The Resurrected Man

by Sean Williams

  But all that Bresland found was more blood: a large pool of it at the end of the streaks. The conclusion was obvious. Someone had been injured at or near that place, then had moved or been dragged to the d-mat booth. Recently, too. The blood was still wet.

  Bresland knelt to examine the pool, and saw, not far away, a sneaker half-visible behind a rack of hydroponic potatoes.

  “Dupk,” she whispered, moving closer to examine her find. The sneaker was occupied. One denim-clad leg stretched across the floor, out of sight behind the rack of plants. Bresland tried to swing the rack with one hand, but found it too heavy. Putting her UDW temporarily in its holster, making Marylin wince with apprehension, she used both hands to lever the weight to one side.

  The rack shifted with a low grating noise. Another leg appeared, then the hem of an active jacket not dissimilar to the one Jonah had been wearing.

  Then Marylin realised it was Jonah. He was lying face down in the corner behind the rack as though he had crawled there to hide. He didn't move.

  This time even Whitesmith was silent.

  Bresland drew her UDW once she had full access to the space behind the rack. Moving carefully forward, she stretched out a hand and rolled Jonah over. Her glove came away bloody. Jonah's eyes stared glassily up at Bresland, sightless and wide. Visible between the lapels of his jacket were the bullet holes where he had been shot three times in the chest. He was undoubtedly dead.

  Dead.

  It took a while to sink in. The routine examination of the scene, performed by remote from ACOC, hardly registered. The rest of the dome was searched and found to be empty. Samples of the spilled blood were taken and forensic agents crawled over every surface. Backup was organised from the nearest settlement in order to keep free the one booth at the site. Jonah's silent body—not equipped with the inbuilt alarm standard to EJC officers that would have made finding him much easier—was wrapped and prepared for transport.

  Marylin went through the motions with all the awareness of a cog in an antique clock, operating under the usual assumption that getting people and equipment to the site was the most important consideration. But the preliminary reports from pathology agents quickly put paid to that idea.

  “We have cellular activity in the body's hippocampi,” Indira Geyten reported, snapping Marylin out of her daze.

  “You mean he might be—?”

  “No. He's dead, but his brain might not be. Not entirely. That's the area most affected by InSight.”

  “We'll bring him in ASAP, then,” Whitesmith said. “Give QUALIA a Resurrection order while we're at it. I want him back on deck within two hours.”

  “But he's not covered—”

  “I don't care. Get approval direct from Verstegen if you have to. We need to know what the hell is going on, and he might be the only one who can tell us.”

  Geyten nodded and severed the line. Bresland was ordered to drop everything and get the corpse into the booth. Within ten minutes, the body was on its way.

  Marylin baulked at that point. Catching Whitesmith's eye, she indicated the operations centre's exit and mimed drinking from a cup.

  “Are you okay?” he asked via prevocals.

  “Not at the moment,” she admitted, “but I will be. I just need time out for a second.”

  “Take it, but stay online. If I need you, I'll call.”

  She nodded. “Thanks, Odi.”

  He didn't look up as she left the room. She admired his intensity, his focus, and hoped that she worked as efficiently when the issues weren't quite so personal.

  Jonah was dead…

  The corridor outside was crowded, but there was a low-g toilet nearby if she needed privacy. The last thing she wanted was to create a scene. Deciding she could maintain her composure for the moment, she edged her way to the nearest refreshment cubicle and selected a revitalising brew. Apart from caffeine, the mix contained a dose of psychoactives designed to keep someone awake and alert for extended periods. The button looked well-pushed, as it did in most EJC operations centres.

  Too fast. That was the problem. She felt overwhelmed. Barely twenty-four hours ago, Jonah had stood on his own two feet for the first time since his reawakening, and now he was dead. She felt guilty for letting it happen, not only as the EJC officer into whose care he had been entrusted, but as—

  What? She didn't know. They had once been lovers but weren't exactly friends. They could work together reasonably well, when they tried. They couldn't seem to get rid of each other. Was that fate or just coincidence?

