Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 118

by Neil Clarke

  Tishembra gave me a dark look. Then she crouched to read the message and I saw a slight uptick in the corner of her lip. “It says Robin and Zeke love Tishembra.” Then she ran her finger down the butterfly’s back to erase the message, and nudged it, sending it fluttering away.

  “It’s wrong,” Robin told her defiantly. “I don’t love Tishembra. I love Mommy.” Then he threw his arms around her neck and kissed her, before running inside to play with his friends.

  Tishembra and I went on to my office, where Glory Mina was waiting for us to arrive.

  When Tishembra saw the magistrate she turned to me with a look of desperation. I told her the truth. “It doesn’t matter.”

  A deep scan is performed with an injection of molecular-scale machines called Makers that map the body’s component systems. The data is fed directly into police records and there’s no way to fake the results. Tishembra should have known that, but she looked at me as if I’d betrayed her. “You don’t have to worry,” I insisted. “The scan is just a formality, a required response in the face of the baseless complaint filed against you.”

  Glory Mina watched me with a half smile. Naturally, her DI would have told her I was lying.

  I led Tishembra into a small exam room and had her sit in a large, cushioned chair. After Glory came in behind us, the office DI locked the door. I handed Tishembra a packet of Makers and she dutifully inhaled it. At the same time my DI whispered that Hera Poliu had arrived in the outer office. Sensing trouble, I looked at the magistrate. “I need to talk to her.”

  “Who?” Tishembra asked anxiously. “Zeke, what’s going on?”

  “Nothing’s going on. Everything will be fine.”

  Glory just watched me. I grunted, realizing she’d come not to observe the scan but to gauge the integrity of her Nahiku watch officer, which she had good cause to doubt. “I’ll be right back.”

  The office DI maintained a continuous surveillance of all rooms. I channeled its feed, keeping one eye on Tishembra and another on Hera as she looked around the front office with an anxious gaze. She appeared timid and unsure—nothing at all like the angry woman who had accosted me yesterday. “Zeke?” she called softly. “Are you here?”

  When the door opened ahead of me, she startled.

  “Zeke!” Hera’s hands were shaking. “Is it true Tishembra’s been scheduled for a scan? She didn’t have anything to do with Key. You have to know that. She hardly knew him. There’s no reason to suspect her. Tishembra is my best engineer and if we lose her this city will never recover . . . Zeke? What is it?”

  I think I was standing with my mouth open. “You filed the complaint that initiated the scan!”

  “Me? I . . . ” Her focus turned inward. “Oh, yesterday . . . I wasn’t myself. I took the wrong mood patch. I was out of my head. Is Tishembra . . . ?”

  The results of the scan arrived in my atrium. I glanced at them, and closed my eyes briefly in silent thanks. “Tishembra has passed her scan.”

  Against all expectation I’d made a home at Nahiku. I’d found a woman I loved, I’d made friends, and I’d gained trust—to the point that people would come to me for advice and guidance, knowing I wasn’t just another jackboot of the Commonwealth.

  In one day all that had been shattered and I wanted to know why.

  I sent a DI hunting through the datasphere for background on Key Lu. I sent another searching through Hera Poliu’s past. I thought about sending a third after Tishembra—but whatever the DI turned up would go into police records and I was afraid of what it might find.

  Tish had used a patch to calm herself, resolved to go into work as if nothing was changed. “I’m fine,” she insisted when I said I’d walk with her. She resented my coddling, but there were questions I needed to ask. We took the elevator, stepping out into a corridor enhanced with a seascape. The floor appeared as weathered boardwalk; our feet struck it in hollow thumps. Taking her arm, I gently guided her to a nook where a strong breeze blew, carrying what I’m told is the salt scent of an ocean, and hiding the sound of our voices. “Tish, is there anything you need to tell me?”

  Resentment simmered in her eyes. “What exactly are you asking?”

  “You spent time in the Far Reaches.”

  “So?”

