The Cazie projection looked at Jackson meaningfully, sudden vulnerability in her holographic eyes. Deliberate, or genuine? He’d never been able to tell, with Cazie. And now it no longer mattered.
He considered rapidly. “Admit Vicki through Decon. She can assist me in my inspection. Put Lizzie in the outside room with the systems experts from New York—are they here yet?”
“No. But I’m afraid Ms. Turner can’t blithely walk through Kelvin-Castner proprietary labs just because you have a—”
“An assistant inspector is in my contract. Read it again.”
“A trained assistant, not some amateur—”
“Vicki once worked for the Genetics Standards Enforcement Agency. She’s trained in espionage. Now show me where I can link with Lizzie immediately. While Vicki’s in Decon.”
Cazie bit her bottom lip, hard enough to draw a single bright drop of red blood. Then she said coldly, “Go down this corridor and through the last door on your left.” Jackson understood that Cazie had absorbed the changes between them, and moved on. That single drop of holographic blood was the only acknowledgment that he would ever see. Or possibly that Cazie would let herself feel.
The door led to an alcove-sized room with a standard, self-contained, building-system terminal. Jackson said, “Call to Lizzie Francy, on premises.”
“Dr. Aranow! Don’t worry about Theresa, she’s back home and asleep.”
“Theresa? Back home? What are you talking about?”
Lizzie grinned. Jackson saw that she was bursting with excitement and self-congratulations. She looked a mess: bits of grass—very green, very genemod grass—in her hair, her face dirty, her screaming yellow jacks more rumpled than he thought plastic jacks could look. She was a vivid, youthful, disorderly smear in the pristine Kelvin-Castner work cubicle, and Jackson felt his spirits lift just looking at her.
“I walked to Manhattan East Enclave to see you, because I have something important to tell you that I couldn’t open a link for—”
“Then don’t say it here.”
“Of course not,” Lizzie said scornfully. “Anyway, I got into Manhattan East all by myself, I’ll tell you how later, and then a security ’bot picked me up and took me to jail. I faked a medical emergency and forced the medunit to open up a link to your house, only you weren’t there, so I talked to Theresa, and she came down to jail and got me out—”
“Theresa? How could she—”
“I don’t know. She does something weird with her brain. Anyway, when Theresa got too scared I took her home and used your system to call Vicki, who it turned out was out looking for me. She brought me here, because she said you needed me. But I wanted to tell you first that the nursing ’bot says Theresa’s fine, and she’s asleep. And Dirk is fine, too—I called my mother.”
Jackson felt dizzy. Lizzie—a Liver, scarcely more than a child—had walked two hundred miles to New York, dipped what was supposed to be an impenetrable energy shield, subverted the Patterson Protect security equipment, and sat there eager to pit herself against one of the world’s major pharmaceutical companies… The individual wasn’t really important for radical change?
“Listen, Lizzie. I need you to write flagging programs for a list of key word combinations I’m going to give you, to search all Kelvin-Castner records. Copy everything flagged for me to look at later, with double-flagging clearly indicated.”
Lizzie stared at him, looking puzzled. What he was asking her to do was something anyone basically familiar with systems could do. He spoke the next words very slowly and carefully, looking directly into her eyes, willing her to understand.
“This is very important. I need you to do what you do best.”
She got it. Jackson could tell from her smile. What she did best was datadip fast, confusing her tracks as she went, so that even the K-C systems experts who would be following everything she did would be constantly one move behind her. She’d find hidden data that matched his flagging combinations faster than they expected, and she’d copy it to her own crystal library faster than they’d believe possible. Especially than they’d believe possible by a dirty teenage Liver.
And after she’d done it, Jackson would have sufficient cause for a subpoena duces tecum of private K-C documents.
“Okay, Dr. Aranow,” Lizzie said cheerfully, and he would swear she looked so wide-eyed and dumb just to throw off the K-C observers. She was enjoying this, the little witch.
Jackson wasn’t. He let Cazie lead him to the first of the K-C labs and introduce him to the junior lab tech (a status insult, of course) appointed to explain the research to the intrusive outsider. Jackson prepared to hear streams of irrelevant summaries, to examine ongoing irrelevant experiments, and to wonder behind what sealed doors the real work was going forward, in directions that would not do anything to make little Dirk less afraid of the trees outside his front door.
Dip hard, Lizzie. Dip fast.
By midnight, Jackson’s head ached. For hours he’d concentrated on the research he’d been shown, trying to discern behind it the shadowy outlines of what he wasn’t being shown. He hadn’t eaten. He hadn’t taken in sunlight. Brain and body couldn’t take any more.
For the first time, he realized that Vicki hadn’t joined him.
“This particular series of protein foldings looked promising at first,” said the senior researcher that Jackson had insisted replace the junior lab tech as his guide, “but as you can see from the model, the gangloid ionization—”
“Where’s Victoria Turner? My assistant, who was supposed to show up here hours ago?”
Dr. Keith Whitfield Closson, one of the leading microbiologists in the United States, looked at Jackson coldly. “I have no idea where your people are, Doctor.”
“No. Sorry. Thank you for your time, Doctor, but I think we’d better resume in the morning. If you’d just point me in the direction of my quarters…”
“You’ll need to call the building system for a holo guide,” Closson said, even more coldly. “Good night, Doctor.”
The building led him to his room, a nondescript rectangle designed for comfort but not aesthetics. Bed, closet, bureau, chair, terminal. Jackson used the room terminal to call Lizzie.
She sat alone in the same room as hours ago, a table by her elbow strewn with the remains of mouth food. Her hair stuck out all over her head, evidently pulled at in the throes of battle, and her black eyes gleamed. She didn’t look even remotely tired. Jackson suddenly felt old.
“Lizzie, how are the flagging programs coming along?”
“Fine.” She grinned. “I’m getting closer and closer to a really good flag. Oh, and Vicki said to tell you she’s on her way through Decon and will be there to talk to you soon.”
“What took her so long?”
“She’ll tell you herself. Sorry, Jackson, I have to get back to work.”
It was the first time Lizzie had ever called him by his first name. Despite himself, Jackson smiled ruefully. Lizzie now considered them equals. How did he feel about that?
He was too tired to feel anything about anything.
But when he came out of the shower, dressed in complimentary pajamas of Kelvin-Castner green, Vicki sat on his lone complimentary K-C-green chair.
“Hello, Jackson. I invited myself in.”
“So I see.” Was his room monitored? Of course it was.
Vicki looked even more exhausted than Jackson felt. Instead of the Liver jacks he’d always seen her in, she wore a pants and tunic of K-C post-Decon green. She said, “I’ve been to your house, that’s why I wasn’t here earlier. Don’t look so alarmed, Theresa’s fine. But I have a lot to tell you.”