Matrix Man Page 10

  It was the sort of thing her parents had done all of their lives, first to survive, and then to put her through technical school. Both were dead now, victims of the big quake in Southern California, and she missed them.

  Like all passenger trains, this one had three levels. First class was up top, with business class just below that, and tourist class on the bottom.

  As the conductor took his ticket Corvan noticed she was a chip head. Though not especially pretty, she wore the latest in jack jewelry, a solar stone-encrusted temple stud. It functioned off available light and flashed to some unheard rhythm.

  For her part, the conductor seemed unable to take her eyes off Corvan's eye cam. "Welcome aboard the City of San Diego," she said mechanically. "First-class is up the stairs and on the right. You are in compartment twenty-four."

  Corvan followed Kim up the spiral stairs and down a brightly lit corridor. He liked the way Kim moved, the way her shiny black hair swished from side to side, and the slight hint of perfume which drifted his way.

  Compartment twenty-four opened to Kim's touch. Inside everything was bright chrome, a large expanse of one-way glass, and finely grained gray leather. Corvan looked around. "Well, Kim, what do you think? Is everything okay?"

  Kim had never been able to afford anything but tourist class anyway, and in recent years the scrimping and saving required to buy an implant had reduced her circumstances even further, so that the compartment seemed incredibly luxurious to her. But she didn't want to admit that, so she did her best to look nonchalant and plopped down in an easy chair.

  "Sure, this looks fine."

  "Good," Corvan replied, taking a seat on the full-length couch and leaning back against soft upholstery.

  Both were silent for a moment, unsure of what to say. Kim cleared her throat. "Why do you do it anyway?"

  Corvan looked surprised. "Do what?"

  Kim gestured toward the window. "Everything. What you've done. What you're doing now. Running around tilting at windmills."

  Corvan shrugged. "My mother's fault, I guess. She taught me to care. More than that, she taught me that journalism is a calling, a sort of priesthood. Following up on Neely's story is a way to keep the faith. But it's more than that. This video matrix thing scares me. In the wrong hands it could be used to tell terrible lies, and that goes against everything I believe in."

  Kim lit a fag and sucked smoke deep into her lungs. She believed him. For Corvan, journalism was a religion, an article of faith, a holy crusade. And the video matrix generator was his latest cause. The only problem was that religious crusaders sometimes trample the innocent on the way to their objectives. What about her? Was she safe from his zeal?

  Corvan stretched out on the couch and pulled a cushion under his head. "If you don't mind, I'm going to grab some sleep. Wake me up in an hour or so and we'll have dinner."

  Kim nodded, but had no intention of keeping her word.

  Corvan was already asleep when the train pulled out of the station, and he was still dead to the world hours later, when the long silver snake made its way out of the Siskiyou Mountains and into Northern California.

  Kim made no attempt to wake him. Instead she ordered a truly luxurious hot meal and ate it while curled up in front of the window. It felt wonderful to escape the editing suite for a while, to eat from a real plate instead of a plastic dish, and to be with someone. Even someone who snored.

  Outside the world flowed by at more than two hundred miles per hour, disappearing so quickly it was hard to get more than a quick impression of what it looked like, but that was enough. The train tracks had been built on what had once been Interstate 5. As a result, the view tended toward urban sprawl, occasionally relieved by open fields and carefully tended tree farms.

  The tree farms helped provide much needed housing, paper products, and most important of all, oxygen to stabilize the world's atmosphere.

  The decision to junk the nation's interstate highway system had been a hard-fought political battle. The automobile and trucking industries had poured millions of dollars into high-powered media campaigns aimed at winning the public over, but their money was wasted.

  Sure, some cars were getting one hundred miles to the gallon, but that didn't mean much when unleaded cost two hundred bucks a gallon.

  In any case, the country's main interstate freeways had been ripped up, track had been laid, and a brand-new transportation system put into place. In spite of that, however, the steadily increasing population was already threatening to overwhelm die railroads and their ability to cope.