  “Did you know about Key Lu?”

  I deserved the contempt that blossomed in her expression. “There are hundreds of tiny settlements out there, Zeke. Maybe thousands. I didn’t know him. I didn’t know him here, either.”

  The DI returned an initial infodump. My focus wavered. Tishembra saw it. “What?” she asked me.

  “Key Lu was a city finance officer, one who signed off on the water deal.”

  “The water deal with no water,” she amended bitterly. Crossing her arms, she glared at the ocean.

  “Someone tried to kill him,” I told her, letting my words blend in with the sea breeze.

  She froze, her gaze fixed on the horizon.

  “There was never a micrometeor. His railcar was sabotaged.”

  I couldn’t read her face and neither could the DI. Maybe it was the patch she’d used to level her emotions, but her fixed expression frightened me.

  She knew what was going on in my head, though. “You’re asking yourself who has the skill to do that, aren’t you? Who could fake a meteor strike? If it were me, I’d do it with explosive patches, one inside, one outside, to get the trajectory correct. Is that how it was done, Zeke?”

  “Yes.”

  Her gaze was still fixed on the horizon. “It wasn’t me.”

  “Okay.”

  She turned and looked me in the eye. “It wasn’t me.”

  The DI whispered that she spoke the truth. I smiled my relief and reached for her, but she backed away. “No, Zeke.”

  “Tish, come on. Don’t be mad. This day is making us both crazy.”

  “I haven’t accused you of being a murderer.”

  “Tish, I’m sorry.”

  She shook her head. “I remember when we used to trust each other. I think that was yesterday.”

  The second DI arrived with an initial report on Hera. Like an idiot, I scanned the file. To my surprise, I had a new suspect, but while I was distracted, Tishembra walked away.

  Glory Mina was waiting for me when I returned to my office. She’d tracked my DIs and copied herself on their reports. “You should have been a municipal cop,” she told me. She sat perched on the arm of a chair, her arms crossed and her eyes twinkling with amusement.

  “It’s not like I had a choice.”

  She cocked her head, allowing me the point. Reading from the DI’s report, she said, “So Hera Poliu had a brother. Four years ago he was exiled from Nahiku, and a year after that he was arrested and executed for an illegal enhancement.”

  “Hera lost her brother. She’s got to resent it. Maybe she resents anybody who has a—” I caught myself. “Anybody she thinks might have a quirk.”

  “Maybe,” Glory conceded. “And maybe that’s why she made a complaint against your intimate, but so what? It’s not your case, Zeke. Forward what you’ve got to whoever had the misfortune to be appointed as the criminal investigator in this little paradise and let it go.”

  I made compliant noises. She shook her head, not needing the DI to know I wasn’t being straight. “Walk with me.”

  “Where?”

  “The mausoleum. I’m going home. But on the way there, you’re going to listen to what I have to say about the necessity for boundaries.” She crooked her finger at me. I shrugged and followed. As we walked past the vistas she lectured me on the essential but very limited role of the Commonwealth police and warned me that my appointment as watch officer at Nahiku could end at any time. I listened patiently, knowing she would soon be gone.

  As we approached the mausoleum, I sent a DI to open the door. Inside was a long hallway with locked doors on either side. Behind the doors were storage chambers, most of them belonging to corporations. The third door on the left secured the poli
ce chamber. It opened as we approached, and closed again when we had stepped inside. One wall held clothing lockers. The other, ranks of cold storage drawers stacked four high. “Magistrate Glory Mina,” Glory said to the room DI. She stripped off her clothes and hung them in one of the lockers while the drawers slid past each other, rearranging themselves. Only two were empty. One was mine. The other descended from the top rank to the second level, where it opened, ready to receive her.

  Glory closed the locker door. She was naked and utterly unconcerned about it. She turned to me with a stern gaze. “You tried to pretend Key Lu was a victim. This once, I’m going to pretend you just missed a step in the background investigation. Zeke, as much as you don’t like being a cop, being an ex-cop can be a lot worse.”

