by B. V. Larson
Grabbing her hand, I formed up a professional smile and walked her off the elevator. We crowded past the hogs, who only seemed interested in boarding the elevator in a hurry.
“Oh, James…” she said when we were clear. “I thought… never mind.”
“You thought what? Stop worrying so much, girl.”
I laughed, but I carefully noted the floor that the team of hogs was heading down to. It was minus one hundred… were they planning to switch at the landing there to keep going down? It sure as shit was a good possibility.
“Hey, I’m starved,” I told Floramel. “Let’s get out of here.”
She looked down, noticing my hand was still clasping hers. “James, I don’t know about that.”
“Come on.”
She let me lead her out of the building and into the streets. Frankly, I was kind of surprised. She’d rejected me for years, and now she even had Raash back to entertain her. Shrugging, I decided not to look a gift-horse in the mouth.
We went out, ate some good food, and drank some good beer. Floramel was still a stiff nerd, but she was runway-model pretty and more like a normal girl than ever. I supposed this was due to the simple fact she’d spent a lot of years on Earth by now.
After eating more than my fill—and polishing off half her plate as well—I asked her what was wrong. “You’ve been kind of moping tonight, girl. What is it?”
“I don’t know.”
She was clearly lying. She didn’t meet my eye, and she ran her fingers over the rim of her wine glass.
“What? Is Raash still freaking out? Can’t he get his tail straight in bed any longer?”
Floramel flicked her eyes up to meet mine, then dropped them again. “Raash isn’t on Earth any longer. There were… incidents.”
“You mean, like, he bit people and stuff like that?”
She shrugged noncommittally.
“Ah, I get it. Okay listen, how about we take a little vacation down to Georgia? I know this great place next to the Satilla River—”
“I don’t want to sleep with you in your shack, James.”
“No? Okay… well, how do we get Etta back? How do we get the files?”
“I’ve already got them. Juan told me how to log in and download what I needed from the secret archives.”
“Uh… you did that while we were in Central?”
“Yes, James. While we were riding the elevator, we went past the Intel levels. I accessed their local routers and did a quick download.”
“Cool.”
I stewed on that for a bit. “Um… Floramel? Don’t you think the computers will have noticed that breach? They’ll trace that down and all—won’t they?”
She nodded. She was back to running her finger over the top of her wine glass. I reached out, and I grabbed her elegant hand.
“Hey… are you in trouble?”
She looked up, and there were tears in her eyes. I’d hardly ever seen her cry. I felt bad and worried. If she was this upset, things were really bad.
“Did you risk everything just to help me out?”
“A debt is a debt, James. You told me this yourself. Once, you risked everything to save my people when we perished on Rogue World, remember?”
“I surely do.”
She nodded. “Consider us even, now.”
“Okay… well… say, you said you’ve got the files, right?”
“Yes. I have what there is to be found. The engrams are fairly fresh and workable, but—”
“We can’t take them to Central for a revive…” I said, thinking hard and fast. “We have to get you off-world, fast.”
“I’m going to prison, James. I’ve been imprisoned on Earth before, remember? I spent my first two years under—”
“Forget that, come on.”
I didn’t need to hear anymore. I grabbed her hand, and I dragged her out of the place, pausing only long enough to swipe my tapper over the pay nub on the table.
We left the restaurant, left Central City, and left old Earth herself behind at a trot. There was no time to lose.
“Why don’t we just go to a Gray Deck somewhere and use the gateway posts to take us to Dust World?” Floramel asked me when we hit the public spaceport.
“Because girl, those places are all government-run. They could all be watched by now. We’ve got to get away while the getting is good.”
Boarding a one-way transport out to Dust World, I paid with my savings, and we left Earth behind.
It was kind of weird, being on a civilian flight. I’d never traveled between the stars without being in the belly of a troop transport.
By my standards, the flight was nice and comfy. There was a restroom for every hundred passengers, and no one vomited or anything. The seats even had cushions. I felt like royalty.
When we reached Dust World, I avoided every official I could. Fortunately, all the customs hogs only seemed to be interested in folks going the other way. Anyone who wanted to come out and live on Dust World was welcome to stay.
Very quickly, we left the valley we arrived in and moved on to Happy Valley, which was where the Investigator lived. It was late at night by the time we’d hiked out to his caves and catacombs. The place was empty, except for a few glimmering lights.
“This place is even more frightening than the first time you brought me here,” Floramel said. “Perhaps that’s because I now fear I’ll never leave.”
“Uh-huh. Let’s see if we can get the old man to help us.”
The Investigator shushed us immediately when we spotted him. He was obviously in the midst of an experiment of some kind.
We watched quietly from behind some gurgling vats. The Investigator was stirring up some goo—and there was something floating in there. It looked like a corpse swimming in molasses.
“Uh… sir?” I dared to say.
His long crooked finger came up between us, but he didn’t look at me. “Timing is critical. I must focus. No prattling, please.”
I shut up again.
The old man had two electrical wires with exposed copper tips in his hand. One was red, the other was black. It looked like he was going to jump-start an old gas-powered tram or something.
