The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction

by Ashley, Mike;

  Konstantin felt her mouth twitch. “Don’t you mean Cannabis Sativa?” she asked sarcastically.

  Mezzer blinked at her in surprise. “Get off. Cannibal’s her mother. She’s good, but Body’s the real Big Dipper.” He smiled. “Pretty win, actually, that somebody like you’ud know about Cannibal Sativa. Were you goin’ in to talk to her?”

  Konstantin didn’t know what to say.

  “Go see Body, I swear she’s the one you want. I’ll give you some icons you can use in there. Real insider icons, not what they junk you up with in the help files.”

  “Thanks,” Konstantin said doubtfully. “But I think I fell down about a mile back. If he was turning Japanese, as you put it, why would he call himself Shantih Love?”

  Mezzer blinked. “Well, because he was tryin’ to be a Japanese guy named Shantih Love.” He frowned at her. “You just don’t ever go in AR, do you?”

  “Can’t add to that,” said the other employee cheerfully. She was an older woman named Howard Ruth with natural salt-and-pepper hair and lines in a soft face untouched by chemicals or surgery. Konstantin found her comforting to look at. “Body Sativa’s the best tip you’re gonna get. You’ll go through that whole bunch in the lot down the street and you won’t hear anything more helpful.” She sat back, crossing her left ankle over her right knee.

  “Body Sativa wouldn’t happen to be in that group, by any chance?”

  Howard Ruth shrugged. “Doubt it. This is just another reception site on an AR network. Considering the sophisticated moves Body makes, she’s most likely on from some singleton station, and that could be anywhere.”

  “Come on,” said Konstantin irritably, “even I know everyone online has an origin code.”

  Howard Ruth’s smile was sunny. “You haven’t played any games lately, have you?”

  Konstantin was thinking the woman should talk to her ex. “Online? No.”

  “No,” agreed the woman, “because if you had, you’d know that netgaming isn’t considered official net communication or transaction, so it’s not governed by FCC or FDSA regulations. Get on, pick a name or buy a permanent label, stay as long as you like – or can afford – and log out when you’ve had enough. Netgaming is one hundred percent elective, so anything goes – no guidelines, no censorship, no crimes against persons. You can’t file a complaint against anyone for assault, harassment, fraud, or anything like that.”

  Konstantin sighed. “I didn’t know this. Why not?”

  “You didn’t have to.” Howard Ruth laughed. “Look, officer—”

  “Lieutenant.”

  “Sure, lieutenant. Unless you netgame regular, you won’t know any of this. You ever hear about the case years back where a guy used an origin line to track down a woman in realtime and kill her?”

  “No,” said Konstantin with some alarm. “Where did this happen?”

  “Oh, back east somewhere. D.C., I think, or some place like that. Life is so cheap there, you know. Anyway, what happened was, back when they had origin lines in gaming, this guy got mad at this woman, somehow found her by way of her origin line, and boom – lights out. That was one of the first cases of that gameplayer’s madness where someone could prove it could be a real danger offline. After that, there was a court ruling that since gaming was strictly recreational, gamers were entitled to complete privacy if they wanted. No origin line. Kinda the same thing for fraud and advertising.”

  Konstantin felt her interest, which had started to wane with the utterance D.C., come alive again. “What?”

  “Guy ran a game-within-a-game on someone. I can’t remember exactly what it was – beachfront in Kansas, diamond mines in Peru, hot stocks about to blow. Anyhow, the party of the second part got the idea it was all backed up in realtime and did this financial transfer to the party of the first part, who promptly logged out and went south. Party of the second part hollers Thief! and what do you know but the police catch this salesperson of the year. Who then claims that it was all a game and he thought the money was just a gift.”

  “And?” said Konstantin.

  “And that’s a wrap. Grand jury won’t even indict, on grounds of extreme gullibility. As in, ‘You were in artificial reality, you fool, what did you expect?’ Personally, I think they were both suffering from a touch of the galloping headbugs.”

  Konstantin was troubled. “And that decision stood?”

