by Al Robertson
Leila gasped. ‘The room wanted to make me an offer for it. And you stopped it.’
‘No,’ replied Holt. ‘Not at all. That was just an ad.’ His voice shook. ‘For personal security systems.’ It was clear that he was lying.
Leila stood up. ‘You’re stopping me from buying it.’ She advanced on him. ‘Cassiel’s right. You’re blocking the investigation.’ Leila felt a strange, hard confidence possess her. ‘I’ll go over your head if I have to.’
‘There’s nothing to investigate!’ His voice was tense with fear.
‘Should I talk to your boss? How about her boss? Or shall I just go straight to the Rose?’ Leila was almost ashamed of herself for pushing Holt so hard. She told herself that he deserved it. ‘We all know how the gods favour the wealthy. I’ll tell her how you stood in my way. Do you want that kind of attention?’
Holt crumpled into a chair. He waved his hand again. Text shivered into being before her. It showed a case number, cost of investment and potential commission. A woman walked out of nowhere to stand next to it. She was dressed in a cream trouser suit with thorned green piping run across it. Her skin was petal white, her eyes and hair a deep, flaming scarlet. She held a tablet in one hand and a rose in the other, and radiated secure, controlling competence.
For a moment, Leila gaped. She’d run into Rose avatars many times, but never one like this. The past flared inside her. She remembered an InSec playground crime swoop. Some of the older kids might have been dealing drugs. She was barely ten. Operatives threatened her and her friends with tasers. The goddess prowled behind them as they patted the children down. Her hair, eyes and lips were an angry crimson, a sharp, punitive brilliance flaring out of pale white skin. Her body armour was crimson too, wrapped around with thorned green wire. Green spikes grew out of her clenched fists. Her voice was a low, thunderous rumble.
‘Obey the law or I will crush you. Do you understand?’
Leila had asked herself what Dieter would do. She bit her lip hard, refusing to whimper like all the others. When the operatives withdrew and the older kids fled Leila huddled her friends together and talked to them in a low, calm, reassuring voice until the tears stopped and they could return home without creating too much parental angst. That night, she’d given Dieter the hardest hug she could. Their mother had still been alive then, but Leila couldn’t remember her being around. She’d either have been lost in one of East’s virtual soaps or passed out in her room.
This new version of the Rose was very different, a presence focused on commerce rather than punishment. ‘Thank you for your interest in this case, Ms Fenech,’ she said. There was little passion in her voice. Despite her appearance she was still a low-level avatar, representing only a small part of the god’s attention. ‘We closed it because we felt that there was no crime to investigate. Reopening it for purchase will generate overheads. The cost will be high compared to any possible commission.’
‘I told you,’ Holt cut in. ‘There’s nothing for you here. You’re wasting your money.’
‘I’ll pay whatever I need to,’ Leila told the Rose.
‘Then I will share the terms and conditions,’ replied the Rose. She chanted legalities. Holt sat hunched at the table, looking defeated. At last the god reached the end of her litany. ‘What level of responsibility would you like to take on?’
That was a question Leila hadn’t anticipated. Without really thinking, she told the Rose: ‘Full. One hundred per cent.’
The avatar flickered as it accessed a new script. ‘That makes you entirely responsible for resolving the case. InSec will provide no support of any kind, and will refer all queries about it to you or your nominated representative. Do you understand?’
She didn’t really take it in. ‘Yes.’ She’d worry about the details later, once she’d got things moving.
The Rose handed the flower she was carrying to Leila. ‘Congratulations,’ she said. ‘The investigation into Deodatus is yours.’
Chapter 8
As soon as Leila got home she called Ambrose. ‘How did it go?’ he asked. ‘Is Holt on the case?’
‘Er – not quite.’ She told him about their meeting. ‘So I ended up buying the investigation,’ she concluded. ‘And now I need your help. You mentioned your search engines. Dieter’s now part of an official investigation, even if I’m the one running it. Could you use them to look for him?’
‘Can’t Cassiel help you? Or the Fetch Counsellor?’
