Lethal Velocity

  “Nope.”

  “They’re studios where you can get a holographic portrait of yourself—alone, with one of the characters, even with Nightingale himself. And you know what? They can’t churn ’em out fast enough. So you’re a Utopia accountant, watching the money pour into the casinos, seeing dads fighting each other for the privilege of slapping down a hundred bucks for a holographic portrait of their kid. Then you look at Terri Bonifacio and her robotics program. Who do you think’s coming up short when they prepare the next quarter’s budget?”

  The question hung in the air, unanswered.

  “But that’s just the beginning.” She turned around, stood up. “Hey, Georgia, you want to come over here a minute? I want to show you something.” Terri waited for Georgia to walk over, Game Boy in hand. Then she turned toward a small object Warne had assumed to be a robot: a black cylinder on wheels, no more than forty inches tall. “They’re also working on this.” She bent over it, pushed a few buttons. There was a brief flickering in the nearby air, and then, suddenly, a baby elephant was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Warne.

  Warne shrank back instinctively, almost tripping over Georgia in surprise. The elephant was perfect in every detail. The small black eye, buried within intricate folds of gray, glistened as it regarded him intently. The fine hairs on the upper lip shone. It was a hologram, but far more realistic than even the image of Nightingale he’d seen that morning.

  “Good Lord!” Warne said.

  “Awesome!” Georgia breathed.

  The elephant vanished as Terri pressed another button on the cylinder. “It’s a portable holographic projector,” she said. “Still under development. I’ve only got this old prototype because they’re thinking of incorporating some memory chips from my deactivated bots. They plan to use these in the Nightingale magic shows opening in all of the Worlds next year.” She jerked a thumb at the black casing. “That elephant was the last thing in its image buffer. It’s easy to use. Here, watch.”

  She adjusted a small lens on the housing, pressed a button marked sample. Then she stepped back a few feet, positioning herself in front of the lens, pressing her hands against her head in a Stooge-like imitation. There was a series of warning beeps, then a short whirring noise. Stepping forward again, Terri pressed another button marked display. Instantly, a second Terri Bonifacio was standing next to her, incredibly lifelike: Terri, as her image had been captured by the machine just seconds before.

  “It can only render stills,” Terri said. “But the detail surpasses anything else around.” She looked at the frozen image. “Hey, Moe!” she said in a squeaky imitation of Curly.

  “Can you make one of me?” Georgia asked.

  “Sure thing.” Terri ushered them over, showed Warne how to work the device. Within moments, two Georgias were standing side by side.

  “Does my face really look that fat?” Georgia asked, scrutinizing the hologram.

  Despite himself, Warne shook his head in mute admiration. Terri switched off the device, and the image disappeared.

  “But what are they using all this technology for?” Terri asked suddenly. “Entertainment. To project a monster into your car on the dark rides, give the kiddies an extra scare. Do you really think Nightingale would approve of that? I think he’d call it shortsighted, and—”

  There was a sudden roar directly overhead: a massive, bone-jarring sound, like ten volcanoes erupting at once. Georgia shrieked, clasped herself instinctively against her father. Warne cringed, throwing his arms over her head. The stool behind him went clattering to the floor. Wingnut made a frightened-sounding chirrup and moved quickly into the nearest dark corner.

  The aggrieved look on Terri’s face dissolved into a grin as Warne slowly lowered his arms.

  “What the hell…?” he began.

  “Sorry, should have warned you two about that. We’re right below Griffin Tower, in Camelot. The 1:20 show’s going on.”

  Warne righted the stool, glanced up at the ceiling. “How many shows are there a day?”

  “One in the morning, two in the afternoon, one in the evening.”

  “You have to deal with that four times a day?”

  Terri’s grin widened a little. “It’s better since they moved me to the smaller lab. Before, they had me underneath Thames Tempest, in Gaslight. The river used to leak.”

  Warne waited a moment, letting the ringing in his ears ease.

  Georgia glanced from one to the other impatiently. “So are you guys done? I mean, how long does it take to unhook the Metanet, or whatever you have to do?”

  Warne turned to her in surprise. “You knew?” He turned to Terri. “Did you say something to her?”

