“I beg your pardon, ma’am?” She looked surprised at the unusual question.
“Are you alive in there? If I could hack through the programming blocks, would I find someone in there, or what?”
She hesitated for a fraction of a second, then switched modes to, “Enjoy your breakfast. You asked for a newspaper.” She produced from a pocket a folded sheet of Active Paper preset to display every media feed available in local space.
“Thanks,” I said, taking the paper, but still looking at her, knowing that, at some level, my question had thrown her out of equilibrium for a moment.
Now she looked a little peeved. “All right, then?”
“You’ll tell me when Mr. Smith wakes up?”
“Of course.” She left without another word, a professional courtesy smile on her face like a mask. I shivered, watching her. That momentary hesitation bothered me. What bothered me more was thinking about how good an emulation of human personality I had going that I should find a “regular” disposable android’s performance so disturbing. It was like an out-of-body experience, looking down at this automaton with my face and my body, behaving just like me, but absolutely not me. Was there anybody in there, really, or did I just believe there was?
To escape this sort of incipient madness, I checked through recent news. Human space was developing into a collective basket case, more so than usual; still nobody knew what to make of the damned Silent; weird religions warred across dozens of worlds; millions were dying for stupid reasons. More disturbing: several human worlds were experiencing global biosphere disturbances, all of them worlds that had been terraformed to various extents. Environmental catastrophes of Biblical dimensions were destroying whole cities, settlements, and rural regions. Countless refugees were on the move now, and I knew many more would soon follow. The Interstellar Red Spiral and other aid agencies were struggling to deal with the unprecedented scale of it all.
And in the background: infamous charismatic and mediagenic conservative religious figures were telling anyone who would listen that the End Times were indeed upon us. The Rapture would begin any moment now. The Faithful should prepare while there was still time.
I would have laughed if it wasn’t so damn tragic.
People were dying because of this crap.
I’d had enough reading for one day. I folded my Active Paper and decided to try and get some sleep. My body still ached, despite the bed’s best pain-management efforts. Sleep came, but so did hellish dreams of human space laid waste, whole stars bright smears of destruction, dreams so fever-vivid I wept and screamed and…
“Ms. McGee, it’s all right.”
In the blur between dreaming and consciousness, I glanced up from the interstellar devastation, and saw one of the nurses smiling down at me, trying to reassure me that all was well.
I swear, though, in that state of mind, I’m sure I saw fire in her eyes.
CHAPTER 14
The following day, Gideon was awake and well enough to receive visitors. By then I was strong enough, and not aching too much, to climb out of bed and sit myself in the floatchair one of the nurses provided. The chair kept me sitting up straight, and was ready to assist with my breathing or pain-relief needs.
Seeing Gideon was shocking. He looked and sounded weak. There was no mischievous gleam in his eye. His white hair was a handful of loose wisps, and his pale skin hung from his bones. He did his manful best to conceal it, but I knew he was in pain from the restoration treatment, his body swarming with biomolecular builders doing their best to renovate his tumbledown body. They wouldn’t make him young again, but they would restore him to something like he had been before he made the fateful error of going to dinner at the Anchorage Tavern with me that night.
He smiled a little when I came in. I smiled back, but immediately felt like I was intruding. He said, “It’s all right. Don’t mind me.”
“You look bloody terrible!” I said, for once not joking about it.
“And you look like a hov hit you and kept going, McGee,” said Gideon. “How’s the ship?”
“It’s getting cleaned.” I said. I was told this earlier and had asked for the cost to be billed to me. The Good Idea required extensive scrubbing and even though we’d been careful to change our environment suits in the inflatable bubble, some small amounts of our filth inevitably escaped. Much of this material was laden with bacteria and fungus; some of it could thrive in an airless, heatless environment. Gideon’s ship had been extensively infected during that dreadful month. I hated to think what the cleaning bots would do to some of the more delicate fittings.
“Keeping well, then?” he asked, doing his best to joke.
“Never better. Healthy living.”
“Thought I might take up dancing,” he said.
“I’ll join you.”
“You could do with losing a bit.” We both knew that I was the proverbial shadow of my former self. Loose skin hung all over me. Under my pajamas, I looked like a Salvador Dalí clock.
“Sorry about your case.”
This surprised me. “What?”
“Your case. The attack scuttled everything.”
I started to see what he meant. “You can’t blame yourself, you silly bastard.”
“My ship. My responsibility. Should have taken stronger measures.” This utterance alone wore him out.
“You couldn’t have known you’d get an intruder.”
“Should have been more careful. Sloppy. I’m sorry, Zette.” He looked upset.
I was amazed. “You been brooding about this?”
“What do you think?”
“Bloody hell, Smith. It’s all right.”
“It’s … not.”
I swore, wishing I knew what to say. “They gave me newsfeed access,” I said, trying to change the subject.
He didn’t say much about this.
“Means I can read up the local coverage on the Fallow business.”
“Good.”
