He was on Earth. That explained the weight—but the mystery of how he had come to be there, and why, only deepened.
He sniffed. There was another smell he recognised: autumnal and earthy, but sweet, hauntingly familiar…
“Do you need a hand?” Marylin leaned around the edge of the doorway, her partner, Fassini, behind her. “The controls of the chair are on your right armrest. If you can't operate them, ask QUALIA to do it by remote.”
He stared at them for a long moment, his mind completely blank, before realising what she'd said. A small joystick on the arm of the chair was indeed within his reach. The wheelchair jerked forward at a touch, out of the booth and into a glass-walled shelter he recognised as one not far from his unit in Faux Sydney. He had used it many times to prevent his father from tracing his movements. The booth in their home had always been a compromise between convenience and privacy.
He stared around him, only slowly coming to accept the reality of where he was.
Through the windows he saw the familiar landscape of half-submerged buildings blocking out the horizon. Each hexagonal block with sloping, grass-covered sides housed six identical, self-contained units. Black solar panels, looking like hi-tech palm leaves, sprouted from the summit of each cluster, beneath a single flowerlike rotor to harness the power of the wind; invisible below were geothermal sinks spreading like roots into the ground. There were no roads, only paved pathways snaking the distances between the units; for every six units there was one cluster of public d-mat booths. Horticultural robots roved an expanse of lawn that stretched as far as the eye could see, trimming and watering the plants as they went. The sun was high and bright in a cloudless blue sky, the only features remaining to suggest that this region of Australia had once been a desert.
He was home.
Fassini stepped forward. The wheelchair echoed Jonah's uncertainty as he edged nervously away. The agent raised his hands in reassurance.
“I just want to free your arms,” he said. “How are you feeling?”
Jonah let him approach. His head was light and fragile, as though it might crack open at the slightest touch. He shook it.
“Can you talk?”
“I—yes.” His mouth and lips were dry. The sound of his voice was loud in his ears. “It seems so.”
“Do you know where you are?”
“Of course. Nothing's changed.”
“That's the point, isn't it?” Marylin asked, standing beside him.
“I guess. Doesn't make it any easier to believe how long has passed, though.”
“It looks better than I thought it would.”
He glanced up at her, remembering then that she had never seen his unit from the outside. Their two trips together had been via the private booth inside. They had left that way, too. If Lindsay had been home on either occasion, they would never have gone there at all.
Then he recalled that she had seen it from this viewpoint—when the body of the latest victim had been found. Maybe, he thought, she was just being polite.
“What are we doing here?”
“We're going to take a look in the unit,” Marylin said. Her eyes watched him closely, glittering. “Will you cooperate?”
He didn't reply immediately. Now that his arms were free he could see how they had changed. His elbow joints were no longer obscene knots of bone covered by parchment skin. His arms had filled out remarkably. The same with his legs and abdomen, beneath the robe. And his heart beat more firmly than it had before.
He was still ill, but much further along the road to recovery than he had any right to be.
He checked his overseer. “This isn't possible.”
Marylin lifted her chin. “You're not going to help us?”
“No, this.” He indicated his legs. “According to my overseer, I've only been asleep ten hours. I can't have healed that fast.”
“Ten hours?” Realisation dawned in her face. “Add another six. You've lost some time.”
“How?”
It was her turn to hesitate. “We'll fill you in later.”
He accepted that for what it was—a stall. The only way he knew of to lose time was by travelling via d-mat. Six hours was extreme, though, unless he had travelled off–Earth and back. He resolved to look into the mystery later. For now, the fact that his health had been restored, in part, was enough to deal with. That, and being in Faux Sydney again.
“We need your help, Jonah,” she said. “Your housekeeper still won't answer our inquiries.”
“I could've given you access from orbit, if you'd asked.”
“Yes.”
She didn't say anything more, but she didn't really need to. The MIU needed information, and his memory needed to be jogged. The whole expedition was just a means to the latter end. Fortunately, that suited him too. Although his reasons were different and the thought of returning to the unit was undoubtedly disturbing, he wanted to see this through as badly as she did.
“Lead the way,” he said.
She glanced at Fassini, and Jonah thought he saw a half-raised eyebrow. He wondered if he had capitulated more easily than she had expected. If so, damn her. She was the one playing games, not him.
It had been sixteen hours since the VTC and the conversation with Verstegen and Whitesmith that had preceded it. The file on his father would probably have arrived, but he noted that she had not mentioned it.
She moved to the exit of the shelter. He followed her in the wheelchair. Fassini fell in two metres back. As the door slid aside, a wave of hot air rolled over them, making him sneeze again.
“If you see anything odd, Jonah, sing out.”
He nodded and they headed along the nearest path. Marylin walked beside him. He was as aware of her as he was of his surroundings. Her face was pale and free of makeup beneath the severe, black skullcap. Her EJC uniform looked out of place on her and would no doubt have been stifling in the heat had it not been made of thermoactive material. A holstered taser hung from her belt. She was maintaining the role of a Public Officer to the letter, not allowing herself to be the woman he had once known.