  “Come on, Dad. It’s been written all over your face ever since that meeting.”

  Warne shook his head, scratched the back of his neck ruefully. There was another, softer explosion overhead. He thought he could hear the screams and cries of an excited audience.

  “This whole thing is pretty stupid, if you ask me,” Georgia added.

  “What is?”

  “Taking it offline. I mean, there’s no bug, or glitch, or anything like that in it, whatever Sarah says.”

  Terri’s eyes twinkled mischievously. “How would you know?”

  Georgia sat up straight, looked at her squarely. “Because my father made it.”

  Warne glanced away, blinked his eyes. For a moment, he was afraid to speak. The lab fell into a brief silence.

  “Sarah told me they want an action plan by the end of the day,” Warne said at last.

  “Yup. Emory’s bean counters in New York have given us a week to detask the Metanet. Basically, that means removing a hundred-odd robots from its control. Fred needs to know the safest, fastest way to do that.”

  Warne settled back on his stool. He took a deep breath. “First, you’d need to take the uplink capability offline.” He thought for a moment. “The way it works now, each night the Metanet analyzes the data streams it gets from the individual bots, looking for ways to improve efficiency. If it finds any, it transmits new code to the bots during the next morning’s downlink. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “So first, you disable the machine learning subsystem. Once that’s done, you simply turn off the uplink. That way, you can still send new instructions and firmware patches to the bots remotely. But the Metanet won’t make any modifications of its own.”

  Terri nodded. “Makes sense.”

  “Disabling the intelligence will be the complicated part. You’ll have to model the process in a test environment first, of course. But once that’s done, the rest is easy. Compile a list of bots and their processes. You make recommendations as to essential or nonessential tasks.”

  “You, you,” said Terri. “What’s all this you business?”

  Warne stared at her. He’d been planning on spending just a few minutes here: assess the situation, give brief instructions, then leave Terri to do the lobotomy herself. But now a new thought came into his mind.

  He glanced quickly at Georgia, who was fiddling with the holographic projector. There’s no bug, or glitch, she’d said. My father made it.

  “Terri, I have to ask,” he said, turning. “There’s nothing you’ve done to the Metanet, as administrator, that could possibly account for this?”

  Her brown eyes widened, flaring with sudden indignation. “Nada. It’s autonomous. I’ve simply logged its updates.”

  “So you’ve been monitoring the changes the Metanet made to bot activities?”

  “Most were pretty minor. Streamlining behaviors, updating rule systems, that kind of thing. It pretty much ran itself.”

  Warne stood, thinking, rubbing his bruised wrist, still aching from when Hard Place had gripped it.

  “What’s going through your mind?” Terri asked, frowning.

  Because my father made it.

  Besides Georgia, the Metanet was all he had left. It was the credibility he needed if he was ever going to secure another academi
c or research post. Hell if he’d give up on it without a fight.

  Warne looked back at Terri. If he understood things right, with the robotics work being scaled back, the Metanet would mean almost as much to her as it did to him.

  He reached out suddenly, put his hand on her arm. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but haven’t we just developed our action plan?”

  She nodded cautiously.

  “Well, that gives us some free time. What do you say if, instead of taking it to the scrapyard, we open the hood and try to fix the damn thing?”

  Terri looked at him for a moment. Then, slowly, the frown faded from the exotic face and her impish smile returned.

  “I think I’m beginning to like the way you think. Sailor”—and at this she leered at him and lapsed into pidgin English—“you just bought youself a girl.”

  “LISTEN UP,” THE voice crackled across the backstage sound system. “House opens in three minutes.”

  Jogging toward Wardrobe, Roger Hagen checked the clock. Prompt to the second, as always. Sometimes the punctuality was almost depressing.

  All around, the usual last-minute preparations for the Griffin Tower show were being made. The front-of-house engineer was in his booth, prepping the control board. The stage manager was going down the event checklist with her assistant. Maintenance workers were milling about, checking gas and fog effects, firing up the colored smoke generators. Grips, gaffers, electricians, set decorators, and makeup artists trotted back and forth. A close-proximity shooter was busy setting up squib connections to a bank of theatrical flash pots. A few cast members already in costume worked on their fencing moves. Others sat huddled in corners, practicing Middle English with diction coaches.

