“Hmm.” Masaru examined his rifle, located the safety, and turned it off. “Proceed.”
Noriko sighed. “Well, you’ve got balls. I’ll give you that much.”
Masaru leaned around the corner, aiming at the stairwell. The foreigners had only two ways up―past him or managing a three-story jump to the ledge in front of Noriko. These fools provided the missile that struck my car. They will atone for Shuji’s death.
wo slabs of vat-grown haddock simmered in a shallow layer of butter-garlic sauce. Nina stood by the stove, arms folded, clutching a spatula. As frustrating as the day had been, Elizaveta hovering around her made her smile. The child seemed to have found the perfect balance point between staying close and not being in the way. Nina had changed into a long t-shirt and decided the whole pants thing to be wildly overrated. Elizaveta wanted to match, so she put on one of Nina’s tees, which covered her to the shins, but left one shoulder bare.
Thermal vision allowed her to swipe the fish from the heat at the exact right moment. Two hundred grand in military-grade optics, and I use it to cook fish. She slid the haddock blocks onto waiting plates already holding instant rice pilaf from a box. Mother would be aghast, but Mother also never had to come home to a hungry child after working.
Elizaveta let go of her clingy one-armed grasp as Nina walked the food to the table.
“Where Joey is?” asked the girl in hesitant English.
Nina smiled. “Good! He’s still at work. He won’t be visiting tonight.”
The girl’s look of extreme concentration faltered to confusion. Nina repeated herself in Russian, then said each sentence separately in English and Russian once more.
Elizaveta nodded before sniffing at the plate. “Stinks good.” She grinned.
Nina cracked up laughing.
“What?” Elizaveta tilted her head.
She offered a brief explanation of the subtle difference in meaning between ‘smells’ versus ‘stinks’ as they ate. Again, Nina pondered her guilt at being wasteful since only about fifteen percent of the food would do anything productive for her. Oh screw it. She savored the taste and sensation of eating, and allowed herself to enjoy it. Elizaveta still ate fast, but she no longer shoveled food down barely chewing it.
Once they finished, Nina tossed the dirty dishes in the machine and went to the living room, flopped on the couch, and spent a minute or five hunting down some educational animated show that would help with basic English. Elizaveta crawled up next to her and cuddled while chattering on about her school, mostly in Russian, but attempted some simple ideas in English. While she seemed to enjoy her school more than Nina had expected, she didn’t like the extra after-hours time for English lessons. Mostly since none of the other children had to stay late every day.
“You won’t always have to do that. It’s only until you’ve caught up with English.”
Elizaveta furrowed her eyebrows. “28 Im-byi sleduyet nauchit’sya govorit po-Russki.”
Nina bowed her head, chuckling. A sudden freeing joy came out of nowhere, and she squeezed the child tight. Despite continuing to grin and laugh, tears ran down her face. Not since Bertrand had mauled her had she experienced anything close to being so… happy. “Oh, Elizaveta. Don’t you think it would be much more work for all of those children to learn Russian than for one you to learn English? And what of the rest of the UCF?”
Elizaveta raised her nose with an imperious air and folded her arms. “29 Oni I Russkiy mogut izuchat.”
“So we should teach everyone in the country to speak Russian so you don’t have to learn English.” Nina rubbed her chin. “Sounds good.”
Elizaveta giggled. “No. I teasing. Is too much work teach all Russian. Just be the only child in room is sad.”
“I can imagine.” Nina ruffled her hair. “It won’t last forever.”
“Yes.” Elizaveta watched the animation, swishing her feet side to side. A few minutes later, she looked up at Nina. “I want not to forget Russian. It is part me.” She patted herself on the chest.
“All right.” Nina smiled. “30 Doma, ya budu govorit s toboi po-Russki, tak chto vy ne zabyli.”
Satisfied with Nina’s offer to continue to use Russian at home, Elizaveta cuddled close and stared at the holo-bar display. Eventually, bedtime rolled around, and Nina carried her to the bathroom, helped brush her teeth, and followed her to the bedroom.
