Virtual Immortality

by Matthew S. Cox

  Dull grey carpet stretched between plain white walls in the main area while simulated red bricks spanned the kitchen and light hardwood polished to a glassy shine filled the inner hall and bedroom. No decoration adorned the walls, not even a holovid player. A data terminal sat on a table in the living room, and she saw no infrared beams or thermal anomalies.

  After clearing the outer room and kitchen, she moved to the bedroom, nudging the door open with her gun. Two assault and one sniper rifle, all of ACC make, lay on the Comforgel pad. A scattering of orange ammunition blocks the size of fingers had been piled near an empty magazine. Slacks and a shirt draped over the desk chair and the scent of a recently shaved man hung in the air.

  Her weapon fell slack at her side. With Whisper 3 calling the place clean and her search coming up empty, she relaxed. Nina muttered “What am I missing?” repeatedly as she walked through a gleam of sunlight on brick into the kitchen. Her foot registered the warmth, a tiny slice of normal that hit her with the gravity of a major realization. She fell into one of the plain wooden chairs, dropped her shoes on the floor next to her, and ran her fingers through her hair.

  “Ops, I need a site team in here to go over the apartment from top to bottom. If Nemsky was here, he had to leave some trace. Have the network team check all activity that originated from the terminal over the past four months, and run a sensor sweep on the entire building until you tag a name on every moving person. Check for any underground exits while you’re at it.”

  “Copy that, tech team will be there in six minutes.” The blond man smiled.

  After the flurry of apologies and confusion faded from the comm, Nina went to the sink and washed the blood from her foot. After returning to the chair, she stared at her expensive shoes.

  She set the pistol atop her purse on the table and let her head fall into her hands, elbows on her knees. A shifting barrier of jet hair cut off her peripheral vision, and she let out a long-suffering sigh. This defied everything she had ever learned about security, cyberspace, espionage, and reality. Nemsky had no training or experience at being a covert operative. Nothing in his file indicated he was anything more than a megalomaniacal former general with a reputation for sociopathic tendencies. The past few months had her wondering if he had broadened his resume or she made a poor investigator.

  Somewhere between her toes, she searched for the answer. It was possible that the bloodthirsty crowd-massacring general never existed after all; the entire identity could be a cover. Maybe Nemsky, or whatever his name was, had been intelligence all along. Nina moaned as she bent her forehead to touch her knees. That thought felt implausible as well. His military career was well documented over the course of many years. Faking it would have taken a decade of setup and no secret escapes notice that long. A vid panel spread open in her mind’s eye, replaying an interview from two months ago with former members of the Russian resistance that had made it out. They witnessed one of his massacres in person.

  “You looked beautiful when you came to see me this morning.” Vincent’s voice floated through the room.

  Nina’s head snapped up. The silence got heavier. Dust danced through a beam of sunlight angling into the sink from the adjacent window. She stared at the flecks, wondering how her mechanical body could feel like it had a lump in its throat.

  “It’s a pity the first time I saw that dress was your grandfather’s funeral.”

  The sound came from the table, from the little device in her purse.

  “It looks a bit different on you now with so much leg showing.” His disembodied chuckle seemed to come from everywhere.

  Nina stroked her fingers over the NetMini, wishing the voice genuine. Division 0 files documented the existence of ghosts; reports from astral sensitives who claimed to see them. If she believed those reports, such things were real. The government did conceal it from the public; up until now, she always thought it due to how crazy it sounded. She read that cold spots often accompanied a spirit. She blinked as a thermal overlay spread over her view, tinting objects in various shades from indigo through yellow. Nothing looked strange.

  “Ops?” Nina sent her thoughts to the comm channel.

  “Proceed, Lieutenant.” The man’s voice sounded happy to hear her.

  “I need you to run a trace on an incoming call to my personal NetMini, active right now.”

  “Understood. Stand by.”