  Performers “behind the show” at other parks were known to act as if they were attending frat parties. At Utopia, however, they sometimes seemed more reminiscent of law students prepping for their bar exams. Hagen ducked across the wings—careful not to trip on the rivers of coax and light-pipe cabling that ran across the floor—then headed down a small series of steps.

  Wardrobe for the Griffin Tower show was packed: wizards, wimpled maidens, and knight-errants stood around in various stages of undress. There was a frantic whirring of sewing machines, assistants rolling racks of antique clothing back and forth. Harvey Schwartz, portly wardrobe master for the show, caught sight of Hagen and broke into a grin. “Hey, look, everybody!” he cried, stepping out from the bank of commercial washers and pointing in Hagen’s direction. “It’s the lame duck!”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Hagen muttered, pulling off his shirt, opening his locker, and shrugging into the fire-retardant Nomex jerkin that hung inside. He glanced around a little uneasily. Despite the occasionally studious atmosphere, Utopia backstage had its traditions, like every other park. And one of those traditions was to play a nasty practical joke on somebody’s last day at work.

  One of the costume assistants came over to help him into his own armor. Hagen inspected every piece—mail shirt, leggings, boots—searching suspiciously for unwelcome presents. Last month, they’d stuck a dog turd in the helmet of some guy on his last day in the show. The poor slob hadn’t discovered it until it was too late, and he’d had to go through the whole performance with the thing rolling around inside his armor.

  Everything checked out, though, and Hagen gave the dresser the okay to lower the helmet over his head. Immediately, Hagen’s world contracted to the small rectangle of light allowed by the forward visor. It wasn’t the armor he minded so much—after all, the aluminum was light and relatively flexible—it was the loss of vision. That, and the smell: by the end of a performance, the suit of armor usually smelled like a ripe locker room.

  He could hear the fanfare, the rising cheer of the audience, as the curtain went up and the show began. The dresser fastened the final snap, switched on the small IR transmitter attached to his helmet, handed him his shield and sword, and gave him a go-ahead rap. With a nod in the direction of Harvey Schwartz, Hagen made his way up the stairs to the backstage area. It was much harder, walking in the armor. He had to be careful where he stepped: if he tripped and fell, he would not be able to get up without assistance.

  He approached the wings, peering out behind one of the blackout curtains. It was a good crowd: the three-thousand-seat theater was packed. The Battle of Griffin Tower had been introduced about four months before and had quickly become one of Utopia’s hottest live-action shows. Little kids especially were eager to see, firsthand, the characters from The Feverstone Chronicles, Nightingale’s animated movies about a mythical, magical Camelot. Watching the smiles of the children, illuminated by 25,000-watt strobes and flickering lasers, Hagen felt a little nagging tug of self-doubt.

  Utopia had been a good place to work. Years before, during college, he’d worked as a Disney riverboat captain, spieling for guests. Utopia was very different. True, the insistence on realism, the background classes, grew old pretty fast. At every show, there were always one or two “nannies” on hand, checking for historical accuracy, awarding points to the best performers. But the pay scale was the best in the industry. Each week, everyone got two hundred bucks’ worth of free tokens for the casinos. And hard work was rewarded: you did well, you got your pick of show times, an accelerated promotion path to lead, or even foreman.

  The truth was, Hagen just didn’t like the desert. Many cast members—the ones who didn’t relish the daily thirty-mile commute from the northern suburbs of Vegas—had made their homes in the town of Creosote, a few miles north of the Park on U.S. 95. Over the past year, what had once been little more than a desert truck stop had transformed into a bustling agglomeration of trailer parks and bungalows, with a boisterous nightlife and the air of a college campus. But for Hagen, living the life of a thirty-year-old student just wasn’t much fun anymore.

  Onstage, Mymanteus the Archmage was now weaving his evil spell, bent on bringing the griffins of Griffin Tower to life. Somebody knocked on his armor, and Hagen backed away from the curtain, swiveling to get a glimpse of Olmstead, the guy who would be playing his shield bearer…or écuyer, as the nannies kept insisting they say.

