Alexander Jablokov - Brain Thief

by Alexander Jablokov

  Bernal picked up on her subtext. “Gambino doesn’t fit, though the drug connection is certainly there. You think Muriel doesn’t fit either.”

  She sighed. “Part of my fight. Oh, it’s not like my suspicions that there was more than one person who ended up under the label ‘The Bowler’ was what made me leave the force. But it was part of it. Just the groupthink, the way people settle on an idea and hold on to it, no matter what. You detected it yourself. Cops decide someone’s guilty. Prosecutors sign on. They pressure the lab techs to make sure that the evidence supports that theory. Witnesses are coached, consciously or unconsciously, all the way from identification to court testimony. There’s a story, and nothing that doesn’t fit makes it in. Any attempt to put checks in, to try to make sure that you’ve looked at all the possibilities, is regarded as .. . treason. Not just not going along, not just being a pain in the ass, but as genuinely being an enemy of everything that is good and true. And cops, as we all know, are good and true. My last year there was hell. And that was one year too long. I had other dominant paradigms to subvert, so I left. There were still years left before I would be able to pull a decent pension, the reason most folks hang in there. So I decided to go for the big bucks in AI surveillance.”

  “All right. Let me subvert your paradigm,” Bernal said.

  “Lay it on me, brother.”

  “You think that Muriel was investigating Hess Tech, found a connection to the Long Voyage cryobank, and came up with a crazy theory about Madeline Ungaro stealing heads as a way of jumpstarting her project. When Christopher Gambino, for his own personal reasons, went out to buy drugs and got himself killed by the Bowler, she tied that into her thinking and started researching the Bowler. But the Bowler had nothing to do with Hess Tech, with Madeline Ungaro, or with Hesketh. She linked everything backwards into one theory, but they were really only linked through Gambino, and he was just coincidental. Right?”

  “Close enough.”

  “But there’s another connection. We’re sitting in it. Just yesterday, we backtracked Hesketh from here, all the way down to the Black River, to a car that had had something taken out of it. . . .” Now that he said it out loud, none of that seemed particularly persuasive. “Did the police check the scene?”

  “They will,” Charis said. “I’ll be surprised if they find anything. It was pretty clean. No blood, no hair, nothing visible. But they may find the connection. Muriel might have died there that night, tying it right back to Hesketh and Madeline Ungaro. But you’re thinking something more, aren’t you? I mean, the connection isn’t just that Ungaro, Muriel, Hesketh, and the Bowler were all there at the same time, right? That’s just some kind of weird-ass jamboree. So tell Auntie Charis what insane theory you’re operating under.”

  “Muriel is communicating with me. It looks like her usual signs-and-symbols stuff. But it’s gotten way beyond that. She sent me the flowers that took me to watch Hesketh. Then, the next morning, she sent a fax to your machine, the one you gave to me. Neither of those things is so weird. But then she somehow got a musical Easter Bunny into my car, with a voice message from her. All of that happened after she was beheaded. I had taken it as evidence that she was alive. Until I found her dead. But, somehow, she is not dead. Somewhere, she is conscious, and trying to communicate.”

  There, he’d said it.

  Charis’s ponderous shape looked carved out of a particularly smooth, honey-colored wood. Rings, bracelets, earrings glittered in the dim light from the clerestory windows.

  “Muriel got her head cut off,” she said. “Just as with Aurora Lipsius, we have not found her head, just her body. You think that head is—what?—frozen and incorporated into Hesketh somehow.”

  “Hesketh is made out of brains stolen from Long Voyage—”

  “But that’s not enough for you.” She was almost yelling now. “Frozen brains turned into a homicidal AI, lumbering around Cheriton at night seeking brainssss .. . that’s not enough to ring your bell. Muriel is still conscious, somehow, inside this .. . thin. She thinks, she wills, and she tries to communicate with you, using coded messages the way she always has. Do I have that about right?”

  “I know her,” Bernal said. “I know what she would know, how she would do things. What can I say? I have a sense of her personality still there. This isn’t just denial, Charis. This isn’t just a refusal to acknowledge her death, anything like that. This is something I see, out there.”

