Headspace

by Damien Boyes

  What if he did manage to track back to me? What would he do? It’s not like I’m breaking any laws—that he knows about. So what if he figures out I’m trying to find the man who killed me. I’m a detective.

  It’s my job.

  I work up a response with what I know about the accident—the digital evidence stripped from the link, wiped communication logs, the forensic results from searching the van—keeping it general but letting on that I know more than I do.

  If he’s as tapped into whatever weird shit is happening on the link as he says he is, he’ll know about the accident already, and probably the circumstances surrounding it, but he’ll be just as interested in finding out who was driving as I am.

  I sit back in my chair, a simple plywood and tubular metal deal that looks like it was rescued from a church basement, and stretch my back. A loader is hovering by, its four big turbines kicking up dust and litter as it delivers a load of apples to a small fruit and vegetable shop down the street.

  The wooden crate lowers gently to the ground, the straps release and the drone shoots up and away. Third delivery today.

  We’ve been sitting here too long, watching the world go about its business.

  We haven’t had a hit on the sweep in hours.

  Daar and Brewer are out fucking up the investigation into Xiao while we sit around and wait for something to happen.

  This is all a waste of time.

  “Woah,” Galvan mutters.

  “What?” I ask, jumping forward to look at his screen, hoping we’ve got a hit. “Cypher?”

  “No—it’s the arKade. They’re having another one.”

  “Yeah, you said. In six months,” I sit back, deflated, and turn around to signal the waitress for another cup of coffee. “Where’s the next one going to be? Maybe we can give the locals a heads up.”

  “No,” he says, jabbing his finger at his screen. “It’s here. They’re doing a fourth night.”

  I straighten up as the cloud of gloom in my head lifts. Finally, some good news. “No shit.”

  “First time ever. Apparently some kind of special request.”

  Maybe snagging that bag of shyfts in the Market wasn’t useless after all. We have another chance to find the arKade before it disappears again. And if the pattern holds, another chance to find whoever’s behind the mindjackings.

  “You think Xiao somehow finagled a hold-over? Make up for the last one to release his new line of shyfts?”

  “Could be,” he says, rapidly tapping at the keyboard in front of him. “But without the location, it might as well be in Antarctica.”

  “It’d be easier to find in Antarctica. There’s got to be some way to figure out where it’s going to be—one of your sources on the Undernet? Maybe I could ask Elder.”

  “Elder?”

  “My transition counsellor.”

  “You could try, but unless he gets an invitation…”

  “Think. There has to be a way.”

  Galvan shrugs. “I’ll keep an ear out, but Kade is tight with his security.”

  There has to be a way. An event as big as the arKade doesn’t materialize from nowhere.

  Another heavy drone whirs over the second-storey rooftops carrying a crate plastered with old routing decals. Back when I joined the military, drones had only just graduated from aerial surveillance and long-range combat to grunt work: hauling gear, construction, medevac. Their advancements still made the feeds, their deployment still caused controversy. Knowing how to operate one was a unique and sought-after skill. Got me through the lean years after the Bot Crash, when most jobs were automated away.

  In the twenty years since, drones have become ubiquitous. Blended into daily life and disappeared from notice. They deliver our purchases, clear our waste, and follow us around to keep the rain off our heads. There’s a whole command and control system that allows them to navigate the city, and the DroneSense protocol that keeps them from smashing into each other. Their movements are controlled to the centimetre, mapped and logged with SecNet on a minute-by-minute basis.

  Which gives me an idea.

  The arKade, as secretive as it is, needs infrastructure. A set up as elaborate as Galvan has described isn’t just hauled in by hand, one backpack at a time. And for Kade to keep it as quiet as he has, he must not have a lot of help. He’s got to be using drones for his heavy lifting.

