‘Can we see those papers on the desk?’
With a fingernail Bobby marked out zoom boxes, and the software’s focus progressively moved in on the litter of papers on the desktop. The wormhole mouth seemed to be positioned about a meter from the ground, some two meters from the desk-Kate wondered if it would be visible, a tiny reflective bead hovering in the air-so the papers were foreshortened by perspective. And besides they hadn’t been laid out for convenient reading; some of them were lying facedown or were obscured by others. Still, Bobby was able to pick out sections – he inverted the images and corrected for perspective distortion, cleaned them up with intelligent-software enhancement routines – enough for Kate to get a sense of what much of the material was about.
It was mostly routine corporate stuff-chilling evidence of Billybob’s industrial-scale mining of gullible Americans – but nothing illegal. She had Bobby scan on, rooting hastily through the scattered material.
And then, at last, she hit pay dirt.
‘Hold it,’ she said. ‘Enhance … Well, well.’ It was a report, technical, closely printed, replete with figures, on the adverse effects of dopamine stimulation in elderly subjects. ‘That’s it,’ she breathed. ‘The smoking gun.’ She got up and started to pace the room, unable to contain her restless energy. ‘What an asshole. Once a drug dealer, always a drug dealer. If we can get an image of Billybob himself reading that, better yet signing it off. Bobby, we need to find him.’
Bobby sighed and sat back. ‘Then ask David. I can swivel and zoom, but right now I don’t know how to make this WormCam pan.’
‘WormCam’?’ Kate grinned.
‘Dad works his marketeers even harder than his engineers. Look, Kate, it’s three-thirty in the morning. Let’s be patient. I have security lockout here until noon tomorrow. Surely we can catch Billybob in his office before then. If not, we can try again another day.’
‘Yes.’ She nodded, tense. ‘You’re right. It’s just I’m used to working fast.’
He smiled. ‘Before some other hot journo muscles in on your scoop?’
‘It happens.’
‘Hey.’ Bobby reached out and cupped her chin in his hands. His dark face was all but invisible in the cavernous gloom of the Wormworks, but his touch was warm, dry, confident. ‘You don’t have to worry. Just think of it. Right now nobody else on the planet, nobody, has access to WormCam technology. There’s no way Billybob can detect what we’re up to, or anyone else can beat you to the punch. What’s a few hours?’
Her breathing was shallow, her heart pumping; she seemed to sense him before her in the dark, at a level deeper than sight or scent or even touch, as if some deep core inside her was responding to the warm bulk of his body.
She reached up, covered his hand, and kissed it. ‘You’re right. We have to wait. But I’m burning energy anyhow. So let’s do something constructive with it.’
He seemed to hesitate, as if trying to puzzle out her meaning.
Well, Kate, she told herself, you aren’t like the other girls he’s met in his gilded life. Maybe he needs a little help.
She put her free hand around his neck, pulled him toward her, and felt his mouth on hers. Her tongue, hot and inquisitive, pushed into his mouth, and ran along a ridge of perfect lower teeth; his lips responded eagerly.
At first he was tender, even loving. But, as passion built, she became aware of a change in his posture, his manner. As she responded to his unspoken commands she was aware that she was letting him take control, and-even as he brought her to a deep climax with expert ease – she felt he was distracted, lost in the mysteries of his own strange, wounded mind, engaged with the physical act, and not with her.
He knows how to make love, she thought, maybe better than anybody I know. But he doesn’t know how to love. What a cliché that was. But it was true. And terribly sad.
And, even as his body closed on hers, her fingers, digging into the hair at the back of his neck, found something round and hard under his covering of hair, about the size of a nickel, metallic and cold.
It was a brain stud.
In the spring-morning silence of the Wormworks, David sat in the glow of his SoftScreen.
He was looking down at the top of his own head, from a height of two or three meters. It wasn’t a comfortable sight: he looked overweight, and there was a small bald spot at his crown he hadn’t noticed before, a little pink coin in among his uncombed mass of hair.
He raised his hand to find the bald spot.
The image in the ‘Screen raised its hand too, like a puppet slaved to his actions. He waved, childishly, and looked up. But of course there was nothing to see, no sign of the tiny rip on spacetime which transmitted these images.
He tapped at the ‘Screen, and the viewpoint swiveled, looking straight ahead. Another tap, hesitantly, and it began to move forward, through the Wormworks’ dark halls: at first a little jerkily, then more smoothly. Huge machines, looming and rather sinister, floated past him like blocky clouds.
Eventually, he supposed, commercial versions of this wormhole camera would come with more intuitive controls, a joystick perhaps, levers and knobs to swivel the viewpoint this way and that. But this simple configuration of touch controls on his ‘Screen was enough to let him control the viewpoint, allowing him to concentrate on the image itself.
And of course, a corner of his mind reminded him, in actuality the viewpoint wasn’t moving at all: rather, the Casimir engines were creating and collapsing a series of wormholes, Planck lengths apart, strung out in a line the way he wanted to move. The images returned by successive holes arrived sufficiently closely to give him the illusion of movement.
But none of that was important for now, he told himself sternly. For now he only wanted to play.
With a determined slap at the ‘Screen he turned the viewpoint and made it fly straight at the Wormworks’ corrugated iron wall. He couldn’t help but wince as that barrier flew at him.
There was an instant of darkness. And then he was through, and immersed suddenly in dazzling sunlight.
He slowed the viewpoint and dropped it to around eye level. He was in the grounds which surrounded the Wormworks: grass, streams, cute little bridges. The sun was low, casting long crisp shadows, and there was a trace of dew that glimmered on the grass.
He let his viewpoint glide forward, at first at walking pace, then a little faster. The grass swept beneath him, and Hiram’s replanted trees blurred past, side by side.
The sense of speed was exhilarating.
He still hadn’t mastered the controls, and from time to time his viewpoint would plunge clumsily through a tree or a rock; moments of darkness, tinged deep brown or gray. But he was getting the hang of it, and the sense of speed and freedom and clarity was sinking. It was like being ten years old again, he thought, senses fresh and sharp, a body so full of energy he was light as a feather.
He came to the plant’s drive. He raised the viewpoint through two or three meters, swept down the drive, and found the freeway. He flew higher and skimmed far above the road, gazing down at the streams of gleaming, beetle-like cars below. The traffic flow, still gathering for the rush hour to come, was dense and fast-moving. He could see patterns in the flow, knots of density that gathered and cleared as the invisible web of software controls optimized the stream of SmartDriven cars.
Suddenly impatient, he rose up further, so that the roadway became a gray ribbon snaking over the land, car windscreens sparkling like a string of diamonds.
He could see the city laid out before him now. The suburbs were a neat rectangular grid laid over the hills, mist-blurred to gray. The tall buildings of downtown thrust upward, a compact fist of concrete and glass and steel.
He rose higher still, swooped through a thin layer of cloud to a brighter sunshine beyond, and then turned again -to see the ocean’s glimmer-stained, far from land, by the ominous dark of yet another incoming storm system. The horizon’s curve became apparent, as land and sea folded over on themselves and Earth became a planet.
David suppressed the urge to whoop. He always had wanted to fly like Superman. This, he thought, is going to sell like hot cakes.
A crescent Moon hung, low and gaunt, in the blue sky. David swiveled the viewpoint until his field of view was centered on that sliver of bony light.
Behind him he could hear a commotion, raised voices, running feet. Perhaps it was a security breach, somewhere in the Wormworks. It was none of his concern.