Shifting Reality (ISF-Allion Book 1)

by Patty Jansen

  But first she’d have to visit Socrates, and that was going to be traumatic enough. Poor man.

  The situation in JeJe was business as usual, but there were more enforcers at the checkpoint than there had been, even though at the moment there was little traffic and most of them appeared to be doing nothing except standing around with their hands in their pockets.

  An increase in enforcers also meant an increase in hansip members, and at least some of those made themselves useful by cleaning scrawled messages off the walls, left there by last night’s protesters.

  A lot of enforcers also prowled around the passageway that led to the docks. Melati was happy to see the area of the BC block closed off with tape. So at least someone was investigating the murder. Maybe they took her seriously because she was with ISF, but in any case, it was a good sign.

  The enforcers’ interviews with people who had last seen Rina would lead them to the dockside hotels and the New Hyderabad mafia . . . who were stuck on the station because of the lockdown. For a change, they had a chance of catching the bastard, and she would do everything she could to help them.

  After the tension at the checkpoint, the activities in the docking area were strangely normal, even considering the lockdown and the fact that no one was leaving the station without extensive administration—and the queue at the admin office was something to behold.

  A couple of tier 2 technicians were working on a Chinese merchant ship, and they watched Melati with keen expressions. They would have been working the entire C shift and would have heard rumours of what was going on in the rest of the station.

  The door on the mindbase exchange office said closed. Melati stopped and stared at the sign. Rina always complained that Socrates started work far too early for her liking.

  Underneath the sign, someone had stuck up another notice Until further notice due to illness. She didn’t recognise the scrawly handwriting.

  Melati tried the door handle. It was locked.

  “It’s closed,” a man’s voice said in B3 behind her. She hadn’t seen him approach, but he looked like a miner with his stained station suit.

  “Have you seen Socrates?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “I found the door like that this morning. I was due to go out on an exchange.” He held up his comm. “Socrates sent me the confirmation himself.”

  “Don’t complain about your exchange. What about my wife?” another man said, also a miner. “She should have been back yesterday, but I came here in the afternoon, and the door was closed. I come back this morning, the door is closed. What’s going on?”

  “I have no idea,” Melati said, feeling uneasy. “How long has it been like this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Has anyone seen Socrates Finlay?”

  The man shrugged, and the other shook his head. “I asked around. No one saw him all day yesterday.”

  The cold feeling that had started in her stomach spread to the rest of her body. She gave an involuntary shiver. Rina dead, Socrates, her employer, gone. Rina’s pocket comm had contained messages from him.

  While the two men retreated to speak to a third man they seemed to know, Melati eyed the closed door and the curtained window. She put her hands against the glass and peeped through the small crack between the curtains. It was too dark inside to see anything more than a few blinking lights.

  When Rina first started working at the mindbase exchange, Socrates had been very clear on rules. One of his rules was that she could have no family come to visit her at work. Rina, being Rina, used to let her friends and family in through the back door when Socrates wasn’t looking. That door was at the back of the unit, in a bare services and fire escape corridor that led past the back of all dockside offices. It was worth trying.

  Since Melati was there last, the corridor had become more crowded with crates and surplus furniture, and other things that would give StatOp conniptions if they knew about it. The doors had no handles on the outside, but Rina had also shown Melati how to open it.

  She dropped to her knees so her eyes were level with the lock. It was a while since she had done this, but people joked that opening locked doors was one of the first survival skills a barang-barang child learned. She held her pocket comm against the lock, punched in the mindbase exchange StatOp security number and disconnected before it could ring. Rina had found out that the emergency call was only logged with security when the computer replied to the call, but that the emergency unlocking procedure completed before then. Still, it was probably best to hurry up in case someone had discovered the security breach.

  A little LED light on the lock flashed red. Melati shoved her unit access key—a thin metal strip—in between the door and the frame. The lock clicked and the door opened.

  The long corridor was completely dark and bathed in the cloying scent of disinfectant that she recognised from the CAU lab.

  The light was off in Socrates’ working office, and she remembered distinctly that it had been on. The room smelled faintly of dirty dishes. Melati remembered the take-away container with the half-eaten lumpia. If it had sat on the desk all that time, it would be starting to smell bad by now.

  She pictured the scene from the other day: Socrates is in the office after she leaves. The enforcers come in. They put the closed sign on the door. They ask him questions. What about? Something he’d done, but Melati had no idea what it could be. He struck her as an honest person. Socrates tries to answer, tries to be evasive, because . . . because he’s nervous about something. Something to do with New Pyongyang spies? Or with the New Hyderabad mafia? No idea.

  But the enforcers persist. And Socrates . . .

  Or maybe the enforcers leave, after delivering a threat of persecution, and Socrates goes into hiding.

  Then a chilling thought: what if Rina was involved with something illegal?

  Another scenario: criminals come into the office and scare Rina at the desk. Rina leaves, pretending she has a headache.

  New Hyderabad criminals? By God, it was the mindbase exchange. They could have been trying to flee the station that way since StatOp now required tougher checks. Rina might have agreed to help them for a substantial amount of money. Maybe she got cold feet and tried to back out. Maybe she contacted Socrates about it. Maybe the enforcers discovered it.