  I get back into my Finsbury Gage account and tell the AMP to run a map of drone traffic around the lake on the hours leading up to the previous arKade. It comes back a few minutes later. The routing along the shore is light—there isn’t much there that’d need a drone’s attention: maintenance bots on the turbines. A few environmental sensors. Personal drones following their owners along the beach. And the regular cross-lake paths for the larger shipping drones.

  But there are also bursts of heavy activity surrounding an empty spot out in the middle of the water, leading up to and continuing after the arKade would have ended. I tell the AMP to find the boat that must have been there, and start to back-trace the drone paths.

  An hour later the AMP hasn’t been able to find me a boat, or any evidence that there was anything at all in the lake at the time, but I’ve got a good map of every origin point for the drones that came within a few hundred feet of the boat that wasn’t there.

  It’s well distributed, a spider-web of traffic with no clear patterns. Multiple drone suppliers and origins spread out all through the city, routed through various cities via a whole network of shipping companies. I don’t have enough of a case to subpoena the payment records for the shipments, and even if I did, I bet I’d find a maze of holding companies and anonymous payments to slog through. But it’s something. A toehold.

  I can work with this.

  For it to remain as secret as it does, the arKade has to be held somewhere remote, or at least sparsely populated, and in a city this size there aren’t many of those left, which gives me a variable I can manipulate. I get the AMP to search drone traffic history from around the city, focusing first on the location of the lost time victims. I instruct it to alert me whenever it notices a spike in traffic to a typically under-served location, and then amend the request to alert me of any areas high activity it can find, under-served or not.

  I’ve got a day and a half before the next arKade meets, and someone out there is ripping people’s minds from their heads.

  This is the closest we’re going to get to an invitation to the party.

  I’m going to stop him.

  StatUS-ID

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

  SysDate

  [17:36:17. Friday, January 17, 2059]

  Now I’m spooked.

  This is all too much. Who the hell was that kid? He was looking right at me, watching me. I’m not imagining things.

  Am I?

  Maybe I’m letting Dora’s fear and Shelt’s paranoia get to me.

  Maybe the ball of grief simmering in my stomach is messing with my head.

  Maybe it was Elder. Coming to get me. It didn’t look like the picture in his dox, but who does these days?

  Or maybe I’m losing it.

  I forget about going home, retreat to a coffee shop across the street instead. I order a large black and sit in the window across from the Ludus Humanitech, prop my elbows up on the table and drop my head into my hands to shade my eyes from the Ludus’ crinkled and shiny exterior.

  My mind is racing, a hurricane of thought tearing through my brain. I don’t want to be here anymore. It’s overwhelming. I don’t know how to cope.

  I just want to be left alone. To miss my wife. To feel the loss. But I don’t even know where Connie’s buried.

  How am I supposed to grieve for my wife when I don’t know who I am? Was Constance Gage my wife or the wife of the guy who threw my life away and pulled me into his shitstorm?

  Why did he do this to me?

  I draw my hands over my eyes, down my smooth cheeks, take a deep breath.

 
I need to pull myself together. I have a job to do, whether I want it or not.

  I shut out the questions, focus on the two things I know for sure: someone pulled me out of storage and someone was behind Dub attacking me. Maybe those two things are related, maybe they aren’t, but I’m not going to figure either of them out sitting here talking myself into a panic attack.

  I’m still not convinced Nyx didn’t engineer Dub’s suicide. And if Nyx was behind it, then coming after me was a coincidence. It’s the simplest answer, and the only way I’ll find out is by asking.

  I don’t imagine she’ll take an appointment before the biggest fight of her life, but with the confidence she was showing on the arena floor, I don’t think she’ll make an early night of it either.

  Poly mentioned a ten o’clock curfew. I’d wager my last dollar that means Nyx is heading out tonight. She’s already earned her chance at the audition, tomorrow is a formality. Why not celebrate?

  I raise my head and have to squint at the sight of the Ludus across from me. It looks like someone made the world’s biggest tin foil ball, lit it with floodlights and excavated a fifty thousand seat arena out of it.

