All they cared about was the money, which he had. Ever since he’d discovered the art of disguise, he’d worked his way into the lives and businesses of the rich and begun patiently to embezzle whatever he could. Charities were the key. Set up a charity and you could move all the money you wanted. Only one thing was slowing him down. This surgery would fix that too.
The staff at the Black Opal all wore masks that covered their faces, even their eyes.
He still knew everything about them.
He’d never been down on a table before and he felt the fear rush in. I chose the wrong place. Not careful enough. Get up and get out. But he fought the weak thoughts off and said he was ready when the disconnected voice of the docball asked if he wanted to start. A mist filled the room and he felt giddy, slightly chilled, happy. The docballs floated into the room, like cotton on a summer breeze. The green biowalls convulsed and expanded, surgical arms extending, their pulpy flesh rippling, forming surgical lasers and unrolling monitors. He was in the room, but somehow not. The mistdrug carried him away and then he winked out, left to their mercy.
He woke up, groggy, as a docball said “Congratulations, sir. The operation went perfectly. We’ll transfer you to the relaxation ward.” He could see the room for a moment as the bed hovered from the surgery ward, the track lights trailing above him.
Then he was out again and dreaming of a thousand faces.
Pastel Monsters
2458 Orthodox Western Calendar
5156 Universal Chinese Calendar, Year of the Dragon
Condor District St. Aya Hospital, Snowstorm Clan Roving Starship Settlement
Hoskin leant on a gnarled, archaic walking stick in front of the cocoon where Quinlin’s new body grew. They wanted Hoskin to use a smart-skel or take some bone and muscle stimulators. He told them the cane would do just fine. He’d whittled the designs on the cane years ago, just another project to keep his mind engaged and alive and sharp. Now he finally had a reason to use it.
A clutter of dim holoscreens clustered around the cocoon. On one screen Quinlin’s face hovered like a holographic ghost, while others spewed ternary code or showed slivers of his body with tiny points of red annotated with med-tags to show where his invisible constructors worked. The blue-green slurry in the biopod was almost totally clear, except for long tendrils of matter that looked like strands of floating pulled cotton, bits of Quinlin beginning to form. In every drop of the medwater, a million mites worked relentlessly to knit Quinlin back together again.
Hoskin had heard the emergency blast from Quinlin’s backbrain ID just as he was stepping from his own med-tank.
Quinlin was dead. It was still hard to comprehend.
He’d sat down hard and hadn’t moved for almost an hour. Now he was looking at a backup of his friend, being rebuilt from nothing.
Watching the slowly swirling strands drifting in the soft waters of the cocoon, Hoskin mourned. What was in the pod wasn’t his dead friend. Unlike the young, who accepted relifeing without question, as a matter of fact or religion, Hoskin knew it wasn’t really Quinlin in that new body. He just didn’t believe that whatever made us truly ourselves transferred in the process. Vatting up a new body and transferring memories into it did not a new spirit make. Or maybe it was just that nobody could ever step in the same river twice? Hoskin wasn’t against relifeing; he was just too old to believe in magic.
He put his hand to the gelatinous shell that surrounded the hanging pod and said, “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
“Doctors say you won’t listen,” said a familiar voice.
“Hey Cap,” said Hoskin, without turning around. “Not really my style.”
“Yeah, I told ‘em that. And you can stop with that. Not your Captain now.”
Hoskin turned around and smiled knowingly at Clarenza. The dark, heavy woman stood in the doorway, surrounded by light, her six arms folded behind her back. She smelled of heavy genesculpted tobacco and cocoa.
“Oh Captain, my Captain,” Hoskin said.
She jabbed her chin out at him, frowned and sat down.
“That really us in there,” she said, “when they put us back together again?”
“Just thinkin’ that.”
“And?”
“Nope.”
“Figured you’d say something like that. Actually I hope it ain’t me when they bring me back. Let someone else be me for a while.”
