* * *
Jill and I had arisen early that morning, enjoyed a leisurely breakfast on our patio with the heat lamps on full force, showered together, dressed, and left our room with nothing incriminating left behind. We took our iPad and mobile devices with us as we piled into our rented Porsche 911.
It was an exhilarating drive through the countryside on a narrow, winding, sometimes icy road, but the Porsche hugged the pavement and gobbled up the kilometers like a hungry panther. Jill was silent but tense as I tried to impress her with my driving skills. When she finally spoke, it was with authority. Just the energy in her voice could shrivel a man’s scrotum.
“Marty, please slow down!” I did, of course. I looked around. On our left was a vertical wall of snow and ice. On the right, a vertical drop of several thousand feet into the valley below. There was no guardrail on the road. I geared the Porsche down to second and glanced over at Jill.
“Marty, I’m worried. Are we walking into a trap? It all seems too easy, us being invited into the belly of the beast. Can you take a peek into the future for me? Does that chip of yours give you that kind of power?”
“First of all, Jill, our handlers back in the U.S. have done a fantastic job of preparing the way for us. Our cover is secure. Second, the Special Ops people are standing by, ready to bail us out with some serious force if we get into trouble at Black Swan HQ. All I have to do is press this little button here on my turquoise bracelet and the Army warriors will come storming in.” I showed her the nearly invisible button. “They’re camped out in some five-star hotel nearby.” Jill smiled sardonically.
“And thirdly, last night after you fell asleep I tried to take a little peek over the horizon, but all I got was a blank screen and some static. I guess there were too many variables and too many possible outcomes, and my chip just kinda shorted out. You know how the future is, Jill….You never know what’s gonna happen.”
“Granted.”
“But I did visit your dreams to see if there were any clues there and—”
“You did what? You voyeur, you!” Jill said with mock seriousness. “What did you see? I hope you didn’t catch any of that wild business with you and me doing it all over the rings of Saturn!”
“No, all I saw was just Leela naked and in a cage. That was enough to freak me out. So I went back to studying our game plan.” I told her about the intel on Wolfgang Maximus that was in our Top Secret packet.
Jill let out a big sigh, sank back in the luxurious Porsche upholstery, and went silent. We passed through tiny villages with names like Schmitten, Monstein, Glans (my favorite), and Frauenkirch before cruising into Davos. The trip from St. Moritz is only about thirty-three kliks, and we did it in less than half an hour.
Davos is primarily a ski resort, your typical overpriced alpine village, elevation eight thousand, five hundred feet, permanent population about eleven thousand. In the wintertime the temps range from around zero Fahrenheit during the day to unthinkably cold at night. Davos used to be famous as a refuge both for the super-rich and tuberculosis victims, back in the early 1900s, and also as the setting for Thomas Mann’s most famous (and most bizarre) novel The Magic Mountain.
More recently, Davos was best known as the home of the World Economic Forum, which every January brought together the planet’s most powerful bigwigs—financial wizards, corporate CEOs, presidents and prime ministers—to discuss how to get more money and more power. Until the crash of ’08-’09. At the 2009 forum, these mavens were clueless as to what to do about the pending worldwide economic collapse. This year, the forum was cancelled, of course, what with airports closed, spotty electricity, transportation and communications systems disrupted, riots in the streets, and so forth.
I guided the Porsche onto the town’s main commercial street, the Promenade, which contained the major hotels, eateries, and coffee houses. Most of the buildings were painted white. I opened the window for a better look, and immediately we were hit by a rush of frigid air.
The car’s GPS spoke in a flirtatious female voice, German accent and all, “Schiaweg Strasse Sixty-three, please turn right,” which led us to a little side street where we found the headquarters building for Black Swan Beta. On the outside it looked like a fancy chalet from the early 20th Century, perhaps ripped from the pages of Thomas Mann’s novel. The Black Swan sign was set on a huge piece of metal on the building’s second story.
Jill and I hurried across the windy, frozen parking lot, hand in hand. I could feel her heartbeat speeding up; probably mine was too. We rang the doorbell at the huge wrought iron door, held still for the security camera, and gave our fake names when requested: “Simone and Roger Hightower.” We carried fake passports in case they were asked for; they weren’t.
Inside, the building was a surprise: all stainless steel and right angles and high ceilings and wild colorful murals done in Jackson Pollack style. Spacious enclosed cubicles with transparent walls housed dozens of employees hunched over keyboards. The whole place had a buzz, a sort of high-tech energy feel to it. I had experienced this feeling before at successful software firms in California’s Silicon Valley. I did a quick scan of the place and discovered that bugs were everywhere, including video cameras mounted on walls and rafters every few meters. We expected that.
We met Herr Lieberman, who was charming and gracious and even kissed Jill’s/Simone’s hand. He explained briefly the problems his programmers were experiencing with their new artificial intelligence application, and quickly turned Jill over to Greta Eisen. Klaus and his programmers thought Greta would be the perfect person for the job because she spoke flawless English, and language was vital in finding and fixing the glitches. Our luck was holding.
Greta took Jill on a tour of the building. I was able to follow them through Jill’s cognitive pipeline, the psychic link that enabled me to see, feel, and experience everything in her reality. Greta knew that Jill was a telepath, and that her job was to mentally feed Jill the data that would allow her to appear to fix—but, in reality, sabotage —the Black Swan supercomputer and worldwide networks. Greta, a petite, pleasant woman with short dark hair and sparkling brown eyes, wasn’t aware that I had a chip implant and possessed some psi abilities in my own right.
As I sipped tea with Klaus and made small talk about the various planetary crises and the ski and toboggan conditions around Davos, the two ladies took an elevator to the level below the main floor. This was the first basement level, familiar because of Greta’s excellent photography.
“This is where the programmers do the serious work using our AI application,” said Greta, sweeping her arm across a vast, bizarro room which contained about two dozen walled-in offices with neither windows nor visible humans. Banks of humming servers lined the perimeter of the room. There was a constant whirring, buzzing sound, absent human voices. The sight and feel of it, through Jill’s POV, gave me a chill.
“Most of the staff here are working twelve-hour shifts to stop the hackers around the world who keep trying to sabotage our servers and our AI application. That’s why you’re here, Miss Hightower, to give us a permanent patch and an impenetrable firewall. To help us carry out our mission and put a stop to this futile resistance once and for all.” Greta looked and sounded angry; an excellent acting job.
“Miss Eisen,” Jill was saying, knowing full well that their conversation was being monitored by the ubiquitous bugs, “I saw another button on the elevator for a level beneath this one. Is that where the—”
“Yes,” said Greta quickly, “that is where the AI application is located.” Greta formed a mental picture of concrete walls enclosing an area about fifteen by twenty feet. Meaningless; what was inside those walls? She also visualized Leela in her nearby cell, a sad and lonely picture. Leela was curled up in the fetal position on a thin mattress, wearing an orange jumpsuit, convict-style.
Had Greta really seen these things on the second basement
level? Or was it just her fantasy of what might be there? One of the problems with mind scans, for me, anyway, is that I can’t tell fantasy from reality. The mind can project a perfectly formed image or mini-movie of a scene or an event, and it can be pure fantasy. Maybe an experienced psi like Leela or Jill could tell the difference.
The image of the imprisoned Leela in Greta’s mind lasted only three or four seconds, but that was enough for me. Whether it was real or imagined didn’t matter. I felt sick inside, desperate to spring her from captivity.