Shadow of a Dead Star (The Wonderland Cycle)

by Michael Shean

  "But now I think this is way more than either of us could've thought. I've been thinking about Stadil, how he acted when we talked, how he died. The girl, she moved around and shit, enough to be able to curl up and die when there was nothing else for her. Enough so that her brains could rot away before much could be done with them."

  Walken frowned, his eyes straight ahead. "Yeah," he said. "But Stadil and his boys burned out."

  "Maybe they did," said Bobbi, "But maybe they didn't. What if this is something new? New and terrible, hooray."

  Walken shook his head. "Now you're making my head hurt," he muttered, gripping the wheel of the Mercedes tighter.

  "Serves you right." Bobbi took a deep breath. "But are we alright, Tom? I don't think I can handle going into this with bullshit drama going on between the two of us."

  He took a deep breath, eyes tracing the embers of the taillights glowing ahead of them. "No," he sighed, his voice a kind of tender resignation, "No, Bobbi. We're fine. I was never mad at you anyway."

  "No shit?" She looked at him, a kind of shy hope in her eyes.

  "No shit."

  A smile found its way to her lips, wide and sparkling and she leaned in to press a kiss against his cheek. "You're alright, baby," she said with her own sigh, lips quirking into the slightest smirk, "Though it looks like you're probably right about us getting killed."

  As the traffic began to move again on the light-strewn ribbon of steel and concrete, Walken wished quietly that she was wrong, or at the very least that it wouldn't happen anytime soon.

  Walken lay in bed that night with Bobbi curled up beside him once again, thinking grimly into the night's late hours. He looked down at the presence of his partner in this, his lover and conspirator and affection welled in his heart. Trust was a tenuous thing, but at least for the moment she had his.

  "Bobbi," he said gently, his hand coming up to brush her shoulder. "You awake?"

  She stirred, her voice soft, tired. "Yeah," she murmured, "I'm awake. What's the matter, baby?"

  He took a deep breath; his hand slid down her arm, resting upon her own splayed upon his chest again. "I was thinking about what you'd said about Stadil and his boys."

  "Nnnyeah?" She sounded a bit more awake now, though only just. "What about 'em?"

  "You remember that Lionel said the Doll's brains — the biocomp — degraded quickly after she died?"

  "Mmmhmm." She buried her face in his shoulder.

  "What if they had the same equipment? Then if Stadil and his bouncers burned themselves out, there wouldn't be anything left to identify. I mean there wouldn't be anything to analyze at all, withered up or no. More than that, it would put anyone investigating it onto the track of some phantom suicide implant."

  Silence for a moment. Then Bobbi sat up sharply in bed. He could feel her eyes on him. "You're saying that they were all like that? Just meat bodies and biocomps?"

  "It's possible," he said. "Jesus. What the hell would they be, then? Artificial intelligence?"

  "Not with just storage..." She trailed off. "Jesus fucking Christ, Tom."

  "What?" He blinked; his nerves stood up at once at the sound of her, the urgency in her tone. "What's the matter?"

  Bobbi turned against him and her breasts pressed into his arm, her voice betraying an exhaustion of the spirit as much as the flesh. "They could all just be...I dunno, constructs. Not dynamic intelligences, but something else. Copies, I guess. Of an original." She groaned in sudden frustration and pulled away. He could hear her pulling on her jeans, the rustle of her top as she slid it over her torso. "I gotta look into something," she grumbled and he heard the ghost-whisper of the plastic sheets as she pushed out into the hall.

  Left alone, Walken had only the horrible image of one-sided people, true hollow men, to hold in the darkness.

  Most of the next day was spent in bed. They burned away tension in the pyre made of their tangling arms, trying to take the edge off through pouring into one another. When they weren't at it, Walken and Bobbi were theorizing, trying to fit their minds around the events that had transpired the few nights previously.

  Bobbi had spent much of the night before stalking the underground community nodes, making very subtle inquiries about the possibilities that they had discussed. She found nothing; the whole thing was science fiction as far as anyone knew. And yet they were also very interested what Bobbi was asking about - she had found herself having to very skillfully retreat from a few conversations with some overly curious parties before things went too far.

