by Dima Zales
I jump to my feet, a surge of adrenaline turning the pain into a distant buzzing.
Before I can bend down, Sawyer retrieves the phone and hands it to me. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs.
I look at the screen.
The camera scans the inside of the car, and I see a body sprawled on the seat in an unnatural position. It’s a woman dressed in a white hospital gown—a woman who possesses an achingly familiar apple shape.
“No,” I whisper. “It can’t be.”
The camera only captures the body up to its shoulders, so despite my uncle’s reaction, it could be someone else. Of course, denial is one of the major stages of grief.
“Move the camera up,” I instruct Detective Sawyer’s partner on the other end. “Let me see.”
The view begins to move.
With all my might, I will this person not to have Mom’s face. I feel like I’d make a deal with the devil for it to be anyone but my mom.
The phone’s owner finally lets me see her upper body, and I feel myself getting welded to the ground.
This body has no face.
Of any kind.
I blink, horror clouding my thinking.
It’s not just the face that’s missing.
It’s also the scalp and the ears.
This body has no head.
Chapter Fourteen
Hypnotized by the atrocity on the screen, I can’t look away.
My fingers loosen for a second, but I tense my grip before I can drop the phone like my uncle did.
I feel the half-digested mashed potatoes in my throat.
The person on the other end of the phone must understand the reaction the headless upper body generates in people, because he lowers the phone again, and this is when I see it.
On the body’s right hand is a ring.
A giant emerald ring that changes everything.
“This is Mrs. Sanchez,” I say hoarsely. “That’s her ring.”
I hand Ada the phone since she’s seen the ring as well. Ada looks at the screen and nods. Then the phone on the other end must move again, revealing Mrs. Sanchez’s headless body, because Ada turns translucently pale and clutches at her mouth as though she’s about to lose her smoothie.
“It’s not Mom,” I say, this time in Russian, because I think my uncle is so lost in grief he didn’t hear me identify the body. “It’s this poor lady who was part of the experiment.”
Relief relaxes the worry lines in my uncle’s face. I realize I, too, must look relieved and feel a pang of guilt. A better person wouldn’t be so glad to see Mrs. Sanchez dead in Mom’s place.
Detective Sawyer takes out a notebook and pen and says, “Tell me about Mrs. Sanchez.”
A half-coherent conversation follows, where I tell him about the poor woman, her family situation, her Alzheimer’s, and her diabetes.
“Maybe she went into a coma,” Ada says in a shaky voice. “She didn’t get her shot this morning, and I doubt the kidnappers brought insulin with them.”
“You’re right,” I say. “They might’ve finished her off, not wanting to take a comatose patient with them.”
“But why take the head?” my uncle asks. “Is this some crazy cult? Or terrorists? Is there going to be a beheading video on YouTube?”
As soon as he asks this, a piece of the puzzle falls firmly into place.
Ada beats me to verbalizing my suspicions. “It’s about our research,” she says. “They took the head because that’s where the Brainocytes are.”
I’ve been too busy to think about the kidnappers’ motives until now, but what Ada suggested is the best explanation, especially in light of the missing head.
The detective must also see it, because he asks us to explain the research to him again. I let Ada handle it while I take my uncle aside.
In Russian, I whisper, “Can you get rid of the cop for me? I want to go to Ada’s house and retry the technological solution, but I have a feeling he might insist I identify Mrs. Sanchez in person or something. Afterwards, tell the hospital people I checked myself out and that they can send me my bill whenever it’s ready. And don’t worry, whatever Ada and I uncover, I’ll keep you in the loop.”
My uncle bobs his head, and as soon as Ada finishes her explanation, he turns to the detective. “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?” In a lower voice, but still loud enough so I can overhear, he adds, “There’s a private matter I’d like to discuss with you.”
The detective’s eyebrows go up in an uncanny imitation of Mr. Potato Head. He probably thinks my uncle might tell him something about his son. The proposition is tempting enough that the detective says, “Sure. Thank you.”
