Chapter two

Xyl was jerked out of her uneasy doze by the drag of deceleration as the maglev commuter train began to slow. The lighting inside the train began to brighten and the synthesized bot voice recited departure instructions in Arabic, then in Mandarin, then in German. Disoriented from the sudden transition from dream to waking, she glanced up at the scrolling LCD screen near the ceiling and tried to figure out where she was.

North Atlantica, Old Manhattan. The blue alphanumerics scrolling smoothly across the bottom of her visual field indicated World Trade Center Station. The tiny tumbling green pyramid in the lower left corner of her vision was not blinking, so she had no NetMail or CallBacks waiting. She nodded unconsciously and reached up to retrieve her backpack and her long black leather coat from the luggage rack above her head, waiting as other more eager passengers got to their feet chattering and laughing.

Thirty-six hours of doing nothing but sleeping and staring up at a hotel room ceiling had partially erased the more obvious signs of exhaustion. A quick shopping run via her nanos’ Mid-Mode had brought the hotel’s bot to her door three hours later with two changes of clothes, the leather longcoat and tickets for the maglev commuter express to Old Manhattan leaving that afternoon. She’d downed two liters of vitamin broth but hadn’t been able to keep down the vegetable soup she’d forced herself to eat. She didn’t care. Vitamin broth had enough calories to sustain human life, that was its intended purpose. In a few days it wouldn’t matter anyway.

World Trade Center Station was the main maglev commuter station for North Atlantica with more than two hundred trains arriving every hour from East Canada Metro, Mid-Atlantica/Old DC and South Atlantica. Elevated and underground tracks all over Old Manhattan were managed and controlled by North Atlantica Port Authority through a collective of advanced Artificial Intelligences. The human contingent of the Port Authority had realized decades ago that human operators simply could not handle the thousands of decisions that had to be made every hour when a single error could send hundreds of people to their deaths and bring traffic to a halt for days. The system now ran itself with the AIs at the controls, and there had been only two accidents in seventy-six years. Both of those accidents had been due to human error.

The main concourse of the Station was a hollow cube of a building reaching ten stories to the roof. Arrival and departure concourses lined the four walls at every level, baggage-handling bots trundling along on small fat balloon tires and beeping