The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “So bad,” she said, looking from Konstantin to Taliaferro. Taliaferro gave no indication that he had heard her. He stood with his back to the wall and his shoulders up around his ears, head thrust forward over the archiver while he made notes, as if he expected the ceiling to come down on him. From Konstantin’s angle, the archiver was completely hidden by his hand, so that he seemed to be using the stylus directly on his palm.

  Never send a claustrophobe to do an agoraphobe’s job, Konstantin thought, feeling surreal. Taliaferro, who pronounced his name “tolliver” for reasons she couldn’t fathom, was such a big guy anyway that she wondered if most places short of an arena didn’t feel small and cramped to him.

  “Real goddam bad,” Pleshette added, as if this somehow clarified her original statement. One bony hand came up out of a hidden pocket with a small spritzer; a too-sweet, minty odor cut through the flat air.

  Taliaferro’s stylus froze as his eyes swiveled to the manager. “That didn’t help,” he said darkly.

  “Oh, but wait,” she said, waving both hands to spread the scent. “Smellin’ the primer now, but soon, nothing. Deadens the nose, use it by the pound here. Trade puts out a lot of body smell in the actioners. ’Suits reek.” She gestured at the other doors lining the long narrow hall. “Like that Gang Wars module? Strapped the trade down on chaises, otherwise they’d a killed the ’suits, rollin’ around on the floor, bouncin’ offa the walls, jumpin’ on each other. Real easy to go native in a Gang Wars module.”

  Go native? Taliaferro mouthed, looking at Konstantin from under his brows. Konstantin shrugged. “I didn’t see a chaise in there.”

  “Folds down outa the wall. Like those old Murphy beds?”

  Konstantin raised her eyebrows, impressed that she was even acquainted with the idea of Murphy beds, and then felt mildly ashamed. Her ex had always told her that being a snob was her least attractive feature.

  “Most people don’t use the chaises except for the sexers,” Pleshette was saying. “Not if they got a choice. And there was this one blowfish, he hurt himself on the chaise. Got all heated up struggling, cut himself on the straps, broke some ribs. And that—” she leaned toward Konstantin confidentially “—that wasn’t even the cute part. Know what the cute part was?”

  Konstantin shook her head.

  “The cute part was, his pov was in this fight at the exact, same time and broke the exact, same ribs.” Pleshette straightened up and folded her arms, lifting her chin defiantly as if daring Konstantin to disbelieve. “This’s always been non-safe, even before it was fatal.”

  “That happen here?” Taliaferro asked without looking up.

  “Nah, some other place. East Hollywood, North Hollywood, I don’t remember now.” The manager’s kimono sleeve flapped like a wing as she gestured. “We all heard about it. Stuff gets around.”

  Konstantin nodded, biting her lip so she wouldn’t smile. “Uh-huh. Is this the same guy who didn’t open his parachute in a skydiving scenario and was found dead with every bone in his body shattered?”

  “Well, of course not.” Pleshette looked at her as if she were crazy. “How could it be? That blowfish died. We all heard about that one too. Happened in D.C. They got it going on in D.C. with those sudden-death thrillers.” She leaned toward Konstantin again, putting one scrawny hand on her arm this time. “You oughta check D.C. sources for death-trips. Life’s so cheap there. It’s a whole different world.”

  Konstantin was trying to decide whether to agree with her or change the subject when the coroner emerged from the cubicle with the cam op right on her heels.

  “—shot everything I shot,” the cam op was saying unhappily.

  “And I said never mind.” The coroner waved a dismissive hand. “We can subpoena her footage and see if it really is better than yours. Probably isn’t. Go.” She gave him a little push.

  “But I just know she’s in some of my shots—”

  “We can handle that, too. Go. Now.” The coroner shooed him away and turned to Konstantin. She was a small person, about the size of a husky ten-year-old—something to do with her religion, Konstantin remembered, the Church of Small-Is-Beautiful. The faithful had their growth inhibited in childhood. Konstantin wondered what happened to those who lost the faith, or came to it later in life.

