Trevor was watching her from a few meters away. As she passed him, Carla gave him the thumbs-up signal they’d previously agreed upon, then slipped him Nina’s visitor pass. He smiled and winked at her, then waited while Nina headed for the escalators.

Carla took a deep breath to steady her nerves. This part was out of her hands.

She made her way to the balcony that looked down onto the lobby. She tensed as Nina approached the desk where they had come in. But the guard didn’t even look at Nina as she dropped Carla’s badge in the return slot, where a scanner automatically processed it. So far, so good.

Carla let a full minute pass after Nina had exited the building, then signaled to Trevor. He descended on the escalator, then rushed up to the guard who stood just inside the lobby. Carla couldn’t hear what he was saying, but she knew the script; she’d written it. He was tearfully asking the bored-looking guard who manned the scanner if he’d seen his mother, whom he had lost at the end of the tour. As proof, Trevor showed the badge his mother had “dropped” during her ride down the photon slide.

The guard would probably remember that an ork woman had just left the building, and might even match that woman’s face with the one on the badge. But because several other visitors had passed through the gate in the interim, he was unlikely to remember whether or not she had turned in a visitor’s pass on the way out.

Trevor’ s act seemed to be working. The security guard pointed outside, took the two badges from him, and dropped them in the scanner. Trevor gave him a tearful smile, then jogged out the building after his “mother.” As instructed, he didn’t look back at Carla and give the game away. Later, when security did a count of the returned badges, they would assume that all fifty-six members of the 5 p.m. tour had exited the building.

Now Carla just had to wait for her distraction to hit. When it did, the building’s security would get much tighter; the guards would immediately ensure that all visitors safely exited the Byte of the Future display. They’d be sure to retrieve a visitor pass from each person as he or she left the area, and to compare the number of passes collected with the number of visitors who entered the building that day. Assuming that none of the visitors actually did go missing when the spirit crashed the exhibit’s computers, all of today’s visitors would be carefully accounted for-probably within a matter of a few minutes. And by the time they were, Carla would be well on her way to the research lab.

She looked around for her tour group leader. The woman had gone back to the escalator to meet the six o’clock tour. As she assembled the group and gave them her memorized introduction. Carla followed discretely behind, careful not to let the woman spot her. There was always a chance she’d recognize Carla as a member of the last group and would start wondering why this “tourist” had missed her bus. Or that she would notice Carla wasn’t wearing a visitor’s pass.

The six o’clock tour made it all the way to the photon slide before the spirit struck. The first sign that it had entered the Byte of the Future computer system was when the music and holograms in the transparent tube faltered to a halt. Next, the overhead lights began to flicker. In rapid succession, a number of displays blinked out. The ventilation system blasted out a jet of overheated air, then made a grinding noise as its rotors shut down, and the speakers began to hiss with static.

No more than a second or two after the whole chain of glitches began, the second- and third-floor display areas were plunged into darkness. As a babble of frightened voices filled the air, Carla made her move. She’d kept a careful watch on the tour guide, who now was shouting at her group to remain calm. Carla headed straight for the voice and deliberately jostled the woman in the dark. At the same time, she snatched the tour guide’s employee badge. Given the mob of confused and frightened people the woman had to deal with, Carla doubted she’d miss the badge for some time. If she did discover it was gone, she would probably assume it had fallen off and was lying somewhere on the floor of the display area.

Carla shed her jacket and pinned on the employee badge. Then she made her way by feel to the photon tube-slide. It would be the fastest way to put some distance between herself and the tour guide. Just as she reached it, a handful of emergency lights-those powered by battery and thus independent of the main computer system-started to flicker to life. But these only dimly lit the area; there were still enough shadows-and enough confusion, among the milling visitors-for Carla to jump into the tube and escape unnoticed.

The slide down to the second floor took only a moment or two. Reaching the bottom, she clambered to her feet and headed toward an employees-only exit she’d noted earlier. A winking red light showed that the door’s magkey was still functioning. It was a simple slide-through pad, operated by its own battery system. Carla aligned the magnetic strip on the employee badge, then slid it through the slot. When the light flashed green, she yanked the door open.

The corridor it led to was well illuminated; it must have been on a separate control system. Carla pulled the door shut behind her and hurried down the hallway. A security guard rushed toward her, heading for the door she’d just come through. Giving him her most earnest look, Carla jerked a thumb at the door behind her. “We’ve had a systems crash!” she shouted. “The power is down and we can’t use the telecom system. I’m going to see if I can reboot the lights.”

The guard grunted out a reply as he rushed past. “It fragging figures. Whenever there’s a system glitch, it’s on my shift.” He obviously didn’t yet realize the extent of the “glitch.”

Carla slowed to a brisk walk as she rounded a corner. Unwilling to risk the elevator, in case the spirit had wiped its programming as well, she entered the first stairwell she found. She climbed eight flights, paused to catch her breath, then emerged onto the tenth floor, which housed a number of office units. Now it was just a matter of working her way to the building’s outermost corridor and finding the skywalk that connected it to the next tower.

Aside from the few security guards who rushed past her, few of the employees on this floor seemed to realize the chaos that had broken out several stories below them. The corridors were filled with the usual hum of conversation and background office noise.

After a few minutes of searching. Carla found the skywalk that led to Tower C-the “Chrysanthemum Tower.” This was the heart of the beast; unlike the other five skyscrapers, which rented space to a variety of different businesses, Tower C was occupied solely by Mitsuhama Computer Technologies. For this reason, it was under much tighter security than the rest of the office complex. Not only was there a gate and a monitor system at the point where the skywalk joined the tower, but a live guard as well.

The guard was a young fellow with sharp features and cratered skin. Japanese, judging by his surname. An oversized pistol hung in a hoister at his hip. Carla had been prepared for that; she’d expected to have to bluff her way past an armed guard or two. Rut when she saw the retinal scanner that was built into the badge-recognition unit, her heart sank. There was no way she’d get past that.

In another moment, the guard would realize that she wasn’t the woman whose name and scan code were on the badge. He’d demand to see some authentic ID, and would call his superiors to deal with the attempted intrusion. Things would be tense for a moment or two, but eventually, once somebody saw her press pass, they’d be forced to let her go. She was simply too well known, too public a figure, to rough up. The mythical “power of the press” would protect her. But it was still fragging disappointing to have come this far, only to have her plans fall apart.