  “Hey, hey,” Olmstead said, his narrow grinning head sticking out of a chain-mail hauberk liberally smeared with fire gel. “How’s it hanging?”

  “Pretty damn high, in this rig.”

  Olmstead’s grin widened. “Come on. Enjoy. It’s your last day, remember? Me, I’ve got another eight performances before the weekend.”

  Dramatic music swelled, pounding from batteries of speakers hidden behind false walls. The archmage’s spell was almost complete, and backstage the tension had grown almost palpable. This was when the real fun started. Hagen glanced over at the stage manager, standing in the wings below a bank of monitors, her finger poised above the effects enable button on the forward console. Nearby, the theatrical tech stood by the pyromusical firing panel, monitoring the computer-choreographed firestorm that was about to launch. Behind them was a short, spectacled, scholarly-looking little fellow Hagen didn’t recognize, a decibel meter in one hand. Probably that fireworks specialist they were talking about bringing in, he thought. The maroons—the low-level indoor salutes used in the finale—were spectacular. But they were loud as hell. Guests were always complaining, and two of the crew had developed tinnitus. Hagen stole another glance at the bald guy brought in to fix things. Quiet fireworks, he thought. Jesus, what a concept.

  They wouldn’t be quiet today. In seconds, all hell would break loose. The griffins would wake, surrounding Queen Kalina and the prince regent. The evil archmage Mymanteus would set upon them with ice bolts and magic missiles. All the children in the crowd would start to scream. And then Hagen himself would wade into the thick of things. Race onstage, fight heroically, die two minutes later. Three times daily. Except at the end of this day, he’d die for the last time. Then hang up his shield, turn in his sword. And hope to get back to Creosote without getting fire-hosed or otherwise abused by his fellow cast members.


  The crews were really sweating now: the fog machines were working overtime, pouring rivers of gray mist out into the theater. The stage manager had armed the electronic pyrotechnic system, and now she punched the enabling button, nodding to the control booth.

  There was a tremendous, floor-shaking crash, accompanied by yells and shrieks from the audience. The griffins were on the move. Thirty seconds. Low flickers of orange and red shone through the gauzy drapes and fire curtains. Now and then, a brighter flash cut through the murk: the laser effects of the archmage’s spells. Olmstead grinned again, nodded. Stage adrenaline began to course through Hagen’s veins. A tech climbed a catwalk at the far right wing, ensuring the small laser-firing robot was on track and ready to go. The floor rumbled again as the subwoofer array beneath the stage cut in. Hagen glanced up at a clock: 1:28. More flashes, then a cackle of evil laughter: his cue.

  The stage manager gave him the high sign. “Hagen! Go!”

  With a deep breath, Hagen took a tight grip on his sword, raised the shield across his breastplate, and began lumbering forward. The assistant manager gave him a thumbs-up. A stagehand parted the blackout curtain, veils of smoke and cordite-heavy fumes wafting between the folds. And then he was onstage.

  He’d done the show maybe three hundred times before. But on this, his last day, he tried to look at it again with fresh eyes: to implant the memory of what it looked like, smelled like, felt like, to be onstage at Griffin Tower.

  Most obvious was the noise. The screaming of the audience, the roar of the enraged griffins prowling the stage, the sharp crackle of the archmage’s magical bolts, provided a suffocating, surrounding presence. As he stepped into the light, and the streams of mist and fog fell away, there was a fresh cheer from the audience.

  Griffin Tower was a remarkable space: a vast, rectangular bailey that rose eight stories, open all the way to its distant ceiling. It smelled of mold and damp stone. Light flickered from flaming torches and braziers set high into the walls. The air was alive with blasts of searing color. Overhead, the archmage cackled once again as—with the help of the effects crew backstage—he hurled fireballs down upon the terrified queen and prince regent. One of the fireballs hit the far wall of the tower: with a roar, a massive piece of masonry cracked, split, then hurtled down toward the audience on invisible truss rods, sheering to one side at the last minute. There were shrieks of delight.