The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “It’s artificial reality—you can’t lie, no matter what you say. It’s all make-believe, let’s-pretend, the play’s the thing.” Howard Ruth laughed heartily. “You choose to pay somebody out here for time in there, that’s your hotspot. Life is so strange, eh?”

  Konstantin made a mental note to check for court rulings on AR as she pressed for a clean page in the archiver. “But if being in an AR makes people insane…”

  “Doesn’t make everyone insane,” the woman said. “That’s what it is, you know. The honey factory don’t close down just because you’re allergic to bee stings.”

  Konstantin was still troubled. “So when did those things happen?” she asked, holding the stylus ready.

  “I don’t know,” Howard Ruth said, surprised at the question. “Oughta be in the police files, though. Doesn’t law enforcement have some kind of central-national-international bank you all access? Something like Police Blotter?”

  “In spite of the name,” Konstantin said, speaking slowly so the woman couldn’t possibly misunderstand, “Police Blotter is actually a commercial net-magazine, and not affiliated with law enforcement in any official way. But yes, we do have our own national information center. But I need to know some kind of key fact that the search program can use to hunt down the information I want—a name, a date, a location.” She paused to see if any of this was forthcoming. The other woman only shrugged.

  “Well, sorry I can’t be of more help, but that’s all I know.” She got up and stretched, pressing her hands into the small of her back. “If anyone knows more, it’s Body Sativa.”

  * * *

  “Body Sativa,” said the first customer interviewee. He was an aging child with green hair and claimed his name was Earl O’Jelly. “Nobody knows more. Nobody and no body. If you get what I mean.”

  Konstantin didn’t bury her face in her hands. The aging child volunteered the information that he had been in the crowd by the Hudson that Shantih Love had staggered through, but claimed he hadn’t seen anything like what she described to him.

  Neither had the next one, a grandmother whose AR alter-ego was a twelve-year-old boy-assassin named Nick the Schick. “That means I technically have to have ‘the’ as my middle name, but there’s worse, and stupider as well,” she told Konstantin genially. “Nick knows Body, of course. Everybody knows Body. And vice versa, probably. Actually, I think Body Sativa’s just a database that got crossed with a traffic-switcher and jumped the rails.”

  “Pardon?” Konstantin said, not comprehending.

  The grandmother was patient. “You know how files get cross-monkeyed? Just the thing—traffic-switcher was referencing the database in a thunderstorm, maybe sunspots, and they got sort of arc-welded. Traffic-switcher interface mutated from acquired characteristics from all the database entries. That’s what I say, and nobody’s proved yet that that couldn’t happen. Or didn’t.” She nodded solemnly.

  Konstantin opened her mouth to tell the woman that if she understood her correctly, what she was describing was akin to putting a dirty shirt and a pile of straw in a wooden box for spontaneous generation of mice and then decided against it. For one thing, she wasn’t sure that she had understood correctly and for another, the shirt-and-straw method of creating mice was probably routine in AR.

  There was no third interviewee. Instead, an ACLU lawyer came in and explained that since the crime had occurred in the real world, and all the so-called witnesses had been in AR, they weren’t actually witnesses at all, and could not be detained any longer. However, all of their names would be available on the video parlor’s customer list, which Konstantin could see as soon as she produced the proper court order.

  “In the meantime, everyone agrees you ought to talk to this Body Sativa, whatever she is,” the lawyer said, consulting a palmtop. “Assuming she’ll give you so much as the time of day without legal representation.”

  “I suppose I need a court order for that, too,” Konstantin grumbled.

  “Not hardly. AR is open to anyone who wants to access it. Even you, Officer Konstantin.” The lawyer grinned, showing diamond teeth. “Just remember the rules of admissibility. Everything everyone tells you in AR—”

  “—is a lie, right. I got the short course tonight already.” Konstantin’s gaze strayed to the monitor, now blank. “I think I’ll track this Body Sativa down in person and question her in realtime.”

  “Only if she voluntarily tells you who she is out here,” the lawyer reminded her a bit smugly. “Otherwise, her privacy is protected.”

