by Jeff Edwards
The man behind the desk has seen the gun now, but he’s still trying to play it strong. “How did you get in here? I’m calling Security.”
He reaches for his phone, and I feel myself squeeze the trigger.
The automatic bucks in my hand, and a thumb-sized crater appears in the man’s face, just above the bridge of his nose. As his head snaps back, a spray of brain matter splatters the painting on the wall behind his desk, and I’m squeezing the trigger again. And again.
I am shouting over the roar of the shots. “How does it feel, Boss Man? Still think you can fuck over the little guy? Still think you’re Big King Shit, and the rest of us are only here to kiss your ass?”
I’m laughing with a wild exultation as I pull the trigger four more times.
Then, I wheel around and start trotting back through the outer office area, ignoring screams and snapping off a shot at anyone who strays into my field of vision.
I pump three rounds into the chest of a man who is too stunned to move. I’m still moving as he crumples.
One of my bullets catches a woman in the spine while she is diving for cover. She hits the carpet like a sack of bricks, her suddenly-limp body tumbling spasmodically.
The world is made of blood, and screams, and the rhythmic rise and fall of my laughter.
I’m nearly to the outer doors when I spot the security guard.
Shift…
I snatched the cranial rig off of my head. It dropped out of my fingers to clatter across the floor. My stomach clenched reflexively, and I found myself fighting down the urge to vomit.
Tommy was at my side in a flash. “You okay?”
I nodded, breathing through my nose, and trying to throttle my heart rate back into a range that the human body can tolerate.
I had shot those people. I had gunned them down, and then laughed about it. Killed them, for no reason at all, or at least for none that I could make sense of.
It wasn’t the first time that I’d pulled the trigger. Not even the first time that I had found it necessary to shoot another person. But I had never fired at anyone who hadn’t tried to kill me first. I’d never done it without reason, and I had certainly never enjoyed it.
But I had enjoyed it this time. Reveled in it. Gotten an almost sexual thrill out of it.
No…
Not me…
The POV subject had done it. The nine-fingered man. He had pulled the trigger, and it was his laughter that I could still hear echoing in my head.
Tommy laid a hand on my shoulder. “You’re spooking me, Dave. Are you alright?”
I forced myself to nod. “Yeah. I’m… okay.”
“Was it that bad?”
I was opening my mouth to answer, when the natural corollary of his question occurred to me. This was obviously a snuff recording. A kill-the-boss scenario, tailored for sick-minded people who wanted to experience the thrill of slaughtering their supervisor and coworkers, without the attendant danger and criminal consequences.
This recording was bad enough in and of itself, but its very existence suggested even darker possibilities. There would be other SCAPE recordings. Rape. Pedophilia. Kidnapping. Torture. Acts of sabotage, destruction, and terror. I had no doubt that there was a market for all manner of nastiness.
The world had always been afflicted with its share of closet maniacs. Fortunately, few of them were bold enough to translate their twisted little daydreams into action. They walked around with murder and mayhem in their hearts, but they lacked the courage to get their hands bloody.
SCAPE could bring their most demented fantasies to life. Give them a chance to live and re-live every revolting second.
The notion was so repugnant that a simple multiple homicide seemed almost wholesome by comparison.
I realized that Tommy was still staring at me.
“It’s a snuff recording,” I said. “An office shooting. Not pretty. At least three victims.”
Tommy almost looked relieved, as if his own suspicions—like mine—had gone to even darker places.
“Did you get what you needed?” he asked. “For your case?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “If there’s a connection, I haven’t spotted it yet.”
Tommy bent down and retrieved the cranial rig. “Do you want to check out the rest of the recording?”
“Not really,” I said. “But I probably should.”
“Do you need a minute?”
“Let’s get it over with,” I said.
As soon as the cranial rig was back in place on my head, Tommy hit the play tab again.
Shift…
The security guard’s stunner swings up to cover me, but he’s a half-second too slow. I snap off a shot that hits him in the throat. He goes down with a gurgling sound that’s probably the closest thing to a scream that his mangled larynx can manage.
I’m shoving my way through the glass doors when I catch sight of shape crouching behind a desk. I can’t tell if it’s a man or woman, and I don’t stop to check. I punch several rounds straight through the desk. The lightweight composite materials of the office furniture do nothing to stop my bullets.
The crouching form jerks under multiple impacts. I’m out the door and into the hallway, still unsure of the sex of my most recent victim.
I stop near the paint-stick markings I left on the silvery wall paneling.
FANTASCAPE 389
Dream Snatcher Presents
THE BOSS
I aim the muzzle of my automatic at the center of the ‘O’ in ‘BOSS.’ I squeeze the trigger, and a bullet hole appears in the laminate, turning the ‘O’ into something that resembles the bull’s-eye of a target.
“That’s all, motherfuckers,” I say in my strangely-accented voice. “Dream Snatcher is out of here. See you next time, on FANTASCAPE three-eighty-nine…”
The hallway freeze-frames, and a white rectangular text window appears at the center of my field of view.
