Back in objective reality, the attempts of the soldiers Lilliana had shanghaied into the illusion to tag the fleeing pair with stunners was turning The Meadows into a free-fire zone. Their beams dissipated harmlessly on the neon and chrome facades, but their squadmates… those who hadn’t been stunned by Regan’s bomb… were not so fortunate.
“HAVOC squad, stand down!” their commander barked over their communits. Unfortunately, the only ones who heard the command were those who were outside the illusion, some of whom had been preparing to stun or tackle their apparently berserk comrades or were trying to draw a bead on the fugitives.
“What in space are they up to?” asked the captain of HAZARD squad, still trapped with his men in the deployment center.
The closed circuit feed and other security subsystems originating from The Meadows had been cut off, but he’d exploited a backdoor into the security grid so he could watch the drama unfolding at the remove of a floor plan with various alerts popping up over it. He’d watched the spell perimeter collapsing, he’d seen the warning about an illusion in effect, he’d seen the sensors registering a Class ZZ explosive going off. He could see the energy signatures of the HAVOC goons lighting up the main concourse and the alerts from their biotelemetry units as they were disabled.
Concourses were HAVOC territory, of course, but if he’d been allowed to contain this while it was still in the restaurant…
“Hey, captain… what’s that?” one of his men asked, despite his express order that they not look over his shoulder. The man pointed a stubby gloved finger at the screen.
“Nothing! Old scans,” the captain said, shutting off the screen. “Archival stuff.”
“There was a blip like someone was crawling around the maintenance access duct in the closed-off section,” the man said. “Shouldn’t we do something?”
“Do something?” the captain repeated. “About a maintenance duct? Are we HADES, private?”
“No, but…”
“We aren’t privates, either,” one of the others reminded him.
“We’re Hospitality Ambassadors,” another supplied.
“We are Hospitality Ambassadors of the Zoo, Aquarium, and Restaurant Division,” the captain said. “Is the MAD a zoo? Is it an aquarium? Is it a restaurant or other eatery? No!”
“We could alert…”
“As far as I’m concerned, this whole mess started because some people can’t be bothered to mind their own jurisdictions,” the captain said. “Besides, I told you, that’s an archived playback.”
“I don’t think they ever had the entirety of The Meadows shut down since it first opened…”
“That’s enough!” the captain said. “It was probably just a damned cat, anyhow.”
In a way… a way that should already be transparently obvious to anybody remotely familiar with this sort of transition… the captain was correct. The figure generating the life sign in the maintenance duct was, from a strictly phenotypical point of view, a cat… and likely a damned one, from some perspectives.
“Come on, come on, come on,” Leo said to himself as he slunk along the narrow tube designed for small robots and engineered organisms smaller or more flexible than humans. “I’m burning daylight… or Nick is. Maybe I’m burning Nick. Whoa. Steady there, Leo, you just got in here and you’re already talking to yourself. You’ll be as crazy as Regan before too long.”
He paused when he got to a junction with a vertical shaft. There were no rungs, but there were grooves where tracked bots could run, and his claws could find purchase in them… so long as no units came along using them. So far, it seemed like the hostess had been right… the whole place was shut down. Nobody, not the mythical Rhodium Club members and not the humblest of maintenance drones, was getting in or out of The Meadows.
Nobody but himself.
“I suppose it won’t matter if I’m as crazy as Regan,” he reasoned out loud as he pulled himself up the shaft. In a radial system like a sphere, the bigwigs liked to be close to the core, and on a linear vessel they sometimes preferred a forward orientation, but otherwise one of the few constants in life was that if you wanted to talk to somebody who could get things done, you had to go up… climb that ladder, as it were. “So long as her luck at cards doesn’t come with it.”
A few feet later, he added, “You’re still talking to yourself, just so you know.”
And then a little bit after that, he responded, “I’m perfectly aware of that. But if you… meaning I… think about it, we… still I… have taken the place of Nick, and so it’s only natural that we would be talking to myself. Right?” he asked.
“If telling myself that makes me feel better, then I should go ahead and do it,” he replied. “Meanwhile, I’ve got a complaint to file.”
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