by Rosa Montero
“At what time was your conversation with Chi?”
“Between about 18:00 and 19:00. I was the last person to see her alive.”
Bruna tried to hold back a small start. Myriam’s call had been at 18:30.
“Are you sure?”
Habib smiled. He, too, had huge bags under his eyes and looked haggard.
“Absolutely. And you don’t have to hide your surprise. I was there when she rang you, Husky. Moreover, I know what she wanted to tell you.”
He paused dramatically, something Bruna found difficult to endure.
“It’s possible...You have to promise to keep all this a complete secret, Husky; there’s too much at stake. So, there is unfortunately a possibility that some reps may be implicated in the deaths. It’s not exactly the best news for our movement, but I’m afraid there’s considerable evidence.”
“What are you saying? Implicated how? What evidence are you talking about?”
“There have always been violent reps, as you know. And if you want me to be honest, I understand it perfectly, because the marginalization and disdain that humans subject us to are hard to bear. But in the RRM we’re not in favor of violence, either ethically or strategically. The intention of our movement is precisely to provide a democratic stage for the battle, for the dignity and equality of our species.”
Bruna suppressed a gesture of impatience. “Sure, sure, I know. But we were talking about proof.”
“The lock on Myriam’s office was manipulated by a rep from Complet, our maintenance company. The door register was altered so that it wouldn’t record the code of the person who put the holograph ball on the table.”
“Have you spoken with the company?”
“Our technicians discovered the lock manipulation yesterday morning, and we immediately went to the Complet head office. We got there just minutes too late. They’d obviously fled in a real hurry after they’d wiped their databases.”
“A most opportune escape.”
Habib sighed.
“Yes, I thought so, too. I find it very hard to believe, but it’s possible that someone from the RRM warned them of our visit. The problem is that it could have been just about anyone, because lots of people knew about it: the technicians, some members of the council, Valo’s crew...”
“Valo’s crew?”
“The combat reps who make up our security team. You already know we’ve had numerous assaults. Yesterday, we took ten of our team to the Complet head office, just in case.”
“How long have you been working with Complet?”
“Four or five months. I can get you the exact date. But, in any case, the company’s involvement seems to suggest it’s not just a question of an isolated act of violence against an individual but something much more complex, sophisticated, and meticulously organized. And there’s something else. Did you see that fanatic, Hericio, on the news?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t it strange that he would be talking about all those things right now? And doesn’t it seem odd to you that’s he’s so well informed? We know Hericio has been meeting with a rep.”
“How do you know?”
The corners of Habib’s mouth twitched wryly and he waved his hand gently in the air.
“Well, let’s just say that we try to be fully abreast of our enemy’s activities. And one of our people saw Hericio meeting the rep in a public, if discrete, place.”
The armchairs under the skylight in the Museum of Modern Art flashed into Bruna’s mind.
“Where did they meet?”
“A sky-tram stop. Is that particularly important?”
The detective shook her head, feeling a little foolish.
“The fact is that we believe it may have been one of the Complet employees. It’s a company composed exclusively of androids. We always try to work with our own. Anyway, Myriam thought that the HSP had somehow managed to buy off that miserable lot. And that it’s all a scheme to discredit our movement, to create an antitechno climate of opinion that would favor their party.”
Bruna thought this over for a moment.
“Sounds plausible. The trouble is, Habib, that we can’t rule out that it might be a new group of terrorist reps.”
“But why would they attack other technohumans?”
“To frighten the androids and make them think that we’re dealing with a supremacist conspiracy, as you said yourself. To radicalize the reps and unleash violence between the species.”
“Hmmm, yes. Maybe...In any event, it’s critical that we clarify what’s happening as quickly as possible. Because there’s no question that social tension is growing all the time. Myriam was well aware of the urgency, and that’s why she rang you yesterday. I know what she wanted to ask you: that you investigate the HSP, and Hericio in particular. By the way, I think the sight of Hericio on the news this morning adds weight to Chi’s theory.”
