Marlowe and the Spacewoman

by Ian M. Dudley

  “You! You’re going straight back to the asylum where you belong.”

  Jebediah bristled, his chest swelling with rage. “You can’t send me back! I won’t go. I won’t let you send me!”

  “Artie! Get in here now! We’ll see who can and can’t do what.”

  “Um, brother,” interrupted Marlowe. “May I make a suggestion?”

  “What?”

  “You may have averted a schism in the cabinet, but the people of the City are still rumbling in discontent. By destroying the Brussels sprouts crop, Nina became their hero. Embracing her will help your image, but you could improve it further by showing what a kind, generous, and compassionate individual you are.”

  “Where are you going with this?” snarled the Governor. And via email, a single question: “I thought you hated father?”

  “Imagine, if you will, a press conference, where you announce clemency for Nina, who is standing to your right, and then welcome home and hug your long-lost father, standing to your left.” Marlowe emailed back, “I did. But he’s shown me he’s not totally devoid of humanity. Give him a chance.”

  “I want to stand on the right,” howled Jebediah.

  “I don’t care which side I stand on, as long as I get clemency,” said Nina.

  Jebediah crowed. “Then it’s all settled!”

  “Just a moment,” shrilled the Governor. “I’m the one who makes the decisions around here.”

  “Of course, dear brother, I’m just making a suggestion.”

  “It is a good, idea, though,” continued the Governor reluctantly. “Actually, it’s a very good idea. Yes, that should work. But, my acceptance of the idea is conditional. Marlowe, I need someone to keep an eye on dad for me. And I can’t think of a better person than you. He can stay out of the hospital, but only if he lives with you. That seems fair, doesn’t it?”

  Marlowe’s smile imploded. The thought if his father living with him triggered a tide of horror so overwhelming even the poker face numbing agents couldn’t resist its effect. He turned away, hiding his face from Obedere so his old nemesis wouldn’t see the pain and disappointment on his face. Unfortunately, he turned to Jebediah, who did see it.

  “What’s the matter with you, Spares! You look like the world’s about to end. Hell, if you feel that strongly about it, I’ll go back to the asylum!”

  Marlowe was about to take him up on the offer, but the Governor torpedoed that idea. “Nope. Marlowe’s right. You’re more valuable to me politically outside. You live with Marlowe.”

  “Excuse me,” hissed Obedere, “but we have another problem. Fortunately, I can offer the perfect solution.”

  “What problem is that?” asked the Governor.

  “The law requires that all citizens be members in good standing, and members can only be in good standing if they are working and generating tax revenue. Clemency aside, Ms. Minari is unemployed. She needs a job if she wishes to avoid the labor camps. Fortunately,” and his eyes lit up dangerously as he said it, “I have a position or two she can assume back in the Ministry of Policing.”

  It was Nina’s turn to bristle. “I don’t think so. I’d rather be executed than work for you!”

  “That can be arranged,” was Obedere’s oily response.

  “Actually, brother, I agree with Obedere that Nina needs a job.”

  Marlowe’s outbreak sent a shock wave of silence through the room. He couldn’t tell who looked more surprised, Obedere or his brother. Then he saw Nina’s face, and decided she had the other two beat by a kilometer. “The idea had already occurred to me, and I have a counter-proposal to Obedere’s suggestion. I’ve recently discovered that I could use a bodyguard, and Nina has already proven herself more than capable of filling that role.” He turned to Nina. “If you’re interested, that is. A job to get you by until something better comes along.”

  Nina took Marlowe’s hand and shook it firmly. “You’ve got a deal. After everything I’d been through with you, one thing is painfully clear. You need looking after.”

  “Fabulous,” said the Governor. “It’s all settled then. Now if you’ll follow me out to the front of City Hall, I’ve called a press conference. Mustn’t let the people worry about Nina’s status any longer than absolutely necessary.”

