“What makes you say that?”
His face cycled through several degrees of fury as he tried to find words. His eyes welled with tears but just as fast as his mood changed to sadness, anger returned stronger than before. “Sons of bitches…”
The profoundness of grief upon him was tangible.
“What did the police do to you?”
He shifted, waving. “No… It’s what the motherfuckers didn’t do.”
She leaned back. “Someone close to you got hurt and the police ignored it?”
“Yeah.” His face contorted and he bellowed; tears ran down his cheeks. “My two boys.”
The entire room turned at the sudden outburst, leaving Avril feeling awkward and exposed.
“I know a few people on the force. Why would they ignore your boys getting hurt?”
“Because, Coe, my oldest… he got himself mixed up in some god damned gang nonsense. Someone shot him and the damn cops… You know those motherfuckers had the balls to tell me to my face he got what he asked for.”
Avril grabbed his arm with both hands. “That’s not true.” She had braced for the revelation that the police killed his son, but this was easier to deal with.
“Arlon, my younger boy, was only fourteen. Why did they have to kill him too?” He sobbed for a while before his grief shifted back to anger. “They ain’t gonna get my daughter, no sir. They ain’t gonna touch… Damn sons of bitches are gonna pay for what they did.”
“Carl.” The innocence left Avril’s voice as Nina emerged. “Look at me.”
He gaped at her; the change in her voice shocked him out of his sorrow.
“You have a daughter that needs you. Please don’t do anything stupid.” She put the Avril voice back on. “Let me talk to some friends of mine, they might be able to help.”
“What is your little ass gonna do?” He smirked.
“You’d be surprised.” She winked. “If you give me your PID, I’ll get in touch with you soon.”
He stared. The life sized Victorian doll seemed as unlikely a hope as anything else. The dichotomy of what she asked compared to her appearance caused his brain to slow to a grinding halt. His face said he did not expect much from the waif in front of him; then again, he had nothing to lose by giving her his contact information.
“Oka,y fine… I still don’t know how to use this damn thing.” He fiddled with his hair.
Nina figured he used a helmet. “Think about opening the control console. When you see the menu appear in front of you, touch the share contact information link and then point at me.”
Carl waved his hand around and a few lines of static disrupted his image in cyberspace. When the request to exchange info popped up in front of her, she accepted.
“Don’t do anything until I call, okay?”
“Yeah… Yeah…” He nodded, convinced that he would never see her again.
“Miss?” The doctor’s voice drifted over from the other end of the room.
Avril looked up as Mitch scurried past the row of seats and out the door. He looked agitated and mumbled to no one at a rapid pace. She got up and rustled out of the chair rows, following the doctor down a hallway to a comfortable office decorated with a number of Indian paintings on black velvet.
Dr. Khan maneuvered around her desk and sat. “This is your first time here, so I have some basic questions for you if you don’t mind… just for my records. First off, what is your name?”
She sat facing the desk. “Avril Boudreau.”
“Thank you, Avril. Again, I’m Dr. Khan. You can call me Preeti if you find it less cumbersome. Can I ask your age?”
“Twenty four.”
“And you are female, yes?”
The oddity of the question raised an eyebrow before she realized that in cyberspace appearance meant nothing. “Yes.”
“Alright, thank you.” Dr. Khan leaned back and smiled. “What brings you here to New Hope?”
Avril looked at the desk. This seemed like such a good idea when she thought of it before, but the moment had come, and now she found it difficult to speak about Vincent.
“My husband was killed,” she blurted at last, the emotion wrapped about the words genuine.
Dr. Khan leaned forward and placed a hand on top of Avril’s. “I am sorry for your loss. I can see that it has affected you deeply. Please, share as much as you feel able to.”
Nina tried to focus on her concocted scenario; the Avril persona had a different explanation for the circumstances and she needed to keep those details consistent.
“We had been in the UCF for two weeks and our apartment was being remodeled. My husband Michel wanted to get away from the noise and the dust and have a night out, so we went to the theater. I don’t even remember the show anymore.” Images passed through her mind of that night, Vincent’s last expression as he reached towards her.
“Take your time. Emotions are a natural part of coming to terms with the loss of someone dear to you. There is nothing wrong with how you feel or with letting it out. How long ago did it happen?”
“About ten…” She hesitated. “Weeks. Men came out of an alley and wanted to rob us. Michel was so calm; he did what they wanted. I got scared and screamed and tried to run.” Nina saw herself breaking cover again; she felt the bullets hitting her. “They shot him when I screamed… It’s my fault.” Tears welled up in her eyes but she fought the urge to sob.
“I can’t say I wouldn’t panic a little myself if thugs threatened me. You didn’t kill Michel, the men that wanted to rob you did.”
“But if I didn’t try to run …” A tiny whisper glided through the otherwise silent room.
“Michel would be happy that you did not get shot.”
“I did.” Avril gave the doctor a guilty look. “But I lived.”
The doctor’s face shimmered as notes typed themselves in on the virtual terminal. “It sounds to me like you may be experiencing survivor’s guilt.”