  “Well, I can say without fear of contradiction that the kid’s throat was cut while he was still alive.” The coroner looked around. “And in a palace like this. Imagine that.”

  “Should I also imagine how?” Konstantin asked.

  The coroner smoothed down the wiry copper cloud that was her current hair. It sprang back up immediately. “Onsite micro says it was definitely a knife or some other metal with an edge, and not glass or porcelain. And definitely not self-inflicted. Even if we couldn’t tell by the angle, this kid was an AR softie. He wouldn’t have had the strength to saw through his own windpipe like that.”

  “What kind of knife, do you think?”

  “Sharp and sturdy, probably a boning blade. Boning blades’re all the rage out there. Or rather, in there. In the actioners. They all like those boning blades.”

  Konstantin frowned. “Great. You know what’s going to be on the news inside an hour.”

  The coroner fanned the air with one small hand. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Gameplayers’ psychosis, everybody’s heard about somebody who got stabbed in a module and came out with a knife-wound it took sixteen stitches to close and what about the nun who was on TV with the bleeding hands and feet. It’s part of the modern myth-making machine. There’ve been some people who went off their perch in AR, got all mixed up about what was real and hurt themselves or somebody else. But the stigmata stuff—everybody conveniently forgets how the stigmata of Sister-Mary-Blood-Of-The-Sacred-Whatever got exposed as a hoax by her own order. The good sister did a turn as a stage magician before she got religion. There’s a file about how she did it floating around PubNet—you oughta look it up. Fascinatin’ rhythms. The real thing would be extremo ruptura, very serious head trouble, which the experts are pretty sure nobody’s had since St. Theresa.”

  “Which one?” asked Konstantin.

  The coroner chuckled. “That’s good. ‘Which one?’” She shook her head, laughing some more. “I’ll have my report in your in-box tomorrow.” She went up the hall, still laughing.

  “Well,” said the night manager, sniffing with disdain. “Some people ought better stick with what they know than mock what they don’t know squat about.”

  “My apologies if she offended your beliefs,” Konstantin said to her. “Is there some other way into that room that nobody knows about—vents, conduits, emergency exit or access?”

  Pleshette wagged her fuzzy head from side to side. “Nope.”

  Konstantin was about to ask for the building’s blueprints when Taliaferro snapped the archiver closed with a sound like a rifle shot. “Right. Some great place you got here. We’ll interview the clientele now. Outside, in the parking lot.”

  “Got no parking lot,” Pleshette said, frowning.

  “Didn’t say your parking lot. There’s a car rental place down the block. We’ll corral everyone, do it there.” Taliaferro looked at Konstantin. “Spacious. Lots of room to move around in.”

  Konstantin sighed. “First let’s weed out everyone who was in the same scenario and module with the kid and see if anyone remembers the kid doing or saying anything that could give any hints about what was happening to him.” She started up the hall with Taliaferro.

  “You could do that yourself, you know,” Pleshette said.

  Konstantin stopped. Taliaferro kept walking without looking back. “Do what?”

  “See what the kid was doing when he took it in the neck. Surveillance’ll have it.”

  “Surveillance?” Konstantin said, unsure that she had heard correctly.

  “Of course surveillance,” the night manager said, giving her a sideways look. “You think we let the blowfish come in here and don’t keep an eye on them? Anything could
happen, I don’t want no liability for the bone in somebody else’s head. Nobody does.”

  “Can I screen this surveillance record in your office?” she asked.

  “Anywhere, if all you want to do is screen it.” Pleshette frowned, puzzled.

  “Good. Set me up for it in your office.”

  Pleshette’s frown deepened. “My office.”

  “Is that some kind of problem?” asked Konstantin, pausing as she moved toward the open doorway of the room, where she could hear DiPietro and Celestine bantering with the stringer.

  “Guess not.” The night manager shrugged. “You just want to screen it, my office, sure.”

