by James Knapp
“Yeah, me too,” I said, but she was gone. I was alone.
It was too surreal. The night before, I was sitting at a table in a fancy restaurant with a bunch of people I didn’t know, practically dying of embarrassment. Someone shot at us and all hell broke loose, and then my best friend died right in front of me. I fell off the wagon, and Nico hit me in the face. Just when I thought I was at rock bottom, I end up in a palace. I’m told I’m important, and that my dreams and crazy visions are not only not insane, but also that they could help stop a disaster.
“How much of this is real?”
Any minute now I’m going to wake up. I’ll wake up on my couch in my apartment, and Karen will be alive.
I got up and walked around the apartment, trying to shake the feeling that I was trespassing. It didn’t feel like home. It was too much. It was too nice. The bed in the bedroom looked really comfortable, though. The inside of the bathroom was all tiled, and along with the giant hot tub was a cascade shower the size of my old bathroom.
In the bedroom I opened a huge walk-in closet and saw what Penny meant when she said that Ai got me some stuff to wear; it was filled with expensive clothes for pretty much every occasion. There were more shoes in there than I had ever owned in my life. Hanging from the door on the inside was what at first looked like a bra, but turned out to be a shoulder holster, like the kind I’d seen Nico wear, but smaller. It had a gun in it too, a little silver one with a pearl handle. There was a note pinned to the holster: FOR EMERGENCIES ONLY. I closed the door.
Shrugging out of my wet coat, I let it fall on the carpet and walked back out to the living room with the big TV. There was a big wood cabinet there with a bunch of glasses arranged on top. I opened the doors and saw it was a liquor cabinet, stocked to the hilt. Right up front were four big bottles of ouzo. I grabbed one off the shelf and shut the door, walking with it across the room, toward the couch.
I was going to flop down on the couch and maybe try to figure out how to work the TV when I saw a set of doors on the far wall and I wondered what they went to. I walked past the couch and pulled them open. When I did, cold, damp air blew over me.
“Wow.”
It was a balcony. I was looking out over the city. Still holding the bottle, I walked outside and up to the rail.
“Wow.”
I’d never had a view like that from so high before. It was amazing. The city was all lit up like some giant machine with a billion flashing lights. Down below, traffic flowed like glowing veins. I was in one of the biggest towers in the city. To the left and right the city went off as far as I could see, and in front, a little ways in the distance, some even bigger buildings loomed. Way off in the distance, two of the largest towers in the world sat on the skyline. The wind blew through my hair and mist sprayed my face, but I didn’t care. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
Without even thinking, I cracked the bottle. When you do anything a lot, you get a comfortable sense of where you stand in that situation, and I’d been drinking my whole life. The year or so when I stopped was a footnote. It was an experiment, a mistake. I knew how drinking affected me at every stage, from the first shot to the inevitable blackout. The ouzo was warm going down, trickling down into my belly while I stood out there in the cold. It started to mellow me out, make me feel more comfortable. I knew it wouldn’t be long before I started feeling more at home in my new place. Once I’d had enough to drink, I would begin to accept that what Penny said might be true.
“She’s been searching for that missing element. She’s been searching for you.”
Before it was over, all of my nagging doubts would be erased. That included the offhand warning about not crossing Ai. It also included the fact that if these people were laying any kind of hope, any kind at all, on me, then we were all going to be in for a world of hurt.
Calliope Flax—Archstone Plaza, Room #103
I tromped down the hall and banged on Buckster’s door. No one answered, but I heard a guy’s voice.
The JZI picked him up. He was in there. I looked through the front door with the backscatter and saw a shape move past it. I banged on the door again.
“Open up, Chief. It’s me,” I called.
I heard the voice again. He was talking to someone. Either he wasn’t alone or he was on the phone. A fan or something started blowing inside, and I went to bang again when I heard him coming. He opened the door, but not much. He looked out at me, then back over his shoulder.
“What’s your fucking problem?” I asked him.
“Nothing,” he said. “What do you want?”
“Nice.”
“Sorry. It’s not a good time.”
“I came to give you a heads-up,” I said. “I heard through my Fed friend, they’re looking to pick you up.”
“They already did,” he said.
“You got their dicks in a twist, from the sound of it. What the hell did you do?”
He looked up and down the hall, then moved like he meant to grab my arm, but he stopped. He was freaked out.
“What did you hear?” he asked.
“Not out here.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Come on in.”
He opened the door the rest of the way and stepped back. I took the opening and went in. The place was messed up a little. A desk drawer was still out. The old guy looked rattled.
“What did he tell you?” he asked.
“He didn’t tell me anything; I heard your name and tapped his JZI communication.”
“That’s a federal off—”
“Hey, I was watching your back.”
“Why?”
“Because you helped me out. Because you’re a slummer from Bullrich, like me.”