Elizaveta climbed up onto the Comforgel pad, which went from dark to a soft orange glow. She slipped under the covers and hugged her teddy bear. “Am I too old for bear toy?”
Nina winked. “Nope. I still have a stuffed rabbit. His name is Nix.”
Elizaveta grinned. “Good night.”
“Night, sweetie.” Nina kissed her on the forehead, dimmed the light, and walked backward out into the hall.
The child waved one more time before Nina moved out of view. Nina grinned and hit the button to set the door three-quarters closed. I never thought having a kid would make me feel so… alive. She wiped tears on the way to the sofa, and sat in a ball with her face against her knees, unable to stop crying. She hadn’t thought about Nix in a while. Truth be told, she had kept the stuffed rabbit in her closet because she didn’t want him to see ‘robot-Nina.’ She’d been ashamed, and couldn’t bear to face him since she wasn’t the same girl who’d grown up with him.
Her attachment to the girl had formed almost at first sight, and only grown stronger. How much of the need to take her in had been a simple reaction to no longer possessing the ability to have kids? Her parents had made it clear for years that they expected her to give them grandchildren. Their insistence had taken her initial ambivalence at the idea and forged it into an active desire not to have any, but it hadn’t been genuine, only spite.
Stop it. This is who you are now. It doesn’t matter what’s under my skin. Her emotional storm waning, she stretched out and tried to relax… by thinking about her case. The ACC had at least five active infiltrators inside Laughlin-Reed Innovation. Since none of the surveillance teams had detected anything unusual, it seemed likely that the spies blamed Katya for the death of the three, or perhaps they too felt Anders had been a rookie who’d made an idiot mistake. Nina had kept a safe distance, so she hoped they compartmentalized and behaved as though nothing had changed in order to maintain their cover.
Daniel Stirling squashing the investigation he started didn’t sit well with her. The move seemed reckless for a spy (why start it in the first place instead of faking it). Of course, the possibility existed he’d been bribed or threatened to flush it.
A light went on over Nina’s head. She raised her arm and pantomimed putting on a rubber examination glove. “Sorry, Daniel. This won’t hurt much… tomorrow.”
Nina yawned, and trudged down the hall to her bedroom.
The next morning, light from Nina’s desk terminals tinted her work area the same shade of cobalt. Years of financial data for Daniel Stirling scrolled by, with nothing yet appearing out of the ordinary. The man had two secondary accounts, but neither of those raised any red flags. One appeared to be a savings jointly accessible by his wife Ava. The other, a much smaller account, commented as ‘Noah college,’ received regular auto-deposits from his primary one.
This guy is too clean to be believed, but everything checks out back to a live recording of his birth. She shook her head. I didn’t think any executive could be this honest. The guy doesn’t even cheat on his taxes.
“What are you hiding, Daniel Stirling?”
She changed tactics and pulled him up in the Division 1 system, looking for anything down to the logging of a simple ‘stop and warn.’ The man had submitted a handful of complaints two years ago to have Human Life Movement protestors removed from his property. That’s not surprising. LRI makes some cybernetics. Heh. Those morons would love me. The idea that a bunch of undereducated religious fringers who believed the rest of the world should live by their ways because it’s ‘what God wanted’ probably would insist that she’d be
better off dead than kept alive by such drastic ‘unholy’ means.
Before she got angry enough to crack the arm of her chair, another block of text caught her eye. Five weeks ago, the son, Noah Stirling, called Division 1 to report his father had been abducted by aliens and replaced. The vid had come in at 1:18 a.m., and showed a black-haired boy with skin pale enough to pass for Marsborn hiding under blankets and whispering at a NetMini. The Division 1 dispatcher noted it as a prank call, and chalked it up to a kid being a kid. He told the boy they’d look into it, and promptly did nothing.
Nina replayed the video, staring into the boy’s large chocolate-brown eyes. He looks frightened.
“Hi. My name’s Noah Stirling, and I need you guys to come over right away. My father’s been abducted by aliens and they’ve sent an evil clone that looks like him.”
Her somatic response system didn’t do much on video as it couldn’t get any sense of skin temperature, breathing rate, or perspiration, but something in her gut needled at her. This kid wasn’t pranking the cops… Something’s going on.