  “It’s artificial reality – you can’t lie, no matter what you say. It’s all make-believe, let’s-pretend, the play’s the thing.” Howard Ruth laughed heartily. “You choose to pay somebody out here for time in there, that’s your hotspot. Life is so strange, eh?”

  Konstantin made a mental note to check for court rulings on AR as she pressed for a clean page in the archiver. “But if being in an AR makes people insane . . .”

  “Doesn’t make everyone insane,” the woman said. “That’s what it is, you know. The honey factory don’t close down just because you’re allergic to bee stings.”

  Konstantin was still troubled. “So when did those things happen?” she asked, holding the stylus ready.

  “I don’t know,” Howard Ruth said, surprised at the question. “Oughta be in the police files, though. Doesn’t law enforcement have some kind of central-national-international bank you all access? Something like Police Blotter?”

  “In spite of the name,” Konstantin said, speaking slowly so the woman couldn’t possibly misunderstand, “Police Blotter is actually a commercial net-magazine, and not affiliated with law enforcement in any official way. But yes, we do have our own national information center. But I need to know some kind of key fact that the search program can use to hunt down the information I want – a name, a date, a location.” She paused to see if any of this was forthcoming. The other woman only shrugged.

  “Well, sorry I can’t be of more help, but that’s all I know.” She got up and stretched, pressing her hands into the small of her back. “If anyone knows more, it’s Body Sativa.”

  “Body Sativa,” said the first customer interviewee. He was an aging child with green hair and claimed his name was Earl O’Jelly. “Nobody knows more. Nobody and no body. If you get what I mean.”

  Konstantin didn’t bury her face in her hands. The aging child volunteered the information that he had been in the crowd by the Hudson that Shantih Love had staggered through, but claimed he hadn’t seen anything like what she described to him.

  Neither had the next one, a grandmother whose AR alter-ego was a twelve-year-old boy-assassin named Nick the Schick. “That means I technically have to have ‘the’ as my middle name, but there’s worse, and stupider as well,” she told Konstantin genially. “Nick knows Body, of course. Everybody knows Body. And vice versa, probably. Actually, I think Body Sativa’s just a database that got crossed with a traffic-switcher and jumped the rails.”

  “Pardon?” Konstantin said, not comprehending.

  The grandmother was patient. “You know how files get crossmonkeyed? Just the thing – traffic-switcher was referencing the database in a thunderstorm, maybe sunspots, and they got sort of arc-welded. Traffic-switcher interface mutated from acquired characteristics from all the database entries. That’s what I say, and nobody’s proved yet that that couldn’t happen. Or didn’t.” She nodded solemnly.

  Konstantin opened her mouth to tell the woman that if she understood her correctly, what she was describing was akin to putting a dirty shirt and a pile of straw in a wooden box for spontaneous generation of mice and then decided against it. For one thing, she wasn’t sure that she had understood correctly and for another, the shirt-and-straw method of creating mice was probably routine in AR.

  There was no third interviewee. Instead, an ACLU lawyer came in and explained that since the crime had occurred in the real world, and all the so-called witnesses had been in AR, they weren’t actually witnesses at all, and could not be detained any longer. However, all of their names would be available on the video parlor’s customer list, which Konstantin could se
e as soon as she produced the proper court order.

  “In the meantime, everyone agrees you ought to talk to this Body Sativa, whatever she is,” the lawyer said, consulting a palmtop. “Assuming she’ll give you so much as the time of day without legal representation.”

  “I suppose I need a court order for that, too,” Konstantin grumbled.

  “Not hardly. AR is open to anyone who wants to access it. Even you, Officer Konstantin.” The lawyer grinned, showing diamond teeth. “Just remember the rules of admissibility. Everything everyone tells you in AR—”

  “–is a lie, right. I got the short course tonight already.” Konstantin’s gaze strayed to the monitor, now blank. “I think I’ll track this Body Sativa down in person and question her in realtime.”

  “Only if she voluntarily tells you who she is out here,” the lawyer reminded her a bit smugly. “Otherwise, her privacy is protected.”

  “Maybe she’ll turn out to be a good citizen,” Konstantin mused. “Maybe she’ll care that some seventeen-year-old kid got his throat cut.”

