Читать книгу Survival Gene. Science Fiction Novel - Artsun Akopyan - Страница 10

Rosalinda left and the trolley stopped right opposite the sofa.

Barkov’s stomach growled at the sight of food. He recalled that all he had this morning was just a cup of coffee and a piece of a sweet roll. There simply had been nothing else in the kitchen. He lived alone in a small one-story house in the north of Miami and often forgot to restock his kitchen.

The fruit and berries lying on the tray looked appetizing, although in some of them there were wormholes. It was a good sign – a proof of the absence of GMO. Worms could live in only natural crops!

Barkov took a large peach and sank his teeth into its fleshy tissue with delight. Chewing, he stood up and went to a window.

As before, the ocean seemed to be calm. The flat surface glittering in the sunlight – and no signs of a tsunami. Perhaps things were not that bad?

Bringing his forehead closer to the window glass, he looked down at the beach. It was about half a kilometer wide. Most of the surface was covered with dark green algae. It meant that water continued receding. Where to? Was there a crack in the earth’s crust? Was water going into it? Hardly. Deep in the planet, there couldn’t be any hollow space. There was high pressure inside. In case of a large fracture, movement would have started in the opposite direction – from within to the surface. That is, it would have burst out as a volcano. Or even a supervolcano such as Yellowstone. In that case, the consequences would be as devastating as a world-wide nuclear war.

Good Lord preserve us!

Terrified by his own thought, Andrew turned to Emily. She was eating grapes, plucking them one by one and looking at the fountain with concentration.

She has pretty fingers, Barkov noted to himself. Finishing the peach, he returned to the trolley, put the kernel on the edge of the tray and nipped off a few grapes.

It dawned on him that he would prefer to live in such a penthouse as opposed to owning the two-storied house he had been dreaming of for a long time. In the morning he would get up from bed and admire the bird’s-eye view of the ocean. The city, people, cars, problems – everything would seem to be small. It would be nice if his beloved one was there, too. Will I meet my other half one day? Or the world will collapse first?

The bamboo doors moved apart, and Rosalinda came out. This time she stopped three steps away from the doors that were left open. The woman’s lips stretched into a wide smile.

“Mr. Lorenzetti decided not to take your job offer,” she proclaimed. “Please walk out of the apartment.”

Barkov choked down grapes. “What? Why?”

“Katherine’s identity is not confirmed. Her real name is Emily Housman. You lied to us. But Lippo will not call the police. He doesn’t want a scandal. Besides that, he won’t charge you for the eaten fruit.”

She raised her hand and pressed a remote control button. The elevator door opened. Andrew thought, She uses buttons on her remote control for security reasons – she doesn’t want the signal to be intercepted by an intruder’s device and duplicated at a distance!

“But… how did you find out her name?” he asked trying to think of how to explain away the deception, but seeing no solid arguments.

“Have you forgotten who he is? Even if you had brought a girl from Mars, he would have uncovered her identity. Farewell!”

Andrew realized that his mission had failed. The best solution in this situation was to go out without making a fuss and to try to obtain the information about the government’s plans another way.

“Have a nice day!” he said trying to keep his composure and giving the sign to Emily to follow him as he walked to the elevator.

“I won’t go anywhere,” Emily uttered in a quiet, but firm voice.

Barkov stopped and turned back. The girl was sitting and still eating grapes.

“Oh, the beauty can speak!” Rosalinda showed a not very sincere surprise.

“Emily, we’ve agreed that I make the decisions,” Andrew said. “Get up, we are leaving!”

“No. Your plan has failed, so the agreement is void. Now it’s my turn.”

It was clear from her tone that she was not going to give in. Should I drag her by force?

“Dear Katherine… I mean, Emily,” Rosalinda cooed. “If you don’t leave this premise right now, I’ll turn on our cutting-edge microwave system. I wonder how long you will endure. In fifteen seconds, water will start boiling under your skin. In thirty seconds, blisters will appear. In a minute, your skin will be charred. I start countdown. Ten… nine… eight…”

The girl continued eating grapes as if nothing were wrong.

Pausing between digits longer and longer, Rosalinda kept counting. “Seven… six… five… four… three… two…”

This time, unlike the demonstration earlier, a tingling of danger penetrated Andrew’s spine. But he had no visions of the source or the target. No rush of energy to counteract it. He knew he should act yet how?

“…one… Well, you have only yourself to blame! Zero!” She shouted the next word, “Danger!”

Barkov felt no burning. Strangely enough, Emily didn’t show any signs of pain either. Moreover, she continued to chew the grapes, taking seeds out of her mouth and putting them on the tray near the peach kernel. Her fingertips, however, were trembling noticeably. That’s a sign of excitement, not pain.

