by Lisa Smedman
The answer was in the final section of highlighted text.
Problems with alpha-test model are in process of being rectified, but imperative that you authorize either transfer of credit or move to new test area as soon as possible. Director of detainment camp is unwilling to risk exposure of project, in light of high mortality rate, and is proving uncooperative. He is refusing to provide more test subjects until further credits are transferred.
There was a little bit more—the usual salutations—but Alma didn't read it. She stared at the flatscreen, unwilling to believe what she had just read. If it was true, there was a darker motivation for testing the REM inducer on Yomi Island. The people who'd had the alpha-test units implanted in their brains weren't volunteers. They were lab rats. And Gray Squirrel had killed them.
It all made sense now. Gray Squirrel's unwillingness to provide detailed destinations to PCI security when he went on his business trips to the Philippines, the low-level tension that Alma had thought was caused by Gray Squirrel's quarrels with his wife, and his reluctance to talk about the alpha-test models. When he refused to provide her with details of the alpha tests, she thought that he'd been trying to avoid biasing Alma's assessment of the beta-test version. In reality, he hadn't told her about those tests because he knew she'd find them abhorrent.
What did you do when you suddenly discovered that one of your best friends—a man you looked up to as a benefactor of humanity—was really a murderer? Alma's lips set in a grim line as she answered the question she'd posed. You either try to deny the evidence and forget you ever saw it, or you confront that friend with what you know and demand an explanation.
She scrolled back to the image of Gray Squirrel that had the crosshairs superimposed over it. Thanks to Abby, Alma would never have that chance. Even though her sinking heart told her that Gray Squirrel was guilty of the crime he'd inadvertently confessed to in the memo, Alma would have liked the chance to hear an explanation of why he'd done it from his own lips.
Part of her already accepted the fact, however, that it would have made little difference. Hu's words echoed in her mind: There are no excuses, only reasons. Even so, Alma still groped for excuses—and rejected them, one by one.
Maybe Gray Squirrel had been forced into carrying out the experimentation on unwilling subjects—but the tone of the memo didn't suggest this. Even scanning between the lines, Alma couldn't find a hint of regret or sympathy for his victims.
Maybe the memo was a forgery, designed to accuse Gray Squirrel of something he hadn't done—but if it was, why had Abby murdered him, instead of exposing him?
Wanting to see where the file had been copied from, and when, Aima called up the summary information on GRIM REAPER. She wasn't surprised to see that it had been pirated directly from a private grid access host that was separate from the main PCI system. What did shock her was the routing code on the file itself. Abby hadn't just accessed a secret system that Alma herself didn't even know about—she'd done it from Alma's workstation. And the date and time at which the file had been copied—11:03 p.m. on November 10—was disturbingly familiar . . .
Alma suddenly realized why. That was the evening she'd worked late at PCI. drilling the security staff on counterintrusion measures, and come home too exhausted even to flick on the lights before crawling into bed. When she'd awakened the next morning, she'd realized at once that her apartment had been broken into the day before. Nothing had been stolen, but there were subtle clues everywhere that an intruder had been through the place from top to bottom. A leaf on her orchid was broken, the window had been left depolarized, the holopic of the Superkids was crooked on the table, and the clothes in her closet weren't in the same order they had been. The intruder had even taken a container of soymilk out of the refrigerator, drunk it, and put the empty container into the trash.
Alma had promptly reported the break-in to Hu, and PCI had done a full investigation—with zero results. Alma had changed the coding of her apartment lock and tightened up security at work for the next few weeks, but there were no further incidents. She'd eventually classified the intrusion as a random event, unrelated to her work—a common break-in. The thief had found nothing of value in her home and had gone on his way.
Now she knew the truth. Abby had broken into her apartment, probably as a test of Alma's security systems. Then she'd gone the break-in one better by infiltrating PCI itself. She'd copied the file that Alma had just read and used it to whet the appetites of the executives at a rival corporation—Tan Tien Incorporated. Then she'd carried out the extraction of Gray Squirrel, framing Alma in the process.
