The Resurrected Man

by Sean Williams

  Her eyes scanned the verandah automatically—left then right, up and down then back to centre, a pattern as familiar to him as his own. The guidelines for relay VTC were simple and obvious: maximise data input by sweeping smoothly across a scene without lingering overlong or jerking between disparate points; avoid losing focus; keep blinking and other interruptions to a minimum; take nothing for granted.

  As her eyes roved, he caught a glimpse of her reflection in the window. Her hair was shorter than it had been when he had woken the first time, almost nonexistent under a matte-black skullcap that matched the severity of her expression, but he had no time to notice more than that. She glanced quickly away, as though nervous of seeing herself—or of me seeing her, he thought.

  “So ask something,” she said, sounding irritated.

  “The building has security?” It was the first thing that occurred to him.

  “Of course.”

  “Annoying little syf, too,” Fassini added.

  Marylin faced the door and pressed her left thumb to a button nearby. The overly expressive voice of a cheap AI answered her call almost immediately.

  “State your name, the name of the person you wish to visit and the purpose of your call.”

  “My name is Marylin Blaylock and I am an officer of the Earth Justice Commission,” she said. “Please disregard this inquiry.”

  Fassini indicated the verandah to their left. “Her apartment's on the second floor at the rear. Nothing too flash. Working for CRE obviously isn't all it's cracked up to be.”

  “Windows?” Jonah asked.

  “She has some, yes. The nearest building is too far away for direct access, but someone could've planted remote surveillance devices from there. Or from the ground. Nanos can get almost anywhere, these days.”

  “Access from the inside?”

  “There are three other apartments on her level. All open onto a central corridor that has clear line of sight. Security wouldn't have missed someone breaking in that way.”

  They headed for the rear of the building. “And I presume she lives alone?”

  “Yes. Her SO in Johannesburg was an ex-partner and she has no dependants.”

  “Has she been stalked?”

  “We asked about nuisance calls and she's had none. She doesn't remember if anyone's been following her. I get the feeling she's a touch agoraphobic. Nervous of open spaces, you know? Maybe a little paranoid, too. She'd notice if someone had staked her out, I'm sure.”

  “She trusted you, didn't she?”

  “Don't sound so surprised.” Fassini grinned and raised his right hand. The holographic tattoo of an EJC Public Officer flared briefly to life in his palm. “It's amazing what this thing will do, even for me.”

  They completed a circuit of the building. Jonah had seen nothing suspicious on the ground or wall surrounding the victim's apartment, and Marylin's visual scan had been thorough.

  “Any ideas, Jonah?” she asked.

  He concentrated. His thoughts were scattered, loosely connected. But the time had come to make a meaningful contribution; he had to do his best, if only to have a chance at finding out what had happened to his father.

  “Is this lack of evidence normal?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “The only way the Twinmaker breaks in anywhere is via d-mat when disposing of the bodies. But we know he observes his victims somehow, if only to make certain of their suitability.”

  “And that's all they have in common—their appearance?”

  “That and the fact they use d-mat. Their nationalities are randomly distributed. The timing of each murder is fairly erratic, as though limited by supply of victims rather than an overwhelming need to kill. The disposal sites have appeared random, too, until now.”

  “But the victims are linked by superficial data, mainly their appearance,” he said, letting his instinct guide him. “There's only one place he could get that sort of detail over that wide an area.”

  “You're thinking of GLITCH, aren't you?” she said.

  “Back doors do exist.”

  “Did. The ones you knew have been closed.”

  “There's no way to keep a network that big watertight. Too many people maintain it on a regular basis for none of them to be corrupt.”

  “Regardless whether that's true or not, we have no way to prove GLITCH is involved, so we have to keep looking for material evidence of some other method.”

  “That's eminently sensible, even though it's not what I'd do.”

  “I know, Jonah. And that's why I don't work for you any more, remember?”

  True, he thought with a wince. She'd never liked unorthodox methods, and the Banytis case, their last, had involved one too many. But she hadn't liked orthodoxy much, either, otherwise she would never have worked with him in the first place. He suspected that in only working by herself, for herself, applying her own standards, would she ever be completely happy.

  Still, she was an officer of the EJC now and she had to behave accordingly. Which meant that he did, too, for the time being. Her comment left him feeling as though he'd been publicly slapped down by a superior.

  Avoid the past, he reminded himself. Anything but that.

  “Let's move on,” Marylin said, heading for the car. She hit a touch-sensitive patch on the side of the car with a fist and the door popped open. “Should we visit NuSense?” she asked Fassini.

  “No. Suche-Thomas said she hasn't been to the office in a month, and that's something we can check with GLITCH now that we have her permission. Her friend—Emily Ahmadi—lives about fifteen minutes' drive from here. We can pay her a visit, if you like.”

  “I don't see the point. Her story fits the facts.” Marylin slid into the car, taking the seat facing rearward. Fassini sat opposite her, all gangly limbs and loose fabric.

  “That's it?” Jonah asked.

  “There's nothing for us here. Nothing new. Just confirmation of what we already know.”

