CHILLER

by Gregory Benford

  George sat back and puffed cool air in and out, waiting for his heart to stop thumping wildly against his ribs.

  Enough. The dance at the end of time faded.

  His shoulder muscles protested against his hours at the keyboard, but he willed away their pain.

  Time for a little fun, then, before saying good-bye. He had spent a good deal of his real estate income on computer costs, fashioning programs that could insinuate themselves into the I2 systems. He started the timer of his Trojan horse. Many hours from now, during a quiet time for the Immortality Incorporated computers, the Trojan would come out to play.

  He checked again his taps on the I2 telephone system. Delicately he opened the line to their phone in the bunk room. Nothing, not even background music. He jumped to their storage bay line, where the chillers were.

  Eeeeeep! George jumped. Going through the local Tustin switching center, a three-step electronic handshake had to occur. Sometimes that backfed a chirp of noise into the line. He hoped there was no noise on the storage bay line, but if anybody picked up the receiver, curious, he would just hang up.

  Evidently nobody did. He listened to a conversation between two minor I2 volunteers, rambling on about the Dodgers while they did routine tasks.

  Still, it worked. Someday he would need to eavesdrop. He had programmed his portable car phone so that he could patch through the Tustin switching center in seconds. He could park his car near I2 and approach on foot, listening to them talk inside.

  That was for another day. He slid neatly out of the I2 system and fled, exploding the dummy telephone numbers he had used to mask his entrance. Anyone who tried to trace him would find a handful of puzzling leads to pizza parlors and sporting goods stores.

  Now for the more difficult game. He tapped in digits with trembling fingers. Last night he had culled information from a small, tightly knit message board group, one he had spent a year getting to know. He had used a nom de Hague, of course, making electronic pals, trading insider dope, generous with dialup numbers and passwords that he no longer needed.

  But the dialup he needed cost money, on top of the network friendships. This single telephone number, plus access code words, had cost him ten thousand dollars.

  On his shimmering green screen appeared

  J00TR01 333 0000

  0000

  LEN 24 125 893

  002 000 000 000 000 000 8

  This was what the expensive telephone number looked like to the switching system. The LEN was the line equipment number that gave access to the true hardware, opening digital doors.

  For tense minutes he tiptoed through protocols, guards, filters. His breathing came in shallow, tight gasps.

  “Bonanza! Bless you, Lord!” he cried out as the screen cleared, giving him access to the Orange County Sheriff’s records file.

  Detective Stern was an orderly type, he saw. The files on the Karen Bocelin case were logged under a special action brief. Detective Detweiler had logged in hardly anything. That confirmed George’s perception of Detweiler as a muscle mechanic, out of step with modern police work. But still dangerous, he reminded himself.

  George patrolled through high-security files, popping them open with hacker tricks, digital burglary tools. There was a cross-correlation chart that connected details of Karen’s case with the earlier waitress file. He pounced on it.

  Data, reports, text—all slid by as he scrolled through the richness, feeding. Heart thumping. Skin cooled by drying sweat.

  There was a file on him, on the Charles Goff persona. A fabric of numbers, Social Security and credit and the address of the crummy Santa Ana apartment George had rented for his nonself. He ran his real estate work out of there. That helped give the persona convincing details.

  The file said Stern had already searched it. Fine. They got nothing. The leads would trickle away into the morass of shady real estate.

  No hint in the report that anybody suspected the apartment was a blind. They had checked the credit with TRW and found him to be a fine fellow, a solid citizen of the data universe.

  They were sniffing around, getting close. But so far Charles Goff was nothing special to them. A suspect, sure, but with nothing more to go on, they would have no great interest. Perhaps. Until they wanted to talk to him, of course, and found that he never stayed in the Santa Ana apartment.

  His hands gripped the table until they turned white. Excitement fretted the pale air. He did not dare let his shaky hands linger over the keyboard. A momentary impulse might make them do something stupid, act on their own. George felt his body shiver with feverish fancies, wild, darting ideas.

