by Jeff Edwards
“I’m guessing that didn’t happen.”
“No,” the Scion said. “It damned well didn’t happen. Somebody… I don’t know who… put out the word that Rhiarra’s death was just a sex crime gone wrong. Rhiarra was LAPD and the wife of a career cop, but the departmental brass decided to handle the investigation as a routine homicide.”
“Not exactly proof of conspiracy,” I said. “I remember an old saying… Something about never attributing anything to villainy, which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
The hologram shook its simulated head. “Cops don’t have carte blanche,” it said, “but we do have some latitude when we’re dealing with known criminal perps.”
I nodded. This wasn’t exactly news.
“Both of the bottom-feeders I took out were career offenders. They were sleaze balls of the lowest order, with multiple felony convictions, and too many arrests to count.”
“And, what?” I asked. “You expected a commendation for cleaning up the streets?”
“No,” the Scion said. “I didn’t expect a medal. But I didn’t expect to get brainlocked, either. Investigated, yeah. Censured, sure. Even booted off the force, and prosecuted. I figured I would have to do some time in lockdown. But not brainlock.”
“So, you think the punishment was too severe for the crime?”
Dancer’s holographic projection sighed. “I probably had it coming. No matter what the provocation was, I stepped over the line. Way over the line. But Stalin, it happened so fucking fast.”
“Which part?”
“All of it. My trial. My sentencing. The rejection of my appeal. The entire process can take months, or even years, if the case is complex enough.”
“How long did yours take?”
“That depends… When was I brainlocked?”
“You don’t know?”
The hologram shook its head. “My memories don’t extend past the recording of this Turing Scion. Anything that happened after that is a blank slate to me. I know when I was scheduled for brainlock, but I have no way of knowing if the sentence was carried out at the appointed time and date.”
“According to Delaney, the sentence was carried out at around midnight of the eleventh.” I checked my watch. “A little over twenty-four hours ago.”
“That makes it about eighteen days,” the Scion said. “From arrest to brainlock.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “Nobody gets shoved through the system that fast, no matter what they’re accused of.”
“I was arrested on the twenty-fourth of October. Do the math yourself.”
I did a quick mental count. Eighteen days. She was right.
The word caught my attention. She. I was starting to think of the Turing Scion as a person. I had to remind myself that it wasn’t Priscilla Dancer. It wasn’t a person at all. It was a thing.
I reached for the interface cable.
“Wait!” the Scion said. “I can help you with your case—”
But I didn’t wait. I pulled the plug.
The hologram of Dancer’s face disappeared. As the computer was powering down, I realized that I’d never gotten around to asking her about Rhiarra’s involvement in the analysis of the FANTASCAPE 389 chip.
It. Not her. The Scion was an it.
I reached for my cigarettes and went in search of a drink.
CHAPTER 10
It was midafternoon before House managed to prod me out of bed. After an hour (or maybe two) of his soft but persistent audio chimes and his gentle verbal reminders, I flopped over and levered my way up to a hunched-over position on the edge of the bed. Somewhere in the midst of my clumsy maneuvering, an empty Cutty bottle slid out from under the sheets. It plonked onto the floor, where it spun through three or four revolutions before coming to rest against a baseboard.
The concealed door to a maintenance alcove slid open, and a small housekeeping drone rolled quickly toward the downed bottle.
I did my best to glare at the little machine with one bleary eye. “Leave it.”
My voice was something between a burble and a belch, but House was apparently able to decipher my meaning. The drone halted instantly.
“I’ll clean up after myself,” I mumbled.
This was probably not true. In all likelihood, I would forget my half-hearted declaration of self-sufficiency about four seconds after I summoned enough strength to stagger out of the room. When I was safely out of sight, House would send his drones to tidy up behind me, and order would be restored to the universe.
But—for the moment at least—House would humor me by pretending that I might actually follow-through on my promise to pick up my own empties. The cleaning drone retreated to its cubbyhole, leaving the Cutty bottle on the floor.
I tried to remember if there had been a second bottle. If so, I wondered where the empty had gotten itself to. House would know, but I definitely wasn’t going to ask him.
My head was a dully-pulsating mass of pain, pierced at irregular intervals by bright stabs of genuine agony.
I put a steadying hand against the wall and lumbered to my feet, causing minor explosions in the region behind my eyeballs.
“Shower,” I grunted. “Hot.”
I heard the hiss of the spray heads starting up. “What program would you like, David?”
I took a few tottering steps in the direction of the bathroom. “I don’t care. As long as it doesn’t move or make noise.”
I bumbled my way into the shower without major accident or incident. The door slid out of my way as I approached, and closed silently behind me.
The walls and ceiling of the shower stall cycled from glossy white to the rust reds and dusty browns of the western badlands. When the projection came into focus, I was standing on a rocky promontory, overlooking a magnificent desert canyon. The sky was a shade of blue that I’ve never seen outside of computer-generated virtual environments.
