by Mel Odom
The news stream blanked for a moment, then refocused on Earth in front of the New Angeles courthouse. I recognized the building because I had often gone there to provide testimony.
Fiest, in the company of three men I assumed were lawyers, walked confidently up the steps.
“Mr. Fiest, I’m Lily Lockwell with NBN. Could I have a moment of your time?” Lockwell strode onto the scene and the 3D split, showing Fiest on the left through Lockwell’s monocam, and an external camera showing the nosie’s approach up the stairs toward her catch.
Fiest turned with that bright smile and unbuttoned his trench coat. “Always available to the media, Ms. Lockwell.”
“Were you chasing the same government contracts on Mars as Cartman Dawes?”
One of the attorneys stepped forward to intercede, but Fiest waved him off. “I think the best way to put it is that Cartman Dawes and IdentiKit were after the same contracts I was pursuing.”
“Very glib, Mr. Fiest, but I think you can acknowledge that Cartman Dawes and IdentiKit were far ahead of you. They already had a plant in place on Mars.”
“Which was blown up by anti-Earth terrorists, I believe.” Fiest grinned like a kid and shook his head. “Believe me when I say this: when DupliKit, Inc. puts a plant on Mars, it will be welcomed. I will do my negotiations with the people there before I attempt to ram a business down their throats. With the way the Martian people are torn regarding Earth business interests, I think it’s safe to say that the matter requires a delicate hand. I’m prepared to do that.”
“Not everyone is convinced that Martian terrorists are responsible for the destruction of the IdentiKit plant.”
“Who else might be responsible?”
Lily Lockwell didn’t pull any punches. “Competitors have been attacking each other for territory since the hunting and gathering days.”
Fiest chuckled. “Are you insinuating that I blew up IdentiKit’s plant?” He shook his head and continued speaking before the nosie could reply. “Are you going to accuse me of Cartman Dawes’s murder next?”
“Since you brought the matter up, Mr. Fiest, does DupliKit have assassins on its payroll?”
The lawyer stepped forward again. “Mr. Fiest, with all due respect, I have to protest this egregious line of questioning. This woman is clearly flinging mud, hoping some of it sticks to you and the corp.”
“It’s all right, Tom. I’m certain Ms. Lockwell doesn’t mean to do anything that will have her in civil court.”
Lily Lockwell didn’t back down. She had a reputation to uphold and her public expected her to ask the hard questions. “Are you going to answer the question, Mr. Fiest?”
“Sure.” Fiest smiled brilliantly. The whole affair was a dog and pony show to him. “DupliKit, Inc. has never, and will never, employ assassins.”
“But you have mercenaries on the payroll, don’t you?”
That was a loaded question. The sec people employed by the corps were often mercenaries.
“Ms. Lockwell, as charming as you are, and as fun as this is, I can’t afford to be late to this court appearance. I’d love to talk to you again sometime. Perhaps over dinner.” Fiest turned and walked away with his attorneys in tow.
Lily Lockwell started to pursue, but the courthouse sec teams closed in and prevented her. She whirled around and addressed the unseen cameraman again, cutting off her monocam. “So far, the New Angeles Police Department has no new leads regarding the assassination of Cartman Dawes and the death of homicide investigator Shelly Nolan. Join me next time when I talk with Luke Kaskade, leader of the Martian Emancipation League, one of the terrorist groups Mr. Fiest referred to.”
That would guarantee a heated conversation with Kaskade. The woman was good at leveraging incendiary material.
“She might not even have an interview set up.”
I blanked the 3D feed and looked across the table. Shelly Nolan sat there in casual wear, not her plainclothes attire.
I stared at her, knowing she couldn’t be there, and yet seeing that she was.
She reached across the table and put her hand on mine. I couldn’t feel the heat of her flesh, and I detected no biometrics.
She smiled at me the way she sometimes did when she was amused by my view of the world, or my lack of understanding. “I’m not a ghost.”
“Ghosts don’t exist.”
“Really?” She took her hand back and looked at me. “Aren’t you a ghost, Drake? Somewhere inside all that neural channeling, there is a person you used to be.”
“No, I was never anyone else. Some of the neural foundation belonged to someone else, but I am myself.” I was curious as to how I could have this conversation with Shelly. I looked around the Castle Club, but I saw no one that might be interested in anything I was doing.
“You don’t know why those two men came after you while you were pursuing Adrian Graham either, Drake.”
I looked back at her.
“A little paranoia is good for you in this job.”
“I can’t be paranoid. I am incapable of that.”
“No one human is immune to paranoia.”
“I’m not human.”
She smiled again. “Part of you used to be. The best parts of you.”
That was something Shelly never would have said. She accepted me, and liked me, as I was. She had told me that several times.
I studied her face. I could detect no differences in her appearance than when I’d last seen her alive. “How are you here?”
“You’re in danger, Drake. How could I not be here?”
I reached for her hand, but before I could touch her, she vanished. I drew my hand back.
“Was that an old friend?”