The tank gurgled and swirled. Once, I saw a hand rise up from the soup and then slip back in.
“There it is, independent movement. The critical moment has arrived.”
He shoved the wires deep into the sludge, his arms widespread. I saw a spark, and his face registered pain. That kind of surprised me. One would have thought that he’d have put on insulated gloves, at least.
The electrical current kept going, and the old guy went rigid. His neck twisted and cranked around, like he was undergoing some kind of spastic reaction.
“Shit!” I said. “He’s electrocuting himself!”
I moved a step forward, but Floramel’s thin hands formed claws, and she tugged at my arm. It would have been nothing, of course, to rip free of her—but I looked at her instead. My mouth hung low, gaping.
“What is it?”
“There might be a method to his madness.”
I blinked. “Yeah… there usually is.”
We stepped closer, but we didn’t touch him. Slowly, over the next ninety seconds, maybe, the Investigator sagged. His body was in a rictus of pain, you could see that on his face, plain as day. My instinct was to give him a kick, dislodging him from those wires and that nasty pool of goop.
But I didn’t do it. Floramel stood with me, fascinated. Her hands were still locked on my arm. She didn’t look horrified—not exactly. She looked kind of entranced.
“I believe we’re witnessing something new. Just wait, James.”
I did, and I began to smell bad smells, the kinds of things a man stank of when his body had let go and no longer functioned.
At last, the old white-haired scientist slumped. His face touched the sludge-pool, and I couldn’t hold back any longer.
“Satisfied now? We might have saved him. Dammit girl, he was our bes
t hope to save Etta.” I ripped the wires from his hands, and I pushed the body aside. The Investigator was stone dead.
“Just wait. I… think we’re about to see something miraculous.”
I snorted. “It’s a dead old guy. I’ve seen lots of those.”
“James… think. How old is the Investigator?”
“Uh… I don’t rightly know.”
“How old did he look when you first met him?”
Squinting, I tried to focus on her questions, but I barely cared. I was already thinking about how I could smuggle the crazy old bastard back to Earth for an illegal revive. Floramel was wanted back home, but I probably wasn’t. If I could get him breathing again, then…
“James! Look!”
A hand had risen out of the goop. I gaped at it. The hand was long-fingered and pale as a ghost.
“Help it. Help it sit up.”
I bared all my teeth at once, but I did it. I reached into the slime and pulled. The thing in the tank sat up, but it was all floppy-like. Floramel maneuvered to the other side, and she helped, too.
“This dude better not bite me,” I complained. “Remember Raash the last time?”
“Don’t remind me of that dark day.”
We messed around and found a hose. I sprayed off the muddy man in the tank. He wasn’t looking much better. He was tall, thin, and half-dead.
“James?” Floramel asked as we worked. “Answer my question?”
“Huh?”
“How old was the Investigator? Back during the Dust World campaign?”
“I don’t know. About the same age as he is now, I’d say. Maybe a little younger. He’s never been a normal guy.”
“I know. How old is Etta, James?”
“Uh… about thirty, right?”
She nodded.
Birthdays. I wasn’t good at birthdays. Just try living and dying over and over, birthdays will probably mean a lot less to you too, as the years roll by.
“Right,” Floramel said. “So you’re telling me the Investigator looked then about the same as he does now—but that was thirty years ago.”
I blinked a few times, thinking that over. “Huh… that’s a little weird, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but I think we now know why. Lift him out of the medium.”
“Uh… he is a he, isn’t he? Get him a towel or something.”
We sprayed him off, dried him with a towel… and I realized I knew who it was we’d just revived.
His face was the same as the man on the stone floor—or almost the same. He was definitely younger.
It was the Investigator, and he was breathing again.
-57-
“Your technique was poor,” the Investigator complained.
That was just like him. We’d saved his skinny ass, but here he was complaining right out of the hat.
“I would have thought,” he rasped, “that two people from the legions would be well-versed in the process of rebirth.”
“Well sir,” I said, “where I come from, we usually operate machines. This is… it’s kind of a ghetto-revive, if you know what I mean.”
He coughed and shook. We slapped him on the back, fed him water from canteens, and generally kissed his ass while he recovered. We didn’t have any fancy equipment to take medical measurements and suggest medical remedies. We just waited it out and kept him from falling over.
At last, he seemed to recover. He looked at the two of us with bleary eyes.
“It took you longer than I expected to come,” he said. “I almost had to do my entire rebirth myself. My usual assistants—they won’t come here any longer.”
Internally, I couldn’t blame them. The Investigator wasn’t only scary and more than half-insane, he was also kind of an overbearing asshole. None of these things were worth saying out loud, so I kept the thoughts inside my fairly empty brain.
“Investigator,” Floramel said when he was sipping a drink and sitting up unaided. “Sir, why did you choose this moment to recycle yourself?”
He looked at her seriously. “Because I knew you were coming. I heard of Etta’s death—and of the things you two did back at Central. Oddly, your name was omitted from the criminal records, McGill. Was this an oversight?”
