Idolon

by Mark Budz

  "Maybe she's seeing someone," he said. It was bound to happen. Even with somebody as closed off as Marta. She shut people out, held them at a distance, but every wall had its cracks.

  Nguyet shook her head, obstinate. "She's not involved with anyone. She doesn't have a regular boyfriend."

  "How do you know?"

  "When she went out last night, around ten, she promised that she'd be back in one hour. We haven't heard from her since."

  That didn't prove anything. "Did she say why she was going out?" he asked.

  Nguyet nodded. "She said she needed to get some fresh air."

  "How'd she look?"

  "Fine. A little pale, but not too bad. Not like before. If she was feeling sick, she wouldn't have gone out."

  "Was she upset about anything?" He'd pissed her off, but not enough to send her into a serious funk.

  "I don't think so. She was alone in her room fifteen or twenty minutes before she left."

  "Did Rocio say something to her?"

  "No. They didn't fight, if that's what you're getting at. He was asleep." NgUyet chewed at a frayed hank of hair. "I think something bad happened to her. She got into some sort of trouble. I just know it."

  The crystals again. Behind her he could see the divination cards spread out on the kitchen table. Seven of them, lined up in a row, one card for each chakra.

  "What kind of trouble?"

  "I think maybe she's trafficking. I did a reading, and it revealed one crystal inside of another crystal. Something hidden inside of something else."

  "Trafficking for who?"

  "Her boss. Someone else. What difference does it make?" Nguyet gave him a strangled look. "That's why she hasn't been feeling well. Whatever she's selling is making her sick."

  "Just calm down." Telling himself as much as her. "Take it easy. Have you called the police? The local hospitals and clinics?"

  "Yes. No one's seen her."

  Just like Concetta, he thought, filling in the blank left by the pause between them.

  Pelayo was no longer walking. He had come to a dead stop next to the accordion-ribbed trunk of a shaggy palm. Bicyclists and joggers cruised by on the fenced footpath that ran along the top of the levee, their shadows tangling with those of the palms. "What do you want me to do?"

  "You know people, right? Street types. Maybe you could ask around, find out if they've heard anything."

  It was probably a waste of time—it had been with Concetta. But if he didn't try, he'd never hear the nd of it. Nguyet would never forgive him. And if something bad happened...

  "Where was she working?" Pelayo couldn't remember. Marta changed jobs the way most people changed philm.

  "This place called the Get Reel."

  "All right. I'll see what I can find out."

  Nguyet sagged, relieved. "Thank you."

  _______

  Turning back to Pacific Avenue, Pelayo noticed an ad mask clinging barnacle-tight to the face of the levee.

  "Atossa? Is that you?"

  No answer.

  The left side of the mask was chalk-white, the right side dark brown smudged with black. Filigreed gold leaf gilded the bridge of the nose, brows, and temples. Carbon-black foil, etched with white curlicues, covered the sides of the nose and the cheekbones. Gold outlined a fish's mouth and blue scales on the chin and jaw. A white triangle, outlined in gold, on the forehead, held musical notes.

  It looked to be a sculpture, part of the other debris embedded in the wall.

  The mask stared blankly at him, its eyes black and unfathomable. The vacant gaze unnerved him. It was like a vacuum, waiting to be filled.

  He started to turn away, but the lips moved. Or seemed to. He couldn't be sure. It might have just been the light. He reached out to touch the mask, paused, then withdrew his hand and hurried off. Atossa would be at work by now. If she was keeping an eye on him, he wanted to know.

  _______

  Model Behavior was located in the old Rio Theater, at the intersection of Seabright and Soquel. It took twenty minutes to climb the hill from the river, past all the tourist shops that had settled there like an incurable infection.

  The theater, over two hundred years old, had gone through at least two major fires and several extensive renovations. The only thing that hadn't changed was the chrome-and-glass ticket kiosk out front. The kiosk verified his DiNA bar code, then ushered him into a main lobby decorated with plush red carpet, black marble walls, and decorative, Art Nouveau-embossed tin ceiling panels. The original concession stand had been converted into a check-in desk.