  “There's value in that—”

  “Not at the moment, or under these circumstances. It's procedure, paperwork, getting us nowhere. Confirmation we already have up to our eyeballs. What we need is another angle, another way of looking at the Twinmaker crimes, another clue.”

  “That's where I come in, I guess.”

  “So I'm told.”

  With a faint electric whirr, the car slid out from the curb and performed an elegant three-point turn. Sunlight caught Marylin square in the eyes as it drove off down the street, dazzling her despite automatically tinting windows. She blinked and looked away.

  “So,” Jonah ventured, “what we have here is a murder victim who's still alive, who knows nothing about being copied and killed, and who shows no sign of having been stalked. The killer might use the GLITCH network to track them and the KTI network to kidnap them. He disposes of the victims by d-mat, too.” He didn't know enough about d-mat to probe the subtleties of the Twinmaker's modus operandi, but he did know how networks operated. “Have you traced the source address?”

  “We've tried,” she said. “The transmissions all pass through a node in the Pool that strips them of their stats. It's the same ID every time: ACHERON-P14-66782.”

  “Who runs it?”

  “We don't know. It doesn't seem to exist, as far as we can tell.”

  “It could be software, then—a virtual node generated by the killer to keep his transmissions anonymous. He shuts it down when he doesn't need it, which is why you can't find it now.”

  “It still needs to be registered with SciCon or else the Pool won't recognise it.”

  “Does the Pool recognise it?”

  “Not at the moment, no. The only time it seems to be used is to relay the bodies anonymously to the disposal sites.”

  “So it's a decoy,” Jonah said. “The Twinmaker has us looking for a fake ID when he could've just given us nothing.”

  “Actually, no, he couldn't have done that. There has to be some sort of return address listed, be it partial or full.
No booth will accept a d-mat transmission without a source to double-check the data. The risk of reconstitution errors creeping in is too high, otherwise.”

  “I see.” He was beginning to feel frustrated and did his best to keep the emotion out of his voice. “But if the bodies are being transmitted through the network via an unknown address, how is the killer doing it? Could he be faking the address so the receiving booth will accept the transmission, or is there another explanation I haven't thought of?”

  “Only that the transmission is coming from within KTI itself.”

  “Is that possible? And if not, why not?”

  “For the technical side of it, you'd have to ask QUALIA, but I'm told it's not an option.”

  “QUALIA?”

  “I monitor every transaction that passes through the KTI network,” the AI explained. “I would know if someone was transmitting data illegally from within.”

  “How can you be so sure of that?”

  “Because that is how I have been designed. My primary function is to oversee the operation of the network. Nothing passes through me without some sort of verification. To assume that something can bypass me is to assume that the network is fundamentally flawed. Diagnostic checks prove that this is not the case.”

  Jonah imagined QUALIA as the spider at the centre of a web—a web comprising the KTI network and the larger Pool surrounding it, much as the EJC's GLITCH network also operated as a kind of trap for criminals with the help of the global network of supercomputers. Although the metaphor was a gross oversimplification, he felt it was fundamentally correct.

  “Yet you can't trace the disposal transmissions. What does this suggest about your performance?”

  Before QUALIA could respond, Marylin broke in.

  “We've looked at this before, Jonah,” she said. “QUALIA can give you the files to browse through later, but you'll save time if you just take our word for it.”

  He quashed an automatic protest. She was probably right. While it was dangerous to accept a claim without seeing the evidence supporting it, he did have a lot to catch up on.

  “Okay, then,” he said. “Do you have something else you want to talk about?”

  She hesitated. “How about why we found you in the first place?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why now? Why here?”

  “You don't think it's coincidence?”

  “No. It's too unlikely. If we can work out why you were given to us the closer we'll be to knowing what the Twinmaker wants.”

  “I'd have thought that was fairly obvious: he wants to kill women who look like you.”

  “But why? What are his motivations, his fears, his triggers?”

  “I don't know. Profiling isn't my strong point.”

  “No, but you're good at teasing relevance out of superfluity. Isn't that what you used to say?”

  “Never believe everything you hear.” He grimaced; everything seemed superfluous. “You've had time to dig out my UGI and alert GLITCH. Have there been any recent hits?”

  “Not yet.”

  “He knows you've found me, then, and must've gone to ground. That's something we can say. Maybe he turned me in because he's finished what he set out to do.”

  “No more murders?” Fassini asked.

  “As I said—maybe.”

  “I doubt it,” Marylin said. “The crimes are escalating rather than diminishing in violence. The first victims had their throats cut and their bodies were mutilated after death. Now we see evidence of extensive torture prior to death; that's not a sign he's about to give in.”

  “Or self-destruct.” Jonah mentally clicked his tongue. “Still, he knows what you're doing. He's watching you try to find him and enjoying the fact that you haven't.”

  “Yet.”

  “He's confident you won't.”