She locked her terminal, flew from her seat, and grabbed her coat on the way out.
Nina guided her patrol craft down from her fast-cruise altitude of 1,500 feet in a graceful sweeping left turn. Sector 8527 stretched out below, along the easternmost edge of West City where plastisteel met the mountains by a place once known as Quincy, California. Wherever the mountainous terrain reached or exceeded the elevation of the city surface, the plates had been altered to fit the contour of the Earth. Dozens of private mansions stood in the shadow of the border wall a few miles east, on natural ground.
In the absence of natural terrain, poor people tended to live near the wall. Old superstitions that the Badlands ‘creatures’ would sneak in at night kept those who could afford to live elsewhere away. However, in places like this, where natural splendor rose above the best efforts of humanity to tame it, the wealthy dwelled.
Stirling’s home was at the modest end of the scale for the area, having only two stories and a mere seventeen rooms plus three-vehicle garage. Forest, likely induced-growth, framed the house on the north, east, and south to a depth of around sixty meters before a property line fence brought the foliage to an abrupt, and pin-straight, halt. Nina shook her head at the rectangular arrangement of trees. Viewed from overhead, the Stirling property resembled a model landscape built inside a shipping box. They had a sizeable grassy front yard stretching to the west with a pond big enough to have a dock and rowboat.
She slowed to a crawl and descended in a circling flight path over the house-end of the property. A quick sweep with thermal sensors surprised her at finding only a child-sized heat signature in the southeast corner room on the second floor. The boy reclined atop a less-intense rectangle of warmth, likely his Comforgel bed. Given the time of 10:08 a.m., she figured he probably had a Senshelmet on and sat in a virtual classroom.
Since the boy’s corner bedroom had a view of the back of the house in the east, as well as the south, Nina brought the patrol craft in for a landing on the north side, concealing it in the trees in case Stirling senior returned without warning. Not that she didn’t have the authority to walk right in and look around, but on the chance he might be working with the ACC, she didn’t want to tip him off.
Birdsong greeted her when she opened the door, accompanied by the soft whisper of a breeze in the treetops. While pleasant, the scenery didn’t enamor her too much; her father’s estate had almost three times the land, even if it was farther north and got colder during the winter. She jogged a short distance in the woods before emerging on well-manicured grass. A stone footpath led around the side to the front porch, and the door gave way to her police override code without a sound.
She entered, eased the door closed, and made a quick circuit of the downstairs in search of any kind of office or den. A room full of fitness equipment with some women’s clothes draped on one of the benches, and another space with a workbench and dozens of plastic models of military vehicles seemed to be the only two places on the ground floor that appeared lived in. The rest of the rooms reminded her of a model-mansion used to show off a development to prospective buyers.
A carpeted stairway led up to the second floor, which struck her right away as more used. A hallway of half-open doors still held a faint trace of cologne, and a boy’s mumbling drifted in from the right. He asked a question about math, evidently objecting to them introducing letters into ‘something meant for numbers.’
Nina suppressed a chuckle and headed the other direction. Three empty rooms, a bathroom, and a guest bedroom that smelled of perfume held nothing useful. The next door she checked revealed a study decorated in dark wood paneling complete with a modest fireplace. Pale grey marble slabs stood on either side of the opening where the holographic fire would appear when activated; the mantle consisted of nine falcons carved out of dark, polished Epoxil… or maybe real wood. From the left to the right, they depicted the same bird in various poses during a dive, like successive still images from an animation.
The desk terminal yielded to her Division 9 override as well. After connecting a wire from its M3 port to the back of her neck, the world erupted in a dizzying array of virtual holo-panels. She ran several analytical softs looking for files with password encryption or containing hidden sections or hidden files embedded within. Rather than sift through all the data right away, she’d go for anything he appeared interested in concealing first.
