by Damien Boyes
“I’m sorry I sicced the drones on you,” he blurts as he unfolds chairs for us. “But this thing with Dub freaked me the fuck out, then some rando claiming to be you called me yesterday and I thought I was next. I thought you were coming for me too.”
I wonder if he’ll be any help at all.
“I get it,” I say. “No harm done.”
Shelt’s office is cramped. Packed with a folding table, a low cot, a small refrigerator and chest-high stacks of instameals and bottled water. It looks more like a bunker than an office—but he’s got the Tz cranked to display an executive’s corner suite. Floor to ceiling windows overlook a city out of a fever dream. It takes me a second but I realise it must be a view of the Hereafter, the biggest and craziest virt in the mesh.
We sit down but Shelt stays on his feet, pacing in a tight circle next to his unmade bed. It smells like he’s spent a lot of time here.
“So is it true, what happened to you?” Shelt asks me. “Went shyft-mad and shot up an apartment building?”
“That’s why I’m here,” I say. “I don’t know.”
I tell him what I do know: coming back in the Russian’s basement, Dub attacking me, the anonymous benefactor that restored me. I leave out Wiser’s visit. I don’t want to make things more complicated than they need to be. “Do you have any idea why Dub would want in my head?”
“I have my suspicions. Nothing I can prove, but I do know that counselling sesh was jank. It was the source of all this. Whatever happened started there. Everyone connected to it went nuts. You blew the shit out of yourself. Elder dropped off the face of the planet. Then you, Dora—glad you’re back, by the way,” he says and flashes her a bashful smile. “Miranda killed the guy she was fucking. Tala shot up a skyn shop. Now Dub supposedly kills himself. Only me, Petra and Vaelyn are left…and you two.”
“And you think someone’s after you?”
“Shit yes. I may be paranoid but I’m not crazy.”
Dora looks at me, I-told-you-so on her face.
“Why?”
“It all started with you,” he says. “You were gunning for Xiao, got close too from what I heard. You started shyfting—”
I don’t want to hear this. “No way I—”
He stops pacing, looks me in the eyes. “Dude, you were Revved 24/7.”
How did I turn into a shyft junkie? I glance at Dora but she won’t meet my gaze. “And just as you were about to bust Xiao, you went AWOL. You came to counselling one last time and you were like a different person. This has to be about tainted shyfts. Got into you, somehow spread to the rest of us one by one,” Shelt says.
So this is all my fault. All the pain and all the death. Me. All this tragedy and I can’t remember any of it.
That just means I have an even stronger reason to get to the bottom of what’s going on.
I need to make it right.
“Have you talked to Dub lately?” I ask. “Did he seem different to you?”
“No, nothing. That’s what’s so fucked, right. Everyone, all of you, seemed normal right up until you weren’t. Then you snapped or disappeared or whatever. Dub had some pressures but he was dealing. This place is doing okay, I mean, we owe some people a little money but nothing worth jumping in front of a train over. He had that fight tomorrow, you know, he was about to hit the big time—” He stops mid-thought and leaps to the window. A family of cloud monsters drifts by, sharing an airplane for a snack, and he watches, a goofy grin on his face as they pass.
After a moment, he narrows his eyes and moves back to the cot, drops to his haunches, slides a long metal locker out from underneath, scrawls something on the lid with his finger and lifts it when the locks snap. Inside are neat rows of shyfts, standing on end, their display caps flickering and winking and gyrating a cascade of colours in the low light. He considers for a moment and selects one with a fuschia crosshatch pattern, reaches around and presses it to his cuff. It empties with a simulated hiss.
His back straightens almost immediately. His pupils dilate and he jumps back to his feet, strides to the refrigerator, grabs a Tam-Tam, pops the top and downs half of it.
I turn to Dora to get a sense of what she’s thinking, but her gaze hasn’t moved from the long box of shyfts. She notices me watching and turns her head, embarrassed to be caught in a covetous moment.
Everyone shyfted these days. Maybe it’s not so hard to believe I’d end up the same way.
