Strange Flesh

by Michael Olson

  The word “memorial” sticks in my head. Gina’s statement weirdly evokes her final words, and the lifespan notation at the end makes it look more like an epitaph than a signature. Knowing her history, I’m not surprised that she would focus on the connection between death and orgasm. Or that she’d program her bots to actually “die” after experiencing a certain amount of pleasure. But the “halt” she mentions can’t mean Ginger, since the next line refers to Genesis 19, just as she did in the video of her death.

  Then it hits me.

  How could she correctly guess the date on which she would be murdered? And if she didn’t put it in, who did?

  This section of IT’s code base was Garriott’s responsibility. But the file history shows he never changed it. So Gina must have added it. Which means the line really was her epitaph, and she hid it in the DNA of the project that came to define her life. If that’s true, then she knew the day she would die.

  My mind recoils from the logic. I try to clear it by standing up to stretch. But my gaze keeps returning to the verse sitting calmly in my debug window.

  If Gina placed these words in her magnum opus, then either she was clairvoyant, or she selected the date of her own demise. She could only know it would be October 29 if she chose that date.

  And if that’s true, then Gina wasn’t murdered after all.

  79

  Her message goes to work on me that night.

  Why do I care so much about what happened to this poor girl? I feel like over the past weeks, I’ve come to know Gina well. In fact, my now gleaming future is really a gift from her.

  It was Lot’s wife who turned into a pillar of salt, so is she saying here that she’d rather “halt” or die than share the fate of her mother? Billy had assumed Gina’s death related to her work on the Dancers, as did I, but here she’s invoking her wretched family.

  Thinking it might be helpful to review a few details of her case, I lob in a call to Detective Nash, leaving a message that I just want to “tie up some loose ends.”

  Then I call Ruth Delaney. Having delivered her daughter’s last words to her, I guess I owe her these as well. And she may be the only person who can help me decode them.

  But the Delaneys are now represented by a “please check your number” message. Charles probably burned through Billy’s largesse in a hurry, and now maybe they’re having trouble with the bills. I search for an alternate listing but can’t find anything.

  I know I won’t be able to give this up until I talk to her, so the following morning I catch a train to Boston.

  Standing at the corner of Cross Street and Blakeley, I stare with amazement at a vacant lot where the Delaneys’ wilted house used to be. Did the city mercifully elect to put it down?

  No. A quick look around reveals traces of debris from a fire. Chips from burned timbers still leach black soot onto the sidewalk in the cold Boston drizzle. A few remnants show where the brick chimney fell and fractured across the back of the lot. I find a mud-covered scrap of yellow safety tape from the fire department.

  Eventually a neighbor, a balding man with an impressive belly not quite covered by his yellowed T-shirt, shuffles out to get his paper. He darts a suspicious look at me but doesn’t retreat when I walk over.

  I ask, “When did it burn?”

  He replies in thick Bostonian, “Back on the first day of February. Two o’clock in the goddamn morning.”

  I run this through my mental calendar. That was the night I called Ruth Delaney.

  “You know what caused it?”

  “Yep.”

  “What?”

  “The wife.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Well . . . I ain’t a fire-ologist, but they can tell stuff by the way the gasoline was spread around, or so they said.”

  “The fire department said this?”

  “Uh-huh. Charlie being stuck to that couch of his with a samurai sword through his gut probably helped them figure it out.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah. I got the feeling the guy was hard to live with.”

  “And Mrs. Delaney?”

  The neighbor looks a little pained. “I guess she didn’t want to live with herself either.”

  Ruth Delaney burning everything the same night I spoke with her is way too much of a coincidence for my heathen mind to process. So I turn to religion.

  She heard something in her daughter’s words that I couldn’t. I pull up the entire chapter of Genesis 19 on my phone, and this time I read to the end. It details what happens between Lot and his daughters after their mother transforms into a condiment:

  And they made their father drink wine that night also: and the younger arose, and lay with him; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose.

  Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father.

  While incest may have been the order of the day in Biblical times, in 2014, being impregnated by your father might start a girl on trying to find a way out.

  Is that what Gina meant? Is that why Charles Delaney objected so fervently to an autopsy? Had he received a revelation of what they might find?

  I recall Olya’s chronology of Gina’s final days. She went back to Boston to tell her parents about her new love. She came home depressed and spouting Bible verses about Sodom. Might her grand declaration have set something off in her father? With his frayed sanity, I can imagine Charles deciding that his daughter had surrendered herself to the Sodomites, and that somehow justified him in doing whatever he wanted with her—to her.

  So he rapes his girl, maybe reverting to an old habit that Gina thought she’d escaped. Her personality is probably consistent with someone who had been sexually abused growing up. She returns to New York the broken woman Olya observed. Her despair deepens over the following months, enough time to miss two periods. She goes to a doctor and has it confirmed: she’s pregnant by her own father.

  Like the daughters of Lot.

  It stands to reason Ruth Delaney would have a better working knowledge of Old Testament stories than I do. Thus the vacant lot.

