The Kuros turned and didn’t seem surprised to see his close friend the priest Sohanat standing there. Venadrik bowed low, his legs rebelling at the movement, even in service of a higher goal.
The Kuros’ golden beard, tied in knots, reached down to his waist. Silvery symbols of the Anatavic sect of the Deos religion threaded his skin, just under the surface. His bald head gleamed in the low green light of the evercandles.
“Yes, I’ve seen them. And they didn’t go unnoticed before God.”
Venadrik smiled inwardly. The religious morons were even easier to manipulate than the rich. They believed so strongly that they were deaf and blind. Anything that fed what they already believed was all they needed.
“It can’t go unpunished,” said Venadrik.
“No. All of it must come to an end before God strikes us down in his rage for their affronts,” said the Kuros.
“Reach out to the people. Let them know what to do. Give them your guidance, your understanding. They need you.”
Venadrik watched the man’s thoughts surging through his mind as electricity; the dark red thoughts were his deepest fears. The hallucinations were coming on now, surging up inside him, but he needed to hold back the ones that weren’t useful. The lights trailed, got brighter.
What a fucking fool you are, old man. You’ll do anything to hide from the truth. You’re like an insect staring into the sun. I see your mind. I know what you’ll do, what all of you will do. You’re all asleep, walking around unconscious, blind to the inner workings of your own tiny minds.
You underestimate them. These fanatics are dangerous. And the rich too.
“Our society is rotting from the inside,” said the Kuros. “Corruption and sickness seethes at every level.”
“Only the cleansing fire—”
“—can bring the rebirth,” said the Kuros.
“You already know what needs to be done,” said Venadrik. “Lead your people. Reach out to them everywhere. All of them. Tell them to strike. Crush the oligarchs. Bleed them from below.”
The old man nodded.
“The only way to make them understand is to make them all suffer,” said Venadrik.
***
The Supreme Kuros’ speech projected out into the minds of his millions of followers. Venadrik heard only fractions of it before filtering it out. The words didn’t matter much, only their effect.
“It’s time to rise up, rise up against the sickness and the perversions, to build a new society. A Godless government is a thorn in the Prophet’s eye. A Godless government must be ripped up by the roots and replaced with a government of the faithful. If anyone be an enemy of God let the righteous hand grind them to dust…”
Venadrik melted back into the crowd. He shifted identities so easily now. Like a brilliant actor, he became the role. And even when he disappeared, he wasn’t really gone at all. He was there, waiting for them, like a scorpion waiting to strike a bare foot in the dark. He was there, hidden in plain sight.
The Beginning of the End
2458 Orthodox Western Calendar
5156 Universal Chinese Calendar, Year of the Dragon
The Farm, One Police Plaza, Snowstorm Clan Roving Starship Settlement
Hoskin, Quinlin and Gideon Daniels spent the rest of the day questioning everyone whose DNA they’d found in Barrotes’ room. Most of them turned out to be Barrotes’ lovers. They were all from the other Dynastic families. None of them seemed to know anything useful, and Hoskin didn’t get the sense any of them were lying, even the ones who didn’t want to talk.
Hoskin and Quinlin worked late, looking for anything on the recordings that would give them another path to take, another clue. Eventually Quinlin fell asleep in his chair. The Captain put Hoskin in a cab and made him go home at 3 in the morning. He passed out as soon as he hit his couch, not even making it to his bed.
Azusa woke him on his innerphone the next day.
“Rise and shine, sweetness,” she flashed.
“Uh huh. What’s going on?” flashed Hoskin.
“All the bodies tested positive.”
“All right.”
“You don’t even know what I’m talking about right now, do you?”
Hoskin thought about it for a minute, his mind still not fully awake.
“No idea,” he flashed.
“All the bodies at the last scene tested positive for Morph signatures.”
“Ah. Great. That’s just great. Means they were all Barrotes, which means we still have a phantom killer or killers who can walk through walls and get out of a fortress in the sky without anybody knowing.”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” she flashed.
“How about I figured it all out and you don’t gotta come in today?”
“I figured it all out. You don’t need to come in today.”
“Thanks.”
He closed the connection and got up. His eyes wouldn’t focus right but it was time to get moving. The time in his left eye read 7:30, and he realized he’d only got a few hours’ sleep. He blinked a storm of stims into his system and it woke him up fast. Just deal with it. Sleep when you’re dead.
He stopped for a second, remembering an idea he’d woken up with: the killer had help. Early morning insights were fragile and Azusa almost made him lose it. He flicked a note to his backbrain, so he could think about it more later.
He yanked on the same clothes he had on the day before. He could shower at the station. He jumped in another hovercab and reviewed Gideon Daniels’ profile again on his innervision.
The only thing remarkable about Investigator Daniels was how unremarkable he was. He was a partial clone of one of the early patriarchs of the Vendralista Dynasty. He didn’t have to work, but he got a job as a systems tech in the CII anyway because he believed “everyone should do their part.” He eventually made it all the way to Investigator, keeping his background secret during interviews at each step so he got hired on merit alone. In the Jovian Independence War he’d fought with distinction, earning a black star and a gold heart. He’d worked his way up and here he was on Hoskin’s case now.
