by Mel Odom
“That hasn’t happened yet.”
No, but that didn’t mean the attack wasn’t terrorist-related.
I dug deeper into the NAPD files first.
* * *
NAPD Homicide Detective 2nd Grade Royo, Jorge
Field Report Regarding Holder, Gordon Murder Investigation
After being assigned to the homicide by Captain Karanjai immediately following the explosion that ended Gordon Holder’s life, I began tracking the man’s last twenty-four hours.
Prior to his transit in the tube-lev, Holder was off the grid for fifty-three minutes. No one I have talked with can verify those missing minutes. Electronic trace of Holder’s ID and financial records — gotten under protest from Skorpios Defense Systems — failed to fill in that time.
Before that, Holder was with his family for ten hours, twelve minutes. This has been confirmed by his wife, Melanie Holder, residing at the same address as the murder victim. They have three children — IDs and ages resourced in an appended document — also at home during this time.
He arrived home from work at Skorpios Defense Systems (see appended file) at 1807, a usual time for him, according to Mrs. Holder.
During the day, Holder was at the main corp office, in his private office as well as conference rooms, also documented (see appended work schedule), except for an eighty-seven minute liaison with an Eve from Eliza’s Toybox. The liaison took place at The Arms of Artemis (see appended document). Melanie Holder was not made aware of this and Skorpios Defense Systems and their parent corp Argus, Inc. (see appended document) have indicated that “sharing such knowledge would be civilly detrimental.”
That meant both corps would sue the NAPD for leaking the information to the wife or to the nosies. I wondered how long that fact could remain hidden.
A quick look at the media told me that Holder’s liaison had already been outed.
Before his work day began, Holder spent the evening with his family (nine hours, seventeen minutes).
Am holding on authorization from Captain Karanjai before further backgrounding.
I copied the file and retreated from Royo’s reports, then headed for the crime scene unit’s records. My NAPD e-ID got me past the watchdogs.
I flipped through the reports. Everyone aboard the tube car had been identified from DNA evidence and witness corroboration. All were, as I had assumed, deceased.
There were no manifests logged for the crates that had been stolen, and no reason given for why they had been packed in containers that could survive the explosives that had destroyed the tube car.
A quick check through follow-up reports indicated that the crime scene techs had tried to follow up on the crates, but Kirkland and his associates stymied the NAPD’s efforts at every turn. Royo and other detectives had tried to investigate further but had been shut down.
Argus, Inc.’s directive regarding the stolen crates had been clear: You are investigating the death of CEO Gordon Holder. We want to know who murdered him. The losses of materials are acceptable. The death of a corp family member and valuable employee is not. Concentrate on bringing those responsible to justice.
The NAPD crime scene files had been hacked twice. Traces had been launched, stealth snooper utilities that were the best the PD had. Nothing had turned up.
“You know if someone’s hacking the PD that whoever is responsible probably has someone inside the investigation, too.” Shelly sounded irritated. “That’s how these guys operate.”
That was true. The corps played fast and loose with criminal and civil law when they wanted to.
* * *
External vid returned to me in a rush of color and data. The perspective didn’t come from inside my body, though. It came from a closed-circuit TV located on the ceiling of the repair room.
I peered down at my broken body and dented chassis. My left arm and left leg were gone. My head had received considerable damage and was crushed in on the left side.
Pools of nanobots worked over the damaged areas. As I watched, new sections were grafted onto my chassis and head. The truncated arm and leg were undergoing reconstruction that would allow new limbs to be attached.
The room was a circular “clean” room with electromagnetic filters in place to eradicate dust and unwanted debris. I lay on a table in the center of the room. Jenny Crain stood next to me manipulating the insertion of new components as well as running diagnostics. She managed everything at once because she wore an articulated harness that gave her the use of four extra limbs that ended in modded hands designed for specific tasks.
Jenny looked the same as before: young and blond with a Martian clan tattooing around her left eye. The natural-born Martians had a fierce pride and wore it on their person; her tattoo indicated she was from the Edward Bradbury colony. They grew up in dome-covered cities with the constant knowledge that anywhere on the other side of the reinforced transplas was deadly to them. She wore a white lab coat specially cut for the articulated harness.
She looked up at the cam overhead. “Are you with me, Drake?”
“Yes, thank you.” My voice came from an external speaker on a small table next to the bed.
“Gave you the bird’s-eye view.”
“It is appreciated. Do you have an estimate on the time necessary for the remaining repairs?”
Jenny continued working without interruption. “I should think we’ll be ready to attach your replacement limbs within 3.2 hours. These things take time.”
“I understand.”
“There will be a further delay, though.”
“Why?”
“Orders from the top. Someone wants a psych eval done.”
“What is the objective?”
“I don’t know.” Jenny smiled and patted my bent head. “This is my theater. What goes on in logical progression and personality is someone else’s bailiwick.”
