“Set your skull rig to accept a link from a box named A7B7C7,” she said, and when Kelley had nodded again she reached for a holographic panel. “Here you go.” Bobbi keyed the cloistered server box she had prepared for this purpose; the little thing was like the ghost-boxes downstairs, autistic save for a wire terminal or a one-way, short ranged wireless unit. Instantly, Kelley stiffened as she felt the contact, and her eyes widened in that strange, faraway fashion that only the Awakened had. Well, the Awakened and the brain-dead. But Freida’s brows were arched high as her brain accessed the data, her glassy eyes wide despite the fact they currently could not see. “Shit,” she whispered, and in the quiet of the office the word sounded like a prayer. “How far does this all go?”
“You just keep looking, honey,” Bobbi said with a sigh. “And you’ll find out. Just remember that I warned you.”
No matter how strong one’s words may be, there really is no warning people against revelation. Once she had finished going through the file, Freida just sat there for a while. Her expression was … awed. Pained and angry. Bobbi knew that look; she and Tom had both worn variations of it once they had first gone through the collection and realized that there had been a single invisible hand guiding the damnation of society. All of the dark technology coming out of Wonderland, all the maddening perversities that seemed like so much black magic – all of these were helmed by a single entity, a single woman at the helm of a massive corporation. Billions of dollars in funds, legal and illicit, all spiraling toward a company which promised not only all of these dark pleasures, but a virtual eternity thanks to telomeric lengthening.
It seemed impossible; it seemed like something out of fiction. And yet, spelled out in digitally signed, imprinted data copy, was the evidence. Evidence which, had Brighton not gotten blasted across the floor of the First Ebezener Baptist Church over it, could perhaps have been waved off as an extremely clever fake – something to cover the acts of some other, lesser organization. And yet she had last seen Tom at a Genefex installation, and the horrors inside as Civil Protection had attempted to clash with the laboratory’s sentinels. She had made sure that Freida had witnessed the recordings that Bobbi had made of the pale, ghoul-like things which so readily threw themselves into the police guns, and tore apart the invading troopers. She had made sure that Freida realized precisely what she had come to believe, and that was this: that if there was a true force of active evil in this world it would be the Genefex corporation, and Ghia Merducci was the Devil.
“I can’t believe it,” Freida finally said, and her voice was tiny. “I just … I can’t believe it.”
Bobbi gave Freida a thin smile. She knew that reaction all too well, and pity welled up in her to see it. “Well, you’d better get started, honey,” she told the now dark-haired woman. “Because as fucked up as it is, the truth ain’t going away.” Bobbi got up from her seat behind the desk and waved her hand; all at once the glowing panels of the displays surged and vanished, leaving them in the far feebler light of the overhead lamps. “Bet you’d like a drink.”
“Yeah,” Freida said softly. She looked at her hands a moment, which were folded in her lap, as if she had to will them to pluck the wireless receiver from the port in her skull and replace the dustplug. Dazed as she was, however, she had clarity enough to turn and watch Bobbi walk over to a low, ornate cabinet which turned out to be a mini bar. “Uh, whisky, please.” She blinked herself into the world a little more. “Better make it a double.”
Bobbi smiled to herself as she took out a plastic bottle of Suntory Old and began to pour it into a pair of heavy crystal tumblers. “Hope you don’t mind the Japanese stuff,” she said, “because I don’t think I wanna leave you alone long enough to go down and get the ‘Fiddich.” Bobbi walked back to the desk and handed Freida one of the glasses, sipping from the other herself. “You gonna be okay?”
Freida didn’t answer at first, instead taking a deep draught from her own glass. She shut her eyes as the stuff burned a path back to reality down the back of her throat. “I think I will be now,” she said with a smack of her lips. “Fuck, lady. None of that was a hoax at all, was it?”
“Not a bit of it,” Bobbi said with a shake of her head. “Sorry if you thought I was bullshitting you before. I definitely wish I was.”