  The lawyer’s smug expression became a sad smile. “Maybe. I care. You care. But there’s no law that says anyone else has to.”

  “I know, and I’d be afraid if there was. Even so—” Konstantin frowned. “I do wish I didn’t have to depend so much on volunteers.”

  She sent DiPietro and Celestine over to the dead kid’s apartment building, though she wasn’t expecting much. If he was typical, his neighbors would have barely been aware of him. Most likely, they would find he had been yet another gypsy worker of standard modest skills, taking temporary assignments via a city-run agency to support his various habits. Including his AR habit.

  Just to be thorough, she waited in Guilfoyle Pleshette’s office for the call letting her know that the other two detectives had found a generic one-room apartment with little in the way of furnishings or other belongings to distinguish it from any other generic one-room apartment in the city. Except for the carefully organized card library of past AR experiences in the dustless, static-free, moistureand fire-proof non-magnetic light-shielded container. Every heavy AR user kept a library, so that no treasured moment could be lost to time.

  The library would go to headquarters to be stored for the required ten-day waiting period while a caseworker tried to track down next-of-kin. If none turned up, the card library would then be accessed by an automated program designed to analyze the sequences recorded on each card and construct a profile of the person, which would then be added to the online obituaries. Usually this would cause someone who had known the deceased to come forward; other times, it simply confirmed that there was no one to care.

  The idea came unbidden to Konstantin, derailing the semidoze she had slipped into at whatever indecent a.m. the night had become. She plugged the archiver into the phone and sent the retriever to fetch data on the other seven AR DO As.

  Delivery was all but immediate – at this time of night, there wasn’t much data traffic. Konstantin felt mildly annoyed that DiPietro and Celestine couldn’t report in just as quickly. Perhaps they had taken the stringer with them and were even now playing to the cam in an inspection of the dead kid’s apartment.

  A bit of heartburn simmered in her chest; she imagined it was her blood pressure going up a notch. According to The Law Enforcement Officers’ Guide To A Healthy, Happy Life (ON & OFF The Job!), sex was the number one stress reliever. The Guide had most likely meant the sort that involved one other person, Konstantin reflected and pushed away thoughts of her ex to survey the data arranging itself on the archiver’s small but hires screen.

  The first to suffer a suspicious death while in post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty had been a thirty-four-year-old woman named Sally Lefkow. Her picture showed a woman so pale as to seem faded. She had passed most of her realtime hours as a third-rank senior on a Minneapolis janitorial team whose contract had included both the building where she had lived and the building where she had died. Konstantin wasn’t sure whether to be amused, amazed, or alarmed that her online persona had been an evolved dragon; eight feet tall and the color of polished antique copper, it had been bi-sexual, able to switch at will. Sally Lefkow had died of suffocation; the evolved dragon had been in flight when it had suddenly fallen out of the sky into the East River, and never come up.

  Konstantin put the dead woman’s realtime background next to the information on the dragon to compare them but found she was having trouble retaining anything. “In one eye and out the other,” she muttered, then winced. Lover, come back. You forgot to take the in-jokes along with the rest of the emotional baggage.

  She marked the Lefkow-dragon combo and went on to the next victim, a twenty-eight-year-old gypsy office worker named Emilio Torres. Konstantin thought he looked more like an athlete. Or maybe an ex-athlete. He had died alone in his Portland apartment during an online session as – Konstantin blinked – Marilyn Presley. Even Konstantin had heard of Marilyn Presley. The hybrid had been an online flash-fad, hot for a day, passe forever after. But not, apparently, for Torres. He had persisted as Marilyn for six weeks, long after the rest of the flash followers had lost interest, and he had died – Konstantin blinked again – of an overdose of several drugs; the Marilyn Presley persona had gone inert in the middle of some sort of gathering that wasn’t quite a street brawl but not really an open-air party, either. There was no follow-up on the persona, nothing to tell Konstantin if the rights to it had been acquired by someone else since.

