Places in the Darkness

by Chris Brookmyre

  “I know you didn’t kill Omega.”

  The shuttle’s co-pilot is emerging from his craft, the pilot still visible in his seat up in the cockpit. He looks apprehensively towards the two unconscious figures lying on the deck, the shorter of whom is now having his clothes removed by Alice. Then he turns his gaze towards Nikki, whom he assumes to be in charge as she is the older of the two.

  “We have orders to pick up a Seguridad detail,” he says, sounding uncertain. “Prisoner transfer to Heinlein?”

  “Prisoners plural,” Alice tells him, standing up. She speaks with the confidence of somebody used to being obeyed.

  Nikki figures the co-pilot’s lens is now telling him who is really in charge, and to precisely what extent: no less than the Principal of the SOE. He doesn’t ask any questions.

  He assists in dragging the two mercs to the passenger cabin, where they are strapped into the side-facing seats. Alice produces a jizz cannon and hits each of the assholes with a cum-shot, binding them around the torso and gluing them to the wall. She then rips out their wrist discs. These guys won’t be sending any SOS messages when they wake up: not until they reach Heinlein, leastways.

  The co-pilot looks at her in shock. Nikki isn’t sure if he’s appalled by her repeatedly shooting unconscious men or if he’s already thinking about the effort it’s going to take to remove all that resin from the inside of his nice ship.

  “I want you to take them to Heinlein and await instructions. Do not open the passenger cabin. These individuals are dangerous. You will be met at the other end by people who can handle these guys. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Then what are you waiting for? Get to it.”

  They watch the shuttle begin to descend on its platform.

  “There isn’t the equipment at Heinlein to free those assholes,” Nikki says. “They’ll need to be brought back to Seedee before they can be completely cut from the resin. That means the pair of them are out of play for at least ten hours, but once the alarm is raised there will be others looking for me.”

  “Flight time to Heinlein is five hours, so that’s our window,” Alice replies.

  “To do what?”

  “Find the puppet master.”

  “You mean whoever’s behind this shit? Because I don’t have a list of suspects. How about you?”

  “Nothing concrete, just the odd suspicious coincidence. What can you tell me about Helen Petitjean?”

  “That bloodless old husk? She’s who you got your eye on?”

  “Just a thread that might be worth pulling. I found out she’s got a high-level connection in the FNG, and as a result of current events, things are suddenly going very well for both of them.”

  “Petitjean is a true believer,” Nikki tells her. “In a bygone age she’d have been a religious fundamentalist. Fond of fancy talk about the potential of humankind but not exactly overflowing with human kindness. She reminds me of every school teacher I ever hated, though I’m guessing hating a teacher ain’t a concept you can get your head around.”

  “Well, you don’t need to like somebody to learn from them,” Alice replies, though there is a hint of a smile in there.

  Nikki can’t help but return it.

  “Come on,” Alice urges. “Clock’s ticking. Get these clothes on.”

  “These clothes that you just took off that merc? Why?”

  Alice hands her a new lens rig.

  “Because you’re Megan Driscoll, veteran FNG data analyst on secondment to the SOE. The facial-recognition alert status on Nikki Freeman was deactivated once you were placed in custody, and now as far as Seguridad is aware, Nikki Fixx is officially off CdC and on route to Heinlein.”

  Nikki accepts the rig gratefully, popping the lenses, wrist unit and sub-vocal into place. Then she slips out of her clothes and into the fatigues. They are a little roomy but a passable fit.

  “Not sure this is me.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  Nikki pulls her hair back into a ponytail, fixing it with a tie-band she found on the floor. There’s always dozens of them in freight areas.

  “I look uptight enough?”

  Alice ignores this.

  “So, you wanna tell me what’s behind you going rogue all of a sudden? How come you know I didn’t kill anybody?”

  “I didn’t say anybody. But I know for sure you didn’t kill Omega.”

  “How?”

  “Because I did.”

