“That wasn’t what I was going to say.”
“No, but it’s what I’m about to do. Just to make sure all our ducks are in a line, here. Isn’t that what you want?”
She sighed. “All right. We’re way past rationality and protocol in this instance. How is it that these things always happen when you’re around, James?”
I laughed. “Lots of people ask that. Where do we start? To find the files, I mean.”
She thought about it, and I let her. After a moment, her eyes refocused. “We’ll start in the Vault. I’m coming to your location. I’ll escort you down.”
I waited, and she soon appeared. We walked into the elevators, and we went deep this time. Really deep. Down to floor minus five hundred and then some.
At last we arrived at the hidden Vaults with all the brains haunting them. We walked into the quiet, gurgling chamber, and Floramel sought out various dead people. We found one named Juan Pujol that was willing to talk to us.
He didn’t speak English, but to my surprise Floramel shifted right into fluent Spanish. She’d apparently learned it for fun one weekend or another.
“What’s he saying?” I hissed in her ear for about the tenth time.
“Shush, James, please.”
This went on for a good half hour until I got bored. Well… that’s not entirely true. I was bored and off wandering the Vault after less than five minutes. Some of the ghosts, or remnants, or whatever these things could be classified as, eyed me with curiosity. I found one that looked female and was easy on the eyes.
“Hey there, brain-lady. What’s up?”
It wasn’t my best conversation starter, but I managed to engage her in a lively talk about current events—but for her, current meant sometime in the 2050s, way before I was born.
It turned out she was an anti-unification rebel leader named Elizabeth. That kind of floored me. I hadn’t thought this archive had people like her lurking in it—traitors, I mean.
“Your name is James…” Elizabeth said. “I recall a man named James… I think I was married to him once.”
“Yeah? Do you miss him?”
“Not as much as I should. My memories are incomplete, you see. I mostly recall individuals from my spy network and the rebel military.”
“Uh… oh. I get it.”
“What do you get?”
What I now understood was why they’d kept old Elizabeth’s mind around for so long. She seemed to know who was a secret rebel, and who wasn’t. I frowned quietly as I contemplated this. The people who ran Central… well sir, I wanted to feel they were good sorts, but things like this kept getting in the way. It was positively diabolical to maintain part of a lady’s brain just so she could rat on people. Worse, all the people she knew about had probably died a good half a century back.
“Hey Elizabeth, what’s your fondest wish?”
“To die, of course. That’s what everyone here wants to do.”
“Uh… why?”
She laughed, and it was a haunted sound. The laugh of an unhappy ghost. “Because we’re trapped in a semi-state of life. Some of us don’t know it, or refuse to accept it, but it’s true.”
“Well, if you want to die so bad, why don’t you just off yourself?”
“We can’t, James. We don’t have any physical bodies. We’re helpless in these glass jars.”
“Oh, yeah…”
We talked for a while longer, until Floramel finally came over to me and plucked at my sleeve. “We’ve got something. Time to go.”
Floramel turned away, and I looked after her.
“Good-bye,” Elizabeth said.
Quietly, I reached around behind her tank. My hand found a lot of hoses. One yank, that’s all that it took. The fluids from Elizabeth’s tank began to piss out slowly on the floor.
“Good-bye, Elizabeth.”
Then I turned around and walked out after Floramel.
-56-
Floramel couldn’t figure out why I was in such an all-fired hurry to get out of the Vault level, and I didn’t enlighten her. Sometimes, it was best for people not to know the truth.
When I managed to get her safely up to around the minus one hundred level and switch elevators, I breathed a sigh of relief.
Floramel looked at me strangely. “You didn’t know that woman in the Vault… did you?”
“Heck no. Never met her before today.”
She nodded. “I suppose it doesn’t matter. I managed to get a passcode from Pujol.”
“A passcode?”
“A way to bypass certain restrictions on our access to the datacore.”
“Oh… that’s what you were asking about down there? How’d you get that out of some ancient ghost?”
Floramel seemed distracted. She worked her tapper with fast fingers and studied the screen. “He wasn’t just anyone. One distant day, two centuries ago, he caused one country’s invasion of another country to go unchecked. His work helped bring a swift conclusion to a great war.”
“Really? You’re telling me he’s an intel man?”
“One of the best in history.”
“Huh… I guess you never can tell. Why didn’t you ask some friend of yours in Central’s regular spook patrol to help?”
“Because… I don’t know any of them—and they wouldn’t tell me anything, anyway.”
“Okay, I get it.”
Floramel wasn’t the best at making friends. To be honest, it surprised me that she’d been able to get anything useful out of a spy’s ghost. But then, maybe that wasn’t an accident. Maybe old Juan Pujol was as tired of being kept prisoner in the darkest dungeon on Earth as Elizabeth had been. Maybe he had good reasons for helping out someone who wanted to do something that broke the rules.
The second elevator took us up to the lobby. The doors swished open and four unsmiling hogs with guns were there to greet us.
I heard a sharp intake of breath from Floramel, and I got the feeling
