Incarnate- Essence

by Thomas Harper

  “Eshe?” Rosaline said.

  “Rosy?” I replied, looking back to her as the train came to a stop in Colorado Springs.

  “Rosy…” she said, “only people close to me call me that.”

  “Sorry,” I said, “Major Riviera.”

  She said nothing for a moment before continuing.

  “That box you took,” she said, “from the basement of that trafficking house.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Our people‘ve been lookin’ at it,” she said, “it’s definitely a computer server. Advanced hardware – the kind of stuff you really only find on the supercomputer server farms at a place like Benecorp.”

  “Then it was Benecorp?” I asked.

  “Doesn’t appear to be,” Rosy said, “unless they’re usin’ different engineering methods than we’re aware of. Doesn’t really match anything in our records, and there isn’t any indication of who made it. Not on the hardware itself, or saved in the memory.”

  “Was there anything saved on it?”

  She shook her head, “no. Wiped clean. And it was wiped extremely thoroughly. Usually when someone wipes a computer, at least bits and pieces can be recovered. But this had nothing. Completely blank.”

  “I wonder what it was doing there,” I thought aloud.

  “No idea,” Rosaline said, “some of our people think it mighta been made by the AKs. But most of us have our doubts. What little hardware production they do is usually pretty crude. Nothin’ more than Raspberry Pis, rubber duckies, pineapples, and LAN turtles. They specialize in software. Programming and hacking.”

  “Interesting that the house we went to was the only one being guarded,” I said, “and just happened to be the one with-”

  The hyperloop train had stopped in Colorado Springs. Out the window I spotted someone I recognized.

  “Eshe?”

  “There,” I said, pointing through the window and out the tunnel to the platform, “I know that guy.”

  “Who?”

  “That Indian guy,” I said, “I saw him at the coffee shop one night. The one that blew up. And again after the explosion.”

  The train started moving, but just before the platform went out of sight, I spotted the second Indian man I’d seen near the Bitter Brews of Bengal after the bombing.

  “Do you think he was involved in the attack?” Rosy asked.

  “I don’t…no, I don’t think so,” I said, “I think one of them is the owner’s son. Sujay, I think.”

  “Yes,” she said, “Sujay. I met him after the attack. He and his mother identified the body of their other employee. Gopal.”

  I turned back to Rosy, “do you have a picture of Gopal?”

  Rosy shook her head, “I can’t divulge that. Company policy. Not without his family’s consent.”

  “But you’re sure the body they identified was him?” I asked.

  “Both of them identified the body as their employee,” Rosy said, “and he was Sujay’s friend. If anyone could identify him…we had the body sent back to India. To his parents.”

  “I still don’t understand why they targeted Bitter Brews of Bengal,” I said.

  “Actually, that’s not the weirdest part,” Rosy said.

  I looked back to her, still being pressed into my seat from acceleration.

  “Every business that was targeted in that attack,” she continued, “in all of the LoC, was connected to people in India – major shareholders in India, receiving imports from India, didn’t seem to matter what the connection was. All that mattered is that there was a connection. For whatever reason, they just seemed to target companies with ties to India.”

  “Do you have a list of all the companies hit in the attack?” I asked, “and their Indian connection?”

  Rosy raised an eyebrow. “I do.”

  “Can you send it to me?” I asked.

  “We have our people looking at-”

  “Just humor me.”

  “You really do remind me of someone. Sure, I can send it to you.”

  “Thanks.”

  Company

  Owner

  # Attacked

  Locations

  Casualties

  Connection

  Nature of Connect

  AgBron

  Jonathan Thurman

  1

  Pueblo

  0 Dead;

  6 Injured

  Jaidev Chakraborty

  Major Shareholder

  Bitter Brews of Bengal

  Bita Mukherjee

  2

  Cortez; Cortez

  2 Dead;

  13 Injured

  Kali Sanyai

  Majority Shareholder

  Carnival Cuisine

  Pedro Sousa

  2

  Fort Collins; Durango

  6 Dead;

  11 Injured

  Kunal Adhikari

  Indian Imports

  Cruise Control

  Brandon Callahan

  1

  Denver

  2 Dead;

  13 Injured

  Pravin Mazumdar

  Customer Service

  Foothill Fetishes

  Conrad Glover

  1

  Denver

  5 Dead;

  19 Injured

  Harendra Ghatak

  Indian Imports

  Glover’s

  Conrad Glover

  2

  Denver; Colorado Springs

  3 Dead;

  12 Injured

  Harendra Ghatak

  Indian Imports

  GoDen

  Natalie Nordstrom

  2

  Colorado Springs; Durango

  4 Dead;

  14 Injured

  Sadia Bhaduri

  Major Shareholder

  I studied the table for some time. There didn’t seem to be any connection between the businesses themselves. In fact, some of them were competitors. I searched the internet for the names of the Indian connections. None of them seemed to have any business connections either. They didn’t even live in the same parts of India. Kunal Adhikari, although still an Indian national with company headquarters in New Delhi, actually lived in Brazil.

