by Eric Brown
‘What was she working on? Can you tell me that?’
That sly smile again. ‘I don’t think you’d understand a word, Mr H.’
‘Try me.’
‘Okay, Suzie was the star researcher on the time-extension team—’
‘I’m with you so far.’
A flash of azure eyes. ‘I haven’t even begun yet, Mr H.’ She hesitated. ‘She was mapping neural interfaces in subject volunteers and correlating reaction times in and out of VR, trying to come to some definitive paradigm concerning cognitive dysfunction in temporal paradox sets—’
‘Okay,’ Halliday said. ‘How about rephrasing that in simple language?’
Her gaze held his. ‘That was simple language,’ she said.
‘Fine. Well, perhaps we’d better skip what she was working on.’ Halliday smiled to himself as he realised that he was feeling inadequate in the presence of what was after all nothing more than an advanced computer system.
‘Was she happy with her work at Cyber-Tech?’ he asked.
She shrugged. ‘We never discussed things like happiness.’
‘What about sadness? Or what she was feeling?’
‘We never discussed feelings. They don’t matter.’
‘You mean, they don’t matter to you.’
‘I mean, they don’t matter to Suzie. They’re unimportant. They’re what other people have, which makes them what they are like.’
Halliday hesitated, phrasing his question. ‘And what are other people like?’
‘Other people are irrational,’ she said. ‘They say one thing and mean another, they act one way today, and another way tomorrow, with no apparent reason or methodology.’
Halliday sipped his coffee. ‘And Suzie didn’t like that?’
She gave him a look which he interpreted as contemptuous. ‘It isn’t a question of liking anything!’ she said. ‘It means that other people cannot think like Suzie. Even the people she works with are constrained by their feelings.’
‘But with you, it’s different, yes? She could talk with you, and you’d understand each other, with no interference from things like feelings and emotions?’
She nodded. ‘We could talk for hours, overcome problems, work out avenues of investigation.’
‘So would you say that you understood Suzie?’ he asked.
She regarded him, obviously working out her reply. ‘I know what she knows,’ she said, ‘and I understand what she wants.’
‘So ... what does she want?’
Suzie closed her eyes. Halliday wondered what exactly a thirteen-year-old autistic cyber-genius might possibly want from life. It certainly wasn’t going to be a pony for Christmas and a party at the local KFC-McDonald’s.
She opened her eyes and looked at him. ‘Suzie,’ she said, ‘is trying to determine whether or not there is materialistic evidence for the existence of the human soul.’
Halliday opened his mouth, but a wisecrack was not forthcoming. He simply nodded. ‘The human soul,’ he murmured. ‘Is that a fact?’
‘It’s what she’s striving towards in her investigations.’
‘Tell me, how far along the road is she towards discovering the truth about the soul?’
‘Science isn’t an exponential curve,’ she said. ‘It’s more like a series of immeasurable leaps. Suzie will know when she gets there.’
Halliday nodded, at a temporary loss for words. So the missing autistic savant was on a quest to discover the human soul, was she? He wondered what Wellman might have to say when he reported that little gem.
‘Do you have any idea why she didn’t report in to work on Friday?’
Suzie shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you know where she might be now?’
‘I don’t know that, either.’
‘She never talked to you about people at work, people she knew outside work?’
‘Suzie didn’t know anyone outside work.’
‘She was seen in a restaurant last Thursday evening with two people, an old guy and a young woman. Do you know if she’d ever met them before?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘She didn’t mention these people to you?’
‘No, she didn’t.’
‘Did she program you to give these answers to anyone who asked, private investigators, the police?’
‘If she did, then she kept the knowledge that she was doing so from me.’
‘So in other words, what you’ve told me so far is the truth as you understand it?’
‘The truth,’ she smiled at him, ‘and nothing but.’
Halliday stood up. ‘I want to look around the house, if that’s okay with you?’
She jumped to her feet. ‘I’ll give you a guided tour.’
Halliday moved to the door. ‘Where’s her bedroom?’
Suzie jabbed a forefinger at the ceiling. ‘Third floor, attic.’
‘Let’s take a look.’
He climbed the stairs, Suzie following. The second floor was decorated in the same dark, old-fashioned style. He’d never seen so much wooden furniture in years. He smiled to himself. Lumber, his father had called it.
Suzie indicated a door giving onto a narrow, curving flight of steps. Halliday made his way carefully up the staircase. At the top he found a light switch and turned it on.
He supposed that if the rest of the house could be described as retro-twentieth-century, then this ivory tower of ultra-modernism might be termed cyber-minimalist.
