The Escapist | Page 7

in the restaurant, Dirty Sara's Quick'n'Easy. Perhaps this was the contact I was after. Perhaps they wanted to make a deal. Or perhaps it was going to be another half-hearted attempt on my life. Either way, I felt man enough to handle the situation. I told the waiter to bring me the bill and to tell Harry that I would meet him at 20:30.
I spent the three hours before the meeting getting organised. I took a room under a pseudonym at a quiet and unassuming hotel, had a shower, and ordered from room-service a replacement weapon that would fit my remaining explosive rounds. Fully kitted-out and fresh, I took the lift back to Dirty Sara's and entered the eatery. I was early, so I ordered a drink. This time I had a whiskey and cranberry juice. The menu looked good, so I chose the honeyed zero-g turbot with au gratin sweet apple-potatoes. These were a genetic hybrid of fruit and root vegetable combined into something called a froot -- sweet and crunchy yet full of carbohydrates. Dirty Sara's diner had a relaxing environment, with early space scenes adorning the walls and waiters wearing bottomless costumes, another social comment. Ambient Vietnamese pop music was playing throughout the restaurant, though it was possible to change the audio for specific tables on request.
Harry arrived. He looked Southeast Asian, which was later confirmed when I learned he was from the Thai Free State. He was accompanied by a girl with the most amazing pair of legs but a face like a lamb's kidney. She was also Thai and went by the name of Santada. Harry approached with a huge grin which hardly left his face the whole time we were conversing. His associate was completely silent, but her eyes told me she knew exactly what was going on. Over dinner I learned that Harry was neither from COSI nor the group behind Chucky, whatever that was.
"My organisation does not want you dead, Mr Dean. On the contrary. We are most interested in assisting your research. We have a proposition to make to you. Your little police force would be very gratified to find out why great research scientists are losing their minds. There are also many in America who would like to find out how this has happened and what has been taken, and what for. My organisation can help you find some answers. We know that you in particular will be able to help us get what we want in return." Harry sat back and grinned an even wider, perfectly-arrayed dental display.
"What is it you want?" I asked.
"We know that you are not quite what you appear to your organisation. We have helped you out of a recent mishap at the Nexus-7 Research Centre. But we could easily place you in far greater trouble." This seemed like a combination of a threat and avoiding the question. It was yet another example of Pacific Rim inscrutability, I concluded.
"So, what do you want?" I asked again.
Harry then launched into a long and enlightening speech about von Kühnert's research and the importance of fibre-optics and neural nets. Finally, after a manufacturer's manual of technical detail, a lot of which I only vaguely understood, Harry began talking about a new kind of machine. The mind invasions were all linked to it, and Harry wanted it desperately. This was the first time I heard about Project Pure Light Abacus.
_Log 000001010010 -- Binary computing systems mimic the structural oppositions of human logic, and were developed from theories of language early in the 20th century. If a person is made up of memories stored in language, then an entire personality can be stored and transmitted using binary systems._
Freida was a real bimbo. Seeing her short skirt and obvious lack of wholesome underwear, most people who had ever met her quickly ascertained that she shaved all over except her head. Maybe even her luscious wavy hair was scalp-incorporated manmade fibre. It had felt real the last time I'd met her, but I hadn't seen her in years. Our previous encounter was in Prague where we'd both been trying to rob the same Russian bank. I'd had to knock her unconscious with a dead security guard's night stick to take the money for myself. It was a sensible move as she wasn't known as the Bobbitt Queen without reason. She wouldn't have let met get away with the cash otherwise. The last place I was expecting to meet her was on a shuttle back from the Moon to Earth. I learned later that it was nothing to do with coincidence. As she bent over me her cheap-looking cleavage, which had been surgically enhanced to comic proportions, jiggled into my face. Her special scent chemically engineered for her by Libyans wafted cloyingly towards