‘The Fetch Counsellor’s already tried. And I don’t want to go back to Cassiel until I’ve found out as much as possible on my own.’
‘There are private investigators,’ hinted Ambrose. ‘Professionals.’
‘I’ve got to be careful who I trust. And I know I can trust you. Please, Ambrose.’ She couldn’t bring herself to offer him money. Trying to buy him would feel like a betrayal of their friendship. ‘I know it’s not easy. But it’s for Dieter. There’s something very wrong about all this. I’m afraid for him.’
A pause. ‘Oh, all right,’ sighed Ambrose. ‘I’ll set the engines running. They’ll trawl the weave, see if they can pick up any traces of him.’
‘How’s that different from a normal weavesearch?’
‘They go much deeper. If any part of him has been in the same virtual space for more than a minute or so, it’ll have bled identity data into local weave caches. The caches aren’t usually purged until they’re maxed out, so chances are that data’s still there. The engines go hunting through them.’
‘How long will it take?’
‘A few hours. Come round tonight, we’ll pay a visit to the firm and see what it’s found. But that’s it. I’ll get you a location, nothing more. And do remember – it’ll only find him if he or his weaveself stopped somewhere. If they kept him moving, he won’t have left any traces.’
‘What about the other two policy holders? Can’t we look for them, too?’
‘No. The engines need core personal identifiers to show them what to sniff out. We don’t have that kind of information, it’s only ever available to close friends or relatives. And as I haven’t seen Dieter for a while, I’ll need to scrape his identifiers from your memories. I’ll need the investigation number, too.’
Leila gave Ambrose the number, thanked him and ended the call. She reached into herself and copied a few random chunks of the recent past across to him.
Then she realised that she had a whole free afternoon in front of her and she didn’t have a clue what she was going to do with it. It was the first time she’d had to herself since all this had begun. She sat back on the sofa and tried not to think about it all. But that was impossible. The flat’s front room was full of memories. She let one after another wash over her. She thought about how protective Dieter had always been. ‘He’d be freaking out now,’ she thought, wondering if she actually did need to feel threatened by Deodatus and the pressure men. That set her thinking about the skull face, the weapon her brother had built just for her.
Late one night, after her recovery from the Blood and Flesh attack, she’d been walking home alone. She’d noticed a man following her down the empty streets, a threatening shadow, never close enough to be unambiguously threatening, never far enough away to be ignored. She’d heard about human attackers hacking fetch control systems and forcing compliance on them. She reassured herself that he probably didn’t know she was a fetch. At each intersection she thought he might choose a different path, but he never did.
It struck her that, if he was a hacker, he probably already knew exactly what she was. Otherwise he wouldn’t be following her. He was still behind her, never any closer, never any further away. She thought about jumping home, but chided herself about paranoia. Perhaps they just happened to be heading in the same direction. Another crossing. He was still behind her. Perhaps he was hunting her. Perhaps he was drawing out the hunt. She thought about speeding up, but worrie
d that he would too. She thought about slowing down to let him pass. She didn’t want him any closer. She crossed another road and he followed. She didn’t want him to see where she lived. In the end she jumped.
After she vomited she sat in the front room, weeping with fear, anger and frustration. Dieter came to see what was wrong. A couple of days later, he suggested reactivating her skull face. She remembered how all fetches used to have them – how, before the Rebirth, they’d had to wear them whenever they were in a public place.
‘It’s scary enough on its own,’ said Dieter. ‘And I can add in some seriously heavy shit. Access your target’s virtual sensory systems, set up escalating feedback loops in them.’
‘Dieter, I don’t even know that that means.’
‘Ah. Sorry. So – we all receive sensory content from the weave. Virtual sights, sounds, tastes, smells, touches.’
Leila nodded.
‘Those sense ports are very easily accessible. They have to be. So much data going through them, all the time. We can set it up so that, when you hit someone with your skull face, you’ll make their sense ports think they’ve been overloaded. Their virtual senses will go nuts. Crazy loud noises, pain, blinding light, disgusting smells, tastes, all at once. It’ll only last a couple of seconds, but that’ll be enough.’ He beamed. ‘If anyone tries it on again – well, you’ll stop him in his tracks.’
