Silhouette

by Dave Swavely

  I had drifted off, wondering why Saul had not just killed Darien with the chip, but then I realized that he would have been taking a chance that someone might discover it as the cause of death and trace it. Better to have a trusting, oblivious pawn blow him to bits, along with my beautiful little girl …

  “What was that again?” I asked.

  “You have to act like everything is normal right now, until we can come up with a plan,” Paul repeated. “He has to pay for this, no question—but any rash moves will cost us our lives as well.”

  “I understand,” I said. “What do you have in mind?” I wanted to kill the old man, of course, though I knew being caught would bring a death sentence. But would his only son want that, too?

  “I don’t know yet,” he answered. “We can’t even get near him as long as Min is around. In addition to his other upgrades, the giant also has state-of-the-art global combat augmentations.”

  Though no one had told me this before, I had wondered about it ever since the time I saw the huge creature move into a defensive position in front of Saul, from a few feet behind, when we had encountered a perceived threat. Actually, I hadn’t seen Min move at all—he was that fast.

  “I would have to find out when he’s going in for maintenance,” Paul finished, and noticed my puzzled look.

  “You can’t take something like him down to your local glasses shop,” he explained. “He has to go right back to Chinatown Underground, where he was put together.” As he said this, I pictured that remarkable part of the city where the local Chinese money (and a lot from elsewhere) had rebuilt the flattened Chinatown, covering the surface with replicas of the former buildings to preserve their “cultural heritage,” but also adding below them a shiny new mall-like town, which stretched twenty levels down and almost a mile in width. Paul explained that one of the Underground’s primary industries was cyberware, and the techs there, along with their counterparts in eastern Asia, had cornered the market on legal, autonomous, high-level implants like the ones Min was sporting.

  I remembered hearing that Japan had once been the leading technological nation in Asia, and the most likely to win the race to such innovations. But after the acquisition of Hong Kong and the overdue rise of a full-blown technological revolution on the mainland, China soon left her smaller neighbors in the dust. About ten years ago, they became the primary pioneers of global cybernetics, partly because most other “civilized” nations had not been shameless enough to dive so eagerly and openly into the process of making men into machine-men, or cyborgs, as they have always been called.

  “I’ll take that drink now,” I told Paul, who stood up and headed for the bar, which was annexed to the side of the theater. Unfortunately, he left my silhouette on the screen. I stared at it, letting each shade of light on the outside, and the darkness within, etch itself into my eyes, mind, and soul. As Paul returned with the drink in his hand, I popped the little disk out of his player.

  “Are there any other copies of this?” I asked.

  “No,” Paul answered. “I deleted the source copy and put it on that old disk because it has no wireless capacity. So no one can extract or copy the image unless they physically plug it into their hardware. But if you want to get rid of the evidence on the disk, I would destroy it utterly or lose it where it can’t be found. Just deleting it would leave some kind of digital residue that an accomplished tech might be able to retrieve.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and stuck the little circle in my datafold.

  “I hope this helps,” Paul said, handing me the drink.

  “I just killed three people, including my own daughter,” I said, downing the whole glass with a grimace. “But I don’t know which feels worse—that or the thought of facing her mother.”

  8

  I’ve never been much of a drinker, but when I have imbibed, it has almost always made me feel happier. By the time the autopilot informed me that we had reached the Napa Valley, however, I was downright angry. The intense emotion seemed beyond the reach of logic as I glared at the food truck parked at the base of my house, resenting it for intruding on my privacy, even though I knew it came every week and the driver was perfectly innocent, cleared by every security check imaginable.

  As my aero descended out of the darkening sky and landed next to the truck, I tried to contain a desire to load incendiary rounds into one of my boas and abuse the other vehicle. What I thought of doing to the driver, who was coming out of the house, was even uglier. He said hello, and I managed to grunt and swerve around him, heading in through the front door. Lynn was in the kitchen, putting away the food. She kept doing it even after she noticed me, and didn’t say anything.