He thought about it, and it looked like he bought it.
“What did you hear?” he asked.
“Not much, sorry. Just that you stirred up a hornets’ nest and they were looking to pick you up. They’re still watching you, you know.”
He nodded. His eyes darted around like he wasn’t sure what to do. That’s when I picked up the jack.
My JZI picked up the signal, and when I locked on, a revivor signature snapped on the scanner. It was somewhere close. Inside the apartment.
“Something wrong?” he asked.
“No.” I scanned around. There was a closed door down the hall. It was where the fan noise was coming from. The signal was in there. I caught a whiff of something, a chemical smell that I knew from the grind.
That’s Leichenesser.
“You sure you’re okay, Chief?”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine. You look like you saw a damn ghost.”
“I don’t know,” he said, and shook his head. “Maybe I did. The truth is, I’ve got to take off for a while.”
“A while?”
“I might not be back.”
I looked around, but I didn’t see any bags or anything.
“Where you going?”
“It’s not important. Just do me a favor.”
“Shoot.”
“If your friend asks, you never saw me today.”
“They sicced that red-haired bitch on you, didn’t they?”
That stopped him. I could see it was true. The look, like he saw a ghost, came back.
“What do you know about that?”
“I know her name. It’s Zoe Ott.”
“How do you know her?”
“I saw her when I went to look up Wachalowski at the FBI. Did she get in your head?”
The look on his face said yes. I chanced a look at the closed door and scanned through. The revivor was in there; I could just make it out. That’s where the smell came from. A body had been cleaned up in there.
“You knew?” he asked. I turned the scan on him and saw the gun tucked under his shirt. “How much do you know?”
“I know what she does.”
He nodded. I saw the JZI flicker behind his eyes, and he got quiet for a second.
“The Fed, he’s an old soldier, like you,” I told him. “He got me out of a bind. Whatever his beef with you is, it’s got nothing to do with me. I just want some answers.”
The orange light went out. He sighed.
“Cal, look. You need to get out of here, okay? I’m telling you this for your own good. You need to leave, and so do I. Just …you didn’t see me.”
“I can take you out of here. They won’t be looking for me.”
“Cal …”
“I’m not being tracked. I owe you.”
He thought about that. His hands moved to his hips. His right one was close to the gun.
“What are you going to do?” I asked. “Shoot me?”
His hand didn’t move. He stayed like that too long for my liking, though.
“Wait here,” he said. “I got to make a call.”
He went into the next room and shut the door partway. On the other side, I could hear him rooting around for something. I didn’t hear him talking, but I picked him up on the JZI. I turned the backscatter onto the bathroom door up close and saw the revivor in there. It had a gun in its hand.
Through the walls I could see pipes and wiring. He paced in the next room, then went to a big safe. It was too thick to scan through. I lost him behind it.
I gave him a minute, but he stayed out of sight. The safe was big enough that he could have used it to cover his ass while he went out a window or something.
“Chief?” He didn’t answer.
I stepped up to the door, ready to shove it when he opened it and came out.
“I said to wait,” Buckster said. He had a metal briefcase in one hand.
“Sorry.”
“You want answers?” he said. “Let’s go.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Grab what you need.”
He held up the metal case.
“I got all I need,” he said. “Let’s go.”
8 Fathom
Nico Wachalowski—Empire Apartments, Apartment #213
I didn’t doubt who planted the monitoring device, but as soon as I passed through the perimeter and my JZI came back online, a message was waiting that confirmed it.
Ai wants to see you.
I still couldn’t reach Calliope; her JZI was showing a status of blocked, meaning it wasn’t taking calls. There was any number of reasons she might do that, but the last time we spoke, she was with Buckster. I’d feel better when she responded.
You worry about me?
I did, a little.
The truth was, I’d worried about her more than I let on. I wasn’t sure why. I hadn’t known her well at all, but somehow she’d gotten under my skin. When we started writing back and forth, I caught myself getting concerned when she stayed quiet too long. It was my first experience being home and waiting for someone to finish their tour.
Was that how Faye had felt? If so, it must have been worse, because back then when I stopped writing, I never started again. I didn’t even look her up when I came back. I never got a chance to make that right.
I shouldn’t have sent her. Calliope was tough. She knew what she was getting into, and she could take care of herself, but sometimes things went outside your control. She didn’t need to put herself in trouble to get me on her side. I didn’t need her to get to Fawkes.
JZI Status: BLOCKED.
I shut the front door behind me and locked it. I hung my coat on the rack and moved into the living room, removing from my pocket the object Bhadra had slipped me. The small electronic device fit in my palm. It was the shape of a capsule, with a smooth outer shell and several built-in data ports.
I slipped a probe into the port and gave it a gentle twist. Right away a flood of messages scrolled by in front of me, before the HUD cleared and a set of indicators began to appear.