  I looked further into Kali Sanyai, the connection to Bitter Brews of Bengal. Most of what I found were tabloid articles. The woman, Kali, was granddaughter of the man who founded the company that owns Bitter Brews of Bengal. She had inherited his majority stake in the company, but she seemed more interested in being a socialite than in running the business, leaving the position of CEO to her cousin Manas.

  Kali had an online beauty vlog, attended Bollywood parties with her alternating line of boyfriends. She was currently dating the charismatic Colonel Brijesh Sikdar, who was working for ISRO – the Indian Space Research Organization – on the joint Indian-Brazilian-European Mars mission. She’s a patron of Indian arts and historical preservation. She often travelled with nine other women from West Bengal, deemed the Mahavidya by one Brazilian blog, after the Adi Parashakti in Hinduism, because of Kali’s name. The other nine were socialites and social media personalities as much as Kali. All nine were activists for the poor in India and very nationalistic. But Kali was the only one of the ten that regularly showed up at political functions.

  “Hm,” I grunted, doing searches for a few of the other Indian connections.

  “What is it?” Major Riviera asked.

  “I think I’m seeing the connection,” I said.

  She waited for me to explain.

  “All of these Indian connections,” I said, “support this emerging Bhaarateey Raashtreey Paartee. The BRP. Hindu nationalists.”

  “Why would Indian nationalists be going outside of India with their money?” Rosy asked, “and why were they targeted in this attack?”

  “Nationalism doesn’t necessarily mean isolationist,” I said, “especially if their bringing more money in than they’re spending outside. Why Benecorp targeted them…and why they specifically target
ed them in the LoC, I have no-”

  An image in my search for Kali caught my attention. I clicked to enlarge. The picture showed Kali getting out of a limo at a press gala. I could just barely see the image of the man sitting in the limo waiting to get out behind her. The man I’d seen at the coffee shop after the bombing, and then again on the platform in Colorado Springs. The man who had been with Bita’s son Sujay. The caption beneath the image says that Kali was showing up at the gala with her half-brother Gopal.

  “What’s going on?” Rosy asked.

  “Bita and Sujay lied to you,” I said, “Gopal is still alive. That was him I saw on the hyperloop platform back in Colorado Springs.”

  “How do you-”

  She stopped when I sent her the article, staring with her mouth partly open in surprise.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” she said just above a whisper.

  Major Riviera parted ways with me at Walsenburg station, where I caught a self-driving shuttle heading west on US-160 – a highway name kept only because that’s what everyone knew it as. The full-sized van was able to drive fast, getting up to one hundred fifty miles per hour on straightaways, but it was still over a two-hour ride back to Cortez.

  I sat down in one of the back seats, which offered more room than on the hyperloop, and watched as five other passengers climbed in before the van took off. I didn’t know any of the other five people riding in the shuttle with me, so it afforded me time to think.

  I opened the internet browser on my ARs, once again seeing the picture of Kali with her half-brother Gopal. The picture was only a little over a year old, shortly after Gopal graduated high school. Gopal and Kali had the same mother after she remarried when Kali’s father died, leaving the majority share of his father’s company to Kali when she was fifteen. She was now thirty-four years old, Gopal nineteen. The position of CEO had gone to Kali’s cousin, who had worked under her father, after Kali outvoted the rest of the board of directors to put him in charge. Since then she took a mostly hands-off approach to the company.

  The parent company of Bitter Brews of Bengal, called Sanyai Baajaar, mostly did business within India and the surrounding region. It wasn’t an incredibly large company, but it was no mom-and-pop operation, either.

  Kali was no stranger to campaign events for BRP candidates. Sometimes she even spoke. A major point of contention for her, and for the BRP in general, was the free grade agreement being negotiated amongst numerous powerful countries, including India. The Global Prosperity Free Trade Agreement, or GPFTA. The BRP particularly took issue with provisions that had to do with the European Union and Sovereign acquiring economic hegemony in the Middle East. The Bhaarateey Raashtreey Paartee didn’t have nearly enough seats in parliament to sway the GPFTA negotiations one way or the other.

  None of that explained what had happened in the attacks at the Bitter Brews of Bengal. It crossed my mind that Bita was lying about Gopal being dead. But it could easily be the case that she didn’t know. It still puzzled me why Gopal’s death needed to be faked, regardless of the motivations. But clearly Bita’s son Sujay knew Gopal was alive, whether Bita did or not.

  But what are they up to? And why would the half-brother of a well-known patriotic Indian socialite need to fake his death?

  My thoughts immediately went to conspiracy. That there was some conspiracy that these Indian companies investing in LoC companies were perpetrating, and that Gopal, Sujay, and possibly Bita were involved. To what end, I couldn’t even imagine. It could be something as banal as making money, possibly to help prop up the BRP. Investing in the LoC, where there is no government red tape, might just be an easy way to extract money from foreigners. But that didn’t explain why Benecorp was willing to attack them.

  You assume it’s Benecorp, Evita would say, but you see Benecorp behind everything.

  There was no denying that the manner of the attack had Benecorp written all over it, particularly the way the bomber in Cortez died. And Colonel Reynolds had said it wasn’t the first time Benecorp has been behind destruction within the LoC, although theirs had usually been sabotaging crops or electrical grids, not specific businesses.

