The Resurrected Man

by Sean Williams

  The first thing she ascertained, with QUALIA's help, was that KTI's Director of Information Security was indeed on his way to Artsutanov Station. He had departed wherever he was via d-mat, fifteen minutes before. That was enough to answer Whitesmith's question, but she dug deeper while she had the chance. According to his file, he had been in his unit in Shanghai. His presence had been confirmed by GLITCH and by a direct sighting earlier that morning. If he had gone elsewhere, it couldn't have been for long. Although the sighting had been some time ago, the UGI hits were within the last hour. There were gaps, but none long enough to allow a return trip to Mars.

  Similarly, the file for the previous week ruled out any opportunity of kidnapping and torturing the seventeenth victim. He had been confined to the station ninety-five percent of the time, as was typical of his schedule. He rarely went back to Earth, and then only for brief periods. Every time a murder had occurred, his whereabouts had been known.

  In short, his alibi held water. Unless he could falsify UGI hits and direct sightings, there was no way he could be the Twinmaker. She could rest her mind on that score, at least. And by following her own logic, she could assume that he wasn't ACHERON, either. Not that she had seriously considered it. WHOLE's leak out of KTI wasn't likely to be the man whose job it was to prevent such leaks, although she acknowledged that someone in his position would find it easy. It just wasn't plausible given what she knew about him. Someone else had to be behind the leaks.

  She really needed to tell Whitesmith about ACHERON. But at the same time she didn't want to alert ACHERON to the fact that the MIU knew he existed. Since it was next to impossible to have a private conversation in MIU-ACOC, she found herself in something of a bind.

  “Odi—”

  “Is Herold on his way?”

  “Uh, yes.” She belatedly remembered the last instruction he had given her. “Shouldn't be long now.”

  “Good. Any more than ten minutes and I'd have gone straight to Schumacher.”

  He spoke without looking at her. His attention was focussed firmly on the events and information made accessible by his overseer and the MIU workspace.

  “Odi, I need to talk to you. Privately.”

  That got his attention, and an annoyed glance. “Now?”

  “Soon. About security.”

  His eyebrows rose slightly. She could almost read his thoughts. Privacy and security were the key concepts. He was thinking about the number of people in the room with them, about the myriad ways their conversation could be monitored from outside, and about how another leak could compromise the MIU.

  “How urgent is it?” he asked.

  This was her chance to say whether she thought the problem was serious enough to warrant bringing the investigation to a standstill while it was sorted out. Lacking evidence, she couldn't justify such dramatic action.

  “Hard to say,” she said. “If we don't do anything now, we're potentially no worse off.”

  He nodded understanding. No worse off meant making as little progress as usual. At least now she possibly knew why.

  He held the tableau, studying her face as though committing it to memory. She sensed that there was something he wanted to say. Before she could even begin to guess what that might be, however, the sound of an alarm ringing caught both their attentions.

  He turned away, startled. “What now?”

  She checked her workspace. “Unauthorised intrusion,” she read.

  “Another one?”

  “QUALIA?”

  “I am receiving a non-KTI personnel transmission through In-booth 137,” the AI stated. “Human and unidentified.”

  “How long?”

  “Five minutes.”

  A sense of déjà vu almost overwhelmed her. “Where from?”

  “Shanghai.”

  “That's where Verstegen—”

  “Was,” said Whitesmith, his face grim. “QUALIA, alert station security. Get an armed response team in place before whoever it is arrives. We can't take any chances.”

  “Agreed. The response team is already on its way. I can delay synthesis if necessary.”

  “Only as long as it takes to get security in place.” Whitesmith directed his attention elsewhere, sending a squad of MIU personnel to reinforce the station guards. Marylin coordinated what was left of the MIU staff to ensure work continued on the rest of the investigation. A new window in one corner of her workspace showed the area around booth 137, the third booth from the left in a row of ten, increasingly the focus of station security.

