Agiliste: Gerade Aus

AGILISTE: Gerade Aus

by

Douglas Sun

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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PUBLISHED BY

Bushi-Go, Inc. on Smashwords

Agiliste: Gerade Aus

Copyright 2010 by Bushi-go, Inc.

Look for the mobile game and more Agiliste stories at: www.theagiliste.com

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Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s work.

Table of Contents

A Day in the Life

That Nagging Feeling

The Persistence of Insanity

A Moment of Boredom

Put Your Hands Up, Put Your Hands Up

When the Pie Hits Your Eye

Ariel

Some Must Watch

The Sixth and Three-Sixteenths Seal

Epilogue: Mean Streets of the Global Village

AGILISTE: Gerade Aus

A Day in the Life

It’s still dark out — no longer nighttime, but not quite morning yet — when Claire Denali sits bolt upright in her bed. Her eyes are flaring, and her heart races as if its accelerator has been jammed to the floor, going from 0 to 80 in nothing flat. She feels moist and clammy — not all over, but in enough places to be unpleasant.

And then it passes. Whatever came screeching out of her subconscious mind to wake her from a dead sleep, she can’t remember what it is. Not a single weird, Dali-esque fragment. And now that she’s awake, she doesn’t give it another thought.

Then her alarm clock goes off. It’s set to a popular streaming music station, but the volume is turned up so high that it’s impossible to make out the song’s lyrics, or even figure out its genre — whether it’s rock nouveau, cavity-inducing tweeny pop, retro-hip-hop, or Brazilian mecha-samba. With her hand now perfectly steady, Claire reaches over and taps the ‘Off’ button. Then she hoists herself out of bed as if nothing unusual has happened.

Because — and here’s the thing — nothing unusual has happened. It’s funny what you can get used to if it wakes you up in a cold sweat often enough.

Having gotten the cue to begin her day, Claire moves about her one-bedroom apartment this morning with hardly a second thought. Like most of her neighbors in this clean, but nondescript-modern building near the loft district just north of Downtown Los Angeles, it’s time for her to get ready for work. Out in the hallway, doors open and click shut, and the chime of the elevator sounds in the distance.

It’s a small place, but not particularly cozy. The furnishings were spare to begin with, but Claire has not improved upon this much. What furniture she has is best described as aggressively functional; it works well enough, but other than that it pretty much sticks the point of its chin out at you and dares you to get comfortable with it. And she’s okay with that. It’s spartan, but it has been five years now since she moved in and she has passed on every chance to pick up something to make the place look more inviting.

She does have a videocaster of a respectable screen size in the living room. It’s streaming the morning news, and it’s a news show that’s working diligently to get her attention. As Claire fiddles with her breakfast, a man — or more often, a disembodied voice — recites a seemingly endless stream of data and commentary about the state of the world. The New York Comprehensive Stock Index is down and commodity prices are spiking on speculation that civil war in an obscure corner of the globe may interrupt the supply of coffee beans and tungsten ore, both of which are considered essential to the smooth functioning of the global economy. A popular singer who caused a stir with an unscripted, high fructose-fueled tirade at a televised awards show has disappeared from the public eye and is said to have entered a high-toned rehabilitation clinic for an addiction to toaster pastries. Cybermaxx, a leading manufacturer of glasware — cybernetic communications and information processing gear that uses state-of-the-art nanotech components instead of old-fashioned silicon microprocessors — is expected to announce several new products next week; what will they be? Air time is given to a United States Senator said to have Presidential ambitions, who announces with an undercurrent of moral outrage that she will introduce a bill to levy prohibitively high tariffs on imported digital pets and other handheld games — this in advance of the upcoming World Economic Council summit, which will bring together senior government officials from the world’s largest post-industrial countries right here in Los Angeles. Afterward, the voice announces that spokesmen from the governments of key exporting nations (Japan, United Korea and Finland) have all warned against the proposed legislation, threatening retaliatory taxes on American professional sports teams playing training camp exhibition games in those countries.

That’s going to raise a lot of revenue for someone, Claire thinks absently. But otherwise, none of this does much to raise her attention from her plate of scrambled eggs. She has already heard about almost all of it in some form or another at work — and in more complete versions than the press will ever see, at least until it attains the status of history and people start yakking. That’s one benefit of doing what she does for a living, although she doesn’t really see it as a benefit.

As a result, she doesn’t use the daily news broadcasts as a source of information. Instead, it’s just background hum for her, a kind of aural wallpaper. She has it on because that’s what other people do, normal people who have to wake up early in the morning and get ready to go to work every Monday through Friday. Despite the dire warnings and trumped-up reports of calamity and chaos that these news shows always feature — as if the calamity and chaos isn’t bad enough without exaggerating for effect — Claire finds it soothing to introduce them into her personal environment. Because it’s what normal people do.

