Chapter 33
Jason rolled out from under the cab on the deserted bridge.
The dogbots had herded everyone away to take cover in the hotels and shops and office buildings on the far side, their commanding voices growing distant as they spread out to clear more streets.
Now he crouched and looked across the dark and motionless cabs at the dark and motionless DC skyline.
Without lights in their windows, the treescrapers seemed to recede into the growing rain like colossal trees in some primeval forest.
The weirdest thing was the quiet. The city usually hummed to itself, a background rumble noticeable only if you listened for it—the low thrum of thousands of electric engines, the rolling of tires on the street, the insectile whine of aircabs, the distant roar of a passing jet.
Now its voice was stilled, the only sounds the hiss of rain and an occasional growl of thunder.
Sprite had him pegged, all right: He was a machine, a weapon, as programmable and hackable as those dogbots out there.
But as a machine, he now had no emotion, and as a weapon, he was aimed at Sprite’s heart, or whatever part of her circuitry was analogous to it.
He would go about this mission as detached and impersonal as Sprite herself.
The rain helped. He had to keep blinking against the water that ran in rivulets from his plastered hair down his face, smelling and tasting of ozone and cheap hotel shampoo.
Dronebots couldn’t blink, and though their sensor eyes would be treated with a water-repelling coating, the rain should still impair their vision.
He kept to the footlanes and the elevated parkways, checking at each corner and intersection before moving on, running when he dared and had the breath, jogging or slinking in between.
An unexpected challenge was the lack of GPS.
He hadn’t realized just how reliant he was on being able to see a destination marker in his smartspace.
Without OverNet, he had only a general sense of the direction—north, toward Georgetown—and a vague memory of the names of nearby streets. But he knew it wasn’t far.
The treescrapers thinned as he went north.
Georgetown hadn’t suffered the same level of rioting and burning in the Cybercrash as inner DC, but during the rebuild, anything deemed insufficiently historic was taken down and replaced, at government subsidy, with a modern, green equivalent, especially in the areas closest to DC proper.
Jason hurried past apartment complexes like miniature versions of the Tower: sleek, curving structures that seemed half glass and half greenery.
Raised footpaths wound through these areas, connecting buildings by so many different routes that the residents jokingly called this neighborhood the “Enclave.” The luxury and informal connectivity drew the biggest of big names.
Career politicians, diplomats, the heads of bureaucracies, Supreme Court justices, CEOs and owners of corporations, rumored presidential mistresses—name someone with DC influence and they probably had a primary or secondary residence in the Enclave.
MorDread had said the System’s core was transportable and had been moved before. Apparently all Norman had done was rent a swanky house. But what better place to hide something than a neighborhood where only the rich and powerful lived? Any disturbance here would be swiftly noted and dealt with.
He ducked under a tree as the dark shape of a rotored drone whined low and slow overhead, searchlights stabbing through the rain. After it disappeared, he slunk out and was confronted with an intersection. Yeang Avenue. Pandala Street bisected it, he remembered, but in which direction?
After a moment of indecision, he turned right—and froze.
Twenty yards ahead, a shape crouched in the rain.
It could be one of the decorative stone formations that marked the entrance to a footpath, but something about it made him stay still, watching, rain running into his eyes and mouth, before he finally took a hesitant step forward.
The shape moved.
He turned and quick-walked the other way, but when he looked back, the shape was closer, bobbing with a slow, deliberate motion that made him think of a cat stalking a bird.
He ran. After the first heavy, splashing footfalls, he realized the dogbots would have auditory sensors and cursed himself, but now the thing was following more quickly, and he couldn’t slow. In moments, he was sprinting down the path, panic grabbing at each gasping breath.
Another figure appeared in the curtain of rain ahead, this one human shaped, and for a very brief moment, Jason felt relief at not being alone, but then a flash of lightning revealed its angular body and digital face.
He veered off the street and onto the nearest footpath.
The shapes followed; another loomed ahead.
He veered again. Yet another crouching shape.
Veered again. This was a nightmare, one of those dreams of being stalked, in which wherever you turn, your stalker is already there, always just out of clear sight, always getting closer.
He was running past the backyards of beautiful single-residence buildings now, the Green DC equivalent of status mansions: tiered Frank Lloyd Wright–like combinations of stone and glass, sloped grass and shrubbery and waterfalls.
Each had a labeled gate. He had almost passed one when he did a double take.
383.
383 Pandala? Despite the oncoming feral shapes, he skidded to a stop. It had to be; that was why there were so many dronebots here. Somehow he’d blundered inside their perimeter, so now any direction he went, he ran into one. Without their knowing, they had herded him to his destination.
They were getting closer, nosing for him, but they couldn’t have a good fix in the rain or he’d be dead already. He vaulted the gate and dropped to lie with his back against it on the other side, breath held.
Heavy, sploshy footfalls came closer, closer, stopped. For a very long time, nothing happened.
The footsteps splashed away again.
He waited another long beat but heard only rain and grumbling thunder. Rising to a crouch, he scrambled up the long slope of lawn to the huge picture windows of the house.
They were shattered. Glass crunched under his feet as he stepped carefully through the jagged remains of a window, out of the rain and into a wide sitting room that was mostly open space.
A couple of low couches were set at right angles on the hardwood floor, but they were draped with plastic sheeting.
This house wasn’t lived in. But that didn’t mean something didn’t reside here.
When this neighborhood had been built, Norman had probably made sure some of these houses had direct networking routed in from the Tower.
Sprite’s core would be downstairs, where the cables would come in.
He headed for the staircase, passing the front door.
Beside the entryway was a parcel door, one of the modern bot-accessible ones big enough to accommodate almost any size of package.
At the bottom, a few pieces of junk mail lay under a thick layer of dust. He paused to read the addressee: Regina Wright or Current Resident.
So Regina Wright had lived here, once. She had sat on those now-shrouded couches, looked out the now-shattered picture windows, enjoyed the life of luxury her brilliant mind had earned her. And then her own creation had broken her heart, literally, and watched mockingly as she died.
He moved cautiously downstairs until he could see into a second sitting room, as wide as the first, but filled wall to wall with equipment: half a dozen server racks, coils upon coils of cables, even what looked like a quantum computer, an elegant pipe organ of brass refrigerant tubes, snaking wires, and cooling lines.
Dotted around the room were bulky white machines he couldn’t identify.
Dust lay thick on them, but they were active, their dated readouts and LED panels casting a soft sheen on the quantum computer’s brass.
One emitted a low, repetitive, strangely familiar beeping.
Wires snaked from every machine, joined together into thick bunches, and ran to the center of the room, where they met at an oblong pod about three feet wide and six feet long.
Sprite’s core.
Directly in front of the core, facing the stairs, sat a dogbot. Its servos whined softly as its turret head swiveled watchfully back and forth.