“Are you not hot?” Rosalinda asked with genuine astonishment.

The girl shook her head and looked at the elevator. Its doors closed.

Rosalinda’s eyebrows flung up. She directed the remote control at the elevator and pushed the button several times. The doors jerked, but did not move apart.

“That’s weird,” she mumbled examining the control from all sides. “It must have broken down.”

“Bad quality?” Emily guessed as she stopped chewing.

Rosalinda uttered a short shriek. The remote control slipped from her hands, her eyes widened. Freezing for a couple seconds, she suddenly turned around and rushed to the bamboo doors. The doors drew together in her face. The woman seized the handle with both hands and tried to move a door panel. She was not a successful. Seizing the other handle, she pushed it to the opposite side bracing with her whole body. The door was motionless.

“Lippo!” she yelled as she clutched her head in hands. “It’s burning! It’s burning me!”

“That’s strange. You said I would be charred,” Emily observed.

It came to Andrew what was going on: The girl had “heard” how electronics worked on the premises and intercepted control. It meant her brain was able to emit electromagnetic impulses as strong as the remote control lying on the floor at the moment. He’d sensed danger earlier, yes, but the danger hadn’t been targeted at him. Whether it was from Rosalinda feeling angry at Emily’s response or from Emily’s intention to get rid of the assistant, he didn’t know.

“Stop it!” he commanded. “You’ll kill her!”

Emily pretended to be surprised. “Me? I have nothing to do with it! Don’t you see that it’s a problem with their system?”

Rosalinda ran clumsily to the fountain, jumped into the lower bowl and tried to hide under water. The container proved to be too shallow for her plump body. No matter how she sprawled and clasped to the bottom, water covered less than half of her. The naked parts – forearms, ankles, neck, face – started to redden.

“The madam lied to us,” Emily continued. “Thirty seconds have passed, but there are no blisters. Perhaps she’s thick-skinned? All right, it doesn’t matter. It seems to me, the system has just switched off. She’s so lucky!”

Spinning twice more and snorting, Rosalinda stopped in her tracks as she raised her head above the water level and waited. A bit later she sat up. Wiping her face with her palms and pushing her hair back, she looked about. Her face expressed nothing but terror.

The elevator doors opened.

“Flee now! As fast as you can!” Emily advised.

Rosalinda flew out of the fountain like a ballistic missile from a submarine and ran to the elevator. Wet clothes stuck to her body and instead of concealing her rolls of fat they now accentuated them. Entering the elevator, the woman hit the button a few times desperately. The doors shut. A faint buzz of the elevator going down was heard.

A moment later the bamboo doors drew apart without noise.

“I guess everything’s working fine now,” Emily stood up and looked at Barkov with a pleased smile. “Shall we start looking for the hacker?”

A part of Andrew knew that Emily should be reprimanded. She was still under arrest and should have executed his orders – after all he was still a public officer! On the other hand, he was not like his boss Palmer who hated any initiatives of his subordinates.

I have to admit the girl did well. She’s smart. And she achieved her aim!

“Let’s go.”

They made their way to the open doors, but a tall, lean man of about fifty came out before them. He wore a black suit, a white shirt and black shining shoes. His dark blonde hair was slicked back and the tips of his neat thin mustache were bent up. He stood in the doorway, raised his hands slowly and clapped several times. “Bravo, Emily Housman! Bravo! You are a real godsend. I’m ready to hire you. How much do you want a year?”

“Who are you?” Barkov asked.

“The one you’re looking for. Let me introduce myself: Lippo Lorenzetti, a computer technology expert.”

He bowed courteously.

In appearance, he was a typical dandy of the end of the nineteenth – the beginning of the twentieth century. Andrew had expected to see someone totally different – a person in creased jeans and a shirt worn outside the jeans, twenty years younger at that.

“Glad to meet you. My name is – ”

“Andrew, I know your name. I studied your file while your companion played with my poor assistant.” A shadow of a smile flitted across his face. “It must be admitted that I had been thinking about replacing her for a long time. She’s been eating too many sweets lately. Hopefully you, Emily, eat carefully to control your weight! But this is not the main point. I would be very interested in a person who can control electronics by force of her thought. How do you do that? I’ve never seen anything like that in my life!”

The girl tried to object. “Me? I can’t control any electronics. Why do you think – ”

“Don’t lie to me!” Lippo interrupted her in a calm and self-confident way. “I have equipment all around, as you mentioned rightly in the very beginning. The sensors detected the signal coming from you. It was quite strong! Haven’t you tried to light up lamps? For a fraction of a second at least?”

She shook her head.