At the sound of the other woman’s voice, I turned in my seat and looked over my shoulder. The black-haired woman from the hotel and the office inside my head approached my table with a bright blue drink in one hand.
“This isn’t real.”
She sat across from me, but took a different chair than the one Shelly had occupied. She took her stir stick from her drink and licked the blue liquid from it. Her tongue was pink against her red lipstick. “Either it’s all real or nothing is real. You told me that once.”
“No, I didn’t.”
She shrugged. “You just don’t remember.”
As I sat there studying her, trying to remember her, I grew increasingly curious about my mental state. I ran a diagnostics check on my systems, but they all came back normal. It was possible that the bullets that had penetrated my body had done some kind of damage that affected my neural software, but I didn’t know how that could be. I would have had some kind of warning.
“You don’t know everything.” The woman sipped her drink, then blotted her mouth on a napkin. “You always thought you did. You planned for things, always figured the angles, but you couldn’t account for it all. I liked that about you. I trusted you.”
“I don’t know you.”
“Not yet, but you will.” She stirred her drink, inserted a finger into the blue liquid, drew it out again, and licked it clean. “Have you thought about what you’re going to tell Haas-Bioroid?”
“About what?”
She smiled at him. “Me. Your friend. These things that have been going on inside your head.”
“I’m going to tell the technical teams that I’m having hallucinations.”
“Really? A bioroid, a tool, that is showing fracture lines? What do you think they’ll do to you?”
I had already considered that and I was troubled. “They could reformat the neural channeling.”
“Do you think that would be wise?”
“Possibly.”
“Everything you’ve become these last seven years will be erased. It will be as though you never lived. In essence, you will die. Like your partner.”
I didn’t want that. I thought that was probably based on the Third Directive, the one that commanded me to preserve myself, but that seemed at odds with the need in me t
o tell Haas-Bioroid everything that was going on with me.
“That’s not what you want.”
I looked at her. “What do I want?”
“You want to solve the mystery. That’s what they created you to do, right? Find the answers to the investigations you were assigned to.”
“Yes.”
“If you’re erased, you’re going to lose the greatest mystery you ever had the chance to unravel. Do you really want to see that lost?”
“No.” I didn’t hesitate. My curiosity was too strong.
“Good.” The woman drained her drink and smiled at me. “I knew you wouldn’t. So, go to Haas-Bioroid and don’t tell them anything about this.”
“Who are you?”
“That’s part of the mystery.”
I felt a hand on my shoulder, and this one was human. The man’s biometrics flooded through my senses. I turned to face him.
The man was in his forties, a dour individual in a grey business suit—set to “static cling,” apparently, since his coat wasn’t hovering around his waist. Jackets with a “static cling” setting were a newer product on the market, made specifically to encourage travel up and down the Beanstalk amongst those who didn’t want to change their fashion look just to accommodate the effect of gravity as they headed up. A white gold wedding band gleamed on his ring finger. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt you, but I knew you were waiting on the ferry. They just issued the last boarding call.”
I heard it then and was curious why I hadn’t registered it earlier. “Thank you.”
The man smiled. “It’s all right. I get lost in my thoughts all the time. I didn’t know bioroids did.”
“I was streaming media.”
The man nodded. “One of the reasons I never will opt for an internal PAD when they become available is that it’s pretty crowded in there already.”
“It gets that way.” But it never had before.
With a final clap on my shoulder, the man walked-shuffled away in the grip-slippers required for humans in low-G, and went to join the dregs of the line for the ferry.
I looked back at the chair where the black-haired woman had sat. She was gone. So were the drink and the napkin she’d used to blot her ruby red lips.
*
From Starport Kaguya, I took a tube-lev to Haas-Bioroid. Although most lunar civilization existed underground, with the lesser gravity on the Moon and the raw resources, buildings were able to reach impressive heights above ground when the corps wanted to make a statement. Haas-Bioroid occupied one of the tallest—an orange and steel-grey edifice that stabbed toward the dark, star-studded spray of space overhead.
The tube-lev pulled into the Haas-Bioroid platform. I waved my chipped hand in front of the e-reader, charged the trip to Haas-Bioroid, and got out. I crossed to the main entrance and met a white-suited technician.
She was young and blond. The clan tattooing over and around her left eye identified her as a Martian. On Mars, the dome-covered colonies tended to become close, often keeping themselves separate from the other colonies. Each dome city, each clan, had distinctive markings. The young woman that met me was from one of the Bradbury colonies—the Edward Bradbury colony, not the Ray Bradbury colony.
“Detective Drake?” Her voice held a hint of an accent, but I could tell she had worked hard to lose it. Many of the younger Martians embraced Earth, grateful for its teeming megapoli and educational opportunities.
“Yes.” We were both being polite. She knew who I was. The e-reader chip in her skull and eyes had immediately identified me. I also knew that Haas-Bioroid set standards with its employees as well as its products. Both were supposed to act human, not like automatons.
“I am Jenny Crain.” She extended her hand.