  I take a sip of my coffee and settle in to wait.

  Nyx will be out soon, I know it.

  ***

  SysDate

  [18:54:51. Friday, January 17, 2059]

  My second coffee isn’t even cold before Nyx emerges from the Ludus’ side entrance, her entourage trailing behind her, none of them dressed for the weather.

  I jump up and race out the coffee shop door, but before I can get across the street, a long hirecar sidles up to the curb and they all pile in.

  I flag a Sküte and feed it directions to keep me behind Nyx’s car. She takes us out of Reszlieville to a semi-industrial zone in the north-east where the hirecar pulls to a stop in front of a low brick building.

  The building has no name, looks like it might have been a garage at one point, judging by the five roll-up bay doors lining the front wall. It’s still early but a line has already formed, stretches along the bay doors and around the corner.

  Nyx and her crew pull up behind a line of million-dollar automobiles and leave their car and walk right up to the red rope. She bends over and gives the huge bouncer a hug and he unhooks the barrier and waves her in.

  I run up behind her but the bouncer replaces the rope, holds up a giant gloved hand. “Where you goin’?” he asks with a squint.

  “I’m with her,” I say, pointing to Nyx as the door closes behind her.

  “Uh-uh,” the bouncer says. “Back of the line.”

  “I’m on the list,” I say.

  “Isn’t a list,” the bouncer says. “Back of the line.”

  “But—”

  “You want to make this into a thing?” he asks with an added growl.

  The way I’m feeling right now, yeah I do, but I zip my parka tighter around my neck, yank up my hood and trudge to the back of the line.

  The club must cater to the Gladiator crowd, because as I wait, a bunch more living weapons pull up in fancy cars, bypass the line, and walk right in.

  An hour and a half later, I’m back at the bouncer and nearly frozen. He smirks as I approach and deducts two hundred bucks from my tab before he lets me pass.

  I walk inside and the temperature shoots up forty degrees. I have to peel off and carry my parka over my arm as I push through the crowded club, searching for Nyx.

  The club is wide-open, smells like perfumed sweat and old grease. The music is loud and guitar-heavy. A smaller version of the Ludus Humanitech’s concave arena floor fills the center of the room and inside two amateur fighters in beefed-up skyns are wailing on each other. Big screens above the floor project the action out the to the people who can’t push in far enough to see the carnage for themselves.

  The fighters are chopping wood. They’ve got none of Nyx’s finesse or technique, all brute strength and raw stamina. They’ve got one tactic: inflict the most damage in the shortest amount of time.

  The crowd is vibrating, a high-pitch whine of excitement as they watch the two giants carve each other up. Must be the smell of blood.

  I’m passing the long bar—ripped men and women in cowboy hats serving both alcohol and Second Skyn-branded shyfts—when one of the fighters screams as his arm is wrenched around backwards with a tearing sound loud enough it drowns out the music and sends the crowd into a frenzy.

  I leave them to their butchery and move deeper into the room, finding Nyx in the back corner in a raised VIP lounge.

  Her hair’s loose and she’s wearing a red cylinder of clingy fabric with heels that add another fifteen centimetres to her already towering height. She’s got her back to me, talking to a much shorter black guy in a form-hugging suit.

  Time for some answers.

  I step over the VIP rope and tap her on the shoulder.

  She spins, faster than I can follow, and my chest erupts in agony, my arms go limp and I drop to my knees, unable to stay upright.

  So. Fast.

  I cough. Blinking through the sudden pain, tears in my eyes. Didn’t even see her hit me.

  She puts a hand on my shoulder and rolls me up so my face is visible. The short black guy flashes his tab in my face.

  “He’s a nobody,” he says a second later. “Gage Gibson.”

  “Less than a nobody,” Nyx says, purses her lips then squints at me. “You were in the Ludus today.”