  Torres had died a month after Lefkow and half a continent away. The next death had occurred two months later, in a cheesy beachside parlor in New Hampshire. Marsh Kuykendall had been unembarrassed by his status as an AR junkie, supporting his habit with odd and mostly menial jobs. Acquaintances of the victim have all heard him say, at one time or another, that realtime was the disposable reality because it could not be preserved or replayed like AR, Konstantin read. “AR is humanity’s true destiny.” “In AR, everyone is immortal.”

  If you don’t mind existing in reruns, she thought. Kuykendall had owned a half dozen personas, all of them his original creations. Mortality had caught up with him while he had been acting out a panther-man fantasy. The panther-man had been beaten to death by some vaguely monstrous assailant that no one claimed to have seen clearly; in realtime, Kuykendall had taken blows hard enough to shatter both his head-mounted helmet and his head. No one in the parlor had heard or seen anything.

  Victim number four had been in rehab for a year after a bad accident had left her paralyzed. Lydia Stang’s damaged nerves had been regenerated, but she had had to relearn movement from the bottom up. AR had been part of her therapy; her AR persona had been an idealized gymnastic version of herself. She had died with a broken neck, in AR and in realtime. Witnesses stated she had been fighting a street duel with a lizard-person. Even better, the lizard-person had voluntarily come forward and admitted to AR contact with the deceased. Stang had been online in Denver, while the lizard person had been cavorting in a parlor not three blocks from where Konstantin was sitting. She double-checked to be sure she had that right, and then made a note to look up the lizard-person in real-time, if possible.

  A moment later she was scratching that note out; the lizardperson was victim number five. Even more shocking, Konstantin thought, was the lack of information on the deceased, a former musician who had gone by the single name Flo. After Lydia Stang’s death, Flo had given up music and taken up AR full-time, or so it seemed, until someone had suffocated her. Online, her reptilian alter-ego had been swimming. In the East River, Konstantin noted, which the Lefkow dragon had fallen into out of the sky. Maybe that meant something; maybe it didn’t.

  Victims six and seven would seem to have killed each other in a gang fight. Konstantin found this disheartening. In post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty, they had been a couple of nasty street kids, sixteen, just on the verge of adulthood. In real-time, they had been a pair of middle-aged gypsy office workers who had no doubt discovered that they had wan
dered into the cul de sac of life and weren’t going to find their way out alive. They had both lived in a nearby urban hive, got assignments through the same agency, did the same kinds of no-brainer files and data upkeep jobs – and yet, they apparently hadn’t known each other offline. Or if they had known each other, they had deliberately stayed away from each other. Except online, where they had often mixed it up. They had stabbed each other in AR but someone else had stabbed each of them in the privacy of their own homes. The times of death seemed to be in some dispute.

  And now here was number eight, a weird Caucasian kid with a Japanese name. Domo arigato, Konstantin thought sourly, and pressed for a summary of the common characteristics of each case.

  There wasn’t much, except for the fact that each murder had occurred while the victim had been online in post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty. Three of the previous murders had taken place locally; the kid’s brought it up to four, fully half. And unless it turned out that the kid had been a brain surgeon, all of them had been lower level drones, not a professional in the bunch.

  She sat back and tried to think. Was serial murder back in style – again} Except whoever had been enjoying the pretend-murder of hijacking someone else’s AR persona had decided to cross over? Or couldn’t tell the difference?

  Konstantin pressed for a table of similarities among the AR characters and came up with a Data Not Available sign. The note on the next screen told her there had been no work done in this area, either due to lack of software, lack of time, or lack of personnel. Undoubtedly no one had thought that it was particularly important to look into the AR personae – it wasn’t as if those were actual victims . . . were they? For all she or anyone else knew, Sally Lefkow’s dragon would be more missed and mourned than Sally herself; likewise for the rest of them.

  Sad, and somehow predictable, Konstantin thought. She made a note to send out for more background on the victims. While she was reviewing what information she had, DiPietro and Celestine called to tell her mostly what she had already known, except for one very surprising difference: upon arrival at the kid’s apartment, they had found a nineteen-year-old woman in the process of ransacking the place. She would answer no questions except to say that she was the kid’s wife.