State of Decay

by James Knapp

  Was it real?

  Having done some research on the type of device used to kill him, I found out that it typically monitored for two things: a loosening of the inhibitions caused by prolonged, extreme pain, and a brain- wave state indicative of drug-induced mind control or hypnosis.

  He wasn’t in any pain. After the beating he took and the surgery that followed, he was on enough painkillers that he wasn’t feeling much of anything. He wasn’t coerced with drugs at any point.

  “Can you hear me?” she asked, as I resumed the recording.

  “Yes.”

  I wondered whether she had known him previously, if somehow this whole meeting was a setup of some kind. The image of the revivor heart signature she had scrawled on the card she left wasn’t just an uncanny representation; when I compared it to the one I had recorded from the female I encountered in the bathroom at Tai’s place, it was an exact match. Every revivor’s signature was unique. She had to have seen it somewhere.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  I’d seen hypnosis before, but never anything like that. I knew his type, and he was ex-military. He was trained on how to behave if he was ever captured, and he could endure a lot of pain and interrogation. It didn’t make sense that a ninety-pound woman could walk in and make him give everything up in less than a minute, but that’s what it looked like he was about to do.

  The kill switch implanted in his head seemed to believe so too.

  The more I watched her, the more interesting the strange woman became. I needed to get her back, but I didn’t know if after what happened, I wanted to risk bringing her back in. Maybe I could set something up off the premises. . . .

  Backing up the recording, I watched as the man reversed out of his stupefied state and the smirk returned. The spit jumped in reverse through the space between his teeth and Zoe backed away; then the camera did as well as we both moved back down the hallway.

  If I had known what was going to happen, I’d have watched her more closely, but as it was, I was focused initially on the suspect and, I had to admit, the message from Faye I had gotten earlier. The only other time we were alone was when Zoe first came in and I met her in the conference room. That had been a short introduction, but it was better than nothing. I kept backing up, looking for the moment when I first walked in and saw her.

  The camera turned as we backed into the conference room and then sat at the table. For a while I focused on her face as she spoke, glancing down self-consciously; then I saw her pupils dilate. They dilated completely, just as they had in the interrogation room.

  I stopped rewinding and let the footage play.

  “. . . and take me to him. When we get there, do what I say and I’ll prove it to you,” she said.

  My eyes had been fixed on hers, just staring, with her staring up at me.

  “Do you understand?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I heard myself say, and I froze the image.

  As sure as I was of anything, that had not happened. I would have remembered it. Frantically, I searched my memory for any trace of that conversation, but it wasn’t there.

  Stunned, I scanned back until her pupils returned to normal a few seconds prior.

  “. . . can help you,” she said.

  “How?”

  That I remembered. I watched as she pushed the paper, her skill list, across to me. I remembered the exasperation and annoyance I had felt when I first realized what I was looking at.

  “I’m serious.”

  “You know, I can see that you are.”

  Her face changed, and then her eyes.

  “Wait,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “You need to give me a chance,” she said in a low voice. “If you could know one thing right now that you don’t, what would it be?”

  “Did she love me?” I heard myself ask. It was barely a whisper.

  Zoe’s eyes narrowed dangerously.

  “Something to do with your case,” she snipped.

  “We have a suspect in custody,” I told her. “I need him to talk.”

  “Good,” she said. “I can make him do that. Don’t think about it. Just trust your instincts and take me to him. When we get there, do what I say and I’ll prove it to you. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  She stared at me as I paused the footage again. She looked at me exactly the way she had looked at the suspect. The nervousness, the shyness—they were gone, replaced by a confidence that seemed absolute. Was the awkwardness an act?

  The JZI pinged. Wachalowski, it’s Noakes.

  Yeah.

  There was nothing left. The blast destroyed everything. Serial numbers, lot codes—it’s all slag.

  What about organics?

  A team is trying to track down a piece we can tie to the revivor, but the site is a mess.

  I understand.

  No radiation was detected, and no biological agents, but see Sean anyway and let him check you out.

  I’m on my way down now. Sir, that bomb was strapped to a revivor, another combat model. It was fitted with a standard communications array. It was definitely military.

  Did you make contact with it?

  I had extended the connection roughly a minute before the bomb went off. It didn’t think it was going to accept it, but with less than five seconds on the timer, it had. I wasn’t facing it at that point; Faye had come out of the restaurant and I was moving her away when the revivor had suddenly picked up.

  Time to wake up, Agent Wachalowski.

  That was all it said. Before I could respond, it was gone.

  Briefly. It knew who I was. It had to have come from Tai’s unknown contacts. They know we’re on to them.

  What about the detective?

  She gave me a name one of the revivors from the fire gave her. Also, she saw something I think might have been the attacker underneath an LW suit.

