by Patty Jansen
Dr Chee said, “From Ganymede? You don’t just visit Ganymede, let alone go on mindbase exchange there. They don’t call mindbase exchange Poor Man’s Travel for nothing.”
Socrates shrugged. “Well, maybe not that, but academic types come here quite a lot.” He sounded defensive. Academics probably visited a lot less often than he suggested.
“Did you give this guy the information he wanted?” Melati asked.
Socrates continued, “We’re not free to give that information to strangers—to anyone, really—but I needed the money, and I thought what’s the harm, and I asked if the name of the swap contact was all he wanted from me in return for the money, and he said it was, so I gave it to him. He left. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of the story. Apparently, the guy in question had disappeared.”
Melati heard Keb’s anguished voice Where is the fucking bastard?
Dr Chee said, “But swap minds are not allowed to leave the station.”
“No, they’re not, but the guy suspected that I’d warned this scientist that someone was on the lookout for him. He came back with some thugs today, and harassed my staff—”
Melati interrupted. “Rina. So she didn’t have a headache, and didn’t go home.” And of course Socrates didn’t mean today. That was just how it seemed to him. She upgraded his previous “a few days ago” to about a week.
“That’s what she told me, honest.”
“And you believed her?”
“No, but then again, her stories don’t check out half the time, so what’s new?”
True, sadly. “What is new is that Rina is dead.”
“Yes, yes, terrible.” Drops of sweat gathered on his forehead.
She continued, “So who were these people if they were not enforcers? Do you think they could have killed her?”
“They could, but I can’t see why they’d target Rina. She was only an employee.” He stared at his hands. “Such a waste of life.”
Melati blew out a deep breath. Stupid, crazy waste of life. Why would the thugs have gone after Rina and not him? It made no sense. “Anyway, what happened next?”
“The thugs came back, after you left.”
“The ones I saw were enforcers.”
“They weren’t. They wore enforcer uniforms, but they weren’t enforcers.”
“Then what were they? New Hyderabad mafia?” They didn’t look in the slightest like New Hyderabad men; they looked like enforcers, like typical constructs.
“Probably. They said they wanted more information. I said I couldn’t help them. What did they think I had, besides the name? And then they started threatening me, and I kept saying that I knew nothing, but they didn’t believe me, and then they got electric prods and injected something that made me feel dizzy and next thing I know I’m here.”
“You’re sure you don’t know anything more?”
“Why won’t you believe me? I tell you, if I’d known anything, I’d have told them. I’m no hero, right?” His nostrils flared.
That much was certainly believable. After a short silence, Melati continued, “This man, the receiver of the scientist’s swap mind, do you know his name?”
He waved a hand. It’s in the database. “A Grimshaw.”
“Troy? The one who travelled back from Mars on exchange?”
He frowned. “What do you. . . ?”
“You left the program open on the screen.”
His cheeks flushed red. “You shouldn’t have been looking, anyway. And why ask me, if you already know?”
“He would be a Taurus Army, local tier 1 construct?”
“I presume so. They use the mindbase exchange a bit. Some of them get terribly bored. They call it space madness.”
Melati nodded; she had heard that term before, and it was where her cohort would end up if she couldn’t sort them out: in the station, doing stupid jobs that led to space madness. “How do you think Rina fits into this?”
He shrugged. “She was around at the wrong time, and saw something she shouldn’t have.”
“So, was this why she called you around the time of her ‘resigning’ from her job?”
He frowned. “Did she? I don’t remember.”
Chapter 21
* * *
WALKING TO HER Learning Unit in the semidarkness of the CA adjustment period, Melati went over the talk with Socrates. He was lying about Rina’s calls, and she was fairly certain that this call had been the reason for someone—hypertechs probably—to have wiped the log. But there were ways of retrieving this information, and she had a feeling that it would concern the whereabouts of this Troy Grimshaw. There were other ways of finding him, too.
If he was a local, he would have his cohort living with him on-station. Probably others had bothered these men, but none of those people would know construct minds as well as she did. Also, they would not have a story to tell about an innocent cousin caught up in the affair.
Finding the cohort would not be hard either. All it required was Ari.
When Melati entered the learning unit, she found the boys on their knees on the floor in the foyer. A buzzing sound came from the other room and a little car zoomed from the main room to the hall and back again.
“What’s going on here?”
“Melati!” The boys looked up. They’d been so busy that they hadn’t even noticed her come in. Whatever happened to their breakfast?
“Where is Christine?”
“In here.” Christine came to the doorway. The little car zoomed past her feet back into the foyer. “They really wanted to do this. I figured better let them do what they wanted than let them sit in the dining hall trying to force them to eat.”
“They ate nothing at all?”
“A bit.”
“But I have so much teaching material to catch up on. How are they going to cope with that while they’re hungry?”
“The lessons are boring,” Keb said, looking up.
“You, young man, and your brothers, go into the main room and wait there. Take your contraption and be quiet.”
They looked taken aback, but did as she said.
