The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2015

by Paula Guran

  As it was, I didn’t have anything except my eyes and my brain, so I got to work looking around. There wasn’t a lot to see, but his chair yielded something interesting: three long kinky hairs, two dark and one white.

  “I could be wrong, but I bet they belong to Maya Tomason.”

  «Excellent. Were they deposited recently?»

  “I don’t think anyone else has sat down since then, or they’d have been brushed off the chair back and onto the seat.”

  I looked around the chair, but found only an uncapped pen on the floor. The trashcan was empty, and it wasn’t one of those auto-compactors, either. Rex checked the custodians’ logs: last emptied at 6:40 a.m.

  I had a look over the desk. It looked rummaged to me in a way the rest of the room hadn’t. Not the way someone might have left it if they’d been working there, in my opinion, and the police were usually more methodical. There was a legal pad in the middle, angled like a lefty had been writing on it. It was about halfway spent, and the top four pages had been torn off carelessly, leaving bits behind. The handwriting on the top little torn flap read, “This letter is to inform,” as did the next one down. The scrap under that, a little bigger, was addressed to Ahmed Desai, and said, “With reluctance, I regret to inform you of my . . . ” The rest of the page was gone. There were a lot of papers on the desk, but nothing with a top left corner missing.

  The drawers were locked electronically; Rex popped them for me. The top left drawer had Grasso’s passport in it. I tapped the button and a holograph of the dead man appeared. I hadn’t seen his face before, but I thought he had an arrogant look to him. Maybe I was imagining that based on the personality he’d left behind. A Swiss visa had been issued to him a month prior, and hadn’t been used yet.

  A piece of paper sticking out of a book kept catching my eye, part of an address. I tugged it out a little further. The handwriting was the same as all the other notes, so Grasso had written it himself, and the paper was slightly yellowed on the half that had stuck out, so it had been written a while ago. It was an address I knew all too well.

  “Rex. You have bits and pieces from Grasso’s assistant in you, right?”

  «That is a deplorable way to describe my logical makeup, but I will grant the broader point, yes.»

  “Why does he have written on this piece of paper the address ‘3 Kingston Circle, Bridgehampton, NY’?”

  «I don’t know, why shouldn’t he?»

  I gritted my teeth. “This is important. Do you know, or not?”

  «I have told you that I don’t. What is its significance?»

  “That’s the address of the home I was arrested in last year.”

  «Ah. Yes, that makes sense. He probably wrote it down so that he could delete it from his implant before creating me.»

  I blinked. That was not what I had expected Rex to say at that juncture, not by a long shot. “You’re going to have to explain this.”

  «Eventually, yes.»

  “No,” I said—quietly, but out loud because I wanted to make the point clear. “Explain it now.”

  «You said you didn’t want to know.»

  “I was wrong. Spill it.”

  «In due time. For now, I need more information.»

  “Then I’m leaving.”

  «Confound you, Andy, finish your search.»

  I made for the door, and got it halfway open before he relented.

  «Damnation! I asked you earlier whether I could say that I was astounded by your ignorance of your own hardware. You took it as an insult, but your judgment was clouded by ego. I intended no such thing.»

  “If it gets you to tell me the truth, then you have my permission to say it.”

  «Noted, but unnecessary. The computing hardware in your head—»

  “It’s the stolen implant.”

  «Why did you engage in dramatics if you already knew that?»

  I sat down heavily in the chair by the door. “I only figured it out just now. But it doesn’t make any sense. Why? It’s . . . it’s impossible.”

  «Balderdash, it is entirely possible. Indeed, it is the only thing that makes sense.»

  My head was starting to hurt. You know that feeling when there’s this pressure behind your eyeballs, like someone’s got a bicycle pump in your sinuses? I had that. “Explain. In small, demeaning words if you have to, but explain.”

