Unidentified Funny Objects 2

by Silverberg, Robert

  “Well, check the system and get back to me,” Dena said. “I am finding no reason why Mr. Smedley would have jumped off a building, not when he had a set of mint 1977 Star Wars figurines to come home to.”

  “Will do, Detective,” Perugio promised. He leaned toward her. “Um, Dr. K’t’ank, can I, uh… do you have email in there?”

  “Most certainly!” K’t’ank said. “I would be pleased to add you to my correspondents. I am very active in staying current with connections.”

  “It keeps him quiet at night,” Dena pointed out dryly.

  SHE TOOK SMEDLEY’S FILES home on a small drive, and went over them while her husband watched a couple of hours of television on their wall-sized screen. K’t’ank shared Neal’s passion for reality videos. Dena had learned to glance up every few seconds while she was doing something else so he could follow the program, without really seeing what was on the screen herself. The medical examiner’s file had arrived during dinner. She studied it.

  “Smedley’s health was fine. He broke his wrist during high school, but since then, nothing. No cancer. No fatal disease. Nothing but a little myopia.”

  “Everybody has myopia,” Neal Malone said, without looking away from the tri-vid screen.

  “Yeah, I know. It couldn’t have been an organic failure. But what? It has to be right in front of me. Something that drove him to not only kill himself, but do it happily.”

  “Look up, Malone, look up!” K’t’ank said. “That terror is like one who lives on my world!”

  A nightmare beast lunged directly toward them, opening a vast blue, fuchsia, and slate gray mouth lined with row after row of sharp teeth. She jumped backward, her heart pounding. It turned on its tail and swam away.

  “Why do you flinch?” K’t’ank asked. “You know what you saw isn’t real.”

  “I hate you,” Dena said. Her pulse slowed to its normal rhythm.

  “That is not an answer!”

  “Yes, it is,” she said, and went back to her reading. She stopped. “Could it really be that easy?”

  “What is easy?” K’t’ank asked.

  “Seeing something that isn’t there?”

  She attacked the company files, much less easy to sift through. The screen opened hundreds of cascading files that all looked alike except for a few lines of text and a 3D rendering spinning in a box, of anything from a console to a single circuit. Smedley’s job as CTO was to collect documentation and coordinate applications to the Terran Patent Office, among other things. At any time, he had somewhere between sixty and two hundred applications under consideration, with more in various levels of appeal or approval. Not only that, there was correspondence from all around the solar system and beyond regarding rival applications. Some of them were for technology almost identical to Totality’s. A few were almost word for word identical to ones submitted by Smedley from a company on Enceladus. They had been forwarded to him by Ms. Bendix. Dena called her again.

  “Those set off alarm bells in my mind,” Iris confirmed. “It looked like someone inside the company was taking Totality technology and trying to bring it to market first, but I don’t know who that could have been.”

  “Who in the company would have provided the tech specs for the original applications?” Dena asked.

  “All of them,” Iris said. “They’re all engineers. Brilliant ones.”

  “Were they all out to get Smedley, forming another company behind his back?”

  “Why?” Iris asked, reasonably. “They’re all rich. Art thought it was just one person. I think he was close. Someone needed more time. I bet they still do. The system shut down while I was talking to him.”

  “That was me,” Dena said. “I mean, the police. You think the data lockdown interrupted the crime?”

  “Yes. The information must still be in there somewhere. If they can get the lockdown reversed, even for a microsecond, you’ll lose the evidence. What you need to ask is, who had one foot out the door?”

  Dena closed the connection. The ocean program was over. Now Neal and K’t’ank were rapt over a show about nanotechnology for surgeries. She had to watch the excision of microscopic organisms that were as gross as the sea monsters from internal organs. The baby shifted and rolled across her bladder. Oops! Time to run. She heaved herself off the couch.

  “Not now!” K’t’ank shouted. “They are severing a tumor from the liver!”

  Dena moaned.

  “So, who had one foot out the door?” Dena asked, hearing her voice echo off the ceramic walls of the bathroom. “All the programmers say they’re happy, but everybody lies.”