  “I’m here,” I said, from just inside the doorway, testing the waters. “Like I said.”

  “Thanks, I think,” she said, not altogether scornfully. “What did you find out?” I hesitated, not expecting this so soon. She stopped what she was doing and looked at me.

  “Nothing,” I said, too abruptly. “Nothing at all, unfortunately. We do have, uh, we did have a suspect, but it was a wash.” We looked at each other too long, but then she turned and continued her chore. “What have you been doing?” I ventured, stepping closer.

  “Nothing, too,” she said, and then turned back to face me, a bag of frozen peas in her hand, when she sensed me approaching. I wondered what it would feel like to be hit in the face with the peas, but as it turned out, I faced no such threat, at least so far. Instead, she started crying.

  “I was watching you and me in old holos, before she was born.” She wiped her face with her free hand. “I thought I should try to be glad for what I still have.” I started to step closer to her, to hold her, but then she gestured to my right. “And I was reading that book.”

  I looked over, and on the kitchen’s center counter was an old book called Black Death, with a picture of rats on the cover. The price tag, for some meager amount, was still on it.

  “I got it at a thrift store a long time ago,” she said. “And finally pulled it out today. It’s funny … when I got it, I thought, I’ll buy this and keep it for when I’m really down, so I can remember that I’m not so bad off.” She laughed, a half sob. “It actually works.” It did seem that the thought of it had calmed her presently. And I couldn’t overestimate the therapeutic effect of a book that she had found at a thrift store … those were two of her best friends, books and thrift stores, even though she could read the same thing on the net and had enough money to buy things new (a hundred times over).

  “What’s it about?” I asked. The moment for hugging her seemed to have passed. I reached for the peas and helped her put the rest of the food away as she explained.

  “It’s about the 1300s, when like half of the known world was wiped out by a plague. In less than four years. They left bodies in houses and streets to rot because no one wanted to get near ’em. Whole towns and cities were abandoned, people leaving all their stuff and sleeping out on the ground to get away from everyone else. Back then, it was a miracle if anyone in your family didn’t die.”

  “I see what you mean,” I said, but still felt the anger boiling within me, though it seemed restrained to some degree by my affection for Lynn. It didn’t seem an effect of alcohol at all—but it did remind me of the effects of some drugs I had taken a long time ago when I was in the military. “Let’s go sit down,” I added after finishing the food and closing the cooler.

  As we walked into the next room and found a couch, I was thinking we might actually get through this night. Her melancholy but moderate manner might have been an ongoing effect of the “medication” the old man had given her, but I wasn’t about to complain. Now, if only I could keep myself from exploding …

  “I’m sorry, Michael,” she said, leaning on my shoulder and putting her hand on my chest. She started rubbing it gently, and I started to think that maybe this whole thing would actually end up bringing us closer, instead of tearing us apart. But then Lynn went on. “I was wrong at first
. I held you responsible, too much, for what happened. My mind was screaming, ‘He killed her! He murdered our daughter!’ It was weird. But I know it’s wrong. You didn’t kill our sweetheart. Somebody out there did. And God, maybe. I don’t know…”

  Then she noticed that my muscles had tensed—an involuntary response to her words. She stopped touching me, and sat up straight.

  “What’s wrong?”

  I didn’t answer right away, but when I did, I said, “Nothing.”

  “Does that make you mad, that I had those thoughts?” Lynn said.

  “Yeah,” I answered, through tight lips. “Maybe that’s it.”

  “Well, that’s just great,” she said, scratching her head violently. “I wait all day to tell you this, thinking we can … commiserate together, and you get mad at me.” She stood up and raised her voice more. “I got four calls from funeral services today—those vultures—something that you should be taking care of anyway. Can’t you change the filter so that kinda junk can’t get through, like I’ve asked you to do infinity-plus-twenty times?”

