Changing of the Guard

10

In the back of the limo, the hour long past dark and late, Cox stared at Eduard, stunned by his news. The limo was secure, swept for bugs daily, and it was just the two of them, parked in Cox’s ten-car garage.

“You shot him?”

“A mistake,” Natadze said. “It should not have happened.”

“You are damned straight about that! My God, Eduard!”

Natadze nodded. “I am sorry.”

Cox sighed. “Is he dead?”

“Unknown. He was hit in the head. If he lives, he will not be doing any work in the near future.”

Cox glared at him. “Oh, yeah, that’ll work out great! Every time Net Force brings in another replacement, you just shoot him in the head! That won’t make them suspicious at all!”

“I am sorry,” Natadze said again. “The error was entirely mine. I will find a way to rectify it.”

Cox shook his head. No point in beating a dead horse, done was done. And at the least, Eduard was right — a man shot in the head wasn’t likely to be doing much in the way of code-breaking anytime soon. Bullets in the brain tended to interfere with things like that.

And Cox doubted that anybody would make the connection to what Jay was working on — as far as anybody knew, it was a case of some driver being pissed off at another and unloading on him. That’s what it had said on the news. It happened all the time. The U.S. of A. was a violent society, and armed out the wazoo. You never knew if some crazy was going to step out of his vehicle and start shooting because you didn’t use your turn signal when you changed lanes.

“All right,” Cox said. “Find out about his condition, follow up and see what’s what. See if you can figure out who will take over for him. Get what you can, then we’ll decide what to do from there.”

“Yes, sir.”

Natadze looked so miserable Cox felt a need to cheer him up. “Don’t take it so hard, Eduard. Mistakes happen. That’s why they put erasers on the ends of pencils. It’s not the end of the world. Let’s learn from our errors and move on.”

“You are too kind, Mr. Cox.”

Nobody had ever accused him of that before. He had to smile at the thought. Well. At least his secret was safe for a little while longer. Like the folks from AA said, you had to take it one day at a time. In the end — well, in the end, everybody was dead. Getting as far as you could before that happened was kind of the point, wasn’t it?

After Eduard was gone, Cox went to have a drink. Once again, he had the house to himself, save for the servants, and given the recent events, that was probably just as well. He doubted that he would be particularly good company tonight.

Midnight had come and gone, and Natadze stood in the rented machine shop in Brooklyn, alone. The place was small, but it had more than sufficient tools for his needs. He had arranged to use it after hours, and it was costing him a thousand dollars, more money down the drain, but it was necessary.

First, he used a screwdriver to disassemble the Korth. He shook his head as he did so, marveling at the fitting. You could hardly see the joins in the revolver, so carefully fitted and polished they were. He disassembled the weapon to the frame and component parts. Then he clamped the barrel into a vise and used a hacksaw to render it into two shorter sections. It was hard work — he wore out a blade, had to replace it halfway through, and pretty much ruined the second one, too. The Rockwell on the weapon had to be around sixty. He developed a healthy sweat sawing on the thing.

A double penance. He would also miss guitar practice tonight to deal with this.

There was a heavy steel crucible, lined with some kind of protective ceramic. He put on heavy gloves, a welder’s mask, and lit the oxyacetylene torch. He fined the flame down and it was but the work of a few seconds to reduce the wooden stocks to ash. He dumped in the smaller parts — screws, springs, and so forth, which melted slowly under the steady play of the pale fire, flaring now and then as they went from dull red to cherry and yellow-orange to blue-white and then fluid.

To this, he added the barrel segments, the frame, and the cylinder. It took a lot longer to finish these, especially the fat cylinder — this was not a smelter, and not what the torch was designed for, but it developed enough heat to do the job, eventually. When the steel was roiling liquid, he shut the torch off and poured this into three small molds that looked like pyramids with their tops sheared off.

When the molds had cooled sufficiently, he removed the blocks of steel, and put them into a water trough to steam and hiss and cool further.

