it. He reached to his waist and grabbed the bottom hem of his
navy blue t-shirt and pulled the shirt over his head. Dropping it
to the floor, he kicked off his shoes, stepped out of baggy tan
pants and loose white cotton underpants and stood naked, his pale
skin gleaming with a light coat of sweat. His skin felt hot, eyes
grainy, stomach sore.
He stepped up and into a chrome half-egg, then shivered and
lay back as body-warmth liquid bled into the slack plastic, which
began to balloon underneath him. He took hold of finger-thick
cables and pushed their junction ends home into the sockets set in
the back of his neck. As the egg continued to fill, he fit a mask
over his face, felt its edges seal, and inhaled. Catheters moved
toward his crotch, iv needles toward the crooks of both arms. The
egg shut closed on him and liquid spilled into its interior.
He floated in silence, waiting, breathing slowly and deeply
as elation punched through the chaotic mix of emotions generated
by drugs, meditation, and the egg. No matter that he was going to
relive his own terror, this was what moved him: access to the
many-worlds of human experiencetravel through space, time, and
probability all in one.
Virtual realities were everywherevirtual vacations, sex,
superstardom, you name itbut compared to the egg, they were just
high-res videogames or stage magic. VRs used a variety of tricks
to simulate physical presence, but the sensorium could be fooled
only to a certain degree, and when you inhabited a VR, you were
conscious of it, so sustaining its illusion depended on willing
suspension of disbelief. With the egg, however, you got total
involvement through all sensory modalitiesthe worlds were so
compelling that people waking from them often seemed lost in the
waking world, as if it were a dream.
A needle punched into a membrane set in one of the neural
cables and injected a neuropeptide mix. Gonzales was transported.
#
It was the final day of Gonzales's three week stay in Pagan,
the town in central Myanmar where the government had moved its
records decades earlier, in the wake of ethnic rioting in Yangon.
He sat with Grossback, the Division Head of SenTrax Myanmar, at a
central rosewood table in the main conference room. The table's
work stations, embedded oblongs of glass, lay dark and silent in
front of them.
Gonzales had come to Myanmar to do an information audit. The
local SenTrax group supplied the Federated State of Myanmar with
its primary information utilities: all its records of personnel
and materiel, and all transactions among them. A month earlier,
SenTrax Myanmar's reports had triggered 'look-see' alarms in the
home company's passive auditing programs, and Gonzales and his
memex had been sent to look more closely at the raw data.
So for twenty straight days Gonzales and the memex had
explored data structures and their contents, testing nominal
functional relationships against reality. Wherever there were
movements of information, money, equipment or personnel, there
were records, and the two followed. They searched cash trails,
matched purchase orders to services and materiel, verified voucher
signatures with personnel records, cross-checked the personnel
records themselves against government databases, and traced the
backgrounds and movements of the people they represented; they
read contracts and back-chased to their bid and acquisition; they
verified daily transaction logs.
Hard, slogging work, all patience and detail, and so far it
had shown nothing but the usual inefficienciesGrossback didn't
run a particularly taut operation, but, as of the moment, he
didn't seem to have a corrupt one. However, neither he nor
SenTrax Myanmar was cleared yet; Gonzales's final report would
come later, after he and the memex had analyzed the records at
their leisure.
Gonzales stretched and rubbed his eyes. As usual at the end
of short-term, intensive gigs like this, he felt tired, washed-
out, eager to go. He said to Grossback, 'I've got a company plane
out of here late this afternoon to Bangkok. I'll connect with
whatever commercial flight's available there.'
Grossback smiled, obviously glad Gonzales was leaving.
Grossback was a slight man, of mixed German and Thai descent; he
had a light brown complexion, black hair, and delicate features.
He wore politically correct clothing in the old-fashioned Burmese
style: a dark skirt called a longyi, a white cotton shirt.
During Gonzales's time there, Grossback had dealt with him
coldly and correctly from behind a mask of corporate protocol and
clenched teeth. Fair enough, Gonzales had thought: the man's
operation was suspect, and him along with it. Anyway, people
resented these outside intrusions almost every time; representing
Internal Affairs, Gonzales answered only to his division head,
F.L. Traynor, and SenTrax Board, and that made almost everyone
nervous.
'You leaving out of Myaung U Airport?' Grossback asked.
'No, I've asked for a pick-up south of town.' Like anyone
else who could arrange it, he was not going to fly out of Pagan's
official airport, where partisan groups had several times brought
down aircraft. Surely Grossback knew that.
Grossback asked, 'What will your report say?'
Surprised, Gonzales said, 'You know I can't tell you anything
about that.' Even mentioning the matter constituted an
embarrassment, not to mention a reportable violation of corporate
protocol. The man was either stupid or desperate.
'You haven't found anything,' Grossback said.
What was his problem? Gonzales said, 'I have a year's data
to examine before I can make an assessment.'
'You won't tell me what the preliminary report will look
like,' Grossback said. His face had gone cold.
'No,' said Gonzales. He stood and said, 'I have to finish
