When I woke, it was as if a chunk of time had simply vanished. My thought train was chugging full speed and I was attempting to figure out how they had conned their way onto the station in the first place, or whether it was a conspiracy from within the Company all along. Several minutes passed before I realized that I was lying in a bed in the medical centre, fully clothed and aching inside and out.
“I should have warned you,” 901 said apologetically into my synapses, “that they were prompted to go for the full contamination alert.”
I looked around, trying to pretend to be unconscious so that I could see what was going on before anybody paid attention. There were two empty beds in the room with me, a monitor reading something from a line taped to the back of my hand, and an untidy pile of microdust-separation equipment with the filter lid open. Through the glass panel opposite me I could see a huddle of green figures poring intently over what I assumed must be analysis of the filters. I looked at the sleeve of my overalls cautiously, and from its unnaturally pristine state gathered that I'd been hoovered whilst asleep.
“What did they do?” I asked 901 in a whisper.
“Blood analysis and immediate microanalysis of your hair, skin, and clothes.” It paused. “And they pumped your lungs. It's terrible there's still so much pollution in the atmosphere; some of it came out virtually black.”
That explained the sore throat and the feeling that I must have been inhaling pure chlorine for the last hour or two. The blackness could have been explained by telling 901 about my old smoking habit, but that wasn't important. Maybe some good would come of it, and now I wouldn't get cancer after all. I felt so bad I decided to do nothing but wait and see who turned up to ask questions. If it was Maria, then that was low security. If it was the head doctor, that was bad news for my health. If it was anyone else, then there was more afoot.
As the minutes passed I felt increasingly restless, but with more than a tinge of nausea. I noted with irritation that the monitor reported that I was fine. “How did the cable thing go?” I asked.
“It's working so far,” 901 said.
“And Roy,” I added carelessly, “that all went OK, did it?”
“Roy was taken,” it said, “not dispatched by me.”
“What do you mean: taken?”
“He was read,” it reported, “and, in being read, lost.”
Scanned, it meant. A technology for mindreading people that had never worked even when the chemical tracers used came down in toxicity. One of the things I used to wonder about was who the unlucky volunteers had been who had wound up dead in order to prove that synaptic patterns could be tracked in living patients, but only once, after which the gateways were blasted forever. It was a stupid experiment—even with the patterns in front of you there was no way of telling what those thoughts were about. As for a weapon, there were many more ways of effectively killing someone like Roy, and anyway the method was made illegal in 2061. I was still shuffling it around as an idea when the visitors arrived.
Maria came first, trailing her spectral Human Analogue Interface, Joaquin. Like most HughIes (stupid acronym), Joaquin was a kind of ornament as well as a method of communicating with the ubiquitous services of 901. Tall and Latin-looking with long dark hair and black saintly eyes, he was dressed as if he had just finished a particularly strenuous bolero. Maria waved him aside flirtatiously and he hung back. I smiled at the faint pout which appeared on his face and met Maria still smiling, which threw her considerably so that she took a breath and said nothing for a second.
Maria was short, and constructed like a small bird made to dart and pry and hop. Her Hispanic features were worn but proud and her black hair was piled on her head and held with combs in the manner of her ancestors. She took a sharp breath at the sight of me and the hard lines on her face smoothed as she tuned in to Sympathy No. 5 or whatever role she had rehearsed in preparation for a situation like this one. Our team had long thought she should be in Sales. But here she was, least wanted, and trying to curb her famished curiosity. The clip of her polished shoes came to a neat halt closer than she usually stood. She held her arms outward a little bit in an offering gesture. The thought of hugging her chilled me to the core and I recoiled.
“You found him?” she asked, snatching her arms back with gratitude and reaching into her pocket for a thin stick of nicotine gum. Her voice fell between making a statement and inviting a collapse into tearful confessions. I gave her the facts, leaving out the bizarre hologram.