As soon as they walk off, I tell Ada, “We’re leaving. Now.”
Ada looks a little shell-shocked. She might still be processing Mrs. Sanchez’s demise. Figuring she can sort out her emotions on the way, I grab the clothes my uncle got me and go into the bathroom.
Again, I’m amazed at the effects the adrenaline is having on my pain sensitivity. I almost feel normal as I take off the hospital gown, but when I put on the street clothes, the pain breaks through with such vengeance that I consider taking a Percocet. In the end, to keep my mind as clear as I can, I decide to tough it out.
“Let’s go,” I tell Ada when I leave the bathroom. “We’ll have to cab it.”
“Please, come in,” Ada says after unlocking the reinforced door to her apartment.
I follow her, wondering if she was the paranoiac who installed it. Since her building is smack in the center of the most bohemian, and thus costly, part of Williamsburg, the neighborhood should be pretty safe, though I guess this door might predate the gentrification. I’m not surprised Ada chose to live here. She fits the neighborhood’s flair perfectly, and her exorbitant salary is proportional to her brilliance.
Personally, I don’t see the benefit in living in trendy neighborhoods unless they come with great restaurants and improve the commute. If I were in Ada’s shoes, Williamsburg wouldn’t work for me. Though it does have great food options, it’s much too far from the Techno headquarters.
I myself live in Brooklyn Heights. It isn’t the cheapest place in the world, but since I can afford a penthouse in NoHo (and thus anywhere in Manhattan), I rightfully consider my current multimillion-dollar brownstone a humble abode. In fact, I often feel like I’m following the advice in the book The Millionaire Next Door, which talks about self-made rich people living below their means. In my case, I’m more like a billionaire living next door to millionaires, but that’s still below my means and within the spirit of the book, I think.
“My office is this way,” Ada says and leads me through a sleek kitchen with modern-style cabinets and appliances that look like she got them at the MOMA museum. When we pass through the long, high-ceilinged corridor, I note a strange mix of punk bands and sci-fi movie posters occupying every inch of wall space.
“This is it,” Ada says proudly as we enter a room that was originally meant to be the living room. What Ada created here looks a lot like a cross between a data center, a gadget lover’s wet dream, and a mad scientist’s lair.
In the cool air conditioning of the room, racks of servers hum computations and two enormous TVs are hooked up to the latest Xbox and PlayStation. A row of about a dozen different monitors occupies the wall to my right. At the center of it all stands a desk with five monitors and a keyboard that’s split in half, with each half about a foot apart. A large trackpad sits in the middle, with a mouse to the right and a trackball to the left. A giant pair of headphones hanging over one of the screens completes the picture.
“Well, you got your input and output devices covered,” I say, noting the row of video game controllers sitting on a large computer tower by the desk.
“Please, have a seat.” Ada points to a large beanbag chair that could just as easily serve as a dog’s bed.
I sit there, and she plops into a blue Herman Miller chair designed for ergonomic work. It’s identical to the ones they
have at the Techno offices.
“Give me a minute.” Ada puts on the ginormous headphones and starts typing.
Her keyboard must be mechanical, with either blue or green switches, because every keystroke is loud enough to make me daydream about Percocet.
I might’ve dozed off, I’m not sure, but she startles me when she clears her throat and says, “I’m going to give you a custom-made environment I designed to work with the Brainocytes. I dubbed it AROS, which you can pronounce as Eros. It stands for Augmented Reality Operating System.”
The room around me momentarily brightens, and a bunch of floating holographic images appear in the empty and, in some cases, not-so-empty space.
“Don’t worry about the unfamiliar icons,” Ada says. “Here”—she hands me the Xbox controller—“control the arrow with this.”
