Jack’s been in the corner talking on his smartphone. He comes over into the light of the whiteboard projector. “I phoned Angel’s mobile again,” he says. “A policeman on Corfu answered it. Amber drove off a cliff. Angel took an overdose.”
“And?” Lynne asks.
“This many brains gone within minutes of each other? Looks to me like we’re under attack.”
There’s a long pause as Lynne’s blue eyes track across the room. “Jack, Sunil, Rachel, Jason—stay here. Everybody else goes home, but keep your phones on and be ready to go anywhere at very short notice. Thank you.”
When the room empties Lynne points to some seats and pours herself coffee from the flask near the whiteboard. Nobody says a word. Eventually Lynne sits down and says, “Okay. We need to be clear about this. Jack—you’re senior director on this movie. How much have we got?”
Jack is in his mid-thirties. He has unfashionably long hair and a patrician English private-school accent, despite the fact that he went to a crummy comprehensive in Bolton. “If we include some marginal takes,” he says, “I’d say we’ve got about eighty percent of it. Just a guess. We’ll have to do a slash edit.”
Lynne turns to Rachel, who is the second ranking director. “Rachel, do you agree with that?”
Rachel nods.
“So,” Lynne asks, “my first question is, can we finish it? We’ve got vast information from the actors on the computers. Haven’t we, Sunil?”
Sunil hates this. He avoids eye contact with the others. “Yes, we have,” he says quietly.
Lynne walks over and stands in his eyeline. “You don’t sound very sure,” she says. “Why can’t we finish the movie using the personalities we have?”
“We probably can,” Sunil says.
“How big or small is ‘probably’?”
Sunil puts his forefinger and thumb into a sign for small.
Lynne steps away and takes a breath. “I’m very stupid,” she says. “We spend two billion Euros to get the most advanced movie-making system ever devised. We collect Oscars the way people get loyalty points in supermarkets. We hire some beautiful people with zero acting talent, hijack their brains, and then I forget that they’re human. They can die. We didn’t protect them. We’re gobshite.”
The blue eyes are unexpectedly wet. Jack’s smartphone buzzes and he swipes the screen with his finger. “Two more,” he says. “They’re taking out everybody.”
Lynne spins around and kicks a chair across the room. “Well fuck them!” she shouts. “This is fucking war! Jack and Rachel, see if we can rescue the movie. Sunil, get the whole of your technical team on it.”
Sunil has his head in his hands, gazing at the grey carpet. “Fine,” he says. “But we may have another problem.”
Lynne picks up the broken chair, sets it down very carefully, and says, “This is absolutely the time I need to know everything. What is it I don’t know?”
EXT. LUTON AIRPORT—NIGHT
A white Learjet 85 is lined up on the apron at the west end of the runway next to the white terminator markers, trembling in the wash of a Whizz Air 737 bound for Prague winding its engines up to take-off thrust. The 737 rolls away down the runway, its wingtip lights flashing brightly; it rotates and lifts off.
The cabin lights are dim in the Learjet, but we can still see Lynne and her PA Jason sipping coffee. There’s busy radio chatter from the control tower, and then the Learjet begins to move, turning into the long reach of black tarmac, accelerates, lifts into the air, and flies southwards across Germany and the Alps, down the Italian coast past Venice and Brindisi towards Corfu.
INT./EXT. LEARJET—CORFU—DAWN
Lynne is sleeping as the plane descends from thirty-seven thousand feet to five thousand and follows the track down the Adriatic towards the islands that mark the northwesterly points of Greece. To their left the flight crew can see the rocky coast of Albania. Jason wakes Lynne with coffee and fruit juice. Orange dawn light is flaring over the mountains to the east.
Danny Edwards, the head of security, doesn’t sleep much. He’s sitting in his seat just behind the pilots, patched into the studio’s hi-tech and probably illegal network of satellite systems. He’s drinking herbal tea, which he hates, and the nicotine patch on his arm itches. He has his headset on and he’s calling in the return of a few favours, plus a liberal sprinkling of Euros. Sunil is sitting beside him, monitoring the exotic equipment in the hold.