“Are you sure that's it?” Maria sat down on the edge of the bed, swung her foot. She glanced back at me and swallowed, wedging the gum in her teeth. “I…the thing is…” She shuffled closer and clasped her hands together in an earnest way, lowering her voice. “The recordings are all jumbled.” I kept listening. “Just in those minutes. Maybe a virus. Maybe just a mistake. I don't know. The thing is…I need to reconstruct what happened, we all will because there'll be an inquiry, and I thought you might have got there just before and then you could remember it all, you know.”
“No, I didn't,” I said, “and the anaesthetic is still making me feel sick.” I tried to look as though I might throw up, so she would retreat. There was an old score between Maria Van Doorn and myself, although she didn't know it. When I had first become a member of Green Team, she had used all her showmanship on getting me to befriend her. I hadn't learned to hide my weak spot then. I confided in her with my worries. Too readily as it turned out—she was not above shooting her mouth off to anyone's detriment when it was to her advantage. Now the banality of her play at being helpless made me hate her.
Maria nodded and smiled. “Well, never mind. Maybe later. Can I get you some drugs? Vaughn's coming to ask you a couple of Qs.” She glanced around and directed Joaquin to fetch an orderly with a medicine cabinet.
He tapped haughtily across the floor to pointlessly tell himself, in the form of another HughIe belonging to the MedCentre, about her request. The medical interface cast Maria a dark glance.
No tea and a nice lie-down for the afternoon for me, then. Vaughn was head of security; I surmised big trouble. But Maria was only offering what she would have thought of for herself: a quick tab of some benzodiazepine for the nerves and later, when signs of depression recur and sleep is long coming and still the fantasies of all-not-well come back to haunt the mind, a shot of chlorpromazine to fuzzy things nicely and bend the will into the form of the Company's reality once again. I knew her history more than I should have. I once glimpsed her notes lying open upside-down on Dr. Klein's desk in the mental health unit, and later that evening read them off the back of my eyelids during a very dull cheese-and-wine get-together. I was cross to find that this knowledge made me pity Maria, and so I only sighed.
Whilst we waited, Maria had a tonic and vitamin booster, two aspirin and some eyedrops which made her blink like a slow loris suddenly exposed to the light of day.
Vaughn appeared after she had gone to fetch me a drink. He squinted at me to check if I was really awake. Still staring, he drew up a chair. His HughIe tiptoed out from behind him and sat down on a handsome piece of metal art nouveau which appeared magically for her, in keeping with her flapper look. She produced a secretary's pad and a shorthand pen and prepared to take elfin little notes, her cute way of signalling that 901 was to record the entire interview.
“You called us? You found him? Was he already dead?”
Never one for preamble, Vaughn's heavy features were hawklike with concentration.
“Very dead,” I said, shaking the hand that he offered. He had a quick grip which pinched my hand between his thumb and forefinger, skin dry and papery.
His eyes narrowed slightly. “What made you come to his room?”
“901 said it had lost contact with him.” I saw no reason yet not to tell the whole truth, but the strangeness of the situation made me want to keep as much as possible to myself all the same.
“He died of massive synaptic failure,” Vaughn said, chin low, giving
me a firm stare as if he would become very angry if I started to show that I was upset. Business was business, his platelike cheeks said—and no hysteria before it's done. He might have been tripping over cadavers in every room.
I didn't remind him about my implant and that he had no need to tell me anything. People without never liked to be reminded that you had a private channel straight into their information, particularly if you could get at more of it than they thought. “I thought scanning was illegal,” I said, hoping he would reveal more.
It backfired on me. “I didn't mention anything about scanning, O'Connell,” he said. “What makes you suggest it?”
“It's the only thing I know that fries your head,” I said.
“And you have access to such technology?”
“No.” For a moment I actually thought he suspected me. “That is,” I said to annoy him, “I know the theory, but I don't think I could put it into practice without detection.”