Melati walked Christine to the door. “Thank you for helping me out yesterday.”
Christine’s eyes met hers. “Are you all right?”
Melati shrugged. So much had happened in a day and it looked like the troubles weren’t half over.
“I’ll be fine. Just need some quiet time.”
“OK, then.” Christine left the unit and Melati went into the room, where the boys sat quiet and sad-eyed.
“Whoa, you don’t have to look at me like that.”
“I don’t like it when you’re angry with us,” Simo said. “Jas said we should always do what you say.”
So now he had taken to teaching the boys? He pulled up his legs, wrapped his arms around them and glared at her over the top of his knees. Very self-conscious, like a teenager.
Simo asked about the funeral, so Melati talked about the rituals, and why they were done.
Tika asked, “When people die, is it like Before? Do you go to a nice place that’s always the same every day?”
That thought made her shudder; he made Before sound like a prison. “No one knows what happens when you die. No one comes back to tell us.”
The boys continued to ponder on the subject of death and what it meant, if anyone ever came back to life, and if, when constructs were inactive, that meant they were dead or asleep. It was a macabre discussion for boys of their age, and Melati scrambled to find something better for them to do.
Since the boys looked like they were keen for more hands-on stuff, she decided to start on their electrician modules. In the cupboards around the room, there were boxes of boards and connectors and their lessons held instructions. Judging by their expressions when she took the boxes out, she had guessed correctly.
While the boys crawled over the floor putting pieces of electronics together, Melati checked the results of the worm search, which, in line with Dr Chee’s earlier
complaints, had taken almost a day to run.
When she opened it, it turned out to contain a complete mindbase. Melati scrolled through the modules, and came across familiar code, all neat and tidy in lines of equal length. This was what she had designed. This was Keb.
But then who was Jas? The same as Troy?
She looked into the room. He had a circuit board and a couple of chips spread out over the table, and was fitting a tiny piece into the circuit board with tweezers. The thing had tiny wire feet which needed to slot into pinprick holes on the boards. He poked his tongue out between his lips.
She went back into the room and sat down next to him. “It’s not easy, is it?” she said.
He glanced aside as if asking, What do you know? “Is that a trick question?”
“No, I know that it’s not easy to get those pieces in correctly, but you will learn.”
He straightened. “You still don’t believe me, right? Which part of I’m not Keb do you not understand? I have nothing to do with him.”
“Where does Jas live?”
He glanced aside sharply. “Somewhere in a long corridor. There is a lift in the middle and green doors along the side. I don’t know the number, but I could find it for you if you let me go.”
“In the station?”
He rolled his eyes. “Of course.”
Except there was no Jas Grimshaw at the station. “What does he do for a job?”
He shrugged and said nothing.
“What is his cohort? Does he have sisters or only brothers?”
“I don’t know!” He whirled at her and flung the electronic piece across the room. It hit the opposite wall and bounced over the floor. “Are you doing this to tease me? I tell you I’m forgetting everything.”
She let a silence lapse and then she asked, “Do you know Troy Grimshaw?”
He froze and then turned to her. “Troy?”
“Yes. Do you know him?”
His eyes grew wide. “Troy is my brother.”
There it was: the connection she had been looking for.
Melati went into the corridor and ran a couple of doors down to the coding lab.
Major Dixon sat in his office and looked up when she came in, a surprised expression on his face.
“I need someone to authorise a search on the StatOp database,” she said before he could say anything. She’d find Troy there, and she was beginning to suspect that Jas and Troy might be the same person.
He frowned at her and his frown deepened as she told the story and her suspicions.
“A mindbase has entered our system from across the security barrier? How could that have happened?”
“I don’t know”—only if the mindbase became autonomous—“and I have no proof, and I would very much like to disprove my suspicions, but I need access to their population database as soon as possible—”
He grabbed his infopad, frowning deeply. “I can sign an authorisation, but it will have to be approved by the upper command and, on the other side, it will certainly have to go through Bassanti.”
Damn the man’s fondness for rules. She’d take it to Cocaro and Bassanti herself, if she could. “How long will that take?”
“A couple of days.”
Melati clamped her jaw. She didn’t want to wait a couple of days, but made the application anyway. Maybe she’d find a faster way while it was in process.
On the way back, she dropped into Dr Chee’s office, where he sat preparing the files for the next cohort.
“I’ve found Keb’s mindbase.”
She described to him what she had done, and told him of her suspicions, after which he was silent for a while.
Eventually, he said, “But then who is Jas and how did he end up in our system?”
“I don’t know, but he’s suffering break behaviour. He’s getting angry and was throwing things around. I think we should bring him in, transfer the boy’s mindbase to stop the cohort deteriorating any further and then do a complete decode on the mindbase that claims to be Jas.”
* * *
Melati took Keb to the lab not much later. He walked silently next to her, but when they were at the door of the lab, he stopped and looked at her with wide eyes. “I don’t know if I want this. I’m scared.”
“It’s a safe procedure.”