  The second suspects on my list were the CSA and PRA governments. Both had not been shy about lobbing rhetorical bombs at the LoC. They both loved to claim that the LoC harbored terrorists – forty-eights, narco-terrorists, Islamic terrorists, cyber-terrorists, transgenics – and both claimed the territory for themselves, accusing the LoC denizens of treason. Conrad Glover’s claim that the well-armed population of the LoC keeping both regimes out appeared to hold true, as both the CSA and the PRA tolerated the existence of the LoC to an extent.

  As far as Colonel Reynolds knew, neither regional government had perpetrated any violent acts of terrorism, instead preferring to wage war with the LoC online. It was primarily the CSA and PRA governments against which the cybersecurity divisions of both LoC Security and Liberty Protection guarded businesses and individuals. The power, transportation, and old military infrastructures within the LoC – as well as the Warren and Malmstrom Air Force Bases in The Republic, Reynolds had told me, which both firms also helped secure – were constant targets for cyberattacks by both regional governments. Both security firms had actually been started by their respective founders for the purpose of protecting their vast infrastructure holdings against such cyberattacks, which were largely perpetrated by the two regional governments. It was their attempt to get the people to lose faith in their stateless system and fall into the arms of one of the regional governments. Blowing up buildings was not a good way to achieve this end, meaning the bombings within the LoC were not the modus operandi of either regional government. And neither government had put forth a concerted effort to blame the other one for the attacks, which meant it didn’t seem as if one side committed the attack to try and lay blame with the other side.

  And it doesn’t explain the Indian connection.

  The third suspect on my list were the Anonymous Knights. They were somewhat of a wild card as far as their motivations were concerned. All we really knew is that they hated mesh networks and transgenics, believing these things were affronts to some God they claimed resided on the original internet. They were using a version of Shirou’s virus to shut down any mesh networks they could hack into. Yet when Benecorp sent those people into Mexico to make Shift, it was the AKs that advertised it as a new Gene Doping concoction online.

  Getting the transgenic crowd to take Shift might be a way of getting rid of them, I thought, but it seems a strange, roundabout way of doing it.

  It’s possible the AKs perpetrated the attack in the LoC. They had tried to get that kid to setup a bomb at the transgenic club. Major Riviera said the AKs were hackers, all about software and programming, only using hardware to further these ends – like the rubber ducky I took from the AK trying to blow up Salia’s joint. But it seemed that they weren’t above a little terrorism, either.

  Yet it didn’t make sense why they would target companies doing business with Indian connections – the AKs were an international group, so they weren’t motivated by economic nationalism. They didn’t seem to have any particular problem with India.

  Dissension in the ranks? The AKs were never a tightly coordinated group to begin with…

  But from what I could tell, they also weren’t fans of he PRA or CSA governments, nor Benecorp or Enduracorp, so I couldn’t see them doing anything specifically for any of their benefits. However, if the AKs weren’t above using the forty-eights to further their own purposes – whatever those purposes may be – it’s possible they would attempt to manipulate governments or corporations to help them.

  But why…why did Gopal fake his death?

  It was times like this that I wished I could count on Akira. And why I needed her to stay. Especially now that I didn’t have Sachi or any of her other resources. Like Carlito’s ability to infiltrate governments and corporations.

  I was growing increasingly concerned about Akira’s mental st
ate. I couldn’t help but wonder about the state of her brain implants.

  Did the doctors mess something up when they examined her brain implants? They were illegally installed by a shady doctor, so there might not be a well-known protocol for fixing them.

  …or someone screwed with them on purpose.

  Either way, if the implants weren’t working properly, Akira might never be the same. And in all likelihood, she would only get worse.

  Of course, your brain isn’t in much better shape, I could just hear Evita say.

  My right hemisphere’s behavior during the interview had been the first time in a while that a split-brain experience caused me significant grief. It further drove home why I preferred staying out of the spotlight.

  Yet, as time goes on, I could feel my right hemisphere diverge more and more from how I thought of my unified self – it was becoming its own person. Not just that it was angry and full of hate, but that it was becoming fully actuated as a separate consciousness.

  Too bad it never thinks of anything productive, I thought, it might actually be nice if I could think about two different things at once.

  There was certainly a lot of things to consider. But it always came back to Benecorp. To whatever Benecorp and Jiang Wei – or, rather, Imelda – were up to. The bombings in the LoC. Getting the kids addicted to Shift. Sending those Shift producers into Mexico while we were there. The GPFTA. The experiments they were running on kids in the DRC. The Enduracorp split by Anita Patrice, who almost certainly was aware of Benecorp’s attempts to engineer reincarnation. I couldn’t help but feel like they all had to be connected.

  Benecorp was attempting to reverse engineer the reincarnation phenomenon. This was almost certainly self-serving. I could just imagine someone like Calvin Lind wanting to live forever and continue running the world from his Benecorp stronghold. Whether he planned to share that power with Imelda or not wasn’t clear. Nor was what Imelda got out of her relationship with Calvin Lind.