Clean: A Mindspace Investigations Novel

by Alex Hughes

  The first slide showed some damage to the hindbrain centered around the pons, likely what had killed him in the end. Intermittent damage across the temporal lobe. But on the third slide a burned-out section as big as my thumb in the lower parietal lobe. I put my thumb over it, thinking.

  “It’s very odd. That section shouldn’t do anything. There’s no reason for it to be burned out in every victim,” the coroner put in.

  I peeled my thumb off the film and backed up, then asked a question about the kind of cross section it was, just to be sure. Then I sighed. “No, it’s not. That’s a major center for processing Mindspace signals, if the rest of the brain is set up to receive them.” I didn’t have the right cross section to see if this guy had Ability—though a few extra folds in certain spots weren’t guaranteed in even the stronger telepaths. Brain waves were a better indication. But the fact he had damage in that spot really, really wasn’t a good sign.

  “What does that mean?” the coroner asked.

  I sighed, not knowing how much I could safely explain. “It means we have a problem.”

  As we walked back, Cherabino pestered me until I told her, “Look, I’m not a wetware guy. I could be wrong. But if I have it right, and the damage is—well, somebody’s overloading their brains. Through Mindspace.” If that didn’t point to the Guild, I didn’t know what did.

  West College Avenue was, if anything, even hotter, with almost no one around. You could fry an egg on the pavement, and I had no idea why we were walking. Even the wilted brown grass was trying to get out of the sun. I was already sweating, already miserable.

  Part of me wanted to do a little jig here in the middle of the street, celebrate the Guild screwing up. Get the newspaper to print a huge front-page story: guild screws up, me proved right. Start the media sensation of the century over exactly how and why, rub their noses in it. But the rest of me—well, that athletic guy hadn’t asked to be dead. Shouldn’t be dead, bug damage or no.

  Cherabino pursed her lips. “So?”

  I avoided looking her in the eye, but kept my voice even. “I’m only going to say this once, so listen up. I’m in over my head. I need a lot more information and some more resources. Maybe another telepath, a Battle Ops guy. We need to call the Guild.”

  She stopped walking and stared. “Call the Guild? Seriously? It’s our freaking case! And you…”

  “I’ll admit they’re not my favorite people,” I said. “I’m not talking about Enforcement. I don’t want to deal with them right now. I’m talking about help. About information. About getting this guy off the street faster—a couple phone calls and some begging.”

  “I don’t beg,” Cherabino said.

  I gritted my teeth. “Asking nicely, then. I’ll do that much. With this getting so much press, even they have to know they can’t drop off the radar at this point. A little help, a few diplomatic channels, that’s all I’m asking, Cherabino.”

  She strode on down the street, her legs stretching at a painfully fast walk. Her annoyance drifted off her in waves. “You were there when the brass decided not to consult the Guild. You can’t just go off on your own, you know. The decision’s been made. If you have new information, great, but right now the only thing we even have that points to the Guild is your say-so—”

  She was cut off by the distinctive whine of a whipcord-thin humblade beginning to vibrate behind us. We turned. Cherabino fell into a defensive crouch and went for her gun.

  A light-skinned man so thin his cheeks were gaunt held the highly illegal humblade, brandishing the thin hilt and vibrating cord that would slice through concrete like butter. The bruises along his arms underscored the desperation in his face. A junkie.

  “Give me your money,” he said, in a voice frighteningly committed.

  Cherabino shifted her grip on the gun. “You have got to be kidding. We’re within sight of the police station. You’re holding up a cop right next to the police station. How stupid can you get?”

  Please don’t antagonize the junkie with the humblade, I thought as the man tensed to move. His mind was on the sharp edge, coming down off a high. I needed to disable him….

  He sprang at me. I snatched at his wrist—not the blade, his wrist—and missed. I dodged to the side—the edge of the blade hummed far, far, too close to my face. The junkie caught his balance again.

  Cherabino kicked him, a sweeping roundhouse kick—connected with the wrist I’d missed, her gun somehow now in its holster. I danced back, back, away from the flying humblade, which whooshed past.