  “You look stunning today, Nina. I could just stare all day.” A trace of sadness wafted in his voice. “I know you were waiting for me to ask about… Your father didn’t like me much, I didn’t want to ruin what we had by making him freak. I had the ring hidden for two months in my kitchen, waiting to be brave enough.”

  Nina shuddered. She had been so anxious about him popping the question; like a little girl the night before Christmas, except every night had been the eve before a day that would never come. She had spent countless hours rehearsing her reaction but still had no idea what form it would take. In another month, she would have ignored decorum and asked him to marry her instead.

  “Lieutenant?” Ops distracted her emotional spiral.

  “Go ahead.”

  “We show no active calls on your device at this time.”

  She stopped breathing. The onyx slab reflected her face, not projecting any video or hologram―but a winking green LED indicated an active audio call.

  “That can’t be possible, it’s on.”

  He shrugged. “We’re not seeing it.”

  She cradled the NetMini against her cheek as if it was Vincent’s hand. Closing her eyes, she tried to imagine the warmth of his touch one last time.

  “Are you in pain?” Her voice faltered.

  The smooth glass vibrated against her skin. “No… not in a physical sense. My heart aches because I can’t touch you.”

  Tears ran down her face. Nemsky ceased to be; all she wanted was Vincent back. “How are you talking to me, why are you…”

  “I can’t leave you.” He choked up. “You’re on the edge between worlds, too. I know there’s not much left of you in there. Certain things no one understands until they cross over.” His voice trailed into an eerie whisper. “They are watching you.”

  Tears hit her feet, her voice a breathless whisper. “Who?”

  “Beings who escort the dead to the next place. They waited for you, but you were pulled away. That little bit of flesh still inside you clings to the world with two fingers. They still watch you, waiting. They want us to be together again.”

  Nina lowered the mini from her cheek, staring into it. Spots appeared, droplets of sadness splattered upon its surface. The voice of some nameless doctor crept through her memory, telling her Vincent had not made it. It took her two weeks not to regret her answer to agent Harper. If not for her mother, she might have given in. Talking to Vincent brought her back to that precipice. After all this time, he asked her to be with him for eternity.

  Her hand shook. “You want me to…”

  “As soon as you leave that shell of a body, we will be together.” His voice returned to its full tonal quality, the sound of it all but smiling at her.

  Nina’s emotional rollercoaster slowed down. Vincent would never have asked her to kill herself. The last look on his face was desperate worry for her safety; but who can say what happens to a mind when it crosses over? Her cloud of swirling doubt scattered as a loud smash came from the front door.

  When their senior walked in, he caught her with a face full of wet microfiber towel.

  “I’m Specialist Dawson. You okay, Ma’am?”

  She nodded, surprised with how steady her voice sounded. “Fine, just pissed that we missed him again, trying to calm down.”

  “I hear that.” The tech team lead nodded at her. “If he left even one molecule of fart somewhere, we’ll find it.”

  She stood, collecting her weapon, shoes, and purse, before going into the living room. All the men froze, staring at her. She almost smiled, pulled out of her despondence by their
prying eyes.

  “Dawson, can you have your team clear the bathroom first?”

  He waved at the door. “Okay guys, you heard the Lieutenant… shitter first.”

  They swarmed over the area with an array of scanners and sprays while one of the female techs connected the computer terminal to their black box to give it the digital equivalent of a cavity search. Nina paced in a circle until she singled out one of them that seemed to be doing nothing of particular importance.

  “You,” she said, waving him over. “Do me a small favor?”

  He approached. “Sure, what do you need, Ma’am?”

  She tossed him the fob for her patrol craft. “Outside in the fire zone, black unmarked. Can you grab my shit out of the trunk? I need to get out of this dress.”

  A collective sigh fell through the room. She smirked, judging by the overacted nature of their disappointment that they were just cops being cops. He returned in about ten minutes with her things, and got to work sifting through the carpeting.

  Dawson emerged from the back. “Lieutenant, the bathroom looks untouched. We found some trace samples, but they appear to belong to the previous tenant from a few months ago.”

