Kendrick floated in the air and his daughter Sam stood on a grassy plain far below, waving up to him. Beyond her, a kite jiggled in a sudden gust and he watched as she ran after it, laughing.
At first he didn't notice the truck. It was painted olive green, its engine humming gently as it clanked across the grass.
'Hey,' he shouted – then again, a little louder. Now he too was standing on the grass, and he started to move towards Sam. He saw his wife there, too, seeming oblivious to everything but their daughter. Neither of them seemed to get any nearer to him.
The truck rolled to a sudden stop, and uniformed men piled out of it. They grabbed at his wife's arm, and the thin sound of her scream carried far across the grass.
They had seized his daughter now and she was screaming too, her kite lost, adrift on the wind. Kendrick just ran, untapped reservoirs of energy he never knew he had propelling him. Sam fell to the ground, the soldiers beating her with the butts of their rifles, the grey metal barrels turning shiny and sticky with splashes of her blood…
Kendrick fell out of his bed, his body slick with icy-cold sweat and his throat hoarse. He must have been yelling aloud in his sleep. He staggered out of his bedroom and spotted something by the front door. It was an envelope, and he picked it up. It hadn't been there earlier when he'd returned, and he didn't get much in the way of mail.
He studied the name on the envelope for a long time. His name – his real name, Kendrick Gallmon – was hand-printed on expensive-looking rag paper. Kendrick felt an immediate and deep sense of foreboding flood through him. He was not registered as the flat's occupant under his real name, therefore somebody was telling him something. They were saying: We know who you are, we know where you live.
He thought hard. Not the police, not the European Legislate. Sending him expensive-looking mail wasn't part of their remit. They'd just barge in and get him. So someone else, then.
Kendrick opened the envelope and found that it contained what appeared to be a simple business card. The letters, printed on textured cream plastic, read Marlin Smeby. He didn't recognize the name. However, as soon as his fingers touched the card itself an image sprang up uninvited in his mind: an image of a man, seen from the shoulders up, hair thinning across the top of his scalp, jet black to wavy grey around his ears.
The card slipped from Kendrick's fingers. He leant down and picked it up again, this time holding on to it more firmly. He decided that he hadn't hallucinated that image.
The second time around the experience was only mildly unsettling. The face he saw now in his mind's eye had to be that of Marlin Smeby. Touching the card brought a sensation not unlike a memory, long buried, suddenly re-emerging, or the spark of recognition someone might feel when a vaguely familiar person passed them in the street – except Kendrick knew that he'd never met Smeby in his life.
Kendrick focused now on the card's surface, his augmented senses allowing him to detect the faint filigree of microscopic silver circuitry woven into its surface. The technology was unlike anything he'd ever come across before, and to place it in a mere business card…
It had to have been designed with augmented humans in mind. He felt sure that someone unaugmented, like Malky, would experience nothing on handling it.
So, someone also wanted him to realize that they knew about his past. In this respect the card carried many intimations: of wealth, and of power – certainly the power to expose him.
Kendrick found a local grid address printed on the card's flip side. He could wait and see what happened next, or he could do something now. He couldn't help but wonder if this was somehow connected to what had taken place in the Saint the night before. But, at the very least, if someone had set out to get his attention they'd done so effectively.
Kendrick tapped the grid address into the query screen of the eepsheet stuck onto his refrigerator door with a fridge magnet. It supplied him with the location of the Arlington, a hotel near the centre of town. Big, expensive- looking place – he'd passed it innumerable times.
The Arlington rested between tall buildings constructed from the same quarried sandstone as the rest of Edinburgh, but unlike the structures in the narrow, crowded streets of the nearby Old Town this was an edifice entirely of the late twenty-first century. The mirrored surfaces of its windows were visible between broad aluminium interstices jutting out at strange angles over the street below, giving the whole a malleable, almost plastic appearance. From the opposite side of the street, Kendrick leant back, gazing up at the broad expanses of glass that reflected anything but the buildings around them. The hotel's windows were programmed instead to reflect other city skylines – perhaps Milan or Hong Kong. He saw the reflection of a building impossibly sculpted in the shape of a sickle, as if designed for a world with little or no gravity, and a view totally in opposition to the reality of the staid architecture behind him. The effect wasn't very subtle, he decided, and spoke more of money than of taste.
Kendrick stepped across the street towards the hotel's wide entrance. Now its glass doors displayed a different view, one that cleverly integrated both Kendrick and the people walking past him into yet another environment…
When he stopped and stared at the broad expanse of the main entrance, a chill ran through him as he recognized the landscape displayed. His reflection appeared to be standing on a wide grassy plain, while behind him the ground curved distinctly up into the distance.
The illusion was well programmed, so that the closer Kendrick came the more he could see. Despite himself, he glanced round at the ordinary street surrounding him as if to check that it was still there. Then, looking back, he moved his head from side to side, finding he could see a little way further along the plain on either side before the illusion shattered into unfocused rainbow colours. Curving walls slid off into the far distance before they became shrouded in cloud and mist. It was the same terrain he'd been seeing during his recent seizures.
Feeling shaken, Kendrick passed in through the door. Instinctively, he reached into his pocket and touched the business card that nestled there.
The receptionist smiled and shook her head. 'I really don't know, sir. The building has a range of programmed window environments, but I couldn't tell you who programmed any particular one. It's just not the kind of information we would possess.'
''You don't know any way I could find out who was contracted to design the current environment?'
The girl wore lipstick like gluey fire, and Kendrick's augmented vision picked out the fine grain of face powder on her cheeks and her neck, even the fine pattern of capillaries just below the surface of her skin.
She smiled again. 'That's not exactly the kind of information we'd have to hand.'
He sighed and shook his head. 'I'm here to meet a Marlin Smeby. Could you let him know I'm here, please?'
'Mr Gallmon?' said a voice from behind him, and he turned. A woman stood there, dressed in an immaculate suit of night-blue wool, smooth ebony skin stretched over well-trained muscles. Kendrick recognized her voice, since she had taken his call an hour or so earlier. She looked like the kind of woman who might equally well be an ex-athlete or ex-military – perhaps even both.
She extended a hand. Her grip was strong, assured. 'My name is Candice. If you're ready, I'll take you up to Mr Smeby now.'
He glanced down at his own green T-shirt and casual slacks, and shrugged. 'Please, after you,' he said.
He reckoned her accent was maybe that of a native New Yorker. Life there was hard these days, and the city had become a neglected and forlorn shadow of its former self. Rumour had it that snipers still hid out in certain deserted Manhattan office buildings, preying on passers-by.
He followed Candice to the bank of lifts beyond the reception area, admiring the way in which the fabric of her trousers slid across her buttocks as she walked, seeming to reveal more than if she'd worn nothing. She stepped back, allowing him to enter the open lift first. Its doors slid shut silently, and she touched a floor button. After that they rode upwards in silence for a while.
