Headspace

by Damien Boyes

  I saw Connie decide to seduce me. A quickie in the car like a couple of teenagers. How could I refuse?

  She put her feet on the dash and pretended to ignore me, pretended to be fascinated by the leaves, but I knew better than that. Her knee rhythmically tapping mine, like it’s doing now, revealing her true intentions.

  She’s going to put her hand on my thigh, and as I think it she does. It’s weight warm and comforting and arousing.

  I reach out to touch her, but my memory-self doesn’t respond and my arm passes through her and I’m reminded exactly where I am.

  This isn’t happening.

  This is a memory.

  It’d be so easy. Forget all that’s happened since. Lull back into the comfort of in her presence.

  A sob catches in my throat.

  I want to. More than anything, I want to.

  But none of this is real.

  Either I can be in my body and feel what I felt, live what I lived, or pull out and be a ghost, a detached observer.

  My brain hiccups with indecision, but then I know what I have to do.

  Ghost it is.

  I’m here for a reason. No more wasting time on sentiment. I didn’t risk dumping this shit in my head to indulge myself. I’m seeking something important. That’s why I’m here.

  Still I let myself hesitate before I drop completely from my body and lose her again.

  I stand. My feet pass straight through the floorboards, my head out the roof. I step sideways through the car.

  “Forward, ten seconds.” My voice is rough but clear enough. The AV snaps into view.

  “Ten more.” The AV beside us. The van rounding the curve ahead.

  “Ten more.” Our car is filled with flying glass.

  “Stop.” The sides of the van are a blur, the back of our car, the trees around it—the Dwell trying to reconstruct something I barely saw—but there’s a clear, detailed recreation of the van’s front left tire, the grill. I can see the dead bugs on the matte black metal.

  “Back a half second.” The glass shards reform to the windshield.

  The van’s resolution shifts. Slides up to solidify the narrow windshield—and the driver behind.

  “Stop.”

  I glide through the car and poke my head into the van’s interior. Everything within is dark, his features murky, maybe Indian or Pakistani. Southeast Asian.

  Everything dark but his eyes. Lit by the sunset slicing through the viewport. Wide, rounded triangles. Determined. But fixed straight ahead.

  He isn’t even looking at us.

  I wonder if he even knew he was killing us.

  There isn’t enough. If I could adjust the contrast, maybe sharpen the edges—

  I have to try.

  I think the console and it’s in front of me. There are point seven seconds of his image, shows me the Dwell can resolve in tenths of a second. Gives seven frames to work with.

  It has to be enough.

  I spend the next four hours jumping back and forth between my memory and the Service Facial Imager, building a reconstruction with the AMP, refining what little I can, trying to figure out who he is.

  When I can’t fiddle with it anymore, I set the AMP running, combing through SecNet for the man who killed Connie.

  After all this, it better come back with something.

  StatUS-ID

  [fdaa:9afe:17e6:a2ef::Gage/-//GIBSON]

  SysDate

  [16:43:51. Friday, January 17, 2059]

  “Stick and move. Line ‘em up.”

  A bot leads me up to the Trainer Deck above the concave arena floor where Poly, Ludus Humanitech’s head trainer and a bunch of others—some in suits, some in sweats, all of them tense—watch Nyx, Dub’s former competition, spar with a quintet of combots. Poly’s half-hanging over the rail, feet in the air, hands cupped to her mouth, screaming at the circling woman below. With her small round head perched on a petite frame, Poly doesn’t look like someone who’d be familiar with the gospel of hand-to-hand combat, but she sure as hell preaches like one.

  “Feet, feet, feet. Use the angles.”

  Beneath us is the biggest woman I’ve ever seen. Maybe the biggest person. Full stop.

  Nyx.

  I don’t know what Poly’s screaming at. Nyx is mid-way through a practice round for one of tomorrow night’s qualifying heats. Five minutes to disable five combots—two massive warbots and three nimble, six-limbed hunterbots—and she’s already disabled two of the hunters and is using the arm of a downed warbot to playfully swat away the third hunter’s advances.