“What?” Nina looked up.
“When a person lives through a dangerous situation but others, sometimes even total strangers, don’t survive that situation, it can trigger feelings of guilt. You wonder “why did I survive?” or “why wasn’t it me that died instead of that person?” Some feel that their life was less important than those that died. Others think that a higher power guides the hand of fate, or just luck they didn’t deserve.”
That made a lot of sense. Nina admitted to the doctor that she often wondered why she had not been able to die with him. The first two weeks, that was all she wanted.
“He’s always in my thoughts. I wonder why I ran; would he still be alive if I kept my cool. Why did we have to go there that particular night?” Her voice trailed off into a breathless whisper.
“Do you think Michel would be happy that you are still alive?”
The last look in his eyes was desperate fear for her safety. “Yes. I think he knows it was my fault he got killed, but he would never say it.”
“Avril. Listen to me. The men that shot him are responsible for his death. You could not have done anything to change what happened. Those men might have shot you both even after he gave them what they wanted, who knows what they might have done to you. You have to open your mind to the thought that things happen for reasons we cannot explain. How would Michel feel if he could see you agonize over him?”
She wondered if Division 0 was right about ghosts. Could he still be here, watching? He got upset when other officers in her old unit teased her. He was protective, but not obsessive, and always seemed to know what to say to make her feel better.
“What if Michel could see you now, do you think he would enjoy watching you dwell in guilt and sadness with no way to communicate to tell you to stop?”
Avril looked up at the doctor with a wide-eyed stare. She pictured Vincent screaming at her trying to get any kind of words through. “I… No, it would be awful for him.”
Dr. Khan folded her arms on the desk. “You should not forget him, but now
is when you need to begin putting your life back together. You should treasure the time that you had with him and keep him alive in your memories. Think about your future. If you spend the rest of your life in mourning for Michel and fill it with guilt and misery, what was the point of you surviving?” The doctor’s voice softened. “I bet that he tried to protect you that night.”
“Yes. He did.” Avril nodded, crying into her hands. “I was so stupid.”
The line between Nina and Avril was gone.
The doctor moved around and put her arm across Avril’s shoulders. She urged her to let it out and cry until she felt better. “No one will ever take away what you had with him.”
Avril looked up. She thought about coming clean and telling the true story, but changed her mind at the last second, not knowing how command would react to her visiting an external psychiatrist.
Nina found her composure a few minutes later and wiped her eyes. “How long is normal to dwell on this? I always think about him.”
“Everyone deals with grief in their own way; there is no correct amount of time. Of course, if it persists at six months to a year, there may be an underlying pathology that we would need to investigate. You say it was about ten weeks ago? I would expect that you would be entering the coping phase by now. Does it feel like your grief is interfering with your ability to function? Do you have trouble getting out of bed in the morning or with your work?”
“No, not really, sometimes I have trouble falling asleep. When I’m busy, I’m fine.” Avril looked at the paintings on the wall, wondering if somewhere a real office looked like this. “I think about him when I’m not doing anything else.”
“Do you find it difficult to concentrate on anything else because you are absorbed in mourning?”
“No, I can do things I have to do… I just don’t find anything fun anymore.”
The doctor patted her on the shoulder. “I can see that your love for Michel is deep, but it does not sound like you are suffering from his loss in an abnormal way.” She smiled with a mother’s concern. “I’d like you to come back for a few sessions if you are up for it. I think you need to have some personal contact. It could be with me, with friends, maybe with some of the others in the program. I saw you speaking with Carl; you must have a way with people. He has not opened up to anyone else yet. I think you should talk to him. It will do both of you some good. You should not isolate yourself with your thoughts and be alone.”
Avril nodded. “I’ll come back next week.”
Dr. Khan smiled. “Good. You can stop by here almost any time; unless I am with a patient in the real world, I am available here. If you need anything or have any questions, any strange thoughts, or anything at all you want to get off your chest, please contact me.”
Avril stood up. “Thanks.”
She stared at her toes darting out from under her dress as she walked, without looking up, to the door. Avril lingered outside New Hope, tracking cars that whooshed along the rain-soaked street. It was as though Cyberspace sensed her mood and changed the environment to suit it. With a sigh, she closed her eyes and let gravity take her. A pixelated mash of color surrounded her as several bright rings rocketed past her from behind. Rather than land upon the cold plastisteel ground, she fell into her office chair, surrounded by the glow of holo terminals.
The only sound was the whirr of the wire as it retracted into her deck.
curtain of holographic panels bisected her office along the axis of her desk. The opposite wall glowed blue from the security screens. Unlike civilian terminals, the back did not display a mirror image of the front, but an opaque block of color. The wall behind her shifted with the contents of the screens, as did her face. Black carpet filled the room except for where a rectangle of grey appeared in the light sliding in from under the door.
