Necropolis

by Michael Dempsey

  “It had a human shape.” She put her hand over her mouth. The vibrating transferred from her lips to her hands. It looked like she was frantically patting her mouth. “Arms, legs, head. An outline, like a shadow, but not on a surface. It went through the air.”

  “Like a ghost?”

  “No, it—”

  “Not like a ghost?”

  “I don’t know, Jesus! When you picture a ghost, its edges are blurry. This wasn’t like that. It was sharp, defined.”

  Then I remembered Maggie. I’d seen her become translucent. A wrecking ball swung through my ribcage.

  “As it went past me, I heard it.”

  “It made a noise?”

  “Like a… whispering chuckle. An awful sound.” Bright points of fear silvered her pupils. “It went past me, out. Then the house lights came on.”

  “No one else saw it?”

  Abruptly she started to cry, softly. “No.”

  I walked back to her, pushed back a lock of her hair, smoothing the burgundy tresses I had pulled. “Sharon. Maybe it’s time you found a new hobby.”

  She sniffled. “Don’t I know it.”

  ***

  They stood staring at me.

  “Probably a drugged-out whacko,” said Armitage.

  “No.”

  “C’mon, Donner.”

  “She wasn’t a junkie,” I said.

  “She believed what she told me. Where that leaves us…”

  My spine ached from sleeping on the cot. I never thought I’d be fondly remembering the monstrosity in my Park Slope bedroom.

  I drained the tea. I had an abrupt urge to smash the chipped cup. I really wanted a beer. I rolled my neck, listening to the grinding glass. I hadn’t thought about booze lately. A radical cure—just die a couple times, ha ha. It was wishful thinking. It wasn’t gone, just in remission. Eventually the cravings would jump from their ambuscade and hit me jackhammer hard. And it would be when I was most vulnerable.

  Muffled Ender voices drifted from above:

  “There are signs so that we may know.

  There is time so that we may change.

  The dead rise as witness;

  Witness the incorruptibility of the spirit.

  What proof need you now?

  When God’s finger moves among us

  For all to see?”

  Nearby, Max and Tippit were playing cards with two Enders. A tensor lamp cast yellow gloom over the table. It was a strange sight, the shaved monks’ heads and deep burgundy robes, sitting across from the Guido suits and craggy jowls. Both jowls and heads had five o’clock shadows. Max, unsurprisingly, had a superb poker face. Not Tippit. Right now, everyone was folding because he looked like the proverbial feline that consumed the canary. I found myself smiling. Then frowning. Attachments were dangerous.

  Maggie had been watching the game, too. I flashed her a smirk and indicated Tippit’s expression. Instead of returning my amusement, she flinched like she’d been stung by a scorpion. She looked away, suddenly preoccupied with straightening her blouse. What the hell?

  I slung a question mark at Armitage, who’d seen the strange reaction, too. He rolled his cuffs down and ambled over to her.

  “What’s up, Mag?” he asked. “You look like you’re about to jump out of your skin.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “Maggie,” he said again. She examined the cracks in the concrete.

  “A straight flush!” crowed Tippit.

  “Imagine that,” muttered Max. He tossed down his cards.

  I laid a hand on Maggie’s shoulder.

  “A shiny shadow,” she murmured.

  “Sharon’s story?” I said. She looked up at me. Her eyes were so wide I could actually see nanoswarms in the irises, like schools of fish seen from below, swirling shapes lit by oceantop sun sparkle.

  “I saw something like that.”

  “What?” said Armitage. “Where?”

  “Alvarez’s apartment.”

  My hands tightened the back of the chair. The wood groaned. I knew it! I’d known it back in Red Hook. After Alvarez had gone out the window. Something had been wrong with her story. But I’d never pressed her, had I? I’d let her distract me with talk about impermanence and separation and consciousness. Again, I felt that rustling of dangerous attachments.

  “You’re saying you’ve seen this shadow?” said Armitage.

  “In the projects. It killed Hector Alvarez.”

  Armitage sat back down, his hands dead weight on his thighs. “Oh boy.”

