Lisa Smedman - The Lucifer desk

One of the guards smiled and nodded at the tourists, occasionally kneeling down to talk to a child. But his eyes constantly scanned the crowd, even when he was talking to someone right in front of him. He might appear to be relaxed, but Carla could see that he was alert and ready for trouble.

The second guard scrutinized the crowd with steely eyes, not even pretending to be friendly.

Carla let the camera in her cybereye continue to record as she followed the other tourists up the winding path that led from the bus loop to the complex itself. That way, she’d be able to prove to Greer, her producer, that she’d actually penetrated Mitsuhama’s research lab. Assuming, that is. that she made it that far.

Instead of walking with her usual smooth reporter’s stride-which would only give her away-Carla meandered along behind the others, gawking like a tourist. The resulting footage would be jumpy, but as long as she maintained continuity. Greer would be satisfied.

There were fifty-six people in the tour group Carla had joined, including herself. This was the second-to-last tour of the day-the 5 p.m. excursion.

As she approached the entrance, she resisted the urge to reach into her pocket, yet again, to double-check that the datachip Corwin had prepared was still there. The security guards would spot the nervous gesture instantly. They wouldn’t know what it meant, and they probably wouldn’t find it threatening. But their attention would be drawn to Carla just the same. And she wanted to remain as anonymous as possible. She’d disguised herself, just in case anybody recognized her from the KKRU newscasts. She’d styled her hair differently and tied a scarf over it. The heavy-framed fashion glasses she wore gave her eyes an entirely different look.

A few steps ahead of Carla, Corwin’s girlfriend Nina and little brother Trevor ambled along with the other tourists. Trevor was just eight years old, but every bit as bright as his brother. And the girl, despite the fact that she was still in her early twenties, looked old enough for her role, especially in the clothes Carla had asked her to wear. Both had readily agreed to help out with this bit of subterfuge. The thought of doing something daring, just like his brother, had especially appealed to Trevor. His part would be a small one, entirely without risk. Carla just hoped that the kid had the brains and nerve to carry it off. He certainly had the acting ability; he’d appeared in ten commercials already as the token metahuman kid. He had a fetching smile, despite his oversize canines.

Trevor was pretending he didn’t know Carla. As instructed, he walked beside Nina, making a point of smiling and talking to her. The other tourists would automatically assume she was his mother.

Carla followed the others into the building. They bunched up at a second set of heavy glass doors that blocked access to the lobby proper. This inner entrance was manned by two more security guards. One stood on this side of the doors, directing the visitors to an automated flatscan camera that took each person’s picture, then spat out a laminated badge bearing the words VISITOR’S PASS and the date and time of the tour group’s arrival. The other guard stood on the far side of the glass door, looking on with a bored expression as visitors who were leaving the building dropped their passes into a machine that automatically scanned and counted them. Eventually it would strip the digital photographs and dates from the badges so that they could be reused.

When it was her turn, Carla smiled for the camera, then attached the pass it spat out to the lapel of her jacket by its metal clip. She followed the others through the inner doors and into the lobby itself.

The lobby had a floor of silvered metal that was etched with black in a pattern that resembled the circuitry of an old-fashioned silicon chip. Banks of escalators at the back of the lobby led up to the second and third floors, which housed the Byte of the Future displays. Each had a balcony from which visitors could look down at the patterned lobby floor.

The other floors of the skyscraper-and the offices they contained-were accessed by entrances elsewhere in the building, rather than from this lobby. Mitsuhama encouraged the general public to view its displays, but took a dim view of them wandering through its office space.

As she stepped onto the escalator, Carla could hear Trevor, behind her now, talking excitedly to Nina about the new SimSea exhibit. She allowed herself a small sigh of relief. The kid was playing his part to the hilt, making sure everyone noticed that he and Nina were together, and frequently calling her “Mom.”

Carla had been on this tour two years ago when doing an entertainment feature on a new series of games Mitsuhama had developed. It had been a fun piece; she’d strapped on the headset and was instantly transported into the cockpit of a fighter ship that was rocketing its way between the stars. They’d even gotten the feeling of zero-G right.

On that occasion, Carla had been an invited guest. This time, she would be a trespasser-no better than a shadowrunner. And Mitsuhama would be doing its best to evict her-by any means necessary.

The Byte of the Future display was tucked into a series of rooms that opened onto the second- and third-floor balconies. Dozens of adults and children moved back and forth from one display room to another, filling the air with their awed laughter. Behind the babble of voices, games beeped and chimed, automated announcements described the static displays and robotic vehicles whined and hummed.

The three Mitsuhama employees who’d been assigned to guide the 5 p.m. tour were waiting on the second floor. They did not wear formal uniforms, but all were garbed in corporate colors: blue slacks and a white shirt. Carla wore the same thing under her jacket.

Out of the three guides who would be leading the five o’clock tour, two were Asian. Mitsuhama might talk about being an equal-opportunity employer, but when you scanned the employee records-as Corwin had done earlier-the truth became clear. The corp showed a clear preference for hiring humans of Japanese descent.

As they split the tourists into three groups, Carla joined the group that would be led by a woman who was of approximately the same build as herself. Thanks to the cosmetic surgery that had given Carla’s face a Native American appearance, she could pass for Japanese-or, at least, for a Eurasian of Japanese descent.

She’d be a close enough match for the picture on the woman’s employee ID badge.

Carla kept to the back of the group as the hour-long tour began. The first stop was an exhibit of oversized, boxy computers from the late twentieth century. All of the machines were in working order, and each had an adapter that allowed it to access the Matrix in a clunky, glacially slow fashion. The exhibit showed the gradual advances in the computer industry, and concluded with an exhibit of the latest direct neural interface technology-all of it, naturally, designed and built by Mitsuhama.

Pretending to examine one of these state-of-the-art computers, Carla fished the datachip out of her pocket and slotted it into one of the multi-ports at the back of the deck. The program on it had been hurriedly designed, that very afternoon, by Corwin. Precisely one hour after it was installed, it would write itself onto the virtual memory of this computer. It would then execute in the background, uploading itself to the display hall’s central processing unit while it was running its batch maintenance programs. The system’s operator might notice a slight stutter in the computer, but would probably pass it off as a hardware sequencing problem.

From there, the program would find its way onto the slave nodes that served the Byte of the Future display and would drop, without a trace, the name Lucifer. It would then be only a matter of time-hopefully no more than a few minutes, but certainly no more than an hour-before the spirit dove into the Matrix again and was drawn like an angry hornet to those nodes, corrupting the programs as it sought to eliminate the files containing its name. When that happened, the system that ran the display area would crash. Every computer-controlled display, lighting panel, and climate-control device in the Byte of the Future exhibit would shut down. And that would provide just the distraction Carla needed.