Rinzler: A Noir Sci-Fi Thriller

by Raya Jones

  Rinzler hacked into a customised corner of the game domain, a ‘locker’ where players can stash their characters. Indigo had chosen to be a commoner who fought against the aliens. Her game persona was righteous and heroic, and her avatar had her real face, complete with the rainbow tattoos under her eyes. So that’s how she thought about herself, she’s the Good Guy, noted Rinzler, noticing that the rainbow under the avatar’s left eye was missing orange.

  Hacking the avatar, he found a password-protected box. It was booby-trapped to auto-delete if anyone tried to crack it. Rinzler hesitated.

  The password prompt bleeped on.

  ‘Orangestreak Yellow Fury,’ he said on a hunch impelled by the missing orange — and silently thanked Schmidt for his training when the box opened up.

  It contained a single text document that told how Indigo had tracked down her family roots. She always knew that her maternal grandmother, who died when Indigo’s mother was a child, used to be a CSG chief. But then Indigo discovered that her grandmother had been born to the Pan clan, the rulers of Cyboratics. The plot thickens, thought Rinzler, wondering whether Indigo’s mother knew about it, and whether Indigo’s snooping had got the Pans nervous. He knew very little about the executive caste, but suspected that the Pans regarded a daughter of theirs joining the CSG as defecting to the enemy. And everyone knows that a clan pedigree doesn’t improve your prospects in the CSG. It was not odd that Indigo’s grandmother kept her origin confidential.

  Indigo’s journal was a couple of years old. Why kill her now? Perhaps she probed further, more recently, and didn’t write about it. Rinzler mentally added ‘A Cy assassin’ to the list of explanations exonerating OK.

  The room light came on suddenly.

  An armed guard materialised and opened the door to let in another. They demanded that Rinzler vacated the premises. He’s had enough time to conduct his inquires, they stated, citing regulations.

  Rinzler protested out of principle, but knew that they were right. OK was reclaiming the property. The guards let in a utility robot that would scrub the place clean of any trace that Indigo ever lived there. That she ever lived, thought Rinzler, suddenly saddened, mourning the woman he never knew.

  Dawdling, he picked up the silken green sash that lay on the bedside table. It was soft and cool to the touch. He wondered on what occasions she wore it.

  The guards told him to drop it where he found it.

  Rinzler left on foot.

  Chapter 18

  Indigo’s door opened to a long metal balcony overlooking a gloomy place of immense height. Like all ‘open’ places in P-7, it was vertical space squeezed amidst corporation-owned tenement blocks and illegal constructions that latched onto narrow balconies. It was crammed full with crisscrossing heavy cables and catwalks. Holographic balloons, advertising commodities rose and sank, their jingles intermingling. Far above, the underside of the huge conveyor belt rumbled distantly. Far below were the skeletal remains of an urban railway track that had fallen into disuse with the advent of teleportation.

  Rinzler strode along the balcony and then climbed up a ladder to the next floor and a few more floors above that.

  Kendall could have walked right up to Indigo’s door undetected, he realised. Why should Kendall risk teleporting into OK’s HQ? It didn’t make sense. ‘But does it matter?’ Rinzler asked Schmidt in his head — and imagined Schmidt nodding.

  Yes, it did matter.

  No, it doesn’t matter, not to me, Rinzler argued in his head.

  Kendall could have killed her. The evidence was flimsy. The single hair found at the crime scene could have been carried there by Indigo herself from the Mineshaft. Rinzler made a mental note to check Mineshaft archives to see whether she sat in the same seat after Kendall — and immediately crossed out that intention. ‘Why bother?’ he mumbled almost audibly. It wasn’t his job to eliminate suspects. OK could approach Teletek, and Teletek will extradite Kendall so that OK Justice could interrogate him. The fact that nobody in OK was rushing to pin the crime on Kendall exonerated OK, no?

  Rinzler imagined his inner mentor shaking his head. If Jeremiah had Indigo killed, he’d know better than to appear too eager to pin the deed on someone else.

  There was still that mystery woman who was last seen with Indigo.

  Rinzler jaunted to 6E Junction. It was a desolate platform, reeking of machine grease and full of machine din. The conveyor belt levelled next to the platform, and forked out further down. Its cargo was automatically diverted either to the left — into a recycling plant — or to the right onto a track that connected with railroads to destinations throughout the planet. There was no human intervention in the process, and no cameras on the platform.

  Rinzler felt the hairs standing on the back of his neck a split second before Kendall tapped him on the shoulder. He turned sharply and grinned to hide his startle, raising his voice against the clanks, whine, and drone of machinery, ‘Fancy meeting you here, mister. Funny coincidence, hey?’

  ‘It’s not a coincidence.’ Kendall spoke gravely, his gaze darting about the gloomy place as if puzzled to be here. ‘I tracked your signal. I can do that.’