“So, I’ve had a long time to think about this and I got it all figured,” Shelt says, and ratchets his chin up to the left and right, grinding his neck through a scale of vertebral pops. “Here’s what we need to do—you go talk to Dub. He was running daily syncs. If anyone can tell you what was up with him, it’ll be him.”
I endure a moment of anxiety thinking about my face pressed in the snow with Dub’s knee on my back, but push it aside. “He’s in the Hereafter?” I ask.
“His custom virt,” Shelt corrects me. “Waiting to hear what the New Gladiators’ investigation makes of his apparent suicide.”
“You expect Fin to cast into Dub’s virt?” Dora asks, looking from me to Shelt. “What if it’s not Dub waiting for him? What if that’s the plan—get Fin into Dub’s head and somehow infect his mind? We don’t even know what’s going on.” She turns to me, pleading. “Don’t go in there. It’s too dangerous.”
“I’ve talked to Dub,” Shelt says, shaking his head. “It’s him.”
“But how can you be sure?” Dora asks.
“Because I know him,” Shelt answers. “Besides, Dub was restored from a clean sync. Whoever was in his head yesterday isn’t there anymore.”
Dora still isn’t buying it, and after the past few months she’s had I don’t blame her. But she’s got her mind fixated on running, sees that as her only option. If I’m going to stay, I need to get to the bottom of this and that means investigating. If I have to expose myself to whoever’s after us in the process, well, at least then I’ll know she was right.
“I’ll be careful, Dora,” I say. “Okay, Shelt, what else?”
“Talk to Miranda and Tala,” he replies immediately. “They’re in custody so I’ll have to submit a request for you.”
“You really think they’re wrapped up in this too?” I ask.
“All I know is they were both part of counselling, both went crazy and acted out their deepest fantasies. You think that’s a coincidence?”
“No, but what—?”
“They’re victims too. They might know something,” Shelt says.
“If you’re so sure what’s going on, Shelt, why haven’t you looked into any of this?”
He stops and glares at me, eyes wide. “Someone’s trying to end me. Why the hell would I go outside?”
“But it’s fine for me to—?”
“You can take care of yourself, can’t you?”
“Yeah, but—”
“So it’s settled,” he says, and looks around at the back of my neck. “Do you have a cuff?”
A cuff? The reality of what Shelt’s asking hits me. I’ll have to open my head up and let the link come streaming in. Isn’t this what happened last time? First it’s a cuff and then a harmless shyft, and then before I know it, I’m laying myself down on the railway tracks—
“I don’t need a cuff,” I say. “Maybe Dora’s right. I’ll talk to Dub through the livewall. I don’t need to meet him in person.”
Shelt shakes his head. “Miranda and Tala are stocked. No communication except face-to-face. You need to cast yourself in.”
“I don’t—”
He doesn’t argue, reaches back, snaps his cuff from his neck and pushes it into my reluctant grasp. It’s still warm.
“Then you need to track down Petra and Vaelyn.”
“Who—?” I’m still transfixed by the cuff I’m holding, and what I’m going to have to do with it. I don’t have much choice.
“Petra and Vaelyn. They were new to the counselling group. Started on your last day. Shit went bad
right after they joined. Vaelyn’s a Rithmist, sells shyfts she rolls herself. Petra’s her girlfriend now. Could be a coincidence, or not. Best to find out, right?”
“And where are they?” I ask.
“Last I heard Vaelyn was holding court in the Fāngzhōu, a Rithmist bar in the Market, trying to make a name for herself. If she isn’t there one night, she’ll be there the next. Petra will be with her.”
“Fāngzhōu,” I repeat, and jangle the word around in my head, think back to my years in China, try to remember what it means. “That’s...boat, right? Or ark?”
Shelt stops his pacing, stares at me like I just shit on his floor. “What?”
“Fāngzhōu. It’s Chinese, right. Means ark?”
“Who the fuck cares what it means,” he moves toward us, shooing us with his hands. “Get the hell out of here and find out who wants us all dead.”