The Learjet pilots have a few words with the tower at Ioannis Kapodistrias airport, lower their landing gear, extend the flaps, and descend to fifteen hundred feet. It’s a bumpy ride as the wind that brought the heroes of the Odyssey home to Greece takes them down the west coast of Corfu. The dark green mountains of the island are to the left. The Ionian Sea, plunging to a depth of sixteen thousand feet, is to the right. They fly past the villages of Agios Stefanos, where Angel died, then Arillas, Agios Giorgios, and Paleokastritsa, where Amber died. The beaches are all in shadow. The gods are asleep, even Korkyra, the beautiful nymph whom Poseidon abducted and married, and who gives her name to the island: Kerkyra.
They turn left and make their approach over the hills to the runway, which is a spit reaching out into the sea. They pass over a white-painted church on a small island. They touch down and savage the dawn peace with reverse thrust.
INT. MORTUARY–CORFU—DAY
Spiros has seen a great deal of sudden death in his career as a policeman, but he still hates postmortems. He hates the bitter charring smell of bone-saws. He hates the calm evisceration, the digital scales, the organs, the dissection of somebody who laughed and loved into a scrap heap of components. He’s sweating.
The mortuary in the new blue-and-white-painted hospital in Kontokali, just north of the town centre, is state of the art. Amber’s mangled body lies naked on one stainless-steel slab and Angel’s perfect dark-haired beauty lies on the next, although she’s not so good-looking with her scalp peeled back. Spiros is pleased to be behind glass in the observation area and not up close and intimate with the body fluids. He’s even more pleased when his mobile phone rings and the head of the prefecture orders him to halt the postmortem. His pleasure doesn’t last long.
The pathology-trained surgeon speaks clearly into her microphone. “This is highly unusual,” she says. She has just trepanned Angel’s skull, exposing the membrane of the brain surface. “The dura mater is bright blue.”
Spiros barges his way through the door into the room. “Stamata!” he says. Stop. “Refrigerate the bodies and wait for instructions. And don’t ask. Politics!”
FAST FORWARD thirty minutes, and Spiros, Selina Mariatos, the acting pathologist, Lynne and her team, and a senior police officer are sitting in a meeting area drinking cold lemon-tea from a vending machine. Spiros swills his down, crushes the can, and throws it very accurately into a recycling bin. “So?” he demands. “We’re conducting an investigation. We are not open to interference.”
“That’s the last thing we want to do, Mr. Koukoulades,” Lynne says. “We think we can help. In fact we know we can help. The thing is, this is time-critical. We have a few hours at most.”
“Make your case quickly, then. As the investigating officer, I will decide whether you are helping or … something else.”
Lynne stands up and walks to the window. “What I’m going to tell you,” she says, “is highly confidential.”
Spiros laughs, and says, “I have two dead film-stars. Everything I do is going to be reported across the world. If you have something to tell me, then tell me. But you don’t decide what is confidential. Is that clear?”
He doesn’t flinch when Lynne turns and opens her eyes wide and looks into his—blue on brown. He’s used to tough women. He married one. “You have two dead film-stars. We have five. This is no accident, officer. This is conspiracy and murder. We need your help, and believe me, you need ours.”
Danny’s looking at his smartphone. “It’s six actors now,” he says. “Can we get moving?”
FAST FORWARD twenty minutes and Sunil and Selina are having a nerd-fest in the dissection area as the equipment from the Learjet is wheeled in. They are thirty years old, almost exactly the same olive-skinned colour, and both good-looking in reasonably dim light. They are both isolated from the human race around them by their considerable knowledge. Selina throws a plastic coverall to him. He puts it on, and then says, “You’ll have to be kind to me. I’m not used to bodies.” She pokes him in the chest and says, “You’ve got one.”
“I may be sick.”
“D’you think I care about sick? If you’re sick I’ll scrape it up and tell you what you had for lunch three days ago. Now—why is Angel’s brain blue?”
“You’ll see.”