There was a silence for a while. At last, I said, “Look, it’s not the first cold case I’ve ever had.”
“Okay. Let me know how it goes?”
“You’re coming with me.”
“They reckon I’ll be here for days.”
“We’ll work something out.” I had no idea just what we’d work out, but I didn’t want to take off and leave Gideon like this.
“Get on with the case while you can.” He was getting agitated, and that was only making him weaker. I could barely hear his voice.
“Yeah. I’ll see you a bit later, okay?”
“Good luck, McGee.”
I swore under my breath and went back to my room.
Back in bed, my muscles ached like I’d sprained my entire body, simply in the process of getting out of the chair and into the bed. By now I’d located the pain-management controls on the bed frame, and cranked them up to maximum.
I was trying not to think about Gideon. I’d never seen him so weak and fragile. He looked so old. It was upsetting to see him like that. Even more upsetting was having him urge me to take off without him. It felt like a dying man telling a loved one to forget about him and go off and live a good life.
I had already decided that I wasn’t going to leave without him. He probably wouldn’t be happy about it, but that was too bad. I didn’t believe in leaving people behind. It’s something I learned on the job, years ago. The Winter City Police Service never had enough personnel, real or otherwise. Stretched thin, we couldn’t always guarantee decent protection everywhere. It was always an unhappy city, a place where people wound up, not where they chose to go. The government was always trying to talk it up as the new capital of the Home System, but nobody believed the hype. Toss in old ethnic feuds, new hatreds between different gangs and tribes of post-humans, too many peopl
e squeezed into cheap and unsafe accommodations, and you can see why some parts of the city had riots every month or two, just to break up the monotony.
Civilians died; cops died. It only added fuel to the cycle. Towards the end, right before the Silent moved in, the riots were taking on the scale of battles, even full-on warfare, right there in the streets and tenements of the New Town. We learned, in those days, that you don’t leave behind your dead and wounded. And unless you had access to wealth or phenomenal medical insurance, it was all too easy to get killed in a billion different, stupid ways. Even so, you took them home for a decent burial and you made sure you did the right thing by them — and by their families — no matter what the cost.
Gideon wasn’t dead, but he looked like he was wondering why he wasn’t. He had the stink of a man who thinks his time is nearly up. I knew that was bullshit, and that once he’d had some serious rest and got his strength back he’d be all right.
Gideon was about the only real friend I had, who seemed to like me more even than I liked myself. So here I’d stay, and I’d help him all I could to get back on his feet.
In the meantime, there were leads on the Fallow case I could follow from here. I had all of New Norway’s media, news and entertainment feeds, tens of thousands of separate channels and sources and viewpoints. At least half of all these teeming thousands of feeds were various kinds of direct advertising, so they were easy enough to filter out. At least half of what was left was pornography, a stunningly broad, rich, complex range of porn such as I had rarely seen since I left the coppers.
By the time I filtered everything out I was left with hundreds of feeds, many carrying multiple services. If you wanted the good stuff you generally had to pay to have the indirect advertising removed. This proved tricky without headware. Financial transactions occurred between headware modules; credit was stored in secure compartments. Some of the highest level commercial crypto protected these compartments and guaranteed the exchanges. The upshot was that most of the process was automatic once you started, though you could cancel or drop out at any time. I didn’t have headware. I did have quite a bit of money socked away in banks, but no easy way to get at it so I could pay for things. Like, for example, new headware. The prospect loomed of having to get Gideon, once he was all right again, to pay for a new headware kit for me. It was a humbling moment, the kind where you can’t help but think that for all our modern fancy gadgets, you still can’t do the simplest bloody things.
At length, all these considerations aside, I curled up in bed with the Active Paper, and manually sifted through all the crap, looking for write-ups concerning the Fallow case.
It was a tough task, and not just because of the sheer profusion of feeds available even after shoving aside all the porn and advertising. It was because the incident concerned a murder in a small colony in a relatively inaccessible region of New Norway.
The little I could find out about the Narwhal Island colony suggested it was one of many such isolated settlements where people went to get away from technology and live a simpler kind of existence. The people on the island farmed, made their own clothing and bread, milked their own cows, and all the rest of it. Nothing was nanofabricated. It was the kind of thing that sounded vaguely tempting.
The island itself was located hundreds of kilometers from the coast of Esseka, one of the few countries that maintained diplomatic and support links with the colony and there were about five hundred colonists, including families. I wondered why Fallow had chosen it of all places to settle down.
As I sat there, looking through the countless feeds in my Paper, a nurse came by to ask if I felt up to something to drink. I didn’t look up from the Paper. I said, “Okay, sure. Coffee, thanks.” And felt, for a moment, a little weird about saying “thanks” to a disposable nurse.
The nurse returned a few moments later with my coffee, set it down on my bedside table and left with the usual flat, smiling expression on her face.
