Dan dogged my heels as I swung towards the commissary, and then hugged the wall, in the camera’s blindspot. Back in my early days in the Park, when I was courting Lil, she showed me the A-Vac, the old pneumatic waste-disposal system, decommissioned in the 20s. The kids who grew up in the Park had been notorious explorers of the tubes, which still whiffed faintly of the garbage bags they’d once whisked at 60 mph to the dump on the property’s outskirts, but for a brave, limber kid, the tubes were a subterranean wonderland to explore when the hypermediated experiences of the Park lost their luster.
I snarled a grin and popped open the service entrance. “If they hadn’t killed me and forced me to switch to a new body, I probably wouldn’t be flexible enough to fit in,” I hissed at Dan. “Ironic, huh?”
I clambered inside without waiting for a reply, and started inching my way under the Hall of Presidents.
My plan had covered every conceivable detail, except one, which didn’t occur to me until I was forty minutes into the pneumatic tube, arms held before me and legs angled back like a swimmer’s.
How was I going to reach into my pockets?
Specifically, how was I going to retrieve my HERF gun from my back pants-pocket, when I couldn’t even bend my elbows? The HERF gun was the crux of the plan: a High Energy Radio Frequency generator with a directional, focused beam that would punch up through the floor of the Hall of Presidents and fuse every goddamn scrap of unshielded electronics on the premises. I’d gotten the germ of the idea during Tim’s first demo, when I’d seen all of his prototypes spread out backstage, cases off, ready to be tinkered with. Unshielded.
“Dan,” I said, my voice oddly muffled by the tube’s walls.
“Yeah?” he said. He’d been silent during the journey, the sound of his painful, elbow-dragging progress through the lightless tube my only indicator of his presence.
“Can you reach my back pocket?”