The Resurrected Man

by Sean Williams

  Visible through the windscreen was the side wall of a large, brick warehouse, possibly a century old, maybe more. Its roof was rusted. Several windows were broken.

  It looked abandoned.

  He checked his pistol and slipped it into his shoulder holster. Then he double-checked that no one was around, and opened the car door.

  Karoly Mancheff, he thought, paraphrasing Stoppard, all the skeletons in your closet are finally coming home to roost.

  Click

  He almost laughed, despite himself.

  “Jonah?” It was Marylin, leaning over him

  “Lost it,” said Verstegen. “I told you.”

  “No, I'm okay.” He sat up, ignoring a twinge in his back. He must have fallen awkwardly. “Is Fassini—?”

  He stopped, noticing Marylin's empty hands and remembering what had distracted him.

  Verstegen had Marylin's gun.

  “I'm here, faszi,” said the MIU agent.

  “What happened?”

  “He moved too quickly, while we were distracted.” Marylin's eyes were apologetic, and angry at herself.

  “I prefer this kind of stalemate,” Verstegen said. “Being held at gunpoint without any means of retaliation strikes me as being distinctly biased.”

  “You're still outnumbered,” Jonah said.

  “I'm not planning to shoot anyone, hard though you might find that to believe. I just want to make sure I can defend myself when you do.”

  Shaking his head, Jonah clambered into a seat. “Ow. Jason, give the blood to Officer Geyten. I want her to sequence that sample, too.”

  Fassini did as he was told, passing the head of the MIU home team a plastic container roughly the same size as a stick of gum.

  “You want to compare both DNA profiles?” Geyten asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Where does this one come from?”

  “I'll tell you when you're finished. Fassini, give me your hand.”

  Jonah breathed a sigh of relief as files rushed into his overseer via their joined palm-links. The agent appeared to have done everything as instructed.

  “Did you have any problems?”

  “No. It was all pretty straightforward.” Fassini looked around, distinctly uneasy. “Is everything okay here?”

  “You are a jokey, Fassini,” said Verstegen, “to use a word you might recognise. A patsy. Whatever McEwen has had you doing, it's just going to waste more of your time, and ours.”

  “Take a seat anyway, Jason.” Jonah waved him to a chair. “In fact, let's all sit down and see what we have here. House? Close and lock the d-mat booth, and provide us with a common CRE access point, no interlacing.”

  “If you expect us to believe any data you care to show us—”

  “Straight from an MIU agent's brain to yours.”

  “Via you.”

  “I've hardly had time to corrupt it—but yes, I'll take your point if you take mine. This is all verifiable. Jason himself can vouch for it.”

  “What exactly are we going to see?” asked Trevaskis.

  “I asked Jason to track down some data I needed to fill the gaps in my theory. One was an old security recording showing the moments before my father's death. Did you get it, Jason?”

  “It's the file called SCAR.”

  “And you recorded your conversation with SciCon's security chief?”

  “Yes. That's the file called TAMBLYN.”

  Jonah called it up. “Okay, good.” A still image of an Asian woman's face, fine-boned but strong, appeared in his workspace; he relayed it to the housekeeper, which put it up for general viewing in the common access point. “You all see that?”

  Heads nodded. He let the video roll.

  “How can I help you, Officer Fassini?” The woman's voice was deep and measured.

  “Are you Ute Tamblyn, Security Chief of the Science of Consciousness Applied Research Facility?” Fassini asked.

  “Yes. And I'm busy. Please get to the point.”

  “I'm looking for security records dating back to April tenth, ’ 66. Can you help me with this?”

  “Most likely, although I don't know why you need to talk to me.” She glanced away as she accessed data through her overseer, then stopped and looked at Fassini again. “Is this to do with the death of Dr. Lindsay Carlaw?”

  “Yes, ma'am.”

  “The footage is available from the EJC Department of Public Inquiries, Archival Office—”

  “I'd rather see the unedited version. Would that be possible?”