  Nikki gapes. This shit just keeps making less sense.

  “I’m sending you a grab. This was taken by Korlakian.”

  Nikki runs the file. Everything lurches and swirls. She’s looking out through the eyes of a guy getting his ass handed to him, and with a growing revulsion it dawns on her that if it ends the way she anticipates, this could be a literal description.

  She is bracing herself for horror, so she isn’t ready for shock.

  “Fuck me.”

  Nikki pauses the playback. She doesn’t need to see what happens next.

  “You did this,” she says. “All along, it was you. So why are you fessing up now? And what else ain’t you telling me?”

  “Because I only found out it was me when I saw the grab. I have no memory of this.”

  Nikki races through possibilities. Are they talking about mind-control shit here? People on Seedee have always been paranoid about the concept of mesh malware, but nobody ever came forward to claim a malfunction, never mind a virus. Besides, Alice doesn’t even have a mesh. G2S only just got here.

  She looks to the girl, a dozen questions on her lips, but Alice is the one who gets in first.

  “I need to know, Nikki: why did you talk about me not being born from drinking and sex? What do you know?”

  Nikki has no notion of how this is relevant or where it might be going.

  “What do I know? About what? I meant you probably weren’t conceived in some late-night drunken fuck like the rest of us. It was a dig at your straight-ass FNG aristo parents. I was forgetting you were adopted. What’s that to do with—”

  “Why did you bring up the idea of someone being an android without knowing it?”

  “I was just shooting the shit, throwing out stuff that sometimes freaks new arrivals.”

  Then Nikki belatedly realises what Alice is saying.

  “Wait. You’re telling me you think you’re an android? That’s your explanation for this?”

  “Yes. Because I have no recollection of doing it, but it’s me right there in the grab. I realised I have no independent verification of anything I did before I came to CdC. And since I arrived at Heinlein, every time I wake up from sleep, it’s like my memory is reassembling itself.”

  “I keep waking up with no recollection of what preceded going to sleep, but there’s a simple explanation. It’s called alcohol.”

  “You said there are rumours that super-advanced AI has been invented on CdC but its existence kept secret.”

  “Yeah, but I never believed them.”

  “How about now?” Alice asks. “Yesterday I woke up feeling physically exhausted and then found out about the Habitek massacre.”

  And suddenly something Nikki has been trying to run away from has her cornered. The assassin who killed Julio and his men: jarringly fleet, impossibly nimble. A white streak, human tracer fire. Part bullet, part ballet.

  “I saw the killer at Habitek. It was at a distance and I was looking through night vision, but yeah. It could have been you. I’m sure it was a woman: slight, sleek, fast, graceful.”

  “That’s what I meant by finding the puppet master. Somebody is controlling me.”

  Nikki is still fighting it. Her cop’s instinct is nagging her that something doesn’t fit, like the times she couldn’t place a suspect at the locus even though everything else appeared to match up.

  She looks at the grab again, paused on Alice’s face as she stares back at Korlakian. It’s her all right, but with different hair. Gotta be a wig.
/>   Shit.

  Instead of dispelling what she can’t accept, she just made another piece fit. Nikki realises who Mrs. Pang was really talking about when they spoke in the alley.

  That girl back at your apartment. Yeah, I saw her here before, except her hair was different.

  Mrs. Pang meant Alice, not Giselle. She saw Alice going up the stairs with Nikki, and she had seen her earlier, heading to Nikki’s apartment with Giselle, but with different hair.

  It was Alice who killed her.

  But even as she thinks this, she sees where the theory doesn’t add up. For one, the face in the grab is not triggering any recognition. Like Amber down in the Catacombs, she appears to have no listed identity.

  “You’ve got an alibi,” Nikki tells her.

  “For what? Being asleep alone doesn’t count.”

  “For Giselle. My neighbour Mrs. Pang said she saw you and Giselle heading for my apartment before she was killed.”

  “I don’t know how they do things in the Seguridad, but that sounds like the opposite of an alibi.”