Freida took another, smaller sip. “I don’t even want to believe it,” she said with a grim shake of her head. “All that time, you know, we knew that Wonderland was helping ruin things. But we didn’t realize that it was behind so much.”
Bobbi nodded. “Yeah,” she said, swirling her own scotch slowly in her glass, “it does sound like the scariest kind of bullshit story. But I don’t think it is. I saw those Special Tactics cops getting torn apart by those horrible things – and you saw that one girl. The one that looked like Merducci.”
“She killed those troops with her bare hands,” Freida said, and again her voice was quiet with awe. “And she moved so fast … I mean, I’ve seen augmented, but that … ”
“Like something out of a goddamned nightmare,” Bobbi said with a shake of her head. “I know. Tom said he killed another one like her in the underlevels.”
“He must have been very lucky.” After saying this, Freida sat up sharply and stared at Bobbi. Her eyes blazed, fierce and bright with sudden fury. “We can’t let them get away with it, Bobbi,” she said, her voice hard. “We can’t. We can tell the Bureau – “
“And get you shot in the face, yes,” Bobbi said with a rueful smile. “And at the very least get me put into a cryoprison. Career criminal over here, remember? Seems to me that going to the authorities is the absolutely worst thing that we could do. Besides, I sent the contents of the archive to the Bureau, and it didn’t make so much as a blip – with Exley in charge it’s most likely been suppressed. Which means he’s just waiting for someone to show up and claim they had the information.”
Freida’s eyes widened a little, and she looked as if she were about to protest – but instead she deflated, sagging against the back of her chair, and nodded. “I guess you’re right,” she said softly, and looked down into what was left of her scotch. “And if Exley’s connected to all this, then he’s just waiting for someone to put their head out.”
“So you can see my position.” Bobbi drained the rest of her glass and set it aside. “Or our position, now, I suppose. Well congratulations, Alice, you’re at my end of the rabbit hole.”
With a shake of her head, Freida got up and began to pace in a slow circle. “The question is, of course, this: where do we go with this? What do we do? Genefex is the largest biotechnological concern on the planet, and it’s obviously got resources that far outstrip the reaches of an everyday corporation. Shall we found a revolution? Take out Merducci with a rifle at a press conference? How do you discredit a creature like this?”
The two were silent for a long time, Bobbi moving to give them both another double. She was right, of course. How could they fight something like this? They’d already dug up a great deal of information on the situation; they could just let the whole thing go, content with knowing an already horrible truth, and live out their lives in the shadow of it. They’d killed anyone who’d had anything to do with it. They’d killed …
“They haven’t killed me yet,” Bobbi said finally.
“I’m sorry?” Freida looked at her from across the room, looking startled.
“They haven’t killed me yet.” Bobbi took her seat behind the desk again, setting her glass down in front of her and cradling it both hands. “No, look. This whole conspiracy has gone around killing off whomever it was who was attached to it. Thinking about it now, I’m the only part of the whole thing – that is, who wasn’t a willing part of it – who hasn’t ended up dead or vanished. What do you think about that? Why do you think that is?”
“I don’t know.” Freida shook her head, frowning again at her glass. “I mean, it’s possible that you just weren’t necessary to remove, right? Or maybe Stadil protected you
.”
Bobbi made a soft growl in the bottom of her throat at that. “Old Anton,” she muttered. “Yeah, that’s entirely possible. You’d think that after two years I’d have thought about this but I honestly hadn’t considered it. Anton was a planner – a real spider, you know. Maybe he had some other plan for me here. But I’ve scanned this whole office, the whole building in fact, and I couldn’t find anything concerning this whole revelation that he had worked out for Tom. It’s like he was waiting for us to figure it out for ourselves.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Freida shook her head. “Well, what do you want to do about it?”