  ‘On account of you being an ace hacker?’ Rinzler said lightly, fully aware that the gun with which Indigo had been shot had not been found. Kendall might have it in his pocket.

  Kendall replied, ‘No, on account of me being a 1Step techie. I can be an ace hacker but they don’t give me a chance. People think I fix cables or something.’

  ‘Isn’t it what Teletek techies do?’

  ‘No, engineers do that. I’m with 1Step. They don’t let me wear the 1Step logo because of my sensitive job, you know. I could be blackmailed into doing something criminal,’ he announced importantly.

  ‘What exactly do you do if I’m allowed to ask?’

  ‘I sit all day in front of a monitor watching user strings go by.’

  ‘So you’ve got my name off your monitor?’

  Kendall shook his head. ‘You can’t get user names off those strings. April told me who you are. I have a job for you.’

  Rinzler said kindly, ‘No offence, Free Spirit, but last time we met you couldn’t pay your debts. How can you afford my services?’

  ‘I have money. I just don’t want to give it to gangsters. They ripped me off with a fake copy of Reluctant Aliens. I chose to be an executive and halfway into the game my character turned out to be an alien. Look, I’ll give you an advance, a down payment. I need to get off this rock fast.’

  ‘Because of Indigo?’

  ‘Huh?’

  Rinzler started cautiously, ‘The OK woman who…’

  Kendall cut him off, impatient. ‘I know who you mean, the one who shot someone. I saw the poster. If I weren’t in deep shit I’d claim the reward myself. I used to see her all the time in the Mineshaft.’

  ‘Do you know her?’

  ‘No, I didn’t even know her name until the poster came up on bulletin boards. But she was weird. She always seemed unplugged and just chatting with April. Look, Rinzler, I’ve got my own problems. I need to get off this rock fast. I’m not stupid. If I claim the reward and start spending the OK vouchers, they’ll track me down.’

  ‘Why are you running away from OK?’

  ‘I’m not running away from OK, I’m Teletek, 1Step Teletek. Tell you what, Rinzler,’ Kendall’s face lit up with sudden inspiration, ‘how about you take the information I’ve just given you and claim the reward for yourself? Call it my down payment.’

  ‘What information did you give me?’

  ‘About Indigo, the wanted woman.’

  ‘Indigo is not the wanted woman.’

  ‘But their poster…’

  ‘Indigo is the dead woman.’

  ‘Oh. Ah, well, there goes that idea,’ Kendall shrugged philosophically. He had his own problems. A couple of months ago a stranger in a bar offered to recruit him to an organization of freelance hackers. Kendall started to call himself Free Spirit in anticipation of h
is new career as a ronin. He wasn’t stupid. He checked out the outfit’s site and it was genuine. A further proof of their authenticity was the fact that they insisted on a test. They are not taking just anybody, you know. Kendall had to demonstrate his worth before he could resign from Teletek and relocate to Sol.

  ‘Why relocate? A hacker can operate from anywhere,’ Rinzler pointed out patiently.

  ‘That’s what I used to think,’ Kendall retorted condescendingly, ‘but we have to make sure that our signals are untraceable. They have the hardware for that in their secret base in the solar system. I think they are nihonjin.’

  ‘What makes you think so?’

  ‘Yojimbo TS sounds nihonjin to me.’

  Rinzler privately wondered whether there were limits to Kendall’s gullibility.

  Kendall went on. The stranger in the bar wanted him to copy someone’s pattern when that person teleported… Rinzler interrupted, perturbed, ‘I thought it can’t be done! Otherwise there would be replicas of us walking around.’

  Kendall confirmed that it couldn’t be done. A user’s pattern deletes itself within nanoseconds of the person being downloaded at the destination. In experiments, when scientists overwrote the auto-delete, the copies didn’t turn out right and disintegrated within seconds. Kendall learned all that in his training. The only way to create a viable copy of someone from a stored pattern is to eliminate the original and to download the copy instead. ‘But what’s the point, there’s still only one you,’ he pointed out. The pointlessness of the exercise convinced him that it was a harmless test of technical prowess. The delay might cause inconvenience to the person being copied, but they can sue 1Step Teletek as far as Kendall cared.

  Rinzler felt sickened. Somehow, it seemed worse than pulling a gun and shooting Indigo dead. He instantly saw the potential for kidnapping. He sighed. ‘Kendall, Free Spirit, what you are telling me is a serious crime. Helping fugitives is against the conditions of my license.’

  ‘But I didn’t do it!’ Kendall protested.

  ‘Then why are they after you?’

  ‘It’s a witch-hunt. They had one of the techies done for treason last month, and they’ve been interrogating everyone. Nothing to do with me,’ he stressed, ‘but this, you know, the test, it could be taken the wrong way. Besides, I did what the nihonjin wanted.’

  ‘I’m confused. Did you or didn’t you copy someone’s pattern?’

