Chapter 17 Part 4
He pulled up his interface, audio only. He whispered a few commands into it unobtrusively. His first order of business was to take an image of himself as he sat at the bar right now. Once this was accomplished, he overlapped the image of himself over himself. There were now two copies of him. One was an illusion, the other was Sal. he whispered another command and the image that was actually him was physically altered to that of a middle-aged businessman, slightly overweight. No one would notice this change, so long as the over-layered image of himself remained. Now the tricky part came. He needed to create a distraction for long enough to get his actual altered self away from his broadcasted image. If someone saw him suddenly emerge from behind his broadcasted image, they would know it was an illusion. Sal needed no one to notice as he slipped away. Simultaneously, he pushed some commands to his overlapped image to be as evasive and to stall as much as possible. Depending on how good these guys were, it probably wouldn't last very long. he could buy a little additional time with a surprise he had in store, however. Sal pushed the surprise he had marked "doppelganger overload" to be triggered the instant his holographic overlay had been determined as fraudulent. This would be decided by a program that operated like Belvedere but was less covert. It would make an inference as to the intentions of the men on the basis of what it "observed". What the program would observe from its perspective would be a series of points in space, but if those points in space began to move too quickly away from the holographic overlay, it would be able to sense that something had occurred that required a new action as programmed by Sal.
After making these quick changes, Sal selected the song "March of the Shapers" for his audio hack. He was going to use mass indoctrinated patriotism to his advantage. When people heard this song, they were compelled to stand and sing. It was not that they had to, but rather if they did not others would tend to give them dirty looks and make less than charitable assumptions about them. Sal cranked up the volume so that everyone would momentarily be distracted by the source of the sound. With a little luck, this would allow just enough time for his new identity to separate from the old.
The man in the suit was very nearly Sal. Another 20 steps or so, and he would be on top of him. Sal pushed his distraction, and as the speakers of the club blared, the man stopped in shock to determine what this new noise was that was assaulting him unexpectedly. When other people stood up and started singing, he knew he too had better begin singing. In that instant, Sal separated himself from his holonospheric image. It looked odd that his image was still sitting in this setting, but because he was seated at the bar, there was a good explanation. Clearly, he was so wasted that he hadn't noticed the change--or so people might think.
One thing that Sal hadn't counted on was that the stereophonic kinetic floor had responded to the change in the selection of the music. The sudden volume made the kinetic waves reach higher peaks, and people were taken by surprise and were screaming in shock as they adjusted to their new situation. The good part of this was that it drew attention away from Sal even more.
Sal quickly made his way over to the patrons playing Bubble Joust. He had thought of leaving, but figured the men in suits would find such an action suspicious. He would instead hide in plain sight, and maybe gain some additional info.