Clarenza rubbed her eyes and then sat, looking down. To Hoskin it seemed like she had trouble looking up, as though lead weights hung from her chin. The lines on her face looked etched in.
“Whadda ya need, Cap?”
“I need you on this,” she said, waving her hand. “Come in, look at everything, let me know what’s going on, ‘cause I got no idea anymore. I just need this whole thing to go away.”
“So I’m un-suspended?”
“No,” she said, finally looking up at him now. “But I’ve been reading over the treaty they used to get you all that fancy gear and get you access to the last scene. What did they appoint you as, Critical Situations--”
“Yeah. And you found that line that says that you can invite the Crit-Sit Investigator to assist on any investigation? I read that too.”
“I figure the Crit-Sit job gives you more powers, more access. Am I right?”
“Yup.”
“Well you’re going to need it. Consider this your official invite. When can you start?”
“I already did.”
***
Hoskin stood in Quinlin’s office looking for anything that might let him know what Quinlin was doing when he died. In a few days Quin might be able to tell him himself, but he didn’t have that long.
Quinlin had left the mediawall on and about twenty five newsstreams spilled across it on mute, except for the one in the middle where the President, a dark skinned woman from the powerful Nevardoo Phyle with their characteristic all-black eyeballs, spoke “fear cannot and will not consume us…” Hoskin waved it off and enjoyed the sudden silence.
As usual, nothing looked out of place in Quin’s office. On his desk, in his bathroom, everything stood in precise rows or compact piles. Nothing dirty, everything polished and spotless. Even the trash stood empty. A perfectly clean food synth hung on the wall, under a holographic print that changed depending on who was in the room. Since it was Hoskin, the floor-to-ceiling print showed a famous simstar in black leather chaps, a gold swirled bikini and a pink cowgirl hat, her hair waving gently in an invisible wind as she circled her hips. If any female colleagues looked it, it would just look like a beautiful nature scene.
Hoskin accessed Quinlin’s cores with root privs and scanned Quinlin’s body log. They cut out just about the time he took his bender then they came back briefly when Hoskin was attacked, and two days ago they went offline again. Why the fuck had he done that? Quinlin liked to record everything. He was a tech junkie. His whole life was recorded, but he’d offlined all logs during his bender and for the last few days. The last message put him leaving the Farm at around 7 p.m. a few days before. Hoskin blinked up a wheel of the last things Quinlin looked at when he left. They sprawled across the wall, and Hoskin skimmed them, but they didn’t tell him anything.
“What were you doin’ out there?” said Hoskin to the empty room.
Hoskin rubbed his rough face. His wiry hair had turned into a light beard in the medtank and he hadn’t bothered to laser it. His skin itched under the fresh gelskin. Before his primary heart had even finished healing, Childress had personally visited and insisted his techs grow him a new gelskin. It had saved his life once, so Hoskin didn’t refuse.
“Talk to me, Quin. What am I missing? Where were you goin’?”
He didn’t know. All day he couldn’t escape the feeling that he was missing just one little thing, one small scrap that would tie it all together. Something he’d overlooked. Something he’d missed somewhere. Instead he saw only the absence of that
thing, the void. And now the void had eaten Quinlin.
He blinked on the mediawall and scrubbed it of its newsstreams. After thinking for a minute, he decided to just bring up everything. All of it piled onto the screen, a meaningless constellation, indecipherable, unbreakable.
He needed help. This had to stop now.
And he would do whatever it took.
He unleashed a storm of hundreds of vSelves with total abandon, all of them scrutinizing smaller and smaller chunks of the case, too many thoughts to deal with in real time, all of the v-thoughts centrally logged so they could integrate back into Hoskin Prime as fast as they could, the queue piling up much faster than they could write back to his saturated backbrain.
His neck burned.