  She sighed. “If it must be.” Her irises flickered. “One moment.”

  “Are we back to this again?” Marylin broke in, her tone impatient.

  Jonah stopped the recording. “Lindsay's death plays a bigger role in the Twinmaker killings than you might think.”

  “How?” asked Verstegen.

  “I thought you'd ask that.” Jonah wavered for a second, then went with the impulse. “House? Open a secure channel to the external address I gave you earlier.”

  “Yes. Please wait. Line open.”

  An image of Karoly Mancheff appeared in another window, which Jonah also relayed to the others.

  “What do you want, McEwen?”

  “My question exactly,” muttered Whitesmith.

  Jonah waved him silent. “The answer to one question, Karoly, then I'll let you go. The other day you implied that when I was in Quebec three years ago I slandered my father by saying he used d-mat. I now know it must have been more than that. What did I really tell you?” Mancheff thought about it, chewing on his inner cheek so his lips undulated. Then: “You told me he committed suicide.”

  “Why did that slander him?”

  “Work it out for yourself. You've had your one question.”

  “I have, and thanks. Enjoy the rest of the video.”

  The line went dead.

  “Suicide?” Marylin was the first to speak. “But that's even less likely than him using d-mat.”

  “Exactly.” Jonah looked around the room. Apart from him, there was only one other person who had definitely known Lindsay at all, and possibly two. Three if QUALIA was counted. Yet his life, in the form of his theories of artificial consciousness, and now his death, affected them all. “After all his dreams of immortality, it simply doesn't make sense.”

  “So what's your point?” asked Whitesmith.

  “If he has one.”

  “Don't push me, Verstegen. I'll get there in the end.” He cast the Director of Security a warning look. “How about we just keep watching?”

  The face of Ute Tamblyn stirred again. The SCAR security chief concentrated solely on retrieving the file until Fassini distracted her, his voice tempered more personably, as though he was making light conversation.

  “Were you here when Dr. Carlaw died?”

  “No,” she said. “I was employed elsewhere at that time.”

  “You know what happened, though.”

  “I am aware of the facts.”

  “Are all security employees here briefed regarding this matter?”

  “What—so our stories will match?” Tamblyn looked at him with thinly disguised amusement. “Hardly. I started here shortly after the inquest. There was a certain amount of fallout to be dealt with.”

  “Fallout of what sort?”

  “The confidential sort, Officer Fassini.” Her look and tone warned him not to pry any further. “Nothing that warrants the EJC's attention, I assure you.”

  “There's no need to assure me of anything, citizen.” The view through Fassini's eyes wandered, encouraging by subtle body-language the impression that he wasn't particularly interested in the conversation. “But I don't suppose you could give me the name and contact details of your predecessor, could you? I might want to speak to him or her as well, to ask a couple of questions.”

  Tamblyn smiled, and Jonah did, too. Good security professionals, like good salespeople, enjoyed competing with each other as much as they liked tackling the general public.
>
  “I have that footage you asked for,” she said.

  “Oh, good.” Fassini's overseer registered the transmission of a large audiovisual file, which he shunted into the buffer memory of his MIU workspace. “I appreciate your help.”

  “May I ask why you need it?”

  “I'm investigating a case involving WHOLE. An associate of Dr. Carlaw is involved. It's complicated, but his murder might be related.”

  “I see. And you think you'll find something the inquest missed?”

  “It always pays to check. Thank you for your help.”

  “I'm starting to agree with Verstegen,” Whitesmith growled. “This is getting us nowhere.”

  “Okay.” Jonah stopped the recording and selected the other audiovisual file Fassini had handed him. “Let's look at the footage, then, to see what it shows.”

  The recording appeared exactly as it had in his restored memory: the SCAR laboratory from an angle high in the ceiling, the SHE processor below and opposite. Jonah skimmed forward until his earlier self entered the room and Lindsay was on screen. There was no sound as Lindsay walked across the image to fiddle with the case of the SHE processor. Lindsay stopped with his hand inside the case of the processor, turned to look over his shoulder at his son, shifted position several centimetres to his right, then the processor casing disappeared in a flash of light.