  I wouldn’t want to face down any one of those bots with a squad for backup, and she’s playing games with them.

  “Engage. Find an opening and fucking engage. This isn’t a game, Nyx!”

  Nyx rotates her sculpted head casually. Runs her tongue over thin lips and stares back at Poly. Then she drops the bot arm. Leaves herself unarmed, and her heart-shaped torso exposed to the two remaining bots.

  The hunter and warbot fan out in front of her but she doesn’t move, continues impassively watching Poly, her face a mask. Playing chicken.

  Poly pounds her small hands on the railing, yells. “Don’t. Fuck. Around. Nyx.”

  The warbot lowers its shoulders and charges to catch her around the waist, while the hunter bunches on its hind limbs and launches two tight black fists at Nyx’s head, targeted for a knock-out blow at the base of her skull.

  “NYX!” Poly screams.

  Nyx holds her position until the last second, then sidesteps faster than I’ve ever seen anyone move. She snatches the hunterbot from the air by its oncoming fists and uses its momentum to swing it around and into the oncoming warbot. The hunter crumples against the warbot’s massive chest and falls to the floor, twitching. The impact drives the huge bot sideways, unbalanced. It jukes to recover but Nyx is already airborne.

  Like she can fly.

  She catches the warbot by the head, tucks, spins and lands on her feet with the bot’s head in her hands. A second later its body topples behind her.

  The whole time she doesn’t take her eyes of Poly.

  “Fine,” Poly says, throwing up her hands. “You win. No more training for today. Get the fuck out of here.”

  Nyx raises an eyebrow in celebration, and as she struts off the arena floor, she hurls the warbot’s head at the still-writhing hunterbot’s cranium, shutting it down with a plastic crunch.

  “Ten o’clock curfew!” Poly screams at Nyx’s back but Nyx just keeps walking.

  “I’d rather fight a train too,” I mutter.

  Poly twitches her head at me, says “Get what you needed?” to the gaggle behind her, but doesn’t seem particularly bothered if they did or didn’t as they descend the stairs.

  “Dub should be down there,” Poly says once Nyx’s handlers have left the training decks. She shakes her head and turns to me. “You’re the guy?”

  “Fins—” Shit. “Gage. Gibson.” I’m going to have to get used to that name.

  Poly clears her throat. “I know who you are. Dub said you’d be coming. A cop was here earlier. Standards. Asked about Dub attacking you.”

  “Short guy, shaved head and a beard?”

  She nods. Agent Wiser.

  “What’d he say?”

  “Wanted to know about your relationship with Dub, if there was any bad blood. Told him he’d have to ask Dub.” She reaches up, tightens her already taught ponytail. “Is there?”

  “Bad blood?”

  Poly nods again.

  “Not that I know of, but I’m not the one to ask.” She nods and shrugs at the same time, good enough for her. “Do you think he’d have any reason to kill himself?”

  “What’d he tell you?”

  “Says he wouldn’t. Claims he was mindjacked.”

  She narrows her eyes, wiggles her head. “He barely leaves the Ludus. And we have a strict no shyfting policy backed up by real shitty penalties and daily pattern scans. How’s he figure he’d get jacked?”r />
  “That’s why I’m here.”

  Poly doesn’t push further and we’re quiet for a moment, watching a fresh set of bots trundle out to clean up the scrap on the arena floor. Their bot budget must be huge.

  “Anyone you know of might want him out of the way?” I ask, flick my eyes toward the ruined bots. “Nyx?”

  Poly winces. “I wouldn’t want to be the one to ask.”

  “She has a temper?”

  “Oh no. The exact opposite. She’s as cool as a calculator.”

  “With Dub out of the way, she’s got a free walk to the Arena Team. Sounds like good strategy to me.”

  She squints at the idea. “Not her style. She’s an iceberg but she loves the show. We have a sold-out arena tomorrow night, projected eyeballs in the millions. As it is, we’re going to have to parade out the whole Arena Team, run through some bot waves. Finish with a pubbie, hype new prospects for the next audition. Dub was our next big thing. With him gone,” she scratches her head, “…it screws all of us.”