“That’s okay!” Lorenzetti continued. “I’m not interested in lamps. We are not performing in a circus after all. On the contrary, our task is to stay in the shade. When you, dear Emily, start working with me, I’ll explain the rules to you in detail. Will six hundred thousand credits a year be sufficient for you?”

The girl’s eyes dilated. “Six hundred thousand? Legally?”

“Yes. Absolutely legally.”

“Of course it will!” She took a squint at Andrew for a second. “Well, on condition that we fulfill our mission first, that I’ll be free and the planet will not freeze or melt in the meantime. What will I have to do?”

“I’ll explain later. So, once again: do you accept?”

“Yes!”

“Excellent. In this case, my friends, let’s get down to your problem first. You were interested in some secret documents, weren’t you? Something about a refuge for the government?”

“Yes,” answered Andrew.

“What for?”

“I want to find out if the President told the truth about consequences of the planet’s core braking.”

“To what end?”

“To know what future awaits us. And to get ready.”

Lorenzetti laughed again. “To know the future? Do you think the President or any other mortal beings know God’s ways? And how can you get ready for what you have no idea about? My opinion is as follows: if the planet is fated to destruction, it will be destroyed. I’ll give you a simpler example: if you are fated to get smashed up in a road accident, you won’t drown in a swamp! Do you think you are able to change the march of time?”

If Andrew hadn’t known who he was talking to, he would have decided that this was an orthodox priest.

“I’m willing to try.”

The hacker laughed haughtily. “I pity you, but I won’t impose my opinion on you. One day you will realize your fundamental mistake. Follow me!”

Going through the open doors, he stopped in the middle of the next room. This room was twice as small. There were no windows in it, but it was lit up brightly by built-in lamps on the ceiling.

“This is my home office,” Lorenzetti said proudly as he spread his arms. “No sounds penetrate here from outside. An ideal place for work, isn’t it?”

Barkov glanced back. The doors shut behind them. This side of them seemed to be made of a white material equal to the material of the walls. No gap shown between the door panels. Were it not for a pair of metal door handles, one could have thought that the wall itself closed.

Is it a trap?

“A strange office,” Andrew said trying not to manifest his uneasiness. “Where are the tables and chairs?”

“I don’t use them as I prefer to work in the standing position. But I’ll let you sit down.” He raised his voice. “Computer! Lift two chairs!”

A part of the floor moved apart before his feet. From the square opening, two light brown spheres resembling large balls of wool emerged. Coming abreast with the floor surface, the spheres rolled to the wall on the left. Meanwhile, the floor closed.

Having stopped at the wall, the balls flattened. A hollow appeared on one side of them while the other side stretched up and bent. This resulted in two armchairs.

“Self-moving transformers,” Lorenzetti explained. “They can take the form of a table, a sofa, a carpet or, as in this case, an armchair. Have a seat!”

Andrew had seen advertisements of such goods, but had never bought them because of their high price. Lippo has lots of money. With his kind of work, it’s natural that he’d earn big fees. But what else might Lippo be involved in? What if legal work for various companies is just a cover, and Lippo is an ordinary crook with extraordinary abilities? If I wasn’t going to leave my job, it would be interesting to conduct an investigation.

He and Emily went to the armchairs and sat down.

“Is it comfortable?” the hacker asked with a pleased smile looking at the girl.

“Yes,” she said.

“If the seat is too hard, I can make is softer. If it’s too soft, vice versa. What would you like?”

“Nothing. Everything is absolutely perfect,” Emily said with some irony.

“That’s great. Let’s get down to business then. Here’s the globe!”

The planet appeared in the air in front of Lorenzetti. Its lower part floated several centimeters above the floor and the top almost reached the ceiling. The Earth looked like an absolutely real object. The sphere started spinning slowly. When the waters of the Atlantic Ocean passed by and the shores of the North America showed up, the sphere stopped. The hacker’s face was directly opposite Washington DC.

“Bull’s-eye!” he exclaimed with satisfaction.

Barkov knew that such realistic images could be created not in the air but directly in a viewer’s mind by a new game computer that cost more than fifty thousand credits. I wonder if this man pays taxes.

“Are you going to play a geography game with us?”

Lorenzetti looked at Andrew with astonishment. “Do you think it’s a game?”

“Of course.”

“You are mistaken. This is how our planet looks at the moment. The image is transmitted from satellites that remained intact after the asteroid attack. We are online!”

Andrew smiled wryly. Yes, he knew the government had devices such as this, with the ability to transmit images and sounds to a human brain in real time. The devices could be controlled by their owners who were able to select game modes and give commands mentally without lifting a hand or even stirring a finger.. But holographic representations like this one were beyond the means of anyone outside the government; only gamers with thick wallets could afford something that even resembled the real thing. “Give me a break!”

