Chapter IV
"[He] proposed it as a thing that is truly questionable,
whether there really be any difference between waking and dreaming..."
-- The Diary of Samuel Pepys, April 2, 1664
Only a few hours remained before Taro's presentation would begin. "The snow job to end all snow jobs," he called it.
The wardrobe was the same one he had worn for five years now. It consisted of a pair of stiff brown shoes two sizes too small, a dull blue suit, and a faded yellow bowtie. He was too nervous to eat, and he now had 150 minutes to waste. He decided to head to the auditorium early, to make sure the sound and light systems were in working order. He was actually hoping for a glitch, so he'd have something to occupy his time.
When he arrived, he found that a tech was already there checking the systems, so he found a seat near the back and ran the introductory speech in his head for the hundredth time that day.
The many presentations Taro had given and sat through at the university had given him the opportunity to meet dozens of technicians. Taro didn't make it a habit to keep track of all of them, but he was reasonably certain that this one was a new hire. Her blue coveralls were neatly creased, for one thing. She was middle-aged, but was working with the speed and lack of care characteristic of a newbie, so he guessed that she might have changed careers. She also didn't know enough to keep her black mid-length hair in a braid or under a hat instead of hanging free to get caught on something. He waited for her to screw up, and was pleasantly surprised when she proved herself perfectly competent in what she was doing. Maybe she dreamt of working with machines her whole life, he mused, and only recently found an escape from her dead-end job as World President.
Taro then took the time to see what the woman was actually installing on those ladders. The smile left his face when he realized it was a pair of MAPU's, one near the boarded-up control room to watch the stage, and one in the stage lights to watch the audience. That was fast, he thought to himself glumly. Tachibana doesn't mess around. He hunkered down and got back to his notes.
Once the units were installed, the next step was to test and calibrate them. The large MAPU's designed for auditoriums came with their own spotlights, so before long two beams of light were searching and illuminating random seats and spots on the stage. Taro noted that the spotlight never shown on him. Story of my adulthood, he reflected wryly.
Taro heard a distant y-phone go off with a distinctive five-note ring and looked up to see the tech in the rafters above the stage. She was lying on her back and adjusting various screws on the MAPU while talking into her headpiece. Taro made the conscious decision at that point not to blame her for the evil represented by her machines. Seeing that she was nearly done, he walked up to the stage for the inevitable technical briefing.
He looked over the auditorium controls installed in the face of the podium as he waited for her to descend, then walked up to her and held out his hand. She grinned and shook it with gusto.
"Are you the one giving the presentation tonight?" she asked quietly.
"Yeah, that's me. That was some nice work up there, by the way."
She shrugged. "It was nothing, really. Just doing my job."
"You've done it a lot better than most of the techs I've worked with. First time?"
"You noticed?" She suddenly looked nervous.
"I notice a lot of things." He decided to bite the bullet, with the possibility of Reika's "silver lining" in the back of his mind. He pointed to the two MAPU's and asked, "you mind telling me how to operate these guys?"
She nodded, then walked up to the podium and quickly added the MAPU controls to Taro's custom control configuration before beckoning him to watch over her shoulder. "The Monitoring And Projection Unit basically creates a holographic link between any two locations in the same local network. By connecting to this location, for example, any member of the university, or any properly-authorized employee of Tachibana Networks, can watch a presentation or performance and then interact, by appearing as a virtual member of the audience."
"Or a virtual actor," added Taro, pointing at the second MAPU.
"Yes," she nodded. "The remote interface allows users to control what they want to focus on. The local controls I've just installed are for setting the default view, and for allowing you to monitor who's watching. Of course," she added with a frown, "those with a high enough security level will be invisible to you."
"I'm well aware of that little 'gotcha'," Taro replied. With the technician's tacit urging, he stepped up to the podium to familiarize himself with the new controls, but stopped himself when he noticed the woman trying to sneak away.
"Leaving so soon?" he asked. "Well, it's been nice talking with you. My name's Taro, by the way." He held out his hand again and waited.
The woman silently debated with herself for a moment, then finally shrugged with a mysterious smile and returned the handshake. "Arisu. Perhaps we'll meet again."
"Perhaps we will. Goodbye."
"Goodbye." She picked up her toolbox and exited via the side door.
After a moment, Taro turned and examined the virtual controls thoroughly for a few minutes before giving up. No silver lining yet, but I'll do a better job later tonight after the presentation. He smiled in anticipation of the challenge to his hacking skills. That's when he noticed the squat black cylinder sitting at the edge of the podium.
He turned and raced out the door with the cylinder in his hand, but Arisu was long gone, so he turned and walked back in, so he could examine the object under the stage lights. It was a plastic container with a rubber lid, the kind used in his childhood to hold rolls of photographic film. Running the scene with Arisu back in his mind, Taro was fairly certain she had deliberately placed the container there when she had calibrated the podium controls. With this as justification, he walked further backstage where the lights were dimmer and carefully pried up the lid.
Inside were two smaller cylinders, each made of a clear crystalline substance, and each about the size and diameter of Taro's little finger. The interior of each cylinder was alive with thousands of tiny colored lights that darted from one end to the other.
Taro recognized the two objects immediately as memory stores. But whose memories were they?
Perhaps I'm in a spy drama after all, he thought.