  Control. Planning. He had to hold his other half in, not let it seize him.

  But joy spurted through him, threatening his control. The cross-correlation chart confirmed George’s hopes.

  He could recall pieces of that night now, and they matched what the cops had found out. He had wrapped Karen in a sheet from her bedroom closet. The dim lights outside number nineteen had been easy to reach; he had unscrewed the bulbs. He waited half an hour, wiping his fingerprints from every surface he could remember touching, and letting anybody nearby who was curious about the failed lights get bored.

  The worst part had been carrying her to the trunk and rolling the body in. That had taken five excruciating seconds in which his heart didn’t beat. Then he was gone, his Chevy purring down Edinger in the solemn night.

  Nobody behind the Vons. One glance around, just one, because furtiveness drew attention to itself. For an instant he regretted his god is custom plates; too easy to remember.

  Pop the trunk. Biceps bulging, getting his legs into the lift.

  She came out easily. Up and over. He kept the smelly, urine-stained sheet and threw it into a trash can miles away.

  He called up the police report on the site. Jargon, boilerplate paragraphs, then a note that jarred him.

  Vons worker Marco Cardena found dead dog in same dumpster “a week or so ago.”

  The dog.

  Blank.

  He could not remember what he had done with Susan Hagerty’s dog.

  Of course he took it from the beach, of course he dumped it. But where? He had no memory.

  Blanks.

  There were many of them. Small details he could not call up, as if they had been stored somewhere in his head and then when he went to get them they were gone, stolen, had never really been memories at all.

  The year when he was eleven. That was a big, yawning abyss. A blank that drew him back to that time, against his will.

  His parents, rotting. Their stretched faces, blurred and hollowed by putrefaction. Waxy skin, staring empty eyes. The stink.

  His mind rushed away from the images, his analytical self gradually getting some control of his racing mind.

  Nothing more. The events following his parents’ death were lost, erased by God’s merciful way. He had gnawed at that missing chunk of himself for years. It never yielded.

  It was as if he had started to blot out parts of himself then. He would find that a football game he knew he had watched last week, could remember anticipating—had dissolved. Blank.

  It was always something he felt about. His memory for numbers, details, or names was flawless. But emotions—the swirling currents, freighted with fire and rage, brimming desire and hopeless yearning—those moments fled, vanished. Deleted.

  He must have brought the dog back to that same dumpster.

  Why? Some deep, reflexive pattern?

  He grimaced, his heart racing. Pattern. He was showing an unconscious pattern. And that was how they caught serial killers.

  I’m a serious killer, he thought chest tight with anguish. Karen was a mistake. Something happened to me there.

  Something buried in the gray spaces beyond memory.

  Blanks.

  They floated like thick snowstorms in his mind. Evaporated moments, condensed into opaque, pearly fog.

  George’s hands trembled as he typed out commands, copy
ing a few of the documents, getting them stuttered into his modem. Then he dropped out of the sheriff’s records. Again he covered his tracks, burning his bridges behind him in the Pacific Telesis webbing.

  He stood and paced around the apartment, trying to stifle the shrill alarms that rang in his mind. He gazed down at the courtyard of the apartment complex, and the blue slick surface of the swimming pool licked at something inside him, bringing old fevers teeming up into his nostrils, forcing a strangled gasp from his throat.

  Wet. Dark. Cold. The black lake. He whirled away from the window.

  Blanks.

  Gray spaces skating through his mind.

  Karen? The same dumpster?

  He lurched over to his exercise machines. A sweaty workout would make him clean again. He tore off his clothes and threw himself on the chromed bars.

  14

  KATHRYN

  “There.” She decisively signed the last document.

  Ray Constantine stacked the inch-thick paperwork and ceremoniously shook her hand. “Welcome.”

  “When do I get my bracelet?”

  “I’ll phone the order in. A couple days.”

