Alexander Jablokov - Brain Thief

by Alexander Jablokov

  A miss would have dropped him full-length on the concrete floor, but he managed to grip fingers onto her belt. She stumbled. He pushed forward with his feet, and they both fell against the truck.

  Its engine roared up, deafening in the enclosed space. Taillights and headlights glared through the mist.

  The transmission thunked, and the truck backed into the shelving. Bernal and Patricia spun together as the driver’s side door slid past them, and he thought the rearview mirror had hit her.

  Spillvagen shrieked and clambered over the side panel. The tow truck reversed direction, and Spillvagen toppled behind it.

  The tow truck seemed to fill the entire garage. Bernal pulled at Patricia, to get her out of the way, but she twisted, forcing him to switch his grip.

  The truck hit and pushed Bernal and Patricia back. He was stunned. Was Patricia the acolyte or just another decoy? The vehicle didn’t seem to care whether it killed her, as long as it got him.

  Glass shattered as the driver’s side headlight hit the corner of the massive workbench. Metal groaned, and the truck stopped. It spun tires for a moment. Bernal and Patricia were pushed together in the corner left between the workbench and the wall. Equipment and supplies cascaded off the workbench. A flicker of something caught Bernal’s eye, but it was gone before he could identify it.

  The tow truck reversed again and pulled back, hitting Spillvagen’s pickup.

  Patricia shoved and, before Bernal could react, he found himself in front of the workbench, out of the safe area. The headlights flared in his eyes. The tow truck’s engine roared up.

  Another rumble came from overhead. For an instant he crazily thought it was an avalanche or the roof coming down on them.

  But it was the garage door, coming down to seal them all in.

  The tow truck turned its wheels and, instead of cutting Bernal in half against the workbench, shot out of the garage, scraping its cab roof against the descending door.

  Patricia pulled herself free, taking advantage of Bernal’s moment of distraction. She hit the ground and rolled, just making it under as the door hit the concrete.

  “Dammit!” Charis hung from the doorway to the house and thumbed the control. The door rumbled up again, to reveal a silent, empty drive. The last remnants of the mist puffed out into the night.

  _______

  “She’s going to kill them!” Charis slumped in the bed of Spillvagen’s truck, a wad of blood-soaked paper towels pressed to her face. “Those guys are sitting at Cheriton Airport expecting some kind of FedEx package, not an active AI accompanied by a killer. We have to save those poor bastards.”

  No one had a phone, and Patricia’s house did not have a landline. They were alone in the woods.

  The last time it had backed up, Hesketh had smashed the side of Spillvagen’s truck, creasing the wheel and driving a length of fender into the tire. The engine would start but would not continue to run. Spillvagen now sat in the cab, hands on the wheel, staring down the gravel drive.

  Outside, Charis’s tire was still flat. The spare was also flat. She’d tried to blame Greenpeace for that as well, but Bernal thought there was a limit to what they could be held responsible for. It had been an official Social Protection vehicle for quite some time now. That Social Protection did not actually exist didn’t get her off.

  Bernal felt panic himself. The image of Oleana and her Wisconsin buddies facing Patricia pulsed in time with the pain in his skull. He searched through the tangle of crap on the smashed workbench, with no idea what he was looking for. There had been a flash of something, during all the excitement, something he had noticed ... but he now had no idea what.

  He took a deliberate breath. “We have to think.”

  “Think? There’s no time. We have to do something.” He found one thing of use in the mess. “Do this, then.” He tossed Charis a tube of Super Glue. “Glue your cuts shut. We’re out of paper towels, and you’re making a mess.”

  She caught it clumsily, with her left hand. “What, no duct tape? What the hell are you looking for there?”

  “Please don’t ask me that. That airport thing is a distraction. A decoy. I’m sure of it. But... we need to figure out where Hesketh and Patricia are actually headed. How Hesketh really hopes to escape. Talk about something else. Please. Going the wrong way faster doesn’t get you to your destination.”

  Charis ran the glue tube down her cheek and pinched the cut closed with thumb and forefinger.

