Tails You Lose

by Lisa Smedman

  "None," Alma answered. "They're steady and strong."

  "Have you experienced any hallucinations—any dreamlike visions?"

  Alma shook her head.

  "Who installed the cyberware?" the doctor asked. "I'd like to consult with the engineer who designed it."

  "That's not possible," Alma said. "He's . . . unavailable at the moment. He had an accident and is recovering in a private clinic. That's why I came here. I've had the tremors for ten days, and I didn't want to put off seeing someone any longer."

  Alma activated the clock in her cybereye. It was 9:47 a.m.—just thirteen minutes before Kageyama's appointment. Her examination by the cybersurgeon had run longer than her appointed half-hour. She needed to get out to the waiting room, to see if Kageyama had arrived yet. She tried to use her augmented hearing to listen for voices behind the closed door, but the room's soundproofing blocked all noise from the corridor and waiting room outside.

  "Of course, your problem just might resolve itself, you know," the doctor added.

  "What do you mean?" Alma asked.

  The doctor touched an icon, and a number—50:12:05—glowed in the air beside the brain scan. It looked like the readout from a clock, except that the first number was too large. But the last part of the number was ticking away at one-second intervals, so Alma assumed it represented hours, minutes and seconds. She matched the number against her retinal clock, and did a quick calculation. The countdown would end two days from now, at noon on February 28.

  Alma shuddered as she realized what that date meant. Hu hadn't been exaggerating during their hushed conversation outside the boardroom. When he'd said that Mr. Lali had decided to "terminate" Alma, but that he'd gained her some time, he'd been speaking literally. That countdown was coming from the cranial bomb that was slaved to her REM inducer. If Alma didn't find the rogue Superkid before noon on the 28th, it would explode.

  Dr. Silverman had reached her own, erroneous conclusion: "It looks like your serotonin inducer is programmed to enter a new cycle in two days' time," she said. "Perhaps it's going to step down your serotonin dosage. If it does, it's possible that the tremors will stop when your serotonin levels return to normal. I'd like to run some further scans after the cycle changes. Are you able to come back on February 28, at 2 p.m.?"

  "What?" Alma asked. It was difficult to tear her mind away from the realization that the bomb inside her head was counting down the hours, minutes and seconds until a portion of her brain was destroyed. How had the bomb been activated? Given Hu's comment about Alma having four days to prove herself innocent, it had to have been at some point during her meeting with him and Mr. Lali in the boardroom. Then she remembered the peculiar sequence of numbers that had flashed across the monitor screen just before the vidclips started: the numbers nine through one, squared and counted down to one, followed by a date that had flashed by too quickly for her conscious mind to register. The countdown had to have been the activator for the bomb, and the subliminal-message date had given the countdown its end point.

  A wave of fear washed over Alma as it hit home that she was under a death sentence, and only with an effort was she able to shake it off. It's a test, she told herself. Just like the endless tests they put her through in the Superkids program. She would think of it as a test and nothing more.

  She still had fifty hours. That would be plenty of time to find the rogue Superkid and prove to Mr. Lali that he'd been wrong about her. In the meantime, she had to deal with the here and now.

  "Can you do something for me?" Alma asked. "Is it possible to slave the inducer's countdown with my retinal clock's countdown function?"

  "Yes, but I've already told you when—"

  "Please do it."

  Dr. Silverman plugged a device into Alma's eye and made a few adjustments, and then asked Alma to trigger her retinal clock and put it into countdown mode. The numbers 50:03:01 appeared, and a second later blinked to 50:03:00 and continued counting down. Withdrawing the instrument from Alma's eye, the doctor motioned for her to bend her head forward and unplugged the diagnostic probe.

  "I'll have our pharmacist make up a dopamine booster for you," she said, handing Alma a card with the date and time of the appointment she'd scheduled. "We'll see if that has any effect on the tremors. It will take about half an hour to prepare the inhaler. Will you be able to wait, or would you like it couriered to your home?"