  Jonah froze the image with Lindsay bowed backwards by the shock wave, blurred by explosive acceleration.

  “There,” he said, sending an arrow dancing to the other side of the screen. Clearly visible but only just in view was his arm.

  “So?” asked Marylin.

  “So Lindsay's standing exactly between me and the bomb.”

  “Your point?”

  He held back an angry remark. She was only asking the questions she had to ask.

  “The inquest found that the bomb was set on a timer,” he said. “Lindsay must have known when the bomb was going to go off, but hadn't expected me to be there. That glance over his shoulder and the way he moved—he was protecting me from the bomb. He deliberately put himself between me and it in order to deflect the blast and thereby save me from serious injury.”

  “Not necessarily,” Schumacher said. “He may have found the bomb just that second, not placed it there himself—”

  “He looked in the casing a minute or two earlier. He didn't see it then.”

  “He missed it, then.”

  “Maybe,” Jonah conceded, “but I don't believe so. If he did know when the bomb was going off, it follows that he might have put it there himself. The inquest never worked out how it got through security. This explains why. If he didn't know when the bomb went off, we're still in the dark.”

  “It's pretty far-fetched,” said Trevaskis. “What's his motive?”

  “Yes,” agreed Verstegen. “Why would he do something like this? I mean, I know he was a member of WHOLE, but not even Mancheff would expect one of its followers to destroy himself and his life's work. If Mancheff's still listening, I'm sure he'd be happy to agree with—”

  “It wasn't WHOLE. I'm certain of that. I think Lindsay might've intended it as some kind of personal statement.”

  “By blowing himself up?” Schumacher chuckled. “Pretty strong. Doesn't leave much room for rebuff.”

  “Maybe, he was trying to make a point—and for some reason it didn't get out.”

  Marylin frowned. “Now you're going to suggest the inquest was rigged.”

  “Maybe. I've no theories on that. But I do know that I managed to follow the trail this far, three years ago. At first I'd hoped it might actually have been WHOLE behind it, and even tracked down Karoly Mancheff in order to confront him with my theory. But no matter how much I provoked him—or bluffed him, if you prefer—he wouldn't admit to anything. He didn't know anything. I was forced to face the fact that the other theory was right, that Lindsay's death had been self-inflicted—and that the reasons why had been covered up.”

  “Why bother?” asked Verstegen.

  “By who?” Whitesmith put in. “That's more the question I'm interested in. Give us a name, McEwen.”

  “It was someone from SciCon,” Jonah said. “That's where I told Mancheff I was going, ‘to bring things to a head.’”

  “Well, that makes a kind of sense,” said Schumacher. “Carlaw was an employee of SciCon. He blew up his own lab, and himself, and almost his own son. Why wouldn't SciCon want to avoid the embarrassment if word got out?”

  “But within a day my memory had been erased by InSight and I was left for dead here. Why would they do that?”

  “Are you sure they did?”

  “Actually—no. I'm not certain they authorised it, although I believe they could have. But it was definitely someone who worked there, someone whose job it was to deal with this sort of ‘embarrassment.’” Jonah threw Schumacher's euphemism back at him with relish. “Unfortunately for me, it was someone who was on the brink of psychosis. The bluff I used on Mancheff was about to come partly true.”

  “The Twinmaker?” Marylin prompted.

  “Yes.” Jonah sagged as the memories washed through him, coming in flashes too brief to distract him. “He confronted me here, after I'd been stalled at SciCon. I told him my theory—” Click “—and he was literally astounded. I could see it on his face. He had no idea what SciCon had been up to, even though he had been actively involved in cleaning up after it. In that respect, he had been gullible, even stupid, and he didn't like that. He became angry—” Click “—almost frenzied. He cursed Lindsay, SciCon, RAFT, everyone who had ever been involved in the SCAR project. For a while, he didn't even notice that I was there—” Click “—and then he left. He just d-matted out of here without saying a word, leaving me to pick up the pieces. I was too confused to do anything, at first. I'd never worked out what it meant if my theory was actually true.”

