7

Sal felt his stomach still churning as he sat restrained in what he was guessing was a sensory deprivation room. He was not certain how long he had been here, but since his stomach started to feel like this four hours after point-to-point slipstream travel, he was guessing he had been here for at least that long. Sal could feel the hair on his head falling around his face. This was unusual as he typically kept his hair in chaotic spiked peaks in a multitude of colors. The style was a little bit retro for the time, but Sal didn't mind standing out. He had picked the style in part because it was no longer common. He grew weary of casting glances at other people and finding that their sense of style was carbon copies of one another. Sure, this person might be wearing this brand, and that person wearing that brand, but for all the powers of the holonosphere, people still felt some compulsion to conform to what other people did as though they were schooling fish. Like schooling fish, no one ever seemed to know what direction they were going to go in next, but rather when the neighboring fish turned they too turned so that the school cohered.

Sal knew what direction he wanted to go in life, he just often had found that the means of getting there was lacking. Since he was a good thinker and could understand things quickly, he had found his way into deception because it was an area where someone could be judged more on what they knew and their merit than by other external measures.

Still, Sal wish he had not taken this job. The churning in his stomach intensified as he considered what might come next. He tried to think back to the wild ride that had landed him here.

Slipstream travel basically took advantage of what amounted to wormholes. Wormholes were shortcuts in the spacetime fabric that allowed a person to travel impossibly far distances in a short amount of time. With the recognition that the world was a hologram firmly cemented, it became possible to spontaneously generate these wormholes at will should a person wish to travel. They were not generally used, though, because they proved hard to stabilize. If the person attempting to generate a wormhole faltered too much in their concentration, they might find themselves spit very far from their intended destination. This might not be so bad if you wound up somewhere else on the Earth, but if you wound up on some uninhabitable planet, or worse, space, your day was guaranteed to become very bad. To navigate a wormhole, you had to guide yourself down various junctures. Each juncture would provide a preview of where it might end.

When the discovery was first made, some intrepid wormhole generators thought it would be cute to use the wormholes to travel back in time. What they neglected to remember when they did this was that no one in the past ever mentioned anyone returning from the future. So either a) everyone going to the past had kept their secrets along with all the information they knew, or b) when people tried to go back in time they fundamentally created another universe which was divided from the one from which they came. B) seemed the more likely alternative, although nobody knew for certain. People kept slipstream travel strictly within a local time slice for this reason. Since reality was a hologram, it was possible that it was more than one version of itself. Nobody could see the whole thing, so nobody knew the pattern that was holographically repeating.

Sal racked his brain for familiar landmarks. He remembered seeing the Prescott High Rise levitating in the distance. This would tend to indicate that Telray had hired some goon to keep an eye on him in the event that he did not deliver on his deception. The thing that bothered Sal about this idea is that since he was so good at deception, it would have been very hard to conceal anyone near him without his notice. If someone had succeeded in doing this, their skill level would be fiendishly high.

Sal glanced down at his wrists and ankles--digital restraints holonospherically generated. He sighed as he wished there had been physical restraints. The only way to break digital restraints was to generate the key necessary to release them. Since quantum computers had come into common usage, most of the time the key needed was an entangled particle pair that was impossible to eavesdrop upon without causing the entangled state to collapse into something else other than the key. It was possible if this happened to run quantum equations to indicate what the entangled pair most likely was, but this was time-consuming and not fool-proof. At the very least, Sal would need his hands to attempt to access the interface. Or would he? Sal had almost forgotten about the ability of the holonosphere to be navigated strictly by eye movement. He had always been a more tactile person. Sal uttered a voice command to try to access his interface. When he made this effort, he found that no audio was heard. Sound dampeners. They canceled out all audio information. If a sound wave was formed, the dampeners would simply perturb the air to create a wave that exactly canceled out the first one.

Sal had to have it to Telray. They were very thorough in their facilities for holding people against their will. Of course, it would have been unlikely that they would have risen to be one of the top underworld operatives were that not the case. Sal began to become very uneasy at this thought.

Suddenly, a thin white line of light appeared on the perfectly black mirrored surface. The little line grew larger and began to reveal a door being opened. Pretty soon, a figure clad in a black suit was silhouetted by the white light. Judging from the curves he could discern, that the figure was female. Sal shifted internally. If his interrogator was female, he had to guard against thinking of her as nurturing or as being the weaker sex. When a female interrogator appeared, whether she knew it or not, her methods would tend to be more emotional and play on deep-seated evolutionary roles that had served humans well over the millenniums. If she weaponized her sexuality, that could prove to be even more disastrous. These were only problems, though, if you did not know about them in advance. Simply by having the thought that the person coming in was not and could not be your friend, nor were they interested in you for any reason other than information, it was possible to keep matters in their proper perspectives. The reason so many marriages lasted so long and ended so abruptly was that sometimes the interrogation sequence was slower. Not all marriages were interrogation sequences, of course, but one would be a fool to believe that most of them were about love. Marriage allowed the interrogator to slide the knife in slowly, and only because the person being interrogated allowed their minds to be clouded by love. Functionally, however, every marriage done for credits, lust, children, or anything designed to manipulate another person was an interrogation. If a couple had unconsciously entered into such an arrangement, they might get lucky and love possibly could overcome the interrogation. Otherwise, the interrogation would last as long as one person could play interrogator and derive benefit, and the other person was fine being interrogated. marriage forgot the fundamental role of interrogation, the person coming in was not and could not be your friend.