StatUS-ID
[a646:d17e:8670:511f::Finsbury/D//GAGE]
SysDate
[07:14:36. Sunday, April 14, 2058]
Galvan and I leave DeBlanc to consider his new career options and we spend an hour scouting along the lake, squinting against the morning sun off the water. We find a series of drag marks at the water’s edge and a high concentration of oddly formed footprints—including a set of barefoot tracks with seven toes.
I consider calling Omondi to drag the sniffer out and run over the area but it’s a public beach, dogs and their owners have been through already, and the waves have obscured most of the evidence. Instead, I get the AMP to check surrounding cameras for suspicious behaviour and run all boat traffic on the lake from midnight to 5am. Maybe we’ll get lucky.
Galvan’s antsy. I have to talk him down from reporting the psyphoning and the shyfts we found. He’s having second thoughts, ready to log everything into the system. All the evidence. By the book.
But as much as DeBlanc deserves the pain he’s brought on himself, providing these details to the official record won’t help our investigation. Not yet anyway. And they may cause whoever stole his rithm to follow through on the threat of torture, or worse. Whatever that might be.
Plus, it’ll mean he owes us one. Whether he’ll ever be in a position to pay us back is another thing.
It isn’t by the book, I tell Galvan, but the book doesn’t have to live on the street and we do. I tell him to consider it a long-term investment.
He concedes, but reluctantly.
Galvan drops me back at my motorcycle, and I meet him at the station where Omondi’s already dug the Cortex out of DeBlanc’s burned skyn. It sits lifeless and dull and partially melted on the stainless steel workbench, its trade-show sheen marred by blood and viscera.
I’ve never seen one outside of pictures, a brain as envisioned by an industrial designer. Like a football moulded out of dull translucent plastic, squashed end-to-end and flattened on the bottom, then joined to a matte black rectangular base with sloping sides and soft edges. The brochures always show them pulsing with an inner blue light, but the shine from this one has gone out.
Hard to believe it once contained the running inner monologue of a human being—thoughts and fears and hopes and desires. Even harder to believe there’s one just like it in my head, that all I am is crammed into something just like it.
Omondi takes us through the autopsy results. There isn’t much to tell. The Cortex is fused, the contents inaccessible. The skyn had been set alight by an off-the-shelf bottle of campfire propellant with no usable prints and the sniffer returned inconclusive for DNA or other trace evidence at the scene.
Officer Gonzales found the likely weapon near a break in the fence just off Lakeshore—a smooth length of pipe, caked in mud but still bearing smears of DeBlanc’s DNA on one end. Omondi even wheeled the sniffer over to the break in the fence and scoured the area but came up empty there too.
I tell Omondi about the suspected psyphoning, ask him to keep it to himself. Omondi and Glavan share a look, but Galvan just nods and Omondi leaves it at that.
Back upstairs, Galvan and I find two desks together and he fills me in on the arKade. The previous meeting had been six months ago in Dubai, home of the second-largest Reszo concentration in the world, after Toronto. I send an official request to Dubai’s corollary to the Psychorithm Crime Unit and after a four-hour turnaround, we get some results: two lost time reports on the two consecutive Sunday mornings following the previous arKade there, same MO as the three here. Wealthy Reszos who recanted their complaints just hours after making them. I bet there was a third that was never reported in the first place. Who knows how many more before those.
We look into DeBlanc’s accounts, see the huge transfers out that disappear into untraceable eCash.
Someone’s come up with a brand new version of the perfect crime. Luring rich victims to a secret underground club, stealing their personalities and using those stolen personalities to clean out their bank accounts. The locations are always unknown and the victims refuse to press charges or provide any helpful details at all because versions of themselves are being held hostage.
Whoever’s behind this has all the angles covered, and now the arKade has moved on. By the time it pops up again, in some unknown place six months from now, these’ll all be cold cases and it’ll all happen again.
Shit. Another failure.
