“The building is built like a bank, a mint, or a prison,” Jesús said. “Big thick walls, windows far off the ground and very small, no good hiding places along its sides. There’s either something they want to keep in, or something they are trying to keep out.”
“Well,” I said, as we all got out of the car, “I don’t suppose they’ll have any active measures around to keep us from going in the front door. It does say ‘Lobby.’ And this seems to be a lucky day—no sign of pursuit yet, and no evidence that anyone knows we’re alive. Maybe the silent alarm just wasn’t hooked up to anything anymore.”
Paula shrugged. “Or maybe Iphwin—the cyberphage, I mean —is acting on our behalf, or maybe the bad guys can’t travel to anywhere this far north for reasons known only to the bad guys.”
“Or maybe they know where you have to go, and there’s no point chasing you all over the field when they can just wait for you there,” a familiar voice said.
We turned around and there was Geoffrey Iphwin, perfectly healthy, wearing his old ridiculous bright white ice cream suit with a painfully loud gold and purple tie. He looked at our slack-mouthed stares and laughed aloud. “Now don’t look so startled. Remember I was only dead in a few thousand of my existences; I crossed over here, with the assistance of the machine-Iphwin. Now a few thousand of me are talking to a few thousand of you. And here I am. I think the adversary is probably coming after us fast, so we should get moving. As for how I found you, I knew where you were headed and how you were traveling. Now, if everyone is ready, let’s go.”
We all were ready enough physically; we just didn’t have a clue as to how to deal with a person we all remembered as dead. But then, why fret about it? He seemed comfortable enough.
“We are coming up on the end of things,” Iphwin said as we crossed the public square. “I think when we get closer there will be some kind of attack. I still don’t know what’s going on and the knowledge may destroy me, or the program of which I’m an avatar, but I see no way I could avoid trying to learn it now. Suppressed curiosity, I bet, has killed more cats than exercised curiosity.”
Jesús said, “If they really want to stop us, why don’t they just hit this whole area with hydrogen bombs until it glows? That would be much more likely to work than trying to hunt us like deer.”
“I wish I knew that too,” Iphwin said. “Maybe it’s just against the rules, and the rules are being made up by someone of whom we have no knowledge. More likely they are afraid of damage to the place where we are going, and so they want to get rid of us in the way that spills the least stray energy. Or it could be something none of us has thought of.”
“It could often be that, at that,” Paula said cheerfully. “Do we have a plan for anything besides ‘walk up and pound on the front door’?”
“The front door sounds good to me,” Iphwin said. He really did look absolutely splendid in the suit, more so because the four of us were in our dirty, worn road clothes. “Least likely to be misunderstood and most likely to produce a result we’ll understand, eh?”
We were halfway up the steps when we heard “Don’t move a muscle” in a too-familiar voice.
I glanced back and saw a dozen copies of Billie Beard, all holding shotguns. “We’re glad we stopped you here. Cooperate and we won’t need to hurt you, don’t cooperate and we’ll cut you in half with all the shotgun blasts.”
Iphwin raised his hands and said, “Looks like it’s your game.”
Without replying, the dozen Billie Beards marched us over to the blank wall of the building and lined us up against the wall. Iphwin began to laugh, something we’d never heard him do before. “What’s funny?” Beard demanded.
We were inside the building, facing the outside wall—in mirror image to the lineup we had been in. Through the soundproofing we heard the muffled sput-thud, sput-thud of guns being fired point-blank into the wall.
“Some of those shots will get through sooner or later,” Iphwin said, “or they might remember that the front door is unlocked, so let’s get deeper into the building before they find a way in.”
We hurried down a corridor beside us; it might have been part of any administrative or technical building of the last 150 years, with CBS block walls painted landlord yellow on the lower part and pale blue on the upper; a black stripe separated the two colors at shoulder height. No doubt some architect somewhere had gotten a pile of money for deciding on that design.
A few minutes of dashing around corners and down corridors, always going up every flight of stairs, past frosted glass windows on doors, and big square wooden doors with numbers on them, was at least enough to get me lost, and to get all the noise of the attack on the wall outside out of earshot. We slowed to a brisk walk, and began to look for any signs or building guides that might give us a clue.
“How did you do that?” I asked Iphwin.
“Practice,” he said. “One reason why you didn’t get pursued much, till you got up here, was that everyone was chasing me, and one reason they were chasing me was because I was keeping in continuous radio contact with the cyberphage. I learned a very large number of very useful things. Not all of which I can explain or show you in the time we have left. Let’s get going—time is precious.”
To our surprise, the first sign we saw said “TO THE OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY.”
“Pretty strange,” I said.
“That a secretary gets a sign?” Terri asked.
I couldn’t help smiling. “Bet you didn’t review your American history recently. A ‘secretary’ in the American government was about what a cabinet minister is anywhere else. That’s the head honcho’s office, not where the typist lives.”
“I know that,” she said, her voice dripping with the kind of contempt that you can only get from an adolescent who has been told something she already knows. “What’s weird about there being a sign for the secretary’s office, in the building of the department he’s the head of?”
“What’s weird,” I said, “is that normally a cabinet secretary would have an office in Washington, and not in Santa Fe. It’s also weird that we found exactly what we were looking for this quickly.”
Paula looked at Iphwin, and he shrugged. “Pure chance plays a role, all the time, no matter what,” he pointed out. “It isn’t really so odd that every so often, even a creature of chance like me can just happen to be lucky.”
We found the door a few minutes later. The glass in the window broke readily enough when Jesús and I swung a small microwave oven from a break room like a battering ram. We turned the knob on the inside, walked past a receptionist’s desk, and found ourselves standing on thick, plush blue wall-to-wall carpet that seemed still to be brand-new; a faint odor of synthetics still hung in the air, indicating that the room had been closed all that time.
On the desk was an old-fashioned VR headset, and the chair was tipped back; there was a pricey pair of black wing tip shoes, at least forty years old, sitting on the carpet under the desk, next to two balled-up socks.
Iphwin shrugged, checked, and said, “The batteries on these computers were lifetime guaranteed, but I don’t think anyone ever thought a computer would have a lifetime like this. Let’s see what happens if we turn it on.”
Nothing did. We started to paw through the file cabinets.
“Here’s a specification,” Paula said. “For a national happiness policy.”
We sat down and pored over it, everyone looking closely. “At least in neurology, this world was ahead of the ones I grew up in,” I said. “Look at this. They have a really, really elaborate spec on the human brain. When they say they’re out to maximize human happiness, they are really not kidding. They know just what it is, it’s a brain state, and this is the program that’s going to make sure that while people are plugged into VR, their happiness gets maximized.”