  “I know why you think she’s alive. But our brains don’t always work so well. We think we can detect a liar, we think we know the truth. But we don’t. This contact with Muriel, it persuaded you that she’s alive?”

  “Yes.”

  “You want her to be alive. But she’s not alive. You, of all people, should understand that. Someone out there ... or something .. . knows what you want to be true. Psychopaths are often uniquely attuned to the needs and wants of other human beings. They don’t share those needs and wants. Theirs are simpler and more elemental. So they can perceive our weaknesses much better than we can and exploit them.”

  And that, Bernal realized, was as clear a vision of how an artificial intelligence was going to perceive us as anyone was likely to come up with.

  “There’s someone out there that’s killing people. Can’t you understand that? It’s not some kind of intellectual puzzle, something to entertain your brain with. Whoever that is lured Muriel Inglis out to a place where she could be killed. Muriel was an intelligent person. So are you. If someone as intelligent as Muriel can be tricked and killed, so can you.”

  “Okay. How about this. I’ll aim at something else. I won’t look directly for Hesketh.”

  “Hoo-boy, that sounds promising. What are you going to look for?” “Whatever was in that Peugeot and was removed. Does that make sense to you?”

  “It makes me think you’re still secretly looking for Muriel. That she was . .. inside the thing. Something.”

  “Charis. Please. Someone saw the device, still active, on. Inside that car.”

  “What? Who?”

  “A shopping-cart guy named Spak.”

  She snorted. “Spak. Hangs his many hats in a group home over on Aldrin Place. That’ll be instructive for you, to see if you can come up with a comprehensible message coming from him.”

  “Don’t make fun,” Bernal said.

  “Bernal. Those messages came to you for a reason. You think it’s Muriel communicating. It’s more likely to get you to do something.”

  “I know that,” he said. “I know. I’ll let you know what I’m doing.”

  “Okay. What are you doing?”

  “Going to Muriel’s funeral. It’s tomorrow.”

  “That’s quick.”

  “Muriel’s daughter has already shown up. Seems to be an efficient sort, has things all worked out. I got an e-mail invitation today, along with an apology for not having something more formal. And she’s put up a little memorial Web site for her mother. It looks pretty good, really. Some nice photographs of her. She was quite beautiful when . . . she . . . was young.”

  “So which is it, Bernal. Dead or alive?”

  Bernal blinked at her. “I’m going to find that out.”

  24

  Someone had chosen a nice medley of music for Muriel’s funeral, from Carole King to Cole Porter. Not exactly funereal, but certainly elegiac. Bernal found that he had trouble breathing.

  “Were you friends with her?” The large woman in the nice suit eyed Bernal. She looked familiar, but he was sure they’d never met.

  “We worked together. Are you related?” Bernal wondered at his own trouble in talking. By now he should have gotten used to the idea that Muriel was dead.

  “My mother.”

  “You must be, ah . ..”

  “Jennifer. I’m not surprised she never mentioned me.” He found himself shaking a firm, dry hand. He examined her. She had inherited little of her mother’s good looks. Bernal felt like a traitor to his generation to even think it. Bu
t Jennifer Inglis was not an attractive woman. Muriel’s elegant nose had ended up just a bit lumpy, her defined chin too wide, her clean complexion nowhere to be seen. Jennifer was bulky, even under the expensive suit, and her movements were graceless and abrupt.

  She noticed him looking at her and turned away to flick at a loose strand of her thin hair.

  “Why not surprised?” Bernal said.

  She sighed audibly. “This is no place to work through my issues. I pay people for that. But you’re not some son of somebody, are you? So tell me: what was it with you?”

  “With me?”

  “I mean . . . she was old enough to be your mother. Your grandmother, for God’s sake. What was it with all of you?” The last sentence came out in a harsh whisper.

  “We were business colleagues.” He really didn’t want to deal with this. With her pain. With his. “I earned a salary. Spent a lot of time in missile silos in South Dakota, that kind of thing.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” She clutched his upper arm for a moment in a painful grip, then sat down on a black folding chair. Muriel’s memorial service was being held in a glassed-in space whose official name was the Memory Center, but which more than one employee had already been fired for calling the Mallsoleum. The air conditioning was cranked too high.

