Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [88]
“Why bring us out here to the middle of nowhere?” she demanded angrily. “If it’s just a tape, why didn’t he just run it in a theater in San Francisco—or New York?” As she spoke, she planted two electronic eyes on her own head, one above each eyebrow. One of them had power enough to transmit a signal to the car, provided that nothing substantial got in the way, and the car’s power system would hopefully boost the signal sufficiently for it to be picked up by a relay sat and copied all the way to Hal Watson’s lair. Whether Hal would bother to watch the transmission as it came in she had no idea, but she took the trouble to give him notice of its imminent arrival.
The notice proved to be premature. Oscar Wilde had already located a downward-leading flight of stone steps inside the derelict building. It was obvious almost as soon as they had begun the descent—with Charlotte planting head-high nanolights every six or seven steps to illuminate their passage—that it had been hollowed out using bacterial deconstructors far more modern than the building itself. By the time they reached the foot of the flight, Charlotte knew that there must be several meters of solid rock separating her from the car. Her transmitter eye was useless, except as a recording device; no signal could reach the car’s sloth.
At the bottom of the stairway there was a very solid door made from some kind of synthetic organic material. It had neither handle nor visible lock, but as soon as Wilde touched it with his fingertips it swung inward.
“All doors in the world of theater open to Oscar Wilde,” Michael Lowenthal muttered sarcastically.
Beyond the doorway was a well of impenetrable shadow. Charlotte automatically reached up to the wall inside the doorway, placing another nanolight there, but the darkness seemed to soak up its luminance quite effortlessly, and it showed her nothing but a few square centimeters of matte black wall. The moment Wilde took a tentative step forward, however, a small spotlight winked on, picking out a two-seater sofa upholstered in black, set a few feet away from them.
“Very considerate,” said Oscar dryly. “Had you not been here, dear Charlotte, I would have been obliged to distribute myself in a conspicuously languid fashion.
As things are, one of us will be obliged to stand.” “I’ll stand,” said Lowenthal. “I’ve been sitting down too long.” Charlotte had to imagine the expression that must have been on his face as he looked at the sofa. There was no dust on it, but it was conspicuously cheap as well as very old. No modern MegaMall outlet would have stocked anything so tawdry.
“Shall we?” said Wilde. He invited Charlotte to move ahead of him, and she did, although she moved a little hesitantly through the darkness, unable to see the floor beneath her feet. There was an interval of five or six seconds after they were seated, and then the spotlight winked out.
Charlotte could not suppress a small gasp of alarm as they were plunged into a darkness which would have been absolute had it not been for the single nanolight she had set beside the door, which now shone like a single distant star in an infinite void.
When light returned, it was very cleverly directed away from them; Charlotte quickly realized that she could not make out Oscar Wilde’s form, nor the contours of her own body. It was as if she had become a disembodied viewpoint, like a tiny bubblebug, looking out