Echoes

by Therin Knite

  I zoom in on the last redacted client until her face hardly fits the frame of my Ocom, as if blowing up her image will somehow add clarity to this increasingly confusing debacle.

  As it turns out, heterochromia lady is a killer.

  “An intellectual orgasm.”

  My head snaps up, the healing muscles in my shoulder tightening so hard a hiss blows through my teeth. I was so engrossed in heterochromia lady’s case file that I didn’t hear anyone enter the surgery room. The man standing opposite me has a skewed grin. It matches his skewed workstation glasses, which are dotted with various pieces of information being fed into the lenses from a specialized computer somewhere in the building. A hazy image of this man floats to the surface of my mind: he was at the Manson house with Dynara.

  “Is that what you call an epiphany?” I ask.

  “Sometimes,” he says.

  Lana, who’s busy packing up her equipment for the night, chuckles. “Lance likes to add the word ‘orgasm’ to everything.”

  “Why?” I ask Lance. “Has the amount of cream in your coffee clogged your brain?”

  A blond eyebrow rises over the rim of his glasses. “Dy didn’t tell you that, did she?”

  “No, she had five coffees. All of them were telling, and you seem to be someone who likes to blunt the coffeeness of coffee.”

  “Is that a metaphor for something dark and depressing?”

  “Is it?”

  The answer is yes, I already know. He’s only a few years older than me, but the experience of past tragedy haunts the edges of his lackadaisical expressions. The dampened horror of losing a loved one. There’s an item of remembrance hidden under his shirt too, a necklace sporting the outlines of two rings.

  “Why bother to ask when I don’t need to answer?” Lance says.

  “How do you know I know the answer?”

  “Oh, gods almighty,” Lana mumbles. She grabs her orange pea coat and heads for the door. “I’m getting out of here before you boys descend into some riddle war.” In the doorway, she hesitates. “I’m sure you already know this, Adem, but don’t overuse your arm for the next week or so. Unless you want to end up in another doctor’s surgery room. I don’t like repeat customers. So if you screw up my work, I’ll kick you to the curb.” With that, she disappears into the maze of EDPA halls.

  “You have that same look Dy gets when she analyzes people,” Lance says. “That’s how I know you know.” He shuffles over to a counter bolted to the wall next to the cabinet and grabs the short stool underneath it. All it takes is a light tug to send it rolling my way. It bounces off the edge of my surgery bed and rebounds a few feet before coming to a stop. Lance sets himself on it with no adjustment, pretending he knew where it was going to go.

  “It’s as if you’re looking right through me,” he continues, “like I’m nothing but words and images stockpiled into physical shape.”

  “You make me sound cold.”

  “You are cold. It’s a genius thing.”

  “You’ve met a lot of geniuses then?”

  “Only Dy before you. But she’s the one who told me that.” He leans across the chasm between us and offers me a hand. “Is your name really Adem Adamend?”

  I situate my Ocom in my lap and give him a solid shake with the arm not currently in a sling. “It is. And what about you? Got an equally dumb name?”

  “Lance Lovecraft. I too was born during the infamous alliterative naming fad.”

  “Nice to meet a fellow victim, I suppose.”

  “So it is.” His attention turns to my Ocom. “Have you solved the case already? Dy bet me fifty bucks you’d figure it out before lunchtime today.”

  “Lunchtime is, what, ten hours away? Ask me again at breakfast. I have a hunch about a lead right now, but I need to investigate a bit more before I can reach a definite conclusion.” I need to figure out how much of my interaction with heterochromia lady last night was coincidence and how much was the result of her involvement with Manson. All I know for sure is that she killed her partner of ten years in self-defense, and Manson cleared her of any wrongdoing in the aftermath. But I have a talent for reading between the lines, and there are a few words that indicate a far more convoluted story. Like “infidelity.”

  In order to convert my speculation into applicable theory though, my course of action—

  A wide yawn escapes from my chest.

  Lance snickers. “You tired?”

  “Well, I have spent the night getting shot at and running for my life.”

