Disclosure_ A Novel - Michael Crichton [140]
Sanders walked forward, stepping through the flowing river of static. The dog growled as he approached. The three heads swiveled, watching him as he passed with cartoon eyes. It was a strange sensation. But nothing happened.
He looked back at Fernandez. “Coming?”
She moved forward tentatively. The angel remained behind, hovering in the air.
“Angel, are you coming?”
It didn’t answer.
“Probably can’t cross a gateway,” Sanders said. “Not programmed.”
They walked down the gray corridor. It was lined with unmarked drawers on all sides.
“It looks like a morgue,” Fernandez said.
“Well, at least we’re here.”
“This is their company database in New York?”
“Yes. I just hope we can find it.”
“Find what?”
He didn’t answer her. He walked over to one file cabinet at random and pulled it open. He scanned the folders.
“Building permits,” he said. “For some warehouse in Maryland, looks like.”
“Why aren’t there labels?”
Even as she said it, Sanders saw that labels were slowly emerging out of the gray surfaces. “I guess it just takes time.” Sanders turned and looked in all directions, scanning the other labels. “Okay. That’s better. HR records are on this wall, over here.”
He walked along the wall. He pulled open a drawer.
“Uh-oh,” Fernandez said.
“What?”
“Somebody’s coming,” she said, in an odd voice.
At the far end of the corridor, a gray figure was approaching. It was still too distant to make out details. But it was striding directly toward them.
“What do we do?”
“I don’t know,” Sanders said.
“Can he see us?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“We can see him, but he can’t see us?”
“I don’t know.” Sanders was trying to figure it out. Cherry had installed another virtual system in the hotel. If someone was on that system, then he or she could probably see them. But Cherry had said that his system represented other users as well, such as somebody accessing the database from a computer. And somebody using a computer wouldn’t be able to see them. A computer user wouldn’t know who else was in the system.
The figure continued to advance. It seemed to come forward in jerks, not smoothly. They saw more detail; they could start to see eyes, a nose, a mouth.
“This is really creepy,” Fernandez said.
The figure was still closer. The details were filling in.
“No kidding,” Sanders said.
It was Ed Nichols.
Up close, they saw that Nichols’s face was represented by a black-and-white photograph wrapped crudely around an egg-shaped head, atop a gray moving body that had the appearance of a mannequin or a puppet. It was a computer-generated figure. Which meant that Nichols wasn’t on the virtual system. He was probably using his notebook computer in his hotel room. Nichols walked up to them and continued steadily past them.
“He can’t see us.”
Fernandez said, “Why does his face look that way?”
“Cherry said that the system pulls a photo from the file and pastes it on users.”
The Nichols-figure continued on walking down the corridor, away from them.
“What’s he doing here?”
“Let’s find out.”
They followed him back down the corridor until Nichols stopped at one file cabinet. He pulled it open and began to go through the records. Sanders and Fernandez came up and stood by his shoulder, and watched what he was doing.
The computer-generated figure of Ed Nichols was thumbing through his notes and E-mail. He went back two months, then three months, then six months. Now he began to pull out sheets of paper, which seemed to hang in the air as he read them. Memos. Notations. Personal and Confidential. Copies to File.
Sanders said, “These are all about the acquisition.”
More notes came out. Nichols was pulling them quickly, one after another.
“He’s looking for something specific.”
Nichols stopped. He had found what he was looking for. His gray computer image held it in his hand and looked at it. Sanders read it over his shoulder, and said certain phrases aloud to Fernandez: “Memo dated December