The voice drops away in favor of a brace of commercials as Claire finishes the last of her breakfast. She rinses off the plate and leaves it in the kitchen sink for later. If it’s time for the 8:00 commercial break, it’s also time to get dressed and leave for the office.

Work clothes for Claire mean an ordinary eggplant blazer and matching skirt — standard business wear just about anywhere you go, nothing exceptional about it. But that’s what she likes about it. She doesn’t give any thought to how the cut of the jacket highlights her athletic figure (which is still lean and trim even though she hasn’t worked herself at peak physical condition in years), or how the color sets off her slate-blue eyes; they’re all business at the office and no one seems to notice anyway.

She takes the most care in arranging her hair, which she draws back tight across the top of her head, into a long blonde ponytail. Holding both hands at the back of her neck, she works it into a small, deliberately positioned braid. Then she takes a pair of slender metal rods, each about the length and bore of a chopstick, but which flare out at one end into a male plug with three small prongs, and sticks them through the twist. But they’re not meant to hold her hair in position; rather, her hair will fix them in place. They’re wireless transmitters, and as the finishing touch, Claire takes each plug, feels her way around the base of her skull, and inserts it into a jack permanently punched through her skin, connecting it to a glasline — an impossibly thin wire made of manipulable molecule-sized components called glas — that is tattooed into her spinal column so that it runs through her cervical vertebrae and into her brain.

She double-checks the chopsticks to make sure the plugs are firmly in place. Then she glances at the mirror, and calmly runs one hand over the top of her head. All ready. Time to go.

For Claire, ‘the office’ means Coerdian West, the flagship property and corporate headquarters of Coerdian, a multi-national corporation that has made itself one of the most trusted brand names in personal security. Coerdian prides itself on being a rock of safety and dependability in a dangerous world. That’s it’s main selling point.

Security has been Coerdian’s consuming obsession for decades. Its predecessor company, Parque de Ville Hotels, had marketed itself as the ultimate luxury hotel, spoiling its guests with decor and service that no one else could match, and room rates to go with it. Parque de Ville’s downfall came when its New York property hosted a meeting of COEPIC, the Consortium of Energy Production Industry Countries, and someone — no one ever figured out who, or why — set off a large explosive device in the middle of the welcoming reception. It was a catastrophe any way you looked at it, and the company’s reputation disappeared in a sanguine cloud of the mangled limbs and other detached body parts of government ministers, their aides and security personnel. And it marked the end for Parque de Ville, whose backers kept it alive only to serve as a sort of avatar, a bankrupt shell to absorb the cascade of civil litigation and bad publicity that followed.

Taking the proceeds from the sale of Parque de Ville’s movable assets, they acquired an entire city block in a blighted area south and west of Downtown Los Angeles under the name of Coerdian, and set up shop anew. Security would be the watchword of the new hotel company — anyone from the largest corporations to individuals who could afford it could stay at Coerdian if they were worried about the safety of their persons or property. At the same time, Coerdian would continue Parque de Ville’s dedication to luxury and attentive service.

In a wealthy and hedonistic but uncertain world, this turned out to be a very successful formula. Coerdian found itself in a position to expand, and branched out all over the globe, setting up satellite facilities in every continent except Antarctica (and plans for an Antarctic branch are simply sitting on a back burner, pending further exploitation of the mineral wealth near the South Pole). Coerdian’s Los Angeles flagship became known as Coerdian West, with the satellites using their city as a descriptor.

In time, its reputation became such that even the governments of powerful nations trusted Coerdian with the safety of their representatives as much as — if not more than — their own security services. Unlike the governments themselves, Coerdian had no traitors, no moles, no leakers to compromise it. Service given over time proved that Coerdian did not employ people who told tales out of school. Somehow, they — unlike government agencies and many of Coerdian’s lesser competitors — managed to keep out the sort of self-important twits who never understood the human toll that even the simplest perfidy can exact. Coerdian kept their guests — and their guests’ secrets — safe without fear or favor, and with a ruthless efficiency that a privately owned company could muster a lot more easily than a politically vulnerable government.

That formidable reputation, gained and preserved through herculean effort and absolute dedication on the part of its employees, persuaded the World Economic Council to take the burden of hosting its semi-annual meetings away from host governments and give it permanently to Coerdian West. The WEC, successor to such multi-lateral efforts to shepherd the global economy as the G8 and G20, draws high-ranking delegations from the world’s post-industrial, still-industrial, and hurriedly-industrializing nations, and along with them legions of private sector VIPs who want the chance to hobnob with those who move and shake the international financial system. To Coerdian, this powerful multi-national consultative body is simply their most important client, but the very fact that they could get — and retain — such a client shows how far they have risen from the wreckage of Parque de Ville Hotels.

