Tri. Dva. Odin. Zashiganiye!

Ignition…

As Kate Manzoni approached the OurWorld campus, she wondered if she had contrived to be a little more than fashionably just-late-enough for this spectacular event, so brightly was the Washington State sky painted by Hiram Patterson’s light show.

Small planes criss-crossed the sky, maintaining a layer of (no doubt environmentally friendly) dust on which the lasers painted virtual images of a turning Earth. Every few seconds the globe turned transparent, to reveal the familiar OurWorld corporate logo embedded in its core. It was all utterly tacky, of course, and it only served to obscure the real beauty of the tall, clear night sky.

She opaqued the car’s roof, and found after-images drifting across her vision.

A drone hovered outside the car. It was another Earth globe, slowly spinning, and when it spoke its voice was smooth, utterly synthetic, devoid of emotion. “This way, Ms. Manzoni.”

“Just a moment.” She whispered, “Search Engine. Mirror.”

An image of herself crystallized in the middle of her field of vision, disconcertingly overlaying the spinning drone. She checked her dress front and back, turned on the programmable tattoos that adorned her shoulders, and tucked stray wisps of hair back where they should be. The self-image, synthesized from feeds from the car’s cameras and relayed to her retinal implants, was a little grainy and prone to break up into blocky pixels if she moved too quickly, but that was a limitation of her old-fashioned sense-organ implant technology she was prepared to accept. Better she suffer a little fuzziness than let some hack-handed CNS-augment surgeon open up her skull.

When she was ready she dismissed the image and clambered out of the car, as gracefully as she could manage in her ludicrously tight and impractical dress.

OurWorld’s campus turned out to be a carpet of neat grass quadrangles separating three-story office buildings, fat, top-heavy boxes of blue glass held up by skinny little beams of reinforced concrete. It was ugly and quaint, 1990s corporate chic. The bottom story of each building was an open car lot, in one of which her car had parked itself.

She joined a river of people that flowed into the campus cafeteria, drones bobbing over their heads.

The cafeteria was a showpiece, a spectacular multi-level glass cylinder built around a chunk of bona fide graffiti-laden Berlin Wall. There was, bizarrely, a stream running right through the middle of the hall, with little stone bridges spanning it. Tonight perhaps a thousand guests milled across the glassy floor, groups of them coalescing and dispersing, a cloud of conversation bubbling around them.

Heads turned toward her, some in recognition, and some — male and female alike — with frankly lustful calculation.

She picked out face after face, repeated shocks of recognition startling her. There were presidents, dictators, royalty, powers in industry and finance, and the usual scattering of celebrities from movies and music and the other arts. She didn’t spot President Juarez herself, but several of her cabinet were here. Hiram had gathered quite a crowd for his latest spectacle, she conceded.

Of course she knew she wasn’t here herself solely for her glittering journalistic talent or conversational skills, but for her own combination of beauty and the minor celebrity that had followed her exposure of the Wormwood discovery. But that was an angle she’d been happy to exploit herself ever since her big break.

Drones floated overhead, bearing canapés and drinks. She accepted a cocktail. Some of the drones carried images from one or another of Hiram’s channels. The images were mostly ignored in the excitement, even the most spectacular — here was one, for example, bearing the image of a space rocket on the point of being launched, evidently from some dusty steppe in Asia — but she couldn’t deny that the cumulative effect of all this technology was impressive, as if reinforcing Hiram’s famous boast that OurWorld’s mission was to inform a planet.

She gravitated toward one of the larger knots of people nearby, trying to see who, or what, was the centre of attention. She made out a slim young man with dark hair, a walrus moustache and round glasses, wearing a rather absurd pantomime-soldier uniform of bright lime green with scarlet piping. He seemed to be holding a brass musical instrument, perhaps a euphonium. She recognized him, of course, and as soon as she did so she lost interest. Just a virtual. She began to survey the crowd around him observing their child-like fascination with this simulacrum of a long-dead, saintly celebrity.

One older man was regarding her a little too closely. His eyes were odd, an unnaturally pale grey. She wondered if he had possession of the new breed of retinal implants that were rumoured — by operating at millimetre wavelengths, at which textiles were transparent, and with a little subtle image enhancement — to enable the wearer to see through clothes. He took a tentative step toward her, and orthotic aids, his invisible walking machine, whirred stiffly.

Kate turned away.

“…He’s only a virtual, I’m afraid. Our young sergeant over there, that is. Like his three companions, who are likewise scattered around the room. Even my father’s grasp doesn’t yet extend to resurrecting the dead. But of course you knew that.”

The voice in her ear had made her jump. She turned, and found herself looking into the face of a young man: perhaps twenty-five, jet-black hair, a proud Roman nose, a chin with a cleft to die for. His mixed ancestry told in the pale brown of his skin, the heavy black brows over startling, cloudy blue eyes. But his gaze roamed, restlessly, even in these first few seconds of meeting her, as if he had trouble maintaining eye contact.

He said, “You’re staring at me.”

She came out fighting. “Well, you startled me. Anyhow I know who you are.” This was Bobby Patterson, Hiram’s only son and heir — and a notorious sexual predator. She wondered how many other unaccompanied women this man had targeted tonight.

“And I know you, Ms. Manzoni. Or can I call you Kate?”

“You may as well — I call your father Hiram, as everyone does, though I’ve never met him.”

“Do you want to? I could arrange it.”

“I’m sure you could.”

He studied her a little more closely now, evidently enjoying the gentle verbal duel. “You know, I could have guessed you were a journalist — a writer, anyhow. The way you were watching the people reacting to the virtual, rather than the virtual itself… I saw your pieces on the Wormwood, of course. You made quite a splash.”

“Not as much as the real thing will when it hits the Pacific on May 27, 2534 A.D.”

He smiled, and his teeth were like rows of pearls. “You intrigue me, Kate Manzoni,” he said. “You’re accessing the Search Engine right now, aren’t you? You’re asking it about me.”

“No.” She was annoyed by the suggestion. “I’m a journalist. I don’t need a memory crutch.”

“I do, evidently. I remembered your face, your story, but not your name. Are you offended?”

She bristled. “Why should I be? As a matter of fact -”

“As a matter of fact, I smell a little sexual chemistry in the air. Am I right?”

There was a heavy arm around her shoulder, a powerful scent of cheap cologne. It was Hiram Patterson himself: one of the most famous people on the planet.

Bobby grinned and, gently, pushed his father’s arm away. “Dad, you’re embarrassing me again.”

“Oh, bugger that. Life’s too short, isn’t it?” Hiram’s accent bore strong traces of his origins, the long, nasal vowels of Norfolk, England. He was very like his son, but darker, bald with a fringe of wiry black hair around his head; his eyes were intense blue over that prominent family nose, and he grinned easily, showing teeth stained by nicotine. He looked energetic, younger than his late sixties. “Ms. Manzoni, I’m a great admirer of your work. And may I say you look terrific.”