by Sean Platt
Dominic augmented the connection. It was blurred somehow. He couldn’t tell how Stahl and Costa were connected, only that they were. The meta — visible only on zooming, to someone with raw logs access like Dominic — suggested a casual connection that may have been made by pattern-matching AI inside City Surveillance. Which meant they just may have been spotted in the same places repeatedly, or that their connectivity blips had a way of colocating more often than coincidence would suggest.
Curious, with his policeman’s senses tingling, Dominic tried to explode the data to learn more. He couldn’t access enough to get the full picture without commissioner’s access, but for now, fascinatingly, he could see that…
There was a knock at the open door. Dominic’s eyes flicked up, sure that he must look guilty. But the cop standing there couldn’t see Dominic’s crappy console screen, and even if he could, perusing citizen and arrest records wasn’t against the law.
“Captain Long?”
“Yeah.”
“The suspect you asked me to keep an eye on? Leo Booker?”
“What about him?”
The young officer nodded. “He’s arrived at NPS.”
“Oh. Well, thanks.” Dominic blanked his screen, pocketed the slip drive full of Thomas Stahl, and glanced back up. The kid hadn’t left his doorway.
“What is it?” Dom asked. “Something wrong with Booker?”
The officer shook his head. “From what I’m seeing, Booker has already been moved to holding without incident.”
“And?”
“It’s the people they brought in with him, Captain. NPS has asked us to send officers to help escort and contain them.”
“You mean the peacenik, granola-munching Organas?”
“Not so peaceful anymore, sir,” the kid said.
Leo sat in the small room, alone with his thoughts. After thirty seconds, he sat on his hands — the only way to keep them from shaking.
He told himself that he could do this.
He told himself that he’d almost weaned completely off the drug. The past few days had been tough, as he’d waited for his small dose, but he’d managed each of the lengthening intervals without caving early and shortening any of them. Now, he was almost down to nothing. The only difference between this jones and all those that had preceded it was that this time, there would be no dose returning to normal. Which wasn’t a problem since he’d eased himself to almost nothing anyway.
Same as last time. Same pain. I just have to wait a bit longer. Then a bit longer after that. Then a bit longer after that, on into forever.
It didn’t help. It actually made his withdrawal symptoms worse because now he had the added element of panic. Specifically, he had the panic that came with the idea that no new dose of Lunis was coming. Almost zero wasn’t the same as zero. What he’d been taking, as his weaning neared its end, was barely the tip of a fingernail of moondust. He’d walked to the cliff’s edge, teetering between dependence and freedom.
But there was still that leap to make. Going from weaning off of dust to not a dust taker was terrifying. He’d always known he’d need to leap, but with NPS’s intervention, the die had been cast. He’d hoped to cross the no-dust gulf at home, safe in knowing that if he couldn’t stand the pain, he could backtrack and dose again. Doing so would crush him, and he’d feel like a failure. But knowing it was possible would at least offer him a sense of certainty, something to dull the red-hot panic.
But the way out was no longer there.
In its place, Leo felt growing panic.
He bit his cheek. He dug his thumbnail into his wrist, just above the old omnidirectional radiocarpal joint he’d had frozen in the ’40s. Once upon a time, he’d been able to bend his wrist in every direction except where his arm bones physically got in the way. But it was hard to blend in, as a teacher, when he kept forgetting to feign normal motion and grabbed board styluses from directly above, folding his wrist back far enough to brush his flesh.
The thumbnail digging into his skin — pressing into the muscle beneath, pinning it between metal and keratin — hurt enough to clear Leo’s fog.
He could do this.
An encouraging voice said, It’s all in your head.
He didn’t recognize that voice. Leo wasn’t big on talking to himself. And yet ever since he’d been taken in by NPS, his brain had been chattering back at him like a dinnertime companion. Like a yammering networker at a cocktail party. He wasn’t used to the intrusion. It kept showing Leo his past, his present, and all sorts of stuff he didn’t even understand or remember.
“You’re not going crazy,” Leo told the empty room.
He sat on his hands again, listening to the rattle of secondary restraints as they dragged across the bench. They’d injected his arms and legs with paralyzers, of course, but the agents who’d done it had scanned him and thrown up their hands at all the latent hardware their hippie suspect seemed to have hiding in his body. There was no way to be sure that the paralyzers would do their job. The old man, they seemed to reason, used to head a gang steeped in technological insurgence — and, if accusations held, was still head of that gang. His own defenses might counteract the NPS nanos. Hence, the secondary restraints.
Nobody in the room answered about the possibility of Leo being crazy. Because he was alone. And yet the room was surely being watched, and now Leo had just spoken aloud about his mental state. What would the NPS officers make of that? What would the NPS station’s AI make of it? Had Leo hurt his case by speaking, or had he helped it, beginning a case for insanity?
It’s fine. It’s good. You have a plan. You just need to wait for the plan to take root. Wait for help. Then wait for the others to be given what they need, through whatever means necessary.