  Infinity-plus-twenty profane expressions were bouncing around in my brain—but I had learned the hard way that using any of them with Lynn created major walls that didn’t come down for weeks, at least. Instead, I forced myself to say, “Sit down and bear with me, please.” She did, but on the other end of the couch. “We’ll win the Nobel Peace Prize, if we can somehow stay together through this.”

  “Is ‘this’ more than Lynnie?” she asked. “I feel like you’re hiding something from me.” I would have laughed at this uncanny sixth sense of hers, if only it were being used on someone other than me. She crossed her arms and scrutinized me silently.

  “Look, Lynn,” I finally said, “I’m not doing well right now. I had a drink at Paul’s, and it’s done something to me. Or it’s the stress. Or both. Can’t we just drop the paranoia, and commiserate, like you said?”

  I looked down, praying that she wouldn’t say, “You didn’t answer my question.” But she did.

  “I don’t even remember the question!” I fired in her direction, twisting to face her. “I’m trying to tell you, I’m not doing too well. Maybe your pharmaceutical wonder and your cathartic book have helped you to get over this, but I’m not there, okay!”

  “I am hardly ‘over this,’ and I can’t believe you would say that.” She let out a gasp of disgust to match the look on her face, and got up again. This time, she pointed at the front door.

  “Go back out and find the monster who killed my daughter!” she said, still pointing. “It’s the only thing I need you for anymore.” She spun and stomped up the stairs, out of sight. After watching the empty stairs for a few moments, I turned straight and stared ahead at nothing.

  Don’t have to look any further for the monster, I thought. He’s sitting on your couch.

  * * *

  I continued to sit utterly motionless for a while, feeling several varieties of pain grow in every part of me. I thought about opening the book on the Black Death, but it was too far away from me, and I couldn’t get up. That’s what this is, I thought, the Black Death. It was settling all around me, seeping into my pores, threatening to drive out all health—physical, mental, and emotional. I pressed my eyes closed, clenched my teeth, and said the word no through them with every outward breath for about a minute. But when the muscles in my arms and gut began to cramp from tensing for so long, I realized I couldn’t go on like this. I need to tell Lynn, I thought. It’s only right, and someone has to help me carry this …

  I opened my eyes to see if she might have come back, and when I saw that she had not, I began moving my head around slowly, studying the room. I took in the two Monet prints on the walls and then stared at the real one for a while, the trains in The Gare Saint-Lazare forever readying but never actually leaving the station.

  It was while my eyes were locked on the ornate mantel above the fireplace that my conscious mind caught up with my subconscious, and I realized why I was looking around at my house: Saul didn’t want me to see it while it was being built! I had mentioned to him one time, during the construction of the house, that I was planning on driving up here to see the workers’ progress. But he had dissuaded me.…

  “Don’t do that, 007,” he had said, “Let them surprise you with the finished product.”

  “But Lynn and I gave you those requests for the design,” I said. “It would be interesting for us to see how they’re being implemented.”

  “I’m sure,” the old man had replied, but then lowered his head and glared authoritatively at me from the top of his eyes. “But don’t do that, Michael.”

  I remember being puzzled at his insistence, but I wrote it off as another eccentricity, and forgot about it. But now it took on a new significance. He had built me this house, and had done so in secrecy, for a purpose. There had to be some reason that he hadn’t wanted me to see what the builders were doing, and I couldn’t think of a better one than surveillance. They must have rigged the house so that Saul could keep an eye on me. And if that was the case, I couldn’t tell Lynn anything here without running the risk of being observed. After a few moments of anger at the thought, it actually made me feel better—because now I had another excuse to keep the truth from her.

  This mild sense of relief was enough to allow my exhausted frame to drift into sleep, which turned out to be quite fitful. Nightmares followed one another in rapid succession.…

  * * *

  The choir at the Requiem bellowed something in Latin that I didn’t understand, but I acted like I did. As my eyes scanned their faces, I saw that one of them was Lynn and the next was Lynette. Her mother seemed to be spitting out the lyrics, but my little girl was angelic as ever, wearing the ponytails I loved so much.