  It was clear to them, of course, that the Dolls were something new and terrible, or perhaps just previously undiscovered. Stadil, who was somehow involved, knew of their coming and, due to his involvement, knew that he was not long for this world. For reasons they could not yet fathom, Stadil had apparently placed Walken on the road to discover the truth behind the Dolls, though at the cost of his career. Now the police and the Bureau were looking for him actively, though they had not yet started a manhunt and they were being led via the clues that Stadil had apparently arranged to lay out for him — which begged the question as to how this was even able to happen.

  Up until now they had both thought he was more or less a very successful smuggler, formidable in his own right but not necessarily some great architect of fates. Had they not known enough of him? Walken only knew him by his jacket and his reputation, which had said nothing about involvement with Wonderland. Bobbi had worked with him for several years and yet she too was ignorant of whatever connections he had to the black hives of the East. It seemed that Stadil, in ways thoroughly unimaginable to them both, had been a terrible spider in disguise. Walken imagined him spinning this web in which he had been caught, chuckling at him from Hell with his fleshless, leering grin flickering in the light of endless fires.

  What was it now that they had encountered? What if there were more out there, not Dolls as Bobbi had suggested, but more easily-camouflaged creatures? More importantly, what about the data that he had sent to Hunt? Was it specifications? Details of his connections? And why send it to her at all, knowing that she would most certainly spin whatever results she ended up decrypting into a story.

  "I think you need to talk to her," Bobbi said in the dimming of the afternoon, when the last of the cargo lifters were winging away and the warehouse creaked faintly in the wake of their jets. She was wrapped around him, still impaled. She said she liked to think that way, straddling him, her hips pressed against his so that she could keep him inside of her.

  "Talk to who?" Walken's fingers glided through her pink hair, flicking through the sex-tousled fronds; he took hold of a handful near the scalp and gently tugged.

  She sighed softly in pleasure, her eyes drifting closed. "That reporter," she murmured into his chest. "Hunt. She received the data from him, yeah?"

  He turned his wrist to pull her hair a bit more. The tension sent constant waves of sensation tingling through her scalp. "I took the data from her," he said. "She put it in my hand."

  "But we know what was on there had to be greater than on a datacell," she murmured. "I put those Sevens in myself, Tom. He was using them to storehouse data. Maybe he put information concerning the Doll on it, sent it to her knowing you'd get it?"

  That could be it, he thought — and then he sighed himself, long and frustrated. "The Bureau has it," he said and his hand slid from her hair to stroke the back of her neck. "There's no way I can get in there now."

  Bobbi snorted at him. "Jesus," she muttered, "You have no imagination."

  He swatted lightly at her shoulder. "Be nice," he said.

  "I am," she said and lifted her head to look up at him. "Tom, c'mon. You didn't think she was gonna just give that to you without a plan, did you? Jesus, cops are all the same — if I were her, even if I did give you the real information I'd have a backup."

  "The Bureau'd be on her if that were the case," he reminded her. "We'd have heard about it on the news if she gave up a fake or a copy; we have ways of tel
ling."

  "Again with the lack of imagination," she chided. Bobbi eased herself off of him, rolling onto the bed so that she could peer up at him. "I doubt that your Bureau boys even know what they've got, if our experience with Lionel was any indication. And anyway, don't you think she has sources? I know about six different ways to copy a file without leaving a signature. Hell, she might have a program that she can run herself, what with the tech she's got backing up that data node of hers."

  Walken hadn't thought of that. It annoyed him. "Yeah," he muttered, "I guess you're right at that. So what do we do?"

  "You have to go see her." Bobbi shrugged one shoulder. "It's just the way it has to be. Besides, what's so terrible about that woman? You act like she's got snakes for hair or some shit."

  Walken turned on his side to face her. "You mean like how she never gives up, goes for what she wants and usually causes a lot of fucking trouble while she's at it?"