This was Program Seven. Or maybe Program Nine. I couldn’t remember at the moment, and I didn’t really care. Whatever its designation happened to be, the projection was not cluttered by crashing waves, or swaying tree branches, or any other extraneous motions that might trigger the nausea reflex in my abused body. House had shut off the audio, so the only sounds were my occasional groans, and the muted hiss of the spray heads.
I stood under the coursing jets of hot water and tried to pretend that I was making progress toward becoming human again.
Some unknown time later, I managed to dress myself and stumble to the kitchen, where I swallowed a medium-sized handful of over-the-counter analgesics, chased with room temperature water.
If you believe the vids, the world is brimming over with quick and effective hangover cures. In the old flicks, every bartender and butler in the twentieth-century knew a secret family concoction for restoring overindulgers to the proverbial land of the living. And in the futuristic sci-fi vids, our star faring heroes always seem to have some clever enzyme that instantly breaks down the alcohol molecule into its harmless constituent components.
In real life, there are no magic remedies. Not the sugar-under-the-tongue trick; not hair-of-the-dog; not even that ionized vasopressin thing that’s supposed to be so popular with biomed students. In real life, you suffer along as well as you can until your body finally metabolizes the last of the toxins that you’ve tried to poison yourself with.
Eventually, when the healing process has progressed far enough, you can begin to think about eating a piece of dry white toast without dry heaving on the floor for twenty minutes. That blissful moment was still in my future, but I was far enough along to attempt verbal communication.
I leaned against the doorframe and massaged my forehead. “Okay, House. I’m assuming that you got me up for a reason…”
“Yes,” said House. “You asked me to make sure you were out of bed before four p.m.”
“I did? Why the hell would I do that?”
“You mentioned a report,” House said.
I grit
ted my teeth. “Shit! I forgot about that.”
I had promised Vivien Forsyth a written weekly report on the progress of the investigation. That’s not something my clients usually ask for, but she hadn’t blinked at my retainer, so I had agreed to it without too much fuss. My nonconformist streak had kicked in enough to avoid the traditional schedules for submitting reports. Instead of Friday by close of business, or first thing Monday morning, I had chosen Thursday night. The selection had been more or less random. I was regretting it now.
I toyed with the idea of letting House do the grunt work. It would take him about a picosecond to create an index of the police files I’d reviewed, and generate a summary of my computer searches and phone calls. Then I could toss in a few notes to give the thing some meat.
I couldn’t make myself do it. I was being paid an honest retainer; I owed my client honest work in return.
I shuffled off to the den and lowered myself gingerly into the chair at my desk comp. When the holographic display sprang to life, it was about twenty-percent larger than usual. House was attempting to compensate for my hangover by easing the strain on my eyes.
I rifled through my older files until I found a group of investigation reports that I’d written for a previous client. I cloned the most recent example, opened the file, and stripped out most of the content. This left me with a neatly formatted template for my first report to Vivien. I blinked several times to clear my eyes, and began to type.
It took about an hour to summarize my review of the police files, the interview with Thurman at TransNat, my examination of the SCAPE chip, and my subsequent verification that the recording had captured an actual crime in-progress. I listed the leads I’d eliminated, and clearly indicated that most of them were rehashes of work already performed by LAPD. (I had no intention of claiming credit for someone else’s effort.)
I included my idea that Leanda might have walked down stairs and exited the building from the balcony of a second floor apartment. I pointed out that the drop to the ground was only about three meters, and this circuitous route would have gotten her out of the building without passing the lobby security cameras.
I marked this scenario as unlikely, but not impossible. Either way, it didn’t provide any clues about where Leanda was now.
Finally, I typed a few paragraphs about the FANTASCAPE 389 angle, speculating that Leanda might have been investigating the Chicago shooting incident itself, or she might have been trying to work up an exposé on the market in illegal SCAPE recordings. I marked both of these as future leads to follow, along with trying to track down the orbital facility that had manufactured the FANTASCAPE chip.
I figured that was enough detail for the short time I’d been on the case, so I checked my spelling and instructed House to send the report off to Vivien Forsyth.
My immediate task out of the way, I limped back to my bed and let the remainder of my hangover drag me down into sleep.
I woke up in darkness. The faintly glowing digits of the bedside clock marked the time as a few minutes after midnight.
I mentally tossed a coin, and decided against trying to go back to sleep. I sat up cautiously. My headache wasn’t completely gone yet, but it was no longer overwhelming my other senses. In fact, I could feel something suspiciously like hunger pangs rumbling in the vicinity of my midsection.
I put my feet on the floor and stood up. House responded instantly by bringing the room lights up to about five-percent illumination. Enough for me to see by, without being blinded.
I made my way to the kitchen in search of toast, or maybe even a sandwich. By the time I got to the refrigerator, House had the illumination up to about twenty-percent and he was continuing to bring it up slowly.
My stomach assured me that it could handle sliced turkey on plain bread, and I was rummaging through the refrigerator when a random thought crossed my mind. I wondered what was in Leanda Forsyth’s refrigerator.
