and bass, where during the day the street teemed with cars and with shoppers all looking for the ultimate dress, the perfect shoes, the neatest toy.
An older woman in tight crop pants, with an artistically clipped full poodle on a leash, walked past the window displays of Sharron Batten: Fine Resort Wear, Beverly Hills, Palm Beach, Cannes.
The woman glanced at the mannequins modeling clothes that only a size four would wear, and then only on the French Riviera. A large black-and-white poster hung from the ceiling and was cleverly backlit so it seemed as if the model standing hipshot, a thumb hooked in the elastic band of her brief bikini bottom, was illuminated by the setting sun. The caption read i like this look!
The gauze print beach shirt on one of the mannequins ruffled in a sudden small breeze. The scarf around the neck of another moved.
A mist began to fill the window display, until a bright blue sphere suddenly materialized in a burst of lightning and intense heat that instantly melted the plastic mannequins, burned through a sizable area of concrete floor, and melted a hole three meters in diameter in the plate-glass window.
T-X raised her head to catalog her new surroundings, numbers and graphs crossing her head-up display with a rapidity that no human could follow. She rose gracefully from her kneeling position, and heedless of the still- glowing concrete and molten glass dripping from the window, she stepped out onto the sidewalk.
In the distance to the southwest, down Rodeo Drive, T-X's infrared systems picked up the heat signatures of a woman and a much smaller quadrupedal mammal das-
sified as Canis familiaris, and immediately rejected either as possible infiltration personas.
She looked northeast. A ground conveyance, classified as a Lexus SC430, was parked in front of a concrete, steel, and glass building, with the legend barclays in brass. The heat signatures from the automobile's engine compartment and exhaust system were consistent with a condition known as idling.
A secondary heat source stood approximately eight meters to the north of the automobile. It was a female human. T-X enhanced her optical system and overlaid the mission's requirements. The female, who was attempting to effect a transaction between herself and an incredibly primitive computer via a small plastic card in which were programmed several hundred bytes of rudimentary information, was not a currently listed target, but she was of the proper weight, height, physical shape, and apparent age for mission purposes.
The ATM machine beeped several times, and a crude, machine-generated voice said, 'Sorry, we are unable to process transactions at this time,' as T-X crossed the street.
Nancy Nebel was only mildly irritated. She'd never had much luck with machines, partly because she wasn't interested and partly because that's what men were supposed to do for a girl. At thirty-two she was what her friends in the business called a looker. Blond, blue-eyed,
with a knockout figure, she was dressed this evening in a rust-colored leather jacket and skintight pants, beneath which she wore a black lace thong and lace Wonderbra. Why give 'em brains when all they wanted was cleavage, was her motto.
And it had worked so far.
Nancy put the gold American Express card back in her purse, and got behind the wheel of her car, the reasons she needed the money tonight already forgotten. She had just enough time to get over to Spago before Lenny got too worried about her.
She looked up as she was about to reach for the gearshift lever in time to see a tall, very sexy blond woman, stark naked, walking up the sidewalk as if she didn't have a care in the world.
A little thrill of fear tickled Nancy's stomach. Something was way off base here. She leaned out of the car. 'Hey! Are you okay?'
The woman didn't miss a beat
Nancy fumbled for the cell phone on the dash. 'Did somebody attack you?' she asked the woman. 'I'll call nine-one-one?'
T-X stopped at the driver's side door and Nancy looked up at her makeup-free, totally flawless complexion. The woman's breasts were firm and perfectly formed. Her stomach was completely flat. She was perfect. Too perfect.
'I like this car,' T-X said.
It started to dawn on Nancy that the broad was some kind of bad news. Somebody's bimbo on a bad trip. 'You're on something, aren't you?'
T-X reached in and gently caressed the lapel of Nancy's leather jacket. 'I like this look.'
'What?' Nancy said, rearing back. This was big trouble. She wanted to get away, right now.
T-X placed a thumb and forefinger on either side of the woman's spinal column at the base of her skull, and pinched. The bone crushed easily.
T-X was not programmed to be squeamish. She dressed in the woman's clothes, including the lace underwear.
When she was done, she got in the driver's seat and studied the dash instruments, the steering wheel, shift mechanism, and pedals for a moment, her processors building a more complete picture of the engineering of the machine than even the original Lexus engineers had.
She dropped it into drive and sped off, peeling rubber as she accelerated, a map of the Los Angeles freeway system appearing in her head-up display.
The telephone rang. T-X answered it, perfectly imitating Nancy Nebel's voice. 'Hello?'
A man came on. 'Honey, I'm at the restaurant, where are?'
T-X broke the connection. An extremely rapid string of numbers crossed her display, which she entered on the cell phone's keypad, her fingers moving faster than any human's could move.
A crash of static came over the speaker as the connection was made. T-X opened her mouth and emitted a
series of eleven beep tones. The distant circuit rang once, followed by the squeal of a high-speed modem. T-X made the audible connection with the proper signal, and moments later data began to stream back and forth between T-X and a Los Angeles County database computer downtown.
Tiny lines of text along with dozens of charts passed T-X's head-up display: names, addresses, medical, financial, and employment data along with images, mostly head shots.
The photographs of two humans, one male, one female, youngish-looking, lingered for a full second in T-X's display, followed by an address in the foothills above Westwood.
T-X was in no apparent hurry, but she drove very fast, and for normal human response times and abilities, apparently recklessly, weaving in and out of traffic, even running red lights when her sensors registered and computed no obstructions.
She jumped onto the Hollywood Freeway, but got off almost immediately because of the traffic. Her onboard navigational systems booted up, automatically merging with the Skynet system currently in orbit for this era.
She was working her way through streets of strip malls and businesses, traffic sometimes heavy, but most of the time light
An automobile with lights mounted on a roof rack shot out from a used car lot and fell in behind T-X.
She glanced in the rearview mirror with one eye, her
sensors scanning and evaluating the new phenomenon. The automobile was a Los Angeles Police squad car. Its red and white lights were flashing; its siren whooped several times.
She was being pursued.
'You, in the silver Lexus! Slow down and pull over!' the amplified voice of the lone police officer boomed from the radio unit 'Pull over immediately!''
T-X considered the situation for something less than one millisecond before getting off the accelerator and braking to a hard stop as she pulled over to the side of the street across from what looked like an office or business complex of some sort behind a tall iron fence. Brightly colored graffiti was painted over all the brick walls inside the empty parking area.
At the end of the block a large, well lit billboard for Victoria's Secret displayed a beautiful model wearing nothing more than a wide, toothy smile, a very low-cut bra, and brief panties.
T-X was aware of the squad car stopping behind her, and of the lone male officer getting out of the car and approaching. He was beefy with a square face and short-cropped hair.
She was also aware of the Victoria's Secret advertisement and what its significance was vis-a-vis the human