  “The green male claimed things that no one else did,” K’t’ank said.

  “Green male? What green male?”

  “Caitako.”

  Dena rolled her eyes.

  “Do not do that!” K’t’ank protested. “It ruins my image of the room.”

  “Caitako is a woman. That’s a she.”

  “No difference,” K’t’ank said imperturbably. Dena had been trying for months to get him to acknowledge Earth genders. She washed up and went back toward the living room.

  “What did she say that no one else said?”

  “That he confided he might kill himself.”

  “Yes!” Dena said, raising a fist triumphantly. “That’s right. That’s what I heard, but I didn’t connect it. It does happen that a suicide will confide only in one person. But nothing else added up. So it has to be her. But how did she do it?”

  “The Totality system must have been compromised,” K’t’ank said. “Humans are inaccurate.”

  Dena shut off her computer.

  “We’ll talk to them in the morning.”

  “We will.” K’t’ank sounded smug. “Now I would like to enjoy the program without interruption. Look, Malone! They are resecting the upper bowel.”

  WHEN SHE REACHED THE TOTALITY offices the next morning, there had already been thousands of cyberattacks on the police lockdown program. The place was crawling with security experts, all of them arguing with the programmers over who was to blame.

  She spotted the lanky Perugio over the heads of the others. He plowed his way through the crowd to her. He looked furious.

  “I keep telling them that the Totality program couldn’t have caused Art to jump off the building, but now they’re talking about industrial espionage! How did Art killing himself get morphed into that?”

  “I have just one question. Did the Totality system correct your vision?”

  “No, it works with what you have,” Perugio said, his anger shifting to puzzlement. “Why?”

  “Because your friend Caitako has been ripping all of you off,” Dena said. “I need to talk to her now. Where is she?”

  “Uh…” Perugio checked his tablet computer. “Her card says she’s up in the garden.”

  Dena spoke into her communicator. “Send up a skycar! The perp’s on the roof.”

  Perugio stayed at her elbow as she ran for the access tower.

  “Roshin would never hurt anyone. Art was her friend. I’m her friend.”

  “She formed a corporation on Enceladus and is trying to get your tech patented ahead of you. Smedley found that out, so she killed him.”

  “What? How?”

  “I called the morgue,” Dena said, watching the indicator on the elevator zoom from ground level toward the ninetieth floor. “Can the Totality system work in corrective lenses?”

  “Sure,” Perugio said. “It’d work in anything that has at least two gig of memory and imaging technology.”

  “Mine have sixteen gigabytes,” Dena said, pointing to her own face. “I bet his were at least that good.”

  “Your what?” K’t’ank asked.

  “His contact lenses,” Dena said. “She hacked his contact lenses! They made him see a roof that wasn’t there.”

  The door slid open. The moment it did, Dena’s vision blurred, but that was little compared with the effect on Perugio. He fell to his knees, clutching hi
s eyes.

  “What’s happening?” he demanded. “Roshin! Why are you doing this? What did you do to Art?”

  “Stay away from me!” Caitako’s high voice floated toward them. Dena looked around, trying to spot her. The garden was overwhelming when she was trying to take it all in at once. Suddenly, it cleared. She could see the gingko trees, the fountains, the basketball hoop—and Caitako. The green-haired programmer huddled against the fence at the edge of the roof, a laptop clutched to her chest.

  “Just stay where you are,” Dena ordered.

  She drew her service weapon and held it in both hands as she sidled out of the access tower. Perugio was no help. He felt around him as though he had been struck blind. Dena left him and started toward the Japanese bridge, keeping her eyes fixed on Caitako.

  “Not there, Malone!” K’t’ank shouted, as she felt for the first step.

  “What’s your problem?” she demanded.

  “No floor between!” K’t’ank insisted. “You are not seeing out of your own eyes.”

  “What? Of course I am!”

  “No, you are not.”

  “I know what I see with my own eyes.”