From Claire’s point of view, working for such an employer is hardly the mark of someone who wants to live an ordinary life. In a sense, it doesn’t make sense for her. But believe it or not, she’ll take it. It’s about the best she can expect, given where she has been and what she has made of it, and she knows it.

Coerdian West isn’t exactly a skyscraper — twenty stories won’t get you a second look in the guts of a major city — but Claire always feels like she can see it from blocks away when she comes in to work in the morning. It’s the aura the place gives off, a matter of psychology rather than what you actually see. Coerdian West is imposing, and the company wouldn’t have it any other way. It dominates through spread, not height. From the air, it looks like an enormous ‘C’ laid out upon the earth, facing the street. But what it is, really, is a building with two elongated wings that curve back toward each other the farther you get from the center. The main entrance is in the center, at the mid-point of the arc, so that it’s actually set as far back from the street as you can go. That’s why it reminds so many visitors of a glass-and-steel pincer — or a maw — and to enter, you have to pass the jaws and the teeth and allow the building to swallow you.

Claire swings her car around to the back, where the employees have a secure parking garage. Some of Coerdian’s executives actually live on the premises in residential suites located above the main lobby and away from the guest wings, but most everyone else commutes. When she gets to the security checkpoint, she smiles and nods at the guard, who is wearing the regulation crisp white shirt, dark tie and pressed dark trousers of the Security Division’s front-line employees, known as the SecTeam.

But she doesn’t pull out an employee ID card, or even roll down the window to speak to him. Instead, she activates her visual cortex display, or VCD. With nothing more than a thought, she initiates a couple of menu commands and syncs up with L.A.R.Y., Coerdian’s massive information system. L.A.R.Y. stands for Logic-based Assembly for Reactive Integration, the original fancy name that its designers gave to Coerdian’s custom-built data and communications system. Because its Coerdian’s digital nerve center, it has always had to keep up with advances not only in information systems design, but with the state of the art in cybernetics, the machine-organic interface. As such, it is so closely integrated with the organic brains of Coerdian’s staff that it becomes more like an intuitive extension of their minds with every system upgrade, rather than the logic-based tool that it once was. So everyone calls it by its acronym nowadays. It makes them feel better to add a veneer of humanity to what is essentially a glas-filled vault.

The guard’s already patched in; he, too, has a wireless transmitter/receiver in the form of an earpiece. It’s not connected directly to his central nervous system, like Claire’s chopsticks; it communicates with a tiny, patch-like wireless transmitter/receiver under his skin that then sends signals to and from his glasware implants. His set-up isn’t anywhere near as sophisticated or as powerful as Claire’s, but it will do for his needs. From his ID badge, Claire sees that his name is Dergin Winslow. In her VCD, a cursor flickers and some menus open and close as she pulls Dergin Winslow’s name from the employee directory and opens direct, real-time communication with him. He nods in return. Claire sends him her password. Dergin Winslow smiles. Thank you, he says, even though Claire still has her window rolled up. She can’t hear him, but the VCD picks it up and prints the words in glowing white across the corner of her vision. He waves her through.

Claire has to walk around to the front of the building and enter through the main lobby, just like the guests and visitors. There’s no dedicated back entrance for the executive suite employees. She always feels like a conventioneer, walking in all dressed for business, but that’s how they do things at Coerdian.

The lobby is, in a word, cavernous. The ceiling is four stories high at its tallest point, and it’s broad enough to fit so many silk-lined couches, heavy armchairs and designer hardwood coffee tables that it feels like the departure lounge of a major airport, but with furniture that people would actually enjoy using. The registration desk extends across the left side of the lobby, and it’s staffed by women wearing crisp navy blazers and red scarves, like airline stewardesses. The lip of the desk rises up to their chins, so that you can’t quite see what their hands might be doing as they shuffle across the workspace, and the desk as a whole does as much as it can to mask the administrative offices behind it, into which the registration clerks come and go.

In front and to the sides, men in dark double-breasted tunics with brass buttons and stiff military collars stand at the ready. They’re called concierges and they look and act like doormen and bellhops, but they’re really another part of SecTeam. Each of them carries a regulation Steinluger M-100 magneto-drive taser pistol on his belt and they all have at least five years worth of training in unarmed and improvisational combat for good measure. They hold open doors and do the heavy lifting around the lobby so others don’t have to, but they keep their eyes open and they’re trained to draw down on you if they think it’s necessary.