  Still, that doesn’t mean Nyx had nothing to do with it. I’m going to have to figure some way of asking her myself. If I had to choose between suspects, rival co-workers with clear winners and losers or a ghost story about a disappeared restoration counsellor with unknown motives mindjacking his way across the city, I’d pick the co-workers. Which would mean no one’s really after Shelt and Dora.

  And if no one’s really after Shelt and Dora, who knows what else might not be true.

  I don’t have an answer for why Nyx would jack Dub and then send him after me. Maybe as a cover, throw everyone off her trail.

  It’s thin. But not impossible.

  Doesn’t explain how Nyx would know that Gage Gibson is really Finsbury Gage, but I put that to the side. I’d rather believe I’m an unlucky bystander in a professional squabble than for this really to be all my fault.

  “Did you have contact with him, that last day?” I ask.

  “Sure. We trained for two hours, same as every day. Kid was focused. Nearly beat Guilian to death.”

  “Nothing out of the ordinary, then?”

  “People get beat nearly to death around here on a daily basis—” she stops, furrows her brow. “There was one thing. Someone was trying to contact him. Tried a couple times but wouldn’t leave a message.”

  “Do you know who?”

  “Some woman. They were always coming around. More distractions. She finally got through to him and Dub left right after training, said he had to meet a friend and he’d be back in an hour or so. I’m not his Mommy, didn’t pay it much attention.”

  “Did you tell the police?”

  “Of course. Dub gets a strange anonymous call and dashes off and doesn’t come back. It was the first thing I told them.”

  “Could they trace it?”

  “If they did they didn’t tell me.”

  “And after that?”

  She shrugs. “He never came back.”

  ***

  SysDate

  [17:02:52. Friday, January 17, 2059]

  Poly lets me look through Dub’s quarters, but it takes less than a minute to search. An unadorned 2 by 2.5 metre room with a bed, a small table, and a narrow chest of drawers. I’ve seen more lived-in holding cells.

  The drawers contain only clothes, all variations on a short/t-shirt sportswear theme. A lone tab lies on the table. The contents are locked but Poly is able to call up what Dub had looked at over the past few weeks and it’s mostly fight vids, vanity searches, some business-related correspondence with Shelt, and a smattering of combat porn. Nothing out of the ordinary, except for how ordinary it all is.

  Dub was focused on his career, on his future. All he did was train. Who could have contacted him that would have had him come running?

  I thank Poly for her time and exit the Ludus through the massive front doors. Night has fallen but the arena’s exterior has the sidewalk lit up like a summer day. A summer day that’s ten below.

  My breath billows like I’m running on steam. I pull my jacket tighter around me, stalk to the curb and wave at the stream of passing Skütes. I figure I’ll head home, wait for the Ministry to give me clearance to visit Tala and Miranda in their stocks.

  One of the Skütes breaks out of the flow and stops, slides open.

  I’ve got one foot in the Sküte when I glance across the street and notice a kid, maybe early twenties, standing stone still while the pedestrians pass by him. He’s watching me. We lock eyes and he doesn’t look away, if anything he stares harder, like he’s trying to read my mind.

  He’s about a metre and a half high. Scrawny. Wearing a windbreaker and loose black pants with his hands uncovered at his sides. I don’t recognize him, but that doesn’t mean anything. For all I know, six months ago we could have been best friends.

  I pull up my tab and try to ID him, but it only takes a second and the low buzz of an error tone to tell me rep-net has absolutely nothing on him, which isn’t possible. Rep-net has information on everyone. At least a name.

  And he’s not hiding his ID. That would show too.

  He’s a null response. As far as the link is concerned, he doesn’t exist. An error message that was never meant to be read.

  I step back out of the Sküte and start towards him but before I can round the front of the bulbous vehicle and wade through traffic, he’s gone, vanished in the crowd, and I have to add another question mark to an already long list.

  StatUS-ID

  [a646:d17e:8670:511f::Finsbury/D//GAGE]

  SysDate

  [15:45:55. Thursday, April 18, 2058]

  We’re getting nowhere.