A whole lot of fucking nothing. Guy’s a prick, but he’s clean. He blinked the profile away.
***
“I can’t get any closer,” said the hovercab in its beautiful artificial voice.
“What?” said Hoskin, waking up suddenly, realizing he’d drifted off in the cab.
“I said, there’s no way for me to get any closer, sir.”
Hoskin knew he was tired if he could drop off with stims surging through his system. He rezzed up his metabolism even higher and rubbed his eyes.
He looked out the window to see a massive crowd surrounding The Farm for blocks.
“That’s all right, I’ll walk. Just let me out here,” said Hoskin.
He flashed some credits at the cab and it touched down just over the ground like a horse bowing to let its master dismount. It peeled open to let him out.
“Thank you, and watch your step. When you need cab service think of—”
Hoskin touched the door to close it and then walked towards the crowd. He knew that if anybody scanned him they’d know he was a cop, even though he wasn’t wearing a uniform. He’d have to move quickly, but with the streets so packed, that didn’t seem likely.
For blocks, reporters trailing a dense tangle of equipment packed the streets. Lots of babbling voices drifted in and out. The sky was heavy with a haze of nano. Holographic screens of reporters’ newsstreams hovered over their heads and over camera drones, competing for attention.
A reporter with a surgically-perfect body but deeply scarred face and hair of bright silver was talking to an invisible swarm of microcameras that could see her from a hundred angles. She touched a spot on her jacket and a cosmetic bubble instantly enveloped her head, altering her features in real time. Each camera tuned to the bubble and projected a different image of her, a hundred subtly differ
ent visual aesthetics for every possible audience.
Everything looked too bright and sounded too loud to Hoskin’s sleep deprived eyes and ears. He pushed past it as he wound his way through the crowd. Hoskin blinked off a search to see what the newsheads were saying. The streams popped into his eyes.
“—opinion is divided on this serial slayer. While many vigorously condemn his actions, there are just as many supporting him anonymously and even openly on the nets.”
“—another day of strikes cripples the city—”
“—corporate price wars, as commercial Tangle shipping comes to a near standstill—”
“—a string of murders—”
Another flash popped into his mind. It was more footage of the murder, split-screened with a man talking at a press conference behind the Gilead Dynasty crest.
“—we can now report that Gabriel Gilead has faded—”
Frozen close up of the killer’s mask.
“—the death of a Titan—”
“—linked to the earlier death of Senator Turnbull—“
“—and just where are the police on this is what I want to know—“
The images flooded his mind, too many to see at once, too many voices. The screens arranged themselves into a dense mosaic over his eyes.
Interviews with people now: “I say fuck the rich, what have these criminals done for us but rob us blind? It’s the little guy that gets hurt. I haven’t been able to get a job in two years—”
And another: “Those rich fucks got what they deserve.”
“—the pervasive mood in the Edgelands—“
“Death to the rich! Death to Kleptocracy!”
“—where the permanently unemployed are marching—“
He cut off all the feeds. The crowd got thicker. He tapped a few people but they didn’t move. Hoskin finally just started pushing.
“Hey. Fuck you man, I was here first,” said an androgynous reporter with colored spots all over its face.
Hoskin ignored it and shoved past. Two blocks later, he came to a dense knot of people clustered around two large screens projected onto the side of a building. They were running clashing streams. Hoskin stopped and tuned his senses to filter one and watch the other. His backbrain automatically recorded everything he saw. The second stream seemed to dull, its colors fading and its sound trailing away. Simultaneously, the first stream got louder, its colors becoming more vivid and intense.
A tall woman with a face like a Noh mask stood at a podium, flanked by men in dark old fashioned suits and bright ties. Behind their heads a hypnotic river of images flowed: trees softly rustling in the spring breeze; children laughing with the tempo slowed just slightly; a blue sky that stretched on forever. Hoskin knew the images were there to convey calm and stability, a common technique at press conferences.
“Stop. You’re asking the same question again,” she said, holding up her hand.
Her face betrayed no emotion. No microexpressions gave away her real thoughts. A true politician.
“The stream is a fake, as we’ve said. There was no party. I don’t have to remind you that video without an authenticated third-party realtime connection is not admissible in court and hasn’t been for the last several hundred years for this very reason. Anything can be faked. Any person can be made to say or do anything. Anyone can be rendered perfectly doing anything,” she said.
Hoskin recognized the politician, City Public Information Speaker Lyza Pye. She knew what she was taking about. He remembered a few years earlier her political opponents had faked up a stream of her having an affair. It almost worked. They just forget to check their times. Turned out she was on Earth in Old Vienna having dinner with a hundred people when she was supposedly fucking a stranger on a Starliner streaking across the dark night.
Reporters shouted. She held up her hand and pointed at one. He spoke up.
“Madam Speaker, why would the killer fake such a scene? To what end?” asked a reporter.
“I do not pretend to know the mind of a madman. Next,” said Pye.