  “What’s their status?”

  “Moved north for work, we have another address and a place of employment on record. It all checked out.”

  She grumbled. “No connection with Nemsky then?”

  “Doesn’t look that way.” He pointed over his shoulder at the bathroom. “You can go now.”

  “Thanks.”

  Nina slid past the techs filing out of the bathroom, entering a cloud of chemical vapors. The smell brought back memories of the life she almost had. She spent a moment gazing at her reflection in the NetMini, wondering if his ghost needed electronics to talk to her.

  With a flick of her thumb behind her neck, the dress slid down around her ankles. She lifted it into a grip with her toes as she opened a comm panel to Samantha Cole.

  “Cole.” The woman appeared upset at the interruption until she saw Nina.

  The virtual image left no clue that her immediate supervisor stood nude in the bathroom of their target’s apartment.

  Nina checked the mirror for blood or damage and found none, then unrolled the ballistic suit.

  “Hardin mentioned you spotted Itai slipping in and out of Warner’s residence.” Nina’s toe searched the ballistic suit until she found the seam and slid a leg into the chilly material.

  “We had positive contact entering the facility at 07:40 this morning. We got him on four security cameras: parking deck, main lobby, elevator, and a hallway leading to Warner’s quarters.”

  Nina shifted her weight, putting her other leg in. Diplomatic Tower apartments each had a floor to themselves. Some of them had separate bubble elevators that expressed to the parking area and any security recorders inside were the property of whatever nation occupied that floor.

  “How long was he on site?”

  Cole looked to the right. “Subject exited the diplomatic residence at 08 hours 18 minutes. We got a good shot of his face on the way out, he looked pleased about something.”

  “Dammit.” Nina worked the suit up over her hips. “Any luck with the laser microphones?”

  “Still nothing, EM profile indicates active jamming. The place is considered foreign territory so there’s nothing we can do without probable cause.”

  She put her hands into the sleeves and shrugged the thing up and over her shoulders. “I hate that bullshit. We can do whatever we want to a citizen, but the foreigners get to hide behind obscure laws.” Nina took a calming breath. “Where did Korin go once he left?”

  “He crawled up his own ass and disappeared.” Cole sounded as frustrated as Nina felt.

  “What the hell does that mean?” Nina rolled her shoulders to seat the material and pulled the front flap closed.

  The plastic zipper went up to her jawline, wrapping her in shiny black.

  Cole shook her head. “We got him on the cameras from the Diplomatic Tower as well as some citycams.” Samantha looked perturbed. “For some reason, the mobile unit did not record him even though it was covering the same patch of street.”

  Nina stretched and tugged at the suit until it molded to her contours. “He shouldn’t have been recorded on one set of cameras and not another. That makes me think we are being toyed with. Did you verify the Karsson-Neimand checksum on the feed from the tower?”

  Cole looked baffled. “We did. They check out. The video integrity is unmodified as far as we can tell. It would take almost four years for a civilian computer system to fake 30 seconds of video with a believable K-N and with our hardware we would still spot it eventually.”

  Nina put her weapon harness on. “Then we need better hardware. Something isn’t right.” She stepped into her boots, putting one heel on the sink to fasten the straps. “Either the mobile unit’s video is full of shit, or the tower cams are being hacked. Two videos of the exact same place at the exact same time cannot show different images. One of them is fake.”

  “Oh, Lieutenant?” Cole looked up. “You asked for a trace on your NetMini before? We found something.”

  Nina froze with one hand on her coat. “What…” Her voice trailed to a whisper as she spoke in the real world and over her internal comm at the same time.

  Samantha brought up a shimmering cyberspace map, a field of black speckled with points of blue and white connected by a web of thin lines. “Someone went to a lot of trouble to hide the signal, but we found it.” Some lines changed from blue to white as an animation relayed the path of signal convergence. “Not only did it bounce through fourteen different countries, they attempted to conceal the data as innocuous NMCP traffic, trying to blend it into the background.” All the white lines flashed several times before returning to dark blue. “It dropped off before we could find the exact source, but I have a feeling it was coming out of the Division 2 complex.”

