F Wilson - Sims

Wait. What was he thinking? He was dealing with a sim. They didn’t have the brains for misdirection. Still…this one had made a fool of him once already…

Just to be sure, Luca did a quick search of the basement. Not much down here; no closets or crawl spaces to hide in, just cinderblock walls and solid concrete floor. Satisfied that she was gone, he closed and locked the open window and headed for the stairs, leaving Morales behind on the floor.

He called his three men together and faced them in the front hallway.

“All right,” he said, forcing a calm demeanor, “here’s the situation: She’s gone. Escaped through the basement window.”

“Shit!” Grimes muttered. He was wiry and redheaded, and his Adam’s apple wobbled in his long neck when he spoke. “We’ll never find her out there in the dark!”

Luca wheeled and got in his face. “She’s hurt, she’s bleeding, she’s on foot, she’s pregnant, and she’s a sim! If you can’t track something like that, you should be working for somebody else!”

Grimes backed up. “Okay, okay. Sorry.”

Luca turned away. He needed more men. He reached for his phone to call Lister, have him find back-up. They’d comb this area until—

The sound of squeaking brakes just outside the front door made him turn. A battered old school bus had pulled to a stop at the curb. As he watched through the cracked glass, the bus doors folded back and a line of sims began stepping down to the sidewalk.

“Hold everything,” Luca said as he headed for the door. “I think reinforcements just arrived.”

He hadn’t wanted to call for help Now he wouldn’t have to. He stationed himself at the top of the front steps and held up his hands.

“Nobody goes inside yet,” he told the sims.

He made them wait in the fine drizzle until the bus had emptied out. They looked to number about forty or so.

“Hey!” the grizzled old driver said. He’d come to the bus door and stood staring at Luca. “Who are you?”

“Someone who’s commandeering these sims.”

“They ain’t yours to commandeer! Where do you get off thinkin—”

Luca glared at him. “Move on, old man. This isn’t your concern.”

The driver looked as if he were about to say something, then changed his mind. As the bus wheezed away, Luca turned back to the sims.

“We’ve come for Meerm,” he told them, raising his voice. “We know you’ve been hiding her. But that’s all right. We’re here to help her and—”

“No!” said a sim, pointing at Grimes. “No help sim! Hurt sim!”

Luca looked more closely at the sim who’d spoken and noticed that his left eye sported the yellowing remains of a shiner. He turned to Grimes.

“What’d you do, Grimes?” he said, keeping it low and through his teeth. “Beat him up?”

Grimes blinked and swallowed. “I thought he’d lied to us, so I just—”

“So you just scared the shit out of them, guaranteeing they’d never tell us a thing. This could have been over a week ago, you fucking stupid—” He turned away before he ripped out the man’s bobbing Adam’s apple and made him eat it. “I’ll deal with you later.”

Fighting for calm, he faced the sims again. He’d hoped to enlist their voluntary support, make themwant to find Meerm for him. But Grimes had blown that, so he’d have to take a direct approach.

“I know it’s cold out and you’re all probably tired and hungry. There’s nothing you’d like better now than to get inside and eat and relax, right? Well, guess what? That’s not going to happen until Meerm is found. We’re going to start searching now, and we’re going to keep searching till we find her, even if it takes all night, understand?”

Luca could see from the resignation in their eyes that they understood, all right. They understood just fine. And this would work. He had forty-plus searchers instead of the maximum dozen humans he’d be able to muster on such short notice. And these were better than humans. Who better to sniff out a sim than another sim?

Yeah, this will work. Damn well better. But what if it didn’t? What if they came up empty tonight and all this commotion caught the attention of some of Eckert’s followers? Or Morales opened his yap to the wrong people? Eckert could wind up with the pregnant sim.

He turned and found Morales standing in the front hallway.

“Listen up,” he told the little man. “If I find the sim, you get the five million. Anyone else finds her, you’re out in the cold. So keep your mouth shut about this.”

Morales stared at him, rubbing his shoulder. “First you push me around, then you do this. You loco, man?”

Not loco, Luca thought, turning away. But if anyone’s going to bring in this sim, it’s going to beme.

15

MANHATTAN

Patrick closed his eyes and leaned back in his swivel chair.

“My eyes are going to burn out the back of my skull if I stare at this computer screen another minute.”

“Here,” Romy said, tapping him on the shoulder. “Let me spell you. We’ve only got a few more to go.”

It seemed like they’d been at this all day. Romy had arrived at his office late this afternoon and together they’d cooked up a list of acronyms, using every possible combination of letters that might conceivably be pronounced “surge”—from CERGE, CERJE, CIRJ, and so on, to SIURJ, ZIRJE, ZOORGE and beyond. Then he’d begun plugging them into one Internet search engine after another.

So far the hits had been few and none had panned out.

“Only a few more, you say?” He stretched. “I’ll keep at it then. What’s next?”

Romy consulted her list. “S-I-R-G.”

Patrick typed it into the entry box on the searcher and hitENTER . Half a second later a string of varicolored type cascaded down the screen. The engine reported 1,753 hits.

“We’ve got something,” he said.

SIRG turned out to be the acronym for a raft of organizations, ranging from the Summit Implementation Review Group to the Spatial Information Research Group to the Student Internet Research Group.

“These sound exciting,” Romy said dryly, reading over his shoulder. She’d been nibbling on a sweet roll and her breath carried a hint of cinnamon. He was sure her lips would taste even better. “Hope you didn’t get your hopes up.”

Patrick shook his head, trying to forget how close she was and focus on the screen. “I’ve learned better by now.”

He clicked his way through one link after another; all the groups seemed pretty straightforward. Then he came to something called the Social Impact Research Group.

“Social impact of what?” he said.

“And on what?” Romy added.

The article was an old one, quoting from another even older article. SIRG received only passing mention in reference to some unspecified appropriations bill.

“Wait,” Romy said. “Appropriations means government. Hit a few more links.”

He did but found only scattered mentions of the group; nothing of substance, no hint as to its purpose.

“Let me try,” Romy said.

They switched seats. Patrick watched her access a directory of US Federal Government agencies and enter a string of asterisks into a password box.

“Don’t forget,” she said, as if reading his mind, “I work for a government agency myself. I’ve picked up a few passwords and access codes along the way.”

He watched a while longer, then got up and moved away. Romy was far more facile than he at the keyboard. She worked too fast for him—he’d no sooner focus on a screen than she’d be clicking to another. He stepped to the window and stared out at the night.

This block of Henry Street was reasonably well lit. He studied the parked cars for signs of life. None. The only pedestrian was a drab-looking woman making her way along the sidewalk directly below.