  Jonah stood and began to pace as he confronted the most difficult memory of all.

  “He came back—” Click “—just over an hour later. He must've decided what he was going to do before he left me. All he'd had time to do was get equipment and come back. He—” Click “—overpowered me, injected me with muscle-relaxants, then pumped me full of InSight and maintenance agents. He put me in the bath, filled it with warm water so that it just covered my head—” Click “—then added the breeders for the gel that would keep me alive for the next three years. Not content with just erasing my memory or killing me, he left me there to rot, while he went back to SciCon and weathered the storm. He already had plans. He knew even then how I might come in handy.”

  Click

  He clutched for balance and found someone's hand.

  “Jonah, sit down—”

  “No, Marylin. I want to finish this.” He pulled away from her, not meeting her eye, not looking at anyone as he tried to reconstruct the crystal theory that resided in his mind. He felt better in an obscure way. Speaking about his memories in detail for the first time seemed to have robbed them of some of their urgency.

  “While I almost died, he moved on. He managed to worm his way into KTI, using the skills he'd picked up at SciCon to work on the developing QUALIA project. He set up a cosy little niche there, using its links with GLITCH to look for victims. He worked out how to compromise the d-mat process at the point of departure. By bleeding off the LSMs essential for Resurrection, he managed to avoid interfering with the data packets as they travelled through the network. He also figured out a way to create a virtual hot-wired environment by using Pool access accounts already in the joint possession of KTI. The environment he made was large enough for him and a victim, and allowed him to commit murder without fear of leaving genetic material behind on the bodies. Anything incorporating his DNA could be ‘erased’ from the body as it was sent back to reality. Also, by confining his activities to hot-wire he avoided disturbances in the mass/energy reserve until the time the body was disposed of. The fluctuations in the Pool would only be noticed—as QUALIA did—when th
e sample size of murders increased to the point where correlations were bound to attract attention. The hot-wired environment even explains why some of the victims experienced periods of weightlessness: in a virtual world, the effect of gravity is purely optional, and could have been ignored at will.”

  He ran a hand across his eyes, suddenly exhausted.

  “But it's still only a theory—” said Whitesmith, sounding frustrated.

  “You'll find proof in the information Fassini brought us.” He stopped in mid-step facing Whitesmith but close to Verstegen. “I have a graph of the fluctuations in the mass/energy reserve over the last couple of days. The data comes direct from the Pool, not via QUALIA, and I'm betting the difference is remarkable.”

  “Why should it be, Jonah?” QUALIA asked, a symphony of concern in the AI's voice.

  He called up both graphs and put the first one in the common CRE window. “This is the original graph you showed me.”

  “It has two dips in it, towards the end. The second one is me being Resurrected then almost immediately returned to the m/e reserve. The first one you said was an error of some kind, a momentary flicker in the reserve that happens all the time. That's fair enough—but you then went on to say that this particular flicker had lasted around two hours. Given that I only existed for less than an hour, the graph should have looked more like this.”

  “And indeed it did. This is the graph Jason Fassini obtained. You deliberately obfuscated the data so I wouldn't notice.”

  “But why would I do such a thing, Jonah?”

  “For the same reasons the blood samples match.” He turned to face Indira Geyten. “They do, don't they, Officer Geyten? And they accord with QUALIA's record?”

  “You knew they would.”

  “Yes.” He ignored the question implied in her tone. “Finally we have the recording.” He turned to face Verstegen. The image of Ute Tamblyn was still frozen in the CRE window. “We never finished that, did we?”

  He set the recording in motion.

  “You're welcome,” Ute Tamblyn said, and went to kill the line.

  “Oh,” said Fassini, “before I go—you forgot to give me the name of your predecessor.”