The Harmony Paradox (Virtual Immortality Book 2)

by Matthew S. Cox

  “Oh.” She lifted the tiny mug to her lips. “I suppose I wasn’t the only one on the vid then. You might be able to elude them if you start running now, but they’re probably already here.” Katya winked and sipped her cappuccino.

  Anders leapt to his feet. He spared her a half-second glare before fast-walking out the door, buttoning his suit jacket. The ‘Nacho Mama’ food van pulled around the corner and followed. She assumed it contained Division 9 agents. Not so subtle as they think. It also didn’t surprise her that Anders appeared oblivious to them. Half a block west from the café door, Anders Becker vanished into the side door of a brightly-painted van covered with images of tortilla chips and cheese.

  Katya shook her head. 22 Pridurok.

  awr,” said a small voice.

  Nina opened her eyes. Eight hours of talking to person after person about Paul Estrada swirled in a disorienting blur of quasi-dream that gave way to her bedroom ceiling.

  “Rawr!” yelled a small voice.

  She rolled over, facing away from the wall to the window side of her Comforgel pad. Elizaveta, in a set of footie pajamas made to look like a bright green dinosaur complete with hood and long stuffed tail, raised her hands and made dinosaur noises.

  Nina gasped. “Oh, no. There’s a T-rex loose in the apartment!”

  She scrambled out of bed and ran. Elizaveta chased her around for a few minutes roaring. When she wound up giggling more than trying to sound like a ravening dinosaur, Nina whirled about and caught her in a hug, sweeping her into the air.

  “Is my little T-Rex hungry?”

  Elizaveta nodded, causing the dino-hood to flop up and down over her face.

  “Well, I suppose there’s some raw meat left… would you like beef?”

  The girl shook her head.

  “Deer?”

  “No.”

  “I might be able to get some pterodactyl steaks.”

  Elizaveta shook her head again.

  “What kind of meat does this scary T-Rex want?”

  The girl raised both hands and yelled, “Waffles!”

  “Waffles!” Nina set her in a chair at the kitchen table and acted concerned. “They’re fast… hard to catch.”

  Elizaveta looked worried.

  “Shh. I’m hunting waffles.” Nina snuck up on the freezer, pulled the door open fast, and ‘ambushed’ a box of waffles.

  “Yay!” yelled Elizaveta.

  Nina stuck two in a small electric convection oven and poured the girl a cup of orange juice. Soon, the oven beeped and she set a plate of hot waffles and a bottle of syrup on the table, then leaned against the wall, quietly bemoaning being awakened a full thirty minutes before her alarm would’ve gone off at 6 a.m. Any trace of regret evaporated when the girl grinned up at her, waffle bits mushing in her teeth as she chewed. I volunteered for this. Enjoy it. These moments won’t last forever. She copied the entire dinosaur chase from her two-hour recording buffer, and saved the video.

  Nina kept smiling, but turned maudlin. Her mind danced around the worry of Elizaveta turning into an angry teenager, as all the horrors she’d seen as a child came back at once. Would she go batshit at sixteen or seventeen, wind up an out-of-control doser? Maybe if I hadn’t found her. No… that could happen, but not with her. She hoped the other Russian orphans wound up with decent homes. Any one of them would be a handful in their later teens if they didn’t get a lot of support over the next few years.

  She scratched at her stomach, taken by a sudden overwhelming guilt at having a false body. Do I even deserve this kid? I’m barely human. Nina tossed the idea aside, thinking of the eerie white-haired synth named Kelly. The conversation they’d had in the whispercraft coming back from the bayou had given Nina new perspective on her situation. She still had a soul; she remained human in all ways that matter. A reluctant smile formed, which grew when Elizaveta grinned at her. She’s so resilient. This is one of her good moments. When it got dark, she could wind up hiding in her room, terrified ‘they’ would come take her away and put her in some other home… or the Citizen Management Officers who arrested her would kick in the door. Well, maybe not that… after watching Nina tear the bars off the primate cages, Elizaveta hadn’t been so worried about CMO officers.