  The historical landmark was used for ad demos and fashioneer shows. FEMbots, dressed in the latest designer clothing or philm, strutted down a runway in front of a big d-splay that provided thematic backgrounds. Preproduction ad masks circulated above the seats, colorful as circus balloons and kites.

  Atossa worked in a second-floor cubicle, where she pulled the electronic strings on ad masks around the world. Locales like London, Paris, Tokyo, and Beijing. Rich first-world cities teeming with haute couture dilettantes and philmheads from every imaginable cast. Clothiers, perfume and cosmetic manufacturers contracted with Model Behavior to have masks advertise their products in cinephile nightclubs, bars, and cafes. As a sales and marketing tool, it had proven to be particularly effective in politically volatile regions.

  Glass cases containing replicas of the masks she was licensed to operate lined the walls of the cramped room. The masks gazed out at him—a Japanese kogyaru, an Indian Maharani, a Russian zolotaya, a Chinese popera queen—illuminated by a real-time cityscape on the room's Vurtronic d-splay: Moscow, judging by the overcast sky and the even drearier Soviet-era buildings.

  Atossa hadn't been looking over his shoulder after all.

  She sat at a desk in front of the d-splay. She looked upset, her hair in disarray, her face puffy, her expression glazed. Her brow wrinkled when he stepped through the door. "What are you doing here?"

  "I just got done. I was going to call, but I figured I might as well come by and see you in person."

  "I wish you'd called." Her mouth puckered, sour. "I'm just getting ready to do a run."

  A frown threatened to corrode his smile. "Are you feeling okay? You don't look so hot."

  "I'm fine! You're not the only one with a job to do."

  "You don't sound fine."

  She sniffed, swiped at her nose with the back of her hand. "Christ. I don't know how much longer I can do this."

  "Do what?"

  She turned away from him, hiding her face while she stared at the d-splay. "Look. This is not the time for a discussion. Not here. Not now." Her voice came out raw, as if she was about to cry, or had been.

  He went to her, bent down on one knee, and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. "What's wrong?"

  She shook her head, twisting free of his touch.

  "What?" he said. "What's the matter?"

  Her back started to shake. Then her shoulders crumpled forward, and a stifled sob escaped her.

  "Girls have been getting pregnant." She cleared her throat. "Five I know in the last week. Some of them don't even have boyfriends. You know what I'm saying?"

  "I'm not sure," he said.

  "Single women. Same-sex couples."

  "Wait a minute." Pelayo pinched the bridge of his nose. "Are you trying to tell me you're pregnant?"

  "It's not what you think." She refused to meet his gaze.

  "What am I supposed to think?"

  "I was afraid you'd be pissed."

  So this was what she had wanted to talk about last night. He stood. "I thought we were taking precautions. Both of us."

  After a second, she turned in the chair to look up at him. "That's what I'm saying. These other girls shouldn't be pregnant."

  Pelayo combed his fingers through the lank, unfamiliar hair and began to pace in the tiny room, feeling suddenly confined. "So how did it happen? If it's not mine, then whose is it?"

  "I'm not saying I am. I haven
't even gotten tested yet. It could just be stress."

  Pelayo stared at her, incredulous. If she was knocked up, the baby wasn't his, and she expected him to give her the benefit of the doubt.

  "I know how it must sound." She dropped her gaze to her lap. "But you have to believe me."

  "How come you haven't been tested?"

  She shook her head. "I've been afraid."

  "Of what?"

  "I'm not sure. I know"—she knitted her hands tightly—"it doesn't make sense. But I'm scared."

  "You afraid to find out what's going on?" he asked.

  She nodded, looked up again. Her eyes were teary, red-rimmed. "Yeah. Maybe. And I don't want to be told it's my fault. That I did something to bring this on myself."

  "Like what?"

  "I don't know. It's that whole, if a woman gets raped or beaten or something, she must have asked for it."

  Pelayo took a moment to let out a deep breath. "So what do you want to do?" he finally asked.

