The Resurrected Man

by Sean Williams

  “Yes.” That was true. Where it would lead she could only guess.

  At least she still had access to VTC and the MIU workspace. If she really wanted to get on with work, there was nothing stopping her. It wouldn't be long before they reached their destination and the opportunity would be gone.

  Sighing, she brought up the file on the victim and went through it one last time. Forensic examination of the body had revealed particles consistent with those found at its last known location, plus a dozen likely to have come from a low-gravity environment. The latter accorded with analysis of the capillaries surrounding her partially healed wounds, which indicated that the woman had spent a significant amount of time before death in free-fall. Whether she had actually died there was difficult to tell; the time her body had spent on the floor of Jonah's d-mat booth had caused the blood to settle in the usual manner, otherwise it would have provided an important clue.

  There were ways around that. The interview of the murdered woman's original would reveal whether she had been in orbit or deep space recently; if she hadn't, that would reduce the number of locations the killer could have kept her to a more manageable number.

  But only relatively, Marylin thought with a grimace. There were thousands of probes and stations equipped with d-mat, any one of which could have provided the Twinmaker with a suitable site. In the late twenty-first century, there were easily enough inhabited places across the solar system to hide one man and a body. Especially if he had help…

  She pushed the thought from her mind. This wasn't the first time a low-gravity environment had been implicated in the Twinmaker killings, nor the idea of conspiracy raised. On the face of it, the killer's resources did seem prodigious. Not only was he able to infiltrate KTI's supposedly impregnable defences, but he also either owned or had access to a safe haven off-Earth; it was therefore easier to ascribe such feats to a group of people rather than to one. But the model was too fragile. The chances of a conspiracy disintegrating increased with every new person added, the greatest leap being from one to two. In her opinion, anyone possessing even half the Twinmaker's intelligence would never tolerate such a risk.

  He was a genius. She was certain of that fact, and never let herself forget it. An amoral, solitary genius, who, if the MIU profilers were correct, wouldn't even work with a copy of himself. That certainly explained why he might have kept such a copy in a state near death for three years and erased a significant amount of the copy's memory simply to keep his pursuers off his back—if Odi was right. And the only way to tell that was to see what the search through GLITCH's archived records revealed. If Jonah's UGI produced a match, then that was confirmation enough. There was no way he could have been in the bath and roaming the world, free, at the same time.

  They drove in silence for ten minutes, she unable to hide her unease and he apparently content for the moment to leave her be. The car took a side ramp off the freeway and slid down into the suburbs. A series of right-angle turns through unremarkable streets finally brought them to a two-metre-high perimeter fence topped with nanowire. The wire was invisible; only the occasional glint of sunlight reflecting off taut threads revealed that it was there at all. Anyone trying to climb the wall at night would lose a finger or worse before realising their mistake.

  The car swung through an open gate in the wall without stopping. No doubt it had been checked by some sort of intelligent system on the way in, identifying the vehicle, its occupants and their destination.

  Inside, their surroundings became decidedly more cramped. The streets were narrower, the buildings taller. Much was concealed behind shrubbery and trees, and the sidewalks were empty, but there was no hiding the fact that a lot of people were crammed into a relatively small space. Unlike other similar suburban blocs Marylin had visited, though, it looked fairly clean; either the collective owners still took its upkeep seriously or it was too new for rot to have taken a visible hold.

  “Not far now,” Fassini said. “You ready?”

  She nodded stiffly. Whitesmith hadn't called, which was probably a good thing. “I'll be fine.”

  “You sure?”

  “It hasn't been that long, Jason.” The last time she had been on clone patrol had been following the discovery of the Twinmaker's seventh victim, almost a year earlier. Nowhere near long enough.

  He craned his neck as the car began to slow. “This is it: number twenty-six.”

  She followed his gaze and saw a white-painted triangular building four storeys high partially concealed behind a giant oak. The yard was unadorned apart from the tree, a local variant of permagreen lawn and a hedge acting as a front fence. Low-upkeep, she thought, perfect for people with demanding lifestyles, or for a society too self-involved to bother maintaining its immediate environment.

  “Looks better in real life,” Fassini commented on the view.

  “Everything does, Jason.”

  “She's in Unit 14. The public booth she used to get home from Africa is just up the street, around the corner. KTI techs examined it earlier today, but we can check it again on the way back if you like.”

  The car came to a smooth halt outside the block of units. A knot deep in her stomach started to twist. She reduced the MIU workspace to an unobtrusive icon and reached for the briefcase.

  He unsealed the door. “After you,” he said. “You're the boss.”

  “Keep reminding me.” She took a deep breath and squeezed past him, back out into the heat.

  The interview took place in an editing suite, where a project midway through had been interrupted by their entrance. Yoland Suche-Thomas was an easygoing woman who dressed about the house in a silk dressing gown that had seen too many manual washes. Light reflected off her fish-white scalp, revealing slight indentations where a professional VTC helmet had rested moments before. The helmet now lay on its side by a bank of card readers, a red light blinking to indicate that it was on standby. Inside the helmet—which provided noninvasive inputs to subdermal implants—it would've been difficult to hear or see anything apart from whatever the woman had been playing when they'd arrived. Now, as though the helmet resented the intrusion of reality, its blinking light kept catching Marylin's eye, breaking her concentration.