No . . . not framing. Spitting on the camera was a clue, just as the taunting messages on Alma's cellphone had been. Abby had probably assumed that Alma, as PCI's counterextractions expert, would be in charge of investigating Gray Squirrel's kidnapping. She hadn't realized that Alma would miss the clue she'd so deliberately left behind—that it would be Alma's superior, Hu, who would spot it.
Abby hadn't been framing Alma. She'd been testing her. Just as the Superkids had once been tested.
With a shiver of fear, Alma shut down the cyberterminal. Abby wasn't just a shadowrunner. She was a damn good shadowrunner.
This morning's I Ching reading had warned Alma to keep an eye on her immediate surroundings. Observe the ups and downs of your own life, it had advised her. Observe your own life if you want to find peace of mind.
She could only think of one place left to observe that qualified as part of her "own life": her apartment. That was where she would find Abby. She was certain of it.
Easing out of Abby's apartment, she made her way down the hall.
* * *
Alma paced back and forth in her apartment, trying to decide what to do next. She'd found no signs of Abby—the apartment was empty, and everything was exactly as she'd left it that morning. She'd searched the apartment building top to bottom, including the roof, the electrical and utility rooms, the laundry and the storage lockers, just to make sure Abby wasn't hiding elsewhere in the building. She wasn't. As a final measure, Alma had mounted a miniature surveillance camera in the building's front lobby and placed another in the parkade where it would give a view of the motorcycle. She'd mounted a third in the hallway outside her apartment and a fourth in Abby's apartment, and then slaved all of them to a cyberterminal in her apartment.
For the past six hours and fifteen minutes she'd been sitting in front of the cyberterminal, staring at its monitor, watching other residents come and go. Although several people passed through the lobby and parkade, none of them resembled a Superkid. And none of them went anywhere near the motorcycle or came to the fourteenth floor.
Alma activated the clock in her cybereye and checked the time. It was 10:06 p.m. She still had to squeeze in a fifteen-minute catnap before she decided whether it was worth relocating her surveillance to Wazubee's. She placed the program she was using into record mode and then stood and stretched. She'd use the REM inducer to sleep from 10:10 to 10:25 p.m. and then do a quick-frame review of whatever the surveillance cameras picked up during that time.
Alma curled up on her bed in a fetal position with her back against the wall—her usual sleeping pose—and closed her eyes. To activate the REM inducer, she had to use a code; Gray Squirrel had designed the beta-test model to avoid the "glitches" he'd found in his first design—glitches that Alma now realized must have been bouts of narcolepsy triggered by accidental activation of the device. The trigger was to count backwards by prime numbers from nineteen—something that a person would be highly unlikely to do by accident. Alma began, subvocalizing to focus her concentration.
"Nineteen, seventeen, thirteen . . ."
She felt a hot tickle begin deep inside her brain, a centimeter or two above the spot where her move-by-wire system had been implanted.
"Eleven, seven, five . . ."
Dreamlike, hallucinatory images began to flicker against her closed eyelids as she began the slide into REM sleep: composites o
f her thoughts, her observations that day, her fears. She was straddling Abby's motorcycle with Akira Kageyama clinging behind her, riding the roaring metal monster through a night sky. Something monstrous followed in their wake, flapping wings that made a sound like grumbling surf. The bike's twin exhaust pipes puffed out clouds of thick black smoke that rained maglock keys, became storm crows and flew away. Up ahead, the moon was a gigantic silver coin with a winking square eye and a big grin on its face. Alma smiled back at it—the grin of a fool.
"Three, two, one . . ."
Consciousness fled, and sleep claimed her.
10
Return
Night Owl opened her eyes, looked around, and saw that she was in Alma's apartment. Good. She hated it when Alma slept in a hotel, forcing her to figure out where the frag she was, or dossed down at the PCI office, which meant that Night Owl had to be extremely careful not to give herself away.