I found the Paper’s phone service and searched through its directory of New Norway addresses for Narwhal Island, and searched that for the local cops. There had to be local cops on that island, and they had to know something about what had happened to Airlie Fallow.
I located a contact address for Narwhal Island Chief of Police Bill Sacks, and got the paper to call him. Narwhal Island time right now would be sometime in the early hours of the morning.
It was ringing.
The phone window opened a few seconds later, but only to a sign indicating that the other party had picked audio-only. “Bill Sacks,” a soft male voice said. “This’d better be good.”
“Chief Sacks?” I said, trying not to shout to bridge the distance from orbit to ground. It was a strange habit, but surprisingly common.
A couple of moments later, Sacks’ voice floated out of the paper, “Who’s there? Is anybody there? Hello?” His voice sounded tired.
The signal was lousy; I was starting to shout. “Chief Sacks? Are you there?”
“Is this someone in orbit? Who the hell’s trying to call me from orbit at this hour? Do you know what time it is down here?” He’d have a display either in his headware or on his phone telling him where I was.
I grabbed the coffee. This could take a while.
“Chief Sacks, my name is Zette McGee. Did you get that?” The static on the line was unbelievable.
“Someone Pea? Is this a joke? I’m not in the mood for jokes! I could send someone up there to arrest your stinking ass for disturbing an officer of the law at this hour, you know!”
“My name is Zette McGee. I’m a retired Police Officer,” I explained again, taking my time. “I’m calling about the death of Airlie Fallow, about a month ago?”
“Can’t this wait until morning?” Sacks said, once he understood. “I mean, later this morning? Business hours? I mean, it’s a bit late here, and I’ve had a hell of a day. It’s not all beer and skittles down here, you know.”
This was going to get expensive. I explained my interest in the case. Sacks began to comprehend that I was a former copper turned investigator. That helped greatly. He still wanted to know why I couldn’t call during business hours.
“I need to get on this matter ASAP, Chief. I was wondering if you could send me case notes, forensic data—”
There was a brief, sudden noise at Sacks’ end. I heard him yell something.
“Chief Sacks? Chief Sacks!” I was shouting at the phone pickup. I could hear only a lurching, gasping sound, then there was a long silence, punctuated only by dull, ominous thrashing thumps. “Sacks! Sacks, for God’s sake, answer if you can!” Deep in the background, I heard a dog barking. There was another, distant thump, quickly followed by a yelp.
Then the connection dropped out.
CHAPTER 15
“What the hell?” For a moment I just sat there, staring at the phone window, with its statement of how much I owed for that call, and inviting me to please use AmundsenCom again soon, and to ask about special orbital long-distance rates.
The nurse returned. “Ms. McGee?”
I was getting the paper to call Sacks back.
My guts were in knots.
“Ms. McGee? We heard you yelling…?”
“Not now!”
The display blinked. A sign appeared: NO SERVICE.
I swore and tried again, and got the same result.
I tried local emergency services, which also meant getting people out of bed. Was there no night-shift down there? Soon there was a med team rushing to Sacks’ home while I briefed them on what I’d heard, and I sent them a compressed high-res recording of the call. A Constable Shoko said he’d get to work on that right away. I also suggested they monitor local sea, air and space for departing vessels.
Shortly after, I heard back from Constable Shoko, who had been given the task of coordinating with me. He
sounded incompetent and very young, but doing his best to keep from panicking. He told me he was on his way out to Sacks’ house to meet up with the med team, which consisted of his partner, Constable Akara, and Dr. Menz. Both had arrived at the scene, reported back to Shoko, and located what was left of Sacks’ body. The poor bastard had apparently had his guts ripped out and there were signs of forced entry. It looked as though the Chief had put up quite a fight.
“I haven’t heard from either of them since,” Shoko said.
“Who else can you call in?”
“There’s no other police here, ma’am, it was just the Old Man, Akara and me. We’ve only got a few hundred people here altogether, and as it is we have to justify our manpower needs to the mainland government every quarter…” He was babbling. I let him go on, telling me that Sacks had only been on the job a few weeks. “He took over when we lost Timms.”
“What happened to Timms?”
“Beg your pardon? Your signal’s dropping out…”
I repeated myself, slowly and louder.
Shoko said thanks very loudly and went on, just about shouting at the phone, “He was looking into the Fallow case.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, figuring as much. “What had he found?”
“…much. The …sband had a history of … behavior.”
“Constable Shoko? Can you hear me? Your signal is getting patchy!”
“…ference. Trying to … route around. Ms. McGee?”
“I’m here! I can only faintly hear you.”
Then Shoko’s signal turned to noise. I shouted at the phone. My Active Paper had a recording of everything Shoko had said during the call. It occurred to me I might be able to get local police to process the noise out of the signal to some extent to pick up more of what he’d said. It had sounded like he was trying to tell me that Kell Fallow had some kind of history of violent behavior. If so, that would be a strange new wrinkle in things. I would have to look into just what these former disposables were capable of.
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