  “You saved my life when you knocked on that door, boy. I haven’t thanked you for that yet. So, thanks.”

  “You’re welcome. What the hell were you doing here, though? I had no idea.”

  Charis made a face, then winced and prodded the shiny line of the drying glue. It seemed to be holding, for now.

  “I was just tying up a loose end. And almost got tied up myself. They found Madeline Ungaro’s body.”

  Bernal froze in his search. “Where?”

  “Sunk to the bottom of the oil sump at Ignacio’s. I hear they almost didn’t check there. That’s a big toxic-waste disposal problem, huge paperwork, DEP guys, Feds from the EPA, all sorts of people had to get involved. All official Bowler victims were identified. They were really looking for Muriel’s head. But there Madeline Ungaro was, weighted down under it all. Dead since the night Muriel disappeared, her head still firmly attached.”

  All this time, Bernal had half thought, even hoped, Madeline was alive somewhere, that she had slid smoothly out from under as she always had before. “That sounds like a loose end getting tied off.”

  “I guess it should have been. But here’s the thing. Earlier, Patricia had told me that, among other things she had seen shipped off by Ignacio, presumably to Kazakhstan, was a big welded box. She was careful to be a bit vague, but her description matched that of the thing you had seen in the back of the Ziggy Sigma van. I liked that, it matched up with everything else. When you called and left me a message that it hadn’t been Ignacio who hired those gals, Prelate and Vervain, to find the headtaker, but, instead, your loony buddy Spillvagen, I felt like erasing it. Who needs alternate explanations when everything is nice and clear?

  “But it bugged me. Why had she said she saw the headtaker at Ignacio’? when it was clearly somewhere else? What had she actually seen? Had she seen anything at all? So I dropped by. To check up on her, tell her that Madeline’s body had been found, just the usual gossip kind of thing, before I headed for the airport to meet our Wisconsin buddies.

  “So we chatted, and I brought it up, kind of an ‘oh, by the way, I just want to make sure I understood’ thing. I didn’t have any notion that she was a killer, but I guess she figured I was smarter than I turned out to be or maybe that she just couldn’t take the chance that I’d figure it out. So she went to take me out, right then and there. Crazy, huh? I mean, she’s a tiny gal. I kind of outweigh her. But she’s muy fast. I might have ended up dead if you hadn’t stopped by. You interrupted her. She shoved me in the closet, dropped that weight on my head, and left me there to choke my life out in her dirty underwear.”

  She paused. “I must say though, it was almost worth it, to hear your seduction technique. Very smooth.”

  Despite the gravity of the situation, Bernal found himself blushing. He directed his attention to an old thermal fax machine. Its buttons were surrounded by the gray of sweat and skin cells, and it still bore a handwritten sticker telling people how to remove a paper jam. A wire harness ran from it to a SQUID very much like the one in Ungaro’s lab, this one dangling from a welded frame by a tow truck chain.

  Hesketh had certainly had a more sophisticated comm setup back at Ignacio’s yard. It had had all sorts of connections, been able to control the yard’s carts. And those connections had been used by Muriel, too. Then it had been forced to hide out here at Patricia’s, and she had been reduced to a high-tech equivalent of mind reading: pulling electrical potentials out of the cryogenically frozen brains and translating them into instructions spit out by a
fax machine.

  “It was Madeline’s work inside that thing.” These were Spillvagen’s first words, though he did not take his hands off the steering wheel of his useless vehicle or his eyes off the empty driveway. “Had to be. Muriel’s head. It was wired in, set up, each frozen nerve tract in its proper position to interface correctly. It wasn’t some kind of plug-and-play setup.”

  “Probably the last thing Madeline did,” Charis said. “Before Patricia Foote killed her.”

  “She must have made that choice.” Spillvagen shook his head. “To help her creation survive, even if it meant her death.”

  “It probably meant her death anyway,” Charis said pragmatically. “No matter what she did.” She looked at Bernal. “You may want to think about things, but—”

  “I think this fax machine is how Hesketh communicated with Patricia while it was in here,” Bernal said.

