Noir Read Free

fine-enough resolution almost to be convincing. He loathed that aspect of the building as well.
    The elevator had opened onto a standard corridor. “This way,” said the flunky. Like an idiot, as if there were any other way to go. The corridor was lined with doors, to all the cubapts on this level. As McNihil’s eyes moved over them, they turned into the kind with worn brass doorknobs and pebbly windows bearing the names of insurance agencies and dentists in chipped gold leaf. The optical trigger hooked in a keyed olfactum; he caught the evocative perfume of dust-fuzzed ceiling light fixtures, unswept and threadbare hallway carpets, stoic despair, and file-cabinet scotch.
    “Here we go.” The flunky pushed at one of the doors.
    Which opened onto a room full of people. Or enough of them to make a crowd in the small space. What had looked like some kind of office on the outside—the flaking gold on the glass had read Derrida & Foucault, Certified Public Accountants—was on the inside a luxury cubicle-apartment, nicely enough appointed in the usual corporate style. McNihil loathed spaces like this; these company-supplied cubapts, more artifacts out of the Denkmann book, were one of the things that had always kept him freelancing.
    The DZ flunky stood back, letting McNihil walk in ahead. Nobody said anything, though some of the business suits recognized him, knew him. The business suits in the room would’ve expected that his lip would curl as soon as he walked in.
But they wanted me to see it
, thought McNihil.
Where all the bad stuff came down
. Whatever it was.
    Their cold eyes watched as McNihil strode through the room, head down into his shoulders and face set in its bad-mood angles. One of them stuck a hand out, but McNihil avoided it. All these executive types, especially at this level, would have those annoying expanded handshake transmitters wired into their palms. Worse, he had a receptor in his own hand, a souvenir from his old job. Coming in on his skin’s nerve endings, it slid past the optical override—the flunky, when he’d come around to McNihil’s place, had caught him off-guard and had downed on him before McNihil had been able to pull his arm back. For the next five minutes, the tactile printout had itched away at McNihil’s left thigh, the nerve endings tingling with a dot-matrix scan of the flunky’s business card. McNihil had let it flash up inside his eye, but the only thing he’d read from it was the stylized DynaZauber logo and the company motto, something about all men being customers. What did he care what the flunky’s name and real job title were?
    With the execs’ collective gaze on his back, McNihil walked over to the tall view window at the opposite side of the cubapt’s living area.
    He stood with his nose almost touching the window, looked out and saw the Gloss stretched out far below. He licked the tip of his index finger with his tongue, then rubbed wet a spot of the glass. There was no pixel blur; the space was as high up as it appeared to be.
    “You got spit on the window.” Harrisch, a silver-haired senior exec that McNihil had encountered before, stood behind him now. “That’s DynaZauber property. Not even leased; we own this puppy.”
    McNihil glanced over his shoulder. “I like to know where I am. Altitude-wise.”
    “What does it matter?”
    “In case I fall.” He shrugged. “I want to know how long until I hit.”
    “You might find out.” Harrisch matched him in grumpy radiation, even though a smile like an open wound surfaced across his even teeth. “You’re a bad guest. You know that, don’t you?”
    “I try to be. It saves time.”
    He’d actually hoped that things would get this ugly, this fast. If nothing else, it meant that none of the other execs would try to introduce themselves. Which meant he wouldn’t have to fend off any more of those hearty ’spandshakes. The verified rumor was that execs like these had the data circuits wired over to