by Rosa Montero
“Nothing else? She knew of no other detail that linked the dead people?”
“Chi hadn’t found anything that would link them. They seem to be victims chosen at random.”
“Could be, Bruna. But, in addition, they all had the word revenge tattooed on their bodies.”
“All of them?”
“All seven.”
“Chi as well?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t see it.”
“It was on her back.”
“Gándara didn’t say anything about it.”
“You left in a hurry last night. Look.”
The close-up of a back floated in the air. Long, undulating, white. But marked by the purple outline of some bruises. Near the smooth start of the buttocks was the word revenge, written in ink in very distinctive, cramped, and rounded letters. The word was just over an inch long and about half an inch tall. It had that purplish grape color of tattoos done with a cold laser gun, like the tattoo Bruna had. They healed themselves as they were being done.
“That’s Chi,” Lizard explained. “But all the tattoos are the same, and they’re in the same spot.”
He switched off the table and looked at Bruna with a slight smile.
“I think I’m telling you too much, Husky.”
And it was true. He was telling her too much.
“Tell me just one more thing, Lizard: what do the lethal mems contain?”
“Rather than mems, they’re induced-behavior programs, outstanding pieces of bioengineering. And the implants evolved from one victim to the next. That is, their programs were becoming more sophisticated.”
“As if the first deaths were prototypes.”
“Or test runs, yes. The implants have a very short memory load. Thirty or forty scenes instead of the usual thousands.”
“The normal number is five hundred.”
“So few? Well, in these mems there are only a few scenes that make the victims believe they’re human and have been the object of persecution by reps...or technos. And then there are other scenes that are like premonitions; compulsive acts that the victims feel obliged to carry out. Something like psychotic delusions. The implants induce a kind of programmed and extremely violent psychosis. The impact is so strong that it destroys the brain in a couple of hours, though we don’t know if that subsequent organic degeneration is intentional or a secondary and unwanted consequence of the implant.”
“And the obsession with eyes?”
“Blinding themselves or blinding someone else is something that started with the second victim. It’s one of the delusional scenes. Something voluntarily induced, without a doubt.”
“The criminal’s signature. Like the tattoo.”
“Perhaps. Or a message.”
Someone really sick has to be behind all this, thought Bruna. A perverse mind that takes delight in the removal of an eyeball. Of a rep eye. Revenge and hatred, sadism and death. The detective felt a vague discomfort in her stomach. She must have eaten too much.
“And why has nothing been said publicly about this? Why is the business of the implants being kept secret?”
Lizard stared at Bruna.
“It’s always useful to hold back some detail that only the criminal would know,” he said finally with his lethargic voice, after a somewhat overlong silence.
“You had the tattoos for that. Why keep something quiet that proves that the reps are victims as well, and not just frenzied killers?”
Another silence.
“You’re right. There are orders from above to say nothing. Orders that make me uncomfortable. There are things happening in this case that I don’t understand. That’s why I’ve contacted you. I think we can help each other out.”
Bruna discreetly rubbed her stomach. The nausea had increased. Something wasn’t right. Something really wasn’t right. Why was Lizard telling her all this? Why had he been so generous with his tip-offs? And what on earth had made him openly say that he distrusted his bosses? Here—in the Judiciary Police headquarters. In a place where all conversations were probably monitored. She took note of the fact that the blonde fuzz that grew along her spinal column was standing on end. It was like a faint electric current running up her back and it always happened to her before she went into combat. Or when she found herself in a dangerous situation. And right now she was in danger. This was a trick. She looked at Lizard’s heavy, fleshy face and found it revolting.
“I have to go,” she said abruptly as she stood up.
The man raised his eyebrows.
“Why the hurry?”
Bruna contained herself and faked an almost amiable calmness.
“We’ve told each other everything, haven’t we? I don’t know anything more. And you’re not going to tell me anything else. I have an appointment and I’m late. We’ll be in touch.”
“Wait.”
