The Escapist | Page 2

been caught
by the mind invaders. They'd picked him up when he was concentrating on one of the
artificially-structured beauties 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