Opposite the main entrance are two great staircases that curl away from the middle, almost like a pair of wings, and lead up to lounge areas above ground level. In between the two wings is the fish tank. Okay, so Claire just thinks of it as the fish tank; it’s an aquarium — 50 feet long, 30 feet deep and 10 feet tall, and free-standing. It’s encased in a wall of impact-resistant lucite so thick it feels like a tomb. No one at Coerdian remembers exactly who authorized its construction and why it’s there. But there is no doubt that its presence in the flagship property of the world’s premiere security company sends a message to anyone who sees it: We can put up an extravagant display of aquatic life in the highest-traffic area of our establishment because it’s perfectly safe here, even though we’ve got a big target painted on our chest. We know it; you know it; and the fish know it.

Claire, however, barely gives a passing glance to the massive wall of fish. She’s just on her way into the office, and that means walking on past the fish and the wing-like staircases, down the length of the lobby and underneath the steel-latticed skylight to the huge bank of elevators at the back. The executive offices at Coerdian West are concentrated on the top floor, allowing easy access to the roof in case of emergency, but to get there you’ll probably have to share an elevator car with guests. And that’s what Claire does, packing herself in with VIPs riding back up to their rooms after breakfast, smiling politely if anyone makes eye contact with her.

Indeed, the car she’s riding in clears out except for her before it reaches the top. Now that she’s by herself, her VCD remembers that she prefers the quiet hum of the motors and prods L.A.R.Y. to shut off the non-sound of the elevator muzak. From the elevator bank she walks down a hallway covered in smooth hardwood panels stained in a heavy dark-brown tone and trimmed in black, with decorative plants dotting the carpeted floor at precise intervals. It feels imposing and yet cool and soothing at the same time; sometimes when it’s perfectly still Claire swears that she can hear the burble of water flowing over a stream bed covered with smooth stones somewhere in the distance.

At the end of the hall is the CEO’s suite. Claire opens the door and walks in, as she does every morning. That’s her job — Administrative Assistant to the Chief Executive. In other words, she’s basically a secretary, and when you get down to it, she uses that expensive glasware melded with her central nervous system, with its pop-up windows and drop-down menus and real-time alerts literally flashing inside her visual cortex, for clerical work. She keeps her boss’ appointment book, collates information about clients and screens his incoming communications from people who aren’t privileged enough to reach him directly. It’s humdrum to the point where an outside observer would probably see it as a waste of the company’s technology resources. But Claire likes it that way. You won’t hear her complaining.

It’s 8:45 on the dot as Claire reaches her desk, which is situated at a discreet distance from the inner office, but also far enough from the outer office door to make it imposing to approach her. It’s a gatekeeper’s position.

The boss is already sitting in the inner office and attending to business. Elwood Miyamoto — known as Mike to his inner circle, as well as those who merely presume familiarity with him — is leaning back in his chair and carrying on a conversation with someone unseen. The door to the inner office is open, and Claire can see clearly through the doorway.

Miyamoto is a man of medium height whose exact relationship to middle-age is probably pretty close, but it’s hard to tell for sure. He wears large-framed eyeglasses that only accentuate his small, dark and inexpressive eyes. But taken as a whole, his face seems designed not to give offense; it’s bland and pleasant, and to cap it all off he has this beatific smile that he can flash in an instant whenever he wants to calm you down and let you know he’s in control. His associates don’t know what to make of him sometimes. He always seems to project this weird sense of tranquility when things are the most tense, and he makes offhand jokes at odd times. He loves little mechanical toys and other gewgaws and keeps them on his desk, and he likes to set them off and just watch them go. He has always kind of reminded Claire of the Buddha; she expects that one of these days she’ll peek into the inner office and he’ll be levitating above his desk in the lotus position, his left hand cupped at his belly and his right hand held up with the thumb and forefinger together in a circle.

His off-beat serenity may seem odd to his colleagues, but he’s great with the clients that way. That’s a big reason why he’s the CEO of the foremost private security company in the world. If you’re worried that your enemies have you marked for death, or that a kidnapper will snatch you, or that your priceless butterfly collection will be stolen before you can get it to auction, all Miyamoto has to do is trot out that broad Buddha-smile, and you’ll settle down and gladly pay Coerdian’s price to put yourself and whatever it is you hold dear in his hands.

Yes, of course. Certainly, I understand that this is a very important month for Coerdian....

He’s talking to a small device clipped to his shirt collar. That means he’s not using L.A.R.Y. and Coerdian’s secure channels; otherwise, he’d get an audio-visual connection through his VCD and he’d look like he was talking into thin air. The device, wafer-thin and no larger in circumference than a golf ball, is an ordinary tele-communicator, just as anyone who came in off the street would use.

"We’ll check and double-check all arrangements, as necessary. The Cybermaxx product launch is going to be a little more complicated than we’re used