  It was, Kim reflected, a losing battle, and it made her wonder if the Exodus Society might be right. Curious about Neely's involvement with the Exodus Underground, Kim had taken time to skim through the background material stored in the network's central computer. It made interesting reading.

  The Exodus Society had existed for about fifteen years now and had been organized around the principle that the planet was overpopulated. They believed the people of Earth were engaged in a life-and-death race between production and demand. A race which the burgeoning population would almost certainly win. The result would be food riots, mass starvation, international conflict, and a new Dark Age. Not a pretty picture, and in spite of the government's claims to the contrary, all too possible.

  The answer? Well, according to the Exodus Society, the answer lay in a full-scale exodus from Earth. The modern version of westward expansion, in which huge one-way space arks would replace covered wagons and a vast corps of space-suited settlers would play the part of pioneers. First to other planets in the solar system and then to the stars themselves. The Exodus Society saw thousands, millions, even billions of men and women spreading outward from Earth to form a brand-new empire.

  It was a stirring vision, one which the Society never ceased to push. There were public-service announcements in which a ragged-looking family stood on a hill and stared wistfully toward the stars. There were conventions to which millions came, fund-raising events to which millions gave, and political organizations to which millions belonged. All dedicated to promoting space travel and the colonization of other planets.

  And yes, there were darker activities as well, or allegations at least, none of which had ever been proved. Some said that those opposing the Society seemed to have an unusually high accident rate. Others whispered of payoffs, intimidation, and blackmail.

  And that's where the Exodus Underground came in. It specialized in acts of civil disobedience, which sometimes got out of hand. Like Neely's pirate radio station, like the hate mail they sent to politicians who opposed the space program, and like the mysterious fires which plagued various branches of the World Peace Organization.

  It was common knowledge that the Exodus Underground opposed the WPO because it might lead toward a single world government, and without nationalism to push it along, the world's various space programs might wither and die.

  Though technically a separate organization, everyone assumed that members of the Underground took their orders from Exodus Society headquarters in Washington, D.C. There was the obvious similarity of names, for one thing, not to mention a substantial amount of common membership and the almost identical rhetoric used by both.

  All of which made Kim wonder why Neely had gotten involved. Had the Underground used him? Or was it the other way around? There was no way to tell.

  Off to the west the sun was little more than an orange smear on the horizon. Turning inward she looked at Corvan, his face peaceful, almost childlike except for the unblinking lens of the eve cam. It stared back at her like a malevolent black hole which could suck her in and destroy her carefully ordered world.

  Corvan seemed nice enough, but she'd seen him ignore a wounded trooper for the sake of a story, and kill a man on worldwide television. Both of those acts were justified, but still, where did the machine stop and the man begin? If faced with a choice between his story and her, which would Corvan choose? Why had she allowed herself to get involved? Was it ph
ysical or something more? Kim looked outside, but found no answers in the passing dark.

  When Corvan awoke he knew something had changed. Modern trains didn't make the same noises their predecessors had, but they did vibrate at higher speeds, and the vibration had just about disappeared.

  Corvan sat up as he swung his feet over the side and onto the floor. Kim Kio was there, her face beautiful in the soft light, watching him with an expression he couldn't quite read. "You're beautiful."

  The words seemed to spill out of their own volition, not part of a plan to make her feel a certain way, just a statement of fact.

  She smiled. "Are you always like this when you wake up?"

  "Always," he promised as he headed for the sink. "It runs in the family. Mom says Father was at his best in the morning.''

  "I'll remember that," Kim replied gravely. "Fortunately it's night outside."

  Corvan splashed water on his face. "Ah, but it's morning somewhere in the world. Where are we anyway?"

  "Just outside San Francisco," Kim replied. "Assuming we're on schedule, we should arrive in ten or fifteen minutes."

  "Good," Corvan said, glancing at his watch. "I'm starving. You didn't wake me for dinner."