His mind fractured into a thousand more pieces and studied everything in the tiniest detail. Nothing irrelevant, nothing assumed. He couldn’t stand anymore and collapsed on the floor, right where he was, his basic motor functions turned to mush in his crowded mind, swirling with a thousand Hoskins that he couldn’t keep up with. He closed his eyes and held on. Even his gelskin started to heat up all over his body as his split personalities worked obsessively, rereading everything, watching every stream again and again, launching pattern match after pattern match and deep scan after deep scan. His last conscious thought was that the guys who attacked him, wearing his face, all had fake lives. Then he saw the black lights and passed out.
He dreamed of the man running again, seeing through his eyes. He felt the horrible burning sensation all through his body. A hand stretched out for the door. And then the man running looked back and saw there was no one behind him. White light, searing pain, and he woke up.
When Azusa shouted him awake, he didn’t know how long he’d been out. The dream was still fresh in his mind. Something about it made sense now. He tried to hold onto the insight but it was slipping. The answer was there. His unconscious already knew.
“What—?”
“You were out,” she said. “We were supposed to meet up an hour ago, so I came looking.”
Two of her Polymorphic selves stood in the corner, a dark black man and a snow-skinned woman. The black man had crystalline white control tats and the white woman had her hair tied into a tight black bun, bound with purple strings.
Hoskin’s vSelves had switched off when he crashed. He was thankful. The thoughts were still streaming into his backbrain, trying to integrate. He backgrounded them. The sudden silence swept through him, calmed him.
“You tryin’ to kill yourself?” she said.
“Not with any real conviction,” he said.
“We just got you back,” said the snow-skinned Azusa.
Hoskin shook his head and sat up. He felt heavy and worn.
“Here, drink this,” said Azusa and tipped some cool water into his throat.
“It’s just one thing, girl,” he said. “Just one goddamn thing I’m missing.”
“You’ll get it, I know.”
He stood up, with the help of the desk, his rage and helplessness building inside him.
“It’s just one fucking thing and I’m too blind to see it.”
“It’s all right.”
“No, it is not all right. Quin is dead and I’m blind because I’ve been looking at the same bullshit over and over and over. It’s right fucking here. It’s in front of me and I can’t see it.”
Hoskin swept a stack of hard copy off Quinlin’s desk and almost lost his balance. The papers blasted into the air and drifted down like oversized snowflakes. He picked up a can of pens and hurled them at the wall.
“Open your eyes and see, it’s right here,” he shouted to himself. “It’s right here. It’s right fucking—”
He looked at the three Azusas and stopped dead.
He thought of the matryoshka doll, taking it apart and putting it back together.
Polymorphs.
It hit him: the person running. That was the last victim from the Barrotes murder. His unconscious already knew.
The man was running for the door, but there was no one behind him. He was running in case anything was watching him, making it look good, but he wasn’t running from anything. There was no one behind him, because he wasn’t being chased. He wasn’t a victim at all. He was the killer.
“That’s it—”
“Wait, what—”
Hoskin felt electric, his body buzzing.
“That’s it. Oh my—”
“Wait, tell me—”
“You got all the atomic signatures on the victims right?”
“Yeah,” said all the Azusa’s at once.
“Run all of them. Look for Polymorphic signatures.”
“But I already ran them on the Barrotes—”
“No,” said Hoskin. “Run them on all the victims from all the murder scenes. How fast can you do it?”
“Like two seconds. They’re all indexed now. Running—done. Wait. What?”
“I’m betting you got a signature for at least one body at every scene. Right?”
“Yeah. Well almost. How did you—”
“We only looked at whether there were Morphs signatures at the Barrotes scene. Barrotes was a Morph and his father didn’t know all his iterations. So when they all came back positive—”
“We assumed they were all Barrotes,” said Azusa.
“Right. But one of them wasn’t Barrotes. Just like at every scene, one of them was a different Morph of the killer. They were augmented and they killed themselves. The girl who jumped was the killer in the first scene. She flipped the body and dissolved the blackbox, then just killed off her augs and jumped to her death. We thought she had help, but she didn’t need it because she was augged.”