“And what about the secret language being spoken? Do you deny it exists? It seems like an incredible length to go to in creating this fabrication,” said another reporter.
“The imagination is a wonderful place and can be used for good or evil.”
Hoskin tuned the screen out and flipped his senses to the other. The screen displayed a tile of images. The party he and Quinlin saw from the stolen footage played in microslices on rapid loops over and over, then faded.
“A new message from the killer. We are told this is the first anyone is seeing of it…”
A vocoded voice played over a stream of fast moving images: people marching; a crowd clashing with energy shielded riot police, their flesh sizzling against the bright purple shields; massive soldiers in biomechanical armor firing into a collapsing building, all of it sliced together, pulsing past in a frenetic flood.
“Already the deceivers spin and spin. Softly and slowly their words weave into you. Do you listen? Do you believe? Are you seduced?”
The images shifted to fast moving video. Hoskin couldn’t tell what was happening. With reluctance, he spawned off a vSelf to slow down the feeds and go through the imagery frame by frame. He needed to be more than himself now.
“Will you continue to believe their convenient lies or will you open yourself to the truth? When your representatives no longer represent you what can you do?
“We are unbreakable, inevitable, and invincible. More and more each day we add to our numbers. More and more each day people see. Can you? Will you?”
Hoskin merged with his vSelf and watched the slowed down video. There were different scenes, shown from someone’s eyes, the kind you’d see in a full sense sim.
Something odd about them. He couldn’t quite place it. On the surface they were banal compared to the violent images the video started with: people talking, someone running, a little girl crying. Got to go over these one by one. It would take a little time. He backgrounded the vSelf and realized he’d missed a few seconds of what the killer was saying. That’s why he didn’t like these damn vSelves. They made you miss things. That’s what he got for taking shortcuts. He rolled back the stream a few seconds using his backbrain recording. He was now watching reality a few seconds behind.
“—the invisible. The hidden. Behind the scenes of your lives the puppet masters pull your strings and you dance and dance. Each week a new one of the rich dies. You can’t hide in your secret fortresses in the sky. The cleansing fire will burn you all.”
New imagery filled the screen. It was a little girl crying, from an adult’s first person perspective. The adult looked down on her, towering over her. This time the video had sound. The adult lashed out, swinging wildly, while she held up her hands, trying to defend herself from the powerful blows.
“Stop daddy, stop!” she screamed.
The video froze. A message floated across the bottom: Gabriel Gilead beats his daughter, authenticated memory 28fa93nf321ff425yg4.
Uh oh.
Now he knew what the fuck was off about the videos. They were actual memories stolen from the victims, not synthetic sense-flicks.
Only one place the killer could have got them: the victim’s blackboxes. He’d broken into their minds.
Hoskin didn’t think that was possible. Blackboxes were supposed to have massive encryption around them. Not good. Just about everyone’s got memories no one should ever see. With enough editing you can make anyone look like a monster.
Another vision floated in. A woman’s face, contorted in ecstasy. Someone was looking down at her. It said, Michael Anton Childress, screwing a whore, while his wife lies dying of pizomorphic cancer.
The vision faded for another. It showed a Barrotes Morph evicting people from twenty apartment buildings he owned as soon as rent control laws were overturned by the Senate.
“But where are all those people going to liv
e?” said his secretary.
“I don’t know. But not there,” said Barrotes. “I can finally charge what they’re worth now. People can’t afford it, it’s not my problem. Always someone who can pay. The rest can live on the street for all I give a shit.”
Four cubes of light tiled up across the frozen video. The video faded. Above the cubes floated four names, Senator Kimball Turnbull, Gabriel Gilead, Barrotes Childress and Michael Anton Childress. A message below them read: download selected memories here.
“We are always and everywhere. We are the cleansing fire,” said the hidden speaker.
He’s used that phrase twice, the cleansing fire. Better dig into it.
No time now. Hoskin knew he had to move. With the minds of the rich exposed to an angry public, the city could explode. He flicked his vision back to real time.
“Get out of the goddamn way, now.”
It took him ten minutes to get through the crowds, and just when he thought he’d reach the Farm free and clear that’s when he walked through an identity scanning field that some slick reporters had set up. Instantly, the holographic ghosts of a hundred reporters popped up all around him, their faces running together. A gaggle of newsdrones rushed him, the floating cameras suddenly surrounding him.
“Officer—”
“Officer—”
“Detective Hoskin—”
“What can you tell us about—”
“I can tell you to get away from me right now and that the department does not comment on ongoing investigations ever,” said Hoskin.
“Why haven’t the police made any progress—”
“Sir, sir, can you explain to the public why the police have no leads—”
“Maybe I wasn’t speaking clearly enough, so I’ll say it slower for you. No—comment—on—existing—investigations—EVER.”
He made a space and pushed to the door to the Farm. The building screened him with a slash of blue and white light and the doors slid open. Hoskin rushed through. A few drones squeezed in with him. He stared hard at them and they got the message. They backed away.
The Scorpion Game Page 16