  Once the waffles vanished, Nina took her to the bathroom. The girl had mixed feelings about the autoshower, refusing to get in unless Nina remained in the room right outside the cylinder. At first, she’d been terrified of it at all, thinking it too much like a cage. After a few days, Elizaveta’s initial fear of the machine had become the same sort of exhilaration one usually got from rides at an amusement park. Nina almost had to lift her through the door, but once inside, the child adored the ‘shower machine,’ and cheered the whole time she could do so without gulping down soap.

  When the dry cycle finished, she sent the girl to her bedroom to pick an outfit, and stole a quick shower for herself. Elizaveta drifted into Nina’s room while she got dressed for work, content to sit on the edge of the bed with her white bear in her lap. Soon, they rode the elevator to the roof and her patrol craft. Elizaveta talked about how much fun she’d have with her ‘cousins,’ Emily and Kelly.

  At some point, she expected the girl to ask why her ‘cousins’ weren’t growing up, but that conversation could wait. ‘One’s a doll and the other’s a synthetic with a person’s ghost somehow stuffed inside it’ would probably go over her head. Heck, it went over Nina’s head.

  After dropping Elizaveta off at the parents’ house in the foothills, Nina raced across West City to the Police Administrative Center. By 7:52 a.m., she flopped in the chair behind her desk. Her office neighbors had all reacted with shock when she began turning the lights on shortly after coming to terms with seeing Vincent’s ghost. The drab grey walls and government-issue blue carpet hadn’t gotten any cheerier, though at least the window let in some sunlight once she opened the blinds.

  Nina settled in and pulled up everything she could about the drug Tao. There seemed to be almost a hundred variations of it, each a little different based on the person who made it. As Doctor Charles had explained, Tao was a street chemist’s attempt to recreate Harmony. Division 1 had hundreds of case reports containing the words ‘Tao’ and ‘Harmony’ (sometimes shortened to ‘H’). Incidents of random anti-authority violence mentioned Tao eighty-seven percent of the time, though there appeared to be a recent upsurge in cases involving Harmony, and two where the aggressor was taking Placinil on a legitimate prescription, however neither of the Placinil cases involved death. One man got into a fistfight with his boss at work, paid a fine for simple assault, and left to find a new job. The second patient, a woman, felt her day incomplete without stopping to inform a pair of Division 1 officers about how they had no authority to tell people what to do.

  The woman served two days for public intoxication, which Nina figured Division 1 used as the law enforcement version of ‘fuck you too.’ Out of curiosity, she pulled the video from the holding cell. Miss Leslie Yu, age nineteen, spent the first two hours pacing circles around a tiny room with fluorescent yellow-green walls, screaming. Mostly gems such as ‘you fuckers can’t do this to me,’ and ‘I have rights,’ and so on. By hour three, she quieted and seemed confused. At hour five, she broke down sobbing and resumed shouting, only in a pleading tone, asking where she was, who took her, and why they’d locked her up.

  Nina sent a handful of sniffer programs over the GlobeNet, hunting for any evidence of Leslie’s digital existence sending data to Mexico. On that note… She spent the next twenty minutes launching sniffers at a selection of people who’d been detained for Harmony/Tao related violent incidents as well.

  She leaned back, put her feet up on the desk, and stared at 473 counters ticking downward.

  While she waited, she thought back and forth over what she knew of Paul Estrada. Finding his parents, a couple people who’d gone to school with him, and one teacher had convinced her he had grown up in the UCF. Any thought of him being an ACC spy, at least
a willing one, had dissipated. The man’s job with a shipping company didn’t give him any intelligence value whatsoever, unless the ACC developed a sudden keen interest in consumer product marketing trends.

  “Nina?” Hardin walked in, reversed a step, knocked, and walked back in. “Morning.”

  “Sir.” She pulled her feet off the desk and sat up. “Estrada was a citizen as far as I could tell. Nothing suspect. Record’s clean. He has almost zero intelligence value. The only thing I can think of is either he’s some kind of test case, or they’re doing something indiscriminate.”

  “Test case?” Hardin sat in one of the two chairs facing her desk. For an ex-military man, he rather slouched, which caused his powder blue sweater to bunch up at the gut.

  “The nanobots are the important bit. What if they do have an operative here we haven’t picked up on, and they snuck up on Estrada one day and shot him full of these nanobots.”

  Hardin’s eyebrow went up. “You’re thinking something along the lines of nanobot mind control?”

