means to dress haute couture but she wished the woman would try taking a step up from such tacky street styles.

  “Do me a favor, Maria Jose. Run a check on where he’s from.”

  Bel provided the little man’s name. Her assistant typed it into her laptop.

  “Nicholas Guerra works out of Intelligence. His profile says he’s a Tier One programmer assigned to the E-Tech archives. One of those brainiacs who spends more time on the sublevels with the hardcore data nerds than at his workstation on forty-nine.”

  “How’d he get authorization to be up here?” It was rare for someone who frequented the tombs to be allowed access to the fifty-seventh floor unless they had an appointment. The way he’d been freely wandering around suggested that such was not the case.

  “His D pass is unusual. Doesn’t list a purpose-of-visit or who authorized it. But it expires in fifteen minutes.”

  “A fake?”

  Maria Jose shrugged. “If anyone can fake passes, it’s someone from that department. Want me to contact Mr Dominguez’s office?”

  Pablo Dominguez was Associate Director, Intelligence – Nick’s boss. Bel shook her head. She didn’t need a full rundown for what was likely to be a quick and inconsequential meeting.

  Bel entered her private office suite. Nick stood in the main room by the window wall, his gaze directed downward and to the southeast. The smog was thin enough to make out an array of Philly-sec skyscrapers.

  “This nation isn’t the first cradle of liberty,” he began. “But considering it’s had a run of three-hundred-plus years, it’s definitely been one of the spryer ones.”

  She didn’t need to see the object of his attention to realize he was looking down upon Independence Hall a few blocks away. The US Declaration of Independence and Constitution had been signed within the reconstructed walls of that modest brick building. It had also been the original home to the Liberty Bell, whose fate remained unknown following its brazen theft by a heavy-lift drone three years ago. Because there’d never been a ransom demand, authorities believed it had been stolen by a wealthy collector.

 
; “The Hall is one of my favorite sights too,” she said, closing the door with a wave of the hand. “Reminds me of what humanity at its best is capable of.”

  Motioning him to a plush chair across from her desk, she was surprised when he hopped onto the armrest and balanced himself by crossing his legs beneath him. Bel was petite but still had ten or twelve centimeters on him. The armrest’s added height put them at eye level.

  She settled in behind her desk, took a long sip from her coffee mug. “Now, what can I do for you, Mr Guerra?”

  “Please, just plain Nick. May I call you Bel?”

  “Feel free,” she offered, surprised he knew her nickname, which she never used in public. Everyone at E-Tech who knew her well enough to dispense with a surname called her Annabel. However, she was no longer surprised by his presumptuousness. She wondered if it came from a lifetime of overcompensating for his size.

  “I need an immediate private meeting with Director Witherstone. His assistant Rory couldn’t help me but said you had the man’s ear and are the go-to gal.”

  Bel took another sip of coffee to hide a grimace at the “go-to gal” remark. It sounded archaic and vaguely sexist, although in a naive rather than mean-spirited way. And he was definitely lying. Rory Connors was too savvy to dump a potential problem into the lap of an associate director, someone technically above him in the chain of command.

  “I don’t believe Rory would have done that,” she said firmly. “Who exactly authorized your visit to this floor?”

  He held her gaze for a long moment. Then his face melted into an “aw shucks, you got me” look. He slid off the armrest, walked across the seat cushion and balanced himself on the opposite armrest.