  Something about her resolution changed, a subtle shift in colors, like an adjusted TV aerial. “Donner was searching Alvarez’s bedroom. The old man was looking out the window, like his whole life was over. Then all of sudden… this thing crossed the room, in a flash, from nowhere. It had a human shape. It was translucent but you could see it shine.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “It pushed at him, like a strong wind. It pushed him straight out the window. It killed him.”

  I wanted that beer again, bad. “Two independent sightings,” I said.

  “Boss,” said Max. “This thing’s real?”

  “Sharon’s story places this same… phantom… at the Smythe crime scene in the dungeon.”

  “With a knife?” reminded Armitage. “A ghost with a knife?”

  “If it killed Dr. Smythe, then it killed the doc you found in the laundry hamper, too, right? Hakuri?” asked Max. “And faked a break-in and a robbery to cover it up? What kind of ghost does that?”

  “Worse,” I added, “what do Hector Alvarez and the Surazal scientists have in common? They’re not connected.”

  “Except by you,” said Maggie.

  Tippit sucked in a startled breath. “Oh shit.”

  “Awfully convenient, Alvarez getting whacked precisely at that moment,” said Armitage.

  “To keep him from talking? Leading Donner back to Nicole?” said Max.

  “It doesn’t make sense. Who would protect Nicole but kill her team at the same time?”

  “Do ghosts have to make sense?” asked Tippit.

  “It wasn’t a ghost,” I said. “It was a smarty.”

  Maggie opened her mouth, then snapped it shut. Armitage was staring at her, hard. “Maggie?” he asked. The players had drifted from the table and we stood in a semi-circle around Maggie. “I can’t tell you,” she whispered.

  “You fucking well can tell us!” barked her leader.

  Her exhalation was measured. She stood and looked at each one of us in turn. “It’s never been heard by human beings before. Do you understand?”

  “Get on with it,” I said.

  She licked her lips. “There’s a legend. About one of the first of us.”

  “One of the first AIs?” asked Max.

  “Legend’s probably not the right word. More like a bed-time story. He’s kinda like the smarty boogeyman.”

  “Why’s he so scary?” asked Max.

  “Because he kills humans.”

  A deep shock froze the room. Finally, one of the Enders said what we were all thinking. “No smarty has ever killed a human being. Smarties are pacifists.”

  “Well, this one wasn’t. This one hunted humans as prey, according to the tale. He was called the Lifetaker.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “You have to understand. The UN debate whether to grant us rights as sentient beings was a firestorm. The General Assembly was almost evenly split. The idea of artificial consciousness terrified the shit out of people. Muslims still view us as demons.”

  “I remember,” said Armitage. “Every link in the world was tuned in to the debates that whole summer.”

  “What finally tipped the balance in our favor was the fact that not one smarty had ever committed a crime. Any crime. Not one petty theft, let alone a violent act. Our ego structure is different. We can’t comprehend putting ourselves before another, which is a prerequisite for violence or crime. That, along with our lack of material ambit
ion, convinced people that we’d be harmless. We wouldn’t become enemies or competitors, the two things humans fear the most.”

  “But the Lifetaker—”

  “Threatened all that. If you found out a smarty could kill, it’d be over. There’d be nothing left for us except slavery or destruction. So, the story goes, he was banished.”

  The planes in Armitage’s face shifted, but he said nothing.

  Maggie said: “I thought he was a cyburban myth.”

  “But what you saw?”

  “It definitely could have been a smarty.”

  “Who knows more about this Lifetaker?” asked Armitage.

  “My old guardian, Jakob,” she said. I must’ve looked lost. “We don’t have parents as such. Newborn smarties are put under the tutelage of a more experienced AI. If anyone would know more, it’d be Jakob.”

  “Contact him,” I said. “If this Lifetaker is more than a spook story, then he’s back. Maybe we can get an answer to why Hector Alvarez and these dead scientists are connected.”

  “Well great!” mourned Tippit. “A smarty serial killer. So much for sleeping tonight.”

