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Her face turned pink. She moved towards him, eyes shining. He smiled at her, trying in vain to remember her command sequences. He prided himself on knowing every operative’s command codes by heart, but nothing was coming to him today. Too tired, too stressed. It irritated him. He grabbed his handheld organizer. Melanie waited, eyes wide and expectant, while he punched them up from his private database.
Ah, yes. Medieval Georgian. Melanie’s whole pod had been command coded in that language. Why he hadn’t been able to recall it was beyond him.“Give me your hand, my dear,” he purred. Her slender fingers were ice cold, though her face was pink, eyes exalted.
He recited a Level Eight reward sequence, and Melanie convulsed with a shriek, eyes rolling back. She sagged against him.
He caught her by the armpits and held her, cursing long and bitterly at the indignity of his situation. His creations were not supposed to fall apart on him when he needed them most. They were not supposed to lose consciousness when he gave them a reward sequence. They should not be so jealous, so competitive, so distastefully oversexed. It should not be so easy to destabilize them. This problem went beyond Zoe’s breakdown. It was a general defect in DeepWeave that he had to address, before he began with the new, fresh ones.
But first things first. He let Melanie drop to the floor. Took ten seconds to let his temper cool. He crouched, and slapped her.
She moaned, opened her eyes. They were fogged with devotion.
“Get up, my dear.” He kept his voice kind by brute force of will. “No time to wallow! We have work to do.”
She scrambled ungracefully to her feet, still panting.
King clicked on the video interface until he found the Parr’s cell. The woman was sitting in the corner, on the floor, positioned in such a way that he could not see her face, it being below and behind the camera’s eye. Just jeans clad legs and pale, bare feet. There was a dusting of scattered white dots around her on the floor. He peered at them, then at the movement of her fingers. She appeared to be picking at some piece of paper. Shredding it. “Did you send Howard’s video archive to play on the monitor in Parr’s room?” he asked Melanie.
“Oh, yes. She’s probably seen the whole loop three times by now.”
“I want to know what she thinks of it,” he said. “Bring her to me.”##
“Lemme get this straight, man.” The dreadlocked cabbie crossed his arms over his chest, releasing a pungent cloud of patchouli and weed. “You want me to drive your car to the Urgent Care, alone. Groaning and cursing. Park in the ambulance zone, where they will tow your ass away. Take two cell phones into the emergency room, and put them in the garbage can. And then walk back to get my cab.”
“That’s all,” Kev said.
The man stared at the eight hundred dollar bills fanned out in Kev’s hand, clearly tempted. “That’s fucking weird as hell, man.”
“Yeah, sure. But you have to gonow,” Kev said. “This thing’s time sensitive. It times out in a few minutes. And so does the pay.”
The man shook his head. His eyes were slitted with suspicion, but sharp. “What other kind of sensitive? I don’ wanna go to jail. I don’t want no trouble with nobody.”
“You won’t be doing anything illegal,” Sean told him. “You’ll be helping save innocent people from criminals. I swear it, before God.”
“Swear all you want, man,” the man said. “These bad guys, they gonna be mad, and I don’ wanna talk to them ‘bout it, after. I don’ want to be caught on no security camera. I got me a woman, a baby girl.”
Kev reached for his wallet again, peeled out four more hundreds. “This is for your woman.” Another four. “This is for your baby girl.” He pulled out two more. “These are for making your mind up, fast.”
The guy shook his head again. “Fast is not good.”
Kev sighed, through clenched teeth. “It is today.”
The guy walked around Kev and Sean’s vehicle. He opened the back hatch, looked in. Looked at the cases of equipment that Sean and Kev had unloaded. “What’s in those cases?” he asked.
“Nothing you need to concern yourself about,” Kev said. “They won’t be in the car you’ll be driving. And then abandoning. Forever.”
“I will be on the cameras at the emergency room,” the cabbie pointed out.
“Maybe so, but you won’t have committed a crime,” Kev countered. “Just a traffic violation. In a car not registered to you.”
The guy stared at the fan of bills in Kev’s hand once again. His hand stretched out, even though his head was still shaking. The extra thousand had clinched the deal.
Kev looked at Sean. “Get the phones out of the trunk.” He turned to the cabbie. “Listen up. As soon as he brings you those phones, do not say another word. Not one more word. Got it?”
“Ah! Bugged phones? This is so fucked up. I don’ like this,” he said, but the money had already disappeared into his pockets.
“Me, neither,” Kev said fervently. “Don’t forget the cursing and groaning, like you have a painful wound.”
“No problem. I groan real good. I drive all day, in this winter slop, and my arthritis kicks up. Auooow! Fuck, man, that hurts…auooow!”
