The Doomsday Brunette

by John Zakour

“I must be nuts. You’re not going to start smoking a pipe, are you?”

  “Oh please, that would be silly,” he said. “I am thinking of getting an Indian house-boy though.”

  “You’re pushing it, HARV.”

  HARV left me alone as I showered, shaved and dressed. His hologram was waiting for me at the breakfast table when I came in for coffee.

  “Any chance we can meet with Threa today.”

  “No problem,” he replied. “She’s scheduled for this afternoon. You’re meeting her in Vyrmont.”

  “Vermont? Seems like a long way to go.”

  “Longer than you think,” HARV said. “Vyrmont is her mystical realm.”

  “She couldn’t come up with a more original name?”

  “She spells it with a ‘y,’ And according to Threa, the mystical realm predates the establishment of the state by two millennia.”

  “So they copied her? Well, that explains a lot.”

  “Also Ms. Thompson’s computer reports that her security experts, the Pfauhan cousins, are back at work, after being severely reprimanded by their employer.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “They’ve already given statements to the police about the incident but we should talk to them ourselves.”

  “I agree,” I said, downing the last of my coffee. “I guess we’re going back to Ona’s…ziggurat?”

  “Correct,” HARV said with a smile. “Before we do, however, I suggest you tune in to Entertainment This Nano.”

  I froze and then let out a sigh.

  “Another Bill Gibbon report?”

  HARV nodded.

  “Why does this always happen in the morning? It sets the tone for the entire day.”

  “That’s the point, I think,” HARV replied.

  I sat back down at the table and turned to the kitchen wallscreen as it came to life.

  “How bad is it?”

  “The story is only just now being reported but let’s put it this way,” HARV said. “The bag is now clearly cat-less, and there’s a very foul odor coming from the fan.”

  26

  “Repeating our top story of this news cycle, and likely our only story for the entire day, Entertainment This Nano has learned exclusively that Foraa Thompson, one of the world renowned Thompson Quads, is dead, murdered the night before last in the home of her playgirl, trillionaire sister, Ona.”

  “Oh DOS.”

  Gibbon’s expression seemed more smug than usual. There wasn’t a trace of smile on his lips as he spoke but I could tell from his eyes that inside he was doing a jig. Why shouldn’t he? This was turning into the biggest story of his career.

  “Anonymous, unnamed sources report exclusively to ETN that Foraa Thompson died while in the company of her three famous sisters, Ona, Twoa and Threa Thompson and that she was apparently poisoned. Furthermore, we have learned that the number one suspect in this crime is none other than…”

  He paused for effect, and I could almost hear him thinking aloud: “wait for it…wait for it.”

  “…Ona Thompson.”

  HARV and I winced in unison.

  “Affectionately known to many as ‘the crazy Quad,’ Foraa eschewed the public spotlight that her sisters so coveted. So, although she was world famous and adored by millions, she spent the last several years of her life in relative obscurity preaching against the evils of the material world to a small, devoted, and decidedly low income, following in the city of New Vegas.

  “The New Frisco Police have thus far refused to comment on the murder or the increasing public outcry that Ona Thompson be arrested and formally charged with her sister’s murder.”

  The scene shifted to live footage from a pressbot camera hastily following Tony down a hallway of the precinct house. Tony ignored the bot as much as possible as he calmly walked to his office then cast an angry glance at the camera before slamming his office door. The door hit the bot’s interface and the picture swung wildly to the ceiling then the floor as the bot toppled over. The picture went to static for a nano before cutting back to Gibbon in studio.

  “However, we at ETN are confident that our persistent requests for answers will soon be met. In the meantime, we’ll have much more exclusive news as this story continues to develop. But first, immediately following this commercial break, we’ll present a moving pictorial tribute to the life and tragic death of Foraa Thompson. I’m Bill Gibbon the third and you’re watching this exclusively on Entertainment This Nano.”

  “What does he mean by all that?” HARV asked. “There’s no public outcry for Ona’s arrest.”

  I turned off the computer screen and felt my stomach tie itself into a knot that felt uncomfortably like a hangman’s noose.

  “There is now.”

  The call from Ona came a nano later. She was already well into her angry diatribe by the time her image appeared on the screen.

  “…crucify me in the media like I’m some celebrity murderer du juor! I could squash that insignificant Gibbon vidiot like a bug. The people who work for me could squash him like a bug. The bugs in my house could squash him. That’s how insignificant he is to me.”

  “I take it you’ve heard the news,” I said.

  “They’re calling for my arrest. They’re treating me like a common criminal!”

  “I wonder which part she finds most offensive,” HARV whispered, “the ‘criminal’ or the ‘common?’”

  I smirked a bit. Ona saw my expression and gave me a steely glare.

  “You’re thinking about some clever word play on the ‘common criminal’ phrase I just used aren’t you?”

  My face dropped.

  “What? No, I wasn’t. Really. I wasn’t.”

  “Fine. We’ll say you weren’t,” she said with a wave. “But I know you were.”

  “It is sort of an obvious joke.”

