The Last Iota

by Robert Kroese

  I heard a muffled gunshot, and at first I was convinced I’d been killed. But then I saw the brain matter splattered across the wall in front of me and realized I’d blown a hole in the top of his head. He slumped to the ground, dead.

  As he did so, his left arm fell limp to the ground and his hand opened. A silver coin rolled across the floor toward the kitchen. I nearly grabbed it before it rolled away, but I was too slow. I drew back into the bathroom as bullets tore into the hardwood floor in front of me. I was still plotting my next move when I heard footsteps thumping down the hall toward me.

  This time I decided discretion was the better part of valor. I stepped back from the doorway into the shower, holding my gun at shoulder height. The guy didn’t bother to stop; he ran right past the bathroom, stepping over his fallen comrade’s corpse. I got off three shots as he passed, and I’m pretty sure at least one hit, but he didn’t stop.

  I ran forward into the hall, pivoting left and firing again. My aim was high this time; the man had reached down to snag the coin, which was still rolling toward the kitchen. He grabbed it with his left hand and then spun around, firing wildly in my direction. I fell back into the bathroom. When I glanced out again, the man was nowhere in sight.

  I moved swiftly down the hall and peered around the corner to the left. The man had just reached the front door. I had a clean headshot, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It’s one thing to blow somebody’s head off to save your life; it’s quite another to execute somebody as they’re running away. I shot him five times in the torso, but it barely slowed him down. He threw the door open and ran outside. By the time I got to the door, he was already to the Cadillac. I thought about taking out the tires, but then what? The guy would be stranded and desperate, and he was still wearing body armor. Meanwhile, Keane and Olivia were cowering in April’s car a few yards away, and I had exactly three bullets left. No, it was time to let this fish go. Whatever the significance of that coin, it wasn’t worth risking all three of our lives over. I watched as the guy got in his car and drove away.

  Keane got out of the car and ran over to me, Olivia following close behind.

  “Why’d you let him go?” Keane snapped, predictably.

  “No choice,” I said.

  Keane shook his head disapprovingly but didn’t argue.

  “We need to get out of here,” I said. “Neighbors must have heard those shots.” The LAPD’s response time was lousy since they’d cut their ranks by half after the Collapse, but in nice neighborhoods like this, there was still a reasonable chance a cruiser would show up within ten minutes of a report of gunshots.

  “I have to look inside,” said Keane, brushing past me and stomping up the driveway.

  “Damn it, Keane,” I said. “There’s no time!”

  But there was no stopping him. He was already halfway to the house.

  “Stay here,” I said to Olivia, and ran after him.

  I followed Keane through the house to the scene of the carnage. “Nice shot,” he said, examining the hole below the man’s chin. A starburst of powder burns emanated from the wound. Keane riffled through the man’s pockets, but found nothing of interest. Spare magazines, a locked comm, mini-flashlight, a few other mundane items. He carried no wallet of any form of ID. These guys seemed to be professionals.

  “Where’s Eric Brassey?” Keane said.

  It took me a second to remember that was the name of the guy who lived here, the one who had gone to see Mr. Kim about the iota coin. “Upstairs, I think.”

  Keane went down the hall and bounded up the stairs. I sighed. If we were going to get caught, I might as well try to gather some more data. I went through the dead guy’s pockets again, to make sure Keane didn’t miss anything. His face was clean-shaven, his hair cropped short. No visible tattoos or piercings—except the one under his chin, obviously. There was a hairline scar running down his left cheek to his neck, and the hair on his right hand seemed to have been permanently burned off. Chemical burns, I thought. The kind you see on military veterans. This guy looked to be in his late thirties, definitely old enough to have seen some action. I checked his hands. Uniformly rough, but no pronounced calluses, like someone who did a lot of physical work of varying kinds. Rolling up his sleeves, I found a small tattoo on his shoulder: a banner with the number 99 on it.

  My comm chirped again. Another message from “Lila.” It read:

  disappointing :( maybe you are not ready for this game

  I was about to tell “Lila” how I felt about her game when a woman’s voice just over my right shoulder nearly gave me a heart attack.