  Then Harris was reading the Latin words from an old vinyl record on one of his infomercials, in his “talking head” voice. He muttered something that I couldn’t make out, but I knew it was something that he had said to me at some point. And I knew it was important. But the scene shifted before I could ask him.

  Then, sometime later, floating in the middle of a dark sea, bobbing back and forth like a small boat, was D’s driveway. I stepped inside it as the gate opened, holding something metal between the fingers and palm of my right hand, and approached the car. D recognized me, and started opening the window, and the little girl in the backseat was up at her window, saying something to me through the glass. But I didn’t really know them. I squeezed the trigger on the disk in my hand, bowled it under the car, and jumped back, seeing a burst of white light through my eyelids. I felt hot all over, and opened my eyes to see that I was scorched from the blast.

  From the flames of the wreckage stepped Saul Rabin, leaning on his cane and laughing maniacally. With the fire behind him, he appeared as a silhouette, all dark except for his eyes, which glowed bright red like the flames. The light from his eyes reached out toward me, pressing like fingers into my head, until the razor-sharp piece of metal inside my brain started moving around, churning and slashing through my gray matter like a farmer’s sickle.

  * * *

  The pain became so intense that it woke me up. I was still upright on the couch, but I was now sweating and my head was throbbing with the echoes of the nightmare wound. I glanced at the clock on the wall, noting that the two hours I had just slept were two more than the night before. That explained the intensity of my dreams—but what about their content? Driven by a morbid fascination, and something nagging at the back of my mind, I reviewed them as best I could.

  The one I remembered most was the last, of course. Were the images of the murder from my memory, as they seemed to be, or a reconstruction from the facts I knew? Certainly the old man hadn’t stepped out of the fire, but the rest of it was real enough that I never wanted to endure it again. And what about Harris? Hadn’t he said something significant to me? In vain I tried to recall it from my two discussions with him, but then I remembered the glasses, and put them on.

&nb
sp; I called up the audio recording of my first talk with him, and listened from the beginning. Halfway into it, I suddenly remembered the prerecorded message that had gotten through to me earlier, and found that. In a few moments, I had what I was looking for.

  “Prayer is what you’ll need, Mick, when he stops liking you Just the Way You Are [singing again] and morphs your ass into goo. Or maybe he’ll do a mind lift, a head hijack, a brain boost, a personality pinch … jerk with your neuros and make you into someone he likes.”

  I rewound a little, and heard again, “jerk with your neuros.” And he had even used the phrase mind lift. Did Harris know about this? If so, it was a pretty high-level leak. Or had he been involved with it before he left BASS? While the glasses were on, I made a note to check into this, and came across the reminder to talk to Korcz about his paranoia regarding our upper-level leadership. This cued me to search the Web for some more information, and I thought of using the room system like I usually did, but then realized that my glasses were more likely to be private. Most homes with net rooms had only one or two at the most, because that was all normal people could afford, but in ours almost every room was equipped with the technology, and it occurred to me that Saul might have been using that equipment to keep an eye on me. I imagined there was some risk in going on the net in any way for what I wanted, but I decided to limit it to a few minutes and hope it didn’t come back to bite me.

  So, staying in the glasses, I entered a search for “neural manipulation.” It took a while to get it started because I had to key the words in letter by letter, using the glasses’ mouse, because I didn’t want to say them out loud. Numerous links came up, and the large majority of them confirmed what Paul had claimed—that there was a broad consensus among experts in related fields that it could be done. There seemed to be no documented cases of its actually happening, but that might have been because the Geneva Accords put a serious cramp in research by forbidding any legal development. The political and corporate leaders who met there certainly were worried about the possibility, and there were many other Web sites filled with paranoia about it.