  Incest would also explain the bloody bathtub the night before Gina died. I’d thought Olya was lying about that incident, but thinking back, she never actually said that Gina slit her wrists again. She just said she cut herself. I pull up Gina’s morgue photos from my private server and see it immediately: a ragged scratch moving horizontally between her hips about an inch or so below her belly button. Perhaps she was working up to a freelance hysterectomy the patient was not expected to survive. But Olya finds her first. Gina asks if she can forgive her anything, says she “can’t bear it.” She looks for redemption through her lover. But Olya lashes out, rather than comforting her.

  For a certain breed of computer scientist, symbols are of the utmost importance. So upon learning of her pregnancy, and that Olya cared more for their robot babies than she did for her, Gina might have felt the keystone supporting her life had cracked. That her great project, her Jack of Hearts, had brought her to ruin. I can see how she might want to expunge it.

  And so Gina gets busy in her workshop, and the next night she jacks out.

  While incest is far more common than people realize, it remains so taboo that even when it’s staring one straight in the face, most people won’t see it. Social workers have to be specially trained to tweak their antennae. The tragedy here is that if anyone could understand the toxic emotions that spew from a gothic upbringing, it should have been Billy. But he sought an explanation for Gina’s misery in his own fucked-up family, instead of hers. Once taken with the idea Blake was responsible, he was predisposed to believe later that he’d actually murdered her.

  So did he conjure all his proof out of thin air? Sharpening digital artifacts until they looked like something sinister? Could those two blond apparitions have been summoned by Billy himself?

  Whatever the source of his evidence, he was wrong. If there was one person responsible for Gina’s fate, I’m now sure it
was her father. And Billy ended up dying for his mistake.

  I get a call from John McClaren at nine AM the next morning. He’s full of his usual hail-fellow irony, but there’s an undercurrent of irritation. He wants a meeting. Now.

  On the way over, I try to figure out the significance of this appointment. Nash must have informed him about my call. The two had known each other before I ever got involved, and I start to wonder about the basis of their relationship.

  At McClaren’s office, I get an overhand shake and a slap on the back. He tells me to sit and spends a moment inspecting me. Finally he says, “So, bud . . . you must be hella busy with your twatomata.”

  “Yeah. It’s getting hectic right now.”

  “Sure, sure.” He tilts his head to the side. “That’s why I was surprised—I’d say amazed, even—to hear that you’ve been bothering the local con-stab-ulary with interview requests.”

  “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

  A mirthless chuckle. “So are you planning to blow up the Overlook just for a little excitement?”

  “No, I’ve seen enough fire for the year.” I smile back at him and reach for a tone of idle curiosity. “Something came up that muddied my understanding of recent events. Just wanted to mop up a couple details.”

  “Jim, cleaning is my job. And I just dealt with a very big mess that you were involved in making. Everything’s fine now, but what I don’t need is you tracking in more shit.”

  “Things don’t look as clean as you might like.”

  “Uh-huh . . . But remember, you’ve been read into this situation. So what you see isn’t what everyone else sees.”

  That line pops the bubble of uncertainty that’s been swelling in my head. I’d been asking myself: why did Billy see something so different from the police when he watched that video? Most of his voodoo forensics were unconvincing, but what about the pale figures in her pupils? No one who watched the recording, including me, ever saw them before he got it. As if they represented a hidden message intended only for him.

  I feel an itch deep in my brain stem. How uncanny that in both Getting Wet and her suicide video, Gina’s eyes would transmit recondite information. Life imitates art.

  Too perfectly, I think. More likely that detail is a product of the same artifice Billy used in Getting Wet.

  How do I know the copy of Gina’s suicide video I took from the NYPD server was anything like the original?

  I’ve been overlooking the crucial attribute of that file: chain of custody. McClaren could easily have gotten Nash to upload a different version. Those tiny ghosts could be the result of a couple hours with After Effects. A capability well within reach of someone who works for one of the biggest media companies on earth.

  Relieved by my newfound certainty, I decide to push it. “Is that because you had Nash swap in a doctored recording of Gina Delaney’s suicide, knowing that Billy would eventually get ahold of it?”

  McClaren laughs. “Buddy, you don’t seem to understand that nobody cares anymore about your questions.”

  “I think after what happened . . . that I deserve to know the whole story.”

  “You’re just killing me here. Look, the only ‘story’ you should be worried about is your own. Right now you’re getting a happy ending. With your line of work, you can probably have as many as you want. Billy? Now, Billy’s story is a very, very sad one. You don’t want to get caught up again in that kind of story.”

  “You want to make that threat explicit?”

  He watches me, his face shut and barred, bonhomie doused like kids pissing on the coals of a campfire. My mind is still racing.

  Why would McClaren want to give Billy a doctored video? To make him believe that Blake murdered Gina? Could it have been a scheme to enrage Billy to the point of recklessness?

  If so, I guess it worked, but not before endangering Blake’s life and risking that this fraud would be discovered. As a strategy, that would be akin to defusing a live artillery shell with a hammer. I remember the look on Blake’s face when Billy started dumping his stock. If that video was a key piece of some plan hatched by his own employee, why did Blake act so surprised when his brother’s actions then spiraled into violence?

