The Doomsday Brunette

by John Zakour

  ““I love my sister. But even I must admit at times she is a shrewd, manipulating, she-dragon. Still I hope, with all my heart, for her innocence.”

  I sat down on one of the smaller rocks and tried to stare out at the landscape, but the mist around the hilltop was too thick to see much of anything.

  “No offense meant, Threa, but that doesn’t exactly sound like an infomercial-level endorsement. I’m thinking that you don’t particularly like your sister and her lifestyle.”

  “You’re half right, Zachary,” she said, turning slowly. “I love my sister. But I despise her lifestyle.”

  “Why’s that exactly.”

  “She demeans herself with her celebrity,” she said, gently sitting beside me. “She’s more powerful, both financially and physically than nearly anyone in her world yet she pretends to be so weak and plays the game by their rules.”

  “You mean any man don’t you?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “She’s more powerful than any man yet she lives by man’s rules. Being a celebrity, a sex symbol.”

  “She could be so much if she wanted. She could do so much, with her natural abilities, her fortune. It’s just very wasteful of her.”

  “What about Twoa, what do you think of her?”

  “Twoa means well,” she said, laughing gently. “But I think she’s more naïve than any of us. Do you really think that anyone thinks of her as a hero? She’s a circus performer. She’s not as bad as Ona but she’s wasting her life as well.”

  “And Foraa? Were you very close to her?”

  “Sadly, no. Not since Daddy died. Foraa is perhaps the greatest tragedy of us all.”

  “How do you mean?”

  She rose again and walked back to the stones, resting her hands against them for support.

  “Foraa was always so full of spirit and wonder. I always thought that she would be the one of us to really change the world. Then Daddy died and she became, well, odd.”

  “Prior to the night of the murder, when did you see her last?”

  “Twoa and I visited her in New Vegas, such a horrid place. She wasn’t particularly friendly then. She just wanted to be left alone with her little band of followers. Foraa’s flock we called them. Mindless little slaves, every one of them. But she took good care of them, I suppose. My, what a truly sad family we have become.”

  I shrugged my shoulders and awkwardly got to my feet. “All families have their problems, Threa. Your family just happens to do everything, good or bad on a grand scale.”

  “You are a good man, Zachary,” she said with a slight smile.

  “How did Foraa get along with Ona?” I asked.

  “Foraa despised her of course. Always being waited on by servants and bots. Foraa thought that was so decadent. “

  “Wasn't that a bit hypocritical coming from somebody who had her own followers? I assume they waited on her.”

  “Foraa felt her followers did her biding because they wanted to, not because she paid them. There's a difference.”

  “Paid servant or mindless slave. Are they really that different, aside from their tax brackets?”

  “Foraa thought so.”

  “I guess there’s no sense arguing it now,” I said. “Listen, I’ll let you get back to the future-looking thing. I’ll let you know if anything comes up in the real world. I mean, you know, Frisco.”

  “I appreciate that, Zachary,” she said with a smile. “Let me know if you need anything else from me.”

  I stared out at the mist surrounding the mountains and drew my coat tighter about me. “There is one thing actually.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m going to need a ride down from this mountain. Any chance you could call me a cab or something?”

  30

  Once back in the real world, it occurred to me that I had spent more time the past two days talking with the supporting cast of Foraa’s murder than I had talking with my own client. I’d gotten all kinds of background information on the Thompson family dynamic and the events leading up to the murder, but I didn’t really have Ona’s take on any of it.

  HARV netted Ona’s computer to set up some face time between the two of us. Her schedule was tight, as you might imagine, but the computer agreed to squeeze me in between appointments (I was happy to see that proving her innocence was such a high priority). So late that day HARV and I returned to Ona’s and met with her in her office, which was at the absolute center of the ziggurat.

  Now, I’ve been in large offices before but Ona’s office was different. It took large and moved it exponentially in a strange sort of way. It was big by normal standards, about fifteen meters square, but hardly awe-inspiring, at least in terms of length and width. Height, however was a horse of an entirely different color.

  “I don’t see a ceiling,” I whispered to HARV as we entered.

  “It’s there.”

  “Is it invisible?” I said, craning my head upward. “Maybe that’s Ona’s little jab against the glass-ceiling concept.”

  “On the contrary, the ceiling is platinum in color, and fashioned to simulate the ornate tin ceilings found in early 20th century architecture.”

  “How come I can’t see it?”

  “Because it’s high,” HARV said.

  “High?”

  “One hundred seven meters.” HARV replied. “At the pinnacle of the ziggurat.”

  “Why would anyone want a ceiling that high?”

  “An architectural conversation piece, I suppose. This office holds the record for being the highest ceilinged single room on earth.”

  “They keep track of those things?”

  “You know better than to ask me that, don’t you?”

  “I guess so.”

  “By the way,” HARV said, “Don’t drop anything of import into her wastebasket. The rumor is that it’s three kilometers deep.”

  Ona was in the office as we entered and she waved us over to the desk at which she sat, at the far corner of the room.

  “Zach. Over here.”

  HARV and I met her at the desk and she raised herself ever-so-slightly out of her chair to shake my hand.