Sunil opens the aluminium carry boxes and arranges what look like sixteen small satellite dishes on work surfaces on either side of the slabs and across the room. He fixes a UK to Continental electric-socket adapter to the plug on the power lead from a heavy black control console and connects it to the mains supply. The console has a flat matte-black square surface on its top, but when he flicks the on-switch the surface glows a deep ultramarine, pales, and rises up to make a translucent sixteen-inch cube of light aqua, as though the colour has stretched and attenuated.
“You have agreed,” Sunil says, “that the video remains confidential.”
“It must be available to the inquest. That’s the law.”
“Selina,” Sunil says, “I’ll share everything with you. There is nothing else like this anywhere in the world. But what happens to the evidence is out of our control. There are many things I can’t tell you yet. But I promise you, we will work together and we will share things that may perhaps not reach the final report. There will be no lies, but some things will remain obscure. Do we have that agreement?”
“I will make my decision later,” Selina says.
The mortuary assistant brings the bodies in their body bags with a trolley one by one and lays them on the dissection slabs. He opens the bags and slides the bodies onto the tables. Sunil feels a flush cover his face. His heart is beating very fast. Amber’s body is a wreck. Every bone is broken. She’s strangely short—truncated by the impact with the ground. Her skull is split open diagonally from above her left ear down to the bottom of the right jaw. Much of her brain is missing. What is left is discoloured—hints of green and turquoise amongst the pink and grey.
Selina puts her arm around Sunil. “This is my science,” she says. “Now you do yours and you’ll feel better. We do it for them. I don’t know if they’re on their way to an afterlife or nothing. But we will find the truth of their last seconds. I’m going to start recording now.” She gestures to the assistant to leave the room and presses the record button on the console.
“This is the continuing investigation into of the death of Julia Jane Simpson, a British National found dead in Paleokastritsa. I will continue this narrative in English and Greek for the benefit of Doctor Sunil Gupta, who is also present.”
INT. CAR—CORFU—DAY
Spiros and Danny Edwards have reached an unspoken agreement. Spiros drives at seventy miles per hour along spiralling mountain roads and Danny doesn’t shit himself, even when Spiros leans heavily on the brakes of his BMW to avoid massacring a herd of goats which has meandered across the tarmac.
“We’re off the record. Agreed?” Spiros asks, having softened Danny up with a constantly-changing array of G-forces. Danny agrees that they’re off the record.
“On any one day a tourist drives off a cliff,” Spiros continues. “On any one day somebody takes an overdose. Holidays can be emotional. We have established that Amber and Angel—to use their public names—were lesbian lovers. They had an argument that morning at breakfast. Amber went off to Paleo, on her own, and drove off the cliff. Angel took an overdose, which is what lovers often do when things go wrong. Would I be wrong to assume the simple explanation?”
“No,” says Danny. “But when six people who work for us die within hours of each other, would I be wrong to assume that we’re looking at murder?”
“You’re not ex-military, I think. You’re not ex-police. Your manner tells me you’re almost certainly ex-security, probably MI5. Are my instincts wrong?”
“No.”
The road to The Golden Fox high above Paleokastritsa is cordoned off. A policeman moves the no entry sign aside and Spiros drives slowly to a point where burnt rubber marks the road. A camera is set up on a tripod and the operator is leaning against the rocks away from the cliff edge, smoking. He stubs it out quickly when he sees Spiros and Danny get out of the car. Danny paces on the road—walks up twenty yards, then thirty, walks back, shading his eyes from the fierce July sun that’s high over the sea. Spiros says nothing. He gestures to the cameraman, who takes out a packet of Karelia cigarettes and offers one to Spiros. Smoke curls into the air as Danny paces and paces again. Danny’s fair-haired and his skin is rapidly turning pink in the intense light. Finally he walks up to Spiros.
“She was a careful, timid driver. She wasn’t going fast—maximum twenty-five miles an hour. She steers into the bend towards the cliff, brakes hard, veers to the left, hits the rocks, bounces off, and loses control. She floors the brakes as she heads to the cliff edge. She goes over.”
The cameraman nods and says, “Ne!” Yes. Spiros holds his hand up and says, “Shh. I want to hear Mr. Edwards’s conclusions.”
