“You open these windows very often?”
“Sometimes. How often is often?”
Bruce furrowed his brow. “I honestly don’t know. Eighty?” He turned back to the window, opened it, and stuck his head out.
“Eighty what?” she asked.
“That’s an excellent question,” he responded, closing the window. “I’ll have to look it up. Anyways, our sensors might be getting confused when you open or close the window. I’ll make a note of it, so we don’t bother you anymore.”
“Thanks,” she said, exasperation showing. “I guess?”
“You’re very welcome,” he said with a big smile. “Have a nice day.”
§
From the roof of the building directly across from Charlotte Redelso’s window, Bruce aimed the piton gun and fired. As the piton sailed away, the thought occurred to him that he probably should have aimed above the window rather than directly at it. The nano–piton smacked into the window, bouncing off it with a crack before clattering to the ground below. Wide–eyed, Bruce quickly recoiled the piton and cable before ducking down behind the short wall at the edge of the roof. After a couple of minutes had passed without any cries of alarm, he cautiously peeked over the edge. No lights on. Let’s try that again.
Another thought lurched into view, this time thankfully before he fired. Redelso had two windows in her apartment, and he had only tampered with one of them. Moving a short distance down the edge of the roof, he took aim at what he was sure was the correct window, caught himself, shifted his aim upwards, and fired again. The piton sailed across the gap and impacted the wall of the building, embedding itself easily in the surface. Bruce glanced at the piton gun’s display: a solid hold.
Designed for rock climbers who mucked about and occasionally died on the exposed faces at either end of the garden well, the nano–piton’s holding capacity was highly variable, dependent upon how squarely they had hit whatever they were fired at. Their average loading capacity was supposedly three hundred and fifty pounds, but the standard deviation on that figure was wide enough that Bruce, and the two hundred and fifty pounds he carried with him at all times, was always reluctant to use it. Bruce attached the piton gun and cable to a second gun using a jury–rigged binding. He fired the second piton at the wall of the roof access staircase he had climbed up, then reeled in the gun until the whole apparatus — cables, guns, and ramshackle binding — was taut.
The next part of the plan was where things got stupid. To describe it to any right–thinking man was a guaranteed way to see him wince and inhale sharply. It gave even Bruce, no stranger to ill–advised schemes, some pause. Grabbing one of the piton guns in each hand, he flipped the setting of one to reverse, then triggered them both simultaneously. The apparatus of madness whirred forward slowly. Bruce sat up on the roof’s edge and spun his legs out over the edge. He grabbed both piton guns firmly. “This will not seem like a better idea the longer you wait,” he said, then lowered himself off the roof, putting his weight on the apparatus. The pitons, cables, guns, and makeshift binding all held. He swallowed, adjusted his balance slightly, then pulled both triggers. With a faint whir, the large man sailed through the night sky.
Ten seconds later, Bruce had crossed the street and gently set some of his weight down on Charlotte Redelso’s windowsill. After a few frantic moments fumbling with the window’s edge, he finally felt it slide up. Quietly, Bruce lowered himself into the apartment and its blessedly solid ground.
The plan entered its marginally less crazy second phase of snooping around to see what there was to see. Bruce trusted that like most people, Ms. Redelso kept some information about herself offline. Every device on board the ship was networked, sharing a common, instantly accessible storage space. All totally private — every desk and terminal was capable of identifying immediately who was using it, rendering private information inaccessible to a malicious third party. Yet, few people trusted this security with their most personal information, and almost everyone stored some information offline on dumb, non–networked terminals, even paper in a few cases. This desire for enhanced privacy ironically made the information much less secure, at least for someone with a knack for prowling around the physical world.
Bruce pulled out his own terminal and flipped the camera to scan in infrared, a useful utility familiar to few people other than maintenance workers. A light glow from the bedroom was Charlotte, still evidently asleep. He surveyed the apartment, picking out the few locations he had already spotted as potential hiding places, then switched from the infrared scanner to another, far more interesting application. He placed the terminal in his chest webbing and proceeded to search the apartment, checking all the drawers, cupboards, and other nooks and crannies.