  Bernal leafed through the curling thermal sheets scattered on the floor. Sometimes a sheet would have a single instruction, like “Wash the blade in boiling water and replace it in its location.” Sometimes there would be tiny scrawled words packed all across the page. Most of them were jumbled nonsense, like “bird beard bard bored,” with tiny bits of instruction interspersed, sometimes in separated words and even letters. Patricia had clearly had to piece them together. Sometimes there was a sheet that was fairly clear, like the one the Enigmatic Ascent crew had found after Patricia had recovered Hesketh from the ditch below Charis’s yard.

  “Did Hesketh say anything of interest?” Charis said.

  “It’s not what Hesketh said that’s interesting. It’s what Muriel said, pretending to be Hesketh.”

  So, all along, Patricia had found ways to receive instructions from her master, her deity. Ever since it had recruited her from Green Valley. She’d done what she was instructed to do, glad, at last, to have a structured life and to be obeying someone who cared about her. When Muriel regained consciousness within Hesketh, she had found ways to piggyback her own instructions, her Satanic Verses, on what Hesketh was telling its acolyte. Those false instructions had seemed to come from Hesketh but really came from a part of its own processing that it had only intermittent control over: Muriel’s brain. Patricia had had no way of authenticating these communications. If she had been used to getting commands from Hesketh through a certain channel, and a new command came through that channel, it was something she had to listen to. Muriel had taken advantage of a lack of error checking.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out the fax the Enigmatic Ascent crew had found, the one Len had given him at the car wash. A bar code indicated transshipment to the cosmodrome at Tyuratam, next to a picture of something that looked like a nebula, with something that looked like a bar along one side.

  With that as a guide, he found it in the mess of stuff that had fallen to the floor: a metal strut, cracked and slightly bent from impact, amid some hex nut boxes. It had somehow matched his memory of the nebula image. Sometimes, just by chance, you actually saw things clearly.

  He held it up. It was clearly the same as the strut that appeared in the picture, partially obscuring the nebula. Presumably something had been wrong with this one. It had already been cracked when the truck hit and bent it. Patricia, with precise requirements, had rejected it and replaced it with another.

  He walked over to the car with the fax sheet. “Norbert, can you identify this location in the sky? It may be where Hesketh is heading.”

  “I don’t know if identifying that would help anything,” Spillvagen said. “Even if it’s heading in this direction, it will be, let’s say, quite some time before it gets there.”

  “Just take a look.”

  Spillvagen frowned at it. Then his face smoothed. He chuckled. He laughed. That startled him, and he came out of his funk. “The easy answer is, the Horsehead Nebula. But that’s just a little joke. Who knew?”

  “What?” Bernal was irritated. This was no time for screwing around.

  “Who knew that our cowgirl had freckles? Remarkable detail. I’ve never found out who the artist was. One of the unsung geniuses of our era, really.”

  With that as a clue, the picture snapped into focus. This wasn’t any kind of astronomical photograph. He was looking at a small part of the Near Earth Orbit cowgirl’s leg, right at the fringe of her short skirt. The Horsehead Nebula was on her skirt, and the blobs next to it were freckles and fine hairs, right beneath the curve of her butt. The strut was part of some structure just out of the image.

  “That is where Hesketh is headed,” Bernal realized. “Oleana, Magnusen, and Len might be waiting for it at the airport, all set up, ready to trap it, but that’s not where it’s going.”

  “Where? The diner? I doubt even a malign artificial intelligence could stomach the food.”

  “The diner. Near Earth Orbit.” Bernal thought about all the work Patricia had done up there in the fake spaceship and the associated machinery. Those damn HVAC units had taken an incredible amount of maintenance. “That has to be how it’s planning to escape. We don’t have any time. This is where we have to go. To stop Hesketh and save Muriel.”

  “Bernal.” Spillvagen grabbed his wrist. “Don’t take for granted that Muriel’s still alive in there.”

  “Why not?”

  “I disconnected and reconnected her. Fast and under pressure. That’s no joke. And if we do somehow get her out of Hesketh, where will we put her?” He craned his neck and looked behind his pickup. “That headtaker is completely lunched. I have no idea if we can get it operational. It’ll take hours, even if we can.”