  The blade embedded itself in the concrete sidewalk two feet behind me. As it vibrated, the hole it made widened with small cracks. A flash of decision from the junkie, and I was moving away again. He swung at me wildly—he had to have the money, he had to have the drug. At any cost he had to have it. I understood, but not now—he couldn’t steal from us.

  He hit Cherabino and she fell, sweeping his legs out on the way down. I jumped in, trying to pull him off her. He had the strength of the insane, laying blows left and right and hitting my face. I saw stars.

  I opened up, my mental training coming into play as I held him desperately with my hands, wrestled him down. His mind was erratic, spotty, hard to hold; whatever he was on changed the shape of it. I paused, trying to find a hold—

  Cherabino got the grip she needed and flipped him facedown on the concrete, his arm wrenched behind him. She muttered under her breath about stupid unarmed perps, “Give me an excuse to shoot you, just give me one.”

  The perp pushed up against her, tried to get away, only hurting himself worse in the process. His high was starting to wear off, his strength gone.

  I disengaged. Sat back, panting. She had him. I didn’t need to disable him—I didn’t have to find a grip on that slippery mind.

  Cherabino pulled out her cuffs and forced his other arm behind him. The alloy strongcuffs snipped as they engaged.

  The strength slipped out of the junkie, and he collapsed. I got a grip on his mind, but it wasn’t a ploy. He was beginning the slide into withdrawal. I held him down, my right knee in his back. I hated everything he stood for, everything I used to be and hoped I wasn’t still. I understood his desperation all too well. Impotent anger pushed at me, but I held on. I could do this. I would do this.

  “You have the right to remain silent,” Cherabino began, continuing to recite his Mirandas. Then straight into the Paglinos, one phrase flowing naturally into the next.

  Abruptly, my precognition kicked in. I got a flash, Cherabino putting a hand out to catch her balance, a hand that landed on the still-active humblade. Blood everywhere, pain, pain. Then, a jarring shift, and I was back in the now.

  Cherabino shifted in her crouch to keep the man down, but she was losing her balance….

  I grabbed the back of her shirt and yanked her in my direction.

  We both fell, on top of the suspect, who oofed and started whining.

  “What in the hell was that for?” Cherabino punched me and pushed up. A long, bloody scrape marred one of her cheeks.

  I yanked her to the side suddenly, away from where she was stepping. “Humblade.”

  Understanding hit her like a freight train as she looked over to where she would have put her hand, where she could have stepped. She bent over to turn the blade off. Added the safety.

  She met my eyes as she straightened, tucking the now-harmless handle and floppy cord into a pocket.

  “Let’s go,” she said. Fear and anger roiled off her. I hurried to keep up, my own heart beating far too fast.

  That had been far too close.

  CHAPTER 5

  We dragged our prisoner into Booking with full ceremony. Dirty, pissed, and with a loudly mumbling burden, we made quite a sight. Two bored cops followed us in our little parade through the department—it was day shift and lunchtime on a slow day, so any distraction was welcome. We probably weren’t as gentle as we could have been with the suspect.

  The booking officer looked up. “What�
��d he do?” she asked, actually interested.

  “Tried to mug us within sight of the police station,” I said flatly, before Cherabino had a chance to get into it. Judging by her expression—and her treatment of the suspect—she’d happily get into a diatribe if I let her.

  The two trailing cops laughed, loudly. The booking officer tried hard, but she also snickered.

  “And you ended up looking like that?”

  The cop behind me guffawed. “Must have been quite a fight!”

  “Well,” I said with full dignity and no small frustration, “it was.”

  As soon as Cherabino got the guy booked in, I pushed her back to her cubicle to cool down, telling her I’d finish the paperwork. She left with noises of cleaning up in the ladies’ room. The cut on her cheek was still seeping blood, and she looked pissed.

  The booking officer scanned in the paper forms as soon as I could fill them out, but we still had to have the original hard copies filed away. It was stupid, mindless work, and exactly what I needed to calm back down. The junkie’s face, his desperation, was sticking with me all too clearly.

