Chapter 6
Chloe’s aircab alighted not at the plebeian ground-level pads but at a pad at the edge of one of the Tower’s garden wings.
She disembarked carefully, because no fences separated her from the two-thousand-foot drop.
Not that the aircab had landed close enough to the edge for danger, but it was close enough to prompt her to pause for a moment and gaze at the city spread out below.
She could even see the White House, nestled among the treescrapers a mile and a half away.
Though the Tower was strategically situated so it could never be in the same shot as the front of the White House, news camera operators could never resist panning to the left.
The juxtaposition made the squat eighteenth-century mansion look like a relic, or maybe a movie set.
Old-fashioned or fake: That pretty well summed up the public perception of the part of American government that wasn’t Andrew Norman.
Chloe wished she had time to linger. She’d been inside the Tower before; its atrium was a popular tourist destination.
But the famous gardens were invitation only, and she’d just seen them in the backgrounds of photos of bigwigs at summits and galas.
As she followed the blue line, her feet sank into lush grass, and the trees and other greenery closed off the view of the city and gave her the feeling of being in some woodland glade.
Stay on the path, Little Red Riding Hood, she thought, and grinned a little.
Kleio would love this place. Take an eyegrab, she subvocalized—she’d send the picture to Marcus to show Kleio, a gesture to go with Chloe’s guilty promise before she’d left that they’d really, truly have a Theme Park Day as soon as Mommy could.
“I’m sorry,” said the cheerful voice in her ear.
“Photography is not permitted while the dome is clear.” Chloe jumped, not because of the voice in her smartbuds, but because another voice, nearby, had said the words simultaneously.
She hadn’t noticed the gardener dronebot just off the path, but now she saw that there were half a dozen of them, moving with almost solemn slowness among the greenery, servos whirring softly as they watered and sheared, keeping this paradise pristine for their human creators.
The nearest one nodded its smiling, digital face toward the dome, whose usually opaque glass was half cleared to let in the morning sunlight, revealing shadowy figures moving behind it.
Right. Inside the dome was the highly classified center where OverNet itself was administered.
Chloe blushed at her faux pas, even though the only observers had been dronebots, and hurried along.
The blue line led her to an elevator tucked in a copse of trees, which read her approach and opened to admit her.
After a short descent, the doors opened and the path shot out again, leading her down a hallway and into the conference room, a wide area almost as greenery-draped as the gardens and just as brightly daylit through floor-to-ceiling windows.
Water burbled along the back walls, feeding small trees and vines.
Chloe had to hand it to Norman, or at least his architect.
If Santa Clarita U had meeting rooms like this, nobody would want to meet in VR.
Besides the abundance of natural greenery, the room also contained Norman and half a dozen congresspeople.
Norman came to meet her on long strides, hand extended.
“At last. You really shouldn’t go off grid like that.
Grab a seat. We’ll get started as soon as I take care of this.
” He turned away and began talking into his smartspace.
“What blip? Emotives are considered stable, unless they hit ten percent. Two percent’s just noise.
If your mood were ninety-eight percent stable, that’d be pretty great, no? ”
Chloe seated herself at the long, polished, faux-stone conference table.
The man in the next chair looked up, smiling, and offered his hand.
Chloe didn’t need the notification that appeared above his head in her smartspace to tell her who this was: Carl Evans, original chairman of the Select Committee to Investigate the Cybercrash.
Despite his lingering reputation as the man who’d failed to find and punish Hacksaw, he was perhaps the second-most powerful person in Washington, now on his fifth six-year term and a favorite to be the next president.
While Norman had been recovery’s poster child, Evans had orchestrated much of it behind the scenes, promoting Norman’s ideas and championing his leadership.
“How are you?” he said, looking deep into her eyes. “I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Carl. That was some guts you showed last night. Norman took note.”
“Thank you,” Chloe said. They had met. She’d been introduced, had shaken his hand, had received the same warm, soul-searching smile. But that was before she’d become a pariah. Perhaps he’d erased her from memory—his brain’s and his phone’s. “I’m lucky there was an opening on this committee.”
Evans’s smile disappeared. “Yes. Poor Harkeet.”
