State Machine

by Spangler, K. B.

  “Sir? I don’t want to—”

  “Alimoren, listen,” Hanlon insisted. “I’ve always known that those with the implant would be useful. OACET… Well, I think OACET is a failed experiment, myself. I think they should be disbanded, and the Agents distributed among different organizations, instead of this closed hivemind they’ve cloistered away in that mansion of theirs. But at the time the implant was developed, I was running a multinational company while campaigning as a Congressman. There’re not enough hours in the day to be that evil.”

  “Of course, Senator,” the Secret Service agent said, adding a half-hearted chuckle. Rachel wished she could read his colors; she imagined the confused look on his face would go well with an uncertain yellow-orange.

  Hanlon shook his head, the picture of long-suffering endurance. “You too, Alimoren?”

  “It’s not my place—”

  “It is your place,” Hanlon said. “Yours, and every other American’s. It’s all about public image, isn’t it? Mine, yours, the Secret Service’s reputation… We can’t do our jobs if the country is second-guessing us.”

  Alimoren nodded. “You said you could help?”

  “Not exactly.” Hanlon’s voice took on a note of iron. “Was this the first time?”

  “Sir?”

  “The first time you helped a thief break in.”

  Alimoren’s eyes widened, and he stepped away from Hanlon. “Sir, I—”

  “It’s not going to take them long to put it together,” the Senator cut in. “If I could, the Secret Service and the MPD will be able to, as well. Someone with access to the White House had to tell Jenna Noura how to break in. Will the MPD find a copy of the employees’ schedules on your laptop, Alimoren? Will they find the archivists’ files of the fragment?”

  Ten feet and ten miles away, Rachel closed her eyes as she heard her own suspicions bounced back at her. Poor Alimoren. Whether or not he had been involved in the break-in, Hanlon had found a way to ensure that all of the blame would be placed on a dead man.

  She didn’t catch the expression on Alimoren’s face, but the sudden anger in his voice caused her avatar’s eyes to snap open. Alimoren was furious. Drunk or not, innocent or not, he wasn’t about to let Hanlon paint him as an accomplice to theft and murder. “No. No, sir, they won’t. There’s nothing to find.”

  “Are you sure?” Hanlon asked.

  Alimoren’s eyes widened. “What are you doing?”

  “Don’t lose your temper,” Hanlon said. “I’m just here to talk. I didn’t realize you were involved when I asked you to bring Agent Peng into the investigation.”

  “I’m not involved—”

  “In case you’re getting ideas about…ending…our conversation,” Hanlon said as he held up his useless device, “I lied about this. It blocks everything but these glasses. I’ve been using them to record our conversation.”

  “Good!” Alimoren shouted. “I want this on record! I had nothing to do with the break-in. What evidence do you have that I did?!”

  “Enough,” Hanlon said, his cruel smile beginning to crack through his concerned façade.

  “Prove it.” Alimoren took a step towards Hanlon, enraged. “Prove it! You can’t, can you? You called this meeting to get me to incriminate myself!”

  Hanlon backed away from Alimoren, touching Zockinski’s old glasses as if to remind the Secret Service agent that he was on camera. “Easy, Alimoren,” the Senator said. “I can help you.”

  “I don’t need your help!”

  “Yes, you do,” Hanlon said soothingly. “It’s all about perception. If I’m wrong—if you’re innocent—then you need me to help you deal with the media.”

  “I don’t need your help,” Alimoren said again. “I’ll go to the press, tell them you’re trying to set me up…” He trailed off, realizing he had no proof.

  “They’ll believe me,” the Secret Service agent said. It sounded weak, even to Rachel. “After the OACET story, they’ll believe me.”

  “No, they won’t,” Hanlon said. “How a story is framed in the media is only half of the problem—the other half is that the public already knows what they’ll think about that story before they even hear about it. You could broadcast this meeting of ours to four hundred million people, and half of them would think it’s a fake, and the other half would only be interested because they’d spot something in it which reaffirms their personal worldview.

