Chapter 17 Part 7
A PMP burst was not fundamentally different than a machine gun burst as far as Sal was concerned. He needed to get the hell out of here, and quickly.
Sal figured one of the easiest ways to slip away would be to stumble toward the restroom. This would be easier for him to do with all of his clones populating the room. A drunk man would find nothing strange about such a scenario. If Sal could stumble his way through it, then he could make it to the restroom and devise a plan of action. He figured he had a good minute and a half or so by common time before the PMP's would be ready to flood the area.
As Sal staggered his way through the crowd and away from the Bubble Joust tournament, he chanced an unfocused glance back at the men. So far his deception appeared to be working. The men were preoccupied with prepping the PMP's and also keeping an eye on all the clones of Sal to make sure none of them stood out as him. It was likely that they had switched to enhanced vision which would give them better clues as to who was a person and who was a mirage. Enhanced vision could detect things like heat signatures. Since the deception Sal had employed involved buying a little time, he had not been thorough in making sure that all forms of information that a human body can have were provided. The men would notice that all the copies were fakes, but they might be hoping to spot one that was the real thing.
Sal ambled into the men's restroom. Fortunately, the room was clear. Sal composed himself. He probably had a little under a minute to get himself out of this situation. He had heard that Inner Sanctum was not below utilizing interrogation methods if they really wanted to know information that person was not willing to provide. Thoughts like that provided Sal with a greater-than-average motivation to solve the predicament in which he found himself. In the restroom, up high in the wall, was a small window that allowed light in. It was transparent--it used some sort of semi-translucent stone that allowed light in but didn't allow people to see through it. Seeing the window reminded Sal of a hack that he had used very early in his career when he did not know much about deception. In fact, he'd used it mostly to evade various authority figures after he had done something they weren't happy with. Often, this took the form of petty burglary. He could make himself a rip.
A rip worked in old physical reality because it bent the existing laws more than it broke them. a rip realized the truth that most solid structures had more space in them than substance. A brick, for example, had many pores in it and space between atoms. It had less space than less dense substances, which was why it was a brick. However, if one could arrange all the space in a seemingly solid structure and concentrate it in one area for a moment, then one could make a doorway where none existed. Usually, the door would be misshapen and jagged. It was not a pretty egress by any stretch of the imagination--so hackers had taken to calling them rips.