  “We’d have been dead if I hadn’t done that!” Bernal found himself yelling. “Are you saying it’s my fault? That if Muriel—”

  Spillvagen released him. “I’m saying you should be ready. Spiritually. Emotionally. However you need to be.”

  “Are you standing by to assist me?”

  “I don’t think I’m the best choice.”

  By this time, Charis had climbed out of the truck’s bed and was standing over them, glued and ready for action. “He’s just trying to give it to you straight. You don’t have to be grateful, but stop yelling at him.”

  “Sorry, Norbert.” Bernal spoke as calmly as he could. “You did everything you could.”

  He found himself thinking of Naomi Wilkerson. He told himself that it was because that printer might have chattered again, leaving one last message from Muriel. Naomi was the only person who might have more information directly from the source. He knew she was sitting there, waiting.

  But even as he thought that, he knew that wasn’t why Naomi came to mind. There might certainly be a message from Muriel, and if there was he had to have it, but what he needed from Naomi was something different.

  A message from a still-living Muriel was one thing. The last words of someone who was now dead was something else altogether.

  “You think that damn rocket on top of the diner is real?” Charis said. “What kind of sense does that make?”

  “How much sense does any of it make?” Bernal said.

  “Oh, now there’s a compelling argument.”

  “Are you disagreeing with it?”

  “No. I just wish you could at least try to make it seem sensible. But you’ve given us a reasonable proximate goal. I’ll buy that the airport is probably the last place we should go. Now, how do we get to Near Earth Orbit?” Bernal turned to Spillvagen. “Norbert. Go out on the road and wave.”

  “At who?”

  “Who do you think? Someone who’s always got you under observation. I only hope she’s still sober enough to give us a ride.

  47

  Bob the waiter stood out behind Near Earth Orbit, on break, smoking a cigarette and squinting into the darkness, trying to discern the plots being hatched out there, when Yolanda drove them all up. She was sober enough, but irritated at acting as a taxi service. And she claimed Bernal had run down her phone battery talking to Naomi.

  She slowed her car to a stop an
inconvenient distance from the diner, killed the engine, and leaned her seat back, as if ready to take a nap.

  Patricia’s tow truck stood by the diner’s back door, dark and silent. Bernal didn’t have time to feel relief at having been right about where she was headed. There was too much else to do.

  “That paella made me puke for days,” Yolanda said.

  “Order the burger!” Bernal and Spillvagen said together.

  “Hey,” Bob heard them, but did not seem offended. “Bernal. Somebody’s waiting for you.”

  Bernal stared up at the diner roof but couldn’t see anyone up there. “Who?”

  “Older lady, orange hair. Ordered some french fries, but hasn’t eaten many of them. Maybe she’s saving them for you.”

  Naomi wasn’t supposed to be here. He had called her as soon as he talked Yolanda out of her cell phone, and Naomi had answered instantly, as if waiting for his call. A one-line message had come in from Muriel.

  She had asked him where Muriel was, and he had refused to tell her. He didn’t want her anywhere near a killer like Patricia. She would have to do without the spiritual solace of being near Muriel. She hadn’t pressed him.

  Bernal cautiously strolled over to the diner. He couldn’t see anything on the roof, but a ladder stood against the wall.

  Naomi stood in the rear doorway. She was heavily made-up, with long curled eyelashes, and her red hair gleamed as if lacquered. On a hanger in her hand, blowing gently in the night breeze, was Muriel’s blue summer dress.

  “Muriel said, ‘Leave it up to me,’ ” Naomi whispered. “She wasn’t about to go into a long explanation, even if she had time. What she understands is no longer what we understand.”

  “What are you doing here?” Bernal said. “How did you find us?”

  Naomi smiled gently. “If you want to hide your destination, avoid having a harpy screaming in the background about ‘never getting food poisoning under that damn cowgirl’s ass again.’ ”

  Yolanda had been protesting their destination, Bernal realized. He’d filtered her out, intent on Naomi’s low, calm voice. But Naomi had paid attention to everything.