A few weeks later, she’d been at a friend of a friend’s party. An older man weaved over to her, drink in hand. ‘Hi,’ he slurred, reaching out to pull her to him, a lubricious smile swaying across his face. ‘Wanna fuck?’
The skull face read her surprise and disgust, and shifted in the back of her mind. She wondered if this was the right moment to try it out. On the one hand, she didn’t feel particularly threatened. She was with friends and her wannabe seducer was clearly an idiot. On the other hand, he could use a lesson in good manners. And she was very curious to see her new weapon in action. What the hell, she thought. She smiled gracefully as she flicked a mental switch to activate it.
‘Oh, you’re a fetch!’ he said, surprised, as his hand passed through her. ‘Well, I’m open minded.’
It took a few seconds for the skull face to fully boot up. She felt it wake and unpack itself, then reach out to interrogate its target’s sensory systems. It called information from Leila, too, calibrating the strength of its response to her sense of the situation. A moment as it constructed a sensory assault package, and then it signalled readiness.
‘So how about it, then? You, me and breakfast?’
Leila let him have it.
Afterwards, when his friends had picked him up and helped him into the bathroom for a clean-up, someone tried to apologise for him: ‘It’s just a joke. He thinks he’s cutting the crap. Getting straight to the point.’
‘Cutting the crap?’ said Leila. ‘I thought I was the one doing that.’
They didn’t stay at the party much longer.
Miwa was very jealous of the skull face. ‘Can’t wait till I’m a fetch,’ she said.
‘Just be patient,’ smiled Leila, for the first time in quite a while entirely comfortable in her own skin. ‘It comes to us all.’
The next morning, Dieter guffawed when she told him about her adventure. She was pretty hungover, but she laughed too. And then she went back to bed for the rest of the day. Every couple of hours Dieter bought her another cup of tea, chuckling quietly to himself. ‘It’s only a shame he didn’t have a friend,’ he told her later. ‘You could have tested out the skull face’s multiple target setting.’
Leila smiled at the memory. She was feeling a little cheerier, but the void hours of the afternoon still stretched blankly ahead of her. She pulled herself back into her bedroom, replaced the neat little business suit she’d worn to see Holt with a T-shirt and pyjama bottoms and opened up the Deodatus case file. There was very little new information. They barely even investigated the three deaths, thought Leila. She shivered as she read her own and Dieter’s names. Cause of death was left blank for him and the two other policy holders. That’s bullshit, she thought. Someone’s definitely crooked. She ran a weave search on the other two, but it was useless. Hundreds of possible candidates hovered in front of her. Cassiel said all she needed was the names. Maybe she could narrow it down to the right ones. She thought about getting in touch with her, but didn’t want to feel wrong-footed again. She decided to wait until she had some concrete results from Ambrose’s search in hand too.
She couldn’t think of anything more to do. Feeling frustrated, she wandered back into the front room. Dieter’s absence tugged at her memories. She went to the window, brought the weave up to full and overlaid Docklands with the brand iconography of the gods, letting the Twins’ festival imagery dominate.
The world shivered as the Twins once again opened up the luxury version of their branding to her. The streets became a sea floor, lithe pathways of pristine sand running between blocks of colour-pulsed coral and drifting towers of seaweed. The spectacle was interspersed with brand messaging, whispering subtly of the luxurious new flavours the Twins would soon be sharing with Station. Deciding to walk out into it all, she returned to her bedroom and tugged her wardrobe’s casual wear section into being. Before she could choose anything, a query flashed up.
‘Fancy splashing out on some new outfits? Our personal stylist Nena is ready and waiting to help you make the best of this season’s fashions…’
‘No!’ snapped Leila. Then, to herself, ‘bloody spam.’ She waved the query away. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, with a sharp cracking sound, her clothes stuttered in and out of sight, then vanished in a burst of static.
