New York Nights [Virex 01] by Eric Brown Read Free Book Online Page A

than ever using the rail system.
     
    She made for Broadway, where she’d hail a cab and make the short journey to the Mantoni Tower, where Kia worked.
     
    The sidewalks were busy with pedestrians and encamped refugee families, while the streets were relatively clear of traffic. A few electric buses shuttled back and forth. Cop cars and taxis still patrolled, along with the occasional vehicle owned by richer citizens. Personally, she thought the oil crisis no bad thing - it made New York habitable again; the streets were no longer death traps and the air was getting cleaner by the day. She had to smile at the conditioned citizens, though: they still kept to the sidewalks and crossed at the crossings, as if the old jaywalking proscriptions still held. Anna took great delight in walking across wherever she wanted. Late at night you could wander right down the middle of some streets in perfect safety.
     
    She caught a cab and looked forward to meeting Kia. They’d missed each other last night. Kia had gone along to the Scumbar, while Anna had dined with a few writer friends in Chinatown. Kia had come home in the early hours, and was up early to start work before Anna awoke.
     
    She’d met Kia Johansen in the Scumbar about a year ago, and at first Anna had no reason to assume that it wasn’t going to be just another brief sexual encounter that would fade, after the first week of passion, to friendship. Anna had no more desire for monogamy than most of the women she knew. She was happy to live alone and reward herself with the occasional brief affair. Then she met Kia, and after a couple of days during which they rarely left the bed, Anna knew that this was going to be different. She was wary at first: Kia likewise had no plans to settle into a serious relationship, and Anna was loath to be the first to suggest that this might grow into something more than just a brief, passion-filled fling.
     
    Mutually, they had sought each other’s company. After a month of seeing each other every day, it was Kia who suggested that Anna move in with her. Kia had lived in a tiny apartment in West Village, hardly big enough for her alone, never mind Anna as well. Anna had been in the process of moving into the roomy second-floor suite in East Village, and it seemed sensible that Kia should move in with her.
     
    It had been the first time that she had lived with anyone in eight years, and despite her own doubts - and the counsel of friends who forecast a quick separation - it seemed to work. Anna had found in Kia someone who understood her, who cared and sympathised. She loved Kia for her headstrong eccentricity, a mad exterior that concealed a serious sensibility she divulged only to those she trusted.
     
    The affair had lasted almost a year now, far longer than she or any of her friends thought likely, and as far as Anna was concerned it could go on forever.
     
    She paid the driver, stepped from the cab and pushed her way across the crowded sidewalk. She left the noise of the street behind her as she stepped through the sliding glass entrance of the towering jet-black obelisk, the headquarters of Mantoni Entertainment.
     
    She took the elevator to the thirty-fifth floor and remembered to affix her security pass to the lapel of her jacket.
     
    Kia was a technician in Mantoni’s virtual reality development section. At the end of a long day, she would start to tell Anna what had gone wrong during that shift, in a language that might as well have been Swahili to Anna. Mantoni, Cyber-Tech and a couple of other companies had been in a race for the past couple of years to develop the first, and finest, VR experience for a public ready and eager to spend its dollars on yet another outlet of entertainment. Kia had often told Anna that it was not enough to be the first on the market: what was the advantage of being first if your product was only second-best? Just before Christmas Mantoni’s rivals, Cyber-Tech, had opened a couple of virtual