Mostly Harmless - Douglas Adams [27]
He slowly brought his breathing back under control again. He told himself repeatedly that he was just in a graphic representation of a world. A virtual universe. A simulated reality. He could snap back out of it at any moment.
He snapped back out of it.
He was sitting in a blue leatherette foam-filled, swivel-seated office chair in front of a computer terminal.
He relaxed.
He was clinging to the face of an impossibly high peak perched on a narrow ledge above a drop of brain-swiveling dimensions.
It wasn’t just the landscape being so far beneath him-he wished it would stop undulating and waving.
He had to get a grip. Not on the rock wall-that was an illusion. He had to get a grip on the situation, be able to look at the physical world he was in while drawing himself out of it emotionally.
He clenched inwardly and then, just as he had let go of the rock face itself, he let go of the idea of the rock face and let himself just sit there clearly and freely. He looked out at the world. He was breathing well. He was cool. He was in charge again.
He was in a four-dimensional topological model of the Guide’s financial systems, and somebody or something would very shortly want to know why.
And here they came.
Swooping through virtual space toward him came a small flock of mean and steely-eyed creatures with pointy little heads, pencil moustaches and querulous demands as to who he was, what he was doing there, what his authorization was, what the authorization of his authorizing agent was, what his inside leg measurement was and so on. Laser light flickered all over him as if he were a packet of biscuits at a supermarket check-out. The heavier-duty laser guns were held, for the moment, in reserve. The fact that all of this was happening in virtual space made no difference. Being virtually killed by virtual laser in virtual space is just as effective as the real thing, because you are as dead as you think you are.
The laser readers were becoming very agitated as they flickered over his fingerprints, his retina and the follicle pattern where his hairline was receding. They didn’t like what they were finding at all. The chattering and screeching of highly personal and insolent questions was rising in pitch. A little surgical steel scraper was reaching out toward the skin at the nape of his neck when Ford, holding his breath and praying very slightly, pulled Vann Harl’s Indent-I-Eeze out of his pocket and waved it in front of them.
Instantly every laser was diverted to the little card and swept backward and forward over it and in it, examining and reading every molecule.
Then, just as suddenly, they stopped.
The entire flock of little virtual inspectors snapped to attention.
“Nice to see you, Mr. Harl,” they said in smarmy unison. “Is there anything we can do for you?”
Ford smiled a slow and vicious smile.
“Do you know,” he said, “I rather think there is?”
* * *
Five minutes later he was out of there.
About thirty seconds to do the job, and three minutes thirty to cover his tracks. He could have done anything he liked in the virtual structure, more or less. He could have transferred ownership of the entire organization into his own name, but he doubted if that would have gone unnoticed. He didn’t want it anyway. It would have meant responsibility, working late nights at the office, not to mention massive and time-consuming fraud investigations and a fair amount of time in jail. He wanted something that nobody other than the computer would notice: that was the bit that took thirty seconds.
The thing that took three minutes thirty was programming the computer not to notice that it had noticed anything.
It had to want not to know about what Ford was up to, and then he could safely leave the computer to rationalize its own defenses against the information’s ever emerging. It was a programming technique that had been reverse-engineered from the sort of psychotic mental blocks that otherwise perfectly normal people had