Chrysalis

45

Bill Cortez waited for the service elevator doors to open, then led his team out onto the fourteenth floor of the Tower. He told his Sentinel unit to double-check the target info.

“Scott Prawn, Fulfillment lead two,” he told the team. “Staff Quarters 1477.”

Nods all around. Target retrieval was a common enough assignment: usually somebody who’d drunk too much the night before and made a scene. Given the population here at the Complex, it wasn’t all that different from the five years he’d put in as a cop in a small Vermont city. Except, of course, every now and then this job offered him the opportunity to nab a corporate spy.

From the dossier, Cortez didn’t think Prawn was one of those. Still, things had been a little strange over the last few days — heightened security, lockdown, somebody placed in the max detainment facility — and so he’d decided to take a team of three instead of the usual two for the escort down to the security wing. Peyton seemed eager to talk to this guy.

They walked along the hall, Cortez glancing at door numbers. It was funny, how you could tell what kind of a job somebody had at Chrysalis just from the decor of the floor they lived on. The managers and high-level propeller heads had wide corridors and plush carpeting. Grunts like him had more spartan accommodations, a step or two up from an army barracks but with more privacy. And this Prawn guy was somewhere in between: the common hallway of floor fourteen had nice enough carpeting, but painted walls instead of wallpaper, and framed pictures instead of flowers. Fewer lounges, too. Midlevel habitation for a midlevel drone.

He stopped. This was it: 1477.

His skeleton passcard unlocked the door, and they stepped into a shared living space also familiar to Cortez. It was a standard four-and-one: two double bedrooms, kitchen and common area, and then a private room at the far end — with a window — for a fifth person, a few notches higher on the pay scale.

Cortez walked through the living room — past the messy couches and tables covered with game controllers, the emergency door topped with an obligatory red exit sign — then stopped to glance into the shared bedrooms. Both equally messy, as expected; both empty, also expected. Cortez knew that four of the people occupying the dorm space were currently at work. He also knew that Prawn, who had the bedroom of honor at the far end, was home. That door was closed, however, and Cortez could hear nothing but background hum, part human and machine, that made up the heartbeat of the Chrysalis spire.

“Mr. Prawn?” he called out. “Scott Prawn? I’m Bill Cortez, from Logistics. Sorry to intrude. Would you mind stepping out, please?”

Nothing.

Cortez walked deeper into the staff quarters, passing the kitchen, which was full of half-eaten, individual-size boxes of cereal, crackers, and — disgustingly — ramen. Put five bachelors together and the surroundings quickly devolved into those of a dorm room. The bathroom, he could see, was open: Prawn was not in it.

Cortez glanced at his team, then approached the door to Prawn’s room. This time, he knocked. “Scott Prawn? I’m sorry, but I’ve been asked to escort you to security for a few questions.”

Still, silence. Cortez stared at the door, which was plain, unadorned by posters, holograms, or anything else. “Mr. Prawn, if you don’t open the door I’m going to be forced to do it myself.”

He waited another fifteen seconds, just in case the guy was jacking off or something else Cortez preferred not to see. Then, again using his skeleton card, he turned the door and pushed it open.

The room beyond had about as much personality as its bare door promised. Inside was a bed, neatly made, with two rec tablets lying on it; a long worktable — constructed, Cortez noted, of better wood than the one in his own single — the suite’s emergency door with its exit sign; bookshelves; a guitar with one broken string; the usual closets and overhead compartments; and the coveted window, polarized a light blue.

This was odd. Prawn was off duty, and he should be home. His ID, which employees at the Complex were required to keep on their persons, indicated he was here. But he obviously was not.

There were other, more obscure ways of tracking him, but they took time and weren’t always reliable. Nevertheless, Cortez pulled the radio from his belt. “Cortez to Forward Twelve.”

“This is Forward.”

“Subject 3877209, Prawn, Scott L., is not in his quarters. Requesting a video confirm.”

“One moment.” There was a brief silence. “Got him — hall camera shows Prawn entering his room fifty-two minutes ago.”

“What about afterward? Did he leave again?”

A longer silence. “Sorry, Bill, that’s a problem. We lost access to most of our tangential feed half an hour ago.”

Tell me about it. That was the latest odd rumor: that Central Storage, maintained by the spooks in Department X, had just crashed. For the time being, there was no way of knowing whether Prawn had left his room again.

“Forward, copy that. Cortez out—” Cortez began to lower the radio, his thumb still on the transmit button. Something was wrong. The exit sign across the room was red, as usual — but a darker shade than normal. And wet. As he stared at it, a single crimson drop gathered at one corner, then slid slowly down the wall.

“What the fuck?” said a team member behind him.

Grabbing a chair from the worktable, Cortez dragged it over to the emergency door, then stood on it, peering into the cube-shaped box behind the sign.

Two eyes, bulging and glassy, stared back out at him.

Cortez had already begun to guess what he might find; nevertheless, he narrowly escaped falling off the chair in his instinctive jerk backward. Regaining his balance, he took a screwdriver from his belt and removed the screws holding the sign in place. It fell away with a scraping sound and a sudden release of fluid; what was hidden behind it rolled out, as well. Cortez put his hands out reflexively to catch it, then thought better of the idea and jumped out of the way as it fell onto the chair and bounced to the floor.

“Jesus on a stick!” came a voice from the doorway.

Cortez raised the radio, thumb still frozen on the transmit button. “Cortez to Forward Twelve.”

“Cortez, why is this channel still open?”

“Send an incident team to Suite 1477, code orange. Tell them to bring body bags. Tarps, too.”

“Did you say code orange?”

“Make it fast. Cortez, out.” This time, he removed his thumb as he put away his radio and glanced back at the three shocked faces.

“They’ll be here in five minutes,” he said. “We might as well pass the time by finding the rest of him.”