  Galvan and I have spent two days camped out at the Mother Bean Cafe in the Market, downing endless cups of coffee in a haze of second-hand pot smoke while we watch minor shyft deals go down in the park across the street. We’ve been using the dealers as bait, waiting for cyphers to pop up on Galvan’s app and haven’t had so much as a nibble.

  Yesterday, I was a ball of tension, perched on my stool in the front window of the cafe, legs cocked, ready to spring the second a red-lined figure materialized on my tab. After the burst of activity in the previous few days, I’d been expecting to be chasing down and hauling in unregistered rithms by the hour, but by the time we gave up and packed it in for the day, we still hadn’t seen anything.

  Galvan’s barely stopped talking since we got here. This morning I flipped the waitress twenty to make sure she only brought him decaf. It hasn’t helped.

  “—identified three more cyphers,” Galvan’s saying, not looking up from the tab he’s using as a keyboard. He’s propped two slender screens against the window with the third laid out flat. It’s like he hasn’t left his desk.

  “How many’s this make?” I’m half-listening, scanning the passers-by, as though I’ll be able to pluck a cypher from the crowd before the app can.

  “Eight now. Look at this guy,” he says and elbows for my attention. “A SecNet drone tagged him at the Zoo—can you believe that, the Zoo. Watching the polar bears!” He points to one of his displays, shows me a 3D render of a dark-coloured skyn. With a broad jaw, sunken cheeks and a tight afro, his head looks like a figure eight. “And this one,” he swipes his hand in front of the display to show a female, pixie-cut redhead, features refined to the millimetre with massive garnet eyes. She looks like a cartoon. “A Service drone tagged her last night, right near here. And this guy,” shows me another white skyn, face like an anvil—squat forehead, angular features and a massive, triangular nose. “Tagged and actually pulled in by a patrol this morning.”

  “Great, so what’s that get us?” I ask. “Eight cyphers out of a few thousand, with one of them in custody? We know anything about him?”

  “Not yet,” he says with a grin.

  Great.

  The high I was feeling yesterday is long gone, trickled away while I’ve sat here waiting.

  After reaching into my head with the Dwell and coming back with a clearer picture of the dr
iver, the AMP had come up with over seventeen hundred possible matches. Once I cross-referenced for known location at the time of the crash I’d still only gotten it down to three hundred and twenty eight.

  Three hundred and twenty-eight people who might have killed my wife. I’d been elated, started immediately, worked my way through half of them, one at a time. Thought I had him but kept going, wanted to be sure. I found another possible. Then another. Then a few dozen.

  There’s no guarantee that any of them are him. He might not even be in the list.

  The lies. Stealing evidence. Making myself into a hypocrite. All for nothing. As close as I am, I’m not close enough.

  Galvan looks over at me, concerned, and I realise I’m grinding my teeth so hard they’re squeaking. I open my mouth a few times to flex my jaw and Galvan goes back to watching his screens.

  If I could grab that second of memory and feed it straight to the AMP, have it enhance the contrast and reconstruct the features better than I can manually, I’d have a match. I know it. But jumping back and forth between my memory and the facial reconstruction app won’t get me there.

  And what if the driver’s bio/kin has never been registered? What if it’s a cypher? A skyn that had been disposed of immediately afterwards—?

  I can’t think like that. I’ll find him. I have to find him.

  I just need to get this memory out of my head and as far as I know, the only way to do that is the ReCog shyft Galvan told me about yesterday. Pull memories out of my head like vid files.

  Except I have no source, so unless one falls into my lap like the Dwell did, it means I’m stalled again. The feeling leaves me hollow. Something needs to happen. I can’t sit here beside Galvan for another day.

  I check myself out of the tab, relog as Gibson, and finally find a response from the message I sent xYvYx waiting.

  Who the fuck are you and why the fuck should I care? Try again when you’re more than a nobody with nothing to say.

  Charming.

  But he’s right. I’ve given him no reason to believe me. I need to ante up. Question is, do I open up about the accident and tell him what I know about the blank spots on the link, risking him figuring out who I really am, or forget about him and continue getting nowhere on my own?