  “That’s not atypical for an EDPA shift. I’ve spent many of my nights getting shot at and running for my life. And I’m the tech guy.”

  “You were the one talking to Dynara in the dragon dream?”

  “Dragon dream? Oh, yeah. That was me. I was pissed at her. She took her damn com out, and then my data went on the fritz. Crosses screw up the Nexus system.”

  “Sorry. It was an accident. I didn’t mean to be there.”

  “I’m not blaming you. Rookie makers aren’t in control of their abilities. You need training.”

  “Yeah, about that…”

  “You’re not joining us?” He leans back and grips the cushion of the stool, nails digging into the cracks in the leather.

  “I can’t. I have a reason to work for the IBI.”

  Lance eyes me cautiously. He knows something I don’t, and he’s not supposed to tell me about it. “So I’ve heard,” he says. “Maybe I can change your mind though.”

  He leaps from his seat, seizes me by the oversized freebie shirt Lana stuffed me into for some modesty, and hauls my exhausted ass off the table. My feet stumble as he drags me through the double doors and into a quiet EDPA hallway. “After all,” he adds, “according to Dy, I’m your escort for the night. I’m supposed to show you things.”

  “Show me what?”

  “How about the Neural Nexus?”

  Freeing myself from his grasp, I fall into step beside him. “Where do you keep that, the basement?”

  He laughs. “It’s not one thing. There are eight Nexus setups in the building, one on each of the belowground floors. There are sixteen Nexus teams, eight day shifts and eight night shifts, that work on alternating days of the week. Dynara and I are part of the night shift team for Nexus One.”

  “How many others are on your team?”

  “Well, we have Murrough. You met him tonight. He doesn’t do echo field though. Then there’s Chai, but she’s on leave for the next few weeks.”

  “Injury?”

  “Honeymoon.”

  “Ah. So—”

  A shrill shriek rips through the quiet hallway. My heart goes into overdrive, but Lance doesn’t flinch. Repeated exposure to warning alarms will gradually wear down the shock response.

  “That’s the level two alert,” he says. “Sorry. Twos tend to appear without going through level one, and a two can lead to a three, and well, you understand where this is going.”

  “How many dreams do you have to deal with in a night?”

  “Twentyish. There aren’t but so many echomakers in Columbia. And when we find a new one, we dose them with a Somnexolene inhibitor. Makes all the bad dreams go away. Of course, we have new makers coming into their powers all the time, so the excitement never ends.”

  Once the alarm is silenced, Lance picks up his pace, and a myriad of identical halls gives way to a multi-ton steel barricade with a passcode pad tacked onto one side.

  “So this is it?” I ask.

  “Yep. Prepare yourself.”

  “I’m good, thanks.”

  He punches in a twenty-six-digit code that I instantly memorize, but when prompted for an Ocom check, he stops short. “Why do you like working at crime scenes so much?”

  My brain kicks into high gear to deconstruct the purpose behind his question, but all I find is genuine interest. Lance Lovecraft is not like Dynara. He doesn’t have ulterior motives. “I want to learn what drives all types of criminals,” I answer. “I want to learn ho
w they do what they do and why they do it. Each crime scene brings me a step closer to understanding what happened to my mother.”

  Lance winces and turns away. He waves his Ocom in front of the passcode pad, confirming his identity, and the locks on the door disengage. A mountain of steel flies upward with a thunderous clank, revealing a cavernous black chamber behind it.

  “Nexus One,” he says, “activate.”

  “Such is the glory of the gods!” Lance raises his hands, gesturing to the impressive setup that is EDPA’s Neural Nexus. Behind him, five reclining chairs skirt the edge of a lowered circular basin that shines with the light of a hundred thousand luminescent wires submerged in two inches of water. Suspended above the setup is the dome of a supercomputer core, its blue glow diluting the brightness of the ceiling lights.

  Lance maneuvers around the central part of the Nexus and proceeds to showcase a complex multiscreen workstation in the corner. “This is where I work. I’m the team coordinator.”