Bruna agreed, slowly. “Okay. I’ll see what I can do.”
They stood up, and Habib escorted her to the door of the office. Barely two steps, in such a small room. Before she left, Bruna turned to him.
“Just one more question. What’s the matter with Nabokov’s hands?”
The man frowned and stood looking at her as if weighing up his answer.
“Valo’s unwell,” he said, finally. “She’s...she’s beginning to show the signs of TTT. Or that’s what we think, because she’s refused to see a doctor. She’s going to a healer instead. Those marks are the bites of a viper. An African viper whose venom is said to cure rep cancer. Well, you know how these things are.”
Yes, Bruna knew. The inevitability and ferocity of TTT meant that many androids looked for miracle cures, and a disordered and motley market of alternative treatments and shady therapists flourished around the technos. Like all reps, she too was sent unsolicited publicity from a horde of charlatans who promised to get rid of tumors via magnetism, gamma rays, chromatic therapies, or animal toxins, as in Nabokov’s case. But as far as she was aware, to date no one had been able to save themselves from the early death.
The detective returned home overwhelmed by a deep depression. She had days that seemed warped from the start, and life, like a soaking-wet blanket, began to weigh heavily on her shoulders. The viper bites scam reminded her that she hadn’t checked her mail for days, so she opened her lobby mailbox and came across a cacophony of 3-D and holograph flyers. They were programmed to switch on as soon as they were exposed to light, and now, newly activated, they filled the small box with a hectic confusion of colors and shapes, tiny voices, and shrill music. That’s why she hated to pick up her mail, she remembered with irritation, and she began to remove the advertisements by the handful, throwing them into the yellow container under the mailboxes: flyers for vacations by the beach; for Torres solar bicycles; gyms; lipo-laser beauty treatments; and the timeworn, cursed miracle cures for techno cancer. The promotional material landed, shrieking, inside the container and once there, back in darkness, fell silent again. What a relief, thought Bruna. In her frenzy of cleaning, she was on the point of throwing out a small message container as well. Fortunately, she spotted it in time and opened it. Inside was the mem she had bought from the trafficker. She had sent the mem to a lab for analysis, and now the results had arrived. She was impatient to discover what they were, and started to read the report right there, leaning up against the mailboxes. It said that the mem was illegal but not adulterated and so would neither incite someone to violence nor be lethal. The report was followed by a detailed description of the scenes in the memory: five hundred, just as Nopal had in fact suggested. She gave them a cursory glance, with the same repugnance she would feel if she were looking at the squashed innards of a cockroach. The bill for the lab’s work was attached at the bottom: 300 gaias. Just what she needed. The only plus was that she wouldn’t have to go back and see the unpleasant dog-eared mutant. That was now a trail going nowhere.
The first thing she did when she got inside her apartment was go to the fr
idge, pour herself a glass of white wine, and drink it in one gulp. She ordered the house to raise the blinds and open the windows wide. She needed light and air. She was obsessed by her memory of Myriam: the thought of her sudden fit of madness, the violence of the attack on that woman, the wheels of the subway train crushing her body. And then she saw Nabokov’s hands again, with their small, regular, violet wounds. She poured another glass of wine, warmed up a couple of soy and algae burgers, and ate them, chewing each mouthful deliberately, slowly and rhythmically, concentrating on the business of eating so as to empty her head of the oppressive images that were persecuting her. By the time the plate was empty, she had calmed down enough to get to work. She poured herself another glass of wine, sat down in front of the screen, and confirmed that Habib had already sent her the documents from the maintenance company. She spent a fair bit of time tracking its business details through the various sections of the regional administration. In the end, it turned out that Complet had emerged from nowhere a week before the RRM had contracted the company, that there were only two permanent employees—both androids—and that the Radical Replicant Movement was its sole client. All quite odd.