  “No, it’s as solid as they come. Because while Giselle was being murdered, you were trussed up unconscious in Trick’s workshop. And what you didn’t notice is that your name doesn’t come up when you look at this woman. No name does: she registers as a blank. This blonde psycho bitch ain’t you.”

  TRUE NATURE

  Alice knows Nikki’s logic is incontestable. She couldn’t be in two places at once. It is also true that she failed to register how no name had come up to identify the face she was looking at. If she noticed the anomaly at all, she perhaps assumed that it was simply what happened when you were seeing yourself in someone else’s grab.

  She calls up the image again, looking closer this time. Maybe she’s imagining it, but she can see slight differences she failed to detect before: lines around the eyes, fewer freckles, a paler skin tone that she subconsciously ascribed to the lighting.

  She has a doppelganger.

  She enjoys a moment of blessed, elevating relief as the implication flows through her: she is not, after all, harbouring a secret self who kills people while she sleeps. However, it is but a moment, as it is rapidly dismissed by a further incontestable deduction.

  “Hey, I just proved you innocent and yet you look like the other shoe just dropped,” Nikki says. “What gives?”

  “I didn’t kill anybody, but there’s a near-identical version of me running around CdC, behaving in a way I never would. Same model, different directives.”

  Alice swallows back tears, but she fears they are merely a sub-routine, a programmed response. The conclusion is becoming harder and harder to escape.

  “I am an android, and so is she.”

  Nikki stares at her, doubtless grasping for alternatives. Alice recognises the process. It’s been her world since she first saw Omega’s grab. Unfortunately there is no way back out of the rabbit hole.

  “This ain’t right. There has to be another explanation. You’re as human as I am. Look at you, you’re crying, for Chrissakes. You eat, you drink. Not the good stuff, but you drink fluids. Hey, you got shot with a dart the other day. Didn’t you bleed?”

  Alice shows her the scab on her wrist where the dart penetrated.

  “I bled. In fact, I’m bleeding now, if you know what I mean. But crying, bleeding, digestion, these are all functions that could be synthesised.”

  “Come on, that’s just crazy. Why the fuck would they synthesise periods?”

  Nikki makes it sound like a game-changing question. But Alice has an answer.

  “To keep the android credulous of the idea that it is human.”

  Nikki’s expression indicates she still isn’t convinced. Alice hopes that the basis for her doubt proves compelling.

  “No. I still ain’t buying it. Though, if you are an android, we certainly got proof that it was a man who designed you. Builds an artificial woman and still gives her the goddamn curse? Fucking asshole. Why would he do that? Wouldn’t not having periods be one of the consolations of being artificial?”

  “Think about it. Convincing the android that she is human would serve to prevent people discovering how advanced the AI has really become. If someone has achieved this level of technological accomplishment, keeping it secret would confer an extraordinary advantage. Androids acting as your agents: compliant, programmable, unsuspected. And how better to conceal their true nature than to keep that hidden from even themselves.”

  Nikki is staring at her now, suddenly gaunt, as though something strong inside her just withered. Her doubt is gone, and something more chilling has replaced it.

  “Project Sentinel,” she says. “That’s what this is. A secret so deadly, you’re a target even if you hear the words.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “At Habitek, I spoke to Sol Freitas as the poor sonofabitch was dying. He said they ‘ate the forbidden fruit.’ Julio’s people took something they weren’t supposed to have, and that’s why they were killed. He mentioned Project Sentinel, called it the touch of death. I remember you asking me about it at Klaws, but you didn’t know what it was.”

  Alice thinks of the first time she heard it, and once more sees an altered meaning in the same information.

  “When I was strapped to Trick’s table, the people who took him bailed in a hurry when one of them recognised me. She said she was running off primary, which was why she saw through my fake ID. She mentioned Project Sentinel but it didn’t mean anything to me.”

  Nikki gapes.

  “They knew what you were.”

  Alice nods grimly.