Sometimes I get depressed when I think about how many video games I’ve played in my life. It’s especially sad when I consider it within the context of, “Time is money.” I feel like I’d be twenty times richer if I’d worked instead of playing Xbox for hours. Then again, I could say the same thing about binge-watching TV shows and other entertainment.
The controller sits comfortably in my hands, as only an object held for thousands of hours could. I twiddle the right stick, and the familiar white arrow appears, only this one is ghostly like everything else in this so-called AROS. It also moves much faster than the one at the hospital. Using the right stick, it takes me only a second to fly the pointer to the familiar sphere icon in the middle of the room, which also isn’t solid in this instantiation.
I click it, and the result is the same as back in the hospital, only the “connection error” sign is see-through.
“Okay,” Ada says without turning. “I traced it this time. The packets definitely left your head and reached Mitya’s LA datacenter. There are no problems with the security there as far as I can see. The issue is that the server can’t shake hands with your mom’s hardware.”
A cold fist grips my heart again. “So she’s either not connected, or she’s dead?”
Chapter Fifteen
“I don’t think she’s dead,” Ada says. “I piggybacked on her ID and tried to ping the other participants. I got the same results each time.”
“Which could just mean they’re all dead, like Mrs. Sanchez,” I say, but the tightness in my chest loosens at the ray of hope.
“That doesn’t add up.” Ada turns her chair to face me. “Why leave only Mrs. Sanchez’s body behind? If they killed everyone, they would’ve taken their heads too and dumped the bodies. Heads are easier to transport.”
Thanks to Ada’s logic, I feel like I can stop hyperventilating a little and gather my thoughts. Getting an idea, I ask, “Is there a log somewhere on the server? Something that can tell you where my mom was at any given point? As they drove around, she probably got onto a couple of Wi-Fi spots before switching back onto the cell network. Wouldn’t those events be logged somewhere?”
“Of course.” Ada smacks herself on the forehead, swivels her chair back around to face her monitors, and clicks away for a few long minutes.
“You’ll have to run the app again,” Ada says when she stops working. “I’ll be able to access the log afterwards.”
The sphere icon shows up, and I click it.
“Yes,” Ada says excitedly and attacks her keyboard once more. After a few minutes of frantic typing, she says, “Come take a look.”
On the biggest monitor on her desk is a zoomed-out map of New York and its boroughs, with dots spread across it.
“You’re a genius.” Ada looks up at me. “Whenever Wi-Fi was available, the event was logged, with timestamps and GPS coordinates. That right there”—she indicates an area on the outskirts of Long Island—“is the last location that was logged.”
She plays with her trackpad, and the map zooms in on the area, switching to satellite view.
“It’s a private airport,” I say, examining the greenery, the runways, and a couple of sleek planes.
“This explains why there isn’t a connection.” Ada swivels toward me again. “They must be in the air without a Wi-Fi connection.”
Though I should feel relieved, the idea that someone is flying my mom to who-knows-where is deeply unsettling.
“We have to tell the police,” I say. “They might be able to narrow it down to which plane and when.”
“Maybe.” Ada pinches her bottom lip. “It’s certainly worth a shot.”
“Can you write a version of this app that’ll keep trying to connect and notify us when it succeeds?” I ask. “This way, when they land or drive into an area with cell service or Wi-Fi, we’ll know right away.”
Ada’s dimple shines in full force, and she says, “I was just thinking along those same lines. I’ve got to say, I’m impressed you thought of it. Unlike me—” She suddenly stops, her dimple disappearing, and looks at me guiltily.
“Thanks, I think,” I reply, frowning.
“I didn’t mean to make that sound like an insult.” Ada looks at her hands. “I’ve been trying to tell you something, but it can wait until we do this.”
Before I can inquire further, she pointedly turns around, puts on her headphones, and begins writing code.
While she’s working on that, I get in touch with the detective, explain why I had to leave the hospital in a hurry, and share the airport information. At the end of the call, I don’t get the warm, fuzzy feeling that my extra bit of information might magically solve anything. Still, I promise to keep them in the loop on our end, get a reciprocal commitment in return, end the call, and contact my uncle to give him an identical update.