  He had managed to get rid of her easily enough when he wanted to, she mused, leaning against a wall and letting the low gravity soothe her aching muscles. The door to the hotel room had been locked from the outside. After she had fallen asleep, someone had let him out. Who and why were mysteries—although WHOLE and to help him escape were the obvious answers. Yet it seemed that Mancheff and Kuei had left the building shortly after she and Jonah had been locked in, and instead of escaping Jonah had gone to Mars.

  And died.

  The look in his empty eyes haunted her, as though somehow she had contributed to his death. But that was impossible. He had left her behind, after all; she hadn't abandoned him. If she'd been with him, maybe she would have made a difference. Maybe.

  The questions multiplied in her mind. Why had he left her? Had it been planned from the start. If so, how? What was the significance of Mars? Was it connected in any way with what he had learned in Quebec? Did it relate to the Twinmaker or the murder of Lindsay Carlaw? And—

  Where did it leave her? What if their brief moment of intimacy had been nothing but an illusion, a trick to lull her into a false sense of security? Would she ever be able to trust him again?

  Time passed; she wasn't sure how long.

  When Whitesmith called, she was still leaning against the wall with the empty drink container in her hand.

  “He was shot with his own gun,” he said.

  Mentally she reeled. “Of course.”

  “I'll assume that's sarcasm. Ballistic evidence confirms that the bullets were fired from the pistol you reported missing four days ago. He was shot three times from close range by someone around his own height, and he doesn't appear to have struggled or fought with his murderer. He wasn't drugged or unconscious when killed, although his body does show marked signs of viral infection.”

  “Nanos?”

  “Natural. He had a bug of some kind, a newish strain he obviously wasn't resistant to.”

  She remembered his fever, his occasional vagueness, his lack of appetite. “His overseer should've dealt with that.”

  “In theory, yes, but it wasn't set for maintenance. He was chock-full of medical agents finishing off the d-med work, and his overseer would've interfered with them. The agents treated the symptoms of the virus but didn't attack the cause, because they weren't programmed to. They would've let a fever run its course, within reason, rather than inhibit his own defences.”

  “How sick was he, at the end?”

  “It's hard to be sure, but his viral load was high.”

  “He could've been confused, then, not completely culpable—”

  “He was ‘culpable’ enough to slip through your fingers,” he said. “Don't worry, Marylin. You won't be reprimanded or put under suspicion. It's he who'll have explaining to do.”

  “How far away's the body?”

  “Not very. But the real clue might come from the blood found at the site. There are two types: one is definitely Jonah's; the other QUALIA is checking at the moment. If we get a match, we might have our killer.”

  “Jonah injured him?”

  “That's the obvious conclusion, although he doesn't have any blood on his hands, or a weapon on him.”

  Marylin thought it over. To obtain an ID this way would be an unexpected bonus. Almost unbelievably lucky.

  “Would it be crazy to suggest that we're being set up?”

  “Certainly not crazy to think it,” he said. “Although
in this case, I doubt it. It's too complex and too vague, and it doesn't seem to be aimed at anyone in particular.”

  “True.” She couldn't help a slight smile. “Maybe the Twinmaker has finally made a mistake.”

  “Yeah, but—” An alarm in the background cut him off. A split-second later it sounded in her workspace. “What the hell?”

  “Unauthorised intrusion,” she translated, never having seen the alert in action before but remembering her training in station security. “QUALIA? What's happening?”

  “I have a non-KTI transmission incoming through cargo section 14,” said the AI.

  “Animate? Inanimate?” Whitesmith pressed.

  “The packets I am receiving contain structures consistent with human DNA and other organic compounds.”

  “Not a bomb?”

  “At this stage, it appears not.”

  “Source?”

  “An anonymous relay by the name of ‘MadDuchess.’”