  I run a finger down the well-worn armrest of the chair nearest to the door, tracing the indentation of a lithe arm. “Is this one Dynara’s?”

  “Sure is. She always insists on the same connector. Claims it feels different than the others. I suspect it has more to do with the fact she’s a stubborn creature of habit.” Lance rounds the corner of his desk and flops onto a rolling chair.

  The connector’s head cushion is bordered by a semicircular metal band that looks suspiciously similar to a clamp. “So you, what, sit down and plug in?” I ask.

  “Basically.”

  “And how does it let you connect to someone’s echo?”

  “It removes your consciousness from your body and situates it on the border of our dimension and the one in which the echoes exist, thus causing a copy of your body to appear inside the echo dimension. Then the Nexus takes that copy and directs it to the selected echo.” He plucks his glasses off and rubs one eye with the back of his hand. “I’d try to explain it in more detail, but I don’t understand all the science behind it myself. The sheer amount of brainpower that went into this thing is unfathomable to me. Years and years. Thousands and thousands of hours. Hundreds of geniuses from a dozen mathematic and scientific disciplines. They rewrote at least three entire fields during the development of the first Nexus prototype.”

  “When was that?” I skim my foot along the surface of the shallow pool, distorting the view of the lit wires into a mosaic of flickering ripples.

  “About thirty-five years ago, the prototype. The first approved model came a few years later.”

  “Approved as in safe?”

  “Approved as in working, most of the time.”

  “I’m guessing more than one death has been caused by this thing?” I take a few steps back and crane my neck to stare at the humming computer core.

  “Oh, yes. You think Ocom software updates have glitches? You haven’t seen a glitch until you’ve seen people’s minds end up in the wrong bodies.”

  “That happens?”

  “Happened. Long before I was around. Version 1.2 of the Nexus. We’re required to study its history during coordinator training.” He raps his glasses on the central workstation screen. “Not all of it is marvelous.”

  “So they’ve fixed that…error then?”

  “Dy fixed it.”

  “She’s that old?”

  The glasses slip out of his fingers, tip over the back of the screen, bounce off the edge of the desk, and dive right into an empty trashcan. “Oh, she hasn’t told you.”

  “Not her exact age. Only that she’s older than she looks.”

  “Understatement of the year,” he mutters. He flicks the lever on the underside of his chair, and it sinks down far enough for him to lean under the desk and reclaim his glasses.

  I wander closer to his station, surveying the constant stream of information. There’s so much data on a single screen that by the time I capture one word it’s already been replaced by a hundred more. “So, are you going to tell me how old she is or leave me in aching suspense?”

  His eyes sparkle with the desire to torment my curiosity, but he decides to throw me a bone. “Fifty-two.”

  I try to equate five decades with Dynara’s rounded college freshman face, but I can’t make the puzzle pieces fit together. “I, uh, how?”

  Lance picks up his feet and drops them on a scuffed desk corner. “You’re looking at it.”

  “The Nexus?”

  “An echo.”

  “An echo made her young?”

  “Made her stay young.”

  “So she…”

  “She’s looked exactly the same for the last thirty-four years.” Lance wets his dry bottom lip as he loses himself in thought. “Which is longer than I’ve been alive. I try to pretend we’re somewhere on the same playing field, but reality comes crashing in all too often. Every time I see her interact with someone older, someone who looks older, I can see the age in her. Every time she starts reminiscing about the past. It’s like her eyes, well…”

  “Are windows to her soul?”

  “If you want to get poetic.”

  “Nothing poetic about it. Eyes are telling.”

  “Like coffee, you mean.”

  “Exact—”

  A rumbling percussion rhythm blasts through Lance’s jacket pocket and booms off the Nexus chamber walls. He scrambles for his Ocom, nearly falling out of his chair as his feet slip off the desk. Once he has the tablet in hand, he repeatedly slams his middle finger on the answer prompt. “Dynara? What the fuck? Did you change my ringtone again?”

