Déjà Vu: A Technothriller by Ian Hocking Read Free Book Online

his mouth and, as he gagged, she pulled his buttoned jacket down to his elbows. To keep the old hat maker busy, she chopped the side of his throat. The attendant cowered. She grabbed his balls. He bit the cigar in two.
    “OK, what are you going to tell me?” she asked.
    “Huh-huh-have we met somewhere before?”
    Saskia shook her head. She certainly did not want to hear that. She swivelled her wrist. “Hhmmph,” he said, and dropped.
    She turned on the old hat maker and pressed the awl into his midriff. He backed away until he reached the coat rack.
    “Tell me all about it.”
    “We were only trying to protect ourselves.”
    “From who?”
    “I’m not allowed to say.”
    “You have five seconds.”
    “Don’t kill me!”
    “Four seconds.”
    “Very well. I will tell you. Please take your fingers away. Let me breathe.”
    Saskia did so.
    The hat maker looked relieved. He pulled out a gun.
    She swore.
    Someone grabbed her shoulders. It was the assistant. He pushed her against the door. She could see the street outside through its marbled glass. A small boy saw her. He tried to attract his mother’s attention but she pulled him along. The butt of the gun hit Saskia near her ear and she slid to the floor, switched off.

A Walk in the Woods
    The world was distorted. Light was scattered somehow. There were shapes. Forces. Temperature. He writhed. He wanted to rub his eyes but the mask prevented him. Then he realised that the shapes were clouds. He was in the upper atmosphere of Shimoda, the virtual planet. He could see little.
    He shivered. His virtual arms were covered by a shirt and, as he checked himself, he realised with some relief that the computer was working correctly. So far. It was accessing the liquid storage device, supplying sound through the earpieces, vision through the mask, and feel through the microbots.
    “Supervisor,” said David. The computer heard the keyword and checked his voice against a database. His voice had not changed in the twenty years since he had last spoken.
    It asked, “Password?”
    David said, “Prometheus.”
    A white square appeared before him. It was perfectly two-dimensional. The square displayed a standard graphical user interface: a file system with various options like open, move, copy and shut down. One icon would summon The Word, the programming language that controlled this universe. He moved his hand over this panel and an answering blue dot appeared beneath his index finger. A touch of the panel would select the option. He hesitated over ‘shut down’. It would stop the program. It would send him back into the real world forthwith, game over. He could not guess where it would send Bruce.
    He touched another icon. It was a picture of his younger self. The computer represented all organisms with a long genome. For visitors like David, the computer used his DNA. Many years before, he had contributed a blood sample. It had been read, decoded, and used to construct his virtual body: his body as it would appear to the eyes of those creatures on Shimoda. He was young, fit, scarless and pale.
    He smiled and dropped to the surface.
    In another universe, David’s glass booth swung about its horizontal axis. His naked body floated, supported on its cushion of microbots, oblivious to the real silence around him. The room was dark. Caroline was not there. She was in the main laboratory.
    She bit her lip. Slowly, carefully, she drew a knife across her little finger. A red drop, shiny and bright by torchlight, fell upon a microscope slide. She sucked the wound. She placed a sliver of clear plastic on top of the blood and pressed. It bloomed into transparency.
    David flew over lakes and trees, up valley walls he had not seen in years, past waterfalls barely changed, into grasslands and desert, over ice floes and black volcanic islands. Night fell in seconds. He touched down in a small glade near the equator. Nearby, he heard the bubbling of a hot spring. Shimoda had many. It