‘Dammit.’ The last time her wardrobe had crashed it had taken half a day to self-check and fully reboot.
‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ a woman said. ‘Your flat – the bandwidth is limited. I had to force close a couple of systems to get in here.’
‘Shit!’ said Leila, shocked. A slim blonde twenty-something had appeared on the other side of the bed. ‘Are you a stylist?’ she asked. ‘Gods, you gave me a fright. I said no, I didn’t want to see you.’
‘No, Leila,’ the woman replied. ‘I’m not a stylist.’
She too was dressed in sweatpants and a T-shirt. On her, they had an impossible elegance. She smiled, and her smile contained all the care and support that the best of girlfriends could ever bring. Leila felt a tug at her mind and remembered the celebrityware that had seized her attention in the hospital atrium. But this was manipulation of a different order.
‘You might say I’m THE stylist.’
‘Ah,’ said Leila. ‘East.’
The goddess smiled. ‘The very same.’
Shock and awe suffused Leila. Her librarian subroutines thrust details of other visitations at her – of compliments that had mollified the goddess, of missteps that had enraged her.
‘Oh, there’s no need to be scared,’ East reassured her. Leila backed away as the goddess moved round the bed. ‘I’m a kitten, really.’ She sat down on the end of the bed. ‘All the scary stuff is just to keep the masses in check. And you’re not the masses anymore.’ She patted a spot just next to her. ‘We need to talk. Girl to girl, just you and me.’
Part of Leila wanted to flee, but the idea of offending the goddess was far scarier than the fact of her presence. Hoping that she wouldn’t say or do the wrong thing, she moved back to the bed and very carefully sat down.
East was inspecting the room. ‘Nice décor,’ she said. ‘I can see you’ve done your best with it.’ She turned to Leila. ‘You have a good eye.’
‘Thank you,’ said Leila carefully.
East put a soft hand on her knee. ‘Really,’ she said, her tone warm and friendly. ‘There’s no need to be afraid. You’re a very special person now, you know. Almost as special as me – and certainly as unique. You’re the richest fetch on Station. That�
�s why I asked Nena to step back and let me have a chat with you.’ As she spoke, Leila felt a soft breeze of divine reassurance pass across her emotions. A vast calm spread through her. Part of her was immensely glad of it. Part of her was deeply resentful.
‘Oh, I am sorry,’ East said. ‘Managing your responses like that is something I just have to do – at least until we get to know each other a little better. And you get used to me.’
‘Gods,’ Leila gasped. ‘I – I don’t know what to say. I mean – I’m well off, I know. But why does that make me special? Why are you here?’
The question amused East. ‘Bless you,’ she replied. ‘So modest. You’re a very powerful woman, Leila. In the last two days alone, you’ve spent more than you used to in a month. And I bet you’ve hardly even noticed!’
‘Well, I’ve had other things to think about…’ Leila began.
The god laughed delightedly and clapped her hands together. ‘Everything’s changed. You’ll never want for the finest in everything. Clothes, entertainment, travel – you’re going to live the kind of life that most of humanity can only dream of.’ She leant in. Lightly scented breath caressed Leila’s face. ‘And here’s the secret I’ve come to share.’ Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘Everyone’s going to want to watch you. Everyone’s going to want to copy you. Because they know you’ll only ever have the best.’ She sat back, beaming. ‘And I want to help them do it,’ she concluded triumphantly.
‘I’m not sure. I mean, it sounds lovely. But there are things I have to do. Obligations to fulfil.’ She wondered whether to tell the god about Deodatus. Perhaps East already knew about her investigation.
But then East chimed in unstoppably. ‘Of course, lovely!’ she beamed. ‘One life’s ending and another one’s beginning. That’s never easy. And you do have a brother to mourn.’ She smiled brightly. ‘But once that’s done with, well. I have such a new life to dress you in. And the celebrity channels will ADORE you! Your people will be so very in this year. I’ll make sure of it. I’m sure the Fetch Counsellor will be thrilled, it’ll be so helpful.’