  There was a pause before I got a response to that one.

  Light-warping technology is top secret. Only a few countries even have access to it. Do you have any idea how expensive that would be?

  Someone has money to burn.

  What about the name?

  A last name only: Zhang. No leads on it yet.

  Could it be the name of one of Tai’s customers?

  Maybe. I’m following up on the dock revivor now. I’ll let you know what I find.

  I switched off the images and made my way to the subbasement, then into the dingy corridor that led to the morgue. The morgue was usually Judy’s domain, and she wasn’t used to sharing it. When the door opened, Sean was leaning over a body that was facedown on the tray while she hovered nearby, her arms crossed in front of her. She glanced at me when I came in. As I approached them, I caught a faint, bitter-tar smell.

  “How’s it going?” I asked. The room was brightly lit, and Sean was still bent over the body, squinting into a magnifying lens that was strapped to his head.

  “Getting there,” he said. He was peering into a square hole he had cut in the back of the revivor’s skull, teasing at something with his instruments. His white latex gloves were smeared with blackish blood.

  “Find anything?”

  “Your news jockey’s eyes were mostly intact,” he said, nodding toward a fluid- filled jar on the counter where they now stared out through the glass at me.

  “They’re slightly different colors,” I observed.

  “Only one is a fake; the other one’s natural. I was able to pull a little bit out of the buffer of the camera eye. I flagged it for you.”

  I connected to the server and checked it out. The first clip was little more than a few frames strung together; it looked like the SWAT team escorting one of the revivors out of the building after the raid. The next was actually a shot of me, from when he had approached me in the lobby.

  “They go backward,” Sean said, “from the end of the buffer back toward the beginning. The last clip was actually recorded first.”

  The last c
lip was a little over four seconds long. From the looks of it, the kid was standing in someone’s private office. Even though the quality wasn’t good, everything in his field of vision still managed to scream wealth. The desk looked like real wood, and on top of it I could see a polished stone clock with what might have been a diamond at the twelve o’clock mark. A small figure sat behind the desk.

  “Is that a kid?” I asked. It almost looked like a little boy at first, except the clothes were those of an adult and the earrings were definitely feminine.

  “It’s a woman,” Sean said.

  Once I got a better look, I could see it was definitely a female, maybe full-blooded Asian, maybe Chinese. She was definitely adult, but very small except for her head, which looked a little too big for her body. She wore a navy suit jacket and white blouse with a gold neck clasp. I could make out rings on both hands, gold earrings, a slim gold watch on her wrist, and cuff links with what might have been real diamonds on them. Her face was made up heavily but carefully, and she might have been pretty except her lips and eyes were vaguely fishlike.

  “. . . exclusivity?” the kid’s voice asked.

  “I don’t care what you do with it after you bring it to me—” the woman said, then was cut off as the clip ended.

  “Someone hired him,” I said.

  “Someone with money.”

  Someone with money, and someone, based on the little bit of footage there was, who seemed uninterested in the monetary value of the footage itself. Whoever it was knew what she was after and must have known where to send him, since there was very little time between their exchange and the images of the revivors. She didn’t want to use or sell the footage if she was turning down exclusivity; she wanted information. She was using him for recon.

  I looked back at the eyes floating in the jar. Someone had gotten the kid killed. Someone looking for information on Tai. Someone who wasn’t us.

  “Apparently, we aren’t the only ones interested in what was going on over there,” I said. “What about the unit we recovered at the dock?”

  “Deanimation was straightforward,” Sean said. “A bullet to the head. You say the other models you picked up there were sex models?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Not this one,” he said. “Check out the caboose.”

  I took a look between the exposed, flat buttocks and saw that the vaginal opening had been sealed, along with the anus. They did that with legitimate revivors after bring-back in most countries; revivors didn’t have sex urges, couldn’t give birth, and didn’t eat. Any unnecessary cavities were just places to invite infection; packing them with biogel and sealing the whole thing over with a skin graft eliminated the problem.

  “Any other bullets hit it?” I asked him.

  “No, why?”

  “I’m wondering if that bullet was meant for it or for me.”

  “Was it destroyed intentionally? No way to know for sure, but if it was, your shooter didn’t exactly succeed. Have a look.”

  I leaned in close as he reached into the hole with a pair of slim forceps and carefully began to pull something out. When the end of the tongs came out of the hole, I saw they were clamped around a small, rubbery object about four inches long. It made me think of a translucent, eyeless squid with tentacles coming out of both ends. Sean slowly eased the thing out until the last little tentacle dangled free, then placed it into a large beaker filled with clear liquid.

  “That’s the main node,” he said. “If a revivor had a soul, that would be it.”