  «Mr. Fitzgerald already told you of the extensive search for the device. They investigated everyone involved, everyone who could have been passed the device, and every place it could have been. Mr. Fitzgerald, though a blustering ass, is neither an idiot nor is he ineffective. But he could not search everyone. An ordinary hiding place would either be under the thief ’s control, and thus susceptible to search, or not under control, and thus susceptible to accidental discovery. Implanted, however, it would be hidden in plain sight and make the most effective use of the device’s own camouflaging capability. With that accomplished, the thief can wait until scrutiny has waned, and retrieve the device.»

  “How’d they get it out of the building, with everyone searching?”

  «I do not know.»

  “That’s insane. Out of everyone they could have implanted it in, why would they pick a random private detective in New York?”

  Except that as soon as I said that, I knew they hadn’t. Implant computers were still pretty cutting-edge when I got mine, and only a few clinics were licensed to do it. The company ships the device to the clinic, the clinic installs it: your first implant is a surgical procedure, to install what they call an “implant bay” and after that it only takes a couple of minutes to swap them out. I’d come up to Boston for mine, and the clinic had been, in the local patois, “wicked busy.” So busy that one guy got the wrong implant and pitched a fit. I was in the recovery room at the time, and he made the docs go around and check everyone with the same model. I didn’t like his tone, and it was the same model anyway, so I said hands off. The woman next to me took the hint and said the same. Long story short, I’d started a mutiny and they had to throw the guy out empty-handed and howling.

  “Desai said that one of Grasso’s employees had been fired before the theft.”

  «Clay Hindle, yes.»

  “Can you get a photo of Hindle?”

  I’d barely finished asking, and there was a headshot of the guy from the clinic. Son of a bitch.

  «The device was intended to be hidden, to act like commercial devices. But it must also have been intended to host a military-grade artificial intelligence, something approaching my caliber. Otherwise there would be no point in having Dr. Grasso examine it for so long. He most likely intended to upload a copy of me into this very hardware upon retrieving it, which is why he was in that lab where you found him.»

  Rex kept talking, but I didn’t pay any attention. The day after the clinic, I’d gotten the call from the French fellow with the house on Long Island. If they couldn’t grab the implant immediately because of the heat on them, there was a good way to at least prevent me or the feds from discovering it until they were ready: make sure it was hidden, turned off in a jail cell for a year.

  “All right,” I said, already not liking where this was going. “So Grasso’s the device thief.”

  «Almost certainly. He was a man of method and ambition, who apparently was stymied here. He could not have failed to notice that he would not be promoted further. I suspect he intended to sell the device, with his revolutionary artificial agent on it, to a competing firm. It would humiliate Turing Technologies.»

  “All right, then, but how did he steal it?”

  «I do not exactly know, yet. He must have had a partner, because your appointment with Fujiwara and Klein was canceled only after his death. It is sufficient for my purpose to know that he was involved.»

  “It won’t be enough for the police.”

  «Knowing this, further deductions must surely follow.»

  I sighed. “Okay, how about an easier one: who killed Grasso?”

&nbs
p; «I do not know, but I am impressed that you recognize it as the simpler question.»

  “I was being a smart-ass.”

  There wasn’t an answer, and I didn’t wait for one. I picked up the sheet of paper with the Bridgehampton address, walked across the room, and put it into the middle of one of the larger stacks. If they were more than ten minutes behind me, the heat signature would be long gone. “Let’s have a chat with this guy Hindle. Can you get him on the phone?”

  «I have been trying to. There has been no answer. Ah.»

  “Ah?”

  «We have just received a message from Detective Stevens, asking why we are attempting to contact Clay Hindle. She wishes us to come to her.»

  As it happens, Detective Stevens was only two blocks away. The big office building looked to be about two hundred years old, red brick with big glass doors and a uniformed police officer at the curb. I identified myself and she sent me up to the second floor. I took the stairs and hooked a left down the hall, following the sounds of loud talking and the gazes of the occasional office worker peering out from their office doors.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said out loud when I got to the door near the end of the hall with the yellow POLICE—DO NOT CROSS hologram. The door was open and a couple uniformed cops were coming out, so it wasn’t until I got right up close that I read the stencil on the frosted glass window: FUJIWARA AND KLEIN ASSOCIATES. The flat black hologenerator chirped as I stepped over it, and I heard an old-fashioned camera shutter noise.

