Alexander Jablokov - Brain Thief

by Alexander Jablokov

  “You should leave,” he said. “It’s dangerous here.”

  “I’ll stay out of the way. But whatever you were planning, however you were going to rescue her . . . leave her. Let her do what she has to do.”

  “And the dress?” Bernal said. “Did she ask for that?”

  “No. This is for us. For you and me and whoever else is watching. I wanted to see her there, one last time. Just as I did when I realized she was not dead. Please don’t make fun of me.”

  “I won’t,” Bernal said. He remembered the scent she’d brought into Muriel’s room. She had a gift for making the dead seem real. He took the hanger with the dress hanging from it.

  “Bob,” Charis said. “What did Patricia take up with her?’' With her wounds stuck together with superglue, her face had an oddly makeshift look, as if Patricia Foote had put it together from spare parts.

  Bob looked up at the cowgirl and rocket ship. “She got me my cooljuice! In some weird high-tech cylinder arrangement. Some other gear too. She’s always putting gear up there. Between you and me, I think she steals it from work and resells it. But I’m glad I got my Freon. It’s really been stressful, thinking about the summer coming up and all.”

  “I got news for you, Bob,” Spillvagen said. “That wasn’t contraband Freon Patricia Foote hauled up there.”

  “Really?” Bob said. “What was it then?”

  “An artificial intelligence based on cryogenically frozen human heads, originally intended for planetary exploration but unfortunately turned to serial murder during beta testing.”

  “Sure,” Bob said. “What are you taking up with you to deal with it?”

  “Oh, this?” Bernal said. “A blue cotton summer dress.”

  “Rayon,” Naomi said. “It’s rayon.”

  Bob took a puff on his cigarette, but did not seem to have any further questions.

  _______

  Curved sheets of smooth inner thigh rose above. Now that he looked, Bernal saw how detailed the sculpture was, with tiny gold hairs that started as the curve of muscle moved the front of the thigh. And there was the Horsehead Nebula on the skirt’s seam. No one could see these things, not from the highway, not from the parking lot. Only standing here, right next to everything, could you feel like a tiny homunculus confronting the cowgirl’s massive femininity.

  The lower two-thirds of the decorative rocket that the cowgirl rode had panels removed. Where you would have expected to see supporting struts, and maybe a bird’s nest or two, was a dense network of pipes, pumps, compressors, and wiring. The nozzles at the end led to massive combustion chambers.

  Beyond a tangle of HVAC equipment both real and fake, lay the cylinder that contained Hesketh, on a sling that looked like an emergency stretcher. A pair of electric motors would reel it up into the rocket’s belly and shut the curved panels behind it. In another world, another life, Patricia would have been an engineer or an artist who worked big.

  “Careful, dammit,” Charis said behind him. “Stop right there. Don’t you see that?”

  She picked up what looked like an old TV aerial off the gravel roof and reached past him.

  There was a snap and a thunk.

  “What. . . ?” Then Bernal saw it. Charis had yanked on a black thread stretched across the opening between two pieces of equipment. A tension spring had fired darts through where he would have been. Two of them had bounced off a large AC enclosure and fallen to the roof. They were vicious spikes with fins made from razor blades.

  “Got to give it to her,” Charis said. “This gal works fast.”

  Patricia must have picked the technique up from her crossbow-building boyfriend, Merrick.

  “Wait here.” Charis faded into the darkness, moving with absolute silence.

  Bernal tried to absorb everything about his surroundings. Here, leaning against the waste stack vent, was what looked like an electrical panel. On top of that was a transformer box with a small toggle switch on it. The little silver lever was easy to miss. But he was positive that it was the main launch switch. When they made the movie it would be much larger and impressive looking, bright red with an OSHA-approved grip, but here it just had to close a control circuit that didn’t carry a lot of amps. He reached for it. It was what Muriel had asked him to do: initiate the launch sequence and let her take care of the rest. He wouldn’t have to go any further into whatever nightmare Patricia had created ahead.

  But he couldn’t. He just couldn’t. If there was still a chance to save her, he had to take it. He held Muriel’s dress by the hanger, letting it billow out in the predawn breeze. It was like she was with him. It was like she was there.

  He turned to call for Charis—and felt a sharp blade bite into his neck. For an instant, he felt as if he were right back in Ignacio’s yard.