  “I’m sorry, Alimoren. Nobody will believe you. It’s too convenient to think you’re responsible.”

  “But I’m not!”

  Alimoren took an aggressive step towards Hanlon, probably to do more shouting and waving. Rachel would never know.

  She didn’t hear the shot.

  Part of Rachel knew what would happen even before Hanlon made a curious gesture with his arm, and spun to the side. She ran straight at Alimoren, trying to knock him out of the way, even as she knew that this version of her body wasn’t made of anything more than photons, even as the top of his head dissolved into red and white and gray before her eyes.

  “Oh,” Hanlon said, as if he hadn’t known it was coming. “Oh no.”

  Rachel heard him, heard Santino, heard Mare, all of them marking Alimoren’s death in their own ways. The only two who were silent were her and Mulcahy, and she was only silent because she was too stunned to speak.

  Her avatar knelt beside Alimoren’s body, trying to hold his brains in his skull with her useless fake hands. Too late, too late, too late…

  “Agent Peng,” Mulcahy said, and the rock-hard solidity of her boss’s presence in her mind brought her back to herself.

  She pulled her avatar from Alimoren to stand by Mulcahy’s side.

  A normal person who witnessed a shooting at close range would scramble for cover. Hanlon was doing this, perhaps a little more slowly than he should, but he needed to make sure his useless gizmo slipped from his hands and was accidentally kicked into pieces as he ran. It was only when he had reached the cover of the trees that he took out his phone and dialed 911.

  He then did what no normal person would do: he crouched on the ground in a tiny ball, making himself as small a target as possible.

  “It’d be more realistic if you ran,” Mulcahy said, walking towards him in giant ground-eating strides. “It’d be more realistic if you shouted for help. In times like this, people without combat experience turn to the comfort of their community.”

  “He doesn’t have one.” Rachel didn’t recognize her own voice. “He thinks he’s above everybody else. That he doesn’t need anybody else,” she added, and steeled herself from turning to look at Alimoren on the ground behind her.

  Shouts came from the direction of the Memorial, and flashlights began to cut through the trees.

  “That’s a mistake,” Rachel said. At her feet, Hanlon was starting to uncurl as he called out to the police for help. “Nobody can make it on their own.”

  The first officer had reached Hanlon. The Senator was pure grace and gratitude, pointing in the direction of the shot, at Alimoren’s body…

  “You’ve made many mistakes over the last few years,” Mulcahy said to the Senator. “We’ll make sure this is the one that brings you down.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Santino was making coffee.

  It had taken Rachel a long time to realize that her partner thrived on complications. It certainly wasn’t true of his social life—the man detested high-maintenance people like slugs on his summer produce—but he thrived within structured tasks. The more effort that went into a chore, the more he enjoyed it. It was a way of thinking so antithetical to her own that she had problems processing it: why bother to make coffee in something that looked like a meth lab when the end result tasted exactly the same as a standard drip coffeemaker?

  He put the first cup on the table in front of her. Okay, she admitted to herself as the smell floated towards her. It might be better than coffeemaker coffee.

  Santino took the chair beside her, abandoning
his customary spot on their kitchen counter. It was a long, long time before he finally said, “I don’t know what to do.”

  “I know,” she replied. “Me neither.”

  “Did… Could we have…”

  “No.” Rachel shut him down. “Don’t second-guess this. You and me? We did nothing to contribute to this clusterfuck. Alimoren was…”

  She didn’t know where to go from there. Alimoren was what? Involved? Innocent? Just a convenient target for a point Hanlon wanted to make?

  “There were a lot of reasons Hanlon could have wanted him dead,” she eventually said. “We start by finding the right ones. Once we do that, we’ll have a better idea of Hanlon’s motivation. Then we can end this.”

  Their kitchen smelled like good coffee and fresh bread. Once Mulcahy had decided there was nothing they could do about Alimoren’s murder, Becca had driven them home, and then gone out to an all-night grocery to stock their kitchen for them. Rachel guessed it was the only thing Becca felt she could do, as Rachel and Santino had gone into mourning, and she didn’t entirely understand why. After an awkward hour of standing around and waiting for them to talk to her, she had kissed Rachel lightly on the cheek, and then run upstairs to hide in bed.

