The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [47]
Smith passed a smartcard through a narrow slit in the wall. The bored teenage girl who accepted it fed it to her station with the world-weary air that was currently de rigueur among what the tabloids called “slaves of the machines.”
“That’s okay, Mr. Smith,” she said after consulting her screen. “Dr. Goldfarb’s waiting for you. Take elevator number nine. This afternoon’s code is 857. Thank you for your patience.”
Lisa tried to remember when “Thank you for your patience” had replaced such vapid formulas as “Have a nice day” in the standard lexicon of programmed social interaction, but she couldn’t put a date on it. Patience had been in such short supply for so long that the mantra might have come into use at any time between 2001 and 2030.
The principal design features of the high-rise had, of course, predated the establishment of the Containment Commission by some twenty years. Their ostensible purpose in the 2020s had been to offer protection against the ever-present menaces of client rage and employees inclined to “go postal.” Unfortunately, the equipment of such edifices with “fortress hearts” had quickly demonstrated that the quality of a fortress is only as good as the people and systems manning it. It hadn’t taken more than a couple of years to reveal the many kinds of chaos that could be created in such a building by a systems crash, and only a couple of years more to reveal how much worse such chaos could become if it were boosted by active malice.
Arguments had raged for years as to how much better each new generation of “foolproof software” really was—until the advent of new plagues had brought about a sudden reversal of public opinion as the millions of people who had to work within the carcasses of these monstrosities suddenly realized the advantages of careful isolation. The building housing the West-of-England office of the Ahasuerus Foundation was probably host to more than a hundred different megacorp groups and close to a thousand human employees, whose chances of picking up even so much as a common cold within its walls were negligible. Even the fiercest plague war was highly unlikely to touch inhabitants of institutions like this one, provided they kept their cars clean and their clothes smart. It also helped if they lived alone.
No wonder the world is overfull of workaholics, Lisa thought as the elevator smoothly carried them up to the thirty-first floor. While conversation was suspended, she took the opportunity to ring Mike Grundy and ask for news. He reported that Chan still hadn’t checked in and that his own attempts to see Ed Burdillon at the hospital had been thwarted by Smith’s men. He also confirmed that her flat was still out of bounds. Lisa asked him to transfer her car, some clean clothes, and a few other essentials of everyday life to the Renaissance. He promised to see to it.
“Did your people get anything useful from Ed Burdillon?” she asked Smith when she’d returned the phone to her belt.
“Nothing useful,” Smith told her, so glumly that it had to be true. “We passed the clothes he was wearing to Forrester—let’s hope he can come up with something.”
The elevator car was capable of sideways movement through “unmanned corridors,” as well as vertical movement in its shaft, so it eventually delivered them direct to a door that was supposedly unreachable by any other means.
Dr. Goldfarb was a little man in a dark-blue suit. The suit was as smart in the new sense as Peter Grimmett Smith’s, and considerably smarter in the old sense. Although the texture of Goldfarb’s skin implied that he was five or ten years younger than Smith and Lisa, he was wearing gold-rimmed spectacles that would not have looked out of place in a Dickensian costume drama; either he was something of a poseur, Lisa deduced, or he was untreatably phobic about lasers.
Goldfarb ushered his visitors through the reception area and into his station-packed inner sanctum. He seemed to be in sole charge