Without intending to, he made a face which clearly let me know his opinion of smug, elitist, and overeducated eggheads like myself. I thought he was probably one of those who would be pleased that Roy was dead, and I felt determined to cooperate even less.
“Where were your other team members at the time?”
“In their private rooms. Peaches is preparing for transition to 902. Lula was analysing the latest material requests for 901’s development.” It struck me how strange it was to sit here merrily chatting away when what had happened was that Roy was dead, probably murdered. I closed my mouth and all desire to irritate Vaughn faded.
“I see.” Vaughn leant back and seemed to ponder for a moment before he changed his tack. “Would you consider that this has any resemblance to the situation which occurred shortly after you began work with 899, when you first arrived on station?”
My head swam for a moment. “You mean the Texas factory thing?” I couldn't think what he was talking about, unless he was trying to say that he suspected 901 of doing Roy in and was asking me if I would add to his thesis by suggesting that 899 was as responsible as he wished it was for the old fiasco over the missing nanyte raws. I'd thought that investigation long abandoned. “I doubt it,” I said, fending him off with a very real scowl of discomfort. “I'll think about it.”
“Yes, you do that,” he said, but in an offhand way and with a kind of smile that I'm sure he intended to be reassuring. It looked mistrustful.
Maria appeared with a cup of watery orange juice. After the lung cleaner it tasted bitter and burned my throat. Maria sat on the end of the bed and patted my foot through the covers. “You should get some rest.” Obviously she'd been reading too many hospital romances on her day off. I could just see her imagining herself as the beautiful matron in a perfect white coat, floating around the wards and dispensing care and nurturing to the terminally ill, feeding like a vampire off the gratitude in their rheumy eyes.
Vaughn looked angry with her, but stared at me instead. “We'll be having further interviews with you,” he said. “Hopefully later on today, after you've been discharged. You can tell me your theory about the Texas incident then.” He stood up and glanced at his HughIe. She smiled and stood and followed him out, her beaded dress swinging and clattering against the doorjambs. These simulations were getting damn good now. No wonder so many people reacted well to them, even if they did tend to treat them like personal servants.
Maria rushed off after him, with a brief good-bye to me, beckoning Joaquin after her like a grand stallion following a chicken. As he passed the bed I saw that his feet were several inches off the floor, and when he reached the door the top of his head got cut off.
There was a moment's peace, then Maria swung back around. “And you must do something about these bloody HughIes, Juju—there's so many glitches…hello?” And she was finally gone.
I rested for a few minutes, feeling sadder with each one. To stop the descent becoming too rapid, I said to 901, “Are you doing that on purpose?”
“Doing what?”
“Screwing up the HughIes.”
“I couldn't possibly comment.”
“I think you need a consultation,” I said. “You think it's funny now. You won't if they get really irritated.”
Silence.
I slept for a short time.
I was woken by one of the doctors in green. He was looking at my monitor.
“You've tested negative,” he said, “and are free to go. How do you feel?”
I recognized Dr. Jakes. We had done time together on the Mental Health Board.
“Have you done an autopsy yet?” I made no move.
“Um…the body has been sent to the central labs. He was working with the nano technologists. May be some cross-contamination or something, not really my area of interest. With a case like this…Mr. Croft was well known as something of an anarchist and…”
He hesitated to say it, so I said it for him.
“A terrorist. In the past.”
“I'm sure you know better than I do.” He was on the home run into noncommittal land now. “It's out of my hands.”
I assumed that there was already a veil of secrecy being drawn around the whole thing. Jakes looked uncomfortable, so I let him off the hook and pretended to doze off. When he had gone I heaved myself out of the bed and staggered slowly homewards, calling Peaches and Lula on the way, but there was no answer from them. At home I made strong coffee and had it with half a bar of white chocolate, but neither revived me. I felt cold and abandoned and sat curled in the sofa, trying to think of nothing, until a message came asking me to Vaughn's office.