  “I’m not sure. They definitely seem to have figured out how to make nanobots alter someone’s mood and trigger a specific aversion to authority figures. Remember that SoCal chem?”

  Hardin chuckled. “Yeah. Some underage girl sold it and her doctor father made it, right?”

  “Yeah.” Nina stared at the countdown timers, trying to will them to go faster. “Made the doser see everyone around them with blonde hair and blue eyes, while overstimulating the pleasure centers of the brain.”

  “Similar effect as Harmony, sounds like.”

  Nina tilted her hand side to side. “Far stronger. Someone on SoCal would’ve stood in the middle of the road smiling at a PubTran bus coming for them, lost in a state of total bliss. Harmony’s nowhere near that… crippling.”

  “I do have some news about Nikkatsu.” Hardin plucked at the bunched-up fabric at his right knee, and flicked a bit of lint away. “They claim that particular model of nanobot isn’t being exported out of Japan, and as far as they know, it’s on a trial run at one specific facility, Nichinan Central Hospital, in Miyazaki Prefecture. I’m told they were quite shocked that we were even aware of the design.”

  “I assume you weren’t the one who spoke with them, so I suppose it pointless to ask if you think they’re lying.”

  “Alas. My friend across the hall didn’t get that impression though.”

  Nina chuckled. ‘Friend across the hall’ meant someone in C-Branch.

  “The Nikkatsu rep gave us some additional information. This particular nanobot was codenamed Kami-no-tako.”

  Nina cracked up laughing.

  “You find that humorous?” Hardin smiled, unsure whether to laugh with her.

  “Divine octopus?” She whistled. “Well, I suppose it does have eight legs.”

  “They claimed it’s part of a breakthrough in brain surgery techniques. These bots are supposed to be able to perform four instructions simultaneously, so in theory, they reduce the procedure time for sensitive deep-brain work.”

  “That’s got to be it.” She glared at the console. “These ‘octopus’ bots are already tailored to work on brain tissue… the firmware is already embedded in them. Nanobots have limited instruction sets due to size. Whoever did this to Estrada had to have gone after these ’bots on purpose. Less work than trying to rewrite all the reference data for brain structures. The nanobots had to have been responsible for Estrada’s personality change.”

  Hardin nodded. “That seems plausible.”

  The first set of sniffers came back with zero detected connections to suspicious address blocks.

  “Shit,” muttered Nina.

  Hardin, staring at the secure opaque rear of Division 9 holo-terminals, tilted his head. “Bad news?”

  “The first six people came back with nothing for outbound data.” She pondered a moment, tracing her finger up and down over her lips. “There’s got to be two components. Maybe the data burst had nothing to do with Harmony. I need to talk to Doctor Charles again, see if he can find some other nanobots in Estrada’s system.”

  Hardin patted the armrests of the chair twice and stood. “All right. Keep me apprised.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Nina tapped the desk terminal and placed a vid call to Doctor Charles. He answered in four seconds, appearing in a sub window.

  “Lieutenant… I’m so sorry. We had a gang war come in and I got swamped. Thirty-seven dead.”

  Her expression stayed flat. “I understand. Vid me when you can?”

  “Oh. You misunderstand me. I finished the scan of Mr. Estrada, but I never got the chance to vid you with the results.” He smiled. “I didn’t find much, but perhaps it will be significant to you.”

  She leaned an inch closer to the terminal. “I’m listening.”

  “The nanobots appear to have constructed additional wires in the brain leading to several sites in the occipital lobe as well as the cerebrum. The specific regions targeted involve sight and hearing.”

  Nina tapped her foot, thinking. “So, he might have been experiencing auditory and visual hallucinations?”

  Doctor Charles shook his head. “A decent assumption, but I do not believe so. The structure of these nanowires appears designed for inductive reactance rather than transmission. In simple terms, they are listening, not sending.”

  Nina’s eyebrows furrowed together. “So… it’s reading what he sees and hears?”

  “Assuming that the technology functions, the nerve clusters surrounding the terminus of these nanowires are those involved in the processing of sight and hearing. The wires picking up electrical activity at those sites may provide signals that could be reprocessed into images and sound, yes.”