  “He has some reason to be confident. All the information we have is distracting. He wants us to get caught up in the details. That way we'll miss the big picture—the why, the how, and ultimately, the who. I'm not saying we should ignore the victims. They're carefully chosen, murdered and disposed of with precision, and that precision tells something about the way the killer works. But it's the seemingly peripheral information that's potentially more telling: the WHOLE leaflets, the placement of the bodies, you.”

  “And the address of the node,” he said.

  “The node? How does that fit in?”

  “Acheron is the ancient Greek name for Hell.”

  “You think it's important?”

  “I don't know. But who's to say it isn't?”

  “I thought you didn't believe in hunches.”

  “I didn't say it was one. It's just—I'm still not thinking straight, not consistently. Sometimes I have to work backwards through the alphabet to see how I got from A to Z.”

  “I'm like that most mornings,” Fassini commented.

  “So the fact that the killer knows a bit about Greek mythology,” Marylin said, “might not be relevant at all.”

  “That's true,” he admitted.

  “Maybe ACHERON's a place,” said Fassini. “Wherever he's gone to ground.”

  “It could be in one of the isolationist states,” she mused. “GLITCH isn't as pervasive in Quebec, say, as it is here.”

  “Another WHOLE connection then,” Jonah said. “But surely hacking into KTI would be even more difficult from somewhere like that?”

  “Maybe. If no one else dies, then that would explain why.”

  “True. Or he really has called it a day.”

  “It's a big ‘if,’ though,” said Fassini.

  “And it still doesn't get us very far.” Marylin shook her head. “We'll need more than this to convince the big three to keep you on the payroll.”

  He nodded, then remembered that she couldn't see the gesture. He doubted she shared the same short-term goal as the “big three,” whoever they were. One of them was probably Herold Verstegen, eavesdropping on the VTC at that very moment. Jonah knew that even if he asked her outright what she thought about speaking with him again, she would very likely fudge the truth to ensure she sounded professional. He had no doubts she wasn't impressed.

  But he couldn't let that bother him. The exertion of thought—of thinking like an MIU officer in particular—was taking a high toll as it was. He felt lightheaded and tired, all too ready to return to the gentle blackness of the hibernation he could not remember.

  “Have you had any other hunches?” she prompted.

  He considered the question carefully. “Just one: I'll bet QUALIA's wrong.”

  “About what?”

  “About there being no way to send a transmission from within KTI.”

  “Hang on.” Fassini raised a hand. “If ACHERON is the source of the transmissions, how can it be inside KTI and outside at the same time?”

  “ACHERON could still be part of KTI,” Jonah responded, “an isolated sub-branch or something. Or the killer could be bouncing the transmission out of KTI then back in by this external node, wherever it is. Whichever way he's doing it, it'd surely be easier than hacking in entirely from the outside. That'd require security breaks in a dozen places, right along the line. It's not feasible that so many would have been unnoticed.”

  “But not impossible,” Marylin said.

  “No. Just more unlikely than the alternative.”

  “Which is impossible,” said QUALIA.

  “So you say,” Jonah countered.

  “I am not mistaken,” the AI stated, “and, before you ask, I would never lie.”

  “Never?”

  “I do possess the capacity to utter falsehoods—when a falsehood will cause less harm than the truth, for instance, or when security would otherwise be compromised. I could not, however, lie to abet a murderer.”

  Jonah pondered this.

  “What if you were unaware that he or she was committing a murder?” he asked.

  “I would know.”

  “How?”

  “I can
state with absolute certainty that since my activation there have been no unorthodox uses of the KTI d-mat network that I have not personally supervised. In each case, nothing illegal was accomplished as a result.”

  “So there have been unorthodox uses?” Jonah seized the admission with a feeling akin to triumph—albeit a small one. “What sort, and when?”

  “I am not at liberty to tell you. The details of each are recorded in an archive accessible only with Director Schumacher's personal authorisation.”

  “Why did they take place, then?”

  “For research purposes.”

  “Research into what?”

  “That also is restricted information.”

  “I thought it might be.”

  “Would you like me to ask Director Schumacher if he will allow you to view the contents of the archive?”

  “Do you think he'll say yes?”

  “I am in no position to predict Director Schumacher's likely behaviour in this instance.”

  “And I guess that means no. It's probably not worth the effort.” Jonah paused, then added: “But on second thoughts, yes, do ask him. I'll be interested to see if he does give us permission—or doesn't.”

  Marylin's voice was shocked. “Jonah, you don't think—”

  “Why not? Has he been investigated?”

  “Yes, of course. Everyone has. He's clear.”

  “I don't think we can rule him out entirely. He could be part of a conspiracy, at least. Whatever's going on in KTI, it'd be much easier to cover up from above.”

  “That's insane,” she countered. “Worse—it's paranoid. Why would he actively assist someone whose actions threaten everything he's built? He's Schumacher, for Christ's sake.”

  “So? Is that any different from accusing me of the murders?”

  “You know it is. You had both motive and opportunity, if not the actual means. Schumacher, on the other hand, has a strong motive not to do it, which cancels out the means. Don't you see how crazy you're sounding?”

  “No. Personally, I think I'm being open-minded.”