“Understood. Thank you.” I quickly wrote a subroutine to watch over Jenny’s progress and alert me if there was anything she needed from me. Then I went in search of Floyd 2X3A7C.
Chapter Nine
Communication from the Moon to the Earth lagged slightly and I adjusted accordingly. I pinged Floyd 2X3A7C’s e-ID and sent him a request for a telepresence audience.
“Drake, you are well?”
“I am.”
“I’d heard you were damaged in the terrorist bombing that claimed the life of Gordon Holder.”
“I was. I’m presently being repaired at Haas-Bioroid.”
“You are salvageable?”
“I am.”
“That is good.”
“I think so, too. May I have an audience with you?”
“Of course.”
I felt a brief shift, then I logged in through a virtu-comm interface that allowed me to join Floyd in his environment. Higher-end bioroids had that ability. My senses uploaded data that he processed and I had the curious sensation of being in two places at one time. Cruising the Net while operating in the physical world had never been a distraction for me, but the telepresence experience was.
Floyd sat in the back pews of a small Catholic church that I knew he favored. I had visited him there before.
The church was located on the thirteenth floor of the Miguel Hidalgo arcology. The building was one of the smaller ones in New Angeles, boasting only one hundred and forty-seven stories, and was in the midst of the constant urban reconstruction the megapolis underwent year round. Many indigent families lived in the Hidalgo arcology on government assistance, and the structure threatened to topple under its own decaying weight. Several of the housing units were uninhabitable by ordinary standards, but the poor people of the megapolis didn’t have those standards. Eventually New Angeles would find money to do the necessary repairs, or they would displace those inhabitants.
When the church had first been constructed, it had been modeled on a nineteenth century counterpart. The twelve stations of the Cross tracked the sides of the main area. Candles, real candles, burned
in tiers. A confessional box sat on one side of the room. Thick rafters showed on the ceiling and the building material appeared to be stone when it was actually textured plascrete.
No service was in progress, but twenty-six people occupied places in the hand-carved wooden pews. A few of them were praying, but most of them simply looked like they had nowhere else to go—or they didn’t want to go wherever they belonged.
Floyd sat in the back in a hooded garment that made him look like one of the penitents around him that wore basic black. Sunglasses covered his silver eyes. They were an affectation that he couldn’t explain even to himself. I knew that because I’d asked. I thought perhaps they were to disguise his most telling feature, but lately he’d come to think the habit might have been a trait left by the core personality that had been instilled in his programming.
He was a smaller version of me, more narrow and less threatening. Floyd had been intended as a subtle foray into the homicide division, but some of the complaints about him had been that he didn’t have enough physical presence. As a bioroid, he was stronger and faster than any human counterpart on the PD, but he didn’t look intimidating.
I had been constructed with an eye toward possessing an intimidation factor. Shelly had taught me to use that, but it had been a difficult thing because I wasn’t supposed to make a human feel threatened—unless it was during the course of an investigation.
Floyd kept his face toward the front of the church, but I knew he could see me perfectly well through the telepresence prompt. “You look well.”
I noticed that I was wearing a hooded garment similar to his, something I had not ever worn.
When I failed to respond, he went on. “That is a joke.”
“Ah, I see.”
“I thought perhaps you might feel more comfortable if you fit into the surroundings.”
That was curious. I wondered if it was actually Floyd’s design to see me suitably attired. Either way, I didn’t care how I was dressed.
Floyd’s hand worked at the rosary he wore around his neck. I was most curious about his search for God, and for his inability to accept himself as a complex machine, not a human. I had heard of churches where bioroids were welcomed, had been told that bioroids contained part of the soul of the individual their neural channeling was based on. Others believed that copying that personality over made a new soul, much the way that biological reproduction among humans was believed to do by many religions. The idea of a splintered soul or a mirrored soul was new to the social paradigm involving the integration of bioroids within the human populace at high-functioning levels.
I had never given those things much thought. I saw no need for a soul, no need to know that I would live past my allotted time in my present capacity. Then I had lost Shelly, only to discover some spark of her continuing to exist for me on a plane that I didn’t understand. Shelly had been religious, and she had believed in an afterlife, but she had never talked to me much about it. I did not think she would choose to haunt me after her death.
Except that she did.
Since my reassignment to the Moon, I had intentionally deepened my relationship with Floyd. He routinely worked between Earth and the Moon, following up on cases there because he was required by Haas-Bioroid to log in for weekly checkups. There had been a number of opportunities to open a discussion with him. What had captivated him, though, were the memories I had of Simon Blake. He thought of them as proof that our lives were not as simple as we’d been programmed to believe. He insisted on being kept updated with the things I “remembered.” The resulting friendship had surprised me, but not Floyd.
Floyd turned his face to me, something he didn’t have to do, but the action was done to help keep humans comfortable with us. From one bioroid to another, assuming that bioroid had multi-focal capability like Floyd and I had, that attention was a token of respect.
“Do you not find the clothing suitable? Perhaps you would prefer something else.”
