Lisa Smedman - The Lucifer desk

After exiting the display of antique computers, the group wound its way through a variety of exhibits: autonomously guided vehicles currently being used in the Mars exploration program; war simulators used to train monotank drivers; simsense walk-throughs of CAD/CAM do-it-yourself architectural programs; animated-cartoon holograms that described the development of ASIST (emphasizing the minor role Mitsuhama had played in its development); and a gigantic, two-story-tall mockup of an optical data-storage and retrieval system. The kids loved that one; they got to slide through strobing tubes, pretending they were individual photons of light. By either bunching together or going singly, they could duplicate the pulses by which data was encoded and could trigger different sounds and holo images. Each group of children erased the data of the group who’d preceded them, writing their own combination.

Carla smiled. It was a bit prophetic, somehow.

The final stop on the tour was a large room that held a wide array of booths that displayed Mitsuhama’s latest simsense games. Here, the members of the tour group were first warned that they had to meet back at the bus at six o’clock, sharp, then were turned loose to spend the last fifteen minutes of their tour playing with the interactive displays.

It was time for Carla to make her move. Winding her way through the people who crowded the room, she nodded at Nina and stepped into one of the simsense booths. It was a multi-user display; there were enough headsets for six people to interact with the program at once. Fortunately, no one else joined them in the booth.

Carla handed Nina her badge. “You remember what to do, don’t you?”

The ork girl smiled. “Null perspiration, chummer. I just gotta drop it in the box.”

Carla winced. Like her boyfriend, Nina had the habit of using Street slang, despite her education. She took Nina’s badge and slipped it into her pocket. “Good,” she said. “Off you go, then.”

As Nina stepped out of the booth, Carla focused on the digital display in the corner of her cybereye’s field of view. It was nearly six o’clock. Time for her tour group to make its way back to the bus. And for Corwin’s program to start doing its thing.

Trevor was watching her from a few meters away. As she passed him, Carla gave him the thumbs-up signal they’d previously agreed upon, then slipped him Nina’s visitor pass. He smiled and winked at her, then waited while Nina headed for the escalators.

Carla took a deep breath to steady her nerves. This part was out of her hands.

She made her way to the balcony that looked down onto the lobby. She tensed as Nina approached the desk where they had come in. But the guard didn’t even look at Nina as she dropped Carla’s badge in the return slot, where a scanner automatically processed it. So far, so good.

Carla let a full minute pass after Nina had exited the building, then signaled to Trevor. He descended on the escalator, then rushed up to the guard who stood just inside the lobby. Carla couldn’t hear what he was saying, but she knew the script; she’d written it. He was tearfully asking the bored-looking guard who manned the scanner if he’d seen his mother, whom he had lost at the end of the tour. As proof, Trevor showed the badge his mother had “dropped” during her ride down the photon slide.

The guard would probably remember that an ork woman had just left the building, and might even match that woman’s face with the one on the badge. But because several other visitors had passed through the gate in the interim, he was unlikely to remember whether or not she had turned in a visitor’s pass on the way out.

Trevor’ s act seemed to be working. The security guard pointed outside, took the two badges from him, and dropped them in the scanner. Trevor gave him a tearful smile, then jogged out the building after his “mother.” As instructed, he didn’t look back at Carla and give the game away. Later, when security did a count of the returned badges, they would assume that all fifty-six members of the 5 p.m. tour had exited the building.

Now Carla just had to wait for her distraction to hit. When it did, the building’s security would get much tighter; the guards would immediately ensure that all visitors safely exited the Byte of the Future display. They’d be sure to retrieve a visitor pass from each person as he or she left the area, and to compare the number of passes collected with the number of visitors who entered the building that day. Assuming that none of the visitors actually did go missing when the spirit crashed the exhibit’s computers, all of today’s visitors would be carefully accounted for-probably within a matter of a few minutes. And by the time they were, Carla would be well on her way to the research lab.

She looked around for her tour group leader. The woman had gone back to the escalator to meet the six o’clock tour. As she assembled the group and gave them her memorized introduction. Carla followed discretely behind, careful not to let the woman spot her. There was always a chance she’d recognize Carla as a member of the last group and would start wondering why this “tourist” had missed her bus. Or that she would notice Carla wasn’t wearing a visitor’s pass.

The six o’clock tour made it all the way to the photon slide before the spirit struck. The first sign that it had entered the Byte of the Future computer system was when the music and holograms in the transparent tube faltered to a halt. Next, the overhead lights began to flicker. In rapid succession, a number of displays blinked out. The ventilation system blasted out a jet of overheated air, then made a grinding noise as its rotors shut down, and the speakers began to hiss with static.

No more than a second or two after the whole chain of glitches began, the second- and third-floor display areas were plunged into darkness. As a babble of frightened voices filled the air, Carla made her move. She’d kept a careful watch on the tour guide, who now was shouting at her group to remain calm. Carla headed straight for the voice and deliberately jostled the woman in the dark. At the same time, she snatched the tour guide’s employee badge. Given the mob of confused and frightened people the woman had to deal with, Carla doubted she’d miss the badge for some time. If she did discover it was gone, she would probably assume it had fallen off and was lying somewhere on the floor of the display area.

Carla shed her jacket and pinned on the employee badge. Then she made her way by feel to the photon tube-slide. It would be the fastest way to put some distance between herself and the tour guide. Just as she reached it, a handful of emergency lights-those powered by battery and thus independent of the main computer system-started to flicker to life. But these only dimly lit the area; there were still enough shadows-and enough confusion, among the milling visitors-for Carla to jump into the tube and escape unnoticed.

The slide down to the second floor took only a moment or two. Reaching the bottom, she clambered to her feet and headed toward an employees-only exit she’d noted earlier. A winking red light showed that the door’s magkey was still functioning. It was a simple slide-through pad, operated by its own battery system. Carla aligned the magnetic strip on the employee badge, then slid it through the slot. When the light flashed green, she yanked the door open.

The corridor it led to was well illuminated; it must have been on a separate control system. Carla pulled the door shut behind her and hurried down the hallway. A security guard rushed toward her, heading for the door she’d just come through. Giving him her most earnest look, Carla jerked a thumb at the door behind her. “We’ve had a systems crash!” she shouted. “The power is down and we can’t use the telecom system. I’m going to see if I can reboot the lights.”