He took the little chunks of steel and put them into a small leather sack. A five-thousand-dollar handgun, reduced to high-grade scrap metal.

Nobody would be comparing rifling patterns to any bullets fired from the Korth.

He would cautiously and carefully drop these blocks into the East River later, where they would spend however many thousands of years it took before they rusted away. Even if they were found, nobody would ever be able to connect them to a weapon used to shoot a federal agent. Just more junk at the bottom of the river, good for nothing, of no concern to anyone.

What an awful shame it was to do such a thing to a weapon like the Korth.

Jay stood in the sand, watching the surf come in. Everything was gorgeous: The waves lapping at the shoreline were a deep blue, the sun overhead gave the sand a glow that made it seem pure gold, and a gentle breeze caressed his skin.

After a few moments, he realized he must be in VR.

This is too good — it’s got no teeth.

The phrase had originated with his instructor in VR 101, an undergrad course that had been new when he’d been in college. The old man had always said it: “Reality bites. Nothing is perfect. Remember that.”

Even the most beautiful beaches had sand mites, stinking seaweed, or rotting fish that marred their perfection. A good VR programmer would include details like this, little teeth, to at least nibble a bit at a VR viewer and thus make it seem more real. Well, except for fantasy VR guys — in those, reality wasn’t supposed to bite.

Had he accidentally jacked into someone else’s datastream? Grabbed an old datafile he’d used for research by mistake?

He reached out with his mind, flicking the off switch which would take him out of the scenario.

Nothing happened.

He frowned. What was going on?

Had his hardware glitched? Maybe an interface problem? The neural stimulators were so good these days it was possible to forget you had a body. One of the new guys he’d hired over the summer had gotten stuck one day when he’d removed the safety and alarm on his stims. That was strictly forbidden, and hard to do without some skill. The poor kid might have stayed there all day if he hadn’t had a dentist appointment and they’d called looking for him. Jay had done a hardware shutdown to pull him out of the figure eight. A bit of bad programming that could have been serious, and a lesson learned: Don’t shut off the safeties.

While Jay didn’t run his stims that high, he did get focused so intently that the effect was sometimes the same.

Well. No matter, he’d break it off now.

He focused on becoming aware of his body; he reached out to feel his index finger, crooking it slightly toward the cutout sensor he knew was there.

Got it…

But once again, nothing happened. The scene stayed on, the waves lapped inward, and a few seagulls, their feathers pearly white, flew by overhead.

Well.

Whatever was happening definitely had his attention now. He’d been feeling a little funny, kind of unfocused when the scenario started, but that was fading fast. His mind searched through alternative fixes for the problem.

Time to try software.

He’d route to an outside link, contact someone to go check on him in the lab. If someone had been messing around with cheap software in his VR rig, they were going to be sorry they had ever been born.

He couldn’t find the link. A moment of panic enveloped him.

Wait a second, hold on. Maybe he wasn’t in VR?

Could he be dreaming?

It was an occupational hazard that VR programmers often developed extremely realistic dreams. All the time that they spent coding sensations into a scenario wore a groove in their own heads. He looked at the perfect sunset and frowned. He’d like to think he’d dream something better than this.

There was an easy way to find out. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet.

Which is there because I programmed it? Or dreamed it?

He’d taken the idea from an old book about lucid dreaming. Lucid dreamers were people who were aware that they were dreaming. Once this synaptic jump was made, they could control their dreams, a very attractive proposal prior to VR. The dreamer would carry a card around in his wallet that said, “If you can read this, you’re not dreaming.”

The wallet trick worked because, in a dream state, your brain had a hard time keeping text together. Lucid-dreamer wannabes would pull the card out in their dreams and read it. When the text didn’t work — usually it slid around the page, or faded out — they’d know they were dreaming.

Jay had used the technique to separate himself from his dreams several times and had offered it to other VR jocks he knew. He’d done it often enough that he’d actually managed to have a few lucid dreams as well. VR without the hardware.