  Marylin realised then. “It's the body, Odi. The latest victim!”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Mancheff asked for a safe relay and MadDuchess is what I told him. I guess he finally decided to cooperate.” The relief was surprisingly strong, but understandable. Fassini, Kellow and Jonah might not have died for nothing after all. “We're about to get what we went there for.”

  “Great, but can you trace it?” Whitesmith asked QUALIA.

  “No.”

  “Indira. Are you overhearing this?”

  “Yes.” The voice of the head of the home team was a calming presence.

  “Can you arrange for someone to collect the body in—how long, QUALIA?”

  “Five minutes.”

  “Consider it done,” Geyten confirmed.

  “Thanks.”

  “Marylin—?”

  She threw the drink container into a recycling slot and headed for the operations centre. “I'm on my way.”

  The body arrived barely a minute before Jonah's, giving the home team more work than it could efficiently handle on its own. Away team staff were requisitioned to take up the slack. Marylin supervised the distribution of resources while Whitesmith concentrated on the reams of data flowing in. Several times she had to coordinate with Jago Trevaskis, and found him to be much less antagonistic than when they had last spoken. She had been forgiven, it seemed, or else he was feeling magnanimous, since the venture Herold Verstegen had backed against his advice had gone so disastrously wrong. On paper, anyway.

  If the amount of information coming in was a measure of the success of the operation, however, it had exceeded anyone's expectations, even if most of it was inconclusive. A brand of post facto nanomachines had erased most of the sensitive evidence from the dome, such as fingerprints and fibres, then self-destructed. The nominal owners of the dome thought they had sold it and transferred registration eighteen months ago. They had, in fact, received money for the sale, but the paperwork had not been filed. They were as surprised as anyone to learn that a murder had taken place inside it, but were more than happy for the dome to be impounded.

  The plants had been maintained irregularly by automatic systems. There was no obvious sign of even occasional habitation. The GLITCH shadow that enshrouded it was not an uncommon feature for an outpost on frontier Mars. However, the booth's location identifiers must have been removed from within the KTI network by someone possessing the authority to edit such information. Someone who had left no trace of such an erasure.

  On top of her official duties, Marylin found time to check with the housekeeper of Jonah's unit in Faux Sydney to see if the wooden sign Jonah said had come from Lindsay's study had indeed done so. The housekeeper recognised the snapshot of the item—its image was on file as an item of furniture—but could not explain how or why it had come to be on the other side of the world, nor even when it had been removed.

  Fair enough, she thought. The AI was only as good as the information it was given. If she found the answer frustrating, then that was just par for the course for the Twinmaker investigation.

  But at least some definite information had come to light during her absence. Indira Geyten had analysed the inert markers in Jonah's spine, as recorded from his initial examination. The analysis concluded that he was the last Jonah McEwen to use d-mat prior to his hibernation. That didn't necessarily confirm that he was the original, but it did help tie down his movements. The UGI hits after that last d-mat trip were all recorded by GLITCH. KTI did not keep such data longer than a week, since it was not KTI's job to track Earth's citizens.

  Jonah's pedigree might not have been a significant issue, but knowing the answer to at least one question did help give Marylin a feeling of accomplishment.

  An hour after the bodies arrived, Trevaskis called a VTC between all the department heads and their assistants. Marylin and Whitesmith participated, along with Indira Geyten and Mereki Graaff. She had expected Verstegen as well, but she assumed he was either locked out or was watching from a passive viewpoint.

  Whitesmith brought them up to date with the site. The spilled blood was the only promising lead found at the scene. Whitesmith handed the chair to Geyten at that point, who explained that the genetic profile of the second person remained unidentified. It wasn't on record anywhere.

  “That's impossible,” Trevaskis said.

  “Actually, it's not,” Geyten said. “There are still some drifters and reprobes who've managed to avoid being recorded.”

  “Are you saying someone like that could've done this?”

  “No. In fact, I'd say it's highly unlikely.”

  “So the data is still gebbabel.”