  “What’s that?” she said.

  “Jesus, Olivia,” I said. “I told you to wait outside.”

  “I didn’t. What does the tattoo mean?”

  “Probably nothing,” I said, standing up. I knew exactly what it meant, but we’d showed enough of our cards to Olivia—or whoever she was. I wasn’t convinced her meeting with us wasn’t part of some ruse on the part of LAFF, and I’m sure Keane suspected the same. At any moment, she could decide our relationship wasn’t working out and call the cops on us. We needed to ditch her ASAP. “Keane!” I yelled. “We’re leaving!”

  Once again I heard sirens in the distance, and was relieved to hear Keane bounding back down the stairs a moment later. “Go,” I said to Olivia, pointing to the door. I didn’t particularly want her with us, but I wasn’t about to leave her here so she could spill her story to the cops. Thankfully, she went without resistance. We went outside and got back in the car. Keane, following close behind, got in the backseat next to Olivia. I pulled away from the curb. I hadn’t gone fifty feet before I saw the red and blue flashers of an aircar approaching from the distance. All we could do at this point was hope we hadn’t been seen leaving the house; panicking and hitting the gas would only draw attention. We couldn’t outrun an aircar. Once they spotted us, they’d get a fix on our location and track us until we ran out of gas.

  Fortunately, the flashing lights began to fade in the distance; the aircar seemed to be landing in front of Eric Brassey’s house. We breathed a collective sigh of relief. Olivia seemed to be as relieved as Keane and I, although if she was half as good an actress as her mother, I’d never know if she was faking.

  “What did you find out about Brassey?” I asked.

  “Hey?” Keane replied. I don’t know where he picked up this verbal tic; every time he did it, I wanted to punch him in the face. I’d once dated an Australian girl who used to reply “Hey?” to questions she didn’t understand, but with her it was adorable. Keane not so much.

  “Eric Brassey. The guy whose house we were just in.”

  “Oh,” said Keane. “He’s dead.”

  “Anything else?”

  Keane thought for a moment. “He had a lot of coins.”

  I sighed and made a right turn onto San Fernando, which would take us back toward our office. My comm chirped: April.

  “Hey, April,” I said. “Sorry to cut you off earlier. Things have been—”

  “Forget it, Blake. We’ve got bigger problems. The police were just here.”

  “At your office? What did they want?”

  “They were asking about you and Keane.” Her voice went quiet. “They think you killed Selah.”

  I sighed. So Keane was right again. We’d been set up. “What did you tell them?”

  “That I haven’t seen you since dinner yesterday. So try not to contradict me when they catch you.”

  “Thanks, April.”

  “Good luck, Blake.”

  I ended the call. “We can’t go back to the office,” I said. “Cops are looking for us.”

  At some point, we were going to have to deal with the cops, but not while Gwen was still being held by Mag-Lev.

  “Find us a hotel,” Keane said. “Someplace that will let us pay in cash. Or iotas.”

  “I’ve only got forty bucks on me,” I said. “And I don’t think we have much more than that in our iota account.” I
’d been using my credit account for most of our expenses over the past few weeks, but if the cops were looking for us, there’d be a watch on that account.

  “I’ve got some money,” said Olivia from the backseat. “I’ll get us a room.”

  “You are not part of the investigative team,” I said.

  “I’ve got nowhere to go,” said Olivia. “If LAFF or whoever it was that killed my mother finds me, I’m dead. And you guys are broke.”

  I sighed. She was right. We were stuck with her.

  TEN

  Olivia got us a pair of adjoining rooms at a motel downtown. I didn’t trust her, and I didn’t like having to rely on her generosity, but we didn’t have much choice. It was getting late, I was exhausted, and we needed a place to lay low while we plotted our next move.

  While Olivia took a shower, Keane and I took advantage of her absence to discuss the case. I was sitting on my bed; Keane was in a chair next to a tiny desk.

  “What do you make of Olivia?” I asked.

  “Clone,” said Keane. He didn’t elaborate.