  I had no answer for that. I knew she was right.

  She climbed into the drawer. As soon as she lay back, the cushions inflated around her, creating a moist interface all across the surface of her skin. The drawer slid shut and locked with a soft snick. Very soon, her ghost would be on its way to Red Star. Once again, I was on my own.

  No matter what Glory wanted, there was no way I was going to set this case aside. Key Lu was dead, while Tishembra had been threatened and made into a stranger, both to me and to her own son. I wanted to know who was responsible and why.

  Still, I knew how to make concessions. So I set up an appointment with an official who served part-time as a city cop, intending to hand over the case files, if only for the benefit of my personnel record. But before that could happen a roving DI returned to me with the news that the city’s auto-defense system had locked down a plague outbreak on Level 5 West. The address was Robin’s day-venture center.

  It took me ninety seconds to strip off my uniform and wrap on the impermeable hide of a vacuum-capable skinsuit, police black, with gold insignia. Then I grabbed a standard-issue bivouac kit that weighed half as much as I did, and I raced out the door.

  We call it plague, but it’s not. Each of us is an ecosystem. We’re inhabited by a host of Makers. Some repair our bodies and our minds, keeping us young and alert, and some run our atriums. But most of our Makers exist only to defend us against hostile nanotech—the snakes that forever prowl the Garden of Eden, the nightmares devised by twisted minds—and sometimes our defenses fail.

  A general alert had not been issued—that was standard policy to avoid panic—but as soon as I was spotted on the paths wearing my skinsuit, word went out through informal channels that something was wrong. By the time I reached the day-venture center people had already guessed where I was going and a crowd was beginning to form against the backdrop of prairie. The city’s emergency response team hadn’t arrived yet, so questions were shouted at me. I refused to answer. “Stay back!” I commanded, issuing an order for the center’s locked door to open.

  In an auto-defense lockdown, a gel barrier is extruded around the suspect zone. The door slid back to reveal a wall of blue-tinged gel behind it. I pulled up the hood of my skinsuit and let it seal. Then I leaned into the gel wall, feeling it give way slowly around me, and after a few seconds I was able to pass through. As soon as I was clear, the door closed and locked behind me.

  The staff and children were huddled on one side of the room—six adults and twenty-two kids. They looked frightened, but otherwise okay. Robin wasn’t with them. The director started to speak but I couldn’t hear him past the skinsuit, so I forced an atrial link to every adult in the room, “Give me your status.”

  The director spoke again, this time through my atrium. “It’s Robin. He was hit hard only a couple of minutes ago. Shakes and sweats. His system’s chewing up all his latents and he went down right away. I think it’s targeted. No one else has shown any signs.”

  “Where is he?”

  The director looked toward the nap room.

  I didn’t want to think too hard, I just wanted to get Robin stable, but the director’s assessment haunted me. A targeted assault meant that Robin alone was the intended victim; that the hostile Maker had been designed to activate in his unique ecosystem.

  I found him on the floor, trembling in the grip of a hypoglycemic seizure, all his blood sugars gone to fuel the reproduction of Makers in his body—both defensive and assault—as the tiny machines ramped up their populations to do battle on a molecular scale. His eyelids fluttered, but I could only see the whites. His black curls were sodden with sweat.

  I unrolled the bivouac kit with its thick gel base designed for a much larger patient. Then I lifted his small body, laid him on it, and touched the activation points. The gel folded around him like a cocoon. The bivouac was a portable version of the cold storage drawer that had enfolded Glory. Robin’s core temperature plummeted, while an army of defensive Makers swarmed past the barrier of his skin in a frantic effort to stabilize him.

  The city’s emergency team came in wearing sealed skinsuits. I stood by as they scanned the other kids, the staff, the rooms, and me, finding nothing. Only Robin was affected.