  He didn’t move his head and couldn’t even swallow.

  He was afraid his Adam’s apple would shred against the blade as it went up and down.

  Patricia didn’t say anything, though he could feel her hot breath on his cheek and the trembling of her muscles. She had to reach up to do it, but she knew what she was doing. Her only communication was to push the sharp edge until he moved. He stumbled toward Hesketh.

  “You don’t need to do this, Patricia,” Bernal managed. “There’s still time to stop.”

  “Her head has to come out,” she whispered. “I was going to put Missy Madeline’s in its place, just for fun, but I lost track of it. Yours will have to do.”

  “But. . .what for?” He felt like an idiot, trying to come up with persuasive reasons for her not to kill him, but he couldn’t stop himself. “I won’t be frozen, my brain will be completely useless.”

  “Hesketh doesn’t need your brain. No one needs your stupid brain. I just need the weight of your head to make sure the center of gravity stays in the right place.”

  It was the only remotely funny thing he’d ever heard her say.

  “Why Madeline? What did she ever do to you?”

  “She had it all,” Patricia said. “But she didn’t understand anything. She didn’t get it. Hesketh needed someone. It found me. She tried to tell me she wanted to be inside it, to please make her part of Hesketh. Instead, I used her to make sure your friend was in there. Stupidest thing I ever did. I need to get her out.” She looked up at a sound Bernal could not hear. “Your buddy is good and stuck now. I picked up a crowd-control grenade that came through the yard. I kind of miss Ignaz, you know? He had so much cool stuff. Now, please shut up and let me get done with this.”

  She turned him, facing into the night and the wind. And, for an instant, she hesitated. Afterward he would remember that hesitation as the tenderest reaction anyone had ever had to him. A cold-blooded serial killer had paused before killing him because he meant something to her.

  Context is everything.

  He lifted up Muriel’s dress and let it slip from the hanger. The light fabric blew over his shoulder and into Patricia’s face.

  She raised her hand to pull the fabric away and loosened her grip. He dove forward and pulled himself free.

  Patricia moved, instantly, to interpose herself between Bernal and the thing she most wanted to protect, Hesketh. For a moment he stood facing a demon with a head of blue flame, and then she managed to get the dress off. She waited for him to come get Muriel.

  But he had learned his lesson. Muriel had told him to leave it up to her, and he was going to.

  He turned, dodged around the air conditioners, and jumped for the control.

  He flicked the toggle switch.

  _______

  He had to hand it to Patricia. She could build a functional device. The motors hummed to life. The cylinder of Hesketh rose smoothly off the roof and up into the rocket’s belly.

  Compressors grumbled as they spun up in the rocket overhead.

  “Charis!”

  “Over here. Careful, these damn things are sticky. I don’t need you stuck here too.”

  She’d been trapped by somethin
g similar to what she had used to capture the Hesketh decoy that night under the powerlines. Adhesive bands had stuck to her jacket and pants, binding her to a rocket-supporting strut.

  She’d already shrugged off her shirt and was struggling out of her tight jeans. Bernal reached out a hand to steady her.

  “Thanks,” she grunted. “But you have to guarantee you won’t look. Muneer wouldn’t like it. And it might strike you blind.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” Bernal said. “Is that a thong?”

  “Man, you are really pushing it.”

  He’d expected Patricia to be right after him. But, with the start of the launch sequence, she had moved to play her role on the ground, to make sure her creation made it.

  With a sharp snap, the engines ignited. The flames glowed blue like rangetop burners. For a moment Bernal wondered if they had all been wrong, if the thing really was nothing but an extremely detailed fake, no realer than the cowgirl. Then the sound grew louder.

  They sprinted for the ladder.

  _______

  Spillvagen goggled at Charis as she came down in her underwear.

  “Where’s Patricia?” Spillvagen said.

  “Don’t worry about her,” Charis said.

  Bob stepped out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on a cloth. He craned his neck at the cowgirl. “What the hell?”

  “Better run for it, hairnet boy,” Charis said. “Your kitchen is getting flambeed.”

  “Anyone else in there?” Bernal said.

  “Nah. I run the kitchen at this hour. But I should make sure—”

  “Run!”

