101 California Street. A spire of opulence forty-eight stories high, with a seven-story glass lobby distantly resembling a geometric mockery of a waterfall. In 1993 a gunman had killed eight people in this building, and injured six others in a crazed attempt to get revenge on the lawyers he blamed for his failures.
Roz supposed he wasn't much different, in the likely outcome of things. It was a nice day outside on the surface. Partly cloudy, comfortable Free State weather, a gentle breeze coming in through the open window of his white Honda Civic. Employees of the Singapore, Incorporated Investment Division were peacefully working up in that big tall building, completely unaware of the device just inside of the riser duct of the 35th floor's chase, sitting on a small square sheet of metal balanced on top of four fire dampers. All one had to do was open up the access door on the front of the line to find it, but of course no one looked in such places unless there was a problem.
And today there would be a problem.
He picked up the commpad from the passenger seat and checked the time. Just another minute. His eyes scanned the street again to satisfy his paranoia and he noticed a family of four, modestly dressed, walking down the sidewalk in the direction of the building. The fact there was even the slightest chance they were heading to 101--that they were going to be anywhere near it--would have been enough to get Roz to call it off. That was why he set it all in motion ahead of time. All he could do now was mitigate the damage... And face the consequences.
With a tap to the commpad he activated the voice modulator, ensuring the receptionist would hear the voice that would in about an hour's time be making real waves. Then he dialed the matrix listed contact number for 101.
It only took three seconds to connect. A polite, professional male voice spoke out of the pad. "Thank you for contacting the Singapore, Incorporated Investment Division. How may I direct your call today?"
"Hello," Roz said, "I've put a bomb in your building." He paused to let that statement register, but not long enough to let the receptionist speak. "This isn't a joke. I've killed everyone in that building you're in right now. Every single one. But you can save them, if you tell them to get out as soon as I hang up. The bomb is going to go off in exactly thirty-one minutes and fifteen seconds. Not nearly enough time to find it or turn it off, but enough time to evacuate the building if you start right now. Use the elevators, they'll work right up until it goes off. Please do something. No one has to die today."
He could hear the terrified shuddering coming from the other side, and of course Roz felt guilty pinning everything on some random wage worker. But he'd done all he could, so he cut the line. Placing the commpad on the passenger seat, Roz rolled down the driver's side window and pulled gently on his beard. In a minute he would see people start to flood out of the building's lobby, the fire escape tubes and the side entrances, or he would see a single receptionist frantically fleeing the scene of an imminent massacre. In the case of the latter, Roz would be getting out of his car, locking the doors out of habit and then walking into the building himself.
While waiting, the commpad chirped with an incoming connection. Roz tapped it and held it close to his face.
To the caller's question he answered, "Yeah. Yeah, I'm here." A pause while she berated him. "I'm gonna stay until I know." Another pause. "I have to." To that, she was silent. "Thanks," he said plainly. Poetic possible goodbyes had never been his area of expertise. But he liked to try, so he added "For everything."
The call cut out and Roz took the commpad in both hands. With a few motions he removed its battery, then its hard drive, then its main circuit board, leaving it a plastic shell with a touch screen. He broke the board, ran a magnet over the drive and then tossed all of the parts out of the window into the grass past the sidewalk.
Around the time he was done with this, the front doors of 101 California Street burst open and people started rushing out.
Roz let out a breath he'd been holding in for weeks. Thank magic for that, he thought. Then he started the car to move further away and see how it played out.
= = =
The receptionist's name was never really proliferated in the reports that followed, but his name was Terry. And the first thing Terry did was dial the building's head of security, who had just come back from his morning soykaf break. Thirty-five seconds after picking up the call the head of security triggered the emergency alert for the entire building and out the people started to scramble. Within ten minutes, corporate headquarters knew, and within fifteen Lone Star was being informed of the situation.
As the bomb caller had indicated, thirty-one minutes and fifteen seconds was just enough time to evacuate 101 California Street. The head of security was frantically sprinting from the building, having made certain it was entirely empty when the device on the 35th floor activated. The exact mechanism by which the radiation was proliferated would come to be a subject of intense study, conjecture and concern for many interested parties in the days to follow but suffice to say that the air itself within the building became a conductor for the energy and it expanded, as energy so often does. It filled every square meter of space in the building sitting on 101 California Street, including the air ducts and water pipes.
The expansion occurred quickly over the course of about a dozen minutes, over which time Lone Star policemen worked frantically with Singapore, Inc.'s corporate security to obstruct the surrounding streets and get people away from the lot. Everyone was expecting a gigantic blast that would shatter windows for kilometers around and their anxiety turned to quiet terror when instead of a conventional chemical explosion the lights in the building all flickered out as the circuitry inside failed. And then about a minute later, the interior of the building was gradually filled with a sickly green glow.
= = =
Dawson's memory of Berkeley was of a place that was welcoming to people with a certain type of soul, and hostile to everyone else. If your mind was open to the spirits around you, you were welcome. If you heard the voice of Mother on the wind, you were welcome. If your chief concerns were profit, or growth, or the confidence of the shareholders... Well, the neo-pagans of Berkeley knew many ways to make someone feel unwanted, only a few of which involved blunt instruments and broken limbs.
When the occupation ended and the city's administration was re-established, Berkeley was one of a few areas that because of their reputations did not attract much in the way of corporate sponsorship. Berkeley's resources for rebuilding had come from the community itself and the charity of metahumanitarian organizations, some of which had operated out of the area when fighting the Protectorate, and when the city council had been reformed they got their own representative on it who had held the seat since. He had a beard down to his waist, wore a boot on his head and was often the sole dissenting vote in any legislation.
She had never felt welcome there, because she believed she didn't deserve to feel welcome anywhere. Even when Mother Earth tried to seduce and captivate her to be their inside woman in the city's police force, it was her hardened self-hatred--and her numbness to chemical bliss--that kept her from falling into Tranquility's embrace.
For Instinct it was an intoxicating place to exist. All the auras of so many living, breathing people twisting together into a blended miasma of essence, expressing themselves like a conclave of absinthe-drunk artists throwing paint at each other's naked bodies. And if you were known to them, they would be so free with those bodies... Free and generous, even though most of them had nothing to spare save for their affection.
Consequently almost any trip into the streets of Berkeley was sure to become an all day and all night affair as Instinct felt compelled to mingle with the natives, to mix with the population. There was no shortage of people to kiss, to tongue, to suck or blow or ride. She'd suggested to Dawson recently that they should come to live here, sell the domicile beside the Orchard and become neo-pagans. Dawson had taken her by the face and whispered softly, "One day, maybe. When we're ready to lose ourselves in everyone else. But for now we need to keep our heads."
When that day would be wasn't a mystery to Instinct, who had the same mind as her human. It would be when all of California was as free and easy as Berkely was. And as went California, so would go the world.
This morning though she wanted to see someone who lived in Berkely but didn't often venture out of the small den that had been arranged for him. It was not easy, making her way through the streets and alleys without stopping to kiss or caress anyone signaling that they were receptive to it, or receptive to being convinced to be receptive to it. She moved by the edges of a crowd in an overgrown lot where a man with a black-and-white beret and a face painted with a smiling skull extended a hand to her in invitation to dance.