  Kim shrugged. "You looked so tired I couldn't bring myself to do it. I ordered you a sandwich, though. I hope turkey's okay."

  Corvan looked around, spotted the sandwich, and sat down to eat. "Are you kidding? Turkey's great. How was dinner?" He gestured toward her tray and the empty plates.

  While Kim described her dinner, Corvan ate his and washed it down with a glass of water. It was slightly salty because the train had tanked up in San Francisco the day before. Over time the rising sea level had pushed more and more salt water inland. Now it was contaminating the fresh-water aquifers underneath Sacramento and had found its way into the area's drinking water. Corvan spat the last of it into the sink and turned around. "Got everything? If so, we're out of here."

  Kim looked up in surprise. "You're kidding. Shouldn't we let them stop the train first?"

  Corvan shook his head and grinned. "Naw, it's not going more than five miles an hour."

  Kim frowned thoughtfully. "You think someone's waiting for us?"

  Corvan shrugged. "Beats me. All I know is that Neely was playing patty cake with some very heavy hitters. It would be naive to think they haven't noticed us snooping around. Better safe than sorry, that's all."

  For a moment Corvan felt guilty about holding out on her, but pushed it down and back, knowing that if her told her that truth he'd have to tell her the other truth as well, and that might scare her just as much as the possibility that people were watching them.

  In spite of the dinner she'd eaten a short time before, Kim's stomach felt cold and empty as she checked the mirror and picked up her bag. Was it as simple as Corvan said? Or did he know something she didn't? The question stayed with her as she followed Corvan out of the compartment.

  Moving quickly, Corvan made his way the length of the corridor, slipped down the spiral stairs, and pulled the emergency release.

  The door slid open, allowing warm, fetid air to blow into Kim's face. Another train went by, headed in the opposite direction. Its shiny metal flanks rippled the greenish light and its repulsors whined as it picked up speed.

  Then it was gone, revealing a dark labyrinth of tracks and equipment, all of which moved steadily by.

  The open door had activated some sort of emergency Klaxon, and it was hooting loud objections as Corvan gestured for Kim to jump. "Go ahead! There's nothing to it!"

  Kim jumped and felt her right high heel crumple when she landed. Stumbling over to lean against an equipment shed, she was in the process of pulling her shoe off when he arrived.

  "Go ahead. There's nothing to it," she mimicked. "Only a man wearing rubber-soled boots would say something like that." She held up her shoe for Corvan's inspection.

  Corvan grimaced. "Oops. The man in the rubber-soled boots apologizes and begs your forgiveness. Have you got any others?"

  "Of course," Kim replied crossly. "And I wouldn't need them if it weren't for all this spy stuff."

  If Corvan had taken his precautions more seriously, or if Kim had been less involved in changing her shoes, perhaps one of them would have seen the middle-aged woman jump off the train and disappear into the shadows. And had they been extremely observant, they might have noticed that she was a good deal more agile than she'd been while boarding the train, also that she was no longer encumbered by two shopping bags.

  But they didn't notice, and that allowed the woman to follow them through the train yard and along a security fence toward the train station. For a moment it seemed as though the fence would funnel them into the terminal, but at the very last moment Corvan saw the gate.

  Walking over, they saw a sign which read, "BE SURE TO LOCK THE GATE BEHIND YOU." Corvan did.

  Outside the train yard they found themselves on a busy street, one of the many which crisscrossed the terminal area, and wasted little time flagging down a three-wheeled electro cab. It had a tiny passenger compartment just big enough for two adults.

  The driver was a kid in his teens. There was a caffeine stick dangling from his lips and a lum-studded dog collar buckled around his neck. The luminescent letters spelled out "Corey's Cabs" in flashing blue letters.

  However, the collar was more than mere ornamentation. It contained a tiny transmitter which let the cab company's dispatcher know where the kid was. That way the company computer could make sure cabbies didn't bunch up at the same locations, lie about where they were, or simply goof off when they should be working.