  The press conference was long and uncomfortable. The press had a lot of questions for the Governor and Nina, and since the longer the press conference went on, the more upset Obedere seemed to get, Marlowe’s brother seemed disinclined to wrap things up in a timely fashion. Marlowe stayed as far back as he could, in the shadow of a marble pillar, and wasn’t called upon to answer any questions. His brother was coming out of the matter OK, emphasizing his roll in preventing Obedere from summarily executing Nina right after the crash. Nina, it was clear to Marlowe, was coming out of it far better than just OK. Even the supposedly unbiased and indifferent press was gushing over her. She was turning into a regular folk hero.

  The drive back after the press conference was long and uncomfortable. No amount of doping by the nano probes was dulling Marlowe’s hunger, and the others looked pretty famished too. On top of that, the Studebaker had strained its magno coils driving up the side of the high rise and blown out its shocks, so every nanometer of variation in the road surface was translated into several centimeters of bounce. Jebediah was in the back seat, having slipped back into a less lucid state and muttering to himself. Nina’s gaze swept back and forth as she tried to take in all of the City, this time without the stress of a death sentence hanging over her. Marlowe thought. And the more he thought, the less he liked what he was thinking about.

  The Marlowe assassination case was still wide open. Why was he killed? What was the motive? The modus operandi of the murder and the attempted murder were completely different. The murder had been quick and efficient, a major inconvenience in Marlowe’s morning, requiring a resurrection and lost time pouring over video surveillance. The trap in the recon parlor had been more personal, not immediately killing him, more like a sick and twisted game, toying with him, leaving him pinned down and knowing he was doomed. Except he had escaped.

  And then there was Obedere’s PDI-killing virus going off at the sewage plant. The timing had almost been permanently fatal. Once the exit had been sealed off, he couldn’t call for help. It seemed unlikely that Obedere’s virus kicking in as the explosions started was a coincidence. Marlowe couldn’t prove the connection absolutely, but Obedere’s past behavior made it clear who was responsible. If one assumed that the attack in the recon parlor had been intended to cause Marlowe a permanent, unrecoverable death, then his managing to survive would have thrown a major wrench in the works. The sewage tank incident had all the hallmarks of an improvised attempt to finish him off after Tray’s itchy trigger failed.

  “House, have you had any luck checking into the City Gas and Electric tanker truck that nearly blew us up?”

  “I did penetrate the CG&E systems, but it’s been slow going. None of the trucks have been reported missing. I’ve been surreptitiously querying all of the trucks, asking for their current status. So far, the ones I’ve queried have all responded. I have to go slowly though to avoid generating suspicious comm traffic and alerting the sys admin. In addition, the trucks tend to gossip.”

  “Try a new search criteria. Let’s assume the attack in the sewage treatment plant was improvised after we survived the recon parlor bomb. The truck would have been called off its normal route to go to the site.”

  “Yes, but the truck thought it was following its normal route.”

  “We don’t know that. We only know it thought it was at the right place.”

  “Hmm, an interesting point. A bit of a long shot, but I’ll try it. I’ll check the delivery logs and get back to you.”

  “Thanks, House.”

  Marlowe went back to thinking as the Studebaker jerked in fits and starts through the heavy traffic. Even if the attack at the sewage plant had been improvised, it still didn’t explain how he had been in
fected with the virus.

  “House, get me Huggy Bear, please.”

  “One moment.”

  Nina looked over. “Still working? Don’t you think you’re entitled to a bit of a rest, at least for the rest of the day? We’ve all been through a lot.”

  “I can’t rest until I bring my killer to justice. I’m just funny that way.”

  Nina shrugged, patted him on the shoulder, and went back to looking out the window. “It’s strange. Everything I look at ends up being nothing like what it seems. Dogs run over and chat you up, buildings are made with Styrofoam, houses have personalities. I’m told parrots are public enemy number one around here, yet the only parrot I’ve seen is yours, and he turns out to be the closest thing to normal I’ve encountered since I walked out of my ship. And that’s stretching the definition considerably. I mean, look at the car we’re in! It can climb buildings! Sometimes I wonder if I’m unconscious on my ship, still in deep space, and suffering from a lack of oxygen or something. It would be simpler if this was all a bad dream.”