Lost in thought, Bruna checked her computer for the analysis of the film clip of the disembowelment. The analysis had been completed hours earlier and the results were indeed there. The program had been unable to identify the location, to reconstruct the deleted ID, or to provide any other evidence connected with the recording, although an analysis of the background suggested a 51 percent probability that the evisceration of the animal had been performed privately rather than in a slaughterhouse. There was nothing new except for one image. At one particular moment, the blade of the knife fleetingly reflected part of the face of the person recording the hologram: half an eyebrow; a fragment of a cheek; half an eye; and the vertical pupil—of a rep. The detective’s mood darkened; the guilt—or at least the collaboration—of technohumans was becoming more and more evident. She made a copy of the images, removed the chip from her computer, put it back inside the holograph ball, and called an instant courier service. When the small robot beeped at her door twenty minutes later, she placed the sphere, the mem, and her astronomical bill for expenses in the drawer of the automated courier, and sent the whole lot to Habib.
That accomplished, she spent the rest of the afternoon wasting time.
She tried to review the documentation regarding the first four deaths that Habib had given her, but she was too tired, and the wine induced a mellow, irresistible sleepiness. She tried lying on the bed and taking a nap, but she found she was too tense to be able to rest. She thought about doing some exercise, but just the thought of the effort made her feel exhausted. She sprawled on the sofa with another glass of wine in her hand, almost catatonic, but minutes later an inner itch made her stand up and wander erratically around the room. She managed to place one more piece into her jigsaw puzzle, but that took such an effort that she then gave up. She read a few pages of Malencia Piñeiro’s latest novel without managing to make sense of any of it. She put on a pair of 3-D glasses and began to play some virtual games: the archery competition, the rocket race, and the giant slalom. This was dizzying and obsessive entertainment that usually cleared her head and managed to stupefy her, but on this occasion the repetitive games got on her nerves.
Then she looked at the clock—21:30—and realized that she had in fact been whiling away time until just this moment, until night fell and Gándara started his likely shift, until she could go to the Forensic Anatomy Institute to see Myriam Chi’s body.
It was quite cool, so Bruna pulled on a thermal jacket over her T-shirt and short metallic skirt, and headed outside. She was feeling a little nauseous: too many glasses of wine for the two soy burgers in her stomach. But half an hour later, as she was walking down the somber corridors of the institute, her steps resonating on the worn stone floors, she worried that she was still too sober and regretted not having had a few more glasses of wine.
Luckily, Gándara was on duty that evening. She could see him through the large window that separated the office from Dissection Room 1 personally rummaging around inside a cadaver. Although it wasn’t necessary to touch the bodies these days, thanks to robots and telesurgery, Gándara continued to put his hands inside almost all of his corpses; he maintained that no technology could replace the complexity and subtlety of firsthand observation. There he was now, leaning over something that had once been someone and looking—so appropriately—like a tawny vulture: his face relatively free of wrinkles thanks to routine beauty treatments; his nose sharp and prominent; his eyebrows bushy; a bristling head of hair; a long, skinny neck; and round, intense black eyes. Gándara looked up, saw the detective and waved with his gloved and very bloody hand for her to come in. Bruna hesitated for a moment, and the medical examiner waved his dripping hand again, the blood clots shining like red lacquer under the powerful spotlight. Then the rep glimpsed a dark, chubby face on the dissected corpse on the table; it was the body of an unknown male. She breathed a sigh of relief and opened the door to the dissection room. She didn’t know if she would have been able to cope had Gándara been dissecting Chi’s remains.
“Hi, Husky, how’s life? I believe you came by here the other day.”
“Yes.”
“You terrified my assistant.”
“He frightens easily.”
“He’s a cretin. Are you here about Chi?”
“Spot on. Always so perceptive.”
“It was obvious. That cretin Kurt told me you were interested in the Caín case.”
“Right again.”