  “They knew what I was, what I looked like. I was strapped to a table and they were still worried. Maybe they knew I was merely one of many, sending information to a central source. Cut off one head …”

  “And someone who looks exactly like you comes along to cut off theirs.”

  CONTROL

  Nikki keeps her head down and avoids any eye contact as they traverse her familiar stomping ground and head towards the passageways beneath Mullane. Fortunately, nobody’s passing curiosity survives contact with Alice, who is broadcasting her status as the FNG’s snooper-in-chief. It’s like a deflector shield, making everybody else keep their head down and avoid eye contact.

  Nikki falls in behind as they leave the main thoroughfare, her gaze focused on the neat figure of her companion. Alice has been transformed since Nikki fled her apartment, going rogue, breaking rules, breaking laws. These things all seem very human to her; quintessentially human, in fact. And yet she’s seen Omega’s grab, an identical woman carrying out the murder, and Alice seems resigned to the notion that they are both some kind of android. It would sure explain how squeaky clean the girl is, how slavishly adherent to rules and protocols, though her conduct over the past few hours would represent a serious malfunction.

  In seeking an explanation, Nikki had been working on the Sherlock Holmes principle that once you’ve ruled out the impossible, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth. She would have to concede that if someone has developed super-advanced, indistinguishably human-like androids, then the widespread assumption that this was impossible would be the perfect cover. And it would certainly explain a lot if this were indeed Project Sentinel, the deadly secret worth killing so many people for.

  Nonetheless, her instincts are telling her there has to be something else. She’s seen a lot of weird things on Seedee, a place where new tech is emerging all the time, but this just seems a leap too far and too fast. If there has been a development as huge as this, she can see the power play in keeping secret the fact that you have effectively created slaves or surrogates who can pass as human. However, a breakthrough like this doesn’t happen overnight, so keeping it secret doesn’t strike her as consistent with the corporate behaviour she is used to observing up here. They would be wanting tax breaks to assist their efforts in developing this revolutionary new tech, not to mention maximising the effect it would have on their share price
.

  Bottom line is she just isn’t buying it, though admittedly that’s easier for her to say than for Alice. Nikki isn’t the one having to contemplate the possibility that she runs on batteries and might be only a few days old.

  “He’s fixed the door,” Alice says as they approach Trick’s den. “Let’s hope he’s beefed up his security too.”

  “I can’t see the door,” Nikki reports, her lens not showing the outline she is familiar with from a host of previous visits.

  “That’s because you’re Megan Driscoll,” Alice reminds her. “Allow me.”

  “Oh yeah, I’m forgetting you and Trick are tight now.”

  Trick looks a mess, all beat up. He seems alarmed by the sight of Nikki, like she’s a total stranger and not somebody he’s known for years. Then she remembers she is supposed to be: one, a mass murderer; and two, long gone from here.

  “Hey, Trick,” she says quietly.

  He manages a crooked smile and shows his guests inside, closing the door behind them. He’s strengthened it and added some bolts. Nikki figures he’s got an emergency exit hidden someplace too.

  “Nikki Fixx. Guess you’re the turd that wouldn’t flush. Hey, I like the new duds. You look halfway respectable, and by that I mean totally unrecognisable. What is this, witness protection? Or did you get recruited? How many dudes you gotta kill before they give you a job helping out the FNG?”

  “Fuck you, Trick. We’re here to save your ungrateful hide.”

  “Save me? From what?”

  “You were right,” Alice tells him. “Nikki didn’t kill Giselle or anybody else. Now we’re working together to find out who did.”

  “These assholes who took you and beat the shit out of you, Trick. We need to know who they were and what you did for them.”

  He physically backs away, stepping closer to the wall.

  “Nuh-uh. I already told your new boss, here. I’m not crossing these people.”

  “They’re not the ones you need to be afraid of,” Alice tells him.

  “You can say that, but fact is I’m more scared of the psychos I know than the devil I don’t.”