  Atossa mashed her lips. Her expression was frayed, pocked with shadows. "If I am pregnant, I'm thinking about getting an abortion..."

  Pelayo wasn't sure what to say. Or what she wanted from him.

  "... but I wanted to talk to you first."

  "Are the other women you know getting abortions?" he asked.

  She twisted her hands. "Some of them."

  "But not all."

  "No."

  "It's up to you," he said. "Whatever you think is best." It was her choice, not his. He didn't want to tell her what to do.

  "I want it to be a joint decision," she said.

  So she wasn't asking for his advice, necessarily, but his support. She wanted him to be there with her, for her. Pelayo knelt next to her again. An when he went to put an arm around her hunched shoulders, instead of pulling away she leaned into him for comfort.

  "Piecework," she said after a while.

  "What about it?"

  "I did that once, when I was fourteen. Grew ro-taxanes inside me. That's what this feels like, except it's not my choice."

  "You think that's what this is? Some kind of industrial infection?"

  She shrugged, then straightened under his arm. "A TV was following me the other day. Watching me."

  "Where?"

  "Here and at home." She rubbed goose-pimpled arms. "It was creepy, like he was checking me out. Keeping an eye on me."

  "When was that?" Pelayo asked.

  She hugged herself. "Yesterday morning. After I went to the clinic to see about setting up an appointment."

  About the same time the TV had been spying on him. Unless it was really Atossa the TV had been trying to keep track of. "Why would a TV want to know whether or not you're pregnant?" he said.

  Tossa shook her head. She sucked in her cheeks, the hollows of her face drawing tight and hard.

  He rested a hand on one shoulder and squeezed gently, feeling knotted, bone-hard muscle. "You want to stay at my place for a while? Until we figure out what's going on?"

  "You sure that's all right?" she said. "It won't mess with the test trial?"

  "Right now I'm more concerned about you." He kissed her lightly, tilting her chin like a wineglass between the tips of his fingers, and stood up. "Let me know when you're done here and I'll pick you up."

  She followed him to the door. "Where are you going?"

  "To get some answers."

  27

  Kasuo van Dijk sat in his office, staring out the window behind his desk. It wasn't a real window. He kept a permanent real-time d-splay from Japan on the graphene-covered walls of his basement office.

  The philm was part of his Samurai pseudoself. Late at night he liked having a little piece of day to light his office. The d-splay provided a view of the rock and raked-sand karesansui garden at Nanzenji, a Zen temple at the foot of Kyoto's eastern hills. Using the nanotrode array woven into his electronic skin, an applet in the d-splay screen kept track of his location and adjusted the view through the window so he saw exactly what he would see if he was looking out the window in Nanzenji. He preferred to leave the graphene on the rest of the walls transparent, showing the bare underlying cinder block.

  Turning from the window, he onlined and queried the SFPD datician. "Damselfly search results."

  He'd used the damselfly from Lisette's apartment as a baseline parameter, but had instructed the datician to include plus-minus permutations if the initial search turned up no useful results. The search included all known image libraries around the world—both public and private—as well as simage-array databases and online transmissions.

  A report d-splay appeared on the wall to the right of his desk. He scrolled through the results. In the last month, there had been three hundred thousand damselfly instantiations worldwide that met the search criteria. Ten thousand downloads a day, on average. Fairly miniscule compared to F8 or XXXodus.

  "Limit the search results to the San Francisco Bay Area," van Dijk instructed the datician. "One-hundred-fifty-kilometer radius."

  The d-splay repopulated to just under three thousand downloads and simage-array recordings.

  Still too many. Van Dijk leaned back in his chair and propped his feet on his desk. Most of the downloads were to Vurtronic d-splays. The graphene screen was capable of producing texture in addition to images, but it couldn't be peeled off. There was no way for the damselfly to take flight from a standard screen.

  "Eliminate all Vurtronic downloads," he said.