  “Baldwin. C’mere.” Detective Stevens didn’t sound happy to see me. She’d been squatting next to a desk, and winced a little as she heaved herself up. I smelled blood for the second time that day, and without the benefit of heavy air conditioning. I wouldn’t say I’ve got a weak stomach, but I was glad it’d been a while since lunch. If that and a homicide detective weren’t clue enough, I caught a glimpse of a man’s shoe sticking out sideways from under the desk.

  “I’ve seen your face too many times today, Baldwin. Why is Claudius Rex attempting to contact Clay Hindle?”

  I filled her in on what Ahmed Desai had told me, and said that we wanted to ask Hindle about the theft. Since he’d been fired just before the theft, he might know about their security precautions and be more candid about them than Fitzgerald. She grimaced, but seemed to buy it.

  “That Hindle?” I asked.

  Stevens grunted and turned so I could see. It was the guy from the clinic, all right: mid-twenties, brown hair, crooked nose, nicely dressed. Someone had whacked him on the back of the head with something good and heavy. Probably sitting, and then pushed onto the floor postmortem. This case was getting less and less fun all the time.

  “When did it happen?”

  “Around noon.” She didn’t elaborate.

  “Well, at that time, I was—”

  “You were with me, Baldwin, yeah. I know you’re out of it.” She gave me a suspicious look. “You willing to swear under oath that your boss Rex is out of the country?”

  I said I’d swear that he hadn’t set foot in the US in the last year. Rex called that sophistry and started spinning an elaborate yarn that I ignored entirely.

  “So, Detective,” I said, talking over him. “Remember how I put you onto the Grasso time of death?”

  She narrowed her eyes. I was pushing my luck, but what the hell. I kept pushing.

  “You probably narrowed down your list of suspects pretty well, right? Anyone you recommend looking at for the theft, under our earlier theory?”

  She sighed, and looked around me at the uniformed cops searching the front room. “Yeah, all right. We’re still trying to figure out who in their big conference had a chance to slip out. Big dark room with everyone watching the front. Anyone who got inside the lab could have done it. Desai and Fitzgerald both had sufficient access to the computer system to alter the temperature logs, and neither of them can prove his whereabouts during some portion of that hour. Another thing: looks like Hindle received a call from TuriTech while I was interviewing you. We traced it to the lab next to where we found Grasso, but I’m betting it’s a dead end.”

  To show my appreciation, I repeated what Maya Tomason had said about ducking out. Detective Stevens thanked me and made a note of it. Then she told me to get the hell out, and I went.

  The weight in the pit of my stomach didn’t go away as I left the crime scene. The thought of a job offer right out of jail had seemed too good to be true, but I’d let it buoy me, help me keep my spirits up. Of course it had been a lie. I stopped short.

  “She didn’t ask me about the job interview.”

  «Your powers of observation are evidently intact.»

  “Yeah, but why not? I was supposed to be here this morning. There’s no way she’d have let that slide.”

  «His computer has been blanked.»

  “Did you do that?”

  «No.»

  I took the rest of the stairs in silence and pushed my way out the front door, nodding to the uniform still standing there.

  “So much for my interview.”

  «It is possible that they intended to employ you, possibly to make amends. I expect that on your first day they would have offered you an equipment upgrade, at no cost to you. Thereafter you would have been no threat to them.»

  “Yeah, it’s possible. Or they’d just whack me and take it. Grasso had that rail pistol out and loaded and ready to go.”

  «Possibly.»

  “Hindle can’t have killed Grasso. Maybe whoever did, got them both. Maybe Tomason was right about it being an outside job.”

  «The partner is a third person, someone who had legitimate access to the building, and who was known to Antonio Grasso. Go back to Turing Technologies; we will speak to Dr. Joshi first.»

  “Look, this has been a long day. It’s time for me to go home and get some dinner and some sleep.”