“Well, I know what I’m going to do,” said Bobbi. “But you don’t have to do a damned thing. You wanted to know the truth, and I’ve shown it to you. That’s all you really have to worry about.” She shook her head and tilted her head back, letting the renewed flood of whiskey burn itself down her throat in a steady, pulsing tide; she felt her head buzz as the alcohol tried to kick in and her cranial implants cut in to take the edge off. Yes, she’d have to dig deeper, wouldn’t she? It’s not as if her mind would let her do anything else. She had to know what had happened to Tom, and what Stadil had truly planned for them. Something still tickled in the back of her mind; she could not accept that all that he had done was simply send Tom into the hands of the company.
Freida stared at her for a long moment. The fierceness in her eyes was there again, and Bobbi knew the decision which she had been expecting had been made. “No way in hell am I leaving this alone now,” Freida said with a shake of her head. “Besides, we live in the city where Genefex is headquartered, right? We’re actually in a better position to affect the corporation here. Merducci is here, too. The board must be here, as well – or at least they have to meet here. If we can operate without falling afoul of the Bureau or Civil Protection there’s no reason why we couldn’t do real and permanent damage to the whole thing.”
“We’re most likely going to get killed,” Bobbi pointed out. “I need you to be realistic about that. I’m doing this because I got a score to settle, and I’m obsessive about mysteries anyway. But you … ”
“I worked with the Bureau for four years,” Freida rumbled. “And in that time I’ve dealt with enough of the dark shit that comes out of Wonderland to want to burn the whole fucking thing down. Fuck ‘em all. If I can help tear the heart out of that place then you bet I’ll stand up to be counted. It’s not like I’ve never had my life endangered in the field before.”
There was no arguing with her, Bobbi saw. The fire in her eyes was the same as what burned in Bobbi’s heart, reflected in clear, sharp blue. “All right then,” she said with a slow nod, “I guess that we’re in business. I suppose first things first: where do we go from here?”
“We start with Orleans.” Freida reached for her glass and held it out to Bobbi in a toast. “Pick up the trail from there. Slainte.”
“Yeah, cheers,” Bobbi said with a nod, clinking her glass against Freida’s. “So all right. It sounds like you still have some access to the Bureau, from what you’ve said. Getting Brighton’s records and such.”
“Something like that,” Freida said with a nod. “So I’ll dig up what the Bureau has on the situation. I can tell you now, there was nothing in the report about any load of Civil Protection troopers getting ripped to pieces.”
Bobbi nodded; she’d heard this story before. “I know,” she said. “Nothing but the explosion, which they blamed on the incinerators going up. Accident, they said. Which, of course, was me. They didn’t explain why there was a mass of cops down there either – in fact, as I recall, they didn’t even mention that the cops were there at all.”
Freida drained her glass and put it down hard on the desk, getting up at the same time. “Well, that does it. I’ve got to see what’s going on there. I’ll see what I can find, and you … do whatever it is you plan on doing.”
“I have a few ideas.” Bobbi gave her another ghost of a smile. “We will see what we can come up with.”
When she had said “a few ideas,” the truth was that Bobbi had zero. But this was no problem, really; once she said it, her brain tended to work in such a way that an answer would soon conjure itself into being. Freida had left soon after that, and Bobbi found herself alone in her office again as the rumbling beat of the music downstairs was a dim and distant storm. Bobbi listened to the sound echo softly up the elevator shaft, then decided to drown herself in the network again. She would return to the source, which meant to go back over the data she had compiled about Stadil. With Freida having revealed herself, though, Bobbi felt like she had some kind of a partner. Some kind of a chance. This was assuming, of course, that the comely transgendered woman was not some kind of plant meant to dig into the conspiracy using Bobbi as her contact. Bobbi thought about that as she shuffled through the Stadil data, building a precis.
When the computer was ready, she sat down and began to go over it. There were the summaries detailing the structure of the whole web, from the black laboratories to the research companies and plantations to their controlling subsidiaries and Genefex atop them. The corporation was the capstone of the pyramid, constantly looking down upon the operation like a vast and terrible eye. There were the reports, signed by Merducci’s hand. There were the balance sheets, detailing transactions worth billions. Never the names of clients, of course, just middle-men and criminal outfits. Should she contact them? How vulnerable would that make her? Should she start down the same path that Anton did, running things for the horrible corporation while she attempted to destroy it from the inside? It was possible, after all. It could be done.