  The cordon built before her eyes. She was impressed, never having seen the security forces of Artsutanov Station put to the task before. They were efficient and disciplined—a credit to Herold Verstegen, whose responsibility they were.

  “One minute,” QUALIA announced.

  The cordon tightened.

  “Any guesses?” Whitesmith asked her.

  “None.” She hadn't quite caught up on the last twenty-four hours, let alone started guessing about the future.

  “Synthesis will be complete in ten seconds,” QUALIA said.

  “ID?” she asked.

  “Unknown.”

  The cordon closed tight.

  Marylin held her breath.

  The doors of the booth opened.

  For a split-second, everyone froze.

  Whitesmith was the first to speak. “What the fuck?”

  The man in the booth, visibly startled, took a step forwards. The cordon edged away, but didn't break. Marylin forced herself to think past a shocked giggle that she knew would sound insane.

  “QUALIA. Who is this man?”

  “I have UGI-confirmation.”

  “And?”

  The AI didn't respond.

  “QUALIA? Odi, this can't be—”

  “I have UGI-confirmation,” the AI interrupted, repeating erself more firmly than before, then adding: “This man is Herold Locke Verstegen, Director of Information Security, Kudos Technologies Incorporated.”

  “You're sure about that?”

  “Yes, Marylin.”

  “But you didn't recognise him from the d-mat transmission!”

  “I know, and I apologise to you all. I cannot explain this discrepancy.”

  Whitesmith's expression was furious. “Just like that? It just happened? Crap! Someone's fucking with us. I—” He stopped as the cordon began to dissolve under the pressure of internal contradiction. No one had told the guards how to contain their own boss. “Now we just look stupid.”

  “Not us,” she said as Verstegen, red-faced, did his best to regain control of the situation. “QUALIA.”

  “You really think that's it?”

  “I don't know, and how could I? We have no real evidence.” She watched the images coming from the other side of the station with the feeling that she was missing something important. It didn't make sense. Yet it had to.

  No, she corrected herself. They did have evidence—in the form of the body of the latest victim, the safe-house on Mars, the blood found with Jonah's corpse, and an attempt to discredit both KTI's Director of Information Security and the AI that ran the entire KTI network. It was all a matter of perspective.

  And time. That was the main problem. She needed time to let the facts simmer and for the truth to congeal. Time she didn't have.

  The murder on Mars, the unidentified blood, the security scare…Someone was getting desperate.

  “We have everything we need to solve the case,” she said, letting her instinct speak. “Right here, and right now.”

  “We do?” Whitesmith looked at her as though she'd gone insane. “Where?”

  All she could do was shake her head.

  Jonah blinked in confusion. He was lying in a coffin-like container lined with foam when just a moment ago he had been standing up, he was sure of it, in a d-mat booth heading—somewhere. A chaotic tangle of memories hampered his best attempt to make sense of where he was and how he had come to be there. He remembered Faux Sydney, travelling to Qu
ebec and having a bag put over his head. Karoly Mancheff had talked to him, Marylin Blaylock had kissed him, and—

  Lindsay had spoken to him out of a hotel's infotainment channel.

  The lid of the coffin slid open with a hiss and Jonah stared up at a face he didn't recognise.

  “Rest easy,” said the woman, some sort of medical supervisor. “There'll be some incoherence at first, but you'll settle down soon enough.”

  Incoherence? He recognised the term. Occasionally something changed between d-mat termini and the mind lost its train of thought. It had happened to him in the past but he had never ended up somewhere other than where he intended to go.

  Mars, he thought. He had been going to Mars.

  “Don't be too gentle,” said a more familiar voice. “This is his second time in two days. He should be used to it by now.”

  “The first time he wasn't conscious,” said the woman, her tone becoming frosty.

  “I don't care if he was doing handstands. If he doesn't get out of there soon, I'll drag him out myself.”

