17

Sal nursed his drink. He could just discern the heads undulating on the stereophonic kinetic floor. He had made it a habit to profile people by figuring out where they would eventually occupy the floor.

The stereophonic kinetic floor would have been a hit at Woodstock if it had been invented a thousand years sooner. Most people at a concert would keep time to certain notes, and ignore other notes. Some people preferred the baseline. Others preferred the higher notes. The reason that concerts typically featured a wall of speakers was not so people could better hear the music, but so people could better FEEL the music inside themselves. The pressure waves from the sound would literally rattle their insides, and for a little while at a concert, it was as if people literally were the music.

When the holonosphere appeared, it did not take long for someone to carry this phenomenon a little farther. Instead of having pressure waves populate the area and saturate people's bodies, it seemed like an easier way would be to translate these sound waves into literal kinetic waves. If you took a membrane and caused it to vibrate at different rates in different places in time to the notes, then you could have people participate more fully in the music. Hence, the stereophonic kinetic floor was born. People on the floor would in actuality undulate to the music in addition to dancing to it. The membrane was, of course, generated with help from the holonosphere.

An unexpected aspect of the stereophonic kinetic floor, at least for Sal, had been the observation that certain kinds of people tended to cluster around certain notes. If you happened to frequent bars as often as Sal did, you began to get a sixth sense of who would end up where.

Sal liked to amuse himself by testing his hypothesis. He had noticed a younger Asian girl who had entered the bar. She had her hair pulled in a combination of ceremonial buns on the side of her head along with multi-colored spikes in the middle. She wore a playful skirt and seemed to be the kind of girl who was emotionally excitable. Sal pegged her almost immediately as being the sort of person who would, like a hummingbird, center on the high notes to obtain a maximum amount of bounciness.

The gentleman who was her escort, though, was another story. He was roughly six feet tall, had darker raven hair, and had a stern countenance. Sal figured he would probably go nearer the baseline. Very often, couples would feature one bouncy person and one person who was more the stabilizer.

As the two made their way to the floor, Sal was not disappointed to discover his hypothesis was correct. The girl broke to the high notes almost instantly, whereas the taller gentleman took his time and found his place amongst the baseline. Even if people weren't making music with instruments, they did so with their beings.

Sal squinted as he looked down into his mug. The bright blue ale had a kick. He guessed they did not call it the Hyperspace Epileptic Tantrum because of its soothing properties. When he had ordered it, he had every intention of trying to ease his mind. Since he had learned what he had at Telray, there had been a tension inside of him he was finding difficult to shake. He was thankful Belvedere had found the solution to the problem posed to him, but his intuition told him that whatever Telray was planning to do, it was something more insidious than usual. It especially troubled him that Agron was involved so intimately. if Agron had seen it fit to cooperate with a shady underworld institution like Telray, the business that was about to be done had to be something several magnitudes more twisted than normal. The only good thing about it all was that he was in a position to potentially make some money since he had the only known solution to whatever deception it was that Telray and Agron were prepared to perpetrate.

A couple of stools down, some patrons were cheering. A few young men were playing a game of Bubble Joust. Bubble Joust was a drinking game enhanced by the holonosphere. Two competitors would find themselves on raised digital platforms. These platforms required a larger-than-average ability to maintain balance. One constantly had to shift their weight in order to stay centered on them. It wasn't particularly hard to manage for most people after an hour of practice. the movements became automatic like the legs sailors develop on ships when the seas are turbulent.

What made Bubble Joust interesting, though, was that each person had a stick with which they would try to attack the other person. the objective was to knock the other person off, but not necessarily by hitting them so hard they fell. Since the platform was constantly shifting, it was usually enough to nudge them. Patrons would gather and take bets on who would win. The losers would have to take a drink--including the guy who fell off the platform. Another round would start, and the person who had the round in him would have to fight against the alcohol, the platform, and the other guy all at once.