  They made it to the far end of the field. Bernal turned to scan the roof. An erect figure stood there, flickering in the waves of heat from the exhaust, looking up at the rocket, and Hesketh. Was that a blue dress floating overhead? It was too dark for Bernal to be sure.

  The main fuel flow came on. The engines roared, then thundered. The sound rose exponentially. Flames poured out across the roof of the diner. The entire structure shook.

  Then the roar became intolerable, and the engines flared. There was an explosion. Flames everywhere, smoke, thunder.

  For a moment, Bernal thought the rocket had just detonated on the roof, unable to detach itself from the tangle of gear to which it was connected. Then the nose of the rocket pushed its way out of the mass of flames and, moving faster and faster, tore its way out from between the cowgirl’s legs and blazed up into the sky. The thunder of its passing echoed from the hills.

  Pieces of cowgirl flew everywhere. Her head came off and bounced once on the parking lot and her shattered visage landed on a car, leaving one complete, untouched baby-blue eye staring up into the sky. A booted leg formed a triumphal arch. Fragments of star-spangled shirt skidded across the asphalt.

  For a moment the rocket rose smoothly.

  Then, as clearly as if an invisible hand had come down from the sky and grabbed it, the rocket rotated and dove straight for the ground. The fuel tanks detonated, spreading flames across the fields.

  Muriel had imposed her will.

  Hesketh was gone.

  So was she.

  _______

  Bob stopped, openmouthed, gazing at the flaming remains of what had once been his place of employment.

  “Airliners sometimes drop giant chunks of green shit-filled ice from their lavatories,” he said, mostly to himself. “They don’t like to talk about it and pay off big for those incidents, in exchange for getting it hushed up.” But his heart wasn’t in it.

  Bob sat down on a guardrail, facing away from the huge tower of smoke that rose from the flames, snapped his washcloth, folded it neatly, put it on his knee, and watched the half moon as it slowly sank and vanished in the lightening sky.

  48

  Oleana, Len, and Magnusen got to Near Earth Orbit just as the rocket lifted off. They had had an argument over what kind of nozzles Foote had recycled, with Magnusen insisting on a Soviet Proton model while Len plumped for a Japanese H2-A. They were as precise and impassioned in their terminology as wine snobs, and with as little actual practical result.

  While they yammered, Bernal sat in the front seat of their minivan.

  Naomi reached in and handed him a handkerchief.

  “At least. . .” Bernal wiped his eyes. “At least she died doing exactly what she wanted to do.”

  “That doesn’t make it a bit easier,” Naomi said. “It won’t actually help to pretend it does.”

  “Okay. I won’t.”

  When he was done, he folded her handkerchief up, finally noticing the embroidered monogram. For Naomi, this was probably a kind of business card. He reached it out to her.

  “Keep it,” she said. “I have plenty.”

  _______

  The parking lot filled with police vehicles, fire trucks, Homeland Security sedans, and gawkers. The fire was out. Police and looters battled vigorously over the remains of the cowgirl.

  Yolanda had driven off, with a promise that Spillvagen would be hearing from her lawyer. Bernal would be interested to hear how the case went.

  Spillvagen had consoled himself by taking off with a cowgirl fingertip the size of a bowling ball, with a clean, dark-red fingernail, barely damaged.

  Had Hesketh really existed? Bernal found himself wondering. He could see a theory where Patricia Foote was someone who communicated with something she interpreted as an artificial intelligence, on whose behalf she acted, but which was actually nothing more than a sophisticated vehicle control with no consciousness or will of its own.

  Or that Hesketh had been an innocent AI with no homicidal tendencies until falling in with a bad-actor human being, who had corrupted it. If Madeline had been around, he suspected that would have been her theory.

  He would never be sure.

  “Muriel was there, wasn’t she?” Spillvagen said. “On the roof. I saw her.”

  “Yes,” Bernal said. “She was there.”

  The sun was rising. It was time to get some breakfast. Despite the fact that he had never liked the food, Bernal was sorry Near Earth Orbit was gone.

  Something touched his cheek. He jerked, turned around.

  A breeze that had come up with the sun had blown a scorched shred of the summer dress off the roof and into the rear of the Voyager. As Bernal watched, it too drifted out over the parking lot. It had seemed like a sign, for a moment, but was nothing of the sort.

  Life was full of that sort of thing.