  Concentrate, Alma told herself, shutting the countdown off. She'd come here to do a job. She opened her cellphone and consulted it. The memo function held only the message she'd left for the rogue Superkid; there was no answering memo. It looked as though she was going ahead with the extraction.

  "I'll wait for the inhaler," she told the doctor.

  She folded up the cell. Aside from the anxiety of knowing that her time limit for finding the rogue Superkid was very real, everything was going smoothly. The prescription would give her an excuse to linger in the waiting room for thirty minutes—plenty of time for Kageyama to complete his appointment. Another small accomplishment.

  Which made her nervous. According to the I Ching, a series of small accomplishments could be followed by a large disaster. All Alma could do was hope for the best—that the accomplishments that were stacking themselves like a house of cards didn't become so high that they tumbled.

  * * *

  Her target was sitting in the waiting room, channel surfing on a mini-telecom set that was built into the arm of an overstuffed chair. Alma recognized him only by the digipics she'd uploaded to her headware memory—without them, she'd never have been able to pick him out of a crowd. Kageyama was of average height and weight, with neatly cut black hair. He wore a conservative business suit and a brown leather jacket that looked casual at first glance but was carefully tailored.

  Alma found herself staring at Kageyama's hands. Now that she knew what she was looking at, she could see the not-quite-natural bulge where his narrow hands had been widened to meet the cybered little fingers. Sensing her looking at him, Kageyama looked up. Alma smiled—it was hard not to, under the sensual frankness of those green eyes—and nodded at the telecom his hand rested on.

  "Anything worth watching?" she asked.

  "Not on the telecom," he answered. His eyebrow lifted slightly. "You seem familiar—have we met before?"

  "I don't believe so," Alma said, extending her hand and leaning toward his chair. "Jane Lee."

  Kageyama took her hand and inclined his head in a bow. The movement brought his lips close to the back of Alma's hand, and the warmth of his breath on her skin sent a shiver through her. She had the eerie feeling that they had met before, but it was probably just a result of her scanning the data on her target so thoroughly.

  "Pleased to meet you, Ms. Lee. I'm—"

  An automated receptionist—a two-dimensional image of a bronze robot with a gratingly polite English accent—shimmered into view on a wall-sized monitor beside them. "Mr. Kageyama, the technician can see you now. Please join Dr. Silverman in Examining Room Three."

  Kageyama rose with a fluid grace that Alma would have sworn was the result of a move-by-wire system, had she not known about Kageyama's abhorrence for implanted cyberware. He bowed once more in Alma's direction. "Until later, Ms. Lee," he said with a twinkle in his eye. Then he turned down the corridor to the examining rooms.

  Alma's anger at her instinctive attraction to him helped her to shake off the sensual lethargy that talking with Kageyama had left her with. She recognized her reaction for what it was: a magically induced effect. She'd experienced something similar once before, when, as a young secguard fresh out of the Justice Institute, she'd been confronted with an intruder with magical capabilities. He'd used them to shape her emotions, giving her a warm, fuzzy glow that made her reluctant to taser him. Thankfully, she'd had backup; the PCI security guard she'd been teamed with at the time was out of the spell's range and took the man down with his first shot. Only later, as the intruder lay twitching, had Alma noticed the pistol
in his hand. She'd been a trigger squeeze away from taking a bullet from her "friend."

  She could see that she'd have to be equally careful with Kageyama. This time, there would be no backup.

  The time was one minute past ten o'clock. According to Priority One Security's log books, Kageyama's visits to Executive Body Enhancements always ended within a minute or two, at most, of the appointed quarter-hour. Kageyama would return to the waiting room in fourteen minutes, plus or minus one.

  She checked her cellphone for the third time—still no return message—and then stood and glided to the door of the clinic to stare out at the corridor, as if bored. The doors were one-way glass; the clinic's exclusive clientele demanded privacy from the moment they walked in the door. All anyone outside would be able to see was Alma's silhouette.