  I took a closer look. I was familiar with revivor technology, but I’d never actually seen one of those things outside the body. I’d imagined it looking metallic, but it almost looked organic. Millions of barely visible little threads ran through it.

  “You can see the connections,” I said. Up close it looked like some giant microbe.

  “You guys are going to clean this up afterward, right?” Judy asked.

  “Sure.”

  I looked through the glass at the strange amoeba, sitting at the bottom of the beaker surrounded by a little cloud of stringy goo.

  “It hasn’t gone inert,” Sean said. “You might be able to scan it.”

  I zoomed in and ran the scan; sure enough, the wriggling amber line coalesced, snapping into the familiar waveform.

  “Nice.”

  I was able to pull the lot number, serial number, model numbers, versions . . . everything. Unlike the one in the bathroom, this one was legit; it had a valid code, so it was wired as part of a national program, and it had a military assignment tag as well, meaning it had actually been deployed. Either it never got where it was going or it was AWOL.

  Also, unlike the one in the bathroom, the revivor components weren’t manufactured overseas; they rolled off the line at Heinlein Industries.

  “Sean, could these parts have been reused?”

  “You mean harvested out of an existing unit and put into this one? No. I mean, some of the nuts and bolts, sure, but not the important stuff.”

  “Then we may have another problem. Let me see if I can get into the memory buffer.”

  I opened a connection to the revivor’s communication node, then sent a specialized virus over the channel. It chiseled through security, then implanted itself and began to map the revivor’s systems. A few seconds later, it sent a bundle of information back over the circuit.

  “I’ve got something.”

  I pulled the access codes out of the bundle and tapped into its memory core. From there I sifted through recent communication entries. Some of them were encrypted.

  A series of text entries appeared before everything scrambled and feedback started coming across the connection. A second later, it dropped. Something made a popping sound from inside the body, followed by a high-pitched hissing.

  “Step away from it!” I said. They didn’t ask why; they just did it. The hole Sean had made in the back of the revivor’s neck expanded as white smoke began to pour out.

  All at once, the back of the head and neck collapsed, followed by the shoulders and back. A clear gelatin had formed inside.

  “Jesus,” Judy snapped, watching the body melt in front of her eyes. She had seen many strange things on her table, but never that. I had seen it, though, and so had Sean.

  “You can’t stop it,” I said. “Let it go. It isn’t toxic.”

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Leichenesser,” Sean said.

  The buttocks, the backs of the thighs, then the calves all melted down like wax within seconds. The gelatin dissolved everything, even the oily blood on the tray beneath it.

  Leichenesser was another controlled technology used in combat. It could start as a small seed, but it fed on necrotized flesh. It was used by the field meds to clean out gangrene and other infections, but in combat, it was very useful against revivors. A lot of the newer ones were seeded with it, set to go off in case their memories were tampered with.

  “It only consumes dead flesh,” I told her. “That fuels its growth. When there’s nothing left to eat, it dissipates.”

  The gelatin continued to dissolve the body, and then it began to boil away into mist. In less than a minute, a single blob of it sizzled around a pool of blood in the middle of the tray like water on a hot pan. Then it was gone.

  The tray was empty except for a few surgical instruments, some lightweight shield plating from inside the body, and the long blade that had been concealed up inside the forearm. Sean used his forceps to pick up a cluster of nodules webbed together that had been the revivor components fixed beneath the skull and along the spine, but they were ruined.

  “What caused that?” Judy asked, leaning back in.

  “I think I did,” I said. The text I’d managed to pull off before I’d triggered the gelatin’s release still sat in a window in the corner of my vision. I brought it to the forefront for a closer look. It was a portion of a list of names.

  5. Mae Zhu

  6. Rebecca Valle

>   7. Harold Craig

  8. Doyle Shanks

  I didn’t recognize any of them. There were four missing from the head of the list, and any number that might have followed.

  “I’ll catalogue what’s left behind here and see what I can get off of it,” Sean said.

  “You do that,” I said. “In the meantime, I think it’s time I poked my head in over at Heinlein Industries.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Their product is popping up where it doesn’t belong.”

  I pushed through the doors to the lab, and Sean followed me out, glancing over his shoulder as Judy frowned at the cadaver tray.

  “As a heads-up,” he said, keeping his voice low, “I sat on my findings regarding your suspect’s kill switch as long as I could, but Noakes knows. He’s going to want to know what you did to set a device like that off while you were alone with that guy in the interrogation room.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  “What are you going to tell him?”

  “The truth.”

  Even as I said it, though, I was replaying the recording in my mind.

  . . . don’t think about it. Just trust your instincts and take me to him. When we get there, do what I say . . .

  He’d been coerced, but not by me. Before I talked to anyone else on our side, I needed to track down that woman again, and try to find out what the truth was.

  Faye Dasalia—Alto Do Mundo