Okay, it had probably been emptied weeks ago, but what had been in there before? Junk food? Health food? Sixteen kinds of leftover gourmet pizza?
I didn’t know if she was a vegan, or a carnivore, or a hardcore carb-loader. I had no inkling about her taste in food, or drink, or music, or vid—or, for that matter—much of anything. On my single visit to her apartment, I’d been too busy trading barbs with Bruhn to pay much attention to gathering a general impression. Since then, I’d been focused entirely on possible methods and motives for her disappearance.
The net result was that I knew next to nothing about the woman. I had no feel at all for what kind of person she was, or what sort of decisions she might have made to get herself into trouble.
Had she crossed the wrong people and paid the price? Had she simply walked away from her own life? I had no idea, and—without at least a rudimentary understanding of the woman herself—I had no basis for an intelligent guess.
I retrieved a vacuum pouch of cold turkey, and closed the refrigerator, sending a rush of cool air across my face.
I needed to go back to Leanda Forsyth’s apartment.
CHAPTER 11
My car’s olfactronic sensors got a whiff of the odor molecules coming off my skin, and concluded that my blood alcohol content was at or near the legal limit for driving. A flashing red message on the instrument screen warned that my top speed would be limited to 70 kilometers per hour, and I would not be permitted to drive on freeways or other high-capacity roadways until my possible chemical impairment fell below city-mandated levels.
A two-option menu appeared, giving me the choice to either accept the proffered restrictions, or override the warning and take full control of the car. I knew that if I overrode the computer, my car would automatically transmit an alert to all local police vehicles, notifying them that a potentially-impaired driver was on the road.
I hit the ‘accept’ tab, and the turbines began to spin up. I wasn’t in a hurry anyway.
The bright orange rectangle of Detective Nicolleti’s parking citation was still bonded to my upper windshield. The time index on the decal read November 13, 2065 / 1:26 a.m.—followed by the countdown to the ticket’s expiration. I made a mental note to pay the fine, and get that damned thing off my car.
I pulled out of my parking spot and drove west, toward Dome #7.
The holographic warning stripes sprang into existence as I approached the front door. I help up the key chip to mollify the police perimeter monitor, and unlocked the door to Leanda’s apartment.
The AI was still offline, so the lights didn’t automatically come on when I entered the foyer. The door slid shut behind me, cutting off the illumination from the elevator lobby, and plunging the room into darkness.
I felt the wall to the right of the doorframe until my fingers encountered the manual lighting control. I nudged the lights up to medium. Good enough to see by, but not glaring.
I started in the living room, working slowly, and trying to take in small details. I ignored the artwork and the layout of the furniture. The overall look of the place had been meticulously planned by a professional interior designer. If I wanted to learn something about Leanda, it wouldn’t be from the décor. It would be from the little things, the personal items that crept in around the edges.
Occasionally I would touch something, or pick it up for a closer look. But mostly I left things wherever they lay. I didn’t have any particular method in mind. I wasn’t here to search the place. I just wanted to get an impression of the woman who had lived here.
I came across a small assortment of leather-bound books. Oliver Twist, The Secret Garden, Lorna Doone, The Coral Island, Little Women, Just So Stories, and a dozen or so others with familiar titles. These were not showpieces. Every one showed signs of extensive handling.
There was also a tattered hardcover of The Dharma Bums, its black and white paper dust jacket gone stiff and brittle. I lifted the book off the shelf, and carefully opened it. My fingertip slid down the face of an old yellow page, stopping at a random passage…
I closed the book and returned it to the shelf. If her taste in reading material was anything to go by, I was beginning to like Ms. Leanda Forsyth.
I found a hand-sized data pad on one of the accent tables. I wondered why the cops hadn’t grabbed it, until I flicked the unit on and realized that it was just a remote for the apartment’s audio system. The discovery rang a strange chord in my head. Before it had been wiped, the AI in Leanda’s apartment had been state of the art. But—for some reason—she had chosen to run her music system by hand.
I scrolled through the play list to check out her most recent listening selections. Her tastes seemed to lean toward classical, with emphasis on the French impressionists. Lots of Debussy and Ravel. Not exactly my kind of music.
I was about to shut off the remote when I noticed a pattern in the time indexes. A lot of the entries were in the small hours. Leanda apparently liked to play music between two and four in the morning. Insomnia? Or was she one of those people who never sleep more than a few hours a night?
I scrolled back to the most recent entry: Debussy’s The Girl with the Flaxen Hair. The time index marked the date as September seventeenth, at six twenty-seven p.m.
That answered one question. She had been here. On the evening of her disappearance, Leanda Forsyth had actually made it to her apartment, listened to a piano composition by one of her favorite composers, and then… what? Vanished into thin air?
Another minute of browsing through the play list revealed something else. Leanda’s music library was enormous, but she tended to listen to the same twenty or thirty selections, often in the same order. Ms. Forsyth, it seemed, was a creature of habit.