Ten minutes later he had found it: a dumb–terminal stuffed in a desk drawer. Although the main interface of the terminal was password protected, this security feature had been broken two hundred years earlier. No one capable of fixing the problem had ever been willing to do so, leaving all such terminals highly vulnerable to people like Bruce. Using his own terminal, Bruce made a copy of the contents of Redelso’s before returning it to its hiding place.
That done, and satisfied he’d seen everything interesting in the apartment — at least everything not in a room occupied by a sleeping woman — he examined the application he’d set running earlier. It was an image–recognition and logging program that scanned the apartment as he searched it, identifying and cataloguing all the objects within. Then, using a database created from publicly listed recycling values and estimated uniqueness, it calculated an estimated value/weight ratio for each object and presented a ranked list to him. An efficient way of deciding what to steal, though it had a hard time determining the value of items it had no record of. Which wasn’t that big of a problem; those were typically the items rare enough to be worth stealing. Bruce scrolled through the list, then retraced his steps, picking out the fifteen pounds he felt confident would make it back across his sideshow of an escape route.
Ill deeds done, Bruce carefully stepped outside the window and closed it behind him to do the second–stupidest thing he’d done that day: return across the street. With an exhalation of relief far more audible than was appropriate to the current level of subterfuge, he alit onto the neighboring roof for a minute or so of shaking before he detached and reeled in his apparatus, and retreated into the shadows.
§
Stein stayed up late that night, hoping that Bruce might spring up with some fantastic news about what M. Melson was all about, solving the mystery without her having to get off the couch. But her terminal stayed resolutely silent. She kept an eye on the news feeds in case the headline “Fat Man Arrested for Horrible Activities” cropped up, but that also didn’t happen.
Crawling into bed, but not yet tired, she began hurling general searches at the network, looking for clues about what she’d seen in the bright blue light. “Bright Light + messages” mostly returned tips about advertising, mixed in with a handful of stories about near–death experiences. Stein was pretty sure that wasn’t what happened to her, as to date, no theologians had identified any greater powers claiming the handle ‘Vlad.’
A search for ‘eyeball messages’ uncovered a lot about corneal tattoos, which had gone in and out of fashion at various points in Argosian history, usually by people whose idea of a message worthy of being permanently branded on their eyeballs was “Fuck the Police.” That was decidedly not what Stein had, but she amused herself for a few minutes with images of people who had gone down this road. This search led to the history of tattoos, from the painful early methods with burning charcoal, through the ink and needle glory years, and up to the genetic tattoos of skin cells manipulated to form what were essentially artificial birthmarks. That article came with some pretty upsetting pictures of lab mice and other test animals, and she turned off her terminal before she saw too much.
Had she imagined it? It all seemed a lot blurrier now. She closed her eyes a
nd rubbed her knuckles into the sockets, sending flashes of lights up her optic nerve. There. That was kind of a shape. A shoe–shaped shape. Was that then a secret message about shoes? That seemed just as plausible as a message about Vlad, which was to say, not plausible at all. She checked the time, decided that it was past even Bruce’s bedtime, and reached the lights.
As she was drifting off, another image appeared, this one deliberately, as she imagined a mouse with “Fuck the Police” emblazoned on its back. She laughed herself to sleep.
Previously
“There’s no way you’re getting 850 babies a year out of your bakery.”
Harold exhaled and looked at the curved ceiling of Kinison’s office. He couldn’t stand Kinison when he was lecturing. “I know that, Lewis. But if the radiation starts coming in again, the poor things are getting zapped in the womb. At least the cans can shield them from that. I get it; we don’t need to match the whole replacement rate. But we can get at least a fraction of that surely? Maybe a hundred?”
“A hundred a year? Never happen. And you know it,” Kinison said. That wasn’t a lie; Harold did know it. First impressions count, especially when they’re impressively violent, and the first few can–born souls had certainly been that. Even when the kinks had been worked out of the process, the stigma around canned babies still stuck. It was kind of a weird hobby for him to have taken up. Not that the ship was lacking for those.
