Out of the Black - Lee Doty [119]
He stacked the two pieces of the tablet in his concealed hands, and broke them again. He pulled the optical storage from the piece that had been the upper left quadrant of the ruined tablet, crushed it to powder between his fingers.
He left the untouched food on the table and got up from the booth. He took two steps toward the door before halting in mid-stride. He returned to the table and scooped up two spring rolls. Underground food usually stinks.
He paused again outside the restaurant's door. He stayed just long enough to hear the excited scream from inside.
To live is to fly, he thought, remembering the line from an old song. He was gone before Asuko bolted out the door looking for him.
***
The stolen microvan passed Mercy Memorial Hospital for the third time. Rae looked right and left, but didn't slow. It was a mid-sized building, maybe thirty floors, on the near north side of the city. Its stone was dark brown, its windows the deep gray of privacy glass, its overall impression was that of a twenty-first century castle. It seemed quiet, but for the moment, she was content to circle the block, attempting to wear a matching moat around the neo-baroque structure.
At a little before 2 AM, the only light was from the city itself. The light from below the sparse clouds gave the sky the color of a child's dream of the deep sea. Behind her, the mantra continued on one-minute intervals. "Seek medical attention."
"Stop naggin'!" When she'd left Jerry's, the idea of taking action was a relief- exciting even. Now, in orbit around the hospital, the end of her waiting seemed less to beckon and more to loom before her.
Finally, on her fourth circuit around the block, she turned right and headed down into the building's underground parking structure. Descending from night into artificial daylight, she guided the gray microvan to a halt in a small dead spot between two security cameras near the hospital's ambulance run. She gently unloaded the comatose bodies onto the sidewalk. After a few seconds spent resisting the mighty pull of common sense, her will won out over her fear and she closed the sliding door and got back into the driver's seat. A sob caught in her throat when she saw them lying abandoned in the rearview mirror, but then she rounded the corner and drove down through the levels of the parking garage. Though spaces were available on the second level down, she took the microvan all the way to the eighth, and lowest, level.
After winding through the whole level to find the most isolated spot, she settled on a parking space between two supports where a dim light left a few shadows.
She was about to see how much time her crazy plan would buy them.
She rummaged through the padded case Alex had brought from his apartment. After a few moments of tech archaeology, she located the item she sought. She removed the badge from her uniform and placed it on the interface pad of the item Alex had called the Hacktronic 3000. It was a little invention he'd been perfecting since his senior year in high school. It had been through many revisions, including four major rebuilds, but the machine's purpose had remained unchanged: to facilitate security mayhem.
Basically, it was a ROM rewriter.
Rae smiled at the memory of the first time Alex had introduced her to his little project. They had been together romantically for perhaps two months. Rae hadn't yet been told that she didn't live in the real world, so she was still shockable by illegal technology. She had been feigning interest in Alex's hobbies, so he had shown her his pride and joy. She hoped she could remember how to work it.
The HT3K (Alex's idea of a pet name, at least he'd stopped calling her 'girlfriend 1.0') rewrote the read-only Assisi chips like the ones in Unis and almost any other security system's hard keys. Alex might well be the only person in the world with the ability to do something so fundamentally dangerous to civilized society. With