I offer to prepare the report. I don’t want Galvan to wrestle with his conscience for omitting details any further than he needs. Halfway through the morning, Galvan asks me for the shyfts we took from DeBlanc’s apartment. For a moment, I figure he’s changed his mind and is set to submit them to evidence, but he says he just wants to give them a once over, see what they contain, so I hand them over.
All except the Dwell I’d separated out and slipped into my jacket pocket.
Six or seven times during the course of the day I snap out of a reverie to realise I have my hand in my pocket and I’m playing with the plastic cylinder, rolling it back and forth through my fingers, cradling it like a precious stone.
Later, as I’m about to start work on my portion of the cypher report for Standards, Galvan comes to find me. He’d analyzed the shyfts and determined that while the ones we found at DeBlanc’s suite were consistent with the codebase on the street, nothing special, the one undamaged sample we’d found under the charred skyn was different. It had a slight alteration, a sub-routine that wasn’t related to the shyft itself.
I ask him to explain what the hell that means, and he says he hasn’t been able to crack it, but he figures the addition could have allowed DeBlanc’s attackers to access his rithm. He promises to continue working on it, and I don’t see him for the rest of the shift.
Around six-thirty, as the day shift is winding down, Herb escorts a man and a woman from the lobby up to the Inspector’s office. They move on the balls of their feet in precise, graceful steps, spines rigid, hands behind their backs. The woman is Nordic, tall with light yellow hair and the man looks Spanish or Italian, dark hair and eyes. They’re wearing similar slate grey suits and similar stoic expressions.
Chaddah catches me watching as she waits at her office door and shakes her head at me. None of my business.
The strangers ascend the stairs and there are handshakes all around and they retreat inside. Chaddah closes her office door and the opaques pull behind them.
“What’s that about?” I ask Herb as he comes back down, angle my head at the Inspector’s office. “They don’t look like civvies.”
“They’re not,” Herb replies. “All I can say though.” But he knows more, that much is obvious.
“It serious?”
Herb opens his mouth to answer and the AMP narrowcasts our position. “Officer Montgomery,” it says, “you’re needed at the front desk.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Herb sighs and rolls his eyes but trudges back toward the lobby.
“Who are they?” I ask the air, speaking to the AMP.
“They are individuals operating under a need to know ba
sis,” the AMP answers, the implication being that I don’t need to know.
Which, of course, just makes me want to. There’s so much going on around me I don’t understand, every new thing just adds to the confusion.
The driver. The cypher. The threat. The psyphonings. And now a couple of spooks striding through the office. I’ve got enough questions. I could do with some answers.
I sit back down, stay at my desk through the shift change, and watch as the two mysterious figures leave a half hour later. They depart with a frostier air than they arrived. Chaddah doesn’t walk them out. I try to snag a quick ID with my tab but they’re out before I can get a good look. No answers there.
Later, I join the evening standing rundown, see a few more familiar faces and meet the Night Commander. Turns out to be Greg Jarvis. He’d been the Staff Inspector in Hold-Up while I was in Homicide. He catches me up on what’d been going on there since I left, which turns out wasn’t much. Same shit, different address. He asks if I’d talked to Ray, and when I say I have we both grow quiet and the conversation dries up.
I spend the next few hours filling in the blanks for the report to Standards, finish two hours into the night shift. The whole time I’m sitting there I’m half wishing another threat will come through my desk. It’d give me something to concentrate on, something to do, but my inbox stays empty.
I’m procrastinating. Barely back to work but my day shift rotation is over today, so now I’ve got two days off ahead of me and absolutely nothing to do with them until the night rotation starts. I stay at the desk, dicking around on the link, tinkering with and rerunning the facial imager scan on the van driver, then hit the weapon range and update my qualifications with perfect 5’s across all tests—the best score I’ve ever posted. Puts me at the top of the leaderboard, tied with the Inspector.
Finally, unable to drag out my time at the station any longer, I walk into the cool night air, my fingers fiddling with the Dwell shyft, and head instinctively toward the light. Toward Reszlieville.