  “Officer Whitesmith—”

  “No, it's okay.” Jonah reached for the edge of the coffin. “I'm awake. I'm up. Could someone lend me a hand?”

  The woman and a white-clad medical intern helped him upright. He was naked, and shivered the moment his skin struck the air. The intern pressed patches against his skin, rubbed a sticky paste around his throat and chest, then slipped a white dressing gown over his shoulders. The woman watched him closely.

  “Do you feel nauseous?”

  “Yes, but it's fading.” He touched the stickiness at his throat. Some sort of nanofood. “What's wrong with me?”

  “You had a virus,” Whitesmith said.

  Jonah turned to face the MIU officer. The sides of the coffin folded to horizontal and he slid his legs out of the padding. He felt different somehow. Different even from before, and that had been a new body.

  The second time in two days, Whitesmith had said. He looked at his left palm. The temporary ID Whitesmith had given him was gone.

  “It must have been some virus.”

  “Actually, it was the bullets that killed you.” Whitesmith folded his arms and leaned against an examination table.

  “How many? Where?”

  “Three to the chest, taking out your heart, left lung and spine. Very direct, but not exactly execution-style.”

  “I meant where as in what place?”

  “Mars.”

  “By whom?”

  “We don't know.” Whitesmith's stare was direct and challenging. “But the calibre of the weapon was .42, which you might recognise. It's not that common. Ballistic tests confirm that you were shot with your own gun.”

  “Please, Officer,” said the woman, “I'll ask you to exercise some discretion.”

  Jonah glanced at the woman. She obviously didn't approve of Whitesmith's heavy-handed approach to Resurrection counselling, but he didn't mind. Waking up in unexpected places to bad news was becoming routine. The less bullshit he had to sit through, the better.

  “Where's Marylin?”

  “She's with Jason Fassini, two suites down.”

  “Can I talk to her?”

  Whitesmith shook his head. “I'm not letting her anywhere near you until I have some answers.”

  “So ask me the questions. I'll do what I can.”

  “All right. Why did you go to Mars?”

  “Because—” He hesitated. No matter how he put it, he was going to sound crazy. “Because someone professing to be my father told me to.”

  “Your father. You mean Carlaw?”

  “Yes.”

  “But he's dead.”

  “I know.” He tried his best to explain. “At the time, I was persuaded.”

  “You were sick.” Whitesmith seemed to accept the point, but Jonah could see his mind ticking over. “And he told you to go to Mars?”

  “Yes. He gave me the directions.”

  “You've never been there before?”

  “No.”

  “What were you expecting to find?”

  “The Twinmaker.” Jonah tried to remember exactly what his father had said. “He was pretty vague about it all. He mentioned something about the killer looking for asylum.” And he told me he wasn't dead. In the clear light of day, Jonah couldn't believe he had fallen for it. He hadn't realised how badly he needed to believe that particular lie. “He said if I moved quickly enough, the Twinmaker would still be there, where I could confront him.”

  “It was obviously a trap,” Whitesmith said. “I could understand him luring Marylin away, but not you.”

  “Unless he wanted her alone in the hotel. She was asleep when I left. There would've been nothing stopping him from—”

  “Exactly.” The MIU officer's forearms flexed. “Can I be honest?”

  “Of course. I am.”

  “Good, because this is where I get the most confused, and pissed off. Why did you leave her there?”

  “Because Lindsay said she shouldn't be involved.” He thought again. That wasn't quite true. “And because there was only one booth at the other end.”

  “How do you know that if you've never been there?”

  “Lindsay told me.”

  “And you took his word for it. Just like that. You left Marylin behind like some trussed-up goose—”

  “She can look after herself—”

  “I know what she's capable of. That's not the point. The point is that she wasn't capable of much then. You said it yourself. She was asleep. She was vulnerable. She was trusting you to be with her if there was a problem. And you walked out on her.”