The Investigator was kind of a planetary governor. It made sense that when some kind of big crime went down, he was on the feed to hear about it. Moreover, he was linked into the community of other planetary leaders. He could pass on any information he wanted to—and he wasn’t a forgiving man. The fact I was his granddaughter’s daddy wouldn’t necessarily stop him from turning me in.
“Hell no,” I said. “Floramel here just up and went crazy. She hacked into some database—I don’t even know which one—and stole files and such-like. I just found out about her crimes when she confessed a few minutes ago.”
“Thanks, James,” Floramel said quietly.
The Investigator gave me a hard look, but he nodded. “It didn’t take much deductive logic to realize you would come here next. Recently, you came here to revive a friend—why would you not attempt the same with your daughter?”
“Uh… yeah. Guilty as charged. What do you think about that idea? Reviving Etta, I mean.”
He smiled faintly. “That’s why I chose to recycle myself at this point. I wanted to be fully fit for the job. My previous body… well, it was at least a decade past its prime.”
We helped him into some clothes, and he looked a lot more like the Investigator I’d known for decades. He was, in fact, almost ageless. It was kind of weird now that I thought about it, that he’d never grown old and died out here on Dust World. Maybe that’s why he’d never wanted to leave here. If he stayed in his hot, humid little valleys he could live forever with no records to detect the illegal revives going on down here in the shadowy catacombs.
The next day, we got started on the Etta project. The Investigator was vigorous again. What’s more, he seemed quite interested in our goals.
That made me smile. These old spiders on Dust World prided themselves on not giving much of a shit about each other or the universe at large, but here the old guy was, offing himself just so he could do a better job of bringing back his granddaughter. It was enough to warm my heart toward him. He really did care—he just wasn’t too good at showing it.
The two geniuses built a first-class setup for Etta. They used a freshly-flushed tank, lots of goo that was almost sweet-smelling in comparison to the used stuff, and a dozen new hoses that still had tags on them. They’d shipped gear out from Earth to get the best.
All this made me feel overconfident, I’m sure. If Floramel and the Investigator couldn’t do a job—well sir, it was probably impossible to begin with. Etta’s existence was therefore in the best hands I could hope for.
On the third day, they got into the files, and their faces fell.
“What’s wrong?” I asked the two of them, but they didn’t meet my eye.
“The files… they’re incomplete,” the Investigator said.
“What?”
“The checksum is wrong,” Floramel added. “That means even what we’ve got is flawed.”
“That might not be true. If part of the file is missing, the checksum could be correct for the entire body of data—we just don’t have all of it.”
Floramel put her face into her hands.
“Uh…” I said, feeling a sinking, sickening sensation grow in my guts. “Guys? What do we have to do to fix this?”
Floramel turned to me slowly. She could barely meet my eyes. “I must have rushed off that elevator too fast. I should have stopped on the Intel floors and waited until the download was finished. It said it was finished, I swear that it did, but sometimes files aren’t fully synchronized when—”
“Hey! Hey, girl? Are you telling me that Etta is permed, or what?”
She shook her head helplessly. “I don’t know, James. Maybe we could go back. Maybe we could get a full scan this time.”
“No. That won’t work. They’ll have
changed all the codes by this time. They might have flushed old Juan Pujol’s brain by now, too. Just to be sure.”
Floramel nodded. She looked miserable, and I felt sick.
The Investigator, however, was still poking at the files on his tapper.
“There may be another course of action open to us,” he said. “It is, after all, only the body-scan that’s damaged. Her mind is intact.”
“Oh no,” Floramel said. She looked at each of us in turn with red-rimmed eyes. “Gentlemen—Raash is so unhappy with his makeshift body. You can’t mean—”
I put out a hand, touching her lips.
“Just do it,” I said, and everyone fell quiet after that.
-58-
The next few weeks were rough on me. Using a full body-scan to print out a human using a Shadowlander revival machine—that was first class. Those fine pieces of equipment could work quickly, printing out trillions of cells in half an hour or so.
The process the Investigator had dreamed up was something different. It took weeks, it was messy, and we didn’t even have complete data to start with.
The first phase consisted of Floramel and the Investigator messing with Etta’s body-scan files. They dug out lots of other files, looking for compatible genetics. Most of every human’s DNA is identical, after all. That made the first part of the job easy. Once they’d identified which genes were missing from the file, they could simply take standardized genes and plug them into place.
The second phase was way more… iffy. They had to use the genetics they could find from me, the Investigator, and others to make educated guesses. Floramel confessed to me that some of this was more art than science.
“He’s got a repository of cells from locals, but… I don’t know if everything will work perfectly.”
“What do you mean?” I asked her. “Are you saying she’ll come out sick, or something? Maybe with a new weakness toward cancer, or with one part of her body rejecting another?”
Floramel shrugged helplessly. “This isn’t really my field of expertise. I’m more of a physicist than a medical researcher. But the Investigator is making the best choices he can from what’s available. Of that much I’m sure.”