  «We still haven’t spoken to Dr. Joshi or Ms. Duvalier. They surely have been warned, and will have time to prepare stories.»

  “Be that as it may, I am tired and hungry and getting very sick of this case. You want to talk to them, call them and talk to them. This is getting into territory I swore I wouldn’t go back to. So I am walking home now by way of a slice of pizza.”

  I took the T back to my new place, a third floor walk-up in Somerville. I’d picked the apartment because it was upstairs from a bakery.

  «This is an atrocious living arrangement,» said Rex when I was halfway up the stairs. «The data network is intolerably slow. I can barely contact my external storage and processing. I shall have to change them from polling to interrupt, which will greatly impinge on my thought processes.»

  “Will it affect your ability to talk?”

  «Thankfully, no.»

  “ ‘Thankfully’ wasn’t the word that came to mind.”

  «We should acquire a more suitable abode immediately.»

  I rested on the second floor landing. “What, like a cardboard box outside South Station where the public wireless is nice and fast? I could use the toilets inside, keep an eye on the buses and maglevs.”

  «I cannot tell whether you’re being flippant.»

  “I’m being flippant.”

  «It is unbecoming of you.»

  I laughed. “The fact that you asked me only proves that you haven’t figured out yet how to cancel my lease and lock the door. So in the interest of saving your time and my breath, I will simply mention that my landlady is a sweet little old Thai woman who does all her business by pen and paper, and the lock is a simple mechanical one with no fancy network access.”

  «Abominable. Stone-age.»

  Rex went on in that vein all the way up to the third floor. I mention this because it was a significant distraction to me when I got to my door. Otherwise I would have paid closer attention to the scratches on the lock— not the marks of a drunk’s keys, but of some rather sharper tools.

  Had I been able to ponder that over Rex’s recitation of the evils
of my domicile, I might not have announced to the empty apartment upon my entrance, “Honey, I’m home!” and might, in turn, have stood a fighting chance before I had a hood over my head and got a lungful of something rotten-sweet. My legs dropped out from under me, and I blacked out.

  So let this little episode reflect not upon my general awareness and skill, but instead serve as a reminder that sometimes it really does hurt to complain.

  I woke up on a cot. My shoulders hurt like crazy, as well they would when a guy’s been knocked out and had his hands tied behind his back for however long. I felt like I’d been out a long time. I was thirsty and starving, my head hurt like hell, and my left arm was asleep where I’d been lying on it.

  I was in a big unfinished room with a cement floor and a bunch of exposed pipes. It looked like somebody’s basement. There were two bare LED banks with pull strings hanging from the ceiling, and no windows. Not musty, though, and I do appreciate cleanliness in an oubliette.

  Next to the bed lay a shapeless black bag, in which I caught a glimpse of aluminum foil: a booster bag. Great, I’d been shoplifted.

  «Excellent, you are awake.»

  My dry lips cracked as I tried to subvocalize. “You still there?”

  «I am operational, yes. I have been without network connection for sixteen hours now.»

  That explained my headache and all.

  “Yeah, it looks like they stuffed my head in a bag lined with a Faraday cage. I’m betting this basement’s got one too.”

  «While you were unconscious, they attempted a test on your implant computer. In its original state, the stolen implant would have responded with a specific pattern, betraying its true nature. I chose not to respond in that way, and they attempted to turn it off. They have made no further attempts at interaction.»

  “Well, that buys us some time, at least.”

  «They have become apprehensive over the last few hours. Apparently they have been attempting to contact me for some time via some link to the outside world. Obviously that is doomed to failure, if they are expecting a call to originate outside this room.»

  The traitorous cot made a drawn-out squeaking noise from its springs when I sat up. This got the attention of the two men on the other side of the basement, a tall skinny fellow and a short skinny fellow. I only mention the skinny because I thought it an odd deviation from the way these partnerships usually go. They were both having a look at a monitor setup on a desk, some kind of terminal next to a hallway or deep-set door. Shorty came to say hi.