Eleven seconds later, the softs had flagged a handful of items. The first file she checked contained pictures of women posing nude or touching themselves; some of the backgrounds appeared to be elsewhere in this house, and none of them looked like Ava Stirling. Nina rolled her eyes and swatted her hand in the air, which threw that file to the side, off her temporary workspace. The next file contained a series of vid-mails in Spanish to a man named Santiago. She grabbed a few stills of the man’s face for later deep diving. The substance of the email confirmed that Stirling had made contact with the ‘assets’ and would ‘make sure no further problems occur.’
She grumbled.
Stirling had a deferential tone with Santiago that made her think of a worker/employee relationship―not the way she expected a Senior Vice President to talk to someone.
Another file held copies of all the Laughlin-Reed Innovation reviews of the production line that she’d already seen. Various shift supervisors, production maintenance crewmen, and middle-managers all came back with the same consensus: something had gotten into a batch of Placinil that shouldn’t have been there. They’d also collected copies of NewsNet stories about reports of random acts of aggression suffered by some users of Harmony. LRI’s PR team had gone balls-to-the-wall stressing that Harmony was not Placinil, and when people illegally tamper with their product, they couldn’t be held responsible for the results.
Daniel Stirling had sent official emails to several production managers, as well as the Junior VPs of marketing and sales instructing them that ‘the problem is being handled in house’ and ‘no further talk of contamination will be tolerated.’
A small spider crawled over a file icon and waved at her. She smiled at it as she reached out to thin air and grasped the tile. Despite the images existing only within her cybernetic eyes, they reacted to her gestures. The file opened to reveal lists of credit transactions to a previously-unknown account. While the cryptic names of depositors didn’t make any sense at a casual glance, Nina felt certain she’d found the ledger detailing his off-the-book sales of doctored Placinil to the dealers.
Placinil plus nanobots equals Harmony.
“Who are you?” asked a boy.
The floating holo-panels glided apart in a curving sweep away from the center of her vision. A scrawny bare-chested boy of about ten stood in the doorway with a small handgun not quite pointed at her. Thick but short black hair formed an orb around his head. His loose red shorts had a Manglers Gee-ball team logo over the right thigh, and sat low enough on his waist t
o expose a thin strip of blue underwear elastic. Though he had a (mostly) calm expression, his toes clutched at the carpet.
“Police, Noah. My name is Nina, and I’m with Division 9.” She spoke in a soothing tone. “What are you doing home alone?”
“Can I see your badge?” He bit his lip.
“All right.” She reached into her sand-brown coat, pulled out her ID wallet, and flipped it open. He stood up on tiptoe to peer at it. “I saw you called us about aliens. I came here to follow up on that.”
Noah’s arm (and the gun) dropped limp at his side. Suspicion shifted to trust in an instant. “Yes!” He ran up to her. “I didn’t think they believed me. Do you believe me?”
Nina put her ID away. “Can you tell me what made you think aliens got him?”
“Umm.” Noah set the gun on the desk and waved his hands about as he rambled. “Like, Mom and Dad always used to argue about her having other boyfriends, but the alien doesn’t say anything about it anymore. He even started bringing women here. Umm… there’s small stuff too. Dad always had to use his EDSB mug for his morning coffee, but the alien doesn’t care what mug he uses.”
“Anything else?” Nina set a mark in her system to save the cortical recording of her time speaking to the boy, preserving it from being overwritten by the usual two-hour loop. “See any spaceships or anything?”
Noah ground his big toe into the rug. “No, but I even asked him if he wanted his Elizabeth Drummond School of Business mug, and he said it didn’t matter.”
“Maybe he got tired of the mug? Maybe it broke?”
“Nope.” Noah shook his head. “The school’s named after Edmund Driscoll, not Elizabeth Drummond. He didn’t notice. An alien wouldn’t know the difference.”
Nina thought for a second. “Do you remember your father knowing Spanish?”
“Duh. Who doesn’t? I mean… everyone knows Spanish unless you’re from up north, then its French and English instead of Spanish and English.” Noah’s eyebrows went up. “Oh! Yeah. Even Minstrel knows he’s an alien. That’s my dog. Since the night the alien came, Minstrel growls at him if he gets too close to me.”
The Harmony Paradox (Virtual Immortality Book 2) Page 52