  Rachel and Santino had left the groceries out. Rachel knew she should get up and put them away, but her legs didn’t want to work.

  “Tell me why you were shouting about the gun,” Santino said.

  She slumped over to rest her head on the table, and gasped as her chin pressed against her arm.

  Santino reached over and turned her face towards the light. “You’re starting to swell up,” he said, and went to go put together an ice pack.

  “The gun’s…complicated,” she said, exploring her face with her fingers. She had forgotten about the boxing match. Everything felt raw.

  “Uh-huh,” her partner said. He spread out an almost-clean dishtowel on the counter, and began to empty an ice tray into it. “I figured. You and Mulcahy knew what was about to happen.”

  “We didn’t know it would be Alimoren,” she said. Her excuse sounded evil and weak, even to her, and she was thankful she had the emotional spectrum turned off.

  “But you did know it’d be somebody.”

  She flipped off her implant. The dark was almost a comfort. “Hanlon knew the Hippos were following him. We think that Noura’s murder served two purposes—it removed her as a possible informant, and forced the Hippos to break cover. Sniper rifles are huge things, Santino. They’re not what you see in the movies. It took Ami a few minutes to get into position after the car chase started, and when she needed to get to the hospital to help me, she had to leave it. She thought Ken would recover it for her. He was busy on the ground, and it…it didn’t work out that way.”

  “Why did Ami have her rifle with her?”

  Rachel didn’t understand the question. She flipped her implant on to see her partner in curious yellows. “She was working. Why wouldn’t she have her gun?”

  “Because it’s a… Forget it. Different cultures. Why would Hanlon want Ami’s rifle?”

  “Ballistics.” This part of the story was solid ground for Rachel. “Ami used to be a government sniper. She’s had her rifle for her entire career—its ballistic microstamp has got to be in some top-secret database you and I have never heard of. The only reason he’d want Ami’s rifle is to frame her—and through her, OACET—for murder.”

  “But the gun Hanlon recovered wasn’t Ami’s rifle.”

  “No, but he thought it was. Mulcahy managed to swap Ami’s gun out for an identical model.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know,” Rachel said, and the ground beneath her started to give way. “Just… Mulcahy used to be a spy, all right? He made Jason Bourne look like a kindergarten teacher. If anybody could pull it off, it’s him. All I know is that Ami’s rifle was locked in a box in the mansion’s panic room at the same time that Alimoren died.”

  He handed her the dishtowel. Rachel pressed it against her chin, and felt the ice inside shift to mold against the contours of her face. It stung; she pushed through the pain until it had reformed as a cold, hard shell around her.

  “Where did the replacement rifle come from?” Santino asked.

  Rachel laughed into the ice pack. “It’s got a long ownership history, but its most recent purchase was in Tallahassee during the Congressional winter recess, to a buyer whose information somehow didn’t make it into the registry. Guess where Hanlon spent Christmas?”

  “I hear Florida is nice two weeks out of the year,” he replied.

  “Yup.”

  “How did Mulcahy know he needed a duplicate of Ami’s gun?”

  She shrugged. “He says he bought copies of all of the Hippos’ favorite weapons, just in case. He’s got resources. It wasn’t that big a deal for him.”

  “Except…” Santino paused, wrestling with his red anger. “He knew there was a chance Hanlon would use those guns.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “I feel like an accomplice to murder,” he said.

  “Don’t!” She slammed her left hand down on the table; a flash of pain cut across her scans. “We didn’t put the gun in his hands. We definitely didn’t pull the trigger. Those were his choices. I will not have you and Mulcahy beat yourselves up while that goatdick of a human being doesn’t regret a fucking thing!”

  Rache found herself standing over him, shouting, the ice pack broken apart where she had lost her grip on the towel. She sent her scans down to the foundation of their home, and seized on the stability of the concrete, tracing the rebar running through the pad, long basket weaves of black embedded within the gray… Slow down, it’s not Santino you’re mad at, slow down…

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “It’s okay.”