  When the kid spoke, the C-stick bobbed up and down with each word. "What'll it be, folks? Gut burgers, sex shops, dope dealers, we got 'em all. Name your poison."

  "None of the above," Corvan replied, and provided an address on Russian Hill. It wasn't his address, but the address of his favorite Mexican restaurant, which was located nearby. In order to get there the cabbie would have to roll by his apartment, which would give him a chance to check it out. The coast would be clear, he'd feel silly, and they'd walk back. Then a drink or two, some nice soft music, and who knows? Maybe she wouldn't use the guest room after all.

  While the two of them squeezed themselves into the passenger compartment, the kid strapped their bags to the rooftop luggage rack, and got behind his controls. The vehicle jerked twice due to slippage in the drive train, pulled away from the curb, and forced its way into the mishmash of slow-moving traffic.

  Like Seattle, San Francisco was organized in vertical layers, with the wealthy living on the upper levels of high-rise condos and less fortunate scraping out a living down below. Much of the city had been rebuilt after the Great Quake, but it was already wearing out.

  Kim felt momentarily claustrophobic as she looked out the cab's dirty window. People were everywhere. Walking, running, talking, working, sleeping, and having sex. She noticed that most of them looked like her: black hair, different shades of brown skin, a mixture heavily influenced by Asian and Latin genes.

  At times their bodies were so thick around the cab that she couldn't see, couldn't do anything except feel and smell them, almost drowning in their noise. And inside the cab Corvan seemed to fill whatever space she left vacant, making her want to scream. Suddenly she realized that her retreat into News Network 56's basement was more than just financial, it was an opportunity to be alone, to reduce her exposure to an ocean of people.

  The noise was an ominous hum, a low rumble made out of a thousand conversations, and pierced here and there by shouts, screams, sirens, and commercial messages.

  Crowded though it was, Seattle seemed almost empty compared to this. As the cabbie beeped his horn and pushed his way through the foot traffic, Kim wondered how long it would be before the have-nots grew tired of the haves' endless promises and took whatever they wanted. The sad thing was that it wouldn't make any difference. The problem was so huge, the population so vast, that whatever they took wouldn't
even begin to fill the need.

  The cab turned onto Post and headed west toward Union Square. Up ahead Kim saw a silver needle which soared upward into the night. It looked like a building but clearly wasn't. Buildings don't have fins and all manner of streamlined bumps. Whatever it was looked graceful and imposing under colored lights. "What's that?" she asked, yelling to make herself heard.

  Corvan looked up through the driver's windshield, saw what she was referring to, and smiled. "That's a spaceship," he shouted. "Or what some PR type thinks a spaceship should look like. From what I've read, a real honest-to-goodness space liner would be built in orbit and look quite different. But the Exodus Society doesn't care about that, it's a symbol, and they're paying the city half a million dollars a day to park it in Union Square. Stupid, isn't it?"

  Kim nodded, but as the cab passed by Union Square and headed towards Leavenworth she wasn't so sure. Unlike Corvan she'd been poor, the very thing which motivated her to get an implant, and she knew how important hope could be. She could imagine trudging off to work each day, passing the silvery arrow which pointed up toward the stars, wishing it would lift and take her with it. Yes, a symbol like that could be very powerful indeed.

  Though crowded, Leavenworth wasn't quite as bad as Post, and the cab made a steady ten miles an hour toward Russian Hill. It wasn't too long before Corvan saw his building up ahead and began to check things out.

  At first glance everything appeared normal—the usual street vendors, the same collection of squatters protecting their concrete turf. But then he noticed something which didn't belong, something which shouldn't be there, a full-sized paddy wagon.

  They all had looked the same ever since Ford had responded to the rising crime rate by marketing a specially designed police van. In the course of covering crime-related stories Corvan had spent a great deal of time inside them and knew how they were equipped. The latest in surveillance gear, enough weapons to fight a small war, and bunks so the cops could sleep in shifts.