Inhaltsangabe
The year is 2069. Plagues have destroyed major food sources, and a virus has infected the vast majority of earth's inhabitants. The virus can be overcome, but only through complete blood transfusion. This is why blood has become the new currency: it is banked, traded, and speculated in. But only by the few who are wealthy enough to have a clean source.
The moon is now a penal colony, a sexual pleasure dome, and home to the most important blood bank around. This bank is watched over by one massive computer, and that computer's security systems were devised by one man: Dallas. Playing by the system's rules, Dallas has become wealthy.
But then his daughter is struck down by a blood disease requiring repeated transfusions. Now he is the security risk, and the perfect player has become a target.
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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor
Born in 1956, Philip Kerr studied law before turning to fiction. His books include A Philosophical Investigation, The Grid, Dead Meat, Esau and A Five-Year Plan. He lives in London, England.
Aus dem Klappentext
The year is 2069. Plagues have destroyed major food sources, and a virus has infected the vast majority of earth's inhabitants. The virus can be overcome, but only through complete blood transfusion. This is why blood has become the new currency: it is banked, traded, and speculated in. But only by the few who are wealthy enough to have a clean source.
The moon is now a penal colony, a sexual pleasure dome, and home to the most important blood bank around. This bank is watched over by one massive computer, and that computer's security systems were devised by one man: Dallas. Playing by the system's rules, Dallas has become wealthy.
But then his daughter is struck down by a blood disease requiring repeated transfusions. Now he is the security risk, and the perfect player has become a target.
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Chapter One
From the window of Dallas's gyrocopter, the Terotech Building looked like the profile of a giant lizard, perhaps a chameleon, since everything -- from the external climate surfaces to the height of the three glass stories -- was subject to change, according to whatever environmental factors were predominant at the time. The seamless interior, with hardly a post, beam, or panel in sight, was no less interactive with the intel workers who inhabited the place. Self-regulating, continually adapting through electronic and biotechnological auto-programming, the Terotech Building's dynamic framework was more than just a shelter for those, like Dallas, who were privileged to work there, more than the achievement of mere ecological symbiosis. For the building was the very symbol of Terotechnology and its business. From the Greek word terein, meaning "to watch," or "to observe," Terotech led the world in the conceptualization and construction of so-called Rational Environments -- high-security facilities for digital cash and other financial institutions, and blood banks. And Dana Dallas was the company's most brilliant designer.
It was a good day for flying, cold but sunny and clear all the way up to forty-five thousand feet with little or no traffic to impede Dallas's four-hundred-mile-per-hour progress. Not that Dallas took much pleasure in the machine. His mind was already occupied with his latest project and the various calculations he had requested that his assistant spend the night working on. He dropped the last fifty feet onto the ground in three seconds, undid his seat harness, and switched the twin turbocharged engine off. But before jumping out under the diminishing steel canopy of the rotor blades, Dallas took a good look around from within the safety of the bullet-proof bubble. It was always a good idea to see who was hanging around the gyro park before stepping out of your machine. These days, with all the bloodsucking scum around, you couldn't be too careful. Even inside the comparative safety of the Clean Bill of Health area -- the so-called CBH Zone. Deciding that everything looked safe enough, he opened the gyro and ran toward the glass doors of the Terotech Building, though not quickly enough to avoid a cloud of dust, stirred up by the speed of his landing, from entering along with him.
"Morning, Jay."
"Morning Mister Dallas, sir," said the parking valet, running to take charge of Dallas's gyro and taxi it to the chief designer's reserved parking space. "How are you today?"
Dallas grunted equivocally. He removed his sunglasses, stood for a brief moment in front of the security screen, and breathed carefully onto the exhalo-sensitive film. It was a simple but effective device, designed by Dallas himself. He liked to joke that you could enter one of America's most secure buildings just by blowing softly on the doors.
Having gained admittance to those parts of the Terotech Building that were not open to the public, Dallas took the elevator down to the sixth level, which was also the most secret. Most of Terotechnology's work took place below ground, in dozens of windowless offices, each made more congenial by the facility of a faux fenêtre screen offering whatever view the occupant required. Dallas liked to look out of his office into the depths of a computer-generated ocean that was home to limitless shoals of brightly colored fish displaying a host of realistic behaviors. This was the view he found most conducive to thought. But there were other times when his fluctuating mood dictated that he look at rivers of red-hot magma, snow-capped mountain ranges, or simply an English country garden.
The undersea view invested the brushed steel, polished wood, and soft leather finishings of Dallas's office with the feel of a private submarine. But despite the obvious luxury of these surroundings -- and Dallas knew how fortunate he was -- it was not uncommon for him to wish that he could simply have propelled his sumptuous sanctuary into the faux fenêtre's unfathomable azure, far away from Terotech and the man next door, who was in overall charge of the company -- his boss, Simon King. Dallas's assistant, Dixy, was fond of quoting at him -- she had an inexhaustible memory for this kind of trivia -- when you're between any sort of devil and the deep blue sea, the deep blue sea sometimes looks very inviting.