The weird thing about Bubble Joust is that you would expect the person who fell the most would be at a disadvantage. Sometimes, though, the exact opposite would happen. A person might have eight rounds to the other person's two, but suddenly at eight rounds, they would reach something like Bubble Joust Zen. The incoming hits would cease affecting their balance as much as the person who was sober. Since the other person was trying so hard to knock the other guy down, their overconfidence worked against them and they would fall off instead. This tactic was dubbed "The Gandhi" because the winning person won by taking no attack at all. It was not always meant as a compliment as Gandhi's example at the dawn of the holonosphere had been used as a reason why people ought to accept certain policies they did not agree with. If a person used this tactic too much in a game of Bubble Joust there was a good chance others would throw him out of the bar.

Sal could hear the cheers and the telltale splash of one of the losers. Some people drink to have a good time, whereas others drink to forget. The two usually did not mix well. Those trying to forget were often annoyed by those who were having a good time. About the only variety that circulated between these two camps with ease were those trying to get laid.

Sal rubbed his temples as he remembered how Felicia had escorted him out of Telray. She had blindfolded him--with a real blindfold.

"Some things," she had purred, "are best done the old-fashioned way, do you agree Mr. Grimone?"

"I can think of a few things I prefer to do the old-fashioned way that involves blindfolds,", said Sal. "That ain't one of um."

"Oh, Mr. Grimone, please. It is either this or slipstream travel."

As she had fixed the blindfold, Sal felt her take his hand. Without his vision, he was forced to concentrate on the soft warmth of her. Her hand felt delicate, but yet also firm. What had surprised him was how she had somewhat playfully rubbed the inside of his hand with her index finger. He was not sure if it was absentminded on her part or intentional.

"Do you always take such careful pains to care for your prisoners, Felicia?"

"No. You are a guest!", she chirped. "I should think a prisoner would have a far less pleasant experience. Now I'm going to let Mr. Trigone escort you to the nearest Palcan with instructions to remove your blindfold once the Palcan is in motion."

"I suppose I won't be able to ask for the after-date kiss, will I Felicia?" Sal sneered.

To his surprise, Sal felt her soft, warm lips on his cheek for an instant.

"I'm afraid that is all we will have time for, Mr. Grimone. See you around."

Sal quickly sensed a burly arm shoving him in some direction less than delicately. "My, My, Felicia, you do like it rough," Sal said sarcastically. He heard a guttural grunting in reply. Mr. Trigone was not amused.

Soon Sal felt the sitting sensation of being on a Palcan Transport. As soon as the motion was underway, he suddenly had the feeling of his blindfold being loosened. The blindfold came off, and the next thing Sal saw were the knuckles of a fist approaching his face. When they made contact, he saw stars. When he came to again, there was no sign of Mr. Trigone. Apparently, Mr. Trigone had not gone to etiquette school.

Sal figured a punch to the face wasn't so bad for the information he had gained. The joke was on Felicia and Telray. He had cracked their code, and they were none the wiser. He sipped his drink as he consoled himself with this thought.

Sal glanced at some newcomers. They carried themselves strangely--too officially. These guys were not here for the ambiance or for the sake of relaxation. They had a purpose, and they were all dressed very similarly. Each of them wore a sharp black suit. Sal recognized the suit as an urban adaptive camo. Its default was set to suit, but it could have very easily blended itself into the environment. Since it was not doing so, it could only mean that the men wearing them wanted to stand out--which meant they were likely on official business. The slight bulge of the sleeve meant that these guys were armed--probably with neural incapacitators.

Sal had learned that when official-looking people came searching around an environment, it was best even if one noticed them to pretend that one had not. he turned back to his drink and huddled over it as though it were the sole focus of his world. He had extended his senses, however, to encompass the room behind him so as to be aware of any information concerning the men who had entered.

They seemed to be searching earnestly for someone. Sal could hear them asking patrons if they had seen a particular man. He assumed they were then shown an image. Sal didn't know who these men were looking for, but he knew he felt very uncomfortable. 