  39

  NICOLE / MCDERMOTT

  Seething, Nicole Struldbrug hung up on her father. The commtat reshaped into its default spider web pattern. She looked through the glass, struggling to get a hold of herself. The reeb in the metal chair looked like a mound of tapioca pudding. Time to send Loretta out again.

  Nicole closed her eyes. Her father’s voice—so papery and thin, so young, yet so full of dust and years. It made her want to retch.

  Previously, he’d been content to fling his criticisms at her from a distance, but now he was clearly suspicious. She could count on a summons from her brother. A calling out on the carpet, and soon. Good. It was time for a reckoning.

  The booth door opened, admitting Dr. Gavin and the reborn McDermott, her security chief. They waited diplomatically while she wrangled her loathing back into its box.

  She regarded them. The two men couldn’t be more opposite ends of the human spectrum. Urbane sophistication and scientific brilliance, next to animal brutality and cunning. The only thing they had in common at the moment was displeasure. It was serious. They never came here.

  “Well?” she said.

  “Someone found Donner,” said McDermott.

  “So? Some ghetto rat stumbles across his bones—”

  “He’s been revived.”

  It was the first time they’d ever seen her completely blindsided. She seemed to realize her mouth was open and clamped it shut. “How?” she asked. Her voice threatened pain.

  “Maggie Chi,” said Gavin.

  “The smarty bitch who stole our formula?”

  “Yes. She must have used it to revive him. A surveillance wasp in the subways took his picture yesterday.”

  “Where was he going?”

  “We don’t know,” said McDermott. “By the time the biometrics identified him, he was long gone.”

  Nicole drummed her fingernails on the Plexiglas. McDermott caught a glimpse of leather beneath her sleeve. She carried Japanese Tanto knives in sheaths on each forearm. She could flick her wrists in a certain way and they’d spring forward, ready to do damage. The blades were graphene-tipped—honed to the monomolecular level and capable of slicing through steel. It was whispered that she’d used them on a secretary who’d eavesdropped on her phone call. According to the legend, the only thing that’d kept the woman’s head from being completely severed was a single strand of cartilage.

  “Donner, Donner,” Nicole mused, flashing her teeth. “What a naughty boy you are.”

  A groan erupted from Gavin. “Didn’t you bring Donner into all of this?”

  McDermott shook his head. Don’t do it, Doctor, don’t do it.

  Her brow darkened. “It doesn’t matter now, Doctor,” she said.

  McDermott saw it coming. Men like this—men with huge intellects and even larger egos, men used to having everyone kowtow around them, men who never developed humility or restraint—they eventually went out in a self-destructive tirade when challenged by an inferior mind with superior authority. Gavin’s resentments charged into the room like a berserker bull.

  “Doesn’t matter!? You’ve endangered everything we’ve worked for with your games! Hiring him was insane! Now the Retrozine is in the hands of the Cadre!”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “Who else could’ve gotten Donner past our security in the lab? Or on the subway?” Spittle flecked his lips. “It won’t take much to figure out what we’ve been doing.”

  “You’re overreacting, Doctor.”

  Gavin yanked on the his coattails and actually shrieked at them. “I’ll let Adam decide that! I have a feeling he’ll be very interested in what’s been going on around here.”

  There was a silent moment. McDermott steeled himself for something ugly.

  But Nicole sighed and said softly, “You’re right. If I hadn’t hired Donner, none of this would have happened.”

  Gavin opened his mouth, then shut it in confusion. McDermott stifled a smile. Gavin had probably told her off a million times in his head, but now all the verbal barbs and lashes he’d honed to titanium brilliance were useless. She’d taken the wind out of his sails simply by agreeing with him.

  “However, if, as you say,” she continued, “this is the Cadre at work, they won’t go public until they have hard evidence.”

  McDermott had an epiphany. “The morgue theft! They’re going to revive Crandall.”

  Gavin looked like he was about to suffer an attack of apoplexy. His face turned the color of a fresh bruise. “He knows everything! If they break him—”

  Nicole cut him off. “McDermott, find Crandall before he can talk.”

  McDermott acknowledged her with a jerk of his head. She smiled in dismissal, then paused. “Oh, McDermott.” He stopped. “One more thing.”