Gándara continued to examine the dissected body as he spoke. A body that Bruna forced herself to look at because it wasn’t anything anymore. That spent flesh, that ever-so-dark blood, those kilos of organic material were nothing. It had once been a human, but death made everything equal.
“And Chi’s case is effectively the same. She had a lethal memory implant too, exactly like Caín. Do you want to have a look?”
“At the memory?”
“No. At Chi. I’ve sent the mem to the bioengineering lab.”
No, thought Bruna, I’m going to say no. I don’t want him to show me the rep leader. But she couldn’t form the word.
“Morgue, take out Myriam Chi,” the medical examiner ordered the central system. Then, turning to Bruna, he added, “Wait a minute while I clean myself up a bit.”
Gándara washed his gloved hands under a vapor jet as the cold room opened and a robot-cart wheeled in the body of a woman. I don’t want to see her, Bruna reiterated to herself. But she approached the capsule, walking slowly and automatically.
“She’s a bit the worse for wear. She threw herself in front of a train, as you know. But on the other hand, for someone who’s been run over, she’s more or less intact, apart from the loss of one leg. The blow damaged her internally. Capsule, open!”
The transparent metal cylinder opened its lid with a pneumatic hiss. Inside, surrounded by a thin cloud of liquid nitrogen, lay Myriam Chi’s body. Bluish, naked, with a shaved head, and scars from the autopsy marking her skull and chest. But with her face untouched. And without makeup. Childlike and defenseless. Lower down, the grotesque mess that was her legs. The severed member, in bits, carefully reassembled like the pieces of a puzzle. The menacing image in the holograph ball flashed across Bruna’s mind like a spasm: Chi’s body, sliced open and abused. When she had seen the image the first time, it was still a lie. She closed her eyes and expelled the memory from her mind. I don’t feel anything, she thought. This is nothing more than a piece of frozen meat.
“She’s quite beautiful despite everything, don’t you think? Tomorrow, I’ll return the body to the people at the RRM, and they’ll be able to stage a lovely protest show with her funeral.”
“Gándara, I need you to give me the lab reports on the mems. I have to find out what those damn implants contain.”
“I’d love to know that, too, but the bioengineering p
eople haven’t given me anything. Not for this one, not for Caín, not for the people on the sky-tram. Oddly enough, the Judicial Police have decided that those reports are secret.”
“The appropriate decision, it seems to me,” said a voice behind them.
Bruna and the medical examiner turned around. He was a huge man, taller than Husky, and twice as wide. His massive body blocked the door.
“Because I’m afraid that if you had the reports, you—who I assume to be Gándara, the medical examiner—would have passed them on to this android. Whom I don’t know,” continued the man.
He spoke slowly, spacing out his words as if he were half-asleep. There was something lethargic about him—about his green eyes, partly veiled by heavy eyelids that seemed incapable of opening completely, and about his solid body and the way it planted itself vertically on the floor as if it wanted to screw itself into the stone.
“We don’t know who the hell you are, either,” Bruna replied with studied rudeness.
But she was lying, because the cheap, conventional three-piece suit—gray shirt and pants, and a slightly darker thermal jacket—were a civil servant giveaway. He was undoubtedly a policeman.
“Inspector Paul Lizard, from the Judiciary,” said the huge man, showing his ID. “And you are?”
“I’m the victim’s sister,” said Bruna, sarcastically.
“You must be the detective hired by the RRM, right? Bruna...Bruna Husky,” said Lizard, impassive, consulting the notes on his mobile.
“A clairvoyant.”
“Well, I’m delighted to meet you. I specifically wanted to talk to you.”
“About what? About why you’re hiding the matter of the adulterated memories from everyone?”
“Maybe. Could you drop by the Judiciary tomorrow? I assume you know where we are. At 13:00?”
“And why should I do that?”
“Because it would be good for you. Because we could help each other. Because you’re an inquisitive woman. Because if you don’t come, I’ll have you arrested and brought in.”