  Kathryn sat back, feeling as though a trumpet should sound somewhere at such a big moment. The I2 stereo system was thrumming with a Dixieland number, ignoring her mood. She blew a puff at wisps of hair that had tumbled down before her eyes. “I’m not quite sure why I did this.”

  “Fastest signup on record,” Ray said neutrally.

  “I borrowed the money for the insurance installment from a friend of mine.”

  “At your age, it doesn’t come to much.”

  “Okay, you can cut the Gary Cooper act. When a lady makes a leading statement, you’re supposed to ask what she means.”

  Ray blinked. “Leading statement.”

  “Nobody can be this dense. Ray, doesn’t it strike you as odd, my signing up as an I2 member so quickly?”

  “Me, I wonder how come everybody doesn’t.”

  “Just because I worked for you guys didn’t mean I was convinced, you know. But seeing Susan suspended, how much it takes to buck the system—it made me choose sides.”

  “You did a damned fine job through all that mess.” Ray struggled visibly for words. “You’ve got guts.”

  “Well, thanks.” Ray was not a man to hand out compliments like party favors. Still, she could see she would have to go to Sheila for some real talk.

  “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re feeling,” Ray said, smiling ruefully, “just ‘cause we don’t dwell on it.”

  She laughed, stood up, and gave him a kiss on his tanned forehead. “Vive la différence,” she said, and went back to her job. So much for grand moments.

  She had devoted several hours of her shift to signing up, and now that it was done, she needed something to occupy her mind. Ray went back to checking the liquid nitrogen connections. She took refuge in her skills.

  She pointedly didn’t listen to radio or watch TV. The incessant media circus had permanently cured her of that. Even print journalism, from the circumspect Los Angeles Times down to the National Enquirer level, was like a steady, distracting drum roll. A moronic inferno of hateful insinuations. And some rasping, abrading truths.

  The truth wasn’t pretty. They had spirited away a body, and Kathryn was implicated. Stern had made a snap judgment that the three men, ambling into the main bay, must have done the job—and only that had kept her out of jail. Stern simply had not believed that Kathryn would take part in such a ghoulish thing, probably because she was a woman. Well, sexism had its uses.

  Kathryn herself had trouble believing she had done it. She had acted out of instinct. Alex had needed help, so she had given it. A path ordained by tradition. How had that old country and western song put it? “Stand by Your Man.” So she had.

  It had gotten her into a bad spot, and then gotten her out. After all, she owed her freedom to a certain gentlemanly reluctance to think that a lady would do such things.

  Take your gains with your losses, girl, she thought moodily, sitting at the main desk in the Immortality Incorporated office. What was that Alex had said? Don’t take sides, but keep score. Well, so far we’re losing. Losing big.

  Kathryn dragged her attention back to her work. She had put in her time at Fashion Circus, scurried about on I2 business, seen Alex as often as she could (considering how much time he had to put into talking to lawyers)—and still she felt restless. She logged into the autosecretary and concentrated.

  First, a list of incoming calls, arranged by category. They were tagged by the voice reader for individual I2 employees, but most ended up in the “general public” column. Which meant they were mostly pest calls, rumor-mongerers.

  Second, electronically transferred utility billings, flagged for the I2 bank accounts. General Telephone, SoCal Edison, water, trash. She would check them over for errors, and if, as usual, there were none, she would forward them to the accountant for electronic authorization to pay.

  Third, news items culled by their electronic clipping service. It surveyed print and visual media, and the list ran down through three full screens’ worth. Kathryn surveyed a few and groaned. CASE OF THE CORPSICLE. CHILLERS PUT THE CHILL ON THE LAW. WHO STOLE SUSAN HAGERTY?

  Fourth, personal messages. Ah, a please-call-back from Alex. Her day brightened. She would have preferred something short, sweet, romantic, maybe mildly dirty, but he had been distracted these last few days.

  She remembered that the memorial service for Susan was only two hours from now. And here she was, swarming with carnal thoughts. Well, perhaps the service would be a useful boundary for them. They should go away somewhere for the weekend.