  Konstantin didn’t know what to make of the look on Pleshette’s funny little face. Maybe that was all it was, a funny little face in a funny little open-all-night world. A funny little open-all-night artificial world at that. For all Konstantin knew, the night manager hadn’t seen true daylight for years. Not her problem, she thought as she stuck her head through the doorway of the cubicle where Celestine and DiPietro were now busy jockeying for the stringer’s attention while the stringer pretended she wasn’t pumping them for information and they pretended they didn’t know she was pretending not to pump them for information. No one had to pretend the dead kid had been temporarily forgotten.

  “Pardon me for interrupting,” Konstantin said a bit archly. DiPietro and Celestine turned to her; in their identical white coveralls, they looked like unfinished marionettes.

  “Attendants’ll be coming for him. Before you do a thorough search of the room, you might want to, oh—” she gestured at the body “—cover him up.”

  “Sure thing,” said Celestine, and then suddenly tossed something round and wrapped in plastic at her. “Think fast!”

  Konstantin caught it by instinct. The shape registered on her before anything else. The kid’s head, she thought, horrified. The cut across his throat had been so deep, it had come off when they’d peeled him.

  Then she felt the metal through the plastic and realized it was the kid’s head-mounted monitor. “Oh, good one, Celestine.” She tucked the monitor under her left arm. “If I’d dropped that, we’d be filling out forms on it for a year.”

  “You, drop something? Not this lifetime.” Celestine grinned; her muttonchops made her face seem twice as wide as it was. Konstantin wondered if there was such a thing as suing a cosmetologist for malpractice.

  “Thanks for the act of faith but next time, save it for church.” Konstantin went up the hall toward the main lobby, Pleshette following in a swish of kimono.

  * * *

  There were only two uniformed officers waiting in the lobby with the other three members of the night staff, who were perched side by side on a broken-down, ersatz-leather sofa by the front window. The rest of the police, along with the clientele, were already down the block with Taliaferro, one of the uniforms told Konstantin. She nodded, trying not to stare at the woman’s neat ginger-colored mustache. At least it wasn’t as ostentatious as Celestine’s muttonchops, but she wasn’t sure that she would ever get used to the fashion of facial hair on women. Her ex would have called her a throwback; perhaps she was.

  “That’s all right, as long as we know where they are.” Konstantin handed her the bagged headmount. “Evidence—look after it. There’s some surveillance footage I’m going to screen in the manager’s office and I thought I’d question the staff there as well—” The people on the couch were gazing up at her expectantly. “Is this the entire night shift?”

  “The whole kitten’s caboodle,” Pleshette assured her.

  Konstantin looked around. It was a small lobby, no hiding places, and presumably, no secret doors. Small, drab, and depressing—after waiting here for even just a few minutes, any AR would look great by comparison. She turned back to the people on the couch just as the one in the middle stood up and stuck out his hand. “Miles Mank,” he said in a hearty tenor.

  Konstantin hesitated. The man’s eyes had an unfocused, watery look to them she associated with people who weren’t well. He towered over her by six inches and outweighed her by at least a hundred pounds. But they were fairly soft pounds, packed into a glossy blue one-piece uniform that, combined with those gooey eyes and his straw-colored hair, gave him a strangely childlike appearance. She shook his hand. “What’s your job here?”

  “Supervisor. Well, unofficial supervisor,” he added, the strange eyes looking past her at Guilfoyle Pleshette. “I’m the one who’s been here the longest so I’m always telling everybody else how things work.”

  “So go ahead, Miles,” Pleshette said, her voice flat. The kimono sleeves snapped like pennants in a high wind as she stretched out her arms and refolded them. “Say it—that if they promoted from within here, you’d be night manager. Then I can explain how they had to go on a talent search for an experienced administrator. It’ll all balance out.”

  “Nobody ever died while I was acting night manager,” Miles Mank said huffily.

  “Yeah, that’s true—everybody survived that riot where the company had to refund all the customers. But nobody died so that made it all good-deal-well-done.”

  Miles Mank strode past Konstantin to loom over Pleshette, who had to reach up to shake her bony finger in his face. Konstantin felt that panicky chill all authorities felt when a situation was about to slip the leash. Before she could order Mank to stop arguing with Pleshette, the mustached officer tugged her sleeve and showed her a taser set on flash. “Shall I?”