A narrow bed occupied one corner, next to a bank of impressive-looking monitors and terminals. A state-of-the-art touchpad lay on the duvet. Not a doll, teddy bear, or holo-poster of a VR star in sight.
In fact, there was nothing at all in the way of possessions to indicate that this was the bedroom of a thirteen-year-old girl.
The hologram Suzie stood at the top of the steps, watching him.
Beside a computer monitor was a stack of perhaps fifty needles. Halliday sorted through them, squinted at the titles printed in tiny lettering along their shafts. He read them one by one, taking his time. They were all technical programs or com-texts.
He looked for blank needles, but found none.
‘Suzie didn’t keep a diary?’
‘She didn’t need to. Suzie never forgot a thing.’
Halliday nodded. ‘Some girl, our Suzie,’ he said to himself.
Two needles had titles containing the word eschatology.
He held up the needle. ‘What does eschatology mean, Suzie?’
She corrected his pronunciation. ‘Eschatology. With a hard ch, like k. It pertains to the study of death.’
‘She certainly knows how to enjoy herself.’
‘She is interested in the theory of existence beyond this life,’ Suzie said.
‘She’s frightened of death, in other words?’
She looked at him. ‘Not frightened. She sees death as illogical, a waste of valuable resources. She told me that it’s a redundancy, a failure in an otherwise efficient system.’
Well, he supposed, you could put it like that.
‘What does she believe in? Life after death? Some kind of reincarnation?’
‘Suzie doesn’t hold doctrinaire beliefs, as such. She understands that beliefs are the refuge of people who have failed to continue the process of learning.’ If it were possible for a computer program to emanate intellectual superiority, then the Suzie hologram was emanating it in gigabytes.
‘But she believes ... I mean, she thinks that humans possess souls, right?’
Suzie sighed. ‘She is intrigued by the possibility that such a phenomenon as souls might have a materialistic basis.’
Halliday nodded and stared around the room. ‘I stand corrected yet again.’
He’d seen enough. He moved towards the stairs and paused beside the hologram girl. ‘You said Suzie’s mother is tanked?’
‘She has another twelve hours in VR.’
Halliday considered. ‘How often does she use the jelly-ta
nk?’
The projected girl looked at him. ‘Every other day.’
‘For the maximum twenty-four hours every time?’
‘Sometimes, yes.’
He made his way down the stairs. ‘And how long’s she been using VR like this?’
Suzie paused on the step above him. ‘I couldn’t possibly say. Suzie’s had me for only the past three months.’
‘Where’s the jellytank?’ he asked, looking across the landing towards three closed doors.
She indicated the middle door and Halliday turned the handle and stepped inside, aware as he did so that he was violating established VR protocol. But what the hell: he was trying to locate the woman’s missing daughter, and every bit of information he could gather along the way would be of value.
The jellytank stood in the centre of the room, one of the new art deco models that looked like nothing so much as a big aquarium. It was, not surprisingly, a Cyber-Tech tank.
Anita Charlesworth hung naked in the solid block of gel like some mummified specimen of womanhood preserved in amber. Halliday moved towards the tank, aware that Suzie had entered the room behind him.
He stared down at the woman. She was emaciated, yellow flesh shrink-wrapped around prominent pelvic flanges and bowed rib-cage. Fortunately, her face was concealed by the visor. From time to time her wasted limbs twitched in the gel as she lived out her fantasy existence in the cyberverse.
Anita Charlesworth, according to the information Wellman had supplied him, was thirty-eight years old - just two years older than Halliday. But the woman in the jellytank looked not a day younger than seventy.
He moved around the tank to the monitor. He tapped the touchpad, bringing up the history file. She had used the tank every other day for the past eleven months - the absolute maximum allowable by law.
He thought that Anita Charlesworth’s physical state was a great advertisement for total abstinence.
He should really cut down, he told himself, or get to the gym.
Most of the sites she’d visited were hosted by Cyber-Tech. He read the list of zone codes: some he recognised as sex-zones, others game- and adventure-zones. He wondered what her daughter might have thought of her choice of virtual venues, if she had considered her mother’s existence at all.
Could Anita Charlesworth’s addiction to VR, he thought, be a consequence of having a severely autistic daughter?
From the door. Suzie said, ‘If you’ve seen enough, Mr H . . . ?’
He followed her from the room and down the stairs into the shadowed hallway. He paused by the door, watching the hologram girl.
The content of the airborne projector, the program it contained, would be of interest to Wellman and his techs.
‘Can you tell me if Suzie ever goes out, other than to work? Does she ever go into the city?’
