He leaned from side to side on his stocky legs to examine her head. “You don’t have a head jack.” Deep concern wrinkled his face. “What are you doing out there? Where is your office?” He took her arm and gestured her all the way inside. The door slid shut.
“I have important news,” she said, “and I need to talk to someone in charge.”
He moved back to the large desk and called up one of the displays. “Not many people up at this hour.”
“Anyone will do. I have information that needs to be passed on.”
He scrolled through a directory, his moving eyes causing the names to cruise by. At last he stopped at a name glowing in red.
“James Willoughby is still in his office. I could call him.”
“Yes, please,” she said. She had no idea who that was. As a worker, she lacked a head jack and had no way to watch the media broadcasts. But meeting with anyone was preferable to standing out in the open like this.
She waited nervously while he activated the comm link. “Mr. Willoughby, someone is here to see you. She says she has important information.” He waited. “I don’t know. She just walked in. I don’t know why she didn’t use the comm link.” He frowned in confusion, then turned to her. “We’ll need to know your name for the log before we send you up,” the guard said.
She stared around at the lobby. Already the black behind the glass doors felt oppressive. If the Repurposers came this far to find her, she was an easy target right now in this overly lit room. “H124.”
The guard stood up abruptly. “What? You’re a worker?”
“Corpse cleanup.”
He spoke into the comm link. “I’m calling security, sir. Don’t come down.”
He pressed a button on the floating keyboard. An alarm erupted in the lobby.
“Just stay there,” he commanded her, coming back around the desk. He pulled a weapon off his belt, a thin black cylinder with two metal prongs. An arc of blue electricity sprang from one prong to the next.
A flurry of footsteps echoed from a corridor at the end of the hall. There a metal door burst open, and a dozen armed men in black uniforms stormed through. The guard pointed at her, and H124 ran. She raced to the front lobby doors, but they’d locked again. She faced the TWR, but when she commanded it to open, it didn’t. She knew how to do workarounds with locks, but there was no way she had the time right then.
The security team poured into the room, all pointing weapons at her, long-snouted things with currents buzzing at their ends. She saw another door, one behind the guard’s desk, and ran for it. The guard tried to grab her, but she slammed an elbow into his face, and he reeled back.
She heard a strange ding, and a voice that yelled, “Wait, wait, wait!”
H124 tried the door behind the desk. It was also locked. The security team closed in, forming a tight semicircle around her.
“Wait!” sounded the voice. From the security corridor came a man dressed in an elegant suit. His black hair was perfectly styled, and kind blue eyes twinkled in a pale face with chiseled features. “I want to talk to her. There’s no need for all of this. Timmons!” he barked.
The guard, grabbing his bloody nose, stood up. “Yes, sir?”
“You should have cleared this kind of action with me before you did this. There’s no need for this show of force.”
The man stepped closer as the armed men lowered their weapons.
“Miss?” he said to her, gesturing for her to come forward. “I’m very interested in hearing the information you brought.” He flashed an angry glare at the guard. “Timmons, you don’t want the higher-ups to find out you escorted a perfectly good story to the brig without even finding out what it was, do you?”
The guard shook his head. “No, sir.”
“Well, then.” He turned back to her. “Miss? If you’d kindly come to my office.”
H124 took him in. Something about him made her trust him. He was good. Her gut could feel that. She came toward him, letting him usher her past the guards to the bank of elevators. They stepped inside.
“Short ride,” he said, smiling. “Only a few floors to my office.”
When the doors slid shut and the elevator began to rise, H124 let out a huge breath.
He studied her. “I’m fascinated. How did you get here?”
“I’ve got some very important information.”
“That I gather. But how the hell did you make it all the way here?”
“It wasn’t easy.” She furrowed her brow. “But I needed to.”
“Fascinating,” he said again and turned to watch the numbers growing higher as the elevator climbed.
They got off on the fifteenth floor and walked down a short corridor. He used the biometric scanner on a door, and it hissed open. “My office,” he said, waving her in.
She entered, gazing around at the immense space. It was easily twenty times bigger than her living quarters. “This whole place is yours?”
He smiled. “Yep. Took a long time to get it. Had to produce a lot of hit shows.”
She tried to guess his age, wondering how long he’d been working toward this. He looked to be at least twice as old as she was.
He took her in, looking at her head. “Of course, you’ve never seen any of my shows.”
“No, not really, not up close.”
“That’s good,” he mumbled. He waved her over to a chair as he sat down behind his desk. “So what is this pressing news?”
She hesitated, then pulled out her PRD. She really didn’t want to turn it back on, but she knew that he’d have to see the animation and movies. She studied him, still deciding if she could really trust him. He wasn’t checked out like the residents she’d seen over the years. She glanced at the side of his head and saw that he didn’t have a head jack