Dallas enjoyed his work, but loathed the man he worked for. It's a common dilemma, and Dallas knew himself well enough to recognize that this had as much to do with his own character as it did with King's. The Terotechnology CEO was arrogant, capricious, and cruel, but no more than Dallas, or for that matter anyone else who was on the Terotechnology board of directors. Dallas hated the director chiefly because he saw himself reflected in the older man and recognized that in time he would probably fall heir to King's job, which was all that he feared most in the world. Design was a very different proposition from the day-to-day running of a corporation the size of Terotechnology. It was an activity for small groups or, as Dallas preferred it, for individuals. The CEO function was about development, a process that required whipping, kicking, and pushing. Small wonder that King required the assistance of Rimmer, his head of security. But it was unthinkable that you could make the Design Department work in that way. The more you tried to make it efficient, the less efficient it would become. For Dallas, his own lack of corporate responsibility was a source of pride. His mind worked to perfect pitch only when it was unfettered by the need to perform the mundane tasks of routine administration. He thought it would be crazy for someone like him, a pure designer, to run a company like Terotechnology; but at the same time, he knew that this was what King, himself a former designer, had planned for him, and he hated King for it. All Dallas wanted was to be left alone to design his intricate models of high security.
Sweeping quickly into his office before King could spot him, Dallas closed the door and then locked it.
"That won't keep him out," said Dixy.
"I know," he answered dully. "I'm open to suggestions for making his exclusion from my life something more permanent."
"Sounds like someone had a bad evening."
Silently, Dallas shrugged off his jacket and poured himself a glass of water. Finding herself ignored, Dixy awaited her master's orders with patient respect.
"These days they're all bad," he said at last.
"I'm sorry to hear that."
"It's my daughter. She's sick."
"Caro? What's the matter with her?"
"That's half the problem," he said. "The doctors -- they don't really know." He sighed and shook his head.
"It sounds like she's been sick for a while."
"Since she was born."
"But why haven't you told me before?" Dixy sounded a little hurt.
It was true. It was the first time he had mentioned Caro's illness to his assistant. Dallas wasn't the kind to mix his home life with his business life. But now he felt the need to tell someone about it. Even if that someone was only Dixy.
"You can tell me anything. That's what I'm here for."
Dallas nodded. He appreciated Dixy's seeming concern.
"She just doesn't seem to thrive," he said. "For a start, she's anemic. And then there's her jaw." Dallas shrugged. "It seems to stick out in the most peculiar way. If she wasn't so sickly, she'd look like an infant Neanderthal. I mean, you'd look at her and your first instincts would be to leave her out on a hillside somewhere, you know what I mean? No, I don't mean that. I do love her, but there are times -- well, let's just say it's not easy to bond with a child like that, Dixy."
"Well, I wouldn't know about that," she said stiffly.
The note in her voice surprised him, and for a moment Dallas wondered if perhaps she wanted a child of her own. Maybe he could organize that.
"Take my word for it," he said bitterly.
"What do the doctors say?"
"The doctors," Dallas snorted contemptuously. "They're running tests. Always more tests. But this far, whatever it is that's wrong with her has eluded their diagnosis. So to be honest, I'm not very optimistic that they'll find anything."
"Oh dear," sighed Dixy. "Is there anything I can do?"
Dallas stared into the screen of the faux fenêtre as a school of butterfly fish swooped as one, their eyes peering out from behind broad bands of black lending them a villainous look, so that they most resembled a gang of marauding bandits. It never ceased to amaze Dallas the way the fish all managed to turn in the same direction at exactly the same time -- they may have been generated by a computer, but they were as realistic as if they had been bought from an aquarium. He supposed it was behavior associated with and modified by their breeding and feeding requirements. But how like the population at large, he thought. The masses of people who were obliged to live outside the Zone, with its system of medical privilege that cocooned Dallas and his class. Dangerous, nefarious people. Uneducable, infected things made of greed and desire. Crowded seas of dying generations against whose contagion a smaller, healthier, morally superior population had, of necessity, sought the protection of reinforced glass, scanning cameras, and lofty electrified fences in hermetic, guarded communities of RES Class One citizens.
Dixy coughed politely, and realizing that she had asked him a question, Dallas looked away from the faux fenêtre with a questioning sigh, to which he then added, "What's that you say?"
"I asked if there's anything I can do," she said patiently. Redundantly. For they both knew that there was nothing she could have refused him. That was why she...
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Doubleday Canada, Limited, Toronto, ON, Canada, 2000
ISBN 10: 0770428169
ISBN 13: 9780770428167
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