  Far off, across the flat green lawn, automatic sprinklers shot parabolas of water into the sunlight. A procession of cars snaked along a cemetery road, and the sprinklers, all at once, shut off. For an instant the water continued, still leaping, ignoring the fact that it had lost its source, but then all of it came to ground.

  “She ... we ... it was never the same after Paul died.” Jennifer spoke quietly and quickly, not looking at him. “She tell you about Paul? No? Well, then I don’t feel so bad. Oh, don’t think badly of me, worried about myself at my mother’s funeral. She was my mother, and she cared for me. That was why she wanted me to draw a clean line with my mascara, and dress to minimize how hippy I am, and eat... the .. . right . . . things.” She pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed at mascara that, if it had been drawn cleanly, had long been smeared. “Paul was my younger brother. Great kid, Paul. One of those guys everybody likes. Including me, and I didn’t really want to, because he was Mom’s favorite. You have brothers or sisters, um . . . ?”

  “Bernal. Yes. A sister. She lives in Maine. Portland.”

  “Your folks—”

  “Her. They liked my sister better.” He thought he was saying it just to calm Jennifer down, align himself with her, and was surprised to discover that it was true. Though his mother still sounded pleased when he called. Really, she did.

  “Okay, then. So you know.”

  “What happened to Paul?”

  “What happens to anyone? He died. Excuse me.” She bit her lip, then got up and went across the room to a group of well-dressed older people. Because of what had happened to Muriel, there was no question of an open-casket funeral. In fact, there was no casket at all. Attention was focused, instead, on a small collection of personal items of Muriel’s: a small leather notebook, a dark-blue coffee cup, a well-worn gardening knee pad, a porcelain doll’s head, and, of course, shoes. A row of elegant shoes stood beneath the table, a black ribbon around each. For all her never-to-be-resolved hostility, Jennifer clearly knew her mother. Jennifer hugged a couple of the people who milled, uncertain, in front of what could easily have looked like a random mess pulled from a closet, directed them into a line of chairs, and returned to Bernal.

  “It’s only going to get worse. Mom knew everyone, just everyone. Those guys are, like, fund-raisers, museum board people, Friends of the Arboretum. Paul was killed rock climbing. He was seventeen. He had a daredevil of I a girlfriend. Not the kind of person Paul usually hung around with. He was ... he looked like Mom, I mean, no wonder the girls liked him, but he was really a conservative person, more like Dad. Dad sold cars. But Madeline—”

  “Madeline Cantor.”

  She looked at him, both curious and annoyed. “Oh, so you’re up on the whole story, are you? My mom convince you that stuff that happened twenty years ago is still interesting?”

  “No. I know her as Madeline Ungaro. A completely different connection.”

  “Completely different?”

  “I’m hoping to figure that out.”

  That relaxed her a bit. “Yes. Madeline Cantor. She—oh, shoot, it’s the supper club people. I’ll be right back.”

  She talked to two couples with elegantly frosted hair, the men in expensive-looking suits, the women in somber I dresses. There were several distinct groups of people in the room. Muriel had clearly gotten around. Two older men put down a pot with an orchid in it and leaned a card against it: care instructions. Bernal looked at Jennifer, who smiled and spoke to the supper club people. He pictured her piling all the flowers somewhere, afterward, and forgetting about them. She looked like a practical woman. Practical people did not care for orchids.

  There was a woman with bright red, curly hair, about Muriel’s age. She wore a star-covered dress with a matching cloak and carried a crocheted handbag.

  She talked earnestly to Jennifer, head cocked to one side, a glowing look on her face. Jennifer looked like she would rather have been discussing cough syrup flavors with an alcoholic street person, but managed to settle her features into a look of attention. The woman tugged at her sleeve. She had the solution. You could see it. Not the real solution, because there was no real solution. The spiritual solution. She shrugged her cloak, pure Madame La Zonga, and explained the way to Jennifer.