  “Thanks for meeting with us, Ona. You remember HARV, my assistant.”

  “A pleasure to see you again, Ms. Thompson.”

  “And a pleasure to see through you again, HARV.”

  HARV’s face dropped a bit and he gave himself a quick once over to check the density of his hologram.

  “It was a joke, HARV,” I whispered.

  “I don’t think she likes me very much,” HARV huffed.

  Ona sat back at her desk and straightened her outfit, a very white low cut jacket over a pale blouse, as a pair of tiny grooming-bots hovered around her head. One quickly combed her hair, the other touched up her make-up. It was only then that I noticed the camera bot, floating just in front of her desk.

  “Are we catching you in the middle of something here?”

  She smiled and let one of the bots buff her teeth to an even pearlier shade of white as she spoke (without moving her lips or jaw).

  “I’m heeding your advice and taking my case to the court of public opinion,” she said.

  “You’re giving interviews?”

  “Not full length interviews, of course. Just splinterviews.”

  “Splinterviews?”

  “They’re very short interviews,” HARV said, “commonly used by most short cycle news services. One question, one response, usually no more than a fifty words. Most of them buzz words.”

  “I’ve been at it since late this morning,” Ona said.

  “This morning? How many have you done?”

  “One hundred and fourteen so far.”

  “What?”

  “Number one hundred and fifteen is scheduled for twenty seconds from now. Pardon me. Computer, which one is this?”

  “Alyssa Solissa from Rapid News,” the computer responded. “This one is to share your grief.”

  “Ugh. Grief,” she said
as she nervously waved the bots away and straightened her jacket. “I’ve been doing grief all afternoon. What about righteous indignation?”

  “That’s next interview,” the computer said.

  “Thank Gates for that.” She glanced quickly at me. “I’ll be with you in a nano, Zachary.” She slid her earpiece into her ear, adjusted the tiny microphone on her collar, turned back to the camera bot, took a deep breath and transformed herself into a grieving sister.

  The change was actually startling to behold because her visage literally seemed to become consumed with sadness. Her eyes moistened gently and her face, though still perfect and beautiful, took on a subtle shade of vulnerability and sorrow. She suddenly looked like a woman who had been crying for two days but had somehow (heroically) pulled herself together in order to talk (exclusively) to her dear friend “fill-in-interviewer’s-name-here” of “fill-in-program’s-name-here.”

  “Yes, Alyssa,” Ona said, as the brief interview began. “Thank you and your viewers so much for your concern. I’m still in shock over Foraa’s tragic death. I appreciate your thoughts and wishes and I’m just so grateful that you’ve chosen to respect the privacy of our family during this difficult time.”

  She gently sobbed twice and then the camera bot switched off.

  “We’re out,” the computer said.

  “Good,” said Ona, her face and demeanor switching back to normal. “How did that look to you, Zach?”

  The truth was that it made me sick to my stomach. But I tried not to let on.

  “Was that the interview?”

  “Splinterview,” she said. “Please try to keep up. Did my grief read genuine to you?”

  “Probably.”

  She nodded contentedly and spoke to her computer. “How long until the next one?”

  “Seventy-five seconds,” the computer responded

  “Plenty of time,” she said turning back to me. “Now, how can I help you?”

  I cleared my head and tried to stick to the business at hand. I pulled my chair closer and leaned toward her, trying hard to catch and hold her constantly wandering eyes (to no avail).

  “I wanted to talk to you again about the night of the murder,” I said. “They’re still not certain how Foraa died, which is good for us, but I want to talk a little bit about the wine since that’s the current focus. You chose the bottle, right?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “When?”

  “Earlier that evening,” she said, “perhaps an hour before my sisters arrived.”

  “You brought it upstairs yourself?”

  “Yes, no one else has access to the wine cellar.”

  “Okay. You chose the wine, you brought it upstairs. Did you bring it into the dining room yourself?”

  Ona thought for a few nanos as the grooming bots once again re-touched her hair and make-up.

  “No, of course not, that's what server bots are for. What good is being rich and having servants if you do all the menial tasks yourself? I only had an hour to make myself look spectacular for the evening.”

  “So, you didn’t see the wine from the time you gave the bottle to that bot until you and the others entered the room.”

  “Of course not. Even I'm not that much of a control freak. I trust my bots know how to properly carry wine.”

  “And that was about an hour, you said?”

  “A little more, perhaps.”

  “I want to see that bot. I want surveillance visuals of its movements from the nano it took the bottle.”

  “Done,” HARV said.

  “We’ll scan them tonight and look for anything that…”

  “No, boss,” HARV said. “I mean done and done. I just scanned the visuals.”

  “What, just now?”

  HARV nodded. “Ms. Thompson’s computer gave them to me. I scanned them.”

  “Already?”

  HARV shrugged. “I’m a super computer.”

  “Did you find anything?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing. The bot brought the wine to the dining room and set it on the table as W was finishing the table setting.”

  “Did W touch it?”

  “He never came near it. He did the last of the silverware then left. The bottle sat undisturbed until Ms. Thompson and her sisters arrived that evening.”

  “DOS,” I turned back to Ona, “Do you have…”

  “Next splinterview in ten seconds,” the computer said.