She sat up on the bed and patted herself down. She was fully clothed, in slashed leather jeans and a baggy fleece shirt: styles that Alma would normally never wear. Curious, she got up, made her way to the bathroom, and stared into the mirror. A bleached-blond reflection blinked back at her. surprise written on her face.
"What have you been up to, Alma?" she asked it. Then she sighed. "I wish you were the type to keep an e-journal. It would make my life so much easier."
She checked the clock that was built into the kitchen stove—Alma didn't seem to believe in knowing whal time it was, since this was the only clock in the place—and saw that it was just after 10:30. Evening, judging by the dark sky outside the apartment window.
The window reflected a square of flickering light that was coming from a table on the other side of the kitchen counter. Night Owl walked into the section of the apartment that served as the living room, taking care not to disturb anything, and looked at the cyberterminal that was sitting there. Its flatscreen was split into four views of the apartment building: lobby, parkade, hallway and . . . her apartment?
Night Owl had shoved her hands into the pockets of the jacket to prevent herself from inadvertently touching anything. Inside one pocket, she felt the three coins that Alma used to cast the I Ching and two cylindrical objects. Pulling them out, she saw that both were keys. One had to be the key to Alma's apartment, but the other had an X scratched into one end.
Night Owl tsk-tsked. "You've been snooping, haven't you, Alma?"
The other pocket held an injector. Night Owl had no idea what drug was inside, but she didn't want to mess with it. She laid the injector beside the cyberterminal and touched a finger to the PAUSE RECORD icon that was blinking on the monitor. The digital numbers that were displaying the time of the recording froze at 10:34:18.
Letting herself out of Alma's apartment, Night Owl padded down the hall. She opened her own door cautiously, every sense on the alert, but there weren't any surprises. Alma had been content, it seemed, to merely observe. She hadn't laid any traps.
Night Owl stripped off the clothes she'd woken up in and left them in a pile by the door. She changed into jeans and a crinkle-foil shirt and strapped the Ares Predator against the small of her back. She picked up the SkyTrain token that had been lying on the counter beside it and slipped it into a pocket of her jeans, together with Alma's I Ching coins. Then she headed into the bathroom to paint her face.
She flicked on the light and stared into the mirror. Which color to use as the base for her mask? The red of loyalty, or the white of the evildoer? The black of righteousness, the blue of the temperamental troublemaker, or the yellow of a tortured soul? Perhaps the silver or gold of the supernatural being . . .
Night Owl closed her eyes and reached out for one of the tubes, letting fate decide for her. Gold it was. She applied the makeup slowly and carefully, streaking a diagonal of black down either side of her mouth and a band of black across her eyes, then filling the rest in with gold. She could count on just six to eight hours in which to roam before a bout of yawning signaled that it was time to return. As soon as she started feeling sleepy, she'd have about half an hour to get back to the apartment, scrub off her makeup, change clothes, and crawl back into Alma's bed.
As she stroked the makeup onto her skin, Night Owl reviewed what must have happened. Alma wouldn't have searched this apartment without going through the files on the cyberterminal, one by one, in her usual methodical fashion. She'd have read the FRYBABY file and realized that the serotonin booster that was implanted in Aaron's brain in 2039 had led to his suicide.
According to that report, the Superkids of Batch Alpha contained a genetic flaw: a mutation of the serotonin 2A receptor gene that enabled the brain to absorb more serotonin than usual. Under normal circumstances, when serotonin levels fell within the average range, there were no ill effects. But increase the level of that neurotransmitter, and the brain became supersaturated with serotonin. Terrible things started to happen, like the suicidal depression that had caused Aaron to jump—and the fragmenting of personalities that had occurred in Alma.
Night Owl knew what she was: an alter ego of Alma's. Her earliest memories were those that Alma had stuffed in the deep, dark hole of her subconscious—the ones that were too painful for her to remember herself. The time she'd been touched there by the technician—Alma had never understood why her favorite tech got fired. The time her cybereyes had shorted out, blinding Alma for three terrifying hours. And the time she saw Poppy's severed head. She got all of the drek—and none of the benefits. She couldn't even access Alma's cyberware.
