The Escapist | Page 2

at Pee Wee's Strontium Gold, an establishment that specialised in girls just over the legal age, although many were probably under. His favourite drink, fittingly entitled a Kesey Cool-Aid Special, had been laced with that age-old perennial LSD while neither he nor his musclebound bodyguards were paying attention. As a result he'd had very little hold on reality when they came to get him. They'd easily disposed of the bodyguards. These two had been found a week afterwards, decapitated and naked in the deep freeze of a local French Restaurant.
Large traces of the LSD were still in the scientist's bloodstream when he turned up at his apartment a few days later. Nobody was really sure how he'd made it into the heavily-guarded South Kensington mansion building without anyone noticing. But he'd been there for over a day when they discovered him, sitting calmly in a leather armchair.
***
There was something very strange about von Kühnert's blank psyche, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Nosing around with the VR rig in the empty corridors of his mind, I could find nothing personal about him at all. The standard rig I was using reminded me of the remote control sets I'd operated when I was serving in the European Rapid Response Air Force. I had shot down two U.S. F-55s over Portugal without leaving a bunker in Hertfordshire. What a stupid war - six days long, with only thirty casualties (most of them from friendly fire) and nothing proven. Europe, with the newly-enlisted Ukraine, was an easy military equal of America. There was no point in any kind of competition between them except through trade. But even legitimate international commerce had become a stalemate, the major markets being so well protected by import taxation. The true battle was being waged by the underground businessmen such as myself, acting illegally in any country we chose. Many of us worked for the big corporations directly, although no company would admit it. That was how the most important goods moved across international boundaries, and how economic advantages were taken by one country over another.
The inner highways of von Kühnert's strangely absent mind were like the empty tunnels of New York's disused subway -- dark, dirty and dreamlike. I was using the VR rig's Hypermove function to speed my way through these tunnels while the plan of this neural maze was recorded on the flash memory of the Philips T1000. I intended to take a closer look at the schematic later. Instead of organised search, I was randomly hunting around to see if there was anything there. All I found was empty space. According to the scientific paper I'd skim-read the night before, with this kind of search you'd normally come up against all kinds of personifications of the subject's thought processes. It wouldn't be so easy to move around. You'd draw to a halt in a few virtual metres, unless the subject was unusually open and didn't mind giving out personal information, which nobody really was. Von Kühnert was totally devoid of anything, yet he wasn't dead. If he had been, there wouldn't have been any structures to see at all -- merely swirling polygons like those produced by early VR systems. This kind of random geometry was the end product of a graphics mapping system with nothing to map. I once logged into a guy's mind during the last four minutes of his life after I'd shot him, for kicks. It's hard to describe the scenes I witnessed - certainly nothing like the media cliché of green fields and sky. What I saw was due to the system having less and less to lock onto as the brain activity of the dying person faded. The distinct pictures that were conjured up, mostly evil-looking naked hermaphrodites, blurred into multicoloured polygons in eerie ways, then fizzled out. It was a sight far more beautiful than the Aurora Borealis, and far less expensive than a trip to Scandinavia. I don't even remember what this particular person's name was. Life had become pretty cheap, unlike information. He'd meant to forcibly obtain some facts worth rather a lot to an international pop music bulletin. Instead he'd had his vital internal organs splattered all over an adjacent wall.
COSI was an interesting place to work, especially as it was the Establishment, or what was left of it. Most of world government had been replaced by the infrastructure of multinationals. All that was left were police forces and the penal system, and even they were biased towards the people who donated large quantities to law-enforcement funding bodies. So, in reality, I was working for organised industry. It was more like being a private investigator than a forensic cop, not that I really had any qualifications to be either. I was reporting