Init version 0.3
Detecting …
Initializing …
Property of Heinlein Industries, Inc.
A series of specs, nondisclosure statements, and legal warnings scrolled by, then cleared away as a connection opened to what I recognized as a revivor network. It was empty.
Interesting. It was some kind of freestanding revivor communications port. It provided a tunnel onto an existing revivor network band.
Searching …
A grid appeared, filling my field of vision, and one by one, nodes began to appear on it. It happened slowly at first, but they quickly filled the screen. I zoomed in until the points began to spread apart. They weren’t connected in the traditional hub-and-spoke configuration; they were all separate, free-floating.
Searching …
Something’s wrong …
The total node count kept increasing, but none of them was tagged as active. They were in some kind of standby state. When the count was finished, it numbered more than six hundred.
Six hundred. The number was like a weight on my chest. Once, during my tour, I saw close to 150 of them let loose on a suburb. Not a shantytown or slum, but a developed region with brick homes and locked doors. It took us two hours to reach them from the nearest base, and by the time we got there, the carnage was visible from the air. Bodies lay torn apart in the streets, where blood baked in the sun. The old, the young, children, and babies were all pulled to pieces, and the revivors were rooting through the remains. We airlifted out fifty or so people from two rooftops. Then command declared the site lost, and it was razed.
They had to be on the tanker. There was no way that many revivors could be stored inside the city limits and not attract attention. Not even Heinlein kept a stockpile like that.
I started to try to trace them, when another process took over and opened a window over the grid. The image of a man’s face appeared in it, part of a digital recording, embedded in the unit’s software. I recognized him; it was the man Heinlein had designated as their liaison back during the first crisis.
MacReady.
Bob MacReady had met me at the Heinlein labs to discuss the case initially. Later he contacted me after I’d secured Faye’s body to provide information on Samuel Fawkes. I had never been able to determine whether he had done that with or without Heinlein’s knowledge.
“Hello, Agent Wachalowski. Listen carefully; this message will not repeat itself and will decay after playback. You have just connected to an experimental component designed to interface with the technology code named Huma. It has all the basic capabilities of the new revivor model. The link you’ve established will place you directly onto any existing Huma network that exists. This version of the revivor communications band is not backwards-compatible with the old one, which is very similar to your JZ interface. Be prepared to gather your information quickly, as we believe the node count is growing and could overwhelm your JZI.”
Huma. It sounded like a new revivor prototype. Was this what I’d seen in the clinic?
MacReady manipulated the computer terminal in front of him, and a second window appeared in a frame next to him. It displayed a schematic of the new node.
“The main reasons for the incompatibility are greater throughput, and a new layered mesh model. The hub-and-spoke configuration, where many revivors are controlled via a single command node, will still exist, but the revivors themselves use a full-mesh configuration. This makes them significantly more effective in the field. It allows large-scale, coordinated operations to remain fluid. Units quickly become aware if an existing directive has become undesirable or invalid. They can quickly relay that information back to the command node.”
The schematic in the window disappeared and was replaced by the Huma logo, followed by several bullet points:
• Field deployable• Field revivification• Enhanced control• Enhanced intelligence network “All of this is accomplished using the next generation of nanotechnology.” The bullet “Field deployable” moved into the foreground.
“You may recall we discussed this possibility during our meeting two years ago. The traditional model of getting
wired for revivification will be replaced with a simple injection. The nodes are constructed inside the body using the material contained in the injection payload. Long-term preservation will still require a blood transfusion, but this new model is extremely desirable in situations where longevity is not an issue.”
That was most of them. At least half the revivors uncrated in the field didn’t last a month. The bullet “Field revivification” moved to the foreground.
“The new revivor model can also be made field ready without a trip back to the Heinlein labs, another improvement that will greatly enhance their effectiveness.”
It had been talked about for years. They’d finally managed it, then. If it was true, a soldier who was wired could theoretically revive right there on the battlefield.
“What I’m about to tell you is not something Heinlein wants getting out, but the situation is out of control and someone has to intervene. You’re the only one I believe I can trust fully. Recently, Heinlein detected a network of these revivors coming online. Whoever took the prototypes has deployed them. I’ve sent out feelers, and learned that your agency is currently looking for a large revivor force; I believe this is the source of them.”
I had no idea the technology was so far along, but it would explain a lot. Fawkes wouldn’t have to smuggle in revivors from overseas. With something like this in his hands, he could create them on the fly.
“Heinlein Industries had reached the phase of human trials, Agent. That was never going to be officially sanctioned in the current climate. They conducted it in secret, at the Concrete Falls facility, where they processed the new recruits. They mixed the injections in among the standard inoculants battery given before deployment overseas. They monitored progress during routine checkups once the subjects were safely out of the country, with the military’s cooperation. It works, Agent, and it’s highly effective.”
In the feed, MacReady shook his head.