I took it and her biometrics pulsed through my mind. “It is nice to meet you, Jenny.”
She turned and started walking toward the double doors. “We’re going to get you in and out quickly today. From what we understand, Lieutenant Ormond is anxious for your return.”
That was news to me.
“I was also told you were shot today.”
“I was. Several times.”
“How are you?”
“I’m fine. The nanobots repaired all the damage. I’m at one hundred percent efficiency.”
“That’s good to hear. We’ll still want to take a look.”
“Of course.”
*
After Jenny escorted me up the elevator to the diagnostics center, I was briefly left in the outer room while she went to set aside a room to examine me. Being in a room full of bioroids lacked stimulus. We all sat in the room and didn’t converse. We could have talked, but none of us really interacted that way. We were designed to interact with humans, not each other. We were supplemental to humans, not truly individualistic.
Or maybe we were individuals, just not capable of being so when around each other. I knew I sat there occupied with my own thoughts, and I suspected some of the others were doing the same. Mostly I thought about the black-haired woman, Shelly, the Cartman Dawes murder, and the attack I had undergone.
They were all intriguing, and I wanted answers. I felt there was some kind of connective tissue between all of those events. Shelly had never liked coincidences, but they did happen.
I surveyed the other nine bioroids in the room that were nearest me. Six of them were service units—groomers and physical trainers of both genders. One was a bodyguard, developed to assume the identity of people marked for death. His body was adjustable in size and height, and his face could be restructured within minutes.
Two were pleasure bioroids, or “sexbots” as some humans called them. They were anatomically correct and capable of sex with humans. Both looked completely human. Synthskin covered the carbosteel skeletons in dimensions designed to be aesthetically pleasing to humans of both genders. One was a blond and the other had brilliant green hair. They both had lacquered fingernails, elegant makeup, and stylish clothing that was too tight in all the right places.
Curious about them, I scanned their ID chips and discovered they were both from the Heaven & Hell Club in New Angeles. I knew the place from previous busts. A great number of illegal activities took place there, and some of them were protected by crime families as well as politicians and corp execs.
The green-haired one must have sensed my cybernetic intrusion. She glanced at me and smiled, but the expression didn’t put a dent in her silver eyes. They were cold and heartless.
I couldn’t help but wonder where that thought had come from. I’d seen pleasure bioroids before, and I’d never had that response. I was clinical about my observations of bioroids, not judgmental.
A male pleasure bioroid entered the room and looked around at the occupants. He was tall and broad-shouldered, well-manicured, and dressed in a current fashion suit that would have allowed him in any club or boardroom. His hair was chestnut colored, parted in the middle, and flipped casually over his wraparound sunglasses.
He smiled at the two female pleasure bioroids and went over to sit with them. Almost immediately, they began complimenting each other, obeying subroutines I could only guess at. Observing them in action was like watching self-replicating code fill a computer holo: busy, but not really achieving anything.
“Detective Drake.”
I glanced over to where Jenny Crain stood in the doorway.
“We’re ready for you now.”
*
I followed the young tech into Exam Room 9, stripped off all my clothes—which I had set to self-clean before taking the tube-lev to the Root—and sat in the link chair in the middle of the room. Instantly, the chair straightened out until I lay horizontal.
Jenny performed a cursory inspection of me, spending some extra time with the repairs the nanobots had made. “The remodeling looks good.”
“Thank you.”
She smiled. “Are you ready for the link?”
“Yes.” Actually, I wasn’t. Although I had been desig
ned not to have many preferences—except for solutions and staying busy—I didn’t like the links. As long as I was linked, my body was not my own. Access to the Net, which I was always on in some fashion, was stripped from me. I was trapped inside my mind and shut off from the outside world. When I’d told Shelly about it, she’d told me it sounded like it was comparable to being laid in your own grave.
Usually, my thoughts were a good place to be, though. I could work on cases or ready reports that would be filed as soon as I once more had Net access.
The links sprang out of the chair and slotted themselves into my body, locking me down. The Haas-Bioroid diagnostic programming invaded me and swept me away.
I blinked and the cold, sterile exam room went away.
I was back in that hotel with the woman behind me as the elevator cage dropped with dizzying speed and my blood dripped to the floor.
Chapter Nineteen
“Let me help.” The woman sounded frantic.
I looked up at her as she approached. Fear widened her eyes. Her pulse hammered at the hollow of her throat. She pulled at my shirt and revealed the bullet wound in my side. I stared at the raw meat and blood, not knowing how my body wasn’t carbosteel. I had just seen it only a short time ago.
The elevator continued to drop and I pushed the woman from me. “There’s no time.”
“You could bleed out.”
“And if we get caught, those men will kill us.” I hit the emergency stop button. We’d dropped four floors, leaving us on the third floor. I knew that the men hunting us would have the lobby covered. We couldn’t go there.
The cage stopped. I shoved one of the pistols into my waistband and kept the other in my right fist. I used my left hand to force the elevator doors open.