  “Thank you, doctor.” She started to hang up, but hesitated. “Oh, one more question. Were all the dead nanobots you found in Estrada the same type, or did you find any others?”

  “We found a small collection of standard stimpak nanobots in his bladder, though they appear to have been there for some time. Based on their condition, I highly doubt they had been active at any point within the past two months.”

  Okay… so it has to be these kami takos. She snickered to herself. Damn. Now I want sushi. “You’ve been a great help, doctor. Thank you.”

  Doctor Charles bowed, and hung up.

  Nina stared at the rest of the countdown timers racing away. “Paul Estrada was a spy… he just didn’t know it.”

  enny kept the truck a touch under seventy, heading south, until they left any trace of Colorado Springs behind. Not that he expected the millipedes to brave direct sunlight, as they tended to do that only when defending an outdoor nest or if starving. Then again, they did just walk right into the heart of a massive nest, so the bugs might have been angry enough to chase them a good ways. He suppressed a shudder at the sheer quantity of them in the mall. What the hell are they eating to have bred to that number?

  “Dad,” gasped Hayley, sounding like she’d throw up again if she opened her mouth too far.

  “Sure… sure… hang on a sec.”

  “Umm, Dad,” said Alyssa. “Why are those kids running around naked?”

  “They’re tribals, hon. Settlers out here call them ‘Scrags.’ It’s gettin’ on toward winter. They gotta be freezing. Probably explains why they risked approaching the truck. Usually, they avoid things that look too ‘new.’”

  “Dad.” Hayley whined. “Stow the National Geographic. I just threw up all over myself and I’m sitting in a puddle of slime.” She sniffed, gagged, and heaved again.

  Kenny slowed and pulled over to the side of the broken pavement.

  As soon as the truck stopped, Alyssa flung the driver side rear door open and jumped to the ground. Hayley followed, almost tripping in her haste to get out. She staggered a few paces away, bile trailing from her lip. In a fit of disgusted noises and flailing, she stripped until she stood naked on the road, arms held out to the sides in a posture of absolute disgust. Yellow patches covered
her from where bug juice had soaked through her clothes. She coughed a little and dry heaved a few times.

  Alyssa gasped; her rich tan became bright red. “Hale, what are you doing? Have you gone native?”

  “I’m soaked in bug guts and puke. My clothes feel like snot!” After peeling a dark reddish-black squiggle from her stomach and dropping it, Hayley gagged and bowed forward to throw up a little more on the road. When that subsided, she wiped her mouth on the back of her arm and stood. “Mom! Water… please.”

  Nasir exited the truck, from the look on his face to get away from the smell of vomit.

  Alyssa squirmed, clearly as uncomfortable as Hayley had been, but stared at Eldon and blushed harder.

  Kathy climbed up into the truck bed. Her presence pushed all four Scrag kids to the tailgate. She keyed a code in one of the storage bins, which opened, and extracted two gallon-jugs of water. After she closed the lid and jumped down, the smallest Scrag boy attacked the bin, pushing random buttons and making it beep.

  Kenny accepted one water jug as Kathy went by. He pulled off his WEC Duster armor, which had―along with his cowboy hat―absorbed most of the deluge of millipede insides. Kathy played showerhead, pouring water over Hayley as the girl chased ooze away from her skin with her hands.

  Alyssa stared at Kenny, shot a pointed look at Eldon, and stared pleadingly at Kenny again.

  “Yo, El.” Kenny chuckled.

  “Hmm?” He looked up from wiping down his armor with a rag.

  “Alyssa wants to clean up, but she’s still mortified about what happened. Don’t s’pose you could make a show of not looking at her?”

  He chuckled. “She brought that shit on herself, but yeah. No problem.”

  Eldon turned his back to the truck. “Just lemme know when it’s clear.”

  Kenny waved to Alyssa, who after a momentary hesitation, peeled off her clothes. Unlike Hayley, she left her underwear on. Kenny caught snippets of conversation in Spanish from the tribal kids, none of whom had ever seen modern clothing, especially girls’ underthings. The middle boy wondered what animal it had been made from. Kenny found it amusing until the oldest commented that Alyssa would make an excellent lifemate. The youngest boy said that he needed to take Luna for a lifemate since she was the only girl left in the tribe.