  She came back to the table, and began to round up the ice cubes with little taps of her fingers. Their mail was everywhere, the cheap ink on the credit card offers starting to run beneath tiny flecks of melting ice. The ice puddled faster than she could get to it, and she swept the whole mess onto the floor with a small sob of frustration.

  Santino let her cry herself out, his own colors a miserable gray. Then, once Rachel had dragged herself back to her chair and some semblance of stability, he pushed his own damp grays aside. “Better?”

  “No. Let’s work.” She removed the 3D-printed replica of the fragment from her pocket, and slid it into the middle of the table. It spun, throwing ice and water as it traveled. “We need to go back to the beginning,” she said. “We find out why Hanlon wanted the fragment of the Mechanism, we learn why he killed Alimoren.”

  “You’re carrying that with you?”

  “I liked it,” she said. “Now it’s…”

  Santino knew the correct phrase. “Now it’s a memento mori.”

  He was right: it wasn’t just metal anymore; somehow it had turned into a reminder of Alimoren’s death, and Noura’s, and Ceara’s, and that poor makeup artist whose name always escaped her…

  She scanned the fragment, as if she could find what was different about it. Nothing. It was the same, and yet its story had changed.

  “Come on,” she said, standing. “I need you to drive me somewhere.”

  Santino had insisted she call ahead: Rachel had insisted there was no need. She had won on both counts. It was barely seven in the morning, but she had known Oscar McCrindle would be in his shop. They found him cleaning, the wreckage from broken drywall and old cinderblock slowly making its way from the front of his store to a dumpster in the back alley. She knocked on the store’s plate glass window to get his attention, and the older man rushed to the door.

  “Agent Peng!” McCrindle made a flapping motion, as if he wanted to hug her but didn’t want to overstep. Instead, he ushered them into the Trout and Badger. “I… The news about… I’m so very sorry.”

  Rachel needed to bump his sympathetic wine reds around—But he didn’t even know Alimoren!—before she spotted a famili
ar digitized green, and realized he was referring to Dunstan’s news story of OACET’s lost five years. “Oh,” she said. “Right. Thank you.”

  “Agent…” McCrindle seemed unable to get past his sympathy for Rachel. It clung to him, smothering his thoughts, and his Australian accent was thicker than usual. “I’m so very sorry. What happened to you was terrible.”

  She took a deep breath, and found the pungent stench of ripe raccoons was gone. “The crime scene cleanup crew came by?”

  “Yes. Yes! Thank you so much!” This, McCrindle could focus on. He flushed red, and showed her the hole where a buffalo’s head used to be. “My lawyer’s office received a court order to remove the bodies. I didn’t even see a bill.”

  “They left a mess,” she said. “If you want, I can—”

  “No,” McCrindle protested. “I asked them to leave it open. I want to put it back together myself. A labor of love, you understand?”

  Santino smiled.

  Lord, save me from kindred spirits, Rachel thought. Then, before Santino committed them to grief therapy via plaster repair, she asked McCrindle if he had been following the White House murder case.

  “Yes, of course! It’s the only story out there—well, it was, until it got swept away when the news of what happened to you broke. It’s fascinating. Did you really recover a piece of the Antikythera Mechanism?”

  “Yes,” she replied. “You were right. The fragment had an inscription on it, and we now think the theft was done to recover that inscription. We were wondering if you could help us understand why it might be important.”

  “I’m not a specialist in ancient Greek translations,” McCrindle said. “You should be consulting with a scholar, not an antiques dealer.”

  “Meet the scholar,” she said, pointing to her partner. “Officer Raul Santino, and we only call him an officer because the MPD can’t figure out what title to give a cop with multiple doctorates in a truly obscene number of disciplines. We’ve also consulted with a translator at the Smithsonian, and an expert mathematician in case the Mechanism could be applied to modern-day high-level mathematics. What we need is someone who can put it all in a general historical context.”