  Jonah could see the anger naked on Whitesmith's face, and was startled by its intensity. “She never trusted me.”

  “Is that what you really think? I can't believe you're that blind, or stupid, or capable of such massive self-deception.”

  “I've been accused of all three.”

  “Then maybe I need to reassess my opinion of you.” Whitesmith's stare didn't budge. “Did the person claiming to be your father tell you anything else I should know about?”

  “He told me how to get there and—and a lot of other stuff I guess he only said to make sure I went.” The Twinmaker is getting out of hand. He needs to be neutralised…My motives are not so simple that I can't disagree with an ally…I am sorry for many of the things I said and did—and for as many that I didn't say or do…But probably the most surreal thing was that Jonah had apparently told the Twinmaker that Lindsay was still alive. “If it wasn't him, none of it makes any sense.”

  And even if it was…

  “We found another blood sample at the site of your murder,” Whitesmith said. “We think it came from the person who killed you, or an accomplice of that person.”

  “Do you have an ID?”

  “Not on record. Did the person claiming to be Lindsay mention that someone else would be there?”

  “No.” A thought struck him. “How deeply did you search outside of GLITCH?”

  “We checked deceased estates, if that's what you're getting at, so it couldn't have been your father.”

  The thought died. “I didn't really believe it could be.”

  “Just because he was dead? Resurrection gives us a way around that. Safer to check and be sure.”

  Jonah agreed. “That occurred to me at the time—that Lindsay might really have come back from the dead—but where would he hide for three years? He implied that he's been around for that long. I managed it, but only at the expense, in any real sense, of my life.” And that was why he found dealing with Resurrection so easy, he supposed. The differences between this experience and his awakening from InSight were only minor. In fact, this was much less traumatic. “Simpler to believe that what I saw was nothing more than a very persuasive fake. Enough to convince me that I wasn't hallucinating, anyway.”

  “Are you convinced? You keep coming back to it.”

  “Obviously I am—both. I've just had a conversation wit
h a man I believed was dead. It's perturbing.”

  “I'm talking to a man I know was dead.”

  “But I know Lindsay couldn't have been Resurrected. I signed the forms forbidding it.”

  “He could've been Resurrected illegally.”

  “Why bother? Why? And where would they have got an LSM file from? Lindsay never—”

  He stopped. Lindsay had.

  “It's all hypothetical, anyway,” Whitesmith said, oblivious to the idea forming in Jonah's mind. “Head-games. I just wanted to demonstrate that we've checked everything we can think of and still come up with nothing conclusive. But there's something else we can try, if you're willing. It's risky, and fairly controversial, but our best minds say it's worth a shot. If it works, we might be able to find out who killed you, and maybe even unlock your amnesia.”

  Jonah blinked. Whitesmith had his full attention now.

  “If it doesn't work?”

  “That we don't know for sure. Anything from a migraine to permanent psychosis.”

  “Sounds ominous.”

  “That's the idea. I don't want you to think I'm hiding anything from you.”

  “But you haven't really told me anything, either,” Jonah said, his mind racing. Regardless of what the method was, it was attractive purely on the grounds that it might allow him to forget half-formed ideas that might lead nowhere, when the answer could be right in front of him. “How about you tell me more and we see where that takes us.”

  “Good enough. I'll hook up the people we need and get things moving straightaway.”

  “This means you'll be needing the suite?” the woman asked.

  “Perhaps. We'd certainly like you to keep it free.” Whitesmith's eyes were already unfocussing as he began moving through his workspace. “Speak to Herold Verstegen if you need authorisation from higher up.”

  “I will.” The woman exchanged a look with the intern, then walked out of the room.

  Jonah watched her go with a twinge of apprehension. She didn't approve of the plan, whatever it was. That wasn't a good sign, since she had already demonstrated that his well-being was her primary consideration. But he still had to hear the MIU out. He wouldn't reject a proposal just because it was risky—as long as he knew for certain what the risks were…