  McClaren sighs as though he expected better of me. “Threat? I’m not making any threats. The only threat we’re discussing is the one Ms. Randall might see in you going around trying to dig up the family cemetery for some ridiculous nonsense you got banging around in that head of yours. You should chew over the possibility that maybe things won’t go so smoothly for you if she has to withdraw her helping hand. If I was you, the last thing I’d want is for that hand to become a fist. That’s just a little friendly advice. Me to you.”

  Helping hand? My stomach drops as I realize what he’s talking about. Blythe called Coles about my new IT enterprise, and I thought that was the end of it. But isn’t it interesting how quickly a currency quant was able to raise venture funds? Coles is loaded, but he wouldn’t have that much just lying around.

  Christ, is my company built once again with Randall money?

  As the thought settles, it starts to make even more sense. Blake was many things, but he wasn’t stupid. Most of the infrastructure he built to profit from IT is still in place. Blythe has already won the contest for control of IMP, so why not appropriate Blake’s idea as well?

  Which leaves me once again a legionary serving the IMPire. That’s a hard thing to swallow right now. But there’s nothing to be gained by acting out with McClaren. I need time to think about all this.

  I stall. “So that’s how it is?”

  McClaren makes a hospitable gesture at the space between us, as if to say, “We serve only the finest of fecal foodstuffs. Please enjoy.” He looks inquiringly at me.

  I have to bite. I’m not prepared to start a rebellion here and now. “I absolutely never meant to cause Ms. Randall any aggravation.”

  “You haven’t yet. That’s why we’re talking. So that you don’t.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  McClaren gets up and puts a hand on my shoulder, giving it an ungentle squeeze. He nods at me solemnly.

  “Thanks so much, Jimmy,” he says. “You’re a real prince.”

  80

  Susan Mercer has lunch by herself at the Sichi Zhilu teahouse in Chinatown at noon nearly every day. Many of my former colleagues believe she secretly owns the place. I find her pouring herself a cup at her regular table.

  “Now, James, if you wanted lunch, you could have called my girl. I believe your new vocation is impinging on your sense of decorum.” She says this with a smile, but it still throws me.

  “I, ah, Susan—” I hadn’t expected her to bring up my new job.

  “Please, dear boy, no need to blush. Perhaps I’m not the withered old prune you imagine.”

  “No, of course, I—”

  “You came here to discuss something else.”

  “I just met with John McClaren.”

  “I know. Johnny and I go way back. I take it you’ve developed questions that he declined to answer.”

  “That’s right. But he implied that my asking them was dangerous, which leads me to believe there’s some truth to their premise.”

  “You want to know why he set about manipulating certain information.”

  I nod.

  “Let me suggest the traditional follow-on: cui bono?” She sits back to let me ponder that.

  Who benefits?

  There’s only one answer to her question: Blythe. She ended up with all the chips.

  Supporting evidence: isn’t it funny she didn’t fire McClaren, despite that for a security specialist, he failed utterly in protecting Blake?

  For that matter, Blythe acted suspiciously forgiving of me, the man who actually killed her brother. She explained her lack of malice by saying she believes that he brought his fate upon himself. But she can’t claim to have done much to stop it. I had always framed the battle of the Randalls in terms of the br
others. I never really placed Blythe in the action.

  Mercer sees the light go on in my head. She shrugs. “Consider that while old John is certainly formidable, he’s not nearly so formidable as his boss.”

  “You were working for her. From the beginning.”

  “We both were. Your Blythe is a student of history. She knows that if you wish to be emperor, you must entice the Praetorians to your side. And we all know the value of picking the right side in a civil war.”

  A civil war with a faction the other two combatants didn’t know they were fighting. The Randall brothers had been openly at odds since Billy had his supervotes yanked. Through it all, Blythe played the appalled bystander to the hilt. But at the same time, she was contending with her twin in the friendly competition for control of IMP. Surely she saw that Billy distracting Blake redounded to her benefit.

  “So she planned all of this?”

  “I think that would be impossible. But . . . Well, perhaps you know that her twin brother was given to dismissing her as an unimaginative ‘pipes’ person, while presenting himself as the family visionary. But in my estimation, Blythe is better seen as a network person, a weaver of webs. Someone who thinks not only about information itself, but how it’s distributed. Someone who understands that you can get a person to accept even the most ridiculous proposition when you present it in the right context.”

  So how did she ensnare her brothers?

  Blythe sets feelers on the shaking strands of their lives. Eventually, she sees this shared pursuit of the male Randalls reemerge: Gina Delaney. Billy’s bipolar love interest, and now Blake’s conflicted money shot. She watches, pretending to dampen their burning enmity with one hand while secretly mixing nitroglycerin with the other.

  Gina’s death provides the spark.

  Blythe intuits that Billy’s terrible grief can, with a judicious reframing, be focused, amplified, and turned to rage aimed straight at Blake. She makes sure he gets a warped view of Gina’s last moments and leaves his dark paranoia to do the rest. Like a Soviet spy who only believes information he steals, Billy trusts the video’s authenticity because he lifted it from me.