  Nina felt foolish beyond comprehension. Not only had someone fucked with her in the cruelest way imaginable, they did it from where she wanted to go. She kicked through the wall. Several techs in the bedroom jumped, peering through the cloud of dust. Her arms shook with unadulterated rage and she glared doom at no one in particular. Flakes of plaster and drywall clattered to the ground as she pulled her boot out of the hole.

  “Must have been a spider,” muttered one of the techs.

  “Think she got it?” Another voice asked before two men chuckled.

  Nina ignored them and looked at Cole’s virtual face. “Sam… Thanks.”

  “Okay…” She sounded baffled at the sudden sincerity. “I’ll let you know if we find anything else.”

  “Lieutenant?” The senior tech knocked on the bathroom door. “There are no prints or bio traces anywhere in the apartment; all we found were traces of male pheromone in the bedroom carpeting.”

  Nina exhaled. “A recently-shaved man, just enough for me to smell.”

  droplet of blood peeked from the corner of the little white-haired girl’s mouth as if checking to see if the coast was clear. It traced a crimson line across her cheek on its way to the ground. The weak breeze would have moved her hair had it not been plastered with grime. Eldon had seen a lot of awful things on active duty, but fate had up until now spared him the sight of a dead child. None of his training had prepared him for it. Not knowing what to do, he kept pulling at her shirt, trying to make her more comfortable.

  For ten minutes, not a word was spoken. The only break in the oppressive silence came in the form of a raven fluttering in to land on a nearby branch. Its head tilted toward and then away from them before it hopped and turned its back; a second later it flew off into the trees.

  Masaru’s brain searched for some way to justify what he had done. The circumstance of her trying to kill them all did little to dispel the guilt staring back at him from the shadows of his mind. His father would be disappointed to learn about the incident. Not that he had taken such a young life, but at
how he felt afterward.

  Kenny contained his feelings well, despite his brain using this as an allegory to prepare itself for the worst-case scenario of Alyssa in the Badlands. He held Amber as if shielding his daughter, not even realizing. Their embrace went from him protecting her to her consoling him without either one realizing it.

  “What the hell?” Eldon’s voice cracked through the silence.

  He pulled the shirt up, wiping his fingers over intact, but bloody, skin. He pushed down on where the cut should have been and the girl’s eyes snapped open. She sat up and grabbed his sidearm, but was too weak to dislodge it from the holster before he regained his composure and grabbed her arms.

  Katya all but fainted, Kenny jumped back, and Joey lifted an eyebrow. Masaru still had not looked. Amber screamed like the token bimbo from a zombie vid.

  Eldon pulled tiny hands away from the gun, pinning them together. “Whoa! Easy, kid…”

  Blood foamed through her teeth as she thrashed. She kicked him in the chest several times, succeeding in leaving only smeared toe prints on his armor. The strikes were so feeble they almost made no sound. Her attempt at shouting produced just a wheeze of a cough that spat up more blood. Eldon held her until she gave up and fell limp into the grass. Her icy blue eyes still burned with malice, though a slight trace of dread had joined it.

  Joey, unable to process what he just saw, laughed. “Now that’s just fucked up.”

  Katya rushed over and wiped the girl’s hair out of her face. The child made a half-hearted attempt to get her hands out of Eldon’s grip at the sight of the glowing pupil in the woman’s right eye.

  “There’s a metallic presence diffused evenly throughout her body, and some kind of metal cylinder attached to her spine just below the heart.”

  “And that means?” Eldon held his free hand out in a ‘please go on’ gesture.

  “I think nanobots. Lots of them, so many it’s almost liquid metal in her veins. More than I have ever seen. The shading makes it look like they are concentrating around her chest where she was hit. Almost like her blood is stimpak fluid.”