“May I have a cigarette?” Danny asks. The cameraman throws the pack of Karelias to Danny, and then the lighter. Danny draws deeply on the cigarette. “Two weeks,” he says. “Two miserable fucking weeks without a cigarette and then this happens. Anyway—looks to me like she was shunted.”
Spiros leads Danny up the road towards The Golden Fox, where Amber had her last swim. “All these deaths,” he says. “I have to be objective, obviously. When the top executives of a film company fly in overnight and start spending big money, I have to think that they’ve got something to hide. I was at the postmortem and the pathologist said there were some anomalies in the brains of the dead girls. So an alternative hypothesis might be that you did something to them which went terribly wrong.”
Spiros’s mobile phone rings. He listens for a few seconds, says, “Endaxi,” and snaps the phone shut.
Danny is standing by the roadside looking down at the pale wakes of the little boats weaving their way between the rocky bays far below. “A beautiful place to die,” he says.
Spiros comes and stands beside him and asks, “Did Clytemnestra really stab Agamemnon to death in his bath? Maybe he slipped and hit his head, but that was too dull a story. It sounds stupid, but that’s why I became a policeman. Old stories. Anyway, I’ve had the dune buggy thoroughly examined and there are traces of black paint on the left-hand rear side.”
Danny takes a last drag on his cigarette and grinds the stub with his foot.
“So,” Spiros says, “let’s see if we can find any traces of a black car at the taverna.”
“CCTV?” Danny asks.
Spiros laughs.
INT. MORTUARY—CORFU—DAY
Selina has dissected the remains of Amber’s brain, weighed them, but before she slices the tissue she places them on a glass plate away from the body. Sunil adjusts the array of dishes, checking frequently with readouts on his control console.
She comes and stands beside him, speaking quietly. “You must explain, for the record. If you don’t, I will never work again.”
“You can come and work for us,” Sunil says.
“Your film company has a lot of opportunities for part-time pathologists? I don’t think so.”
“Unfortunately, this week it does.” He moves away from the console and stands carefully facing away from the bodies and the pile of brain tissue.
“Okay,” he says. “Background. Cinema is the only art that totally depends on technology. That’s its greatest strength and also a curse. People drifted away from actual cinemas when TV took off. The big studios are closely tied in
with the distributors and theatre owners. They want people back in the cinemas. They want to sell seats and popcorn. That’s why 3D got so heavily sold at the end of the first decade of the century.
“The technology isn’t that good. People who don’t wear spectacles don’t like wearing them, and people who do don’t like having to fix another set over the top of their prescription lenses. Ten percent of people can’t see the effect anyway. Still, whizz bang, latest thing.
“We’re a small production company. We don’t like being at the beck and call of some inflated ego talking poolside in Malibu. Particularly Lynne. Her ancestors were so scary the Romans built a ten metre wall to keep them in. So, to cut to the chase, we invested—well, she invested—in technology. We are miles ahead of the game. We can now deliver a better experience in your sitting room than you’ll ever get in a cinema.”
Selina paces. “So how does that relate to these poor dead women?” she asks.
“We can generate direct brain stimulation to the audience. You can live it, feel it, and experience it emotionally. So we can create this, we borrow the brains of our actors—with their full agreement. We inject them with some harmless nano and similar equipment to this sets up a kind of quantum entanglement. We use some of their brain centres without them being aware.”
“How do you know it’s harmless?” the pathologist demands.
“We’ve done animal trials, human trials—it has no effect.”
“Does that cause the blue colouration?”
“Probably. After exposure to air.”
“Sunil, I’ll believe you for now, but you may have to prove that to the Examining Magistrate.”
“Fine. Now—we should not wait too long.”
Selina gestures to the equipment. “Describe,” she says.
Sunil presses some buttons on the console. The light in the translucent cube flickers. “I’m attempting to re-entangle the nano,” he says. “I’m recording these data for the report.” Suddenly the segments of brain tissue appear like a model in the cube. He flicks a switch, and false colour marks some regions in red and orange. “The visual centres are destroyed,” he says. “The nano particles store short-term information in a buffer for about ten seconds before loss of entanglement. It looks to me like we may have something coherent in the superior temporal gyrus region. Auditory processing. This may take some time to extract.”
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection Page 91