But Bobbi the Kingpin wasn’t a role that she could see herself being placed in. Gray though her interests might be, she didn’t do things that she outright knew would harm innocent people. She might be a little bent, but she wasn’t broken. Not yet. Heaving a deep sigh she called up more data on the battery of floating displays, sitting at her desk, a sorceress calling up evil spirits. One of them had a list of all Genefex properties in the Seattle area, upon which Orleans Hospital had been prominent. There were a good deal of them, twenty or thirty. Many of them were in the Old City, which surprised Bobbi at first, but in the end made sense. The company could afford security, after all, and even the horrible crazies out there could provide some measure of experimental material. They were well out of the sight of Civil Protection as well. All that space to get lost in … yes, she could see why Merducci would choose to roost in the wilds.
Bobbi turned her attention to another window as the list scrolled on, frowning at a letter from a Genefex executive to some criminal fucker over in Wonderland. Lots of messages going to Bangkok and Phuket. There was the order for the Princess Dolls, for whom Bobbi also had the schematics but no means of understanding them. She wasn’t scientific, after all, just technical. The horror presented by those little girls had been in the fact that they hadn’t been little girls at all, not for a long time; they had been once, then they had been snatched off the street and had their brains entirely removed – not simply replaced in part by biosynthetic computer modules but entirely swapped for massive memory constructs meant to try and host human personalities. They had been not simply sexual creations but an attempt to completely get around the body question, immortality through consciousness transfer. It would have changed the world if it had worked, but the personalities transferred didn’t change or grow beyond their initial limits. The company had given them up for failures, transferred them to a Wonderland broker, who in turn sold the three girls to a very high-profile executive here in Seattle. Stadil had handled the sale. Stadil, for whom she had worked. Stadil, who had sent her to see to Tom when his investigation into the Dolls began here in the city.
It always came back to this. The giant question mark. Bobbi scowled at the data floating before her. Something about it bothered her, something new that she could not put her finger on. What was it about the data that seemed different to her now? She leaned back in her seat
, reaching for the bottle of Suntory that she’d left on the desk after Freida left, and was in the process of screwing off the top when realization came singing to her. Her eyes were drawn back to the slowly scrolling list of facility locations; she reached for the window, dipping her fingers into it, ‘pulling’ it so that it scrolled the other way. Addresses scrolled past, addresses she didn’t recognize, and then – there it was.
Bobbi sat back hard and frowned. Surely this wasn’t right. It couldn’t be. And yet there it was, an entry for what was listed as ‘TISSUE PROCESSOR 017.’ The name was bad enough; Orleans had also been marked as a ‘tissue processor’, and from what little Tom had said from the premises, it had apparently been like something out of nightmare. But it was the address that truly gave her a shock – it was the address of the automotive complex that had been on the news earlier that very evening.
No way in hell was that right, Bobbi thought at first, and yet when she looked up the story on the NewsNetNow nexus and cross-referenced it with a pre-Collapse municipal index, she had no choice but to believe. Suddenly this woman had become her new focus, and she accessed the NewsNetNow nexus again to track through the news outlet’s archive of material concerning her.
As Maya Frail said in her broadcast, Redeye and her group – whose numbers seemed to be growing with every appearance – had struck four other locations in the Old City since the year before. Bobbi went back through the list of secret facilities, comparing them with the addresses of the locations that had been bombed. Sure enough, they matched. A thrill of something that was best described as horrified delight shot up her spine as she went over their locations. Two more tissue processors, numbered 07 and 012, hidden in an old bodega and an abandoned garage. A warehouse had concealed Data Nexus 231. Now they had bombed the factory, which had been listed simply as Assembly Plant 29.
Redeye (The Wonderland Cycle Book 2) Page 5