“That’s what they all say, but last time I did this, it didn’t end up so good. I think I died, you know. Can you swap someone to a dead body?”
A discomforting thought: what happened to a mindbase traveller whose original body had been killed? Rina might have said something about cases like that, but Melati couldn’t remember. And she could never—ever—ask again.
She blinked away tears. “This procedure will be controlled and Dr Chee is a very good doctor. It will be safe. I think we have no option but to go through with it. You’re already adapting to your body. There is no advantage to leaving you as you are. You don’t remember what has happened, and the cohort is being damaged. You’ll be safe. I will go and look for the truth.”
Judging by his expression, he wasn’t convinced. Melati tried not to show her unease. Yes, of course it was perfectly fine to tell someone to hide inside a computer for an unspecified amount of time. Like people did that every day. Like there was even a body for him to go to. She wanted to say I’m sorry. She felt awful about this. Yes, she should restore Keb to his body, but she wasn’t talking to Keb, right? This was Jas, or as she suspected, Troy, who had come back from Ganymede, not Mars, and who had somehow, for a reason she did not yet understand, ended up in the ISF system.
In the lab, Dr Chee waited for her.
The cribs were being readied for the next cohort, but Dr Chee had one of them activated. He asked Keb to put on a surgical gown and told him to lie down. Laura Jennings bustled about with the BCI pads.
Keb’s face was pale and his eyes kept darting to the equipment surrounding the crib. When Melati took his hand, it was sweaty.
“What are you going to do with me?”
“The doctor is going to transfer your mindbase to the computer and put Keb’s in its place. He will then put your mindbase through a program that translates the file and generates graphic representations of the memories so that we can more easily see what happened and how you ended up here.” If it worked, and that wasn’t always the case. Sometimes, memories translated into a heap of nonsense.
Scientists liked to think they knew a lot about mindbase translation, but a lot of it was like fighting an octopus in the dark.
He asked, “After you read the modules, how long does it take to translate?” Anxious.
“It should take a few hours before we can see the first of the memories. To translate everything will probably take days. But we get to look at the most recent ones first.” She’d be using the new software that translated mindbase memory files into approximated graphics. Neat technology, but the render times were huge.
His eyes were wide. “Can you please hurry up? I’m not sure if we have that kind of time.”
“I’ll do my very best. I promise.”
Dr Chee started to attach the harness. Melati squeezed Keb’s hand and then let go to sit behind her terminal. Laura Jennings attached the drip to his arm.
Keb watched, his eyes glittering.
Dr Chee put his head in the harness and delivered a tranquillising routine. Keb nodded off to sleep, and then the serious work began. Melati left to go back to her boys. Dr Chee would first do a total wipe. Then he would transfer the irregular mindbase transferred to disk, and copy the proper mindbase. Midway through the shift, he sent her a message that all had been performed without a problem.
Melati went to watch Keb—the real Keb—wake up soon after. He opened his eyes, frowned and turned his head to Melati. “Where is everyone?” His expression was clear and open, no longer troubled. Even his voice sounded different.
“Your brothers are waiting for you.”
“Simo? Abe? Tika?”
Melati nodded.
&nb
sp; “Can I play with them?”
“As soon as the nurse finishes with you.”
“Goodie!”
He sounded like a boy. He was a boy.
While Laura Jennings monitored him, Melati went into Dr Chee’s office where the doctor watched Jas’ mindbase scroll over the screen, a long list of code in blocks of ragged-looking lines.
“I’ll run the program as soon as this finishes reading,” he said without looking at Melati. “There will probably be some results midway through B shift.”
“I’ll come in early tomorrow to watch it.”
He nodded, still concentrating on the screen.
Laura had Keb dressed, seated at her desk wolfing down a high-energy snack.
Melati took him to the Learning Unit not much later.
As soon as she opened the door, there was a shout in the main room.
“Keb!”
Simo ran out, followed by Tyro, Shan and Esse, and they all piled on top of Keb, who stumbled into the wall. The others joined as well, and the entire group fell on the floor and sat there, laughing.
Abe said, “Melati, I’m really, really hungry.”
So Melati ordered a huge bowl of energy cubes from the canteen, which they demolished in no time, before showing Keb what they’d learned.
Melati watched them, and thought about a large file on a computer. Poor Jas.
* * *
Melati managed to slip out of the shift change without picking up the two guards along the way. They were waiting for her at the entrance to the change room, but she saw them first and made a detour to the change room through the room with the humidivac cubicles and the base’s medical storage room. When she came out on the other side of the change room, the guards didn’t appear to have noticed her trick.
Excellent.
She messaged Ari in the lift as soon as the StatOp communication came online. When the lift doors opened, it was to a sea of noise and angry voices. The entire near side of the hall was full of people, miners in dirty overalls, dockworkers in orange jumpsuits and hypertechs. Someone was yelling through a microphone in B3. By God, Harto was still at it.
“We can’t even go to a funeral of our people. We’re sick of this nonsense.”