The images of several men gazed at her. Farthest left, short brown hair wrapped around a thick, rugged face as if windblown. Anatoly Nemsky’s face wore the same mocking smile it had since she first saw it. With each passing week, the old picture seemed to be taunting her more for not having been able to find him. It was a three-year-old image that Division 9 agents lifted from a Russian news agency, but it confirmed the brief glimpse of him she had gotten from the shuttle terminal cameras.
A man in early thirties with a few days’ worth of beard appeared in the second panel. His hard brown eyes challenged Nina as if daring her to do something about him, his smirk a taunt that felt more mocking as time went on. The shadow of where hair belonged was dark; it could be black or brown. Itai Korin had been every bit as elusive as she had expected a former Mossad agent to be, and then some. Since his shuttle landed three months ago, traces of him had been sparse.
Vincent’s portrait smiled among them as well. She had poked into the system enough to discover that someone altered her patrol route that night, and it had not been done on the orders of Captain Farris. He had denied knowledge of it when she paid him a visit some months later. Someone wanted her and Vincent to be in that alley, and it was a short leap of logic in her mind to connect that to the augmented monster. She was convinced someone targeted her or Vincent on purpose, but she could not find anything in his file that provided any sort of motive.
Nina’s own background prior to that night also looked bland. The only motive she could come up with was abduction for ransom. She dismissed that theory almost as soon as she had thought of it, given the brutal beating she received.
The video taken that day by the Division 5 A3V proved difficult for her to watch, but she forced herself to be a spectator to her own murder, several times. She tried not to look at the gore that spread out from her body as it slid into frame; instead focusing on the silhouette of the man standing over it. A brief glimpse of his face flashed orange as the detonation of heavy weapons fire reduced his non-cybernetic arm to red mist. The blast had knocked him flat, but he got back up and loped off into the night. The crew had been more concerned with trying to save her life; only two men gave chase, and lost him. Nina spent an unhealthy amount of time staring at that face, knowing that he was still out there somewhere. If she ever ran across him, she did not want to miss the opportunity.
When she could no longer stand looking at him, she returned to Nemsky and Korin.
She replayed some of the video footage from the shuttle terminal. Lines of people milled along trying to get through the security checkpoints and baggage claim. She watched Itai slip through like a common civilian using the name Joshua Cohen.
Division 9 had become aware of his activities three years ago upon the first report of his involvement with mercenary operations. Contacting Mossad had been useless. The Israeli government denied anyone by that name had ever even worked with them. Standard procedure, she thought. They wanted to avoid an international incident at all costs. She found their lack of assistance vexing, but could not force their hand without more proof. The footage from the terminal represented the only credible sighting they had of either of them thus far. It made her feel like a rookie not to be able to track them down.
I’ve only been operational for six months. I am a rookie.
Next to Vincent’s face, the file on ‘The Silver’ gleamed at her. The image of a magnificent white and chrome building rotated in place, a giant middle finger. It had only a small portion of its space devoted to human occupancy, most given to computer equipment and security systems. Their real world security force consisted of retired police and their network security people were considered the best-paid experts in the field. As far as anyone knew, the night of her attack was the only time anyone succeeded in breaching The Silver.
The idea that her ambush had been little more than a distraction for law enforcement was not new to her. She could find no logical reason why anyone would target her or Vincent over any of a dozen other officers in the area. Any injured cop would cause the same reaction; it just did not seem plausible when combined with the alteration to her route.
She had gone over the file dozen
s of times looking for anything she might have missed. Again she scrolled through system logs, videos, and network traces; anything she could find regarding the event. She could stare at Itai and Nemsky for months and get no closer to finding them. It felt like they were ghosts. Knowing these two had eluded all of Division 9’s resources for over three months frightened her with how dangerous they might be. No one else in the unit had any better luck, but that did little to temper her feelings of inadequacy.
A sudden intrusion of bright light made her squint. The reaction was involuntary; her brain knew nothing of cybernetic eyes. Image processors compensated for the unexpected environmental change in microseconds, separating her immediate supervisor, Harold Hardin, from the glow in the doorway. His hair, chestnut-brown greying to white, leaned over his left temple in a curled mass like some dead animal.
A coffee stain spanned the breast of his powder blue sweater and his nondescript tan slacks looked like they had never known the business end of an iron. He had been retired from fieldwork for quite some time, but the job was in his blood. She saw him at the office all hours of every day, as if he had nothing else to do. He had the look of a combat soldier trapped in a body too old to enjoy it.
“Still sitting in the dark?”
Where else should the dead dwell? “Yeah.”
“What do you think you missed?”
A soft metallic click as he nudged the door closed behind him.
“Missed?” Nina looked up.
“I can practically read those files by the patterns of light on your face. You think you’re going to find something new the thousandth time going through them?” He sat in the chair facing her desk.
“I got nothing else.” Frustration seeped through the calm. “No new traces, no sightings, no financial activity.”
Hardin let his hands rest on his knees, fidgeting at a fold in his pants with his right thumb. “You know that no one in this building blames you for what happened to Dale.”
“If I wasn’t inside yelling at people for setting up such an amateurish―”
Virtual Immortality Page 25