Poor Harkeet? Chloe subvocalized a news search. There it was: He’d tripped over a cleaner bot in an elevator. Hit his head on the door. Doctors weren’t sure if he’d wake up. “I’m sorry,” Chloe said. “I didn’t know.” But she should have known. She should have asked herself why there was an opening.
“Just one of those crazy, unpredictable things,” Evans said. “Sobering to think about. He was so alive at our last meeting, full of fire, haranguing us.” He gave a slow shake of his head.
Chloe had never met Harkeet Majumdar, but she’d always felt an affinity with him.
They were both the children of immigrants (well, grandchild, in Chloe’s case, but Yai counted as her parent in her mind), which was increasingly rare.
Lip service to diversity was strong, but post-Cybercrash xenophobia was stronger.
Chloe had sensed a hesitancy, a certain suspicion, lingering around the edges of her political career that she’d put down to the cognitive disconnect people experienced when they met her, caused by the combination of the Irish name she’d inherited from her father and the Thai looks left to her by her mother, as well as the lightest trace of Yai’s accent, picked up unconsciously as a child and now something she would never consciously repudiate.
Harkeet’s name and accent marked him even more strongly as different.
And now he might never speak again. “What was he so fiery about?” she asked.
“About Norman’s plans to announce the System before we’d gotten a chance to see it.
He gave quite an impassioned speech. He said—you’re a historian, you should get a chuckle out of this—he said, ‘Are you going to wait until you hear Andrew quote Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita before you get scared by this thing?’” Evans chuckled.
After a moment, Chloe realized her mouth was open and closed it.
“Hey,” Evans said, giving her back a light thump, “don’t look so worried! Harkeet had—has—a flair for the dramatic.”
“But he felt strongly enough to oppose Norman.” Which was rare in a career politician.
“I wouldn’t say opposed. Or, maybe—what’s the phrase? Loyally opposed. He was the loyal opposition. He just saw things differently. Like you!”
The loyal opposition, huh? Who then suffers a freak accident and is removed from the picture? Careful, she thought. That way lay conspiracy theories. Occam’s razor: It probably really was a freak accident.
But it was no accident that Chloe was here.
Norman must have known what it would look like if Harkeet’s replacement were someone from his own ideological camp.
Chloe’s little outburst of principle last night had been perfectly timed.
She’d brought herself to Norman’s attention exactly when he needed her.
“Sorry, new technician wasting my time,” Norman said, turning back to the table.
“Mr. Evans, please start.” Those still standing seated themselves, except Norman—and, Chloe saw with a start, the older woman from last night.
She was leaning against a pillar at the far end of the room, as impeccably dressed as before, casually alert but aloof.
Chloe wasn’t sure how she’d missed her at first. Maybe because no one else was paying her any attention.
She returned Chloe’s sharp look with a bland one.
So “Grandma” was observing here. Who was she?
Last night Chloe had decided she was Norman’s plant, sent to purposefully goad her into speaking out so Norman could twist her words against her.
But she didn’t seem to be with Norman. And she couldn’t be a committee member, since she wasn’t an elected official—not that that seemed to stop Norman, who wasn’t part of the committee but had apparently called this meeting, and in his own territory no less.
Her gaze had turned toward Norman and was cool and appraising, as if she were studying him.
She had certainly studied Chloe. So who was she?
Once again Chloe told her phone to find out, and once again she got nothing.
No facial recognition. No MeNetID. She was no one.
In Norman’s world, only Very Important People could be no one.
“First order of business,” Evans said. “Welcome to our newest member, Chloe Dunne-Carr. You all remember her vicious attack on Andrew last night.” There was a smattering of laughter, and a corner of Norman’s mouth stretched.
“But Andrew knows he needs input from all sides, because . . . well, I’ll let him speak for himself. ”
“I had Mr. Evans call this meeting,” Norman said, “to ask for help from you all in convincing the rest of Congress to back the System when a vote is called next week to approve its launch on OverNet.”
There were murmurs of surprise. “Are we going to finally see it first?” Representative Jacobs asked.
“Nobody’s seen this thing yet?” Chloe hissed quietly to Evans.