  “Argue with me!” K’t’ank said, sounding frantic. She felt his tail beat against her ribs. “Only, stop walking. Now! Stop!”

  She did. The bridge looked fine. Caitako was a hundred feet in front of her. She could break right or left, behind one of the many obstructions.

  “Why are you so sure what I see isn’t what I see?” Dena asked.

  “Because you are the owner-operator. I am an observer. I use your sight as a newcomer. I know when the images you perceive are not as they were before. There is pixilation, extremely fine, an overlay to your normal vision, not even as it was before you entered the facility this morning. Your eyes are lying to you.”

  Dena reached for the handrail of the bridge. Her hand went right through it.

  “Not my eyes,” she said. “My lenses.” Dena turned her head to try and dislodge the image, to cause a time delay of any kind. “She reprogrammed my lenses!”

  “Take them off,” K’t’ank said. “The whole garden is full of lies.”

  “I can’t. They cover my whole eyeball. I can’t take them off here. It takes ten minutes to get them out. She’ll get away! These are police issue! They were supposed to be virus-proof. Can you do anything?”

  “I possess passive capability only,” he said, “but I will call out when I believe the floor is not the floor.”

  “When you believe?” Dena asked, desperately. K’t’ank’s reply was calm.

  “It is all we have.”

  “All right. I want her before she blanks the entire database of this company. Try to warn me before I step on something.”

  She moved through the weird terrain, her heart pounding. Every time she thought the footing was solid, K’t’ank’s shrill voice was in her ears, warning her off. She tried to step on safe zones, but the console in Caitako’s hands kept the landscape moving.

  “Stop it!” Dena shouted. “You’re trying to kill a police officer!”

  Caitako’s eyes were huge under her fringe of green hair.

  “I don’t want to kill you. I just need more time. Let me into the system. Please! Just for a second. That’s all I need!”

  “I can’t do that until I’m done with the investigation,” Dena said. “What am I going to find?”

  “Nothing! Stop looking, please! Go away! I just want you to go away!”

  “You’re greedy, Caitako,” Dena said, moving inexorably toward her. “You wanted to take your work to market first. It wouldn’t last long, but it would be a big psychological moment. Art caught you. ”

  “It was my work!” Caitako shouted, pounding her own chest with a forefinger.

  “But you signed a noncompete clause, Caitako.”

  “It’s so unfair!” the programmer wailed.

  “Go forward,” K’t’ank urged her.

  Dena felt an uprush of wind and halted, quivering. An endless cliff lay before her.

  “I’m on the edge!” she cried.

  “Not so,” K’t’ank said calmly. “An air fountain is beside you. Solid stones. Four steps there, jump to the left for more solids. Jump farther!”

  “You try jumping with a growing baby and a petulant alien throwing off your balance,” Dena snarled.

  Keeping the moving green blob that was Caitako in her peripheral vision, she tried not to believe in what her eyes told her was ahead of her. K’t’ank guided her, even berating her impatiently when she hesitated.

  “Why do you wait?” he demanded. “Move! Nothing is there!”

  “Do you know how annoying you are?” Dena asked, stung into hopping forward over a pit of crabs snapping their claws. An immense thorn bush blocked her way. But to either side, massive squids waved threatening tentacles.

  “Is that a rhetorical question?” K’t’ank asked.

  “Yes!”

  “Step right and go forward again. Go!”

  The thorn bush that Dena was certain existed kept its shape in her eyes even as she ran through it. Her mind played tricks on her, convincing her she felt the pull of the sharp talons in her skin. She winced. She feared for her life, for that of her unborn child, and for K’t’ank, not necessarily in that order, but she had a job to do.

  “Police! Put the computer down!”

  Instead, Caitako jumped up and ran for the access tower. Dena ran to intercept her, wondering when the police chopper was going to arrive. Caitako made to the left for the miniature arena. Dena following, through the images of moving vines, snapping jaws, and boiling vats of acid. It felt like being in the middle of a giant computer game. Caitako was getting away!

  “Tell me what’s real!”

  “Nothing!” K’t’ank insisted. “It is all thin air.”