  After Jennifer managed to peel her off, the woman wandered over to the display of personal items. In addition to the careful arrangement that Jennifer had put together, there was an area of personal donations, things people had brought that Muriel had given them or that had a strong personal association. She swirled her cloak like a toreador and yanked at something in her pocket. It seemed to be stuck, and she struggled with it, finally having to lean her weight on the table to pull it out: a figurine made of seashells, from some Florida vacation.

  Despite the solemnity of the occasion, everyone’s eyes had been glued to her mighty struggle. She smiled apologetically to the crowd and placed the figurine gently in the middle of a scattering of postcards from various locations around the globe.

  There was just one thing. Bernal hadn’t actually seen it, but he had the distinct sense that, while she was leaning and distracting attention with one hand, she had managed to scoop something up from the memory table with the other and drop it into her big bag.

  He was trying to figure out what it might have been when Jennifer came back.

  _______

  “Oh, God. Naomi.” Jennifer plopped down.

  “Friend of your mother’s?”

  “Best bud, really. Since high school, I think. Naomi Wilkerson. Pity she’s so crazy. Talks to the dead. I’ll be hearing a lot from her, you can be sure. And you know, I don’t think she was raised Gypsy.”

  In between other interruptions, Jennifer Inglis told the story of Paul Inglis and Madeline Ungaro.

  Madeline Ungaro had always had some flash, with ash blond hair pulled back tight and dark brown eyes under heavy lids. A reading of The Tale of Two Cities or something had given her an obsession with tumbrels and guillotines, and for some time in late high school she wore a red ribbon around her neck, as fatalistic yet fashionable aristos had during the Terror. No one had understood it, but it became a bit of a fashion with other girls, who chose to change the ribbon’s color, accessorize it, or wear it around an arm or other body part. Mortified, Madeline had stopped wearing her ribbon and stopped talking to anyone else who wore one. She couldn’t bear people who didn’t get the point.

  Muriel hated Madeline as soon as she learned about her. Paul was closemouthed, even sullen, quite unlike him, which frightened her, so she turned her interrogation skills on Jennifer. She even softened to Jennifer’s smeary and appalling goth style, reducing her criticisms, suggestions, and purchas
es of what Jennifer called “Barbiewear” to the point that, for a while, Jennifer even felt safe coming home. But Jennifer really knew little enough, and nothing that was important to what later happened.

  What was interesting was that Paul and Madeline had met over a nerdy interest: space travel. The glory days of the space program were gone by then, and interest in free-market solutions had not yet come. A vague group had come together around the time the Challenger exploded. They, like kids across the country, had been hauled in front of TV screens to watch the schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe take a flight that seemed only slightly more interesting than a routine flight to Europe, only to find themselves watching the endlessly repeated sight of the detonation and the two plumes of smoke in the sky.

  But there was one huge difference between them. Madeline was a risk taker. Paul, in his essential self, was not. That neurological difference, rooted somewhere in the adenosine system of the brain, was not as obvious as some of the more commonly worried-over differences between members of a couple, like age, race, or religion, but was a fundamental split that Madeline might have recognized but Paul certainly did not. He persuaded himself that it was a matter of choice, of will and focus, and followed, and even tried to lead her in her exploits.

  Madeline was also an athlete, something Paul never really was. She played lacrosse. She swam. And she climbed. Rock climbing wasn’t the popular thing it was to become. That was almost geeky, too. She’d go down to the Quincy quarries south of Boston, all sorts of places, looking for rock. And Paul would go with her. From what Jennifer understood, he’d gotten pretty good at it, at the end. But never as good as she was.

  So, one weekend, senior year, they went on a big trip. The Shawangunks, in eastern New York. Famous for their rock. It was spring. Ice still lurked in the shadows and cracks of the rock and still expanded during the cold night. Madeline had been leading a difficult pitch, more difficult than either of them should have been doing. It was Paul’s turn to climb, and Madeline was holding the rope and looking down at him when some shift of weight or final giving way of support led a head-sized rock to slide down the cliff and knock Paul loose. He had also been overconfident with his protection. His last chock stone was ten feet below him and not placed to withstand much force. By the time Paul had fallen twenty feet, he had generated enough force to pull the next, well-placed one loose as well. And rocks came after him. He might still have been alive, half buried, for a few minutes, but by the time Madeline had gotten to him, he was dead.