  Marylin was profoundly relieved that the woman had no hair. From a distance that would make them look even more alike, but from her perspective it made the woman look unfamiliar. She still associated herself with blonde hair—with the features the Twinmaker hunted.

  “Off-Earth?” Suche-Thomas said in response to Fassini's question. “No, not at all. If I needed to go somewhere like that, I'd VTC for sure.”

  “The trip worries you?”

  “Well, you know—d-mat is complicated enough down here, not to mention expensive, without all the interchanges you need to go through to get into space.”

  “It's only marginally more difficult, I'm told,” Fassini reassured her. “Most of the work is done by the time you've left the booth. From there it's just a matter of routing the data, which is essentially the same anywhere.”

  The woman smiled as though she thought he was lying, or greatly oversimplifying the truth, when in fact he wasn't. “I know the risk is small,” she said, “but the thought of bouncing around in transit still bothers me.”

  “You're not alone there, Ms. Suche-Thomas.”

  “Tell me about it.” She rolled her eyes. “I went to Africa with a friend of mine. She'd been nagging for months to meet my ex-partner, but neither of them like to use the booths.”

  “Your ex-partner?”

  “Yes. Nari and I parted some time ago, but we're still friends. Emily was watching an old CRE I put together for our separation, and thought she might like to start up a friendship. Or whatever.” The woman smiled disarmingly. Her openness regarding personal affairs was a welcome change to the many resistant interviewees Marylin had encountered in her career. “Anyway, it boiled down to which one would cave first—use d-mat, I mean. In the end I forced the issue by taking Emily with m
e. Has she been rerouted too?”

  “We'll check. Can you give us her surname?”

  “Ahmadi. Only she'll be even more worried if what you say turns out to be true.”

  “We don't know that it is, yet,” said Marylin. “We can let you know. Obviously we'd appreciate it if you could keep the information to yourself, regardless of Ms. Ahmadi's feelings.”

  “Sure.” The woman tipped back her head and beamed. “What do I look like? An alarmist? This is just the sort of information WHOLE would love to get their hands on.”

  “Exactly.” Fassini returned Suche-Thomas' grin with an air of casual coconspiracy.

  Marylin rubbed her eyes and leaned back into the seat, letting Fassini do most of the work, her thoughts punctuated by the flashing light. As expected, the interview was turning out to be a dead-end: the woman hadn't been off-Earth, had only visited her ex-lover for a holiday, had not been followed that she could recall, and seemed in every respect oblivious to the fact that a copy of her had been horrifically murdered, just like the others. As the d-mat hangover—exacerbated by sudden shifts in temperature from the EJC building to the car to the woman's apartment—became a stabbing headache that Marylin's endorphin regulators could barely keep in check, she found herself wishing she hadn't got out of bed that morning. Or, perhaps more effectively, hadn't gone to bed at all. While she had been absent from MIU-ACOC, she had been relegated to shitwork without her realising.

  Worst of all was the thought she couldn't shake: I've seen your naked body, Yoland Suche-Thomas—tortured beyond recognition—and it looked just like mine…

  Finally it was over. As the woman showed them cheerfully to the door, Marylin instructed the car to meet them at the curb. They'd had to find a spot in a car-park a block away from the woman's unit, as they were forbidden by local ordinances from parking on the street. She didn't want to waste another moment in Houston, if she could avoid it.

  “That seemed to go okay,” Fassini said as they waited for the car to arrive. “No problems extracting information, anyway.”

  She just nodded, then groaned as a red light began to flash in her primary visual field.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “No. Yes. Hang on; I've got a call. Who is it?” she asked her overseer, using prevocals.

  “Public Officer Odi Whitesmith,” responded the gender-neutral voice.

  She ignored a twinge of apprehension. “Put him through.”

  Whitesmith's face appeared in the window, framed by one of the cubicles of the MIU forensic lab in Artsutanov Station. “Hello, Marylin. How's it going down there?”

  “Ahead of schedule. We've finished the interview.”

  “Damn.” He frowned briefly. “Where are you, then?”

  “Still at her address.”

  “Better than nothing, I guess. Hold on for a second while I give you the latest news.”

  “Okay.” She sighed inaudibly. “What is it?”

  “We've sent QUALIA on a quick pass through the GLITCH archives to see if anything showed up right away.”

  “And?”

  “We have two hundred and seventy-five hits on Jonah's UGI.”

  Her mind tripped over the number. Such searches usually took hours to find even a handful of positive matches. “There's no doubt?”

  “None. In fact, there are probably ten times that number waiting to be found. Errors do occur, but not on that scale.”

  “So—”

  “So, Marylin, there's another Jonah McEwen loose out there, and we're hot on his heels at last.”

  She was silent for a long moment as she absorbed the information. The GLITCH network existed solely to track the movement of people across the globe by means of visual triggers and Universal GLITCH Identifiers. If Jonah's new UGI had been detected, then that meant that he had been somewhere other than his unit's spa in the last three years. Two hundred and seventy-five times, at least. Evidence didn't come much harder than that. “How long until we can trace the duplicate's current location?”

