(eng) Lawrence Watt-Evans - Carlisle Hsing 02 by Realms of Light

Author:Realms of Light [Light, Realms of]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

I finished logging out and shutting down, and then I sat for a moment, staring at a desktop image of rolling ocean.

This wasn’t a coincidence. Oh, technically, I suppose coincidence was a possible explanation, but it wasn’t one I’d run. Even the stupidest gambler in the Trap wouldn’t play those odds. There had to be a connection between my visit to the Seventh Heaven system, and that hour-long probe a day earlier.

And the connection was pretty obvious. I got my access to the back door from a recording of Yoshio Nakada that I got from the old man’s ITEOD file, and I wasn’t the only one to look at that file. One of the others must have booted up a copy, just as I had, and found out about the back door from it.

That gave me three suspects: officer of the court Hu Xiao, an intelligence named Dipsy 3, and the anonymous user who had used a Nakada Enterprises corporate account. I knew which one I’d bet on, given a choice—the one who’d had a connection with Grandfather Nakada all along.

But that left another question—what was the connection with Seventh Heaven? Why would my mystery person (or Hu Xiao or Dipsy 3) want access to a dream company’s records? I knew why I wanted it, but somehow I doubted that some member of the Nakada clan was searching for a particular wirehead in the storage tanks of Trap Under. Why would anybody be looking at dreamer files?

Whoever it was presumably wanted something Seventh Heaven had. I wanted my father; what did this other person want?

What did Seventh Heaven have?

More specifically, what did they have that other companies didn’t? If the intruder had been going through multiple companies looking for credit or information, I didn’t think she would have gotten to Seventh Heaven this quickly; a dream company wouldn’t rank very high on my list of targets for the usual sort of exploitation.

So what would a dream company have that other companies wouldn’t?

Dreams, of course—millions of hours of interactive imagery ready to be fed into a client’s brain without being filtered through actual eyes and ears. Imaginary kingdoms of light and color, lands of bliss, bedrooms where no matter how energetic or inventive you got, you never had to worry about tugging on hair or twisting an ankle. Thrilling adventures, willing harems, transcendent scenery.

But you could get that kind of thing anywhere. Hell, a lot of it was public domain, and you could download it free from the city’s public service. Sure, some of the best stuff was the dream companies’ proprietary material, but was it really worth this much trouble?

What else did Seventh Heaven have?

Row upon row of dreamtanks—enclosed life-support systems that could keep an unconscious human being alive and reasonably healthy indefinitely without any external supervision, while a hardwired link fed pretty pictures into his brain. Was there some use for dreamtanks that I wasn’t seeing, something that made them valuable?

You could hide things in them, I supposed,

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