Subhan was staring at him, immobile, a white-hot fury pouring off his body, the likes of which Haroon had never seen. When he spoke, it was with a deathly quiet voice.
“The police.”
“Y-yes?” Haroon said. “The RCMP.”
He stood, now completely sober, and slowly and deliberately spat on the floor by Haroon’s feet.
“You. Get. Out. Don’t. Come. Back.”
He turned his back on Haroon and walked out of the apartment.
Haroon felt his arms and legs go weak, deflated, as though something had stabbed him, and everything had drained through the gaping hole.
He sat there for a very long time, not reacting. Not understanding.
KEL
Kel shivered and wished she’d taken her usual route through the habitat to warm up more quickly. She hated going out in the late February air, especially after eating dinner, as that always made it feel worse. But she’d needed to eat, and she had been fed up with the options available in the lab. Kel had treated herself to a nice big bowl of bánh phở and headed back to work.
She was anxious to return. She’d built three more prototype implants with an improved design, better pattern filters, and had drafted a presentation she planned to give to Robert. She needed to compose an application to the ethics committee to go with it before she went home for the weekend.
Kel got to the lab door and then stopped.
The outside door was wide open. It normally closed and locked automatically after anyone with an authorised entry signature in their digital tattoo opened it. Worse, the inside door was also open. Was pathogen scanning operational? Had someone come in without being scanned? It might not be too bad if they stayed in the office area, they could quarantine and scrub that, but contamination of the habitat could be disastrous.
It was still dark in the lab. Had the door malfunctioned? Was there something wrong with the facility controls?
She approached the door cautiously. “Hello? Robert? Bao-Yu?”
Did something just move? Her heart started thumping.
Kel stepped inside the door. The lights did not come on as they should have.
She cursed, and her mouth and throat went dry and tight. Everything seemed unnaturally quiet. It all felt very wrong.
Were the animals okay? Were they even still in the habitat? Or was that door open, too?
Something hard smashed into her shin and she cried out in shock and pain, falling forward. Someone grunted in the blackness right beside her — so close! — and moved and the hard thing came down on her head.
Then there was nothing.
RAY
A drone dropped out of nowhere, stopping between them. It was big and silent and unmarked.
It flicked a scanner beam, long and red, like a tongue, up the length of Mick.
And then it exploded.
Flashes. Mick blown backward, collapsing into a pile of shredded flesh. Blinding white light. Blood everywhere.
The emergency vehicles. Lights. Voices. A rough boot kicking his ankle. “This one is still alive!”
Too much pain to feel. Blackness…
That picture of Mick. Poor Mick.
Swimming, swimming upward, must get out, struggling, surfacing…
Ray gasped and blinked.
Everything seemed so dazzling. His eyes watered. He raised a stiff and shaky arm to wipe them and discovered tubes plugged into the back of his hand. He stared at them, uncomprehending for several minutes. Then he became conscious of tubes up his nose, and he snorted and gagged. He ripped them out. He let his hand drop, drained by the effort. A light flashed above his head. He strained to look around and figure out where he was.
“Easy there, luv.” A woman with a brusque and confident manner came into the room a moment later. “You won’t like it if I have to put those back in. Go slow and we’ll see how we get on without them. All right then?”
Ray tried to nod. The woman seemed startled. “Oh my, we are doing better today, aren’t we?” She came closer, peering at him. “You’ve been floating in and out of consciousness for a few days now since we took you out of the coma.” She ran a gentle hand up from his forehead and over his head. Ray realised he had no hair.
The woman seemed to understand the widening of his eyes and gave him a soft smile. “Sorry, duck. Don’t worry, we’ll let it grow back soon.” She frowned at some devices where the light had flashed. She glanced down at him again. “I’m Jane, by the way. And never mind if you can’t remember that the next time you come to.”
He tried to say his name. His voice was a hoarse wet growl. Jane clucked her tongue and patted him. “There’ll be none of that just now, yeah? Save your energy.” She turned away from him and inspected what Ray registered was an IV drip. A hospital. It wasn’t all a dream — a nightmare — then. It had happened.
But he would not be deterred. “R-ay,” he croaked.
Jane cocked an eyebrow at him, considered, and said, “Right, so you’re one of those. Stubborn blokes. Hang on.” She left, but returned quickly with a small cup of ice chips. She gently pushed one into his mouth.
It was cold and clean and beautiful. He closed his eyes, groaning a little. When he opened them, she was looking at him kindly.
“Where?” he whispered.
“You’re at Toronto General,” she said. “And you probably wouldn’t be alive if you hadn’t been so close. Do you remember any of it?”
Ray hesitated and then nodded slightly.
“Aye, well,” Jane perched on the edge of the bed. “I’ll not judge, and anyway it seems to me with the stuff you’ve been shouting in your sleep that you’re not the type to be involved in any of this anarchist nonsense we hear about down south… I’m sure the police will still want to speak to you when you’re ready though.”
Ray was tugging at her sleeve, trying to get her attention. “H-ow… how long?”