  “Came—” I splutter, my breath coming in spurts. “For Dub—”

  She smirks. “You’re here on Dub’s behest?”

  I nod, not trusting my voice.

  She lets me go and steps back. “Ari Dubecki is at best a fool. But better a fool than a coward. Who are you then, to do a fool’s business?”

  I use two fingers to prod my chest, try to keep the pain off my face. It’ll be a hell of a bruise but nothing’s broken, I’ll live. But not for long if I don’t get my shit together.

  I wasn’t thinking. Haven’t been thinking since my restoration. I’m a raw nerve, twitching every time I’m poked.

  She’s right. I’m nobody. Certainly not a cop. I used to have a badge. It was a club, a wedge, a shield—whatever it needed to be. Without it, who the fuck am I?

  Just a guy asking questions no one has to answer.

  I’ve got no angle so I go with the truth. “Dub thinks he was targeted. Mindjacked.”

  She nods, shrugs. “Quite possibly. But he allowed it happen. There is no absolution in stupidity. Is your intimation that I am complicit in his shame?”

  “Dub said no way,” I collect my jacket, get up on one foot. When I’m fairly certain my legs will hold I ease myself upright, resist pressing my hand against my chest. Her entourage is watching, making jokes to each other. “Said he knew he was going to lose. I wanted to find out for myself.”

  “So you volunteered to play junior detective.”

  Ouch. That stings more than the punch. “Dub believes he’s innocent and he’s looking at the end of his career. I’ve got a skyn and he doesn’t, so I said I’d help. I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t exhaust every lead, and that includes his biggest rival.”

  She considers this, folds herself down into a curved gel bench. “Dub may be a fool, but he has honour. I don’t believe him a coward. If someone were able to occupy his head, it wouldn’t have been accomplished by force. He would have rather seen his body broken than give up his mind.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “Is it not obvious, Mr. Junior Detective? Whatever circumstance lead to his death, Dub must surely have agreed to it.”

  StatUS-ID

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

  SysDate

  [17:34:21. Thursday, April 18, 2058]

  Toward the end of the day, Inspector Chaddah calls Galvan back to the station to go over concerns the Service Counsel raised regarding his cypher app and I tell him to take the cruiser and go, that I’ll catch up later. I stay behind in the
café and alternate between watching nothing happen on the sweep and watching the real-time updates as the AMP charts and compares and catalogues the tapestry woven by hundreds of thousands of drone paths. Already a ghostly cross-hatch of drone traffic covers the city map and it’s barely started.

  Eventually, my ass and patience both numb from sitting for too long, I get up, stretch my legs and decide I’ve had enough waiting around for something to happen. I start walking in the direction of my apartment but can’t keep from constantly glancing at my tab, swapping between the cyphers and the drones, hoping something will pop before I have to give up and return to my empty life.

  Fifteen minutes into my distracted walk, I give up and hail a Sküte, play deaf to the nagging concern as I climb in, and tell it to circle while I watch the tab for cyphers. Maybe moving around I’ll be luckier.

  I’ve done two laps between Reszlieville and the Market when the Sküte tries to kill me.

  I’m cruising along College St., heading toward the Market, eyes on my tab. Not going too fast, bunched in the commuter swarm, when the Sküte hiccups, lurches in the lane. The sudden movement startles me, sends my pulse galloping. The dash flickers and the muted feeds all freeze.

  Something’s not right.

  “Stop here,” I say.

  The Sküte doesn’t respond. It swerves, knocks into another pod beside me and breaks through into the vehicle lane. This can’t be happening.

  “STOP,” I yell.

  “I found you,” The Sküte says in its sing-song voice. “Now I will be whole.”

  The Sküte cuts the internal lights and swerves into on-coming traffic, puts itself into the path of an oncoming bus. I brace myself, waiting for the bus’s safety system to see the obstruction ahead and stop or swerve. But it doesn’t.

  The bus doesn’t see me.