  Konstantin glanced at her nameplate. “Sure, Wolski, go ahead.” She stepped back and covered her eyes.

  The flash was a split-second heat that she found oddly comforting, though no one else did. Besides Guilfoyle Pleshette and Miles Mank, Wolski had also failed to warn her fellow officer, the other two employees, or Taliaferro, who had chosen that moment to step back inside. The noise level increased exponentially.

  “Everybody shut up!” Konstantin yelled; to her surprise, everybody did. She looked around. All the people in the lobby except for herself and Wolski had their hands over their eyes. It looked like a convention of see-no-evil monkeys.

  “I’m going to screen surveillance footage of the victim’s final session in the manager’s office, and then interview the rest of the staff,” she announced and turned to Taliaferro. “Then I’d like to question anyone who was in the same module and scenario.” She waited but he didn’t take his hands from his eyes. “That means I’ll be phoning you down the block, partner, to have select individuals escorted to the office.” She waited another few seconds. “Understand, Taliaferro?” she added, exasperated.

  “Let me do some prelims on the customers,” he said, speaking to the air where he thought she was. He was off by two feet. “They’re gonna be getting restless while you’re doing that. We’re going to have to give them phone calls and pizza as it is.”

  Konstantin rolled her eyes. “So give them phone calls and pizza.” She turned back to Pleshette. “Now, can you show me to your office?”

  “Who, me?” asked Miles Mank. “I’m afraid I don’t have one. I’ve been making do with the employee lounge.”

  “Suffer, Mank,” Pleshette said, peeking between her fingers. “No one was talking to you.” She started to lower her hands and then changed her mind.

  Konstantin sighed. Their vision would return to normal in a few minutes, along with their complexions, assuming none of them suffered from light-triggered skin-rashes. Perhaps she should have been more sympathetic, but she didn’t think any of them would notice if she were.

  She put her hand on Guilfoyle Pleshette’s left arm. “Now, your office?”

  “I’ll show you,” said Pleshette, “if I ever see well enough again.”

  * * *

  Pleshette’s office was smaller than the smelly cubicle where the kid had died, which was probably a good thing. It meant that Konstantin didn’t throw anything breakable against the wall when she discovered the so-called surveillance footage was an AR log and not a live
-action recording of the kid’s murder. There would have been no point to throwing anything; unlike the living room where she and her ex had had their final argument, there wasn’t enough distance to make a really satisfying smash.

  She settled in to watch the video, every moment, including the instructional lead that told her that the only pov on monitor would be detached observer; she could use the editing option for any close-ups or odd angles, and there was a primer to pull down if she were feeling less than Fellini, or even D.W. Griffith.

  How helpful, she thought, freezing the footage before the lead faded into the scenario. How excessively helpful. What was she supposed to do, decide how to edit the footage before she watched it?

  But of course, she realized; this came under the heading of Souvenirs. Footage from your AR romp, video of your friend’s wedding, pre-packaged quick-time scenics from a kiosk in the Lima airport for a last-minute gift before you boarded the flight home—you made it look however you wanted it to look. To whomever happened to be looking, of course. Maybe you didn’t want it to look the same to everyone—a tamer version for one, something experimental to hold another’s attention.

  Konstantin tapped the menu line at the bottom of the screen. Options? it asked her, fanning them out in the center of a deep blue background. Pick a card, any card, she thought; memorize it and slip it back into the deck. There’ll be a quiz later, if you survive. After a moment, she chose No Frills.

  The image on the screen liquified and melted away into black. A moment later, she was looking at an androgynous face that suggested the best of India and Japan in combination. The name came up as Shantih Love, which she couldn’t decide if she hated or not; the linked profile informed her that the Shantih Love appearance was as protected by legal copyright as the name. No age given; under Sex it said, Any; all; why do you care?

  “Filthy job, Shantih, but somebody’s got to.” She tapped for the technical specs of the session. Full coverage hotsuit, of course; that would tell her when the kid had died. She scrolled past his scenario and module choices to Duration: four hours, twenty minutes. Yow, kid, that alone could have killed some people.