He didn't try to start a conversation. Instead, he leaned back into the chair as it trundled along the path, its rocking motion soothing his aching muscles. Rosebeds had been added since his last jaunt outside. Row after row of severely pruned bushes reached like splayed skeletal hands up out of the ashy soil in eerie contrast to how he guessed they would look in summer.
He crested the side of his hill and followed the path winding around and over the earth-wall into the centre. The low-frequency humming of the rotor above was the only sound. Every now and again he passed through the shadow of a solar panel, giving relief from the sunlight. The relief was only relative, however. Even in the shade the temperature was in the high thirties.
The dimple at the top of the hill contained the stem of the solar panels and six black, high-security doorways. His had been sealed with warning tape which Marylin pulled aside with a sharp tug.
“Do you remember the entrance code?”
He nodded. “What if I don't?”
“We'll have local security override it by remote.”
“So why ask?”
“Just testing.” She waved him forward. “Get us out of this heat.”
He manoeuvred the wheelchair until he could reach the smooth surface of the door. His palmprint triggered an automatic security system that requested he input his master code sequence for verification. He didn't hesitate to provide it. If the MIU had bugged his overseer there wasn't much he could do about it. And his entry code wasn't worth much, as Marylin had pointed out.
“Potato,” he said, and typed in, “ghoughgheighghough,” entering the characters individually to complete the sequence. When he had finished, the door buzzed once, warning him to remove his hand, then slid aside. The corridor revealed within was gloomily lit and also barred with cautionary tape.
He didn't move to enter. “I presume you checked for nanoware?”
&nb
sp; “Thoroughly,” Marylin said from behind him. “Unless one of your cleaning agents has mutated and turned nasty in the last couple of hours, we should be safe. I wouldn't be here otherwise.”
He trundled forward, over the threshold and through the second streamer of tape. Lights flickered on in the entrance hall as the transparent inner door opened.
The first thing he noticed was that items had been rearranged. Not to a great extent, but enough to allow access to all potential hiding places. The room was otherwise exactly as it had been, decorated in earthy browns and greens that mimicked the world outside.
Three waist-high wooden statues faced the entrance, flanked by unframed African landscapes painted in watercolours. On either side of him were two earthenware pots filled with soil that had once held palms; the plants must have died long ago and been cleaned away by the housekeeper. The air was cool and still, with just a hint of herbal potpourri.
“Are you going to let us past?” Marylin nudged the rear of the wheelchair.
He started from his examination of the room, not realising that he'd stopped moving. “Of course.” He wheeled forward a couple of metres. “Did you find anything?”
“Nothing incriminating, no. Should we have?”
“There's a cache of surveillance bugs in a hollow lampshade.”
“Superseded and not illegal any more, you'll be relieved to know.” She nodded. “They're where you left them.”
He took one last look at the room, then moved on, through an arched entranceway and into the dining area. The floor was tiled in slate, like that of the entrance hall; the table had a glass top and legs of polished brass. The matching chairs cradled cushions woven from Tasmanian hemp.
Marylin followed him, walking slowly to match his pace. Fassini remained in the entrance hall, blocking the only physical exit and keeping a decidedly low profile. Jonah assumed that he had been told to keep out of the way while Marylin showed the prisoner around.
Scanning the glass and metal surfaces, Jonah asked: “Fingerprints?”
“None in here. The housekeeper erased them from any exposed surface. We found some on crockery in the cupboards—” she nodded in the direction of the kitchen, visible over a high pine counter “—and more on hardcopy files.”
“Whose prints?”
“Yours, mostly, but a couple of Lindsay's.”
“No one else's?”
“I'd mention them if we had.”
He nodded slowly, absently twisting the joystick of the wheelchair. He was reluctant to move any further into the unit. From the dining room and kitchen, the next room was the lounge and his first sight of the d-mat terminal since his awakening.
That would be the test. The memories of his missing week were locked in his head as firmly as they had been two days ago. Although, of course, InSight might have erased them completely, in which case they would never return. He only hoped that something, anything, such as being in the unit now, or studying the details of the EJC investigation when the MIU finally provided them, would trigger a recollection; one would be enough to give him hope for more.
Part of him was reluctant to push through that barrier, though. Once through there would be no going back. He felt like a necromancer, afraid of calling up something he would be unable to put back down.
“Jonah?”
The edge he heard in her voice could have been concern, but not necessarily for him. More likely for the job he was supposed to be doing for them, for the time ticking away.
He didn't answer her directly. “House?”
“Yes, Jonah.” The voice of the unit's housekeeping AI was a contralto of indeterminate sex.
“I'd like you to retrieve your maintenance records from April 11, 2066, to now, and copy them to an unrestricted directory. On no account will you erase or alter any archived data until otherwise instructed by me.”
“Understood.”
“Also, do you remember Marylin Blaylock?”
Marylin glanced at him.
“I have that person on file, yes,” said the housekeeper.