Before I get a chance to check if Ada is done, my phone lights up from an incoming video call.
A jolt of adrenaline hits my already overloaded system.
It’s Joe.
He wanted me to keep him posted, and I forgot to do exactly that. Did Uncle Abe tell Joe what he just heard, and does my cousin now want to berate me, or worse?
“Privet, Joe,” I say, though the Russian “hello” and the very Americanized “Joe” go together about as well as an American eagle and a sickle and hammer. Although, strictly speaking, an eagle (albeit a double-headed one) was the main coat of arms of the Russian Empire before it went all Soviet, and I think they brought it back later in the nineties, but that was after I’d left. Some think of bears when they think of Russian symbols, but I’ve never understood why. There aren’t any bears on any of the Russian or Soviet regalia, and if any nation should be associated with bears, it’s probably China, given their fascination with pandas.
“Hey,” Joe responds tersely. “Is this the Olga you told me about?”
The screen switches to the front-facing camera, and the face of the nurse who was working with Mom at NYU Langone fills the screen.
Instead of her usual uncaring expression, Olga looks disheveled and terrified, like a pigeon facing a rabid tomcat. She’s standing in a dingy hallway, and I see a door broken off its hinges to her left.
“Yes,” I say, doing my best to disguise my unsteady voice. “That’s her.”
My cousin perches the phone on something—probably a shoe rack, judging by the boot blocking part of my view. Then he walks into the frame and up to Olga and grabs her by her throat. “Tell me who took Nina Cohen if you want to live,” he growls at her in Russian.
I’m almost too petrified to notice the Terminator-ish line Joe accidentally quoted. If my cousin were sane, he’d wait for an answer before blocking her speaking apparatus. But this is Joe, and he squeezes her neck until the woman’s eyes bulge out of her head. When he lets go, she gasps for air but doesn’t scream out answers the way I would have in her place.
Suddenly, a man sticks his head into the open doorway of the apartment. He’s big, and his face is contorted in fury.
“What the fuck is going on here?” the guy says in accented English. “I’m calling the—”
Without a single word, Joe leaps
at the newcomer.
In a smooth motion, my cousin punches the guy in the stomach. He must catch him straight in the solar plexus, because the big guy doubles over and gets a knee to the face.
“Nyet,” Olga screams as she looks down at the fallen guy, and I realize Joe just took down her husband or boyfriend.
My cousin must realize this too, because he cruelly kicks the man in the ribs and says, “Speak, bitch, or you’re scrubbing him off the floor.”
Olga looks too stunned to speak, but Joe doesn’t care and gives the guy another vicious kick, this time in the face.
Blood pours from the man’s face. Seeing it, Olga frantically cries, “Stop!”
She starts speaking quickly, stress making her mix English and Russian together.
“He spoke Russian,” I puzzle out, “but he had an accent, like he just arrived from there. He paid five grand for the information about the Russian woman, Nina Cohen, and the rest of the people. I don’t know who ‘they’ are. I’ll give you the money he gave me. I’m sorry. Please don’t kill me. Please don’t kill Grisha.”
“I want a name.” Joe’s hand is back around her neck. “Give me a name, or I’ll break your fucking neck.”
“He said to call him Anton,” Olga gasps. “I don’t know his last name. I don’t know anything else.”
“Describe Anton.” Joe loosens his grip on her neck.
She frantically describes a man who sounds suspiciously like my attacker. Joe, who heard the description from me, must recognize that, because he’s convinced enough to let go of her neck and pull out a bunch of computer printouts from his pocket.
“Which one?” He shows her the images.
My guess is he has the pictures the cops showed me earlier. I wonder how he got them. Joe’s official line of work is private security, so maybe he has connections on the force? At least I hope that’s what it is.