Death Match

FORTY-NINE

In the room known as the Tank, the wall clocks read 18:20. Normally, the space would have been full of Eden technicians: monitoring throughput, scribbling notes on palmtop computers, ensuring the matching process that was the heart and soul of Eden proceeded in a fully optimized fashion.

This evening, however, the room was empty. The dials and monitors displayed their data for no one. There was no sound but the whisper of forced air, no movement but the blinking of diagnostic LEDs. The Tank, like the rest of Eden, had been evacuated.

As the clocks rolled over to 18:21, a soft click sounded in the hallway outside. The double doors parted. A lone figure peered cautiously within. Then it came forward, closed the doors, and moved quietly across the room.

As she’d moved through the corridors of the inner tower, Tara Stapleton had been struck by the emptiness, the atmosphere of watchful silence. Yet she was totally unprepared for what now lay before her. She had been in this room hundreds, maybe thousands of times. Every time, it had been humming with activity. Every time, people had been standing before the Tank, mesmerized by the avatars gliding restlessly within their digital universe. But there were no spectators now, and the Tank was dark and empty. Client processing had been halted when the tower was placed under Condition Delta, and would not resume until the next shift began work the following morning.

She came forward, toward the face of the Tank. She stretched out a hand to the cool, smooth surface. The sensation of great depth, of velvety darkness, remained. And yet how strange to see it depopulated. Though she knew the avatars were just electrical phantoms — binary constructs that had no existence outside the computer — it seemed wrong somehow, against nature, to drain them from the Tank, leaving it lifeless.

Her eyes drifted away, stopping when they reached the wall clock. 18:22. Twenty-two minutes past six.

She walked to a nearby console. Typing a series of commands, she brought herself into the Tank’s dataspace and accessed the central client archives.

Then she paused. As chief security tech, her authorization was more than high enough to carry out what Lash had suggested. But there would be a record of her access, a log of her keystrokes. Questions would be asked, probably sooner than later.

She shook her head. It didn’t matter. If Lash was lying — if this whole business was some part of his madness, some imaginary conspiracy or persecution complex — she’d know it pretty damn quick. On the other hand, if he was telling the truth…

She flexed her fingers briefly, returned them to the keyboard. She didn’t yet know what it meant if Lash was telling the truth. But one way or the other, she had to learn.

She typed another command. The screen went black briefly, then refreshed.

As she stared at the screen, Tara felt a sudden urge to place her own avatar in the Tank: to see her own digital representation glide through that velvet darkness. Had it taken long to find Matt Bolan’s avatar? She was standing at a command console. She knew his identity code by heart; she could—

She reminded herself this was no time for wistful nostalgia. Besides, she wasn’t doing this for Lash, or even for the Wilners or Thorpes. She was doing this for herself. If she could help unravel this mystery, set things right… maybe it wasn’t too late for her own avatar, after all.

She took a deep breath. Then she typed a single number: 2.

The screen refreshed:

She typed the number she’d seen in her office, the first client avatar ever recorded: 000000000.

Almost immediately, there was a glow within the Tank. A lone avatar appeared, tiny and fragile in the dark vastness: a pale, pearlescent apparition of shifting color and shape. Sometimes it drifted almost listlessly, other times it darted at great speed.

Tara looked back at the screen. Opening a separate window, she posted a query to the client archives for the identity codes of the six supercouple females. The results came back immediately:

Returning to the main screen, Tara entered Lindsay Thorpe’s number. Immediately, another avatar glowed into existence. She paused, glancing over her shoulder. With only two avatars in the Tank, the matching process — for better or worse — should take only moments.

As she watched, the two avatars drifted: now pulsing with new color, now almost fading from view. Gradually their range attenuated as the attraction algorithms drew them closer together. There was a brief moment when they circled gracefully, like dancers performing a pas de deux. Suddenly, they darted at each other. There was a flare of brilliant white, then a storm of data appeared on nearby monitors as a million variables — the individual nuances of taste, preference, emotion, and memory that make up a personality — were instantaneously parsed and compared by the supercomputer, Liza. A new window appeared on the screen:

Tara stared at the monitor in surprise. Lindsay Thorpe’s avatar and the unknown avatar, 000000000, had just been successfully matched. It wasn’t a perfect match, like Lindsay’s match to Lewis Thorpe, but at 97.8 percent it was within acceptable range.

She removed Lindsay’s avatar and then — more quickly — began to introduce the avatars of the other women, one by one, into the tank. And one by one, they also matched successfully with the mystery avatar. Karen Wilner, 97.1 percent. Lynn Connelly, 98.9 percent.

In growing disbelief, Tara entered the three final codes. Again, successful matches.

All six women — from all six of Eden’s supercouples to date — matched with the mystery avatar.

What was going on?

Could avatar 000000000 be some kind of control mechanism that matched with all avatars in the tank? It was possible: although she was familiar with the process, she didn’t know all its technical subtleties.

Turning back to the computer, she called up a non-supercouple client at random, inserted her avatar into the Tank with the mystery avatar. The compatibility came back at 38 percent: no match.

Now, Tara wrote a short routine that extracted a random sampling of a thousand female clients, past and current, and inserted their avatars into the Tank, a hundred at a time. Briefly, the Tank flared into a semblance of normality as the ghostly apparitions appeared within. This process took a little longer, but within five minutes it, too, was complete.

None of these thousand avatars successfully matched with avatar 000000000.

Abruptly, the watchful silence was broken by the beep of her cell phone.

Tara jerked in surprise, then fumbled for her phone, heart racing. The call had a Connecticut area code, and she didn’t recognize the number. She flipped the phone open. “Hello?”

“Tara?” the voice was faint, thinned by a wash of static, but nevertheless she recognized it instantly.

“Yes.”

“Where are you?”

“The Tank.”

“Thank God. And what did—?”

“Later. Where are you?”

“In a data conduit not far from you, I think. I—”

“Wait.” And Tara lowered the phone.

She thought about everything Mauchly said when he’d told her Lash was the killer. She thought about the diner, what Lash had begun to say. She thought about the look on his face when he’d appeared in her office, begged her to do just one more thing. Most of all, she thought about the six supercouples, and the mysterious avatar whose identity code was zero.

Tara was not by nature an impulsive person. She always examined the evidence, weighed the pros and cons, before making a decision. Right now, the cons were deadly serious. If Lash was the killer, she was in grave danger.

And the pros? Helping an innocent man. Solving the riddle of the two dead couples. Maybe sparing the lives of future victims.

Tara put her free hand into her pocket, withdrew two long, narrow strips of lead foil. She turned the strips over, looking at them. Maybe she wasn’t impulsive. But she realized that, this time, she’d made up her mind what to do long before setting foot in this room.

She lifted the phone. “Meet me outside the Tank. Quick as you can.”

“But—”

“Just do it.” And then she closed the phone, killed the running processes, logged off the control terminal, and turned her back on the dark and empty Tank.