  “Hold that thought, Zach,” Ona said as she turned back to the camera bot. “Which one is this?”

  “Alvin Calvin of World Entertainment News.”

  “And this is righteous indignation?”

  “Correct.”

  “Good,” she said, turning to me. “My indignation comes a lot more naturally than my grief.”

  “So I gathered.”

  She turned back to the camera bot, took another deep breath and transformed herself yet again. This time she became a grieving sister who, though besieged by a bloodthirsty media, had somehow (heroically) pulled herself together in order to speak (exclusively) to the one journalist who truly understands human emotion, her dear friend “fill-in-interviewer’s-name-here” of “fill-in-program-name-here.”

  “Alvin, Foraa’s short life ended less than two days ago and yet I’ve been forced to relive that awful night every nano since then by poorly dressed vultures posing as journalists trying to create a story on the infrastructure of my grief.”

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” I whispered to HARV.

  “Don’t retch too loudly,” HARV said. “I doubt she has time to do another take.”

  “After everything I’ve done for this world, after all the good that I’ve created with my wealth; aiding under-privileged children, funding disease research, driving programs for environmental renewal and reinvention. After devoting my vast fortune to raising the quality of life for every downtrodden person in the first through fourth worlds, I think I’m entitled to better treatment than this.”

  Ona finished the splinterview and turned again to me.

  “Sorry, Zach,” she said. “I have two minutes until the next one now. What else do you need?”

  I stared blankly at her for an ominously long nano or two. I’d honestly forgotten where we’d been in the discussion before the interruption. Worse still, I saw her looking at me now with a wide-eyed look of interest and I couldn’t help wondering if it was genuine or just another type of splinterview.

  “Zachary?”

  HARV sensed my uncertainty and filled the void.

  “We were discussing the wine and how it might have been tampered with during the hours leading up to Foraa’s death,” he said.

  “Yes. Exactly,” I mumbled. “We need to prove that nothing happened to the wine while it was in your possession. Computer, can you give HARV the visuals of Ona selecting the wine from the cellar.”

  “I’m afraid not, Mr. Johnson,” the computer said.

  “Why?”

  “The wine cellar is a technology-free zone,” HARV said. “There are no surveillance cameras and, I assume that the computer cannot monitor that particular room either.”

  “That’s correct,” said the computer. “I’ve never ‘seen’ the wine cellar. So to speak.”

  “Why is it technology-free?”

  Ona shrugged. “It was part of Daddy’s design. He said the electromagnetic energy from computers spoiled the wine.”

  “So we can prove that nothing happened to the wine once it left your hands,” I said, hanging my head just a little, “but we have nothing to prove that you didn’t tamper with it while you were in the cellar.”

  “Other than my word.”

  “No offense, Ona, but in a court of law, your word isn’t the be-all-end-all.”

  “Not yet, but give me time,” she said.

  “Ona, I don’t think you fully grasp what’s going on here…”

  A gentle tone sounded on her desk console and she turned her attention to it, cast
ing a glance at the desk screen with a smile.

  “Oh, good. The poll numbers are in.”

  “You’re taking a poll?”

  “Just a quick check on the effect that the splinterviews are having on public opinion” she said, gently touching the OLED screen surface that was her desktop. The raw numerical data was reflected in her smiling eyes as it came on the screen before blurring like drops of binary rain in a storm when she scrolled through it.

  “Ona, I don’t think it’s appropriate for you to be taking poll numbers at this time…”

  “Ah, eighty-four percent of all respondents find me sympathetic,” she said, oblivious to my words. “That’s up dramatically since this morning.”

  “…It makes you seem a little callous…”

  “Seventy-nine percent of all respondents feel that I am being unfairly persecuted because of my celebrity.”

  “…and more interested in protecting your own position than in finding your sister’s killer….”

  “And ninety-three percent think I’m above the law.”

  “You think that’s good?”

  “Well, I’d rather be above the law than below it, wouldn’t you?”

  And that was it. Granted, it had been a long couple of days, so my fuse might have been a little shorter than usual at that particular nano but I certainly wasn’t happy with how my client was behaving or how she had ordered her priorities.

  I juiced up my armor slightly and brought my fist down hard on the top of her desk. Not hard enough to crack it but the electromagnetic pulse from my armor frazzled the information on the screen. Ona turned to me, wide-eyed and shocked.

  “This isn’t a game, Ona. It’s not a popularity contest where the person who gives the best interview wins.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Her voice was cold.

  HARV stiffened and cast nervous glances first at me, then Ona.

  “I think what he means, Ms. Thompson…”

  “What I mean is that if the cops get one shred of evidence against you, they’re going to come at you with everything they have and whether they make their case or not, it will ruin your life. If you go to trial for killing your sister, win or lose, your days as an icon are over. At best you beat the rap and become some pop-culture joke or the center space on the Whatever-Happened-To edition of the Hollywood Dodecahedron. At worst you go to jail for the rest of your life where you wear the same thing as everyone else every day and no one gives a DOS about your hairstyle. Now are you capable of wrapping your genius-intellect around that truth or is your vanity too impenetrable to let you?”