Sal observed the figure as she entered the room. She was a medium-height blonde with shoulder-length hair. She had a way of moving through the room that exuded femininity. The sideways movement of her hips was slight but deliberate. Though she was wearing a suit, she had taken careful pains to be sure that the suit accentuated the right curves. Something told Sal this woman was accustomed to receiving desire from men. Instead of rejecting it, she incorporated it into her being to get what she wanted. Her entire ensemble was designed to evoke desire, and then to control that desire to achieve her ends. If she also proved to be smart, and odds are she probably was, then this lady would be no end of danger.

As she drew nearer, Sal could see her features. As he expected, her face had delicate lines. Her nose was slight--her lips soft and inviting. What caught him off guard, though, was her eyes. Usually, women who use others to achieve their ends have a certain hardness out of their gaze. This woman, though, had very bright blue eyes that had a bit of sparkle to them. Either this woman was very, very good at what she did, or she wasn't what she appeared to be.

"Mr. Grimone, I trust you have found your accommodations here comfortable?" she asked as she raised the inflection of her voice at the end of the query.

Sal sat closed-mouthed. He wondered why it was when people started interrogating others, they always had to start with a sarcastic quip about how comfortable things must be. Probably, it was designed to provoke a response, since people were eager to correct an untruth in most instances. Sal was an expert deceiver, though, and he knew that the most unsuccessful deception was an ignored one.

"Aww, not in a talking mood?" she purred diplomatically. "How about we get those restraints off of you? I probably wouldn't be much for conversation in them either."

Sal rubbed at his wrists and ankles where the restraints had been. He had noticed that the sound dampening appeared to be off since he could hear the woman so clearly. Maybe he could pop his interface up and initiate slipstream travel out of here.

"I know what you are thinking, Mr. Grimone, and I wouldn't advise it. Believe it or not, you are more of a guest here, although if you were to do something rash that status might change into something less favorable. You probably believe you are in danger, but so long as you do nothing completely stupid I can assure you you are not."

Sal thought inwardly to himself. Hearing that you are safe is of course what most people in a situation like this would want to hear. He refused to believe he was safe, but he resolved to play along for the time being to see where the road ahead bent.

"You guys have a funny way of treating guests," said Sal. "We could start by introducing ourselves since I have no idea who you are or where I am."

"Well, Mr. Grimone, I think we need to establish a basis for trust. So, I am going to answer one of your questions, and then you can answer one of mine. You are currently in a building owned by the Telray syndicate."

Sal blanched a little at hearing his suspicion confirmed.

"Now," asked the woman, "How is it that you failed in your task to place a simple terrain deception AND get kidnapped to boot?"

"I'm glad to hear you admit I am in fact kidnapped," said Sal.

The woman furrowed her brow slightly. "I did not kidnap you, Mr. Grimone. Do I look like the sort of woman who is interested in underworld activities?"

"No," said Sal. "You look like the kind of woman is accustomed to getting what she wants."

The woman bit her bottom lip and a small smile crossed her face. "I suppose I am," she said. "You still haven't answered my question."

"I don't know why the hack didn't work. It should have. I don't know how the man in question managed to sneak up on me either. He shouldn't have been able to. The only thing I can figure out is something is fundamentally different about that area of the holonosphere. I might be able to figure it out with enough time, provided no one tries to kill me or torture me."

Light musical laughter erupted from the woman. "Really, you think you are that important that someone wants to kill or torture you because you failed at a terrain deception? I think your sense of importance might be a tad inflated."

Sal looked down at the floor. "I was evidently important enough to kidnap," he growled.

"This is so," said the woman, "but not because you failed. Rather what is desired instead is to provide you with an opportunity."

"You've got a hell of a way of doing it," replied Sal.

"I think you have forgotten to ask me a question since you answered mine," said the woman chidingly.

"Fine. Who the fuck are you?", retorted Sal.

The blond extended her hand. "My name is Felicita Pragma--chief researcher of Quantum Bayesian Algorithms--Agron Corp division."

Sal suddenly sat straight in his chair. What would an Agron Corp chief researcher possibly be doing with a shady underworld organization like Telray? Whatever Sal had stumbled into, he realized the intensity of it had just grown exponentially.