  I nodded, having come to the same conclusion. We’d been talking around the possibility since we first found Selah’s body, and by now the evidence was overwhelming. Part of Selah Fiore’s plan for immortality had been creating genetically engineered clones of human beings. As far as we knew, she’d only cloned a few people as test subjects, but it made sense that she would have made at least one of herself, as a fail-safe in case something happened to her. Selah Fiore turns up dead, and lo and behold, her long-lost daughter appears to take on the mantle of Flagship Media. Good insurance policy for Selah, who was nothing if not a shrewd businesswoman. Hair and complexion aside, Olivia was a dead ringer for her mother. And she didn’t talk like a twenty-year-old college student. She talked like Selah Fiore.

  “Do you think she knows?” I asked.

  “She suspects, at the very least,” replied Keane. “Presumably Selah would have programmed Olivia with most of her own memories, as well as the bogus backstory about Belgium and Cal Poly. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there’s an Olivia Fiore enrolled at Cal Poly, in fact. Selah was thorough. The question is how far she was willing to go with the ruse.”

  “You mean whether she thought it was necessary for the clone to believe the backstory,” I said.

  “Precisely. As Twain said, ‘If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.’ If she believed the story herself, she’d be able to pass a multiphasic lie detector—which might very well be necessary, if she wants to take over Selah’s empire.”

  “She acts like she has no interest in her mother’s—that is, in Selah’s—money.”

  “Yes,” said Keane. “‘Acts’ being the key word. The problem with Selah going the self-deluding route is that, well, she’s Selah.”

  “Meaning that she’s too much of a narcissist to screw with her own memories?”

  “That, and also that she’s too smart not to figure it out. Unless she erases everything she knows about the cloning program, she’s going to know all the signs of implanted memories. So she’s stuck in a paradox.”

  “The only way the clone can be fooled into thinking she’s not Selah is for Selah to have altered her memories to the point where she’s not Selah. Thus defeating the purpose of cloning herself.”

  “Very good, Fowler.”

  I shook my head. The existential issues were beyond me. I was more curious in the logistics anyway. “So how would that work, exactly? There’s another secret cloning facility somewhere? They’ve got Olivia in a box, and when Selah dies, somebody breaks the glass and lets her out?”

  “It wouldn’t have to be an actual cloning facility, just somewhere they can keep her in suspension. But yes, some event would presumably trigger an alert telling the technicians in the facility to revive her. Maybe Selah had to enter a code every twenty-four hours to prevent the alarm from being triggered. Or, more likely, she had an implant to monitor her heartbeat or brainwaves. Activity stops for a certain amount of time and voilà, Olivia wakes up in a house in San Luis Obispo, fresh as a daisy.”

  “But if Olivia is Selah’s insurance policy, it’s got a fatal flaw. Literally. The clones age too fast.”

  Keane nodded. “Unless Selah found a way around that problem, which seems unlikely.”

  “I wonder if there are more of them,” I said. “Like if this one dies, another one takes its place.” It had occurred to me that perhaps “Lila” was yet another clone of Selah, orchestrating all of this from some secret hiding place.

  “Doubtful,” said Keane. “The estranged-daughter story would only work once, if that.”

  “How long does she have?” I asked.

  “Hard to say,” Keane replied. “Selah’s other clones aged at close to twenty times their normal rate. If this one’s aging anywhere near that fast, she will start showing her age within a few months. But that’s the least of her problems. Odds are she’ll die of some kind of cancer or degenerative disease within a year. Her cells are multiplying way too fast for her body to stay healthy for long.”

  “So what’s the point? Why let loose a clone of herself if it’s only going to die a painful death in a few months?”

  “That’s an excellent question,” said Keane. “Based on what Selah said about the coins, my guess would be that her intention was to secure her legacy. But we shouldn’t assume Olivia’s motivations are identical to Selah’s. Even if they have the same memories, they are in different circumstances. We also don’t know whether Olivia is acting alone.”

  “You think her cooperating with us is a ruse?” I asked. “That she’s still taking orders from this Tad Curtis guy?”