As the men in suits made their way around the room, Sal saw out of his peripheral vision that one of the patrons had looked hesitantly over in his direction in an uncertain way. The men in suits followed the patron's gaze. One of them nodded slightly and made some movements that indicated he intended to come over to where Sal presently sat. Sal was out of time. He had zero interest in talking to these men, and he intended to make sure he did not. The most obvious hack he could think of involved the audio system. If he could get into it, and he probably could, he could likely create a diversion long enough for him to slip away unnoticed, but he would have to work fast. Sal regretted ordering that Hyperspace Epileptic Tantrum. Fortunately for him, his subconscious skill was more than sufficient for hacking the audio of the place, as most people had no reason whatsoever to want to hack it.  

He pulled up his interface, audio only. He whispered a few commands into it unobtrusively. His first order of business was to take an image of himself as he sat at the bar right now. Once this was accomplished, he overlapped the image of himself over himself. There were now two copies of him. One was an illusion, the other was Sal. he whispered another command and the image that was actually him was physically altered to that of a middle-aged businessman, slightly overweight. No one would notice this change, so long as the over-layered image of himself remained. Now the tricky part came. He needed to create a distraction for long enough to get his actual altered self away from his broadcasted image. If someone saw him suddenly emerge from behind his broadcasted image, they would know it was an illusion. Sal needed no one to notice as he slipped away. Simultaneously, he pushed some commands to his overlapped image to be as evasive and to stall as much as possible. Depending on how good these guys were, it probably wouldn't last very long. he could buy a little additional time with a surprise he had in store, however. Sal pushed the surprise he had marked "doppelganger overload" to be triggered the instant his holographic overlay had been determined as fraudulent. This would be decided by a program that operated like Belvedere but was less covert. It would make an inference as to the intentions of the men on the basis of what it "observed". What the program would observe from its perspective would be a series of points in space, but if those points in space began to move too quickly away from the holographic overlay, it would be able to sense that something had occurred that required a new action as programmed by Sal.

After making these quick changes, Sal selected the song "March of the Shapers" for his audio hack. He was going to use mass indoctrinated patriotism to his advantage. When people heard this song, they were compelled to stand and sing. It was not that they had to, but rather if they did not others would tend to give them dirty looks and make less than charitable assumptions about them. Sal cranked up the volume so that everyone would momentarily be distracted by the source of the sound. With a little luck, this would allow just enough time for his new identity to separate from the old.

The man in the suit was very nearly Sal. Another 20 steps or so, and he would be on top of him. Sal pushed his distraction, and as the speakers of the club blared, the man stopped in shock to determine what this new noise was that was assaulting him unexpectedly. When other people stood up and started singing,  he knew he too had better begin singing. In that instant, Sal separated himself from his holonospheric image. It looked odd that his image was still sitting in this setting, but because he was seated at the bar, there was a good explanation. Clearly, he was so wasted that he hadn't noticed the change--or so people might think.

One thing that Sal hadn't counted on was that the stereophonic kinetic floor had responded to the change in the selection of the music. The sudden volume made the kinetic waves reach higher peaks, and people were taken by surprise and were screaming in shock as they adjusted to their new situation. The good part of this was that it drew attention away from Sal even more. 

Sal quickly made his way over to the patrons playing Bubble Joust. He had thought of leaving but figured the men in suits would find such an action suspicious. He would instead hide in plain sight, and maybe gain some additional info. 

In his peripheral vision, Sal saw the man try to take his virtual image by the arm. The main reacted instantly--almost before his fingers touched the image's arm. the ping alarm rose in Sal's ear, and simultaneously an alarm began to sound. They had broken his best encryption in about two seconds once they learned of his deception. Inner Sanctum was a force to be reckoned with. Sal would probably have been able to break it as fast if not a little faster, but he was one of the best in his field.