“But I didn’t find any augments on any of the bodies.”
“Right, because before they killed themselves they took something to burn them clean.”
“Yeah, sure. It could be done. You could do that with a few different compounds, Phenolxolyte or Xenatridex. Soldiers take them sometimes if they’re captured.”
“Is it traceable?”
“It’s gone from the body in a few minutes.”
There was one other thing. He remembered the crashed crime scene bubbles at the Barrotes murder scene. Why hack the ones that protected the bodies on the bed, if it was the body by the door that mattered? Then it hit him. It was to throw him off, draw focus to the wrong damn thing, instead of the one thing that mattered: the last body, the one at the door. Daniels must have been improvising. Or Quinlin. No. He couldn’t believe that. Not without proof.
“But one problem,” said Azusa. “The Treasury Secretary’s murder. Nobody at the scene is a Morph.”
Hoskin thought about it for a minute and he got it.
“The hooker we found, not far from the scene. The one with the gloves. She was there, we know that. Maybe when it came time to check out, she lost it, took off. Can different Morph’s think differently? Can they break from the group?”
“Yeah,” said the black Azusa. “Sure. Sometimes we fight. We don’t agree, get our own ideas, close off the group for a bit.”
“It doesn’t happen often,” said the snow-skinned Azusa and Azusa Prime at the same time. “But it happens.”
“So she got skittish,” said Hoskin. “Couldn’t go through with it. She wanted to live and she panicked and ran. Then one of the other selves shows up and kills her. Took her gloves so we wouldn’t put it all together.”
“Right. They’d all know where she was. It’s almost impossible to hide from one another,” said all the Azusas, totally in sync now.
“How long could they hide?”
“I don’t know. Not long,” they all said. “Another problem though. Polymorphs have to register, be tracked. It took me months to get through all the red tape.”
Hoskin paced now. He suddenly didn’t need his cane. Adrenaline flooded his system, made him pain free. He could do anything. “Black clinic th
en. Unknown DNA, mol-sig, vector state, because it was never—”
“Never recorded. Never catalogued.”
“Are there any clinics big enough to do the procedure?” said black Azusa.
“There’s got to be,” said snow-skin.
“Right. Gotta be one,” said Hoskin. “Can you find it?”
“If it exists, I’ll find it.”
“Then go. Right now. Don’t tell anyone. You got it?”
The three Azusas hustled out of the room. Hoskin stood stunned, almost drunk.
“I’ve got you, you son of bitch.”
He almost didn’t notice the tiny ping in his backbrain. It was coming from Quin’s private core. An encrypted channel popped into his mind and he took it. On the other end, something spoke in Quinlin’s voice: “upload completed 003.45.66.2.166. Key match. Backbrain signature: Detective Danuba Quinlin. Authenticity verified. Watermark verified. No changes made after upload. Verifying recipient backbrain signature: Lieutenant Durante Hoskin. Verified.”
A ball of light filled his left eye, with the word “open” flaring just under it.
Hoskin blinked it open.
Quinlin’s voice again. “If you are watching this, I’m dead and this is a deadman’s script…”
Hoskin froze as the final few minutes of Quinlin’s life played across his innervision.
A Thousand Faces
2437 Orthodox Western Calendar
5135 Universal Chinese Calendar, Year of the Rabbit
The Black Opal, Snowstorm Clan Roving Starship Settlement
When Venadrik woke up, he was aware of multiple thoughts in his mind. He’d have to get used to that. Blinking crazily, he managed to open different sets of eyes. He took a huge breath and the myriad voices seemed to quiet down, under his control for now.
He turned to his left and looked at another him. This other him was a black man, much older, distinguished, with snowy hair. It was strange, the way the other him looked back. He could see through both sets of eyes at the same time. He blinked and the dark man on the other table blinked. He could see himself on the table through the other him's perspective and yet he could see the older man as separate. It was disorienting and he had to close his eyes.
The Scorpion Game Page 28