This time, Leo nodded at the suggestion. Somehow, he felt sure that the voice was only trying to pacify him because it needed to use him, but right now that didn’t matter. And besides, what kind of crazy bullshit thinking was that? It was a voice in his head.
What do you call it when you think the voices in your head are out to get you?
Leo didn’t want to think about it. He remembered all the cult stories in the late 1900s and early 2000s, which scared him enough to leave a mark. People saying that something outside of themselves whispered in their ears and made them do horrible things. The devil made me do it. Hell, Son of Sam had been driven to murder on the advice of his dog.
Maybe he really was losing his mind. Maybe Lunis withdrawal was deadly. Maybe you couldn’t actually wean yourself off it.
That’s what everyone said, but Leo had been arrogant enough to think he could quit the drug and keep his sanity. Well, har-har on him; he’d felt something snap inside during the train ride down while listening to the screaming Organas one car back. As bad as his withdrawal was, theirs must be ten times worse.
If Leo was hearing voices and feeling strange, murderous impulses, then the others — who hadn’t had time or foreknowledge to wean before being cut off cold-turkey — must be about to claw out their eyes to rid themselves of crawling bugs.
Wait for help, Leo. You know it’s coming.
Of course Leo knew. But he didn’t like the new voice of insanity reminding him.
Fight the withdrawal, Leo. You always knew coming here was the only way to beat it.
And of course he knew that, too. It’s why he’d stood right beside the bug and made up all of those delicious lies about revitalizing a never truly dormant Gaia’s Hammer, daring NPS to truck up and arrest them all.
But again, that was none of the voice’s business. He didn’t trust the voice and didn’t appreciate its agreement. The voice wanted Leo to kick at the first person who came in to speak with him. The voice wanted Leo to bite the hand that tried to inject him then use his metal legs to drag that person in and break his or her neck. The voice wanted Leo to run, despite its farce of civility — of urging calm and patience. Because the voice didn’t just want to help Leo out. It wanted him to kill.
<
br /> In the train, everything had clicked on like a switch. All those old add-ons had sopped up the approaching core grid Beam access like a sponge, hungry after so much time spent dormant in the mountains. And as they’d come alight, Leo had felt downright inspired.
I never should have dismantled Gaia’s Hammer. I should have kept it active because the establishment needs lessons. It makes so much sense now.
And then the images. The plans. The schemes and how-to-kill tutorials entering his desperate mind fully formed, as if piped in from outside or rising from deep within. The minute he got out of here, Leo knew what to do. He knew where to go, and whom to go after.
Leo pressed his fingernail deeper into his wrist, bringing more pain. The fog backed away. The sense of red-hot panic lessened. The urge to kill and maim took a step back but remained ready, like a fantastic idea awaiting its time.
Maybe he was going crazy.
He could only imagine how it must be for the others.
Wait for Leah, the voice told him. And wait for Austin Smith.
One, then the other.
The pain would end.
His imprisonment would end.
And then you can move on to what matters most, the voice added.
Kate entered the police station, feeling uneasy. She’d been in this very station three times as Doc, on petty crimes and nuisance accusations, and it was hard to believe the station’s canvas — being a cop canvas — had no idea who she really was. She (back when she’d been he) had spent her life savings on the refurb, but even the best modifications didn’t erase memory and self-image.
She still swaggered when she walked.
She’d been unable to cure herself of leering at attractive women, and she’d similarly been unable to keep from winking lecherously at most of them.
Interestingly, the responses she got from women these days were far more encouraging than those she’d earned as Doc. His scoring record had always been about numbers, even after he’d made himself rich and grown into his looks. Getting a night’s company never really stopped being like cracking a code by trying all the permutations. If he approached enough hot women, eventually he found one who’d go home with him. But winking as Kate was different. Straight women sometimes frowned awkwardly, sometimes smiled as if thinking they were sharing a joke that only one of them got. None ran. None rushed to the nearest Beam surface to request rescue from a creep.
And now, as Kate swaggered and leered through Dominic Long’s police station, she couldn’t help but be Doc in another way: specifically, sweating the surety that she’d be spotted and stopped.
As Doc, she wasn’t quite an official criminal but was definitely persona non grata — or persona au gratin, as Kai liked to say in her dumb way.
As Kate, she was a Lunis smuggler.
As Kate, she was a murderer. She’d never learned what happened with Lunar Inspector Levy’s body and hadn’t been bold enough to run a search and find out. Maybe Sector 7 — whatever that was — had managed to erase Levy the same way it had erased (or at least hidden) Kate’s moon visit from searchable records. Thinking about it now, she could imagine something disposing of Levy before his body was found. There were supposedly nanobots that could consume flesh like bacteria decaying organic matter in fast-forward.
Poor Levy. Maybe he shouldn’t have tried to put his dick where it didn’t belong.
But despite Kate’s nerves, none of the officers looked up as she passed. Kate had to check in at the front desk, but the officer there had merely tapped his console and pointed her toward the back. He’d even offered to pass an overlay guide to her ocular implants, if she had them, but Kate had told the flirtatious young man that she could find her way through a room to a door without assistance, thank you very much.