At almost the same time the encryption broke, Sal's little surprise became activated. The inferential algorithms must not have liked what they were seeing, and Sal was inclined to agree with them. The bar was suddenly flooded with images of Sal. All of them were in different poses, and all of them were talking loudly to one another. The vast majority of them were moving. The men seemed less surprised than Sal was expecting. When Sal's display started sounding another audible alarm, he understood why. The men were preparing to flood the bar with Polarized Micro Particles, or PMP's for short. 

PMP's were a curious feature of the holonosphere. They had their origins in self-referential logic as present by the logician Kurt Godel. Godel had concerned himself with logic that was self-referential in the sense that numbers could often talk about themselves where their properties were involved. The easiest way to think about it would be a stranger whom one was curious to know. When one makes inquiries to a stranger, the stranger might say, "The only thing I can tell you about myself is nothing." Has the stranger told you anything about himself? Yes and no. One knows something, namely that the stranger can tell you nothing of himself. Logically, such matters become tricky, as sentences arise that say things such as "This sentence is false." How does one evaluate such a statement? This question had been what Godel considered at least a thousand years ago. Godel eventually concluded that whatever system a person cared to construct logically, provided it could do basic arithmetic, that system would make some statements that could neither be proven true nor false within the system itself. It was, in essence, incomplete.  

What Godel had found even more pre-historic Zen masters had found. They had submitted that all phenomena were ultimately empty. If one believed something, it was because one had convinced themselves to believe that something. The holonosphere emergence had come about directly because people had been forced to accept that reality was a hologram. In moving away from the assumption that reality was concrete, it was possible for them to experience a different, broader version of reality. Had they given up the idea that reality was a hologram, it is hard to say what might have happened. 

Self-referentiality had a curious effect on the holonosphere, though. Since the holonosphere was adaptable in many ways, when it encountered self-referential statements in the physical form of what amounted to a Zen koan, it would cause the entire holonosphere to glitch. It would glitch because for a moment it would be trying to respond to the PMP's which were particles that basically asked the holonosphere to evaluate the truth of "This sentence is false." Such a question had the effect of making the holonosphere as an entity face its emptiness, and in so doing it would become momentarily empty before it could re-shape itself to a different representation of reality. Since the holonosphere was fractal, it was likely it would re-shape itself near a strange attractor. In other words,  it was more likely it would return to a close approximation of what it was prior to the flooding of the PMP's than it was to become something radically different. Most of the time, PMP's flooded the holonosphere just long enough to reveal holonospheric deceptions. since the old physical reality was slower to react, the PMP's didn't affect it so much. Since the holonosphere adapted so quickly, most people never noticed it glitching. Perhaps they might be near the source of the particles, but other users of it farther away in the world would not necessarily experience any unusual behavior where it was concerned. 

A PMP burst was not fundamentally different than a machine gun burst as far as Sal was concerned. He needed to get the hell out of here, and quickly.

Sal figured one of the easiest ways to slip away would be to stumble toward the restroom. This would be easier for him to do with all of his clones populating the room. A drunk man would find nothing strange about such a scenario. If Sal could stumble his way through it, then he could make it to the restroom and devise a plan of action. He figured he had a good minute and a half or so by common time before the PMP's would be ready to flood the area.

As Sal staggered his way through the crowd and away from the Bubble Joust tournament, he chanced an unfocused glance back at the men. So far his deception appeared to be working. The men were preoccupied with prepping the PMP's and also keeping an eye on all the clones of Sal to make sure none of them stood out as him. It was likely that they had switched to enhanced vision which would give them better clues as to who was a person and who was a mirage. Enhanced vision could detect things like heat signatures. Since the deception Sal had employed involved buying a little time, he had not been thorough in making sure that all forms of information that a human body can have were provided. The men would notice that all the copies were fakes, but they might be hoping to spot one that was the real thing.

