Death Match

She reminded herself this was no time for wistful nostalgia. Besides, she wasn’t doing this for Lash, or even for the Wilners or Thorpes. She was doing this for herself. If she could help unravel this mystery, set things right… maybe it wasn’t too late for her own avatar, after all.

She took a deep breath. Then she typed a single number: 2.

The screen refreshed:

ENTER AVATAR IDENTITY CODES

She typed the number she’d seen in her office, the first client avatar ever recorded: 000000000.

Almost immediately, there was a glow within the Tank. A lone avatar appeared, tiny and fragile in the dark vastness: a pale, pearlescent apparition of shifting color and shape. Sometimes it drifted almost listlessly, other times it darted at great speed.

Tara looked back at the screen. Opening a separate window, she posted a query to the client archives for the identity codes of the six supercouple females. The results came back immediately:

Returning to the main screen, Tara entered Lindsay Thorpe’s number. Immediately, another avatar glowed into existence. She paused, glancing over her shoulder. With only two avatars in the Tank, the matching process — for better or worse — should take only moments.

As she watched, the two avatars drifted: now pulsing with new color, now almost fading from view. Gradually their range attenuated as the attraction algorithms drew them closer together. There was a brief moment when they circled gracefully, like dancers performing a pas de deux. Suddenly, they darted at each other. There was a flare of brilliant white, then a storm of data appeared on nearby monitors as a million variables — the individual nuances of taste, preference, emotion, and memory that make up a personality — were instantaneously parsed and compared by the supercomputer, Liza. A new window appeared on the screen:

PROVING CHAMBER DATA OVERVIEW

$START PROCESS

BASELINE COMPARISON 9602194

A-SHIFT NEG

CHECKSUM IDENT 000000000: 4A32F

CHECKSUM IDENT 000462196: 94DA7

PENETRATION DATA: 14A NOMINAL

COLLISION TOPOLOGY: 99 NOMINAL

DIGITAL ARTIFACTING: 0

ANOMALOUS PROCESSES: 0

DATAFIELD DEPTH, POST-PENETRATION: 1948549.23 Mbit/sec

CLUSTER SIZE: 4096

START TIME: 18:25:31:014 EST

END TIME: 18:25:31:982 EST

BASAL COMPATIBILITY (HEURISTIC MODEL): 97.8304912 %

M.O.E: + / — .00094 %

$END PROCESS

Tara stared at the monitor in surprise. Lindsay Thorpe’s avatar and the unknown avatar, 000000000, had just been successfully matched. It wasn’t a perfect match, like Lindsay’s match to Lewis Thorpe, but at 97.8 percent it was within acceptable range.

She removed Lindsay’s avatar and then — more quickly — began to introduce the avatars of the other women, one by one, into the tank. And one by one, they also matched successfully with the mystery avatar. Karen Wilner, 97.1 percent. Ly

In growing disbelief, Tara entered the three final codes. Again, successful matches.

All six women — from all six of Eden’s supercouples to date — matched with the mystery avatar.

What was going on?

Could avatar 000000000 be some kind of control mechanism that matched with all avatars in the tank? It was possible: although she was familiar with the process, she didn’t know all its technical subtleties.

Turning back to the computer, she called up a non-supercouple client at random, inserted her avatar into the Tank with the mystery avatar. The compatibility came back at 38 percent: no match.

Now, Tara wrote a short routine that extracted a random sampling of a thousand female clients, past and current, and inserted their avatars into the Tank, a hundred at a time. Briefly, the Tank flared into a semblance of normality as the ghostly apparitions appeared within. This process took a little longer, but within five minutes it, too, was complete.

None of these thousand avatars successfully matched with avatar 000000000.

Abruptly, the watchful silence was broken by the beep of her cell phone.

Tara jerked in surprise, then fumbled for her phone, heart racing. The call had a Co

“Tara?” the voice was faint, thi

“Yes.”

“Where are you?”

“The Tank.”

“Thank God. And what did—?”

“Later. Where are you?”

“In a data conduit not far from you, I think. I—”

“Wait.” And Tara lowered the phone.

She thought about everything Mauchly said when he’d told her Lash was the killer. She thought about the diner, what Lash had begun to say. She thought about the look on his face when he’d appeared in her office, begged her to do just one more thing. Most of all, she thought about the six supercouples, and the mysterious avatar whose identity code was zero.

Tara was not by nature an impulsive person. She always examined the evidence, weighed the pros and cons, before making a decision. Right now, the cons were deadly serious. If Lash was the killer, she was in grave danger.

And the pros? Helping an i

Tara put her free hand into her pocket, withdrew two long, narrow strips of lead foil. She turned the strips over, looking at them. Maybe she wasn’t impulsive. But she realized that, this time, she’d made up her mind what to do long before setting foot in this room.

She lifted the phone. “Meet me outside the Tank. Quick as you can.”

“But—”

“Just do it.” And then she closed the phone, killed the ru

FIFTY

When Lash rounded the corner, Tara was waiting. He approached quickly.

“Thank you,” he said. “Thanks for taking a chance.”

“You look even more beat up than before,” she replied. Something flashed silver in her hands, and for a ridiculous moment Lash feared it was a pair of handcuffs. Then he realized it was a strip of lead foil. He watched as she took his bleeding hand and wrapped the foil carefully around his identity bracelet.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Neutralizing the sca

“I didn’t know you could do that.”

“Nobody’s supposed to. I got these from slitting open a lead apron in a radiology lab down the hall from my office. They’ll buy a little time.” She raised her own arm: an identical strip of foil had been wrapped around her own bracelet.

“Then you trust me,” he said, immensely relieved.

“I didn’t say that. But without the foil I’ll never get the chance to know whether you’re lying or not. Tell me one thing. You were kidding about them shooting at you, right?”

Lash shook his head.

“Jesus. Come on, we can’t stay here.” And she led him down the corridor.

They reached an intersection, turned the corner. “What did you find out?” he asked.

“I found out avatar 000000000 was a match for all six women.”

“God damn. I knew it!”

At that moment, Tara pushed him through a doorway.

Lash glanced around. “Is this a ladies’ room?”

“With my bracelet covered, I can’t unlock any doors. Here at least we can talk undisturbed. So talk.”

“All right.” Lash hesitated a second, wondering just what to say. It hadn’t been easy, even in the coffee shop; here, with his limbs trembling from the long climb and his heart hammering in his chest, it would be even harder.

“You realize I can’t prove anything,” he said. “The most important piece is still missing. But the rest of the pieces fit perfectly.”