Focus on the work. . . .
If the terrorists had really been running Dragonslayer they wouldn’t even have seen the real life support center, much less been able to interact with it. So how could they have set off an explosion there? Not to mention, the virt was supposed to go into sleep mode as soon as a player entered a restricted area. It shouldn’t have been running at all in that location. But Dobson had a record of the two guys inloading the final quest segment right before the explosion. So they were definitely playing in a restricted area. How was that even possible? The longer he searched for answers, the more questions he seemed to have.
With a weary sigh he leaned forward on the desk, resting his head in his hands. He must be missing something. Some vital clue that would make all these conflicting elements come together. But it wasn’t in the game code. He was convinced of that.
A sudden knock on the door startled him. “What?” The proximity sensor should have alerted him that someone was approaching. Had he been so wrapped up in his thoughts that he hadn’t heard it? “Who is it?” He waited for the door to relay a response, but there was none. Great. He was going to have to check the settings again. Why couldn’t the damn thing just work like it was supposed to? He started to get up—
Suddenly the door gave way with explosive force, and two men in chitinous black armor rushed him. For a moment he was frozen in place, too stunned to respond, then he stumbled backward, trying to get away from them. As he did he grabbed the chair and shoved it in front of him, hoping to slow them down a bit. It was all he could think to do. Desperately he looked around the room for something he could use in self-defense—anything! But though the far wall was hung with dozens of weapons—display models from his game—they were too far out of reach.
Then one of the men yanked the chair out of the way while the other slammed into Micah, shoulder first, driving him into the desk. Equipment crashed noisily to the floor as the first man grabbed him by the arm, twisting it behind his back so hard that the pain was blinding. The other grabbed him by the hair, and together they began to drag him across the room. He struggled wildly, like a beast in a trap, but to no avail. They were stronger than he was and faster than he was, and they were clearly trained for this kind of confrontation. All he was trained to do was sit behind a desk and design imaginary fistfights.
He opened his mouth to scream for help, but then he saw the red Tridac insignia on one man’s collar, and the sound froze in his throat. They had come for him. That’s what this was. Tridac was going to accuse him of altering Dragonslayer. Who would help him if that were the case? No one who lived on this station, that was for sure. He was at the mercy of corporate justice now.
They dragged him out into the hallway, only it wasn’t a hallway anymore: it was a mouth now, armed with glistening fangs above and below, and the floor was its tongue. The men clearly meant to feed him to it—
He woke up.
Shaken, he raised his head from the table. His headset was askew, and he pushed it back into position. The desk was still in place. All his equipment was still on it. His heart was pounding so hard he felt as if a rib were about to snap, but his arm no longer hurt.
SYSTEMIC STRESS DETECTED, his wellseeker informed him. RED ZONE. ACTION? He drew in a deep breath, then visualized the icon that would release a bit of sedative into his veins.
A dream. That’s all it was. A fucking dream.
His friends had advised him not to take this job, he remembered. Terran corporations don’t operate by Common Law. If anything goes wrong out there, you’ll have no legal protection. But Dobson Games had made it clear that station residence was a condition of employment. For security, they’d claimed. In the end he had chosen to accept the risk in order to work with some of the best designers in the virtual immersion industry. Not to mention gain access to Dobson’s state-of-the-art equipment for his own research. Given some of the ideas he wanted to explore, that was no small thing.
Now all that was at risk.
He visualized the symbol that would connect him to the station’s innernet. Menu icons scrolled into his field of vision, and he looked for the one that would open the master archives. He needed to review Corporate Law so he knew exactly what his rights were. Could Tridac really send thugs after him, like they’d done in his dream? Or was he protected by due process, as he would be on the waystation? He needed to know, if for no other purpose than to banish his nightmares.
He found the icon. He started to activate it—
And stopped.
If he accessed those files, he realized suddenly, he would leave behind a data trail. What if whoever was spying on him checked his innernet activity? They would know he had been researching his rights. Would an innocent man do that?
He took his headset off. The menu icons faded from his vision.
I have to get away from here.
* * *
The docking ring was crowded as always, its private facilities teeming with uniformed stewards waiting to fawn over traveling executives, its public spaces just plain damn crowded. In the lobby of Public Transportation Center Five, row after row of people sat in the waiting area, most of them leaning back in their chairs as if asleep, their eyes flickering back and forth beneath half-closed lids as they focused on the digitized vista of their choice. All of them were terramorphs, of course, identical in shape to Earth’s first spacefarers. In Terran parlance, “they looked human.” No matter how long Micah worked on Tridac Station, he never got used to the eerie uniformity of its population.
He wandered up to the registration desk with what he intended to be a casual saunter, though it lost some panache in the lo-G setting. In truth his heart was pounding, and if any of the security cams focused on him were taking biological readings, they would detect it. Or maybe a real person was watching him. There were so many people here that anything was possible.
Just pretend you’re not worried. This is a normal booking. A weekend’s jaunt.
The clerk was a woman with a corona of blazing red hair. Ruddy freckles suggested her coloring was natural. “Can I help you, Micah Bello?”
Startled, he realized she must have run a facial recognition check as he’d approached her station. Of course. That was just part of her job, and of no significance whatsoever. “I’d like to book a pod to Harmony.”
“Singler, doubler, or multi?”
“Singler.”
“For how long?”
“Just the weekend.”
Her gaze turned inward as she accessed the necessary files. If Micah’s wellseeker notifications had still been active they would probably be blazing all the symptoms of his anxiety across his visual field, but the system had gotten so annoying that he’d finally put it into sleep mode. I’ll have to detect my own stress, he thought dryly. Just like an Earth primitive.