Far from worrying about his catastrophic loss, the dealer seemed to be getting angrier and angrier. He started shuffling again, with a vengeance. Fully intent on taking back what he had just lost.
As he shuffled, Oeufcoque was surreptitiously dissecting the contents of the chip. He caused part of the glove to turn, gently fixing Balot’s hand so that it made a fist shape, with the chip packed away safely in her grip out of view.
Miniature laser cutters appeared inside her fist, moving about inside the space of a few millimeters to scan the contents of the chip, extracting its contents.
Oeufcoque extracted the contents of the chip carefully, cutting them out with absolute precision, taking care not to damage any of the contents. He then transferred the contents into a little pocket in the gloves he made specially for the purpose that moment. The pocket was sewn up behind the memory chip, and the hole left in the original was filled up with identical material so that no one would ever have been able to guess that it had been tampered with. The whole process was done in absolute silence.
Balot’s right hand was released, and she slowly opened her hand that held the chip.
The words floated up inside Balot’s left hand, and she squeezed back in return.
At that moment, Balot was assailed by a sensation she hadn’t experienced before.
Oeufcoque’s writing was always inside her glove, never on the outside. The letters themselves were inside out. Furthermore Balot’s hand was bunched tight. Their conversation should have been utterly undetectable to the outside eye.
And yet, at that very moment, Balot felt that their conversation was being
MANIFOLD
01
“I can’t tell,” remarked the man watching the screens, “which of them is the mark.” He slumped down into his fake leather chair.
The control room was bathed in the light of countless screens set into its walls. The room wasn’t made for a large number of staff—it was for this man alone.
Behind the man stood a floor manager trembling with anxiety and fear.
“Look at this,” said the man in the chair. “It’s like he’s being toyed with. You’re the floor manager—if you had to say which one of them appears to be getting roasted, who would you go with?”
“W-well, Chief, it seems to me that maybe it might be Marlowe?”
“Yes, I agree. With the incidents in the poker room and at the roulette tables, how many people are going to have to be fired today?”
The floor manager recoiled. Management of the dealers was his responsibility, and to him, there was nothing as chilling as a runaway dealer.
“Well, it’s no use,” sighed the chief, running his finger along a shiny black moustache. “Run a graphical search for any images we have of these guests.”
“S-so, you’re saying they’re cheats, Chief?”
“No, we can’t tell just from these screens. All I need to have is an excuse ready for the boss, if it comes down to it. Say they’re later found to be cheats, and we haven’t done anything about it. You and me and Marlowe, all three of us will get to be real swell pals, just three more dupes on the next bus to the employment agency.”
“R-right. So, how many people do you want on this?”
“Just you will be enough. Get twenty or so videos, send them to me, and go to sleep. But make it look like a few dozen others worked on it. Got it?”
“R-right. But, do you…when you say I can just sleep…”
“Once you’ve done what I’ve said, I’ll have my excuse, if it comes down to it. You, on the other hand…”
He made an exaggerated gesture of slashing his finger across his neck.
The floor manager gave a hurried bow and turned to leave, when a figure appeared before him. He took a misstep and froze in place.
A frantic voice came booming into the room. “Why are you calling for me when I’m in the middle of important business?”
The voice’s owner had swarthy skin and wore Chameleon Sunglasses the turquoise color of a robin’s egg.
“What’s going on? House Leader? Chief? Special Consultant?”
All of those titles belonged to the man seated in the fake leather chair—the question seemed to ask, “Which do you prefer being called?”
Not responding to the rapid-fire bluster, the chief turned to Shell-Septinos, slowly pushed two palms in the air, then looked at the floor manager and said, “You called for him?”
“Y-yes. Th-that’s what the regulations say to do.”
“Yes, that’s right,” said the chief, as if condescendingly praising a little child. “That’s the regulations.”
The floor manager, caught between the chief and the owner, scrunched down his shoulders, as if he were shrinking into himself.