He looked at the card.

If you can read this, you’re not dreaming.

Well, that answered that.

He glanced away from the card and then looked back to be sure.

If you can read this, you’re not in VR, either.

A chill frosted his shoulders.

Uh oh. What was going on here?

He tried to remember his day… It had been calm — he was going to see Saji, and then—

As if the thought had conjured her, he suddenly saw his wife across the beach, almost at the opposite end.

Saji! He felt a sense of relief. Saji would know what was going on. He’d talk to her, see what kind of VR he was stuck in.

As he drew closer to her, he could see that she held something. A little white bundle.

The wind on the shore suddenly carried to him a thin cry over the crash of the surf.

The baby!

What was going on? She’d just been diagnosed — well that wasn’t the right word, she’d… found out she was pregnant, just a few days before.

Something was wrong. He looked over toward Saji, and noticed that even though he hadn’t been moving slowly, she seemed to be farther away than before.

And in the same glance, he noticed that the water had pulled back from the sand — way back. Fish were flopping in the suddenly empty bay, seaweed and kelp beds were exposed, out past the coral reef.

He looked far out to sea and it was as if his vision had suddenly turned telescopic.

A huge swell moved toward the shore.

Tsunami!

Jay had gone on a holiday a few years back and had seen a sign on the shoreline: TIDAL WAVE ESCAPE ROUTE. The words had cast a shadow over his short foray on the beach — that and the fact that an old man had looked at his pale skin and asked, “Where you from, boy, Alaska?”

When he returned to the hotel, he hit the net and did a little studying on tsunamis. Shortly after that he moved to a hotel farther inland. The power of the water in a tidal wave could wipe out entire villages in seconds, and you never knew when one was just going to show up and swamp everything before the warning could do you any good.

And there was Saji and his baby right in front of one.

No way. VR or dream, or whatever. He was Jay Gridley, he was not going to let this happen!

Jay ran, using every trick he could think of to alter the scene: imagery, focus points, meditation, and VR conjurations.

Nothing worked. The wave kept coming.

He ran faster, figuring that at least his body — or what passed for it, wherever he was — was operating with a set of consistent physics.

But he wasn’t going to make it. He got closer, though, close enough to see little fingers grasping his wife’s shoulder as she started to breast-feed.

She doesn’t see the danger.

The sound of the water coming had grown, and there was a feel of imminent threat, death coming, everybody out!

“Saji!” he yelled, as loud as he could, “Get out of here! Run!”

He kept yelling as he ran, getting closer and closer. He thought about what he would do if and when he reached her. Run with her toward high ground, or at least try to find some kind of shelter—

He glanced to his left and saw it. The swell had jumped up in size, the seabed forcing higher as it approached. He had seen some surfers once on TV, riding on sixty-foot waves, monsters that dwarfed them, making them look like toys.

This wave was bigger.

A lot bigger.

He screamed Saji’s name again, and this time she heard him. She looked over, her eyes widening in surprise, and a smile beamed across her face.

No, no! Run! Run!

He gestured frantically toward the sea, and finally, chillingly, she looked.

Her face went pale, her eyes wide, and her mouth opened to scream. She turned away from the oncoming wave, tried to shelter the baby, but it was useless—

They were swept away—

Jay braced himself as best he could as the wave hit. He expected to be crushed, but some freak variation of the shoreline must have saved him: The water thundered down, tossed him into the air, then carried him away, but somehow, he came to the surface, alive, uninjured.

Except for the emotional horror of it all. His wife and new baby hit by a wall of water! And him unable to do a thing about it!

It wasn’t real. He clung to that small solace. It couldn’t be real — but… what was it? It certainly wasn’t VR as he knew it.

His face felt as if it had been set in stone. This was not good. He was supposed to be in control.

He floated in the water, the taste of salt harsh in his mouth.

What was happening?