  “Or whoever Tad Curtis is working for, assuming Tad Curtis even exists,” Keane replied. “She could be plying us for information.”

  “How would this mysterious mastermind know about the clone? Selah presumably kept it a secret.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Keane. “She may have hinted that she had a fail-safe to discourage attempts to kill her.”

  “But she would have kept the details secret. How would our mastermind know where she was?”

  “Come on, Fowler,” Keane said with a frown. “Surely you’ve figured that out.”

  I thought for a moment. “Selah told him,” I said. “That’s what her killers were trying to get out of her before they executed her.” In my mind, Selah’s killers had been after Gwen, but of course they didn’t care about Gwen. They didn’t even know she had one of the coins.

  “So our mastermind needs to get Selah out of the way for some reason,” I said. “But he knows she’s got this insurance policy, in case something happens to her. So he has his thugs interrogate her until she tells them where the clone is. They go there and … um, abduct her, I guess? Tell her to cooperate or else?”

  “Or maybe Olivia’s story is something like the truth,” said Keane. “Maybe they really did trick her into calling you. She’s definitely too smart to be as naïve as she’s pretending to be, though. We have to assume she’s using us. That fact does not preclude us using her, however.”

  “Use her for what?” I asked. “Other than temporary lodging, I mean?”

  “Not sure yet,” said Keane. “We’re tragically short on clues, despite the day’s endeavors.”

  “There is one thing,” I said. “The guy I killed had a tattoo. A banner on his arm with the number 99 on it.”

  Keane frowned. “And does this mean something to you?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve seen it a few times before, on guys who worked for a private security company called Petoskey.”

  “What does the 99 mean?”

  “It refers to the Battle of Jeddah,” I said. “Also known as the Massacre at Jeddah. I wasn’t there, but I knew some guys who were. November of ’24. American forces were dug in, waiting for an attack. Supporting us was a company of guys from a private firm called Petoskey. Mercenaries, mostly ex-Marines and the like. Good guys, most of them. We ribbed
them for being our cleaning crew; they tended to get assigned to the shittiest details, security for low-level diplomats, crowd control, stuff like that. At the end of the day, though, we were all on the same side. Anyway, the Americans are hunkered down, waiting for these insurgents to attack. Word comes down from the brass that Jeddah’s a lost cause. The insurgents have a dirty bomb—like the one those end-times assholes used in Santa Monica in ’22, but a lot bigger. A non-nuclear device that has a core of something radioactive, like plutonium. These guys are true believers, Jihadists in the worst sense of the word. They’re going to set this thing off in downtown Jeddah and seed the place with enough radioactive dust to make it uninhabitable for the next thousand years. We had the manpower to defend the city against a frontal assault, but there’s no way to defend a city that size from every goat farmer with a pickup. So we got out. Let them have the city.”

  “I don’t recall a dirty bomb exploding in Jeddah,” said Keane.

  “It didn’t,” I replied. “That was bad intel. An informant misheard something. But the Allied commanders in Jeddah were panicking, trying to get all our guys out of this city before it turned into the Chernobyl of the Gulf. They did get out in time; commandeered every vehicle they could lay their hands on—airplanes, boats, buses, whatever they could find. Only problem was, in the confusion nobody told the Petoskey guys.”

  “You’re saying the Petoskey contractors got left behind.”

  “It was the middle of the night when our guys got the order. And like I said, it was chaos. The officers were trying to be secretive about it, because we’d made some kind of deal with the regional security forces, and they weren’t going to be happy about the Americans pulling out. Frankly, it’s a miracle none of our guys got left behind. Some of the Petoskey guys figured it out, but what could they do? There were no vehicles, no way to get out. You can’t just walk out of Jeddah. You’ve got the Gulf on one side and desert on the other. And the desert was full of guys whose hobbies were molesting goats and decapitation. A few of the Petoskey guys might have been able to hop on a transport or bus, but then they’d be leaving their buddies behind. So they stayed—all three hundred and forty of them. Care to guess how many survived the invasion?”