Bypass Gemini

Chapter 23

The streets were crowded with both foot traffic and street traffic. It wasn’t like Lon Djinn, where the city was used to that sort of thing and had adapted. This was clearly the rare and ill prepared for uptick in population that conventions invariably brought to an area. Verna Coronet was very earth-like. Across its five continents, every climate was represented, and the VC tower stood on the east coast, just a bit above the equator. The place was practically a vacation resort, with cool sea breeze blowing over a lush, green environment with palm trees imported from California and trendy restaurants and boutiques, also imported from California, lining every street. People were mostly hustling to make it to the tower to witness the VC CEO explain that his company, sure enough, still had more money than God, and such would remain the case for the foreseeable future. Sifting among the legion of designer labels and spray tans was a curious sight; an unshaven man in a flight suit, all of its pockets bulging, and a dull gray bundle strapped to his back. His face was smudged with irregular shaped black splotches, like a football player’s warpaint if it had been applied on a roller coaster. He wore bizarre mitts on his hands, thick blue gloves. Despite the fact that he stuck out like a sore thumb, Lex didn’t garner a second glance from anyone. As a matter of fact, he didn’t even get a first glance.

He nervously twitched a knob on his backpack. Karter had managed to “ruggedize” the mental cloak, meaning that he’d given it a somewhat sturdier covering than its duct tape cocoon. He’d also thrown out an awful lot of amplification and power apparatus, knocking its range down to about two hundred meters and its weight down to about ten kilos. This, he claimed, would “probably” prevent it from causing seizures. The threat of sudden debilitating brain ailments managed to be the last thing on Lex’s mind, though. Mostly he felt naked. The face paint was to foil facial detection and identification, and it seemed to be working. On the other hand, he was trusting a piece of machinery that was currently undergoing its first actual test, and operated on principles that he would have sworn were just made up, to keep him from being seen in broad daylight on a crowded street. He felt like the emperor wearing his fancy new clothes. Yet, astoundingly, it was working.

It wasn’t like he was invisible. It was better. If he’d been invisible, he’d have had to worry about people constantly running into him. With this piece of technological witchcraft, people were actually stepping out of his way, making room for him as he jogged by. A half hour of moving unnoticed through the crowded streets had taken him to the outskirts of the VectorCorp Tower Plaza, but simply being ignored wasn’t going to help him any more. The courtyard was utterly packed, shoulder to shoulder with nowhere to move. Most attendees were men in suits or women in business wear, gathered to witness a speech by their glorious leader. These people worked eighty hour weeks for this man, but squinting at a podium several hundred feet away on the steps of the building, or on one of the pair of massive screens set up along the side of the tower, was likely the closest they would ever come to actually meeting him. By rights, the VectorCorp CEO should have been the most famous person in the galaxy, but this was one of those occasions where specific names just didn’t matter anymore. VectorCorp was a force. You cared about as much about the man in charge as you cared about the name of the engineer operating the train you were riding, or in the case of Lex, of the train that was about to hit you. A parade of silver-haired men, or women who paid a small fortune to avoid being silver-haired, had held the post over the years, like different actors reprising the same role on a soap opera.

The rest of the crowd was made up of broadcasters of every type: Bloggers, Vloggers, business media, generic news, local, regional, galactic. It didn’t matter what language you spoke or where you lived, over the next week, you were not going to be able to avoid seeing clips of this speech. It would be nice to think that all he had to do was de-cloak in the middle of the crowd and scream that VectorCorp was plotting to kill thousands of people, but that sort of thing happened every year or so, and press laughed it off as a harmless lunatic’s rantings. Lex had, too. Now he wasn’t so sure. But what he DID know was that he needed a better way, or at least better evidence, and that meant getting inside.