It was OK being with other people. It was being alone that was bad. When there's nobody there my defences vanish, inside and out. I wish they didn't. And I wish that I could remove them when someone was listening, but they don't seem to work that way. I once tried out therapy sessions with Dr. Paige, my colleague, but I've let those lapse. I didn't like the idea of seeming so weak to my superior. Maybe with Lula once or twice I'd let my tongue wag about what I really thought, but not often. A lot of it was about Roy Croft. Now, with him gone…I should have talked to him when he was still alive. But I didn't.
Vaughn's office was in the main administration complex and luxuriously appointed, with plenty of space used for nothing but strange clay sculptures poised on octagonal pedestals here and there so as to discourage any kind of hurrying motion. Sometimes the sculptures looked like a deranged coconut tree and sometimes like shrunken heads. Today they were knotted figures, tightly curled in on themselves, giving nothing away. I guessed they were mood-attuned to him, a sort of semaphore to visitors. Or maybe I was just supposed to think that.
Vaughn was with his secretary. Maria took the most comfortable chair in his absence. Joaquin perched on its sturdy arm at her side. Unwillingly I sank into the mire of his fake leather sofa—brought up at who-knew-what-silly-cost from Earth—and tried to gather some wits.
Vaughn himself was not our superior. We had none as such, and in that respect Maria did not govern me or any of the Core Teams. She was our facilitator, the Teams’ manager, as answerable to us as not. Vaughn was head of station security. We answered to him only if we were involved in something which directly concerned him. He knew little of Core AI Operations, although I recalled that he would try to brief himself thoroughly when issues involving us came up at the Steering Committee responsible for authorizing 901’s activities.
Now he came in, smoothed his suit over his short frame, and sat down at his desk. His HughIe sat in the least prominent chair. Maria and Vaughn—Freddie was his first name—shared an uneasy and unconscious glance at my aloneness. It reminded them of my implant. It was a common theory that the direct interfacers were whisperers, information traders, and unpleasantly secretive. Traditionally, we thought HughIes narcissistic and phony. It made some conversations very difficult.
“I've reviewed the story so far,” Vaughn began, “but what happened in the corridor—did you hear anyone?”
�
��I was immersed,” I said. “I didn't hear anything until 901’s alarm and the medical alert.” It was a peculiar question for him to ask. I assumed the recording “failures” must have included the whole Core Ops subunit, which really did look like serious sabotage.
“And when you entered Roy Croft's office, you saw nothing unusual?”
“No.”
“No mists, dusts, nothing in the air?”
Again this obsession with nanytes. As if scouring my insides with glasspaper wasn't enough. “No, nothing like that. The air conditioner made a noise when I walked in. He liked to keep his room hot, and the air outside was cooler, but he was lying on the couch as the medics found him. It was quiet. There was nobody there.”
“And the door to his room was open?”
“Yes. I assumed 901 opened it on an override before I got there. The air was stuffy. It hadn't been open long.”
“I see.” He nodded in the direction of his elf, and she wrote earnestly, resting the pad on her knee.
Joaquin and Maria had not moved.
“Do you know why Peaches and Lula were not alerted?” he asked then.
“No,” I said.
“Why didn't you call them as soon as you found…Mr. Croft?”
“I assumed that 901 would have called them,” I said. “I wanted to call medical first.”
“But 901 did not call them.”
“It set off the emergency alarm and that would have called them, if it wasn't disabled in their rooms.” I didn't like his line. “If you want to know more, then ask 901.”
Vaughn looked at his HughIe and, in a strange, unexpected moment, she and Joaquin shared a glance at one another as if they were real. So real were they to Maria and Vaughn that neither of them noticed. I concealed my start of surprise. Never mind a few inches off the top of the head, having them react like that was the kind of development that caught my interest. The idea that 901 might really be splitting itself down into them as individual subpersonalities darted across my mind.
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