  No Melati, you’re seeing things.

  Maybe this was all nonsense, and there was a good explanation. Perhaps Socrates was sick. He lived alone, and besides, that half-eaten lumpia was not one of Uncle’s so it could not have been any good.

  She walked into the corridor, where her footsteps sounded loud on the sterile linoleum. To the left and right were the labs where the people in transit were stored. Blue and green lights blinked in the semidarkness. That poor man waiting for his wife. Maybe she should do something about that or, while Socrates remained absent, ask Dr Chee to collect the mindbase capsule off the launch satellite for the bullet probe and process the waiting mindbases. There was a limit to how long a body could be stored while awaiting a mindbase. Whatever had happened, those people outside didn’t deserve to be caught up in it.

  In her mind, she upgraded Socrates’ illness to something more serious. Someone should go and check on him. If he lived alone and had few friends, he might be dead in his bed and no one would know. God, was there a version of the possible truth that didn’t have dead bodies in it?

  The front office, with Rina’s desk, was also dark. The computer was off. The air smelled stale, with a faint tang of chemicals from the carpet and the labs.

  Melati turned the computer on, but it came up with a login field. She didn’t know the password for the mindbase exchange system, so it just glared its blue screen at her. The front desk was completely empty. The drawers did not contain anything that revealed that Rina even worked here.

  The sound of voices drifted from outside. Someone tried the door handle and banged on the door. A voice shouted something that she couldn’t hear. Anxious. Where is my wife? t
hings like that.

  In Socrates’ absence, these people needed to be cared for.

  She’d better do a quick body count to inform Dr Chee of the extent of the problem.

  StatOp wouldn’t like it, but unless they found someone to quickly replace Socrates, innocent people might be in trouble. The StatOp hospital didn’t deal with mindbases. The Taurus Army didn’t do updates or fixes. After their education, Taurus Army constructs were free to do whatever they wanted.

  To the left and right of the corridor were “storage” labs, two on each side. The first contained five cubicles, each with a suspension harness—a kind of chair that supported the body. When a mindbase was loaded onto the bullet probe, the donor body needed to be looked after until the swap mind arrived. That meant a period of two to three weeks of inactivity. While the CAU kept the boys’ bodies in cots, the mindbase exchange let their passengers sit up.

  Three of the cubicles were occupied—two men and one woman, all of them barang-barang. Some people made a living out of renting out their bodies to people from all over settled space who wanted to visit the station. The thought gave her the creeps. She was all-too-aware of the things that could go wrong.

  Through the tiny window in the front of the cubicle, the three travellers in this lab looked comfortable, as if merely asleep, with their drips and monitors attached, the temperatures between twenty-nine and thirty-one degrees, and readouts all good.

  The next room contained eight cubicles which were all occupied.

  Melati checked the monitors—and found one flashing red. The temperature inside the cubicle was way, way too low.

  She peeked in through the glass in the front, and saw the shape of a person inside. At fifteen degrees.

  Damn. How did this thing open?

  She fumbled with unfamiliar clips and fastenings. By now, her hands were trembling. She’d done courses about treating people in stasis and how to handle emergencies and was required to update this knowledge every year, but there had never been a need to use it. ISF safety records were unblemished. When the constructs woke, Dr Chee and Laura Jennings were always there to take care of emergencies when they happened, and if they did it was not on this scale.

  She managed to unclip the sides of the front panel and heaved. The giant drawer slid out. Cold air wafted over Melati’s hands.

  The man inside sat slumped in the poorly-done-up harness, as if put there in a hurry. He still wore clothes, not the white suit that the mindbase exchange usually provided for their customers. The point where the drip had been attached to his arm was bleeding, and blood had stained the clear fluid in the tube. Moreover, his arm had slipped from the harness and by the look of things, the weight of his body restricted circulation. He was cold and his skin unhealthy blue-white.

  God, not another death.

  First, she pulled out the drawer in its entirety so that the sides fell and the cold air could escape. She turned off the cooling. Chilly air pooled around her feet. Then she felt his pulse. It was very slow. His pants were wet and smelled of urine.

  She dropped to her knees. He was breathing shallowly. She pushed up his head to make him breathe easier and looked into his face.

  Socrates Finlay. Damn it.

  A screen next to the unit’s control box was on, but showed no status report of his mindbase or whether he was being kept artificially sedated or whether his mindbase had been removed. She tapped on the screen. It brought up a menu that was different from what they used in the CAU. The language was unfamiliar and the choices not clear. She knew how to wake up the boys, although she had no authority to do so, but she didn’t dare touch this system. It might kill him.

  She took out her pocket comm and called ISF emergency.

  * * *

  Both emergency crew and Dr Chee came quickly after she called. Melati let them in through the front door, where a small crowd had assembled, mostly barang-barang workers, kept at bay by a few bewildered enforcers, who asked if she had any authority to act, and she replied that they’d worry about the emergency first and then worry about authority. After which they seemed to want to consult with their supervisors.