  Marlowe was missing something. He could sense it on the very edge of his awareness, and it bugged him that he couldn’t quite see it.

  “How much longer must I endure these indignities!” Jebediah had decided to interact with the world again. “I am NOT insane. Just because people say I’m crazy doesn’t make it true! You can’t believe everything you’re told.”

  “I know, Father. It’s OK, nobody believes you’re crazy any more.”

  “I have Huggy Bear. Piping him through now.”

  “Huggy Bear, any progress on that virus?”

  Huggy Bear’s face popped up in his left eye. His hair was even oilier and more unkempt that before. He was perspiring slightly, but had a big smile on his face.

  “Marlowe, thank you again for giving me this virus. It’s fascinating. Utterly fascinating. I’m learned how to code things I didn’t even think was possible. When you find the author, I simply must meet him. He’s a genius. A super genius!”

  “So you have made progress.”

  “Well, of a sort. I’ve been watching it execute on a virtual PDI in debug mode. That way I get a line by line view of the action, as it were. This is a clever virus. The first time I tried, it detected that the PDI was a virtual PDI and tried to infect the host system! So I ran a virtual PDI on a virtual PDI to see what-”

  “Huggy, as impressive as I’m sure this dialog is about to be, I’m not up to speed on my geek terms. Just give me the highlights, please.”

  “Well, I managed to fool the virus into infecting a virtual PDI and then watched it execute. There was no way your PDI could have been recovered with anything but the complete wiping of the hardware and a reinstall of an uninfected image. This thing is thorough. It was a tough nut to crack, but then it hit me: what if there isn’t one virus, but two, and you need both to start the infection? Turns out I was pretty close. You have two components, but they aren’t separate viruses. The first program is a virus, and it has to be resident on your PDI when the second part, the trigger, is received. And the trigger in and of itself is harmless, so you’d never think twice about receiving it.”

  “What was the trigger?”

  “I don’t know exactly. I found the bit that changes when the trigger is received, and when I flipped that bit, the virus launched. It could have been a word, an image, a spoken phrase. The virus apparently takes a checksum of the trigger phrase or file, so I can’t reconstruct the actual trigger. Maybe if I ran checksums on everything you’ve received in the last day, but that would take quite a bit of time. And that’s assuming the trigger still exists. Oh, and Marlowe?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You may still be infected by the executable part of the virus. I’m sending over a virus scanner to check your PDI. There’s no way of knowing when you were infected by the virus. It could have been lying dormant for years, which would mean it’s in all your backups.”

  The download bar superimposed itself over Huggy Bear’s face. It downloaded very quickly.

  “The file he’s sending scans clean,” said House.

  “And so did whatever it was that actually infected me,” said Marlowe wryly. “Ah nuts. Here goes nothing.” Marlowe executed the program. Two seconds later a window popped up. “Virus not detected,” it said, a little yellow happy face next the to statement winking at him.

  “Looks like I’m clean, Huggy.”

  “Then you received the infection sometime after the backup you used to restore your PDI.”

  “Thanks Huggy, keep digging.”

  “I will.”

  “Oh, one last question. How long after receiving the trigger does it take for the virus to execute?”

  “Oh, I can’t say for certain, but I’d guess not very long. I haven’t found any timing mechanism in the virus, and to keep things simple, the trigger is probably just a trigger, without any extra code attached to it. But there could be a pointer in the virus I’m missing, so I can’t rule out a time delay.”

  “If there’s no timer?”

  “Then I’d guess a few seconds. A minute or so tops.”

  “Thanks Huggy. Let me know if you find anything else.” Marlowe killed the link. “House, you know what to do?”

  “Scan all the backups for the virus to see if we can detect when you were infected?”

  “Right on the first guess.”

