“Tender assembly on phrase: ‘Hey, Luther.’ Confirm.”
The kid came right up to him, holding forward a different steel part. A cell phone headset was now visible on his close-cropped head. The kid nodded. “Hey, Luther.”
Both men extended their hands and slid the steel parts together. They mated perfectly with a satisfying click.
“Assembly confirmed.”
A pleasant chime sounded over the line. “Operation complete. Twenty network credits. Demobilize.”
The kid took control of the combined parts and continued walking.
The Voice came over the phone headset. “Assembly stage two. Vector 168. Prepare to tender.”
The kid held the assembly down at his side, turned to the appropriate compass direction, and proceeded through the crowd at a brisk walk. In a few moments he and a young woman locked on to each other. She was big-boned, dressed like a businessperson. Utterly invisible to most men. The kid vectored in.
“Tender assembly on phrase: ‘Afternoon, Rudy.’ Confirm.”
The woman nodded as she came up to him, a flip phone handset held to her cheek. “Afternoon, Rudy.”
He placed the two-part assembly into her hand and disappeared into the crowd. “Assembly confirmed.”
A pleasant chime sounded over the line. “Operation complete. Twenty network credits. Demobilize.”
She snapped the kid’s two parts into a yellow plastic base and moved through the crowd, following her new vector.
As he headed back to the parking structure, the kid imagined the tactical assembly now under way; like swarming nanobots amid the mass of shoppers, the Daemon’s distributed assembly plant ran half a dozen independent lines, with no individual having knowledge of anything more than the few seconds in front of them and the mechanics of the single assembly for which they’d be responsible. The parts arrived in place at the moment they were required, The Voice vectoring them into a collision course. Assemblers came and went, passing the assembly on to the next worker in the chain after confirming completion of their step. Redundancy gave high probability that sufficient parts would arrive on station at the appropriate moment, and that waylaid assemblers could be quickly replaced.
What he didn’t know was what they were building. He wondered if he’d ever know.
In the battered lobby of a C-grade office building, a (now) debt-free graduate student faced the wall and clicked a methane-oxide fuel cell battery into place inside a form-fitting plastic handle.
The Voice spoke to him over his earpiece. “Confirm assembly completion.”
He powered the unit up and waited for a diagnostics check. A green light came on. Ready. He lowered the assembly out of sight. “Assembly complete.”
A pause. “Stand by…stand by…”
He looked around the lobby. It was a typical two-story box in a low-end tech park. Security consisted of locked doors with mag-card swipes at the entrances. In other words: no security. Long halls laid with orange indoor-outdoor carpeting crossed each other in a barren atrium in the center of the building.
He waited patiently in a water company uniform, complete with photo ID badge and water-bottle-laden handcart as The Voice kept repeating, “Stand by…” in his ear every ten seconds.
Then it paused. “Vector 209. Prepare to tender completed assembly.”
This was it. The Receiver was coming. He glanced at his GPS and turned to face the security door.
Charles Mosely walked briskly toward the lobby doors. It was a bright spring day under a wide Texas sky. He could see his reflection in the door glass as he approached. He was dressed in a phone company uniform with tool belt, clipboard, and phone headset. He swiped his security card, and the door opened with a buzz.
The Voice spoke on the headset. “Receive assembly on phrase ‘Here it is.’”
Mosely approached a young Asian man standing in the lobby with a handcart piled with five-gallon water cooler jugs. As he walked by, the man extended an odd-looking steel and yellow plastic device to him. It was shaped like a glue gun, with the top section missing—an empty channel with twin grooved steel plates. “Here it is.”
Mosely grabbed it with his work-gloved hands and shoved it into a slot on his utility belt designed specifically for it. He heard the water man exit the lobby doors behind him, but he walked purposefully on his appointed vector, passing a nondescript guy in a pullover shirt bearing some company’s logo. He nodded congenially as he went past, but the guy didn’t acknowledge him in the least. Just some tenant.
“Vector 155,” The Voice said in Mosely’s ear.
That was straight down the corridor. Mosely kept moving down the hall, glancing at office doors.
Suite 500.
Ten minutes ago he thought he was going to tap a phone system. But now in possession of the assembly, he recognized it immediately. He had used it before.
It was an electronic pistol.
Manufactured with bright yellow plastic and brushed steel, it resembled a battery-powered hand tool—it even had a tool company logo on the side. But in reality it was a fully automatic, precision-made handgun. It was nearly 100 percent reliable because it had no moving parts. Instead of a firing pin and complex recoil-based reloading mechanism, an electronic pistol was a fire-by-wire device; the caseless bullets were stacked in a straight line in one of four parallel twelve-inch barrels, and a logic chip fired each bullet independently with bolts of electricity from an onboard battery. The gun was reloaded by slapping on new barrels of ammunition. Mosely had already received three rapid-loaders from a courier out in the street. It was a foolproof, untraceable weapon designed for one thing: killing people at close range.
Suite 710.
He steeled himself. There was a grander purpose at work here. He had to keep reminding himself of that. This wasn’t the same as what he’d done as a teen. He wasn’t doing this for himself. The world was changing. He’d seen it. This was part of the plan. There were no random acts in the plan.
The Voice said, “Stop.”
Suite 1010.
Mosely drew the unloaded pistol, then took the welded-steel barrels from the other side of his tool belt. He slid the two together with a click-clack. It was now loaded and looked very much like a garish, toy laser pistol.
The Voice came to his ears. “Device code…4-9-1-5.”
Mosely flipped the gun and tapped in the four-digit code at the base of the handle. The device was now armed.
He turned to face the door. Then he reached into his pocket and produced a hard plastic door key given to him by a woman out on the street. All master key systems were vulnerable to mathematical reduction.
The Voice continued in his earpiece. “Confirm instruction: kill the occupants of suite…1-0-1-0.”
Mosely closed his eyes. He didn’t relish this. He thought he’d left this behind years ago. But the Daemon had found him out. It knew he had killed before. He took a deep breath, then said, “Instruction confirmed.”
“Proceed.”
Mosely inserted the key, turned it, and pushed the door open. He moved into a cluttered office with shelving piled high with papers and boxes on the far wall. Banks of cheap desktop computers sat atop folding tables. A thirtysomething guy with a sizeable gut turned quickly in his chair to face Mosely. He had a cherry Danish almost up to his mouth.