The android felt the inspector’s hot, rough hand on her skin and she had to call on all her self-control to stop herself from elbowing him in the face and breaking free. She gave him a haughty, questioning look.
“You certainly do have something to tell me. You were attacked by Cata Caín.”
Bruna took a deep breath and turned back round to face him. Lizard let her go.
“Yes. It’s in the police report. So?”
“You were in one of the induced scenes in Caín’s mem. According to the program, your neighbor had to spy on you, go to your apartment, strangle you with a cable until you were unconscious, tie you up, gouge out your eyes, and then kill you.”
Despite herself, Bruna was deeply affected by this information. She opened her mouth but had no idea what to say.
“Isn’t that interesting? There’s your name, Bruna Husky, in the scene in the mem. Your name, your image, and your address. Why do you think you’ve been included in a killer implant?”
“So, you’ve brought me in to interrogate me?”
“I’m not interrogating you. Officially, I mean. I’m just asking you.”
“Well, I’m answering you that I have no idea.”
“It’s odd. You should have been a victim, but you weren’t. A matter of chance? Or of prior knowledge?”
“What are you insinuating?”
“Maybe you knew what was on the mem. Maybe you even collaborated in the making of the implant.”
“Why would I include the scene of my murder?”
Lizard gave a lovely smile.
“To have a superb alibi.”
Bruna felt relieved. Oh, she preferred him like this, openly taking her on, clearly hostile. She returned his smile.
“I’m afraid we aren’t going to end up being friends after all,” she said.
And she turned on her heel and left. She was crossing the threshold of the door when she heard the policeman’s reply from behind her: “That’s a pity.”
That damn Lizard seemed to be one of those men who always insisted on having the last word.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
In fact, Bruna did have an appointment, although she’d almost forgotten. She had been going to a psych-guide every Saturday at 18:00 sharp for the past three months. Her problem had started a year ago. One afternoon she was in her apartment watching a film when suddenly, reality disappeared. Or rather, she was the one who quit the scene. The screen, the room, the whole world seemed to move away to the other side of a long, black tube, as if Bruna were looking at things from the far end of a tunnel. At the same time, she broke out in a sweat and began to shiver, her teeth chattered, and her legs shook. She suddenly felt crushed by a horrific panic the likes of which she’d never experienced before. And the worst of it was that she had no idea what was terrifying her so much. It was a blind, indecipherable fear. Mad. Sanity suddenly switched off. The crisis barely lasted a few minutes, but it left her drained. And a permanent hostage to the fear of fear. To the fear that the attack would recur. And it did in fact recur a few times, always at the most unexpected moment: running through the park, eating in a res
taurant, traveling on the sky-tram or the subway.
Initially, she resorted to a psych-machine, as she had done in the past during her years in the military. Combat troops used to use these “idiot booths” after a particularly tough engagement or at times of heightened threats of war. You’d go into the psych-machine’s little cubicle, sit in the easy chair, put on the electrode helmet, place your fingertips on the sensors, and tell the booth what was happening to you. And it was assumed that the psych-machine would give you verbal advice, gently stimulate your brain with magnetic waves, and, if that was not enough, dispense an appropriate pill. Androids went in search of them—the pills: tranquilizers, sedatives, stimulants, stabilizers, drugs that induced euphoria, antidepressants. They knew what to say in the booth in order to get what they wanted, and the sessions only cost fifteen gaias, excluding the drugs.
But on that particular occasion, the detective didn’t know what she needed, what she was searching for.
“You’ve had an anxiety attack,” decreed the booth in a ringing baritone voice (Bruna had selected a male voice under the sound option).
“But why?”
“Panic attacks are the result of a fear of death,” said the psych-machine.
As if that explained anything. The android’s entire brief life had been spent weighed down by the awareness of death, and she’d obviously found herself in deadly peril many times without it provoking any crisis. On the contrary, that risk pumped her system full of a kind of lucid, cold calm. It was one of the contributions from genetic engineering, one of the hormonal improvements with which combat reps were endowed. But then, just like that, one afternoon while watching a silly film at home, she had gone to pieces. Why?