Nobody cared that she was here. It was as if she were just a normal woman who’d killed nobody and smuggled nothing, wanted by no relentless pursuers.
Kate reached the door with the brass plate reading CAPTAIN and paused.
She waited. When nothing happened, she said, “You in there?”
The voice of the police captain came back: “Who is it?”
“The fucking Pied Piper.”
“No, really.”
“Really. The Pied Fucking Piper.”
The door opened. Kate saw Dominic behind it, his hand on the knob.
“Oh, it’s you.”
“You’re surprised?”
“I thought you were one of my officers.”
Kate looked around. There must be female cops here somewhere, but she couldn’t see any, and that meant Captain Long had taken her voice for a dude’s. She reminded herself to work on her feminine articulation. What did girls talk about? Flowers and shit. Makeup. Tampons and long walks on the beach.
“Come in, come in.” He stepped aside to let Kate enter then closed the door behind her.
He nodded to a hard-looking wooden chair in front of a battered desk.
“Have a seat.”
Kate sat and crossed her legs. She reminded herself to stop wearing skirts because they meant you always had to shield your cooch, but Doc had never had that particular add-on, and the sensation of open air down there was still new enough to be interesting.
“I thought this was the central precinct in Manhattan,” Kate said, looking around. It looked a bit like a museum of mediocrity.
“It is.”
“Do you not have Beam access?”
“Of course we do,” said Dominic, sitting and trying not to attempt a look up Kate’s skirt, or a glance at her ample assets.
Kate thought of the door that hadn’t opened when it saw her coming and the antiquated equipment she’d seen crossing the room beyond. She eyed the freestanding screen on Dominic’s desk, which looked like a kid’s toy. She decided not to elaborate.
“So,” Kate said. “Conspiracy right here at the police station. Nice.”
Dominic’s eyes darted to the door.
“Don’t tell me this room isn’t private,” Kate said.
“No, no. Of course it is.”
But now Kate was wondering. With that wooden door? With these blinds that looked a hundred years old covering normal-looking glass?
“It just looks like hell. It’s electronically sound-cancelled with echo-backs that fill the gaps in the doorframe and walls. Here, see?” He turned the child’s toy to show Kate a large green privacy seal verification on what passed for a police console.
“There are gaps in the walls?”
“Don’t ask.”
Kate sighed. “Okay. Then why am I here?”
“It’s too risky to smuggle the shell out of this room. I don’t understand what’s on here — ” Dominic tapped a small slip drive, which Kate assumed contained Doc Stahl’s digital corpse, “ — but I don’t trust Omar any farther than I can throw him. Even though he’s pretty small and wouldn’t be hard to throw.”
Dominic smiled. Kate resisted the urge to roll her eyes at the captain’s eager-to-please expression and settled on a look of indifference.
“Anyway,” Dominic continued awkwardly, now looking at papers on his desk, “there’s some stuff I saw going into this dossier that raises my eyebrows. I don’t know why Omar didn’t choose someone boring, like a dead accountant who’d never stepped a toe over the line, but he was insistent. It had to be this spook, down to the Beam ID. The way it assembled, it might present as a person. If the station canvas detects a dead guy walking out of here in your purse, it might raise questions we don’t want to answer.”
“You want me to upload it now?”
“Just into storage. Your perimeter will hide it. Expand it later, assuming you trust your Beam connection.”
“I have plenty of protection.” But then again, she’d made that assumption before, and Xenia (or whoever Xenia reported to, be it Micah Ryan or someone higher up) had still found her even through Ryu’s anonymized router. Although it’s possible they’d just ID’d Doc. She didn’t know for sure that they’d s
nooped her connection.
It was a toss-up. She nodded again, figuring what the hell.
“You don’t think it’s a risk for us to be doing this here?” Kate looked around. “Right in the police station?”
“It was the only way to get the shell out undetected.”
“You could have uploaded it. Into storage.”
“I don’t trust this data.” He practically whistled as he said it, like the slip drive was hot and he wanted it gone. “I don’t want it in me.” He seemed to realize what he was saying and held up a hand. “I’m sure it’s fine for you.”
Now Kate wanted to be offended on principle. “Fine for the criminal’s head, but not for the good cop. Is that it?”
“No, no…”
Kate sighed and snatched the drive. There was no point in arguing. She knew what needed to be done, and that she’d need Doc to do it. Arguing that Dominic should take the shell was her own stubbornness. All the objections Dominic had raised during Omar’s proposal went away once you realized the disembodied Doc Stahl and the new and improved Kate Rigby were strangely compatible.
“Whatever. Let’s just get this over with. I don’t have a port, though.” She turned the drive over in her hands. It wasn’t a good idea for smugglers to have discoverable openings other than the natural ones.
“It’s contained inductive.”
“So I don’t need Fi.”
Dominic shook his head. “I took the liberty of keying it to you already. Just hold it close and bring up your dashboard. It’ll prompt you.”
“How did you key it to me already?”
Dominic seemed to wince. “I took a hair from Omar’s chair after you left.”