  “We're still looking,” said Graaff, coming to her superior's aid. “A record may yet turn up somewhere.”

  “Do we have anything concrete?” Trevaskis asked.

  “The ID on the latest victim,” Geyten reported. File images of the murdered woman appeared in Marylin's workspace: blonde hair, blue eyes, slim build. A very good match. “Her name is Cary Ann Pushkaric, self-employed, with a registered address in Christchurch, New Zealand. No privacy restrictions. She was copied two days ago from a transmission leaving Wien and terminating in the NSR. I've checked with the New Soviet branch, and she's not reported missing.”

  “What about cause of death?” asked Trevaskis

  “We're not one hundred percent certain,” Geyten said. “The body is riddled with internal injuries, but she might have been at least partly dismembered while still alive. Give us a little longer and we should be able to say for sure.”

  “No other details?”

  “Nothing incriminating. She's as clean as the others.”

  “Okay.” Trevaskis moved rapidly on. “McEwen. What's new there?”

  “Autopsy confirms everything we already knew. Three bullet holes, one body. It's nice to have something simple for a change.”

  Marylin didn't bring up Jason Fassini or Lon Kellow, although she would've liked to. “What about the cellular activity?”

  “Spurious output from the InSight-affected portions of his brain.” Geyten must have read the blank expression on Marylin's face. “InSight acts like a dam, storing the chemical and electrical signals needed to evoke memories. And also like a dam, a potential builds up behind it. When the brain dies, that potential is released, hence this last flicker of activity.”

  “So they're the trapped memories?”

  “Perhaps. It's hard to be certain because we can't decipher the signals. Memory is too idiosyncratic, too reliant on internal cues that vary from person to person. Only Jonah's brain can interpret itself.”

  “How long until he's up and around again?” Whitesmith asked.

  “I haven't received the Resurrection approval yet,” Geyten said. “QUALIA's modelled what we need to do, but without the authorisation—”

  “You've tried Verstegen?”

  “He's not available.”

  “He's off-station,” said Trevaskis, with a hint of self-satisfaction. “We only manag
ed to track him down an hour ago. He's on his way now.”

  Whitesmith muttered something obscene under his breath. “So we have to wait until he comes before we can bring McEwen back?”

  “Yes.” Trevaskis frowned. “Why? What's the hurry?”

  “The sooner we have him back, the sooner we'll start getting answers.”

  “If he talks.”

  “And even if he doesn't.”

  “What does that mean?” Marylin asked.

  “We have the signals from his brain, right? What's to stop us plugging them back in and seeing what they produce? They could be recent memories, like who shot him, or they could help cure his long-term amnesia. Either way it's worth a try.”

  “Except it's not that simple,” Geyten said.

  “Why not?”

  “We can only monitor the signals, not replay them. Most of them are chemical triggers designed to interface with neurones, not electrical impulses. And besides, the signals are fading. The tissue will be dead by the time McEwen is resurrected.”

  “But we still have the body's LSM. We can get the signals back any time we want.”

  “True,” Geyten mused. “Maybe…”

  What?

  She shook her head. “Maybe nothing. Just an idea. But I'll keep looking at it and let you know.”

  “Please do.” Trevaskis glanced at the others. “The same goes for everyone. If you have the slightest thought, check it out and pass it on. Otherwise we'll bring each other up-to-date like this every hour or two. I don't want us to miss something important because we're not paying attention.”

  Geyten and Graaff dropped off-line, and Trevaskis soon followed. Whitesmith severed the VTC and turned to Marylin.

  “Patronising shit,” he muttered.

  Marylin agreed, but privately admitted that Trevaskis had a point. “What's next on the agenda?”

  “I want you to track down Verstegen,” he said. “Make sure he's on his way here. Just our luck that the one time we need him he's not underfoot.”

  Marylin nodded and set to work. She, too, had noted that fact. On the heels of Jonah's suspicions, it seemed almost incriminating.