“Look, Harold,” Kinison said. “You’ll get some. It’s a good safety net if nothing else.” He smiled, with only the slightest hint of condescension detectable. Dr. Kinison was one of only two or three people on the ship capable of speaking with Harold intelligibly about his work. Where Harold had stumbled upon his career by accident, Kinison had been homing in on the role of senior naval medical officer for decades, responsible for the long–term health of the ship’s current and future generations. “We can’t ignore your research,” Kinison continued, “or the results you’ve had thus far. But we can’t do what you’re proposing. Not at that scale. We’ll stick with the conventional methods. End of discussion.”
Harold bit his tongue. It was the end of this phase of the discussion, but he wasn’t prepared to concede any future phases just yet. “All right.”
§
Outside Kinison’s office in the aft core of the ship, Harold tried to get his bearings in the curving hall. He hated this part of the ship. So obviously a space ship up here, it made him claustrophobic. Picking a likely direction for an elevator, he set off.
He guessed right and shortly thereafter spotted Chief Hatchens, the head of ship’s security, standing in front of the elevator doors. The chief looked up at him, eyes flickering in recognition. A small lump of fear pinballed through Harold. He hadn’t had many dealings with the famously heavy–handed security department and preferred to steer clear of them when he could, but an abrupt U–turn would only bring more attention to himself.
“Dr. Stein. How are you?”
Harold swallowed and hesitated, concerned that Hatchens knew him by name. Then he worried that his hesitation made him look suspicious, and hesitated some more. Finally, in a hurried voice, he said, “All right.” Because taking five seconds to come up with ‘All right’ doesn’t sound suspicious at all.
Hatchens looked at him intently. Harold wondered if the man ever blinked. “That’s good.”
Harold swallowed again. This is going well. They stood quietly for a while, Harold passing the time with silent curses about the elevator’s speed.
“I was sorry to hear about your friend,” Hatchens said. “Kevin Delise? You two were fairly close, right?”
Harold blinked. “Pardon?”
Kevin, the first canned baby on the ship since it launched, was not his son, just the next closest thing: one of his success stories. They were not in any way genetically related — Harold wasn’t that mad of a scientist — but he was still the closest thing the boy had to a father.
Hatchens’ eyes widened, but Harold got the impression that his surprise wasn’t genuine. “I’m sorry. You don’t know.” His mouth twisted into a knot. “I’m sorry to tell you, but Mr. Delise has been murdered. I thought someone would have contacted you about it by now.”
Harold’s mouth went dry. He leaned against the wall. The colors around the edge of his vision started to fade.
“When was the last time you heard from Kevin?” Hatchens asked.
“What? I don’t know. A week ago?” Harold looked down, then up at Hatchens. “Yeah, a week or so ago. We talked about work. My work. My god, are you sure it was Kevin? What happened?”
Hatchens studied him for a second before turning his attention to the elevator door. “It was a knife. The neck, you see?” Hatchens’ hand moved up towards his own neck as if to demonstrate, before he seemed to think better of it. “First deck,” he said instead. “No idea who might have done it, but we’re checking the feeds now.”
The elevator finally arrived. Harold blinked, lurched into the car, and turned. Hatchens remained outside, looking at something on his terminal. “Oops, looks like I have to go. I’ll be in touch. Sorry again.” The doors closed, obscuring Hatchens’ face and an expression that didn’t look very sorry at all.
As the elevator accelerated downwards, Harold’s legs gave out. Finding himself sitting on the floor, he looked at his shaking hands. Oh, Kevin, my boy. Oh, Kevin, Kevin, Kevin…
Chapter 3: Brash
Ron Gabelman had an excellent excuse for missing work; his head had been nearly lopped off. Stein found this out when she arrived at the maintenance office to find a red–eyed Curts already there in the company of a bulky security officer, Sergeant Hogg.