  “Maybe she’ll turn out to be a good citizen,” Konstantin mused. “Maybe she’ll care that some seventeen-year-old kid got his throat cut.”

  The lawyer’s smug expression became a sad smile. “Maybe. I care. You care. But there’s no law that says anyone else has to.”

  “I know, and I’d be afraid if there was. Even so—” Konstantin frowned. “I do wish I didn’t have to depend so much on volunteers.”

  * * *

  She sent DiPietro and Celestine over to the dead kid’s apartment building, though she wasn’t expecting much. If he was typical, his neighbors would have barely been aware of him. Most likely; they would find he had been yet another gypsy worker of standard modest skills, taking temporary assignments via a city-run agency to support his various habits. Including his AR habit.

  Just to be thorough, she waited in Guilfoyle Pleshette’s office for the call letting her know that the other two detectives had found a generic one-room apartment with little in the way of furnishings or other belongings to distinguish it from any other generic one-room apartment in the city. Except for the carefully organized card library of past AR experiences in the dustless, static-free, moisture- and fire-proof non-magnetic light-shielded container. Every heavy AR user kept a library, so that no treasured moment could be lost to time.

  The library would go to headquarters to be stored for the required ten-day waiting period while a caseworker tried to track down next-of-kin. If none turned up, the card library would then be accessed by an automated program designed to analyze the sequences recorded on each card and construct a profile of the person, which would then be added to the online obituaries. Usually this would cause someone who had known the deceased to come forward; other times, it simply confirmed that there was no one to care.

  The idea came unbidden to Konstantin, derailing the semidoze she had slipped into at whatever indecent A.M. the night had become. She plugged the archiver into the phone and sent the retriever to fetch data on the other seven AR DOAs.

  Delivery was all but immediate—at this time of night, there wasn’t much data traffic. Konstantin felt mildly annoyed that DiPietro and Celestine couldn’t report in just as quickly. Perhaps they had taken the stringer with them and were even now playing to the cam in an inspection of the dead kid’s apartment.

  A bit of heartburn simmered in her chest; she imagined it was her blood pressure going up a notch. According to The Law Enforcement Officers’ Guide To A Healthy, Happy Life (ON & OFF The Job!), sex was the number one stress reliever. The Guide had most likely meant the sort that involved one other person, Konstantin reflected and pushed away thoughts of her ex to survey the data arranging itself on the archiver’s small but hi-res screen.

  The first to suffer a suspicious death while in post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty had been a thirty-four-year-old woman named Sally Lefkow. Her picture showed a woman so pale as to seem faded. She had passed most of her realtime hours as a third-rank senior on a Minneapolis janitorial team whose contract had included both the building where she had lived and the building where she had died. Konstantin wasn’t sure whether to be amused, amazed, or alarmed that her online persona had been an evolved dragon; eight feet tall and the color of polished antique copper, it had been bi-sexual, able to switch at will. Sally Lefkow had died of suffocation; the evolved dragon had been in flight when it had suddenly fallen out of the sky into the East River, and never come up.

  Konstantin put th
e dead woman’s realtime background next to the information on the dragon to compare them but found she was having trouble retaining anything. “In one eye and out the other,” she muttered, then winced. Lover, come back. You forgot to take the in-jokes along with the rest of the emotional baggage.

  She marked the Lefkow-dragon combo and went on to the next victim, a twenty-eight-year-old gypsy office worker named Emilio Torres. Konstantin thought he looked more like an athlete. Or maybe an ex-athlete. He had died alone in his Portland apartment during an online session as—Konstantin blinked—Marilyn Presley. Even Konstantin had heard of Marilyn Presley. The hybrid had been an online flash-fad, hot for a day, passé forever after. But not, apparently, for Torres. He had persisted as Marilyn for six weeks, long after the rest of the flash followers had lost interest, and he had died—Konstantin blinked again—of an overdose of several drugs; the Marilyn Presley persona had gone inert in the middle of some sort of gathering that wasn’t quite a street brawl but not really an open-air party, either. There was no follow-up on the persona, nothing to tell Konstantin if the rights to it had been acquired by someone else since.