  “Good. That I can handle.”

  Dena plunged forward, running between the raked rows of seats. Caitako headed toward a darkened archway at the far end. With her unwieldy center of gravity, Dena wasn’t sure she could catch her before she vanished. She grabbed up one of the T-shirt cannons in the stands. Followed the green blob through the waves of illusion fuzzing her vision, she fired.

  The green blob dropped. Dena heard the clatter of the laptop hitting the ground, and the crackle of shattered circuitry. The nightmares cleared away, leaving the arena empty and one dishonest programmer a boneless heap on the ground, a pile of white T-shirts scattered over her. Dust covered the entire rooftop suddenly as the police chopper lowered onto the playing field. An officer swung out and took Caitako into custody. Dena breathed a deep sigh and sank onto the nearest seat.

  “Thanks, K’t’ank,” Dena said.

  “Come, we are partners,” K’t’ank said. “And if you were to die, I would have to find another host.”

  Dena groaned.

  “Thanks a million for your boundless sympathy.”

  “It is my pleasure,” K’t’ank said, as usual missing her sarcasm. “May I give the press briefing this time? It was my insight that caused us to solve the crime.”

  “Not a chance,” Dena said, rubbing her eyes. “But I will let you make a statement afterwards. First, though, I want to get these lenses out. They’re killing me!”

  “Almost,” K’t’ank said. “But not quite.”

  Best-selling science fiction and fantasy author Jody Lynn Nye describes her main career activity as “spoiling cats.” When not engaged upon this worthy enterprise, she has published over forty books and novels, largely humorous, some in collaboration with noted writers in the field, such as Anne McCaffrey and Robert Asprin, and over 110 short stories. Her latest books are Myth-Quoted, nineteenth in Asprin’s Myth-Adventures series; and View from the Imperium, a sort of Jeeves and Wooster in space.

  THE HAUNTED BLENDER

  By K.G. Jewell

  On Thursday, I inherited my grandfather’s haunted blender. He’d tried to make the perfect basilisk omelet, insisting on gathering his own
eggs, and ended up stoned.

  And not in a legal-in-Colorado kind of way.

  On Friday, I made gazpacho in his memory. Or, I tried to, but the moment I pushed puree, all hell broke loose.

  It was a minor hell, so reality wasn’t torn asunder, but it made an unreal mess of my kitchen. Ectoplasm splattered across my countertops, and the disposal burped bubbles of sin. This mess wasn’t something I could clean up myself.

  I called my girlfriend, Lisa. A fortuneteller by trade, she knew people that dealt with this kind of stuff.

  “Try Glip’s Exorcism and Dusting. I’ve heard good things,” Lisa said, rattling off a phone number. I jotted it down on the fridge, the numbers burning into the whiteboard with an acrid hiss. “Also, Mother and I are going to the cabin tonight to finish reading our books.”

  “What are you reading?” I asked, sulfuric smoke from the charring whiteboard burning my throat.

  “Ted, Sunday is book club. You’re hosting, remember?”

  The book club. Right. Lisa’s mom’s book club was reading About a Boy, and wanted to discuss it in the home of an authentic bachelor. Lisa had volunteered my kitchen. My now-hellish kitchen.

  I eyed my microwave. The window showed a looping clip from Three’s Company. Every thirty seconds Jack Ritter’s hand got caught in a toaster, and every time it happened my toaster giggled.

  “Right. No problem.” Well, my kitchen was a problem, but hopefully Glip would take care of it.

  “Also, save some gazpacho for us. It’s Mother’s favorite.”

  “Mmmm.” I hoped the sound was non-committal.

  “Oh! It’s my turn to suggest a book for next month. Have any ideas?”

  “Nothing comes to mind.” I’d just finished Never Grow Up: Child Athletes Past Their Prime, but that was more therapy, less entertainment.

  “Well, if you think of anything, let me know. Love ya.” She hung up.

  I called Glip, the numbers on the fridge bursting into flame as I dialed. He picked up on the first ring.