  "Sounds like someone we know," she said in a stage whisper, then winked.

  "Yeah, only she's completely self-interested," he insisted, but Bobbi shook her head.

  "Again, it sounds familiar." Bobbi leaned forward to peck his lips and chuckled. "Only it's in my best interest to see that you're taken care of, see? And not for the money, either, so don't ask." She poked his chest with a blunt-nailed finger and shrugged. "Just treat her like you do me, baby. Only don't fuck her, because then I gotta mess ya both up."

  He shuddered. "Girl," he said with a shake of his head, "She's got nothing on you. Trust me. I'd sooner stick my dick in a sewer main."

  She blinked at him a moment before smirking. "My hero."

  That night Bobbi arranged for a secure call to be made to Hunt's apartment via an uplink to a Bell Canada satellite that she'd cribbed out of a pirate node, which in turn was piggybacked through six different global network hops into the city. The result was a somewhat distorted signal that, at least acoustically, sounded as if it were coming in from some distant Fourth World nation or perhaps even low orbit.

  "I want to talk to you," he said into an ancient military field handset, his voice threadbare from its jigsaw orbital course, "Tonight." He sat next to Bobbi's altar while she monitored the screens. She didn't need to brainride for this, at least not after the initial connection.

  "Who the fuck is this?" Hunt bore no charm for mysterious callers.

  He licked his lips, weighing the probabilities and spoke. "Thomas Walken."

  Hunt was silent for a long moment. When she spoke again her voice was silky. There was something in the back of her throat he couldn't identify. "Well well," she said, stretching out the words. "Agent Walken. Hello."

  "Good evening." A burst of static spat across the line.

  "I must admit, I'm surprised." She didn't sound it at all, though. "Calling for an exclusive? Well if you want to get your job back through me, honey, you're out of luck. I don't deal with child killers."

  He grunted. "Is that the word?"

  "Mmmhmm. Murdering prostitutes and federal witnesses, they say. Probably working with Wonderland all this time — probably since before you started working with the Bureau. Is that it, Agent? They get to you in Baltimore when they messed up that girl of yours with a hot dose?"

  Walken bit his tongue so hard that he winced. "Look," he said after a moment, "If you want to sit there and fuck with me, fine, get the knives out. You can tell the Bureau all about this call. But if you do that, you'll be missing out on the greatest story you ever fielded." The words felt lame the moment they came out, but he hoped that they would hold some weight.

  If they did, Hunt didn't show it at first. Instead she giggled, heaving the faintest sigh of amusement on the other end of the line. "You know," she said, "You must be really desperate to use that line on me. Don't you think I've heard that from a million people before you? What the hell do you possibly have that could interest me?"

  Playing with him she might be, but that meant he had her interest. "And I'm sure those are the last words you say before they give up something tender," he replied, eyes narrowing. Bobbi rolled her eyes, made a sign like a gun shooting herself in the head. He smirked.

  "Something like that," Hunt purred into Walken's ear. "So let's hear it, then. It better be good if you want my help, after the shit you pulled on me. I don't take kindly to people barging in and taking what's mine."

  Suddenly, quite without his meaning to, a smile lined his lips. "Well it's about that, actually," he said. "You have a copy, don't you?"

  She snorted. "That'd be like begging the Federals to come bash down my door," she said. "Don't be stupid." Despite her words, however, Walken scented the faintest hint of nervousness.

  "Ahhhhh." The voice in his head stirred, rumbled satisfaction. He took a deep breath while Bobby spun lazily on her round stool, knees tucked up against her chest. She kept her eye on the monitors even as she spun, on watch. "Well that's shit luck for you, sister, because I know what's on that thing. I know what it is, where it comes from."

  "Bullshit," she said, almost too quickly — she was still playing out the illusion. "If you knew what it was you wouldn't be calling me, you'd be calling your boys in the Bureau. See, I know where it comes from, too."

  "But you don't know what it does." He licked his lips, looked at Bobbi; she stopped her rotation, shrugged. She gave him a 'go ahead' gesture and turned toward the mobile terminal, hands flexing over its hexagon keys. "And I do."