Given that the idiot booth hadn’t soothed her anxiety, she considered the possibility of visiting a psych-guide. Ever since the Peruvian psychologist Rosalind Villodre had developed her post-Freudian master theory in the 2080s, her disciples had become very popular. Near Bruna’s apartment there was a Health Arcade, one of those shopping malls specializing in therapies that were more or less alternative, and on the ground floor a psych-guide called Virginio Nissen had his consulting rooms. One afternoon the detective went in with the vague idea of getting some information, and left with the commitment to return every Saturday; in a somewhat inexplicable way, the man had managed to impose this obligation on her. It was now two months since the rep had had a panic attack, but she seriously doubted it was thanks to Nissen. It could perhaps be due to the eighty gaias that a half-hour consultation cost her: she had no alternative but to get healthy in order to save herself that amount of money.
And now Bruna found herself lying on a sensory-deprivation couch on top of a mattress of fine air bubbles and wearing virtual glasses that made her feel as if she were in the middle of the cosmos. She was floating pleasurably in the stellar blackness, weightless and incorporeal. The somewhat sickly sweet voice of Virginio Nissen reached her in that distant comfort zone.
“Give me three words that hurt you.”
You had to answer quickly without thinking.
“Wound. Family. Harm.”
“Let’s discard the first one—too semantically contaminated. Think about family and give me three more words that hurt you.”
“Nothing. No one. Alone.”
“What does nothing mean?”
“That it’s a lie.”
“What is a lie?”
“We’ve talked a lot about this already.”
“One more time, Husky.”
“Everything is a lie...Affection...The memory of that affection. The love of my parents. My parents themselves. My childhood. Nothing swallowed them all. They don’t exist; they never existed.”
“The love you feel for your mother, for your father, exists.”
“That’s a lie.”
“No, that love is real. Your despair is real because your affection is real.”
“My despair is real because my affection is an illusion.”
“My parents died thirty years ago, Husky.”
“My condolences, Nissen.”
“What I mean is that my parents don’t exist either. All I have is a memory of them. Same as you.”
“It isn’t the same.”
“Why?”
“Because my memory is a lie.”
“Mine, too. All memories are lies. We all invent the past. Do you think my parents were really the way I remember them today?”
“I don’t care, because it’s not the same.”
“Fine, let’s leave it there. And the second word, no one? What does it mean?”
“Loneliness.”
“Why?”
“Look, you can’t understand. A human can’t understand it. Maybe I should look for a techno psych-guide. Are there technohumans doing this? Even rats...even the most miserable mammal, has its nest, its herd, its flock, its litter. We reps lack that essential group. We’ve never been truly unique, truly necessary for anyone. I’m talking about the way in which children are necessary for their parents, or that parents are necessary for their children. And then we can’t have children, and we live for only ten years, which means that becoming a stable couple is very difficult, or agonizing.”
Her throat suddenly became constricted and the detective stopped talking for fear that her voice would break. Each time she brushed up against the memory of Merlín’s death, the grief overwhelmed her with an undiminished fury, as if almost two years hadn’t elapsed. She breathed deeply and swallowed the knot of pain until she managed to recover an acceptable level of control.
“What I mean is that you’re not important to anyone. You can have friends—good friends even—but even with the best of your friends, you wouldn’t occupy that basic position of belonging to any one of them. Who’s going to worry about what happens to me?”
It’s marvelous, Bruna said to herself sarcastically. It’s truly marvelous to be paying eighty gaias to a psych-guide for the privilege of spoiling my afternoon and having a miserable time. The astral space in which she was floating, previously so relaxing, was beginning to feel like a place of anguish.
“It’s not, in fact, exactly as you say, Husky. Even the comparison you’ve used isn’t correct. Not all mammals live in groups. Wild bears, for example, are totally solitary animals all their lives. They only get together briefly to mate. So...”