Night Owl hadn't really come into her own, separate awareness, however, until the REM inducer was implanted in Alma's brain. She could still remember the night she was "born"—when she'd found herself jacked into a cyberterminal, staring at the memo that Gray Squirrel had sent to Mr. Lali. She had no idea what the file was about—the last thing she could remember was being an eight-year-old girl. But she knew that the memo was both terrifying and important. If it wasn't, she wouldn't have had tears pouring down her face. She'd copied it onto an optical chip, tucked the chip into a pocket, and jacked out. Somehow, she'd managed to stumble out of the PCI building and, after wandering across half the city, let instinct guide her home. She'd spent the night rummaging around Alma's apartment, trying to figure out who and what she was, and then had collapsed into a deep sleep.
She'd awakened from that sleep the next evening, and the search had begun anew.
Night Owl hadn't liked what she'd found. Alma was a corporate drone, blindly obedient to the company she worked for and incapable of seeing her "friends" and colleagues for the monsters that they were. She worked long hours of overtime without being properly compensated for it and then came home to a sterile apartment each night, alone. The one time she'd found true love, she'd let her overblown sense of propriety and duty cause her to throw it away. She was pathetic.
Night Owl, on the other hand, was carefree and bold. Drawn to Vancouver's shadows, she'd used her runs to do some good in this world. She might not have been able to contribute as much cred as she'd like to Cybercare for Kids, but she was certain some child, in some dirt-poor backwater somewhere, appreciated the little she'd been able to give.
Night Owl had to assume that Alma had read the GRIMREAPER report in its entirety. Alma was smart enough to realize that the REM inducer inside her brain was allowing an alter ego to awaken each night, every time she drifted into REM sleep. Getting the REM inducer removed wouldn't be so easy now—not with Gray Squirrel dead—but Night Owl was sure that Alma would find a way. Why else would a business card from the Executive Body Enhancements clinic have been inside Alma's pocket? When Night Owl had called the clinic, posing as "Jane Lee," they'd confirmed her appointment for February 28: tomorrow. After chatting with the receptionist, Night Owl had learned that the cyberware the chopdoc was going to deal with was a "serotonin booster" that had been acting up. She could guess what that meant: the REM inducer was coming out tomorrow.
Tonight could be her last run. She'd b
etter make it worthwhile.
* * *
Night Owl glanced out over the city from the rooftop of one of the few large buildings still standing in the Richmond Ruins: the Relax Hotel. Outside the sky-cab shelter in which she stood it was raining—hard. Raindrops pelted the cracked plexiglass and collected in large puddles on the rooftop outside the shelter before draining down through the rockworm holes in the roof. Across the river, the lights of Vancouver wavered like an underwater mirage. Night Owl wondered if it would be the last time she'd see the city and then shook off the melancholy she felt.
Time to get down to biz.
The first buyer—the blond Seoulpa ganger—was the easiest to track down. When Tiger Cat had confronted the woman outside the coin store, he'd called her Alma's "Johnson." On a hunch, Night Owl scrolled through the autodial memory on Alma's cellphone and found an entry for MS JOHNSON. She highlighted the number and touched a thumb to the dial icon. After five rings, Blondie's face appeared on the monitor screen.
"Yeboseyo?"
Night Owl saw a restaurant in the background, rather than prison bars. Blondie had either recovered from Tiger Cat's magic in time to stagger away from the police, or she'd talked or bought her way out of being arrested. Good. That saved Night Owl the difficulty of dealing with someone she didn't know instead.
As soon as Blondie saw who was calling her, she grimaced. Her image filled more of the monitor as she moved the cellphone closer to her face and peered into it; she was probably trying to spot background detail and figure out where Night Owl was calling from. Night Owl had anticipated this, however—in fact, she'd counted on it. The angle at which she was holding the cell would allow its vidcam to pick up the ruined rooftop and part of the jumbled skyline behind it. She hoped that Blondie was smart enough to recognize the Ruins—and that she would start moving in this direction. Night Owl didn't have all night to wait for her.