“She is to be granted access to the data I just asked you to copy, along with any other information she requires to verify the authenticity of, or to clarify, that data. No one else. Her security clearance is to be downgraded to Blue-2.”
“Understood.”
“Downgraded?” Marylin asked in surprise.
“You used to have full access,” he explained in an aside. “It would've talked to you if you'd only asked. Not one of your flunkeys, though.”
“So how much access do I have now?”
He waved her quiet. “House? You are to accept no incoming d-mat transmissions unless I am their source. Anyone else attempting to use this address will be denied entry and requested to contact me for clarification.”
“Citizen Lindsay Carlaw is to be expunged from the record?”
Jonah winced. “Yes. He is deceased.”
“I will expunge his name from the entry record. Otherwise, your instructions will not alter my response to incoming d-mat transmissions.”
Jonah had half-expected that. Access had been limited to Lindsay and himself. Since Lindsay was dead that implied that the body of the woman had been d-matted into the unit under his own security code.
“Lastly, then, all previous security codes are to be erased upon our departure. I will provide you with replacements before then. If anyone attempts to use the superseded codes, even me, you will immediately notify Officer Blaylock or Officer Whitesmith of the EJC Matter-transference Investigative Unit. All security preferences other than the ones I have mentioned are to remain unchanged. Understood?”
“Yes, Jonah.”
He slumped back into the chair. It was done. The MIU would have the data they wanted and his security now had a loophole for them to pry open, if they wanted the lot. But at least he had taken the first small step towards proving his innocence.
Marylin was watching him from the other side of the table. Her expression was unreadable.
“Thanks,” she said. Her tone was ambiguous, too.
Before she could say anything else—or he could change his mind—he directed the wheelchair around a dividing wall and into the lounge.
The booth stood open on the far side of the room. Jonah had expected to see some sign of the grisly remains it had contained, but it was spotless, as was the floor around it. Clearly, once the MIU away team had examined the body and recorded every detail, the housekeeper had been allowed to dispose of the mess. Nonetheless it captured his attention; in his mind's eye, he still saw the blood.
The booth was a single, the bare minimum required of units in Faux Sydney, but sufficient for two people who had led separate lives—especially when one of them hadn't used d-mat at all. Its interior was little different to that of any other compact unit: matte black and ribbed with the many sensors and emitters required in order for it to function as both a transmitter and a receiver. The only distinguishing feature was that he had replaced the customary mirror with a single light-emitting diode that normally glowed green. The light was off.
“It's powered–down,” Marylin said, following the direction of his gaze. “We ran a diagnostic check through it, hardware and software. It passed.”
Jonah accepted her word on that; he doubted that the Twinmaker would infiltrate the booths where he planned to dispose of his victims' bodies.
“You can have it if you want,” he said. “I don't think I'll be using it again.”
“I couldn't afford the operating costs.” She pulled a disgruntled face. “You should be able to off-load it easily enough. The secondhand market is a seller's dream at the moment.”
He forced himself to think about something other than the dismembered remains he had glimpsed three days before. “The cost hasn't come down much, then?”
“No. They keep promising a next generation, but it keeps getting delayed. You know how it goes.”
He did. When KTI had gone public, it had introduced d-mat to a
sceptical market slowly, initially targeting just the rich and influential. Costs and turnaround times had been high per journey, more than conventional forms of transport around the globe. Only for those who wanted to travel off-Earth had the technology been cost-efficient. But the word had spread, arousing interest in the general population. The second generation, released five years later, allowed trips that had been cheaper than air-travel and of slightly lesser duration than an intercontinental flight. More people had begun to show interest. The third and fourth improvements had killed the large air carriers forever, and the fifth had rendered most forms of long-distance road transport obsolete. Only for short journeys did the car remain a feasible option in terms of both time and cost.
But it was still too expensive for most people to lease and operate private booths, let alone own them outright. That was reserved for the wealthy and the powerful. Most people made do with public booths maintained by local councils, paying a modestly high fee charged by KTI for the use of its network. While KTI retained the stranglehold on the network, or until a new generation drove the costs down even further, that situation was unlikely to change.
Whether the delay was caused by design difficulties—which Jonah could understand, having enough of an idea how the process worked to appreciate its complexity—or by greed, didn't matter. D-mat wasn't going anywhere in a hurry, and the social changes it had already engendered were likely to be permanent. Those few who disagreed had been in the minority three years ago, and he felt safe to assume that their position had only worsened during his hibernation. In the case of such quasi-legal organisations as WHOLE, that would make them more desperate.
But did it make them killers?
The placement of WHOLE literature at each disposal site in such a way that it could not be missed certainly implied an awareness of WHOLE's activities and goals, but Jonah was unconvinced that it proved the Twinmaker's involvement in anti-d-mat activities. Just as plausible was the theory that it was another smokescreen, an attempt to keep the MIU looking in the wrong direction. Until more evidence surfaced, he intended to keep his mind open as to the motives and beliefs of the killer—especially if it was him.
The Resurrected Man Page 17