Suzie pursed her lips. ‘She does go into Manhattan from time to time.’
‘Do you know where to, exactly?’
She shook her head. ‘She’s never told me.’
Halliday nodded. ‘Okay. Well, I guess that’s it. I’d better be going.’
He made to turn to the door, then reached out, quickly, before she had time to react.
His hand sank into the side of her head, and his fingers closed around the projector. He felt it surge as it attempted to free itself. He held on tight.
He hurried out, closing the door behind him, and jumped into the Ford. In the driver’s seat, he slipped the projector into his pocket.
He should have known that Suzie would not be silenced so easily.
Her face appeared, bizarrely, at his crotch, staring up at him. ‘Once you get out of the car, Mr H, I’ll scream and screa—!’
He clapped a hand over his pocket and her protests became muffled. ‘Then I’ll have to use force to ensure that you’re a good little girl, won’t I?’
He locked the device in the glove compartment, wadded into an old rag to disable the projection.
All the way from White Plains to Manhattan, he could hear Suzie’s muffled contralto as she demanded to be let out.
* * * *
Five
He left the holographic projection device with Roberts at the penthouse suite on Madison, then made his way back to the office. The sun was going down as he parked the Ford outside the Chinese laundry, but the temperature was still in the nineties and the humidity was choking. Soon the rains would begin, bringing temporary respite to the sultry, tropical atmosphere.
The street was packed with traders and customers; entire families sat out on the steps, calling back and forth like spectators at a sporting venue.
He bought take-out from a Thai stall, then returned to the car for the case that Roberts had given him. He made his way to his office, hit the fan and sat behind his desk. He blew the dust from the leaves of the bonsai oak, gave it a little water, then brewed himself a coffee.
He placed the case on the desk and thumbed open the catch.
The first surprise was the fact that the case was a small, self-contained computer, with a screen set into the lid and a touchpad that folded out.
He started it running, and seconds later a face smiled out at him.
‘Halliday,’ Wellman said. ‘Hope you find some of the items in the case of use. They’re the latest gadgets on the market. Good luck.’ The executive disappeared, to be replaced by a menu listing the contents of the case and their use.
Halliday went through the devices. The first was a capillary holo unit, or chu. He pulled it from its wrapper and held the mask before him, activating the slide control and watching as a hundred different faces emanated one by one from the fine mesh webbing.
Next out of the case was a neural incapacitator, a simple hand-held device no bigger than a pack of cards. One jolt from the incapacitator could scramble an assailant’s neural network, leaving him or her temporarily paralysed.
There were a couple of surveillance devices, a vision aid a little thicker than a contact lens, and a series of disposable bugs tuned to an ear-piece.
Halliday had seen, and sometimes worked with, examples of all these devices, though he had to admit that these were the best that money could buy.
Then he came across something that he’d never seen before. They seemed to be a series of disposable surgeon’s gloves, each one packed flat in a thin, transparent envelope.
He scrolled down the menu until he came to: Cellular tracer [gloves]. The fingertips of each glove, he learned, were coated with nano-monitors used frequently these days in surgery; the monitors invaded the target’s bloodstream and relayed to the computer the state of the subject’s health, everything from blood pressure to brain patterns. The monitors also reported the subject’s precise whereabouts directly to an on-screen map.
He calculated that the contents of the case were easily worth the two hundred grand he’d requested for locating the Charlesworth kid. Wellman was clearly serious about finding her.
Outside, the rain began. It drummed on the fire escape beyond the window, lashing against the glass and filling him with an odd sense of reassurance. One thing you could always be certain of in this uncertain world was the arrival of the evening rain.
His spiced beef take-out, overlooked in his absorption with the devices, had grown cold and congealed in the silver trays, He hurriedly ate the meal and poured himself another black coffee. He was stuffing the empty trays into the trash can when his desk-com chimed and the dollar sign in the top left corner - which Barney had installed years ago - flashed on and off, signalling the arrival of a potential client.
He closed the case and slipped it into a drawer, then pulled himself closer to the desk in the swivel chair and tried to recall how to assume a professional attitude before a customer.
Not, he told himself, that he intended to take on another case while working for Wellman.
Someone knocked on the door, then entered without waiting for a reply.
The woman was slim, attractive, her short blonde hair spangled wit
h rain. She was maybe in her mid-twenties and well-dressed. She paused by the door, one hand still on the handle, and smiled at him. ‘Hiya, Hal.’
Halliday stared. ‘Christ. . .’
The woman grinned. ‘How’s things?’
‘Casey? I mean, Jesus Christ, what’s happened?’