This is apparently the scorecard for the shooting spree I’ve just experienced. After about ten seconds, there’s an almost subliminal flicker of something resembling video static, and then another one of those instantaneous shifts.
It’s over…
I pulled the cranial set off of my head. I still had no idea what the connection might be between this recording and Leanda Forsyth’s disappearance. Had she been investigating the office shooting? Or trying to track down this FANTASCAPE 389 thing? Or the Dream Snatcher? Or was there no connection at all?
In all likelihood, the cops had cued on the SCAPE chip because: (A) it depicted a crime, and (B) it had been found in Leanda’s apartment. Neither of those facts were automatic proof of a link to her vanishing act.
I set the cranial rig on Tommy’s workbench. I’d pull the thread on FANTASCAPE 389 and the shooting in Chicago. It might turn out that everything associated with the SCAPE chip was a blind alley, but at least it was a place to start.
CHAPTER 8
When I got home, I had House check the news feeds for stories about an office shooting in Chicago on April twenty-third. It took him about a millisecond to confirm that the events depicted in the snuff SCAPE had been real. An unknown perpetrator had walked into the offices of AVX Analytics on North LaSalle, whipped out a handgun, and gunned down the senior onsite vice president, three mid-level managers, and a security guard. Four dead, one critically wounded.
I watched six or seven vid updates, and they were all pretty much the same. The lone shooter was still unidentified. The police were following up on promising leads, but no arrests had been made.
I lit a cigarette and made my way to the desk comp in my den. The chip containing Leanda Forsyth’s missing person files was still plugged into the data slot near the right end of the desk top.
I tapped the desk to wake up the holographic keyboard, and paged past the ultrachrome logo of LAPD’s West Hollywood Division. I had been through about fifty of the ninety-two files on the chip.
I ran a search for the term
s ‘FANTASCAPE 389’ and ‘Dream Snatcher.’ The computer highlighted three of the unread files.
The first was a brief description of the commercial SCAPE market, presumably to provide context for those (like myself) who were new to the technology. There were two emerging players in the SCAPE industry: IMAGISCAPE, which was rapidly moving toward market dominance; and VIRTUSCAPE, which was losing customer base—due to some undefined but recognizably-artificial quality in its recorded media. FANTASCAPE 389 was not a registered commercial trade name. It was a black market brand, dedicated to the production and distribution of criminal experiences.
No surprises there. I closed the file, and moved on to the next one.
It was physical analysis of the SCAPE chip itself. Not the copy I’d gotten from Bruhn, but the original chip that the crime scene team had discovered in Leanda Forsyth’s apartment. I didn’t understand most of technical language, but I did come away with a few nuggets of information.
One: the internal circuitry of every SCAPE chip was legally required to contain something called a ‘non-repudiation cell,’ a feature that was missing from the chip in Leanda’s apartment. I had no idea what a non-repudiation cell might be, but the lack of one made the chip unlawful to manufacture or possess, regardless of what was actually recorded on it.
Two: the words ‘FANTASCAPE 389’ had been embossed into the carbon strata of the chip. The lettering hadn’t been stamped, or etched, or engraved into the surface. The chip had been built that way. The markings were an integral part of the chip’s design. In other words, the chip had been specifically manufactured for FANTASCAPE 389’s black market customers.
Three: a microscopic examination of the circuit layering showed a level of perfection that could only be achieved in microgravity. Which meant that chip had been created at one of the orbital fabrication facilities.
I made a mental note to follow up on this last point. There were a limited number of microgravity production sites. With a bit of nosing around, I might be able to trace the chip back to its original source.
LAPD’s jurisdiction did not extend to any of the orbital stations, but I wasn’t operating under any such limitations. I had a very powerful client and an unlimited expense account. I could afford to indulge in some orbit-hopping, if the case happened to lead me in that direction.
I closed the second police file, and opened the third. It was a summary of the available information (not much) on the unidentified criminal suspect who called himself the Dream Snatcher.
There were nineteen known Dream Snatcher recordings circulating through the black market. To-date, his body of work encompassed acts of assault, robbery, murder, rape, arson, and—oddly enough—vandalism. One of his SCAPE recordings featured the utter destruction of a priceless fifteenth-century bronze, by the Italian Renaissance sculptor Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi, better known to the world as Donatello. This last act had been carried out in a major European museum with a reputation for impenetrable security.
Analysis of the available samples revealed that the POV subject was not always the same person. Or more precisely, the first eight recordings had been made by a single adult male, and the next eleven recordings had been made by a second man, of approximately the same apparent age and physical stature.
Why the change? Had Dream Snatcher ‘Alpha’ gotten tired of the game, and turned the position over to Dream Snatcher ‘Beta’? Had the second Dream Snatcher killed off the first guy and taken his place?
The file contained another interesting detail. Apparently, recordings made by Dream Snatcher Alpha were gradually disappearing from the black market, as though they were being quietly bought up, or recalled. By contrast, the recordings of Dream Snatcher Beta were practically flooding the streets.