  ‘I told you, it can’t be done unless the original is eliminated. That part was supposed to be done by someone else for me but it wasn’t. Someone else botched it up, not me. It’s not fair that they cut out on me!’ When Kendall tried to contact his recruiter after the test was botched, he found that all the links were dead. Even the outfit’s site had vanished from cyberspace. Kendall never met the Yojimbo TS rep in person. They communicated via April, because that person was in Sol.

  As far as Rinzler knew, it was impossible to use an andronet as a surrogate from outside its local range. Someone locally must have set Kendall up to be an unwitting accomplice in a crime. Afterwards they could quietly eliminate Kendall, and nobody would suspect anything, because Kendall would have quit Teletek after bragging for weeks that he was going to Sol to join a secret nihonjin outfit. ‘You’d better give me details, I can do some archaeology,’ said Rinzler, taking out his pad.

  ‘So you are taking my case?’

  ‘Maybe, provisionally. I’ll have to check your credit status first. If your credit is fine…’

  ‘It is fine!’

  ‘Then it’s just a formality. Pop into my office in a couple of hours and we’ll sign the contract. Who did they want you to copy?’

  ‘I told you, I can’t tell a name from a string. They put a marker for me.’ Kendall knew only the precise date and time of the felony that was aborted through no fault of his own.

  Rinzler too knew that precise date and time.

  It was the timing of his would-be-collision with Indigo.

  Chapter 19

  Alone again, Rinzler walked the deserted platform to the far end. Trash containers shunted past the flapping of opaque plastic strips at the entrance of the recycling plant. Thumps of guillotines and whistles of pressure valves from deep inside it could be heard. Nobody could leave through there alive.

  Joy riders arrived with the conveyor belt. They held onto straps securing the containers screaming at the top of their voices, adrenaline pumping, and then jumped off to the platform one by one, falling and rolling over. ‘Hey, be quick! You don’t want to be mincemeat!’ they shouted to each other when sensors sent the containers to the recycling plant. And ‘You don’t want to go to Cardiff!’ when the containers were directed the other way.

  One by one they teleported away as soon as they landed, and soon the place was deserted again.

  Rinzler waited until he spotted cargo directed to the surface, and jumped onto it.

  He jumped off at 7E, where the belt intersected with the railroad. Cranes shifted cargo onto train wagons. The trains were meant for freight only though sometime had carriages that could accommodate people. It was free transport. Nobody monitored it.

  Rinzler found a secluded alcove behind jagged protrusions of nano-architecture gone awry, like chaotic stalactites and stalagmites, and lay down in shadows. He activated the biosuit mask to filter the bad air.

  He was getting used to being homeless, he realised, glad that his parents were not alive anymore to find out. They were against the idea of ‘Rinzler Investigations’ from the outset. When he insisted that he had a sponsor going by an alias, they regarded him with the pitying dubiety that he regarded Kendall’s ambition to become a ronin with an outfit called Yojimbo TS. But he didn’t tell his parents that he used to be Harvey Schmidt’s apprentice and that his sponsor was the same man. Perhaps Kendall too withheld information.

  One thing was clear to Rinzler: Indigo was not meant to die in the teleport collision. Someone wanted to put her on hold. Whether the plan was to kidnap her, to delay her from doing something, or just to annoy her, the perpetrator was prepared to kill an innocent bystander for it.

  Rinzler took it personally.

  He fell asleep full of questions and woke up a while later, disoriented and disconcerted to be lying in a dirty alcove. His mind continuing to spot inconsistencies.

  How did a single hair from Kendall get to the crime scene? If Indigo had unwittingly carried it from the Mineshaft, why didn’t she carry other people’s hairs too? If Jeremiah had it planted, why didn’t he make it believable and plant also Kendall’s skin flakes and fingerprints? Rinzler recalled something else from Acid Burns’ report. Someone had teleported outside Indigo’s door and almost immediately teleported away moments before the mystery person left Indigo’s home.

  When Kendall said that you can’t retrieve a name from a string, he either lied or was in a very lowly position indeed. Rinzler knew how to get such information. Schmidt had taught him. Acid Burns too knew how to do it. She accessed the concordance archives and found that the information was deliberately withheld. If the unidentifiable caller had nothing to do with Indigo, why cover his or her tracks? Who could even do that? Schmidt can, Rinzler thought.

  And then he thought, Kendall too, if he’s cleverer than he lets on.

  Indigo was shot facing the door. Rinzler imagined her opening the door to face her killer. But if the killer stood outside, who was the other person indoors?

  An eyewitness, that’s who she was, Rinzler thought with an exclamation mark!

  He strolled back to the 7E platform, thinking. That woman was a witness who didn’t leave any physical trace. It could be done by keeping her biosuit on optimal insulation, which meant that she had deliberately made herself untraceable. She was a witness who wouldn’t come forward, probably because she was involved in something big and nasty with Indigo. Perhaps Kendall was involved in it too. Yet