“How long have you been here, you mean?” She pursed her lips. “That’s a good question. They’ve had you in a coma since before I rotated in, so…” She consulted a device. “A couple of months, looks like. They took a whole bucket of shrapnel out of you, printed a new spleen, reconstructed your eardrum, loads of grafts, put you in the physio machine several times…”
But Ray had stopped breathing.
Two months.
Two months was long enough for the building owner to have given up on him. To have sold off everything he had so carefully collected and given away his space. Long enough for the job interview to have been marked as ‘no show.’ For him to have been labelled a skip. Not stable.
Not worthy of integration.
Marked.
He had lost everything he had been working towards.
Everything.
The low keening noise he had started making grew louder. The nurse halted her monologue and looked at him in alarm.
“Now what are you on about? You’ll be up and about before you know it and you’ve got all four limbs, which is nothing short of a miracle, and — oh, lawks…”
The anger and helplessness of his teenage years came crashing back. He wanted to break something.
Break everything.
Adrenaline slammed into him and the heart monitor went wild. He sat bolt upright, ripped the drip out of his hand, threw it at Jane and roared, the cords of his neck bulging and his face flaming red. The fire in his chest consumed him. He stagger-slid out of the bed and smashed his fist into the digital chart above his bed. The glass shattered everywhere.
He was still reeling unsteadily around the room, tears pouring down his face, and screaming when a hospital security guard tackled him to the floor.
PART II
KEL
When Kel came to, it took her several minutes to realise she must be in a hospital. Still groggy and confused, it was several more minutes before she remembered why she was in one. She recalled being struck twice. What else had happened? She pressed the button to call for a nurse.
A few minutes la
ter, a big man with red hair and a face full of freckles strode in. “And there ye be,” he said, smiling. “My name is Sam.” He checked the screen at the head of her bed. “And you’re… Kel, it says here.”
Kel thought she could detect a Newfoundland accent. He projected a friendly sort of confidence; she liked him right away. “Hi, Sam,” she said. “Yes, I’m Kel. What happened?”
“Well good, glad we have the right person in the assigned bed,” he winked. “They brought you in here with a wicked coupla knocks to the head and a right shin that has seen better days. You’re a hockey player then?”
Kel laughed, despite her fears. “No, I wouldn’t know one end of a puck from another.”
“Just as well you don’t play, as pucks really don’t have ends, seeing as they’re round and all,” Sam replied, still reading her chart. “The short answer to your question is: not very much in the grand scheme of things, and you’re goin’ to be fine.”
Kel tried to shift in the bed and winced when a pain shot up her leg.
“Yes, don’t wiggle yourself about just yet. You’ve got a badly broken shin there, and the painkiller will only give you so much of a buzz. We’ve had to insert calcium phosphate putty, and you’ve got magnesium alloy pins and plates in there to make everything sit tight. Once the swelling comes down more, we’ll print you up a cast for it, too. Your next interface with a food fabber should tell it not to supplement for magnesium as you won’t need any spare when those bits start to biodegrade, but watch for that, eh?”
Kel nodded.
“As for your head, you took a solid smack to the back of your noggin, and then, I’m sorry to say, you seem to have fallen on your face. You’ve a right shiner, I must say. This your kit?” Sam pointed off to her left.
Kel gently twisted to look. Her bag was sitting on the night table by the bed. “Yes, that’s mine. How did that get here?”
Sam referred to her chart again. “Says here one of your colleagues, someone called Bao-Yu? She put it in the ambulance pod. She found you. Is there a mirror in there I can get?”
“Yes, I have a silver compact in there. It was my grandmother’s.”
“Sweet,” Sam said as he fished it out of the back. He pried it open and flipped it over to show her the reflection. One side of her face was swollen and the area around the eye was a deep purple.
Kel raised a hand to touch the bruise. “Ouch!”
Sam nodded. “Yeah, I know. We can give you something to speed up the healing there, if you like, or you can just let it fade on its own.” He lifted the sheet covering her leg and checked it over for signs of infection. Satisfied, he tapped in some notes into her chart.
“There’s… nothing else then? I wasn’t… “Kel paused, unsure how to ask what she wanted to know. She’d been unconscious. “I wasn’t assaulted in any other way?”
“Cor, no, there’d be more than just me here to see you if that were the case.”
Kel breathed a sigh of relief.
“You’ll get on the go in a day or two, looks like. If you feel up to it, the police would like to chat with you. Oh, and we’ve eight messages from your mother for you to call her when you’re conscious.”
“Eight!” Kel groaned. “How long have I been in here?”
“Only since last night.”
Kel groaned again. Her mother was her emergency contact, so she would have been notified almost immediately. “Who should I talk to first then?”
Sam grinned at her. “Well, your mother was threatening to visit if she didn’t hear soon…”
Kel reached for her wristband. “Say no more.”
~
By the time Kel had reassured her mother she would be okay, half an hour had passed. A delivery bot trundled up to her bed, bearing a tray of food for lunch. As hungry as she was, Kel had a hard time choking down the tasteless sandwich and the tea that tasted like ditch water. When she was finished, she was certain hospitals sourced their food fabbers from the lowest bidders.