  The list narrowed to six occurrences. None of them were downloads. All of the occurrences, were ad hoc simages, programmable graphene appliques that weren't restricted to a fixed location. Three of the occurrences, including the oldest, took place in Lisette's apartment. Of these, one preceded the time of death of the young woman by twelve hours. One instantiation, the most recent, was in South San Francisco. The second oldest time stamp registered in Dockton. That left Santa Cruz and San Jose, the two most recent occurrences after South San Francisco. All of the occurrences had street addresses but no subnet address.

  "Identify origins of these images," he said.

  "Unknown," the datician said.

  "Trace."

  "I'm sorry, Detective. The paths dead-end."

  Van Dijk frowned. Whatever it was, it didn't want to be found. He lowered his feet. "Cross-correlate," he said, "based on location and time."

  A second d-splay opened on the wall. It mapped the locations in a stack of space-time sheets, starting with the oldest at the bottom and progressing upward to the newest. Lines joining each occurrence helped him to visually track the progression of events, but failed to reveal a meaningful pattern. The links appeared to be random and unconnected.

  Van Dijk turned to stare at the karesansui garden. The simage in Santa Cruz was associated with an ad agency, Model Behavior.

  Could the young woman have been working as a model, an ad demographic scout, or marketeer?

  Van Dijk had the datician submit a request for the firm's employment records. It would take some time to process; he'd need the approval of a judge. The agency hadn't filed a missing person's report with SCPD, but maybe the firm didn't know an employee was missing. It was also possible that she was a former employee.

  The address in San Jose was equally baffling. It was subleased to a tenant named Zhenyu al-Fayoumi. A relative, possibly, or a boyfriend? According to the datician, the man was an associate professor with the Developmental Nanobiology Department at San Jose State University.

  "Tag him as a person of interest," van Dijk said. "Message him with a request to contact me as soon as possible." If there was probable cause, he could subpoena any call records later.

  "Message sent," the datician confirmed.

  Van Dijk turned his attention to the Dockton address, a travel agency that was no longer in business and hadn't been for a year.

  At a loss, van Dijk said, "Display the images. Oldest to newest."

  Several d-splays opened in quick succession to show the now-familiar dams
elfly, followed by a flying fish, a damselfish, and finally, an ad mask with the mouth of a fish.

  "Point of clarification," van Dijk said.

  "Yes?"

  "Explain the fish images."

  "You requested any images that contained elements that were an exact match to those found in the baseline image of the damselfly. The wings on both the flying fish and the damselfish meet that criteria, plus or minus the standard deviation of 2-percent."

  "What about the ad mask?" It didn't have any wings that he could see.

  "The mouth and scale pattern are an exact match of the fish mouths recorded in the other two images."

  Which meant he could probably rule that one out. At least for the time being.

  "Calculate and d-splay the most probable locations, from highest to lowest, for the girl associated with the baseline image."

  Lisette remained his first priority.

  On the d-splay, the address in South San and its assigned probability blinked red at the top of the list.

  28

  Marta didn't know what to say. She and Nadice couldn't talk, not really. Not with the TVs listening in and watching. Marta could feel their eyes peering at them through nanocams hidden in the walls and the utility dust floating in the cool, recirculated air. The air chafed her skin and smelled faintly of fullerenes.

  Nadice didn't strike her as a convert. She wasn't proselytizing, bubbling over with enthusiasm. She seemed more a victim of circumstance than a willing initiate.

  Their reasons for being here might be different, but the two of them were more alike than not. They were both guarded, wary.

  Still, the silence grated. It was unnatural. No talk was more suspicious than idle chatter. They needed to maintain at least the appearance of normalcy or they would draw more attention to themselves, not less.

  "Some music would be nice," Marta finally ventured. Inane, but she was tired of tiptoeing around the forced quiet. The plush bed was starting to feel like a coffin under her, the room a funeral parlor.

  Nadice scrutinized her, as if searching for ulterior motives. "I guess. Depends on what they let us listen to."

  "Who do you like?"

  Nadice gave a halfhearted shrug with one shoulder. "F8's all right." Everybody liked F8. It was the most noncommittal response she could give. "How about you?"