  She spotted Kageyama's bodyguard at once. He was the human Euro with pale red hair just across the foyer, leaning next to the elevator and sipping from a paper soykaf cup. He was deliberately casual, but he stood with one thumb hitched into his belt, next to a holstered taser. His eyes tracked everyone who walked past the clinic entrance. Then they stopped, and his posture straightened slightly as he spotted Alma's silhouette. She waited a moment, glanced over her shoulder as if answering the call of a receptionist inside the clinic, and then turned away. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the bodyguard relax and resume his careful scrutiny of the corridor.

  The man who had been seated next to Alma was called into an examining room by the receptionist, leaving Alma alone in the waiting room. She sat down and consulted the clock: eleven minutes and forty-nine seconds to go before Kageyama's appointment ended.

  While she waited, she thought over what she had learned about the man. Or, rather, what Bluebeard had dug up and loaded onto the chip that Alma had slotted. She had to admit—albeit grudgingly—that the decker was good. He'd managed to dig up information that was decades old—data that had led Alma to some startling conclusions about the target of her extraction.

  Kageyama's mother was a Japanese singer who became an overnight success in the 2010s when she changed her name to Benten and began performing songs inspired by Japanese mythology. Her hit song, "Tides of a Dragon's Heart," sold more vidclips in a single month than all of the other rock groups in the country sold in a year, combined.

  In those days, the Japanese ate up anything that had even a tangential connection with dragons. Their country had seen the first-ever appearance of a great dragon in 2011, when Ryomyo announced himself by racing a bullet train near Mount Fuji, and the craze for dragons had built throughout that decade. Benten played upon her stage name: that of an ancient goddess of love, eloquence and music who had tamed a dragon and prevented him from devouring the children of a coastal village. She encouraged rumors that her songs, so unlike the limp pop ballads she had sung previously, were secretly written by a dragon. She even went so far as to claim that this muse—who, like all great dragons, had a voice that was audible only telepathically—was using her body as a vessel with which to sing.

  One week later, in a much-hyped press conference, Benten tearfully announced that these claims were false. Her songs had actually been composed by her bass player, a mere human.

  That was in 2020, when Benten was at the peak of her career. A few weeks later came the announcement that she was pregnant. In a complete reversal of her previous antics, the singer shunned the media spotlight and went into seclusion. Despite the fervent efforts of the Asian press, which speculated daily about who the father of her child might be, very little appeared on the newsnets about the birth itself. There were rumors of a stillbirth, unconfirmed reports that the child had beenborn with some sort of deformity, and, later, stories that the infant had been kidnapped from the hospital and a twenty-million-nuyen ransom demanded.

  When Akira was presented to the media, those rumors were squashed. The baby was both healthy and whole. He had the normal complement of fingers on each hand in the vidpics that Bluebeard had provided—and, Bluebeard had discovered after noticing that a vidpic of the infant had been touched up, deep brown eyes.

  Which didn't match up. Alma had just looked into the eyes of the adult Kageyama. They weren't cybered, and he wasn't wearing colored contact lenses. His eyes were a natural-looking green. While a baby's eyes will sometimes start blue-green and darken to brown, a brown-eyed baby grows up to become a brown-eyed adult.

  Shortly after the birth, Benten had announced who the father was: the author of her songs, bass player Yoshi Kageyama. A DNA test that was leaked to the media confirmed that he had indeed fathered the child. A few months later, the couple split up, and a month after that Yoshi died of a BTL overdose.

  Benten's songs lost their sparkle after Yoshi died, and her popularity gradually waned. After several years of appearing only at retro concerts, she abandoned her career as a singer. She faded from the public eye and wasn't mentioned again by the newsnets until 2057—and then only posthumously, as a footnote—when Kageyama was named in Dunkelzahn's will as the recipient of the great dragon's Vancouver condoplex.

  The other information that Bluebeard had gleaned added little that Alma hadn't already known. Kageyama was wealthy—the copyrights from his mother's early hits still brought in a substantial income. He had immigrated to the Salish-Shidhe nation in the early 2050s and had become a close friend of Vancouver's most famous part-time resident: Dunkelzahn.