  Torres had died a month after Lefkow and half a continent away. The next death had occurred two months later, in a cheesy beachside parlor in New Hampshire. Marsh Kuykendall had been unembarrassed by his status as an AR junkie, supporting his habit with odd and mostly menial jobs. Acquaintances of the victim have all heard him say, at one time or another, that realtime was the disposable reality because it could not be preserved or replayed like AR, Konstantin read. “AR is humanity’s true destiny.” “In AR, everyone is immortal.”

  If you don’t mind existing in reruns, she thought. Kuykendall had owned a half dozen personas, all of them his original creations. Mortality had caught up with him while he had been acting out a panther-man fantasy. The panther-man had been beaten to death by some vaguely monstrous assailant that no one claimed to have seen clearly; in realtime, Kuykendall had taken blows hard enough to shatter both his headmounted helmet and his head. No one in the parlor had heard or seen anything.

  Victim number four had been in rehab for a year after a bad accident had left her paralyzed. Lydia Stang’s damaged nerves had been regenerated, but she had had to relearn movement from the bottom up. AR had been part of her therapy; her AR persona had been an idealized gymnastic version of herself. She had died with a broken neck, in AR and in real-time. Witnesses stated she had been fighting a street duel with a lizard-person. Even better, the lizard-person had voluntarily come forward and admitted to AR contact with the deceased. Stang had been online in Denver, while the lizard-person had been cavorting in a parlor not three blocks from where Konstantin was sitting. She double-checked to be sure she had that right, and then made a note to look up the lizard-person in real-time, if possible.

  A moment later she was scratching that note out; the lizard-person was victim number five. Even more shocking, Konstantin thought, was the lack of information on the deceased, a former musician who had gone by the single name Flo. After Lydia Stang’s death, Flo had given up music and taken up AR full-time, or so it seemed, until someone had suffocated her. Online, her reptilian alter-ego had been swimming. In the East River, Konstantin noted, which the Lefkow dragon had fallen into out of the sky. Maybe that meant something; maybe it didn’t.

  Victims six and seven would seem to have killed each other in a gang fight. Konstantin found this disheartening. In post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty, they had been a couple of nasty street kids, sixteen, just on the verge of adulthood. In real-time, they had been a pair of middle-aged gypsy office workers who had no doubt discovered that they had wandered into the cul de sac of life and weren’t going to find their way out alive. They had both lived in a nearby urban hive, got assignments through the same agency, did the same kinds of no-brainer files and data upkeep jobs—and yet, they apparently hadn’t known each other offline. Or if they had known each other, they had deliberately stayed away from each other. Except online, where they had often mixed it up. They had stabbed each other in AR but someone else had stabbed each of them in the privacy of their own homes. The times of death seemed to be in some dispute.

  And now here was number eight, a weird Caucasian kid with a Japanese name. Domo arigato, Konstantin thought sourly, and pressed for a summary of the common characteristics of each case.

  There wasn’t much, except for the fact that each murder had occurred while the victim had been online in post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty. Three of the previous murders had taken place locally; the kid’s brought it up to four, fully half. And unless it turned out that the kid had been a brain surgeon, all of them had been lower level drones, not a professional in the bunch.

  She sat back and tried to think. Was serial murder back in style—again? Except whoever had been enjoying the pretend-murder of hijacking someone else’s AR persona had decided to cross over? Or couldn’t tell the difference?

  Konstantin pressed for a table of similarities among the AR characters and came up with a Data Not Available sign. The note on the next screen told her there had been no work done in this area, either due to lack of software, lack of time, or lack of personnel. Undoubtedly no one had thought that it was particularly important to look into the AR personae—it wasn’t as if those were actual victims … were they? For all she or anyone else knew, Sally Lefkow’s dragon would be more missed and mourned than Sally herself; likewise for the rest of them.