  Huggy Bear’s analysis of the PDI killing virus clearly indicated a very sophisticated program. Most of the viruses Obedere had sent were, as House put it, obvious. Even the id box hijacking virus, after a second pass, had been found and disassembled with relative ease. Clearly not of the same quality as the PDI killer. It made Marlowe wonder. He had another thought.

  “House, while I was driving to the sewage treatment plant, did any military or police aircraft take off from airfields in the vicinity?”

  “I can check with the Ministry of Policing satellite database.”

  “Please do.”

  The Ministry of Policing maintained a network of satellites hanging over the City, watching and recording every square centimeter and maintaining a stored database of images going back a couple of years. It had been another of Obedere’s pet projects, ostensibly for use during large events, to gauge crowd sizes, but Obedere had immediately co-opted it for more devious purposes.

  “I’ve reviewed satellite images of all airfields within two hundred kilometers of the sewage treatment plant taken in the three hours leading up to the attack, and have detected no flights that flew over you.”

  “Stealth aircraft?”

  “No stealth aircraft took off during this time frame. While our level of confidence that my back door into the Ministry of Policing servers has risen dramatically after your intrusion, until we know for sure where the virus that crashed your PDI came from, there will always be some question as to the validity of any data I collect from them.”

  “Point taken.” Marlowe mulled. If, if, if. If it was Obedere who had infected his PDI, then all the information gleaned from the Ministry of Policing back door was garbage. If Obedere hadn’t infected Marlowe’s PDI, then the information was good and they were dealing with another player. It would have been so much easier if House had detected a stealth plane taking off; not detecting it didn’t rule out the existence of such a flight, so Marlowe would now have to approach the case from two angles. One assuming Obedere was responsible, one assuming he wasn’t.

  The advanced level of the virus that hit him suggested Obedere wasn’t involved, based on his previous sophomoric attempts. Unless Obedere had hired a new programmer, which was also possible. Or the previous attempts were clumsy in order to lure him into a false sense of complacency. It made his head hurt, thinking about it.

  Traffic ground to a halt. Marlowe was going to have to check the Studebaker’s TrafAvoi algorithm. It was supposed to check the traffic status reports to avoid this sort of congestion. A stray glance out the window revealed a familiar sight – the entrance to the al
ley where he’d first met Toulene, and then where he’d entered the sewers for their assault on the Ministry of Policing headquarters.

  “Damn that alley. It seems like I can’t escape it. This is the third time I’ve laid eyes on it in the last couple of weeks, and that’s three times too many.”

  Marlowe returned his gaze to the rear of the vehicle in front of him, an oversize MuniBus converted for use as a daily commuter. The unseen driver was in the back, a rising and falling barbell being the only clue to his presence. Marlowe turned back to the alley entrance. He began to feel the alley was a nexus of sorts, a whirling vortex that he kept finding himself sucked into like a Ministry of Policing toilet. With just as pleasant a final destination, no doubt. He wondered if any of this would have happened if he hadn’t met Toulene there. It was conceivable that House wouldn’t have come up with the plan to break into the Ministry of Policing, meaning Nina would either be dead or a fugitive, and that would most likely mean Marlowe would be dead or a fugitive too, having failed his brother and opening the door for Obedere to take over the City. What else would be different if he’d never helped Toulene escape the City, he wondered.

  A bird dropping exploded on the windshield, and the car’s wipers angrily swept back and forth to clean it. The avian splatter triggered a realization for Marlowe. He made a leap, and the pieces suddenly fell neatly into place. Marlowe felt terrible fear. Real, bone-chilling fear. The assassination, the hunt for Tray and the trap that waited there, the abortive attempt on their lives in the sewage tank, it all made sense now if he was right.

  “House, pipe in my favorite music.”

  “Lately, I’ve gotten into the habit of just assuming all our conversations should be encrypted.”

  “House, do you have that list of addresses Tray gave me, for his wives and kids?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you checked any of them out yet?”

  “It seemed a low priority, given the circumstances. Oh, very interesting.”