Wild bears be damned, thought Bruna. They were another lot of beings that didn’t exist: there were only a few left in zoos. The rep flung off her virtual glasses and sat up on the couch. She blinked a few times, a little dizzy, while she returned to the real world. In front of her, lounging in an armchair, sat Virginio Nissen, with his long, braided moustaches, his gold earring, and his shaved and waxed head.
“I’ve had enough. Let’s leave it for today.”
“Fine, Husky. It’s time for our session to end anyway.”
Of course. Nissen always had to have the last word. Another control freak like Lizard, the android said to herself mockingly as she transferred the eighty gaias from one mobile to the other. The man’s computer beeped receipt of funds, the psych-guide widened his smile a tiny fraction, and Bruna walked out into the mall anxious to raise her spirits with a drink.
But no. She was drinking too much.
Instead of going into the bar opposite Nissen’s consulting rooms, she set off through the main gallery of shops toward the Health Arcade exit. It was costing her a little to leave; she really fancied that untimely and solitary glass of wine too much, and the keenness of her thirst was beginning to frighten her. She really must drink less. A lot of androids ended up as alcoholics or dependent on some other drug, no doubt spurred on by that same bitterness Bruna was unable to explain fully to Nissen. And that was also the reason why so many reps got into the dangerous illegal mems game. Though they were unable to live one real life lengthwise, at least they could try to live several lives widthwise. Simultaneous lives, one on top of another. Cata Caín was programmed to gouge out Bruna’s eyes an
d then kill her. She felt another shiver and noticed that old scenes of blood and violence were flooding her memory, feverish snippets from her combat service days that she was normally able to block out. Four years, three months, and twenty days.
The shopping mall was packed with people; lately, there was nothing that obsessed people more than health. And not just the technos, but humans, too. Despite the optimistic scientific predictions of the twenty-first century, what was certain was that the life expectancy of the average human had not extended beyond ninety-six and, on top of that, it could not be said that conditions for nonagenarians were especially good. Transplants, bionic parts, and cellular engineering had improved the quality of life of younger people, but they hadn’t managed to ease the implacable deterioration of old age. True, old people died wrinkle-free, converted into their own distorted death masks thanks to plastic surgery, but the passage of time was still eating away at them from inside. At least the reps were saved from that, thought Bruna—from a slow and painful old age. Heroes die young, like Achilles, Yiannis used to say to cheer her up whenever they came across those old people on the street, trapped in the prison of their deterioration: minds laminated by the years, drooling mouths, broken bodies transported hither and yon in wheelchairs, like dead meat. And yet, despite all this, the android reflected, she would have changed places with a human there and then.
The Health Arcade wasn’t very big, but it had a bit of everything: hyperbaric chambers, antioxidant therapy centers, secondhand bionics stores, spiritual healers who claimed to be following the Labaric rite. And the usual host of anti-TTT quacks and visionaries. It seemed there was even a Gnés doctor on the upper level. The arcade was one of the few places where you could gaze at an alien close up—apart from in my own bed, of course, Bruna said to herself. She shook her head to rid herself of the thought of Maio’s huge, translucent body, the annoying memory of which had just buzzed through her mind like a hornet.
Close to the exit there was a small tattoo bar that the rep hadn’t noticed previously. She wandered over to have a look; the tattoo bar did essentialist tattoos. If she remembered correctly, the essentialist sect had sprung up in New Zealand toward the end of the twentieth—or the beginning of the twenty-first—century. Bruna didn’t know a great deal about the sect’s beliefs, though she had an idea they were based on ancient Maori rites. Whatever the case, its tattoos were famous. The essentialists considered them to be sacred, an external representation of the soul. People had to discover which was their tattoo, their primordial design, the visual interpretation of their intimate and secret being, and once the exact design had been found, they should have it engraved on their skin, as if they were writing the signs of their soul. According to the essentialists, tattooing the wrong image meant atrocious chaos, and brought with it no end of misfortune; applying the correct design, on the other hand, soothed and protected the individual and even cured multiple ailments. It wasn’t surprising that these tattoos had become fashionable.