  Dynara dismisses his complaint with a snort and says, “We have much bigger problems than your taste in music. Guess who just showed up at Valkyrie?”

  Lance freezes for a moment. Then he shoots me a worried glance. “The director?”

  “Yep.”

  Oh, shit.

  If Brennian has been informed about the incident at Valkyrie, then by now, he must also know everything concerning my involvement in the Manson case. It’ll only be a matter of time before he tracks me down here, grabs me by the ear, and hauls me off to house arrest or some equally unpleasant punishment. If I wasn’t royally screwed after my own commander gunned me down at a crime scene, then I certainly am now.

  “Is Adem there with you?” Dynara asks.

  “Yeah, he’s right here. Doesn’t look so hot though. I think he’s panicking,” Lance says. “I’m guessing the IBI is going to come collect him?”

  “Inevitably. I had to tell them we have him. Brennian caught me in a legal trap, got one of his judge buddies to keep the Valkyrie shootout under the IBI’s jurisdiction. We’re required to hand over all persons we know were involved. Including Adem.” Dynara’s voice is strained. She’s been awake and active at least as long as I have, and unlike me, she hasn’t had any down time since our fight and flight from the IBI SWAT team. It seems she went straight back to the club after dropping me off for surgery.

  “At this point, you have two choices, Adem,” she continues. “I’m sure you know what they are.”

  “I can either turn myself over to the IBI, or I can run,” I reply.

  “What would be the point of the latter?” Lance looks up from his Ocom, frowning. “They’ll catch you eventually, no matter what. And if you run, you’ll end up in more trouble than you are now.”

  “Yeah, I will. But if I go in now, I’ll be put into some kind of lockup, barred from doing anything Brennian doesn’t want me to do until further notice. If I run, I get to stay a free man for a few more hours. In that time, I can still work on the Manson case. I can still solve the Manson case. And I think I know where to start.” I reexamine the extraordinary marvel that is the Neural Nexus one last time before I turn to face the door. “Dynara?”

  “Yes?” The amusement in her voice is thick.

  “I need a shortcut to the metro station at Jefferson Circle. Got a suggestion?”

  Chapter Eleven

  I find her eating dinner at a rest
aurant at four thirty in the morning. She isn’t difficult to track down.

  On my way to Jefferson Circle, I plug her picture from the Manson file into the IBI’s reverse image search program, and the results pour in by the hundreds. In minutes, I have a detailed outline of heterochromia lady’s public life.

  Like many upper-class modders, she goes by a pseudonym. Hers is the pretentious Lady Svipul. Lady Svi for short. Her real name is nowhere to be found on any news or media sites. The rich like their private lives as far away from the poor and dirty as possible.

  But while I’m shuffling onto an early bird train that’ll take me to Hamilton End, I decide her name isn’t vital to solving the Manson case.

  As long as I can talk to her in person.

  She has a shared feed that publicizes her every social move. At five o’clock yesterday evening, she ate breakfast with a few old friends who came from Tokyo to visit. At eleven, she attempted to go to Club Valkyrie, only to find the place shut down and crawling with IBI agents. Two minutes later, however, she’d already fallen into step with another group of acquaintances, and she spent the next several hours at a masquerade ball in the suburbs.

  Now, she’s having a three-course meal at the famous Beacham Inn Restaurant on the corner of 2nd and Roosevelt. Once she finishes up her busy night at her favorite expensive restaurant, she’ll head home, bathe in a luxurious tub with gold fixtures, and sleep from seven AM to three in the afternoon. So goes the life of a night socialite.

  Before I dare get within two blocks of the restaurant, I make a detour onto a side street and duck into one of the micro-designer stores that make Hamilton End the shopping destination of thousands of tourists every year. The lone cashier gives me a quick survey, determines I’m penniless riffraff, and tries to shoo me out. If she had any security on duty, I’d probably be dragged out of the neighborhood and tossed into the nearest low-class sector. She’s not that lucky though, and I’m not that luckless. Or that dumb.