Sal ambled into the men's restroom. Fortunately, the room was clear. Sal composed himself. He probably had a little under a minute to get himself out of this situation. He had heard that Inner Sanctum was not below utilizing interrogation methods if they really wanted to know information that person was not willing to provide. Thoughts like that provided Sal with a greater-than-average motivation to solve the predicament in which he found himself. In the restroom, up high in the wall, was a small window that allowed light in. It was transparent--it used some sort of semi-translucent stone that allowed light in but didn't allow people to see through it. Seeing the window reminded Sal of a hack that he had used very early in his career when he did not know much about deception. In fact, he'd used it mostly to evade various authority figures after he had done something they weren't happy with. Often, this took the form of petty burglary. He could make himself a rip.

A rip worked in old physical reality because it bent the existing laws more than it broke them. a rip realized the truth that most solid structures had more space in them than substance. A brick, for example, had many pores in it and space between atoms. It had less space than less dense substances, which was why it was a brick. However, if one could arrange all the space in a seemingly solid structure and concentrate it in one area for a moment, then one could make a doorway where none existed. Usually, the door would be misshapen and jagged. It was not a pretty egress by any stretch of the imagination--so hackers had taken to calling them rips. 

Rips were considered a distasteful hack mostly because they were not all that elegant, and usually people didn't use them and those that did were often looked down upon. Sal wasn't all that concerned about his status in the eyes of other hackers. He was more concerned about getting away from where he was. In real life, one did not need an aesthetically elegant solution so much as any solution that would accomplish the ends sought. Sal called up his interface and formed a crude rip in about the middle of the wall. he dove through headfirst into what he guessed was a small utility shed that shared the restroom wall. The rip closed behind him and he found himself encased in darkness. he took a few moments to collect himself--just long enough to notice the extremely bright glow permeating the shed. The PMP pulse had been set off. Sal had just caught the edge of it, and so his disguise only barely wobbled. His clones that had been left behind in the bar were probably not so lucky.

Sal weighed his options. the man inside would be monitoring the effect of the pulse for a while. If he stayed where he was, they might just leave of their own accord. Since Sal knew they were Inner Sanctum, however, he figured they would likely form a search perimeter once their concentration inside had yielded no result. Undoubtedly, they would search this shed. Sal needed to press his time advantage while he could. He found another wall in the shed that was clear and formed another rip, and found himself near the back side of the bar outside.

As Sal got to his feet, he discovered that a piece of his disguise was not as unscathed as he had presumed. As he caught a glimpse of himself in a nearby puddle, he noticed that his face was part businessman and part Sal. The rest of him was distinctly businessman, but the face was arguably the most critical part. It was almost at the same time that Sal felt something press into the small of his back. 

"Mr. Grimone, I presume. I wouldn't do anything silly. I'd have to have to use this on you. We are just going to take a nice trip down to Inner Sanctum Processing and have a little discussion. I hope you didn't think your little puppet show back there would be enough to keep us from finding you. After all, a simple matter of signal triangulation in retrograde time gave us your position near those gentlemen playing Bubble Joust. Once we scrubbed through the footage and saw your disguise, we could trace its movements to the restroom. We were a little surprised that you resorted to using a rip, but desperate times call for desperate measures, don't they Mr. Grimone?"

Sal sightly slowly. "Since you guys know so much, I assume you know what I need right now the most."

The voice behind him laughed. "We are sharp, Mr. Grimone, but we are not psychic. If I were you, I'd probably want to get away the most right now."

"Close," said Sal. "I want you assholes to blow me!"

The man broke out into a convulsion of a belly laugh. "We'll see what we can do abou..."

Sal suddenly felt the man's hand go slack. Then he heard a new voice.

"Mr. Grimone, I don't have time to explain to you who I am, and I can't hold this gentleman for very long. I suggest you make your escape now. Inner Sanctum gets particularly ill-tempered when they find their security has been circumvented. Since they will continue to look for you, you are going to have to trust me. Come to Underside in the Old District. When you pass by Iron Bastion, you will find a cottage. You'll know it when you see it. RUN!"