  Sad, and somehow predictable, Konstantin thought. She made a note to send out for more background on the victims. While she was reviewing what information she had, DiPietro and Celestine called to tell her mostly what she had already known, except for one very surprising difference: upon arrival at the kid’s apartment, they had found a nineteen-year-old woman in the process of ransacking the place. She would answer no questions except to say that she was the kid’s wife.

  Konstantin checked quickly; as she had thought, the kid was the only—or the first—married victim. “Bring her down here,” she told them. “Fast.”

  * * *

  “Tommie was looking for the out door,” said Pine Havelock. “Anybody was gonna find it, it would be him. And now look what’s gone and happened.” Tomoyuki Iguchi’s self-proclaimed wife was sitting in a plastic bucket of a chair hugging her folded legs tightly and staring at Konstantin over the bony humps of her knees with a half-afraid, half-accusing expression. Dressed in what looked like surplus hospital pajamas, she seemed to be completely hairless, without even eyelashes. Her eyes weren’t really large enough to carry it off; she made Konstantin think of a mental patient who had fallen into a giant vat of depilatory cream.

  “What out door would that be?” Konstantin asked her after a long moment of silence. “The one to the secret Japanese area?”

  Havelock raised her head, staring oddly. “Get off.”

  “What out door?” Konstantin asked patiently, suppressing several inappropriate responses.

  “Out. Out. Where you go and you’ll stay. So you don’t come back to something like this.” She looked around Guilfoyle Pleshette’s office.

  “Uh-huh.” Konstantin leaned an elbow on the desk and rubbed her forehead. “Where would you end up?”

  “Out.” The woman’s forehead puckered in spots; Konstantin realized she was frowning. Without eyebrows, all of her expressions were odd. “You know—out. Where you don’t need the suit or the top hat, because you’re there. Not here.”

  Konstantin finally got it. “So you and Iguchi were looking for the magic door to the egress. Did you know of anyone else—”

  “Egress,” Havelock said, nodding vigorously. “That’s it. Door out—egress. That’s what she called it.”

  “Who?” Konstantin asked, and then almost said the answer with her.

  “Body Sativa.”

  * * *

  “Sun’s gonna come up,” Guilfoyle Pleshette said threateningly. She looked tired. Even her hair was starting to lose its lift.

  Still sitting
at her desk in the minuscule office, Konstantin waved at her impatiently. “Sorry, Taliaferro,” she said into the phone while she scrawled notes in the archiver one-handed. “I didn’t get the last thing you said. Repeat.”

  Taliaferro was surprisingly patient. Perhaps lack of sleep had simply made a zombie out of him. “I said, they’re still running data on the other seven so we don’t have anything solid yet. But the probability is running to 80 percent that anyone who frequented the Sitty as often as any of them would, at some point, have had AR contact with the persona or entity known as Body Sativa.”

  “‘Entity’?” said Konstantin incredulously. “Who’s calling this thing an entity? The probability program or someone who’s in a position to know?”

  “Actually, I heard some of the clientele in the parking lot calling it that. Or her. Whatever.” Taliaferro sounded a bit sheepish. “Probably it’s some slicko with a lot of good pr. Famous for being famous, you know.”

  “You do much AR?” Konstantin asked him suddenly.

  There was a moment of loud silence. “Is that a sincere question?”

  “Sorry,” Konstantin said. “Don’t know what got into me.”

  Taliaferro hung up without replying. She turned to Guilfoyle Pleshette, who was yawning hugely and noisily. “Do you do much AR?”

  “Yeah, sure. Employee discount here’s pretty good.”

  “Do you spend much time in post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty?”

  Now the manager shrugged and looked at the ceiling almost coyly. “I guess I been known to. You gotta scan rated zone because when you get a virgin in, you gotta talk about what you know. I say that’s the difference between a quality business and a ditch.”

  Konstantin nodded absently. Once a place got too popular, nobody would admit to going voluntarily, even in AR. “And Body Sativa?”

  Pleshette shrugged one shoulder. “Everybody knows about her, but not as many really seen her as say so.”

  “But you have,” Konstantin said.