  "You do?" She laughed again, though behind it the viciousness had gone, replaced by real interest. She was such a greedy bitch, this one. "All right, Walken, I'm listening."

  He cleared his throat. "What if I told you," he began, "That someone in Wonderland had developed a way of making copies of people? Not just clones, but real, actual copies of a personality or even engineered personalities put there by whoever commissions them?"

  "I'd say you're full of shit," Hunt said, but this time she didn't chuckle. "And then I'd ask if you had any proof."

  "That data," he said. "I think it's proof enough. I found the last Doll, Miss Hunt. Her head was one big biocomp storage unit wired directly into her nervous system. She didn't need a brain to move around and act. We thought they were prototypes at first, but now..."

  Silence. Then, finally, Hunt spoke with the bitchy edge of one beaten at her own game. "Fine. I'll meet you." She gave him a time and an address and hung up.

  Walken said nothing until after he had taken a deep breath and Bobbi had cut the link. "Well, that went all right. Do you think that she'll sell me out before I meet her, or after?"

  Bobbi shrugged.

  The First Ebenezer Baptist Church, which lay in the southeastern end of the Verge not far from the border of the Old City, was a blasted ruin inside a border of twisted iron fencing. It was somewhat famous, or at least it had been when anyone gave a shit about the spiritual, as being the birthplace of the last great religious movement in the United States, the New World Evangelical Movement.

  The New Worlders started up in the aftermath of the first fifteen years of the century. It was a time when Islam was the enemy and American boots crunched dusty soil. The desert wars were at their height, when a maddened Tehran glassed Baghdad and portions of Saudi Arabia in an attempt to force Americans out of the Middle East forever, the New Worlders were born out of the resulting political and religious fallout; America went mad and briefly became an overtly crusader nation and First Ebenezer was its spiritual capital. Must've been a really fucking weirdo time back then, he thought as he drove the Mercedes through the fraying streets. The end of oil, end of the global economy as they knew it, end of Mecca and old Islam and the beginning of the end of Christianity and the belief in God the world over.

  The war between the ideologues that marked the death of spiritualism writ large extended into the Twenties and Thirties, but by '37 the world had generally moved on. Media, science and technological convenience converged to form a new paradigm for the human race and that spelled the end of most things spir
itual. By the late Sixties almost all traces of religious worship, beyond that which sometimes lay in the less developed areas of the world, had vanished. The Vatican was the personal compound of a network mogul who bought the whole thing out in the wake of the European War.

  The worst thing was, at least to Walken, that it wasn't reason that people had abandoned religion for. It was convenience. It had always amazed him how quickly humanity abandoned the spiritual for animated fabric and self-heating food, krill steaks and same-day plastic surgery. Not that the major faiths didn't have a lot coming to them, two thousand or more years of hatred and misunderstanding done in their name, but when it came down to it — when the choice to cling to faith or not came to the fore — it seemed that the majority of humanity just chose to discard it like a suit of once-comfortable clothes long since gone out of fashion.

  And what had come in to fill the vacuum? Anything? Faith in the greater whole of the universe seemed to have died with the great religions and all that was left was faith in network schedules and next year’s change in fashions. And now, he would meet a perfect product of that empty culture at the place where it had begun.

  He stood outside the church's crumbling ruin a full ten minutes before the time she told him to meet her, just looking at it from the comfort of the sedan. It looked more like a bunker or a modern-day castle than a church, he thought, its shattered five-story walls made from thick permacrete and bristling with the dull orange spider-legs of rebar. He'd read that it had taken three shoulder-fired antitank rockets and a van full of block hexalocyclene to blast the thing to cinders. This was ironic, for in those last days the suicide bombers so feared were not Islamists at all but competing Christian factions. It was a Sons of Calvary cell that had spelled the end of the New World Evangelists, not the terrorists that they had seemed to see at every turn. He watched for a bit, looking for signs of activity and, seeing nothing, go out of the car.