Virtual Destruction

EPILOGUE

Friday night, and the band played louder than ever.

Craig worked his way through the crowd at the staggered tables and set down two pints of a reddish beer topped with creamy foam. He nudged one across to Paige.

“Red Nectar Ale, right?” he said.

Paige took a long sip and let out a contented sigh. “Best beer ever made.” She smiled at him with a little mustache of foam on her lips.

He took a long drink, then shrugged off his suit jacket. He loosened his tie and, after hesitating a moment, pulled it off entirely. He unbuttoned the top button of his whjite shirt, stuffing the tie into the pocket of his suitjacket.

“Case over,” he said to Paige’s surprised expression. “I can relax a little now.”

“Don’t you have to write up a report?” she said.

Craig waved his hand. “That’s just busy work.”

“You came in here to look into a mysterious death, and you managed to shake up everything. Are you always like a bull in a China shop when you do your investigations?”

Craig snorted. “It’s not my fault everybody we had under investigation was doing something they weren’t supposed to be doing. The hard part wasn’t finding a guilty person — it was finding the person guilty of the crime I was interested in.”

He looked into Paige’s blue, blue eyes. “I still can’t believe that of all the people we were questioning, none of them killed Michaelson. It’s unbelievable to think that a big important man with so many enemies could have been killed by… by accident.”

Paige shrugged and automatically lowered her voice as the band stopped playing and fell into a break between songs.

“Remember those freeway shootings down in LA, when bored gang members took potshots at cars driving by on the freeway? Pointless mayhem, senseless violence,” she said, then raised a slender finger.

“But suppose, just suppose some kid goes out with a rifle and shoots into a random car. Say he doesn’t like rich people, so he targets a Mercedes or a Porche. Pow! He ends up killing the head of a defense corporation.

“So what happens? Nobody assumes random violence, even though it is. The kid got lucky and hit somebody important. But the homicide investigator will start out with the assumption that our defense contractor was assassinated. It throws everybody off on a wild goose chase.”

“Good comparison,” Craig admitted. “What about Duane Hopkins. How is he?”

Paige looked down at the table, tracing water stains on the dark wood. “He obviously didn’t know what he was doing. People like that really bother me.”

“What do you mean?” Craig asked.

“Those plutonium buttons he picked up were nickel plated, warm from secondary decay — but they weren’t high-level radiation sources at all. He’s got a dose, of course. He might have some superficial burning on his hands, and he’ll have to be watched for the rest of his life to see if he develops cancer. But he thought he had fireballs in his fists! Sheesh! How can somebody work in the Plutonium Facility for fifteen years and still not have a clue what he’s working with?”

“What about the alarms?” Craig interrupted. “The radiation detectors were set off.”

Paige answered him with an exasperated expression. “Everything is set so sensitive in that room, if you had a luminescent watch it would probably trigger something. As I told you before, we are very, very touchy about radiation exposures. Hopkins is like one of those people terrified that their home electricity comes from a nuclear power plant, afraid of radiation leaking out of the light sockets.”

“Radiation is dangerous stuff,” Craig said. “You can’t treat it lightly.”

“And we don’t,” Paige said, her voice turning brittle. “But ignorance is even more dangerous, and it’s probably caused a whole lot more harm.”

Craig took another swallow of the beer and felt the coolness slide down his throat. He was still dehydrated from his experience in the VR chamber, but the bitter fruity taste of the Red Nectar Ale was refreshing. If he didn’t watch himself, he’d drink it too fast, and it would all go to his head.

Paige ran her finger along the top of the pint mug, changing subjects. “Do you investigate these sorts of cases often?”

“High-tech crimes,” Craig said, nodding. “If I have a specialty, that’s it — although in this area, with Silicon Valley and the weapons labs and all the cutting-edge industry, it’s getting to be more and more common. In fact, it turns out this case ties with another one I made a mess of last week.”

“How? Did you find something else?”

Craig shook his head. “Defective computer chips. Ever wonder why Lesserec’s simulations were just a little too vivid? I had worked on a case where NanoWare Technologies were dumping defective chips. T Program is used as a beta test site for new hardware, and were shipped some of their doctored chips. Lesserec added them all to the VR simulation workstations. He got more than he bargained for — and so did I.”

Craig took another sip of the beer. “Hey, this stuff is pretty good.” After a moment of silence drowned out by the music, he asked, “So what’s next for you?”

“This whole thing has caused a public relations debacle like nothing the Livermore Lab has ever seen. Of course, the whole IVI demonstration has been canceled. The foreign nationals are not coming out here, and the President himself is ‘reassessing’ the entire concept of Virtual Inspectors.”

“Is this going to be another shakeup just like the Laser Implosion Fusion Facility? Dr. Michaelson seems to carry that sort of luck along with him.”

Paige waved her hand in dismissal. “The LIFF situation involved mismanagement and poor planning,” she said. “This one’s even worse because actual crimes were involved at every step of the process. But who would have thought that Lesserec’s unauthorized handling of the VR chamber would have opened up a new, high-visibility market for the lab?”

Craig nearly choked on his beer. “Lawrence Livermore is going into the entertainment business?”

“No, no,” laughed Paige. “Medical applications — psychotherapy for one. Lesserec had obtained quite a bit of information from Duane Hopkins about his son’s medical condition. After seeing the way those handicapped kids reacted, Lesserec wanted to expand the use the VR chamber to the medical field. So I guess something good did come from that, as warped as Lesserec was.”

“You’ll be pretty busy then, I take it,” Craig said, not knowing quite what he was fishing for.

“And you’ll be off on another high-tech case before long, I suppose,” Paige said.

“I suppose,” Craig answered, then looked down at his pint glass picking, it up and running his fingers nervously along the bottom.

“Tomorrow’s Saturday. I’m still going swimming,” Paige said. “I wouldn’t give that up.”

Craig looked up at her. He let his smile grow. “Should I bring my suit?”

She laughed. “Maybe you won’t be quite so formal this time.”

“I’ll try not to,” he said. “But it’s difficult for us FBI types you know.”

She raised her glass, and he raised his. They clinked their mugs together. When the band started playing again, they couldn’t hear their words. Craig slid his hand across the table and held her hand; they sat looking at each other across the table.