The hacker’s face became stern, almost angry. “I guess you have no idea who you have come to see. All right, I’ll prove it to you. Let’s start not with the President but with your mother. Is she home now?”

Andrew bristled at the mention of his mother – and Lippo’s threatening tone.

“Why do you want to know that?”

“I want you to make sure that this isn’t a recording of past events or an imitation of the present ones, but a reality. Is your mother’s address 1237, Southwest Street, Miami?”

Barkov nodded unwillingly. Really, Lorenzetti had studied his dossier thoroughly!

The globe turned down, then started to scale up. The North Pole disappeared somewhere under the ceiling and the South Pole, under the floor. The western and eastern parts went into the walls. The image shielded the part of the room that was behind it. It seemed that the planet’s surface was approaching quickly, not scaling up. Wind whistled in Andrew’s ears. Although he had the wits to understand that there was no danger, he felt a unpleasant chill in his stomach and a desire to back up.

Soon he recognized the Biscayne Bay outlines, the network of streets leading from the seashore to the center and, finally, the gray roof of his mother’s house. He could even see branches of trees around the house swinging from the wind.

“I’m switching to the street viewing mode,” Lorenzetti announced.

The point of view changed. A part of the room they were in turned into the street. This time the image was a bit dim. In some places of the image there were gaps where the opposite wall of Lorenzetti’s room could be seen. Nevertheless, Andrew easily recognized his mother’s house, three coconut trees growing in front of it and the garbage can lying on the road with some black bags of garbage and cola cans spilled out around it. He instantly remembered the burglars’ Cadillac that had run down the garbage can.

“That’s it! It’s her home!” Emily blurted out.

Andrew’s brain spun as he realized, Of course this guy has a brain e-vision system just like the government – he was probably the one who helped develop it! He was starting to understand why Lorenzetti was treated like such a highly secret government asset.

“It is her house!” Lippo claimed with triumph. “But that’s not all. Let’s switch to the premises viewing mode!”

The house scaled up and the spectators “entered’ the closed front door.

Nellie Barkov was collecting things scattered around the house and putting them into a cardboard box.

“Mom!” Andrew shouted as he jumped up.

Lorenzetti smirked. “Don’t shout, she can’t hear you. But we can hear her!”

The shuffling of the woman’s feet and remote voices that came seemingly from her old e-vision could be heard.

“That’s impossible,” Andrew murmured. Now his heart raced. No one could penetrate any private premise. First, it was illegal: the International Primal Privacy Act, enacted by the President years ago, ensured total privacy within any private residence. It had been a keynote in his campaign, as assurance to the world that eliminating borders and creating a World Government would allow all citizens to retain their privacy, not give it up in the process. Second, since Andrew worked in dangerous missions and he or his family could be a target for revenge, Andrew had installed an insulating shield on his mother’s home. It was a shield impenetrable by electronic interference to ensure his mother’s safety. Even an electronic bug placed in her house would set off an alarm on Andrew’s monitor. So… no way was this video feed from inside his mother’s house real – it was surely a hoax.

Raising his hand, Andrew looked at his mindphone ring on the fourth finger and commanded, “Connect with Mom!”

The old bracelet on Nellie’s wrist started to flicker. The call melody was heard. The woman stood straight, looked at the bracelet and pressed the button, smiling. “Listening, Son!”

Andrew’s skin crawled as he heard her voice. “Mom, are you at home now?”

“Yes, I am cleaning up. And where are you?”

“Not far off. I’m doing… business.”

Her voice became anxious at once. “Do you have any news? Have you tried to free Housman?”

“Not yet. I can’t discuss it at the moment. I’ll call you back as soon as I can.”

“Okay.” She paused. “Don’t forget to have dinner, Son!”

“I’m not hungry, don’t worry. Bye!”

Andrew disconnected. Nellie looked at the bracelet thoughtfully for a few seconds, then sighed and continued tiding up.

“Have I removed your doubts?” Lorenzetti asked.

Still shocked, Barkov nodded. Lippo couldn’t have modeled Andrew’s conversation with his mother beforehand. The big question was how had he managed to transfer video and audio from a house where there was not a single video camera and a total electronic shield?

“Fine! The next stop is the residence of the President of the United States of the World, Washington DC. You’ll be able to eavesdrop on everything said in that house as well. God help us!”

Lippo closed his eyes, crossed himself slowly and in a sweeping manner. Then he opened his eyes and looked intently in front of him.

The picture changed at once – Barkov felt as if he flew up through the mother’s house roof and soared into the sky.