Hogg asked Stein what she knew about Gabelman’s activities over the past few days. She explained the task she had assigned to Gabelman the last time she had seen him, when she sent him to investigate the hot and cold complaints in the aft government offices. She pulled up the complaints on the Big Board for them to observe, although from the dismissive glance Hogg gave them, she got the impression that Curts had already walked him through this. The two complaints were both flagged as ‘Resolved.’ One had a brief note attached to it: “Adjusted air balancing.” The other simply said, “No Issue. Complaint was mistaken.” A couple of taps on the screen indicated Gabelman had made these notes shortly after ten in the morning the day he disappeared, at which point he should have reported back to the maintenance office.
“So, he should have returned here at, what, 10:30?” Hogg asked.
“Sure. But it isn’t unusual for techs to take their time walking back,” Stein replied. She exchanged a glance with Curts, who nodded.
Hogg eyed Stein carefully for a few seconds. Finally he said, “His body was found this morning on the first deck, off 45th and Fir Street. Do you know of any reason why Gabelman would be in that part of the ship?”
She shook her head — she really had no idea what the kid did for kicks.
Hogg nodded, and continued, “We also found a couple tabs of guru on him. Did you ever know Mr. Gabelman to use narcotics? Did he ever arrive at work intoxicated? Tardy or absent often?”
“He was new, so I can’t be completely sure. Not necessarily a model employee, but I never saw him doing anything like that.”
“How was he not a model employee?”
Stein waved her hands back and forth defensively. “I don’t mean anything bad. He was just a little slow. Sometimes took longer, needed more help with tasks than I’d prefer. That’s all.”
Hogg stared at her for a few seconds more, waiting to see if she would elaborate further. She recognized the ploy and stayed silent. Hogg frowned, looked down at his terminal, then the door. “Okay. If I have any further questions, I’ll be in touch.” With a nod, he turned and left.
Curts slumped forward on the table, head resting on one hand. He yawned, then repeated all of Hogg’s questions, apparently checking to see if Stein had decided to withhold information from the security man that she would f
or some reason share with him. She answered his questions, not bothering to hide her annoyance. Eventually, satisfied that Stein wasn’t omitting anything, Curts stood up and straightened his ridiculously clean orange jumpsuit. Whatever he’d been doing the past few months, it clearly hadn’t been very dirty work. As he tucked away his terminal and adjusted his webbing, Stein detected a hint of indecision in his movements.
“Let me know if we have any more w–w–weird calls like this,” he finally said. He gestured at the board. “Hot and c–c–old complaints right on top of each other. That’s weird. I don’t like seeing that.”
“Yeah, I noticed that at the time. Thought it was just people being bitchy. Guess that’s why Ron flagged one of them as a mistake.” She frowned. “You want me to go follow up on it?”
Curts shook his head and waved her back. “Don’t bother. I might go check it out myself, actually. If I need you I’ll c–c–call, but for now don’t worry about it. Just let me know if something like that shows up again.”
“No problem, boss.”
Curts nodded, his eyes unfocused, head slumping forward. He blinked, looked around, seemed startled to find out where he was, then smiled weakly and left the maintenance office. Stein squinted at the retreating orange buffoon. Strange service calls? Curts didn’t seem the slightest bit concerned by the news that one of his technicians had been decapitated.
She was looking up at the Big Board and the day ahead of her, when she realized she wasn’t that concerned about it either.
§
“Do you know if your son had any enemies?” Hogg asked, straining to sound gentle. A blubbering stream of nonsense greeted him in response. The sympathy he had forced himself to muster for Gabelman’s mother was beginning to subside. He was growing annoyed, though not with the poor woman crying in front of him. Just his colleagues. The whole security apparatus in fact. It had been hours; someone really should have told her that her son had been found dead before Hogg got there. He watched the woman sobbing and felt the annoyance grow. Because, however unfortunate this whole murder business apparently was for Gableman’s mother, it was really quite a lucky break for him, and one that couldn’t have come at a better time, career–wise.
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