  I focused instead on the stupid hard-copy forms, line after line, box after box filled out in pencil in block caps so the secretaries could read them. Hard copy, for all it was dumb, was necessary. Nobody remembered losing all their records in the Tech Wars the way the cops did. Electronic quarantine and antivirus, separation and security—they were all good to have and the cops were fanatical about them. More important was keeping data and transmissions separate, checking every byte of new data, every new program as if it was the new End of the World. Because once it had been.

  No one remembered the war like the government, like the cops, who told one another the stories over and over again. Bombs had split the sky, and worse, the superviruses split our minds from the inside, until the toll of death made people look at computer technology like the Black Plague. Even now, more than a half century later when small computer chips were let out on a leash—small ones barely powerful enough to run an oven timer, and still frightening to the diehards—the real Tech, the sentient computers and the implants and anything powerful, was outlawed with terrible penalties.

  People were afraid. Still. Terrified of the computers, the data, even the smallest transmission of information over unsecured lines. So if it took three days to send an e-mail through all the layers of Quarantine, if the small Web was regarded with the same respect/fear as a pit viper, if even Cherabino had to have a thorough background check and be monitored constantly in the Electronic Crimes works for fear she’d come across something truly dangerous, well, a lot of people had died in the Tech Wars. A lot of data had been erased beyond retrieval; a lot of holes had been made in the history books. A lot of loss, period. Hard copy? Hard copy was safe. Hard copy was forever. And if India and Mars and Brazil made fun of the West for our caution, well, they hadn’t taken the brunt of the Tech Wars, had they? They hadn’t died in the millions and rotted on the street and watched while their neighbors died, trapped in their houses while a madman held them captive through their Tech. Never, never again would that be possible, we had sworn. Never.

  And so here we were, fear burned in the memory—and schooling—of every American, every European since. Caution was king, even from those like Cherabino who policed the tiny Net that remained. Some things would never happen again. Could never happen again.

  It was still a pain in the ass as far as paperwork went. Hard copy was slow, tedious, and had a regrettable tendency toward paper cuts. But even I wasn’t stupid enough to suggest a change. Biology, artificial organs, physics, anti-graviton generators for flying cars, drug-assisted telepathy—the world might be perfectly fine with those kinds of technologies. They didn’t talk to one another. They didn’t grow minds of their own. But computers? Data? Tech? A complete WorldNet with instant e-mail and a phone system connected to the computers? Not in my lifetime. People were just too afraid, with too good a reason. The population might be rebounding, but memory didn’t leave that easy. So I filled out paperwork, hard copy, and didn’t complain.

  I finished checking the last box. I said good-bye to the booking officer and the secretaries and found my way to the men’s room to wash the pencil lead off my hands.

  In the elevator I ran into Paulsen. Papers and coffee flew everywhere—I managed to grab the cup as it half spilled on my shirt. The stale donut I’d grabbed was a lost cause, now covered in dirt. I sighed and bent over to pick up the papers from the floor. At least Paulsen helped.

  “I was looking for you,” she said, once I’d regained my mental balance. “We have a hot one in the interview room.” She met my eyes. “Wait for me before you start, okay? Recording tech has the brief.”

  She handed me the last paper and a napkin before getting off at the main floor. I hit the button to the basement, still mourning the lost donut. I’d wanted that donut, damn it.

  The doors opened up on a badly lit hall with nine doors—four interview rooms with mirrored walls that let the cops observe while the suspects sat, plus the entrance to the holding cells farther on. All the doors had unnecessary bars on the windows for effect. But only the entrances to the actual interview rooms, the housing for suspects, had double lights above the doors to show when they were in use. The third room was full and interviewing, and the second had a suspect but no interviewer. I was betting that was me.

  I opened the second cop’s door, nodded hello to the recording tech. The room was long and skinny, filled with boxy recording equipment with built-in self-diagnostics and absolutely no connection to any other equipment. The recording ban in public places had gotten a—carefully controlled—reprieve in police interview rooms, but it was still bound up in a lot of laws and regulations I was glad not to keep track of. The interviews were always transcribed, printed in permanent ink, and filed within twenty-four hours. The army of secretaries upstairs wasn’t just for show.