  “GLITCH has come up with nothing so far, but QUALIA will keep trying. Later today we hope to have an answer. All he has to do is walk into the open and he'll be picked up.”

  “It can't be that easy, Odi. Why would the Twinmaker lead us to Jonah when he knew it'd be so simple for us to get hold of him? There must be something else, something we're not seeing.”

  “You might be right. But if we're being misled, then it must be for a reason, and I for one intend to find out what that reason is.”

  Something in his voice nagged at her. “Have you told Trevaskis about this yet?”

  “Not yet. I will when we have some concrete data.”

  “That could be a while. You're taking a risk, working without his approval—”

  “How? We're still looking into his skin theory back in Faux Sydney. The fact that it's not getting anywhere is hardly my problem. At least I've made some progress, and stand to make some more very soon.” The image of his face smiled evilly. “If your little friend doesn't know anything about what's going on, I'll eat a raw steak in Thailand.”

  “You're talking about Jonah, I presume.”

  “Who else?”

  She suppressed a sharp retort. Your little friend. He should have known better. “Have you started interviewing him yet?”

  “Bahr's reading him his rights at the moment. I thought I'd take the opportunity to check up on you, let you know what's going on. See what you uncovered.”

  “I appreciate it, Odi, but—” Beside her, Fassini touched her elbow. The car had arrived. “We found nothing and I'm keen to get out of here. Can debriefing wait until later?”

  “Debriefing can. But first I want to run something else by you, before you leave.”

  Here it comes, she thought. Fassini opened the door for her and she swung inside, putting the briefcase of equipment she hadn't even used on the floor. “Better make it quick, then.”

  “Basically, I've decided to give Jonah the opportunity to assist us in the investigation.”

  All thoughts of leaving suddenly vanished. She held up a hand to stop her partner as he began to program the car to return to the EJC office.

  “You must be joking,” she said to Whitesmith.

  “Far from it.”

  “Why?”

  “Lateral thinking, Marylin. Finding him like this has put everyone in a spin. We weren't expecting it. We don't know what it means. But it opens up a wealth of possibilities we've never considered before. Like putting him to work and seeing what he comes up with.”

  She shook her head. “It won't work.”

  “Why not? He's been involved in this sort of investigation before.”

  “But that was different.” Before. “He could be a serial killer, Odi—”

  “He isn't. You know as well as I do there's no way he could've committed the murders himself. It's the other him we're after.”

  “And you know you're only splitting hairs. Whichever one it is, how can we possibly trust him?”

  “Because we have no choice. He's our closest link to the Twinmaker. There's something in him with the potential to become a psychopath. We need to know what that is and how to deal with it before someone else dies. I don't want him walking away too soon.

  “And besides, Marylin, we're not trusting him. Far from it. We're giving him the rope to hang himself. It makes sense if you look at it that way.”

  She neither agreed nor disagreed, unable for the moment to get past the thought of being that much closer to him, after so long spent first avoiding him then trying to find him.

  “Do I have any say in this?” she asked.

  “Not really. Not about him being involved, anyway.”

  “Have you spoken to Jonah himself about it yet?”

  “Not yet. Give me another five minutes and I will have.”

  “He'll like it even less than me.”

  “We have leverage over him. Anyway, if he wants to maintain his innocence much longer, he's going t
o have to give us a reason to believe him. He'd be a fool to say no.”

  “Don't be so confident. He's smart enough to know that we need him, too. If you try to force him like you did last time, the two of you'll lock horns and nothing will get done.”

  He nodded. “I know, now. He's like you in that respect.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Just don't you lose sight of the real issue here. It's not whether we treat Jonah fairly or not. It's catching the Twinmaker. Everything else is secondary. I don't know how you can even consider sticking up for him, given what he's probably been involved in.”

  “I'm not sticking up for him, Odi. I just think you're taking a big gamble.”

  “Hardly. He's going to be bed-bound for a couple of days yet. I don't see how much damage he can do from there.”

  “Then what good is he going to be?”

  “Come on, Marylin.” Whitesmith's tone of voice was reproving. “We'll give him someone to liaise with by VTC, maybe show him a few unimportant sites and so on. Work him into it gradually.”

  She resisted the temptation to repeat her question. If they were going to give him access to trivial data only, there was no point having him involved at all. Unless just by having him onboard Whitesmith hoped Jonah would let something slip—some apparently unimportant detail they hadn't picked up before. Which did make a kind of sense, she forced herself to concede. But that didn't get rid of the fact that he was inextricably linked to the Twinmaker; whoever liaised with him would be constantly reminded of the fact.

  “If he agrees, when do you see this happening?”

  “Soon. Very soon, in fact.”

  “Do you have an itinerary in mind?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I presume you realise how hard it's going to be to find someone suitable to act as a liaison?”

  “All too well. It needs to be someone who knows both the case and Jonah well enough to spot any slips. Someone I can trust to be discrete and not screw it up.”

  “You're asking a lot,” she said, then went cold as the realisation of where he was headed hit home.

  “Exactly,” he said. “That's why I called you.”