  Here it comes.

  “Dr. Gavin is going on leave. Exhaustion. Notify the press office.”

  Gavin whitened. “What—”

  “And McD? Be a dear and close the door on your way out.”

  McDermott exited quickly. He knew he should keep going down that hall without pausing, but he couldn’t help himself. He crept back and listened outside the door.

  It wasn’t very dramatic. A whisking sound, a wet plop. A gasp. Then a large thud a moment later as the body hit the floor.

  Eviscerations were the worst. You had whole seconds to watch your purple-gray entrails spill out onto the carpet in front of you before your heart failed.

  As McDermott hurried down the corridor, he wondered whether, in the brisk air conditioning, Gavin’s guts had been steaming.

  40

  BRIAN

  The Devil’s Fist stalked their prey in Battery Park City. More reebs, Dell Broggorico said. Better hunting. Here, it was the 1880s, and the ladies sashayed in hoop skirts and bustles, twirling parasols. The men sported natty herringbone suits. Kids in knee-socks and knickers rolled their kinetic hoops along the sidewalks, annoying shop owners as they interfered with the local power grid.

  The residents of BPC had managed, through their jackass of a representative in City Council, to get a permit for equestrian transportation. They’d tried to ban cars outright, but the Mayor had quickly put an end to that nonsense. Consequently, the traffic jams down here were infamous and bizarre, as floater and buckboard jockeyed for position and horses bolted when their manes rose in the vehicles’ mag fields. Motorists stayed clear if they could. Horse shit superheated by a EM pylon was an olfactory experience you wanted to avoid.

  The hunters dressed to blend in: spats, sweater vests and bow ties, their tats and piercings hidden. Brian didn’t get a weapon. That would be earned by his first bona fide kill.

  Kill. Electric ferocity disrupted his thoughts. Another part of him, however, a part that was slowly growing smaller, murmured with discomfort.

  They found a homeless reeb beneath a bridge
support. He hummed tunelessly along with the whine of the asynchronous HDVC fuel ribbons. Empty bottles of rotgut stood sentry around him. He was in his re-twenties, but his jaundiced skin hung in elephantine folds, unable to keep pace with the accelerated alcoholic youthing. The men’s faces had a predatory shine in the glow of his sterno fire.

  The act itself was disappointingly inelegant. They simply dove at the poor fool, punching and stabbing. The pathetic old fuck died much too quickly. Brian managed to get a kick in to the man’s groin that elicited a satisfying rasp of pain, but their frenzy didn’t leave him much room. They stood, panting, faces blazing, looking down at his broken form.

  La-Ron whirled to Brian. “Whaddaya think a that, eh?”

  “It was okay, I guess.”

  Dell guffawed. “Okay? Did you hear that, Yrko?”

  Yrko was the scariest of the adult Devil’s Fisters. His face carried the history of some ancient conflagration. One eyebrow was missing, and the rest looked melted, the cauterized flesh twisted like putty. Yrko relished the revulsion he inspired. He had a weird Cockney accent. He’d burnt an ear off the last guy who laughed at it. He hauled Brian by his shirt up to his ugliness. “Lad’s a goer, eh?” he said. “Maybe we have a job fer ya.”

  La-Ron bristled. “That was my job!”

  Yrko ignored him, studying Brian’s fearless face. He understood how dangerous a hollow man could be.

  “We got us a… patron,” he said. “From time to time, we do work for her. She’s looking for a certain few blokes. Deep underground, hard to find. But even worms come up in the sun once in awhile, eh? Now, I got me plenty o’ eyes uptown, but I need somebody down here. You up to that, me lad?”

  “Right-o, guv’nah,” said Brian, and everyone snickered.

  Everyone except Yrko.

  41

  DONNER

  My Beretta was in a docker’s clutch, the strap digging into my side. I wriggled my shoulders and managed to shift the chafing to another spot. Armitage’s shirt was freshly ironed. It didn’t matter. He still looked rumpled.

  “He’ll be hostile. You killed him.”

  I shrugged. “Brought him back, too. Maybe it’ll balance out.”