  I lit up a smoke; the recording tech turned on the air filter without comment. We’d wait however long it took Paulsen to arrive, hopefully a while. It’d give me some time to settle.

  Through the glass, the suspect was pacing the room. At the moment, he was facing away from us, head down, looking like any other self-important lowlife. “What’s he accused of?” I gestured with the cigarette, the smoke making sinuous trails on its way to the filter.

  “Actually, this one’s on spec.” Paulsen’s voice came from behind me.

  I turned. “The multiples case?”

  She frowned, the wrinkles on her face deepening. “Might be. Department received an anonymous note this morning telling us to talk to the guy. Likely another trafficker trying to improve his own business, but we’re going to check it out anyway.”

  “Trafficker?” I said cautiously. “You mean drugs.”

  “Yeah. You’re interviewing the beta for a ten-block radius in East Atlanta. For the local Darkness ring, apparently, not just drugs, though of course we can’t prove anything.”

  I took a breath. “Anonymous note, huh? Does sound like a local squabble with amateur tactics. Any fingerprints?”

  She snorted, as if to say, “Of course.” “The thing’s sitting in the lab waiting for the techs to get to it. Low priority, but might turn into something. I want you to ask him about the multiples case either way. It’s his territory; he probably knows something we don’t.”

  The tech’s boredom lightened suddenly, and I turned back to the glass to see what he was reacting to.

  It was then I got my first good look at our suspect’s face, and my stomach sank. “Joey the Fish? That’s your beta? Seriously?”

  “Do you know him?”

  I ground out the cigarette. “He was muscle for Harry and Marge, maybe part-timer for some other groups. You’re serious, he’s second in charge?”

  “For ten blocks, yeah.” Paulsen’s nose wrinkled, and she cranked up the air filter to try to clear the air.

  “Peachy.”

  Joey was my fault, and I
knew it. When I went clean—and then when I came back on the wagon the second time—I’d helped take out all of the guys who’d ever supplied me with Satin. Vindictive? Not even a little. I’d helped take down all the big fish, the Harries and Juans and Marges; I’d sicced the cops on them in one industrial-strength drug raid after another, until the last guy who’d helped me sell out my soul was off the streets. So the little fish, like Joey, had really risen in the ranks. Unfortunately, he knew me and had access to plenty of info on me I’d rather the cops not remember. Now I was going to interview him, in front of Paulsen. This day just kept getting better and better.

  “Is there anything else I need to know about this?” I gestured to the glass.

  “Nothing I can tell you right now.” Department policy—written by Paulsen herself—was nobody prejudiced my interviews.

  Would Joey recognize me? I did look a lot different now, bulked up from regular eating and lifting weights, had even shaved. I’d grown out my hair and lost the half-dead look of desperation. Maybe he wouldn’t even question the clean-cut interrogator. It would be a big bet—for high stakes—but a fair one.

  “Let me get my files,” I told Paulsen, and she nodded.

  Assuming he didn’t bring up my past, I knew exactly how to deal with Joey. Me and the file clerk had gotten together a nice little collection of repro files, glossy photos of gory crimes solved while my grandparents were still in diapers. I retrieved the smaller set from the file room and started back; they were three files, not real thick, the glossies inside only medium-shocking and unlikely to fall out without my meaning them to.

  Joey’s room was the worst of the four. It was done for atmosphere. Ancient, beat-up furniture you wouldn’t wish on your enemies, so dirty I couldn’t sit in there too long before I needed to steam myself clean.

  The man himself looked like he hadn’t showered in at least a week, and even across the room I could smell rancid sweat and caked-in pollution. He was wearing the latest street fashion, an upscale fan-denim, faux-fur jacket combo, his hair greased from sweat, his face streaked dirty from the air outside. The look in his eyes carried your final impression, though, a look that mixed anger and a subtle intelligence that just wouldn’t let you dismiss him.