There was a knock at the door. A constable from the Toronto Police Service nodded at her when she looked up. “Are you Kel Rafferty?”
“Yes,” Kel said, and he came in. He introduced himself as Gobinder Singh. He pulled a chair over to her bedside, carefully hitched up his trousers and sat down. Without preamble, he put a small tablet between them and thumbed a control. It flashed to show it was recording. Then he said, “I understand you were involved in an incident last night? Please tell me what happened.”
“I’m not sure I can tell you much,” Kel said. “I came back to my office after going out for dinner and found the doors open. I stepped in to see what was happening, something smashed into my leg, and then I guess I was hit on the head. That’s it.” She gasped as she suddenly recalled her concerns going into the dark room. “The animals! Was the habitat breached?
Singh shook his head no. “It doesn’t look like it. I interviewed your supervisor this morning and reviewed security camera footage, and nothing appears to be missing from the… habitat, I guess you called it. So we can probably rule out animal rights activists. Was anyone at your office with you or were you working alone?”
Kel felt limp with relief. She wasn’t sure she could handle another research setback. “Alone, as far as I know.” The constable gave her a quizzical look. “I mean, people pop in and out of there all the time, but there wasn’t anyone with me.”
“And you weren’t expecting anybody?”
Kel shook her head. “No.”
“Do you often work alone at night on a Friday night?”
Kel wasn’t sure she liked the tone of his question. He made it sound as though it was a weird thing to do. “Quite a bit, I guess, yes. Why?”
“Is this a habit, I mean? Part of your routine?”
“I… don’t really have a routine. I work some nights… but not all nights, if that’s what you mean.”
The constable stroked his beard. “Thank you for clarifying. Did you have anything of value on your person that is now missing?”
Kel thought about the contents of her bag, which usually included a hairbrush, some cosmetics, and perhaps a snack bar or two. “No, nothing. I mean, I didn’t have anything really valuable. I haven’t checked whether anything was taken.”
“How about in your office? Was anything of value there? From the footage I referenced earlier, it looks like whoever hit you took things from your desk.”
“No, I—” Kel gasped.
Two of her prototypes, a printout of the schematics and a hard copy of her proposal had been in her desk.
“Are you sure?” she said. “My desk?”
“Yes, one of your colleagues,” and here he swiped away the recording screen on his tablet temporarily to check his notes, “Robert? Robert said it was your desk. What was there, Dr Rafferty?”
Kel didn’t know how to answer. Who would steal what she was working on? Who even knew what she was doing? She had told no one at the office yet. Would saying something now end up putting details into the public record? How would that affect the university’s chances of getting a patent? Kel hadn’t wanted to say anything to Robert about the side project until she had a solid presentation put together. She might not know a lot about office politics but she knew enough to want to avoid presenting something half-baked.
“Dr Rafferty?”
“There would have been… parts. Parts of an implant for the macaques I work with,” Kel replied.
“Do you know the registration number of the implants?”
“Uh, no.”
“Would you have the registration number on file?”
“No, they were parts, as I said…”
Constable Singh nodded, the badge on the front of his turban flashing. “So nothing of value then?”
“Well, it’s really rather important I get those back.”
A flicker of annoyance went across his face. “Do you have an IP address for them? Are they GPS-enabled? RFID?”
“No, I’m afraid they weren’
t hooked up into the thingweb, and as I said, they were parts so—”
“Dr Rafferty, I appreciate you might be feeling a bit rough, but I will need more than this to do anything further. Were these parts expensive to license and print? Were these exclusive licences? Are you or the university going to be significantly out of pocket here, or what?”
Kel felt like a stuck audio loop. “No, they were parts, but the configuration I was using was unique and—”
Singh raised his hand. “Okay, look, I get it. They were important to you. Do you have any idea who might have taken them? Anyone have a grudge against you at the moment? Does anyone have access to the contents of your desk or to your work computer, or know what you were working on? Is this an intellectual property concern?”
She reviewed what had been happening lately. If he wasn’t impressed by a real robbery, he would not think much of dead lab animals or her missing data, given she couldn’t prove anything about either. All she had were coincidences. Reluctantly, she shook her head.
Constable Singh looked disappointed and stopped his tablet from recording any further. “I think we’re done here,” he said, standing up and giving his tunic a short, sharp tug to straighten it. “I’m sure you will remember your unique configuration, and you’ll print new parts. But I can’t do anything if you won’t tell me more. If you think of anything else I should know, please get in touch.” He left.
Kel was suddenly conscious of how much her leg was throbbing and her head ached. She felt miserable. All she desired was to close her eyes and have it all go away. But one thought kept repeating in her mind: What would someone — someone willing to attack a stranger — do with a device that recorded and replayed brain states?
RAY
March had decided to come in like a lion. The weather was absolutely foul.
The day had started with howling winds and driving snow — big, wet clumps that landed with a splat and stuck to everything. By noon, it had warmed enough to change into freezing rain, and now the footpaths were slick with it. The pod flows had slowed to a crawl. Walking was treacherous. The cold was damp and phantom-like, getting under his skin, sucking the heat out of him and making him ache.
Echoes of Another Page 11