“No. This is acceptable.”
“Good. Why have you come?” He rested his hands on the pew in front of him. His fingers worked through the rosary and the click-click-click of the beads came as regularly as a metronome.
“To ask a favor.”
“Of course. Anything within my means.”
“This pertains to the Mara Blake kidnapping.”
Floyd tilted his head slightly, a reflexive move that I had come to recognize as heightened curiosity. “I would be happy to assist you.”
I transferred the image of the young man Jonas I had captured from my errant memory of Mara Blake to Floyd. Together, in the telepresence, we regarded Jonas’s scarred features.
“Have you managed to identify this man?” Floyd enlarged the image and studied it.
“No.”
“Where did you get it?”
“In one of the…flashbacks that I have been having.” Floyd thought my memories of a prior existence as a human might be proof that the human soul did exist within bioroids. His own curiosity impelled him to aid me in any way he could to expand upon his knowledge of the subject.
“Tell me what you remember.”
I did.
“So in this flashback, you were also hunted and nearly killed.”
“Mara was hunted and nearly killed. Those people were not after me.” I felt certain that distinction needed to be made.
“Yes, but I do not believe it is in your best interests to assume Mara Blake—”
“Parker.” I couldn’t help correcting him. “She was Parker then, not Blake. Whatever files you may find regarding that crime will list her under that name.”
He nodded. “As may be, Mara Parker was the only target in this scenario. Have you tried accessing information regarding the attempted violence?”
“I have, but that memory came only moments before Gordon Holder’s assassination. My partner is presently tasked with finding the Martian terrorists who blew up the tube car. I will be joining him as soon as I am once more physically fit.”
“I understand. And two investigators will be better than one.”
“Exactly.” That had been one of the first lessons Shelly had taught me. No detective—human or bioroid—was an island. Cases were broken by team effort, not isolated incidents of individual exertion, although those could not be overlooked. I had broken several cold cases on my own of late, but that was because I had been ostracized by the department. Those successes were part of the reason I had been sent to the Moon as well.
Floyd was quiet for a moment and I knew he was running Jonas’s image through the facial recognition databases the NAPD had access to. “It is interesting that this man is not in the files.”
“Yes.” We both knew that meant Jonas had elected to disappear himself, reinvent himself, or someone had disappeared him. Those things happened, often successfully even with all the data that surged through the Net.
Floyd’s hands continued working through the rosary. Click-click-click.
I spoke into the silence that hung over the church and felt oddly uncomfortable. “There is another reason there may be no record of Jonas.”
“What is that?”
“That he never existed.”
“That is an odd supposition. Explain.”
“I may have invented him.”
“Why?”
I sat quietly in the pew. “I am facing a conundrum.”
“How so?”
“I don’t think I can trust these flashbacks to be true things.”
“You no longer think they are memories?”
I knew that was something he didn’t look forward to hearing. Floyd wanted more information about the bioroid condition and how we fit into the theological view of the universe. “I believe that they are memories, but at best they are jumbled and uncertain shadows of what might have been. The face I have assigned to Jonas may be an amalgam of others Mara and Simon Blake met during their time together.”
“Curious.”
“I find the pros
pect…unsettling.”
“I can understand that. Still, this image is a lead that might prove worthwhile.”
“Yes.”
Floyd’s hands moved without fail, as constant as an irrigation sprinkler. “There is also the connection to the chimera tattoo from the mercenary group that Simon Blake was part of on Mars.”
“I know.”
“Have you dug any further into that avenue of the investigation?”
“I have tried. The information concerning that mercenary unit is also uncertain.”
“Of course. You wish for me to track down this man Jonas?”
“Yes. If you can manage the workload.” The homicide division stayed incredibly busy clearing the dead bodies that hit the streets. Most of them were simple affairs, if dying could be considered something so pedestrian. People killed people every day, for sex and money and a myriad of other nuanced reasons that reflected those two things. The NAPD had to file the paperwork and manage accountability.
“I will do so. I appreciate the opportunity to work with you on this. It is most intriguing.”
I believed that the mystery would have been more intriguing to me if I had been on the outside of it instead of in the middle. I had learned that during the pursuit of the conspiracy that had led to Shelly Nolan’s death. Close connections to a case resulted in an unaccustomed tunnel vision that disrupted the methodology I habitually employed.
“You’re welcome. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must return.”
“May your path be peaceful.” That was from the religious training Floyd had undertaken. Since talking to him about these matters, I had discovered that religion often had as many rules and conventions as police work. Both, to a degree, were about salvation.
“And yours.” I faded away from the telepresence link.
Chapter Ten
How do you feel?”
I stood on my own two feet again, although one of them was new to me. The new leg and foot had less wear showing than the other, though the difference was so infinitesimal that humans would not notice, and I detected a slight weight difference that required a half-dozen program readjustments regarding movement. I flexed my new arm as well and adapted it accordingly.