  Alma glanced up at the clock. Five minutes and eighteen seconds to go. When Kageyama emerged from his appointment, she would continue the conversation she'd initiated earlier and walk with him to the elevator. She had already prepared for what would come after the elevator doors closed—she'd broken off the heels on her pumps during an earlier visit to the washroom and changed into a pair of shoes she'd bought at the arcology. The injectors were concealed inside her jacket pockets. Taking down both Kageyama and his bodyguard with an injector to bare skin should be relatively easy, if she timed it right.

  The seconds ticked away. Three minutes to go.

  Kageyama would be emerging from the examining room any moment now. Alma stood up so that she could see out into the corridor. Was the Priority One bodyguard waiting outside the door or near the elevator?

  The bodyguard was gone. In his place stood a Eurasian man wearing black pajama-style pants and a blood-red silk shirt. He stood with his back to the clinic, as if waiting for the elevator, but his head was turned to the side as if he was watching someone walk away from him down the corridor. Alma's hackles rose as she put one and one together and came up with a pairing she didn't like.

  Behind her, she heard the examining-room door opened, and Kageyama thanked the technician. As his footsteps approached, she was just about to turn and greet him when the man near the elevator turned in her direction. A shock ran through Alma as she saw that the man's eyes were a solid white, without iris or pupil. She had the sudden, chilling sensation that those eyes could see her, despite the one-way glass. This had to be the man the rogue Superkid had warned her about: the one with the strange eyes.

  In that same instant, Kageyama touched her elbow. Alma had to instantly counter her move-by-wire system—her hand came halfway out of her pocket, injector at the ready, before she was able to stop it.

  The feeling of being stared at eased, as if the man with blank eyes had suddenly lost interest in her. He was still looking in the direction of the clinic, however, and now he started to walk toward it.

  "Hello, Jane, " Kageyama said, oblivious to the approaching threat. He placed a slight emphasis on the name, as if saying it tongue-in-cheek. "I'm glad you're still here. I wanted to talk to you about—"

  The man with the blank white eyes opened the door. Alma could sense that his attention was no longer on her; it seemed to be focused on Kageyama instead.

  Kageyama blinked . . . and then a shudder ran through him. "No!" he shouted. With reflexes as fast as Alma's own, he leaped into the air and planted a martial-arts kick squarely on the other man's chin. The man's al
l-white eyes blinked shut as his head snapped backward, but a second later he came in through the door low and fast, sweeping Kageyama off his feet with a spinning kick as soon as he had cleared the doorway. Kageyama bounced back to his feet, and the two came together in a blur of punches and kicks. Kageyama aimed a kick at the other man's kneecap, but his target danced back out of range. The blank-eyed man grabbed a fistful of jacket and tried to use Kageyama's own momentum to hurl him across the room, but like a fish wriggling off a hook, Kageyama slipped out of his grasp, the jacket tearing off him as he wrenched free.

  Had she not been cybernetically enhanced, Alma would have been left standing like a statue, watching the whirlwind fight. Only her boosted reflexes allowed her to react in time. The man with white eyes was ignoring her, concentrating on Kageyama. Her left hand was closest to him. Whipping it forward, she tried to jam the injector into his back.

  Something threw her aim off—later, she wasn't sure if it was the blank-eyed man's lightning-fast reflexes or the fit of trembling that suddenly gripped her hand. She thrust shakily forward, missing the white-eyed man by several centimeters. The injector connected with Kageyama's side as he sprang back onto his feet, and the load of gamma scopolamine was injected with a loud hiss of compressed air.

  Kageyama's muscles tensed. The man with the blank eyes chuckled and stepped forward to grab him as he staggered and fell. Cursing her bad luck—the chaos the I Ching had predicted had caught up to her at last—Alma whipped her right hand into her pocket.

  As she pulled out the second injector, Alma forced herself to heed the advice of the I Ching: to center, to balance. She pretended to draw away from the man with the strange eyes, sliding her hand up and out of her pocket while hiding the injector it held with her body. At the last moment she whipped her hand forward and stung his arm with the second injector. A single word whispered in her mind—Stop—before his pupils dilated and his mouth clenched shut. Rigid as a statue, his arms still wrapped around Kageyama, he toppled to the floor.