Neither one of the Dream Snatcher perpetrators had been identified, so there was no way to know why the starring role had shifted from one man to the other. Nor was there any clue as to why the recordings of Alpha were being called back, while the recordings of Beta were hitting the market in ever-increasing numbers.
I closed the file. Once again, more questions than answers. I hadn’t stumbled across any great revelations, but at least I had a bit of background for the Dream Snatcher stuff.
I stood up, stretched the kinks out of my back, and reached for my cigarettes. I was just lighting up when something tugged at my memory. Some small detail that had escaped my conscious attention.
I exhaled a stream of smoke and turned back to the computer. When the menu appeared, I re-ran the Dream Snatcher search, and came up with the same trio of files. I didn’t bother opening them. The information was right there on the file menu, in the properties column. The creator of all three SCAPE reports had been an LAPD Cybercrimes technician named R. Dancer.
I stared at the holographic display. Dancer. It wasn’t exactly a common surname. In fact, in my whole life, I had only met one person that last name. Coincidence? Maybe…
According to Detective Delaney, his former partner, Priz Dancer, had a wife. What was her name? Rhiannon? Rhiarra? Something that started with an ‘R’.
I walked back into the living room. Dancer’s Turing Scion was still lying on my coffee table, where Delaney had left it.
I picked it up. The black rectangle of carbon-polymer fit neatly in my palm. I really did hate these things, and—truth be told—I wasn’t all that crazy about Dancer either. But I could always unplug the thing if it got too obnoxious.
I carried the Scion back to my desk and hunted around until I found the right kind of fiber optic cable. I connected one end to the desk comp’s optical port, and the other end to the Turing Scion.
The computer instantly kicked into restart mode. It took much longer than usual to boot up.
And suddenly, a holographic rendering of Dancer’s head was floating in the air above the desk. The image made eye contact with me, and gave me a smile that was more sneer than humor. “How’s it hanging, Stalin? Did you miss me?”
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I didn’t miss you at all.”
CHAPTER 9
My first impulse was to unplug the damned thing. I was about two nanoseconds from reaching for the interface cable when the Scion spoke again.
“I’m kind of surprised,” it said. “I expected this to be completely fucking bizarre, but it actually feels good to still be here.”
“You’re not still here,” I said. “No matter what your programming matrix tells you, you’re not Priscilla Dancer. You’re a stack of silicon and software that retains her memories and simulates her thought processes.”
The hologram shot me an expression that was pure Dancer. “Jesus, Stalin, don’t you think I know that? Do you really think that’s somehow escaped my fucking attention?”
I reached for the cable. “This was a bad idea.”
“Hold on!” the Scion said. “Please… Can you just give me a few seconds, here?”
I waited.
“This was a bad idea,” the thing said. “I realize that. The whole thing is creepy as hell, and it’s not like you and me were buddy-buddy even when I was alive. But I didn’t have a shitload of options, you know?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what Delaney told me.”
“What else did he tell you?”
“Not a lot,” I said. “He told me about the attack on your wife, and that she died from her injuries. I was really sorry to hear about that. I never met your wife. I didn’t even know you were married, but…”
I didn’t bother finishing the sentence. It was a waste of time expressing sympathy to a heap of circuitry with delusions of consciousness. But I knew what it was like to lose a wife.
The last of Maggie’s things had long since been packed away. I’d spent one endless scotch-addled day removing every physical trace of her existence from the house. Every photo of her, every trid, every vid recording, every document with her name on it. I’d even replaced her favorite pieces of furniture, and the bed we’d slept in together.
&nb
sp; Despite my efforts at emotional asepsis, memories of Maggie had a way of collecting in the corners of every room, lingering on the air like ghostly vestiges of her long-vanished perfume.
“Anyway,” I said, “Delaney told me that you went after the perpetrators. That you killed two out of three before you got caught.”
I didn’t like using the word ‘you’ to address the Scion, but I couldn’t think of an alternative pronoun.
The hologram nodded. “The third perp knew that I was zeroing on him. He made a run for one of the Japanese orbital colonies. I was making preparations to go after him when Internal Affairs caught up with me.”
“And that’s what you need me for? To go after the third perpetrator?”
“Yeah. I want to finish this, and I can’t do it without help.”
“What that brotherhood-of-the-badge thing? Why aren’t your cop buddies helping you?”
The facial features of Dancer’s projection seemed to harden. “Ordinarily, they would be helping me. But these aren’t ordinary circumstances.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that somebody high up is exerting pull.”
“Someone inside LAPD?”
“I never managed to find out,” the Scion said. “But I could feel the pressure. Everyone could.”
“Such as?”
“Rhiarra was one of our people. Not a cop, but still LAPD. She was under the department’s protection. Or she should have been. When those scumbags raped and killed her, it should have been treated like a cop killing. Her death should have triggered a department-wide manhunt. A fucking blue tornado, until those bastards were either dead or brainlocked.”