  She tried his home number. Busy. She stabbed repeat call and said “Silky Thighs” with her voice low and musky. The tape would add that to the beginning of the English-accented “is urgently trying to reach” message that would now try Alex’s number every minute. Romance by the numbers; who said there was no such thing as progress?

  She rewarded herself with a new technotrick that had been installed in the autosec. She had spent yesterday trying out the new voice-writer, writing a letter of protest to the Los Angeles Times. She thumbed it up on the main working screen.

  From there on the program had simply assigned the most probable-sounding word. To start off the program yesterday she had pronounced a few minutes of vowels and words, following instructions. From what the monitor called her “variations in idiom, adjacent and verbal modalities,” the program had gotten nearly everything right, cleaning up most of the mistakes.

  She worked through the rest of the letter, polishing it even though she knew the Times probably wouldn’t run it anyway. As she printed it out the thought suddenly struck: This is what my mother used to do. She was a maven of the op-ed page, a walking bundle of opinions, sensitivities, ferociously worded arguments. Every week, a fresh volley in newsprint. All from a frail, worn woman with parchment skin who was lying in her deathbed and knew it.

  She shivered. The afternoon sunlight outside slanted low, bringing an autumn gloom.

  Quitting time. She had asked to leave early, to attend the memorial service for Susan Hagerty. She kept her copy of the letter and sent the text electronically to the Times number. If she didn’t save a hard copy, there was a good chance that the entire message would never be more than gossamer phosphors on a screen. Unless they published it, the entire matter would have been carried out through dancing electrons on cathode ray tubes, words without weight. She liked a certain solidity in her world.

  Maybe I need more of it, she thought, getting into her car. I wonder if that’s what Alex means to me? He has his own fragile side, but he’s rooted, steady.

  She had never seen him wear stripes with plaid, either. The man had many pleasant aspects.

  15

  GEORGE

  He steadied himself with fifty one-handed push-ups, then some weightlifting. Lats and pecs and biceps. Straining, grunting. Bulging ropes of m
uscle reflected in the plates of chromed steel.

  The gray spaces in his mind faded. His analytic self spoke clearly now, telling him what to do.

  Muscles oiled by sweat, he sat down and went through the things from Karen’s apartment. Scraps, paperwork, items he had taken on impulse, out of urges his mind would not recall.

  The whole time there was now a chalky, vacant zero. But he had the records.

  Why? Until this moment he had not thought about these scraps. Now he saw with a sharp jolt that—of course!—they were strong evidence against him. How had he forgotten them?

  Blanks.

  Scattershot colors fractured the air at the edges of his vision. His head jerked around, muscles knotting, trying to catch the fleeting traceries. Finally he calmed himself.

  Karen had said something about being the personal assistant to this Mr. Lomax, and here were his routine billings. The Saddlery. Neiman Marcus. Boutique International. Pascal’s. Lomax had running accounts in dozens of the best shops and restaurants. The man got around. Vitality Corporation must be prosperous.

  Something caught at the edge of his mind. He was making mistakes, he knew that. Whatever had made him kill Karen was now working on him slowly, silently. Bringing flashing, discordant images into his mind. Fretting his sleep with vibrant dreams. Snatching him up from slumber into hoarse-voiced hysteria.

  But now he forced that side of him back down. He exerted the rule of his analytical self. The exercises helped. After some leg lifts he had himself under control again and was ready to begin thinking, planning, readying himself for his next task. His Calling.

  He began by replaying tapes from the news coverage of I2. Shots of the crowds, the smug faces of the cryonicists, their self-advertising speeches. He could look at them now with cold, patient hatred.

  So arrogant, so blind. So rich, from selling their damnation to the desperate. Rich enough to skip off on a Hawaiian holiday.

  He went into the kitchen, feet like wood thumping on the Formica. Popped open the refrigerator. Cartons of Mexican takeout, moldy tacos and burritos, half-eaten during the endless hacker hours. He threw them out, clearing the ground for his analytical side.