  Curious onlookers yelled questions at her.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Where is Socrates?”

  “Can I pick up my wife?”

  People crowded around the door. Melati half-closed it to stop people pushing their way in.

  “Sorry, we have a sick man in here. All your relatives are fine.” She shut the door and locked it, but she could still hear the voices, now angry rather than questioning.

  Dr Chee regarded her with his liquid brown eyes. “I hope this is worth the trouble it’s going to cause, Melati.”

  “There is a man almost dead from hypothermia. I don’t know where his mindbase is.” She had to stop herself from mentioning Rina. Dr Chee needed to attend Socrates. There would be time for talk later. But her mind churned with implications.

  They rushed down the corridor into the storage lab, where the two nurses were already attending to Socrates.

  In the lab, Dr Chee dropped to his knees next to the cubicle. He already had his kit out and was preparing the injector gun with one hand while punching into his pocket comm with the other.

  He and the nurses worked quickly, cutting off Socrates’ clothes and applying a warming gel to his skin. They covered him with an insulating blanket.

  One of the nurses wrestled with the menu on the screen that Melati had not dared touch. “I can’t find what happened to his mindbase,” he said without looking up. “This is the mindbase exchange owner, isn’t it?”

  “Afraid so.”

  “I’m going to have to take him for internal warm-up,” Dr Chee said, rising to face Melati.

  “You’re taking him inside the ISF ring?” Hypothermia was always a risk with miners, and the general station hospital also had an external warming machine. He would know that.

  “The general hospital won’t be able to deal with him unless we find out where his mindbase is. Are there any others needing attention?”

  “There is a whole bunch of other swap bodies in the other room. Their vitals are all fine for the time being, I think.”

  “Check them and make me a list, if you can. See if you can get any of their regular nurses to come.”

  Rina had mentioned some of the nurses’ names, but Melati couldn’t remember them. She had no idea where Socrates kept that information and the system wouldn’t divulge anything without a password. Who else except Rina and Socrates knew where to find it?

  While Dr Chee worked on Socrates Finlay, Melati checked the other cubicles, opening every drawer and looked into the unconscious faces of her fellow barang-barang, and with each person she looked at, she felt sicker.

  She was used to seeing her young boys in that state before they were activated, while their minds were empty and they hovered between life and death. It didn’t seem right for adults, surrounded by machines that monitored vital life signs. Some were on respirators that filled the room with their wheezing sound. Even the boys didn’t use those for very long.

  Her list grew. Fifteen people, thirteen of them her kinsfolk, two tier 1 enforcers.

  The computer system remained stubbornly unresponsive to her.

  Melati rummaged in the front office desks and Socrates’ office, but could not find anything that informed her of the dates of return or treatment any of these people needed. In fact, Socrates’ office looked so empty that she began to suspect that incriminating material had been removed.

  There was a noise in the corridor, and Dr Chee’s voice. The ISF nurses were lifting Socrates on a trolley, and one of them wrestled with the bolt to open the room’s double doors.

  “There’s fifteen other people,” she said to Dr Chee.

  “Any who need immediate care?”

  “Not as bad as Socrates, but I cannot find any information on what treatments they need.”

  He frowned at her. “That’s not on the cubicles?” />
  She shook her head. “I have no idea how long they’ve been in stasis and when their treatments are due.”

  His frown deepened. He strode into Socrates’ office, touched the unresponsive computer screen and typed in a password. The computer responded Incorrect user code. Please type again.

  He did, with the same result.

  “Hmm, not sure if I’m all that glad that they finally seem to have taken security seriously.” He swivelled the chair around and opened a cabinet behind the desk. Empty shelves glared at him.

  “Hmm. This is strange.” He opened the cabinet’s other door. Also empty. “I would have thought they’d keep a backup machine in here as well as—” He shook his head. “Let’s take them all into observation. Just to be sure. Unless things have changed recently, the station hospital has only one BCI machine anyway.”

  “All of them?” said one of the nurses who wheeled Socrates into the corridor. “Don’t you think that will just give Bassanti more reason to—”

  “Temporary measure. Until we’ve sorted out this mess, and until I can make sure that the stationside hospital has the equipment to deal with this and we know where the mindbases are. Saving lives is more important. If Bassanti has a problem with that, you can send him to me and I’ll chew a piece off him.”

  “Fair enough.” The man grinned. “I’d love to see that.”

  The two nurses continued with the trolley, through the front office and out the door, where the crowd had grown.

  Several of the onlookers outside recognised Socrates, and calls about their missing relatives grew louder.

  “We’ll sort everything out, although it may take a few days,” Dr Chee said. Unfortunately, he didn’t speak B3 and most people wouldn’t understand him. “I plead for your patience. Everyone is all right. Your relatives will be returned as soon as possible.”

  He followed the nurses out, in the path cleared by the trolley. Several people ambushed Melati, wanting to know what Dr Chee said and when they’d have news of their relatives. By the time Melati had explained, Dr Chee was gone and she realised she’d had no opportunity to ask for the day off.