  I stripped off my hood. Out in the playroom, the gel membrane was coming down and the kids were going home, but inside the bivouac Robin lay in stasis, his biological processes all but stopped. Even the data on his condition had been pared to a trickle. Still, I’d seen enough to know what was happening: the assault Makers were attacking Robin’s neuronal connections, writing chaos into the space where Robin used to be. We would lose him if we allowed him to revive.

  I checked city records for the date of his last backup. I couldn’t find one. Robin had turned three a few weeks ago. I remembered we’d talked about taking him in to get a backup done . . . but we’d been busy.

  The emergency team came back into the nap room with a gurney. Tishembra came with them. One glance at her face told me she’d been heavily tranked.

  At first she didn’t say anything, just watched with lips slightly parted and an expression of quiet horror on her face as the bivouac was lifted onto the gurney. But as the gurney was rolled away she asked in a defeated voice, “Is he going to die?”

  “Of course he’s not going to die.”

  She turned an accusing gaze on me. “My DI says you’re lying.”

  I cursed myself silently and tried again, determined to speak the truth this time. “He’s not going to die, because I won’t let him.”

  She nodded, as if I’d got it right. The trank had turned her mood to smooth, hard glass. “I made this happen.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She turned her right hand palm up. A blue prairie butterfly rested in it, crushed and lifeless. I picked it up; spread its wings open. The message was only a little blurred from handling. On the left wing I read, You lived, and on the right, so he dies.

  So someone had watched as we’d dropped Robin off that morning. I looked up at Tishembra. “No,” I told her. “That’s not the way it’s going to work.”

  The attack on Robin was a molecular crime, which made it my case, and I was prepared to use every resource of the police to solve it.

  Tishembra nodded. Then she left, following the gurney.

  I could work anywhere, using my atrium, so I stayed for a time. First I packed up every bit of data I had on Robin’s condition and sent it to six different police labs, hoping at least one could come up with the design for a Maker that could stop the assault on Robin’s brain cells. The odds of success would go up dramatically if I could get the specs of the assault Maker—and the easiest way to do that was to track down the twisted freak who’d designed it.

  Easy steps first: I sent a DI into the datasphere to assemble a list of everyone at Nahiku with extensive molecular design experience. The DI came back with one name: mine.

  So I was dealing with a talented hobbyist.

  It could be anyone.

  I sent the DI out again. No record was kept of butterfly messages—they were designed to be anonymous—but surveillance records were collected on every public path. I instructed the DI to access the records and assemble a list of every
one who’d set foot on Level 5 at any time that day, because the blue prairie butterflies could only be accessed from there. The list that came back was long. Name after name scrolled through my visual field, many that I recognized, but only one stood out in my mind: Hera Poliu.

  I summoned the vid attached to her name. It was innocuous. She’d been taking the stairs between levels and had paused briefly on the landing. Still, it bothered me. Hera had been involved with Key Lu, she’d filed the complaint against Tishembra, and now I had her on Level 5. Coincidence maybe . . . but I remembered the chill I’d felt when she accosted me in the corridor . . . and how confused she’d been when I reminded her of the incident.

  I went by my office and changed back into my uniform. Then I checked city records for Hera’s location. She was at the infirmary, sitting with Tishembra . . . Tishembra, who’d been a quirk just like Hera’s brother except she’d eluded punishment while Hera’s brother was dead. Maybe it was baseless panic, but I sprinted for the door.

  The infirmary had a reception room with a desk, and a hallway behind it with small rooms on either side. The technician at the desk looked up as I burst in. “Robin Indens!” I barked.

  “Critical care. End of the hall.”

  I sprinted past him. A sign identified the room. I touched the door and it snapped open. The bivouac had been set up on a table in the center of the room. Slender feeder lines descending from the ceiling were plugged into its ports. Tishembra and Hera stood alongside the bivouac, Hera with a comforting arm around Tishembra’s shoulders. They both looked up as I burst in. “Zeke?” Tishembra asked, with an expression encompassing both hope and dread.