  “I’m not paying you for jokes. Obvious or not,” she said. “I want you to fix this.”

  “I don’t control the media, Ona,” I replied. “You have a publicist don’t you?”

  “I have several.”

  “Then put them to work. The story’s out now so start spinning your side of it.”

  “You mean play the distraught and grieving sister?”

  “Just don’t make it seem like you’re hiding anything.”

  She looked away from the viewer and pursed her lips in thought. “I can do distraught and grieving,” she said. “Maybe I should give an interview or two.”

  “I was thinking more along the lines of issuing a statement. You don’t want to jump too deeply into the feeding frenzy. The press can twist things. Make you look bad. You don’t want to do anything you might regret.”

  “You mean like confess?” she said, and her eyebrow arched menacingly.

  “That,” I said, swallowing hard, “would be a worst case scenario. You don’t think you’ll…accidentally confess do you?”

  “I’m not the killer, Zach.”

  “Good,” I said. “Because that would sort of change the focus of my job.”

  I was greatly relieved a few nanos later when the corners of her mouth turned gently upward in a subtle smirk.

  “Shouldn’t you be out finding the killer now?” she asked.

  “I was just leaving,” I said.

  27

  HARV and I were in the hover and a few minutes into our trip to Ona’s when the call came in from Mom. There was no point in trying to duck it this time so HARV just put her through and her face appeared on the car’s vidscreen.

  “Good morning, dear,” she said, cheerily. “Did you sleep well?”

  She stopped and stared a little more closely at the screen.

  “Goodness, you didn’t sleep well at all, did you? You look awful.”

  “It’s good to see you too, Mom,” I replied, not taking my eyes from the road. “Just so you know, I’ve been yelled at by my client already today so I hope you’re not going to pile on.”

  “Ona Thompson’s not blaming you for her problems
, is she? That would be just like her,” Mom said. “Refusing to take responsibility for her own failings.”

  “I don’t think the murder of her sister counts as a personal failing.”

  “Well, it is if she killed her.”

  “Mom,” I surprised myself when it came out as two syllables.

  I took a quick glance at the vidscreen as I spoke. The camera was close on Mom’s face but the background that I could see behind her seemed very dark especially for this time of the day. I couldn’t really make out any shapes behind her because the room was mostly unlit. There were just stray spots of small purple lights.

  “Where are you, anyway, Mom? That’s not the Rochester teleport center. Is it?”

  “I’m running a few errands first,” she said, a little uncomfortably. “I’ll be in Frisco later tonight.”

  “Do you need me to pick you up anywhere?” I asked. “My day’s pretty full but I can always send HARV with the car.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I can take care of myself. But about Ona Thompson…”

  “Mom, you know I can’t talk about that.”

  “I just want you to be careful,” she said. “It sounds like this could get dangerous.”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “Has anyone tried to kill you yet?”

  “…No. “

  “You’re lying,” she said.

  “It was nothing, Mom,” I said, a little defensively. “It was just a gorilla playing a practical joke.”

  “A what?”

  “Then some police pretending to be the Belgian syndicate. But they weren’t really trying to kill me.”

  “Don’t forget the suits of armor,” HARV chimed in.

  “Oh yeah, there was that,” I mumbled. “That was real.”

  “Zach, I really don’t like you being part of this,” she said. “It seems so seamy and perilous.”

  “Trust me, Mom. I have things under control.”

  “Forgive me dear but that’s what you said about the third grade science fair and the homemade jet-pack.”

  “Okay, that was not my fault,” I said.

  The whistle of a tea kettle sounded in the background and Mom turned toward it, slightly annoyed at the interruption.

  “DOS,” she said. “I have to go, dear.”

  “Are you making tea?” I asked. “Mom, where are you?”

  She turned briefly back to the screen and moved a little closer to the camera, filling the frame more and reaching for the controls.

  “I can’t talk now, Buttlebug.”

  “Mom.”

  “I mean, Zach. I’ll see you tonight. But please promise me you’ll be careful today.”

  “Mom…”

  She disconnected the call and the screen went blank.

  “Is it me or are the conversations with Mom getting progressively weirder?” I asked.

  “Both,” HARV answered with a smirk.

  For the third time in as many days, HARV and I went to Ona’s ziggurat and entered, again, through the secret, underground entrance. The throng of pressbots at the mountainside gate had increased exponentially since the announcement of Foraa’s murder and things were on the verge of getting seriously ugly as more and more pressbots were trying to slip past the guard post (and subsequently were being disintegrated). Interestingly, the pressbots were developing strategies, with bots from the networks using bots from the local affiliates to make diversionary suicide runs in the hopes that they could sneak in while the defenses were occupied. All such endeavors failed (spectacularly) but it was interesting, nonetheless.

  “The press seem to be developing actual thought processes,” HARV said. “It’s like watching evolution with paparazzi rather than primates.”

  In any event, we were soon inside the ziggurat where we were greeted, once again by the house computer.

  “A pleasure to see you again, Mr. Johnson,” it said. “I trust you’ll find your visit today less eventful than yesterday’s.”

  “That’s my hope,” I replied. “Right now I’m looking for the Pfauhan cousins.”

  “They are in the security command center on the other side of the compound,” the computer replied. “I’ll summon some ground transportation for you and HARV. The Pfauhans are expecting you.”

  “Yes. That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  The security command center turned out to be a box-shaped two-story-detached building about two hundred meters from the ziggurat. I say “two-story-detached” because, although the first floor was traditionally anchored to the ground, the second floor was completely detachable and fitted with low powered hover-thrusters so that it could take to the air and actually float around the compound like high-tech maintenance blimp over a football stadium. The Pfauhans were both currently aboard the floating half of the building so I had to port up from the first floor to the second (something which I’m loathe to do) in order to talk to them.

  The airborne half of the building housed the various monitors and security-related controls for Ona’s home. There were hundreds of visual and audio monitors covering various areas of the compound as well as the surrounding perimeter. Several types of alarm system displays were laid out on a central console and a small army of bots tended the nano to nano workings of it all. The Pfauhans acted as overseers to the bot workforce, monitoring them as necessary and, I assumed, taking over their duties when the situation required a human touch.

  The Pfauhans themselves were block-like men with sharp European features, long black hair and menacing chu-manfu goatees (a new “facial hair formation” where the upper lip is clean-shaven while a beard is grown along both sides of the mouth and around the bottom edge of the chin, also called “the hairy u” – for obvious reasons).

  As Ona had mentioned, the two men were completely identical, right down to their heavy black boots, black band sunglasses (complete with built-in computer monitors) and knee length faux-leather jackets. One sat at a work station, scanning visual feeds from locations around the compound (and flipping through the images faster than a bored couch potato looking for a ballgame). He shook my hand coldly, without turning away from his work.

  The other cousin floated outside the room, checking the strength of the force bubble that encircled the compound. He waved at me through the room’s large window as he worked. He had milky white anti-grav disks attached to his boots that let him hover in the air in all positions, even upside down, and flutter from place to place like a high-tech humming bird.

  “So you guys are actual identical twins?”

  “Identical twin cousins,” said the one inside.

  “Once removed,” said the other through his radio headset.

  “Which one of you is Sturm and which one is Drang?”

  “Does it matter?” they asked in unison.

  “Not really,” I said, “but humor me.”

  “I’m Sturm,” said the one scanning the monitors.

  “I’m Drang,” said the one from outside.

  “I guess you know about the murder the other night.”

  “Yes. It was mentioned several times during our discussions with the police,” they answered.

  “Do you mind telling me where the two of you were that night?”

  “We were out of town,” Sturm said.

  “Where?”

  “Tradeshow…”

  “Conference…”

  “Which one was it?” I asked.

  “Conference…”

  “Tradeshow…”

  “Okay,” I said with a sigh, “a word of advice here, the police don’t particularly like those kinds of answers.”

  “It was a tradeshow and conference,” they replied.

  “I don’t like them either,” I said.

  Drang flipped away from his place by the force bubble and barrel-rolled gracefully toward the floating monitor room. He stopped himself with a gentle hand on the window and stared at me through the glass.

  “That isn't really a concern
for us,” he said. Then he pushed off from the window and darted to another section of the force bubble like a playful fish in a tank.

  I walked toward Sturm, as he continued to scan the visual feeds and gazed gently over his shoulder. He caught sight of me out of the corner of his eye and stabbed a button on the console that scrambled the screen images. He no doubt had a de-scrambler built into his glasses so, while to my eyes, the images on the screens were electronic garbage, they were crystal clear to his.

  I focused my thoughts and shot HARV quick message.

  “Can you de-scramble the images on the monitors for me?”

  “It’s top of the line encoding,” HARV replied in my head. “Give me a few nanos.”

  I turned away from Sturm’s monitors and pretended not to care.

  “How long have you two worked for Ona?” I asked.

  “Five years,” Sturm replied.

  “Sixty-three months,” said Drang.

  “And this is your first murder?”

  “It wasn’t our murder.”

  “It just happened on your watch.”

  “It wasn’t our watch either.”

  “It happened in the house that you’re charged with protecting. How do you think the murderer was able to get past your defenses?”

  “No one got past the defenses,” Sturm said.

  “How do you figure?”

  “It’s our job to keep unwanted people out of the ziggurat,” Drang said. “We do that…better than anyone. We can’t control what goes on inside. We provide only the packaging for the snack food.”

  “We make it airtight and seal it for freshness.”

  “But we have no control over the snacks inside.”

  “If someone goes crackers…

  “Or nuts...”

  “Or just flakes out…”

  “It’s not the fault of the box.”

  “I see,” I said. “You’re defending yourself with pretzel logic.”

  Both Sturm and Drang stopped their work and turned to me, their sunglasses covering what I could only guess were two very humorless stares.

  “Hey, I’m not the one that started the snack food metaphor,” I said with a shrug.

  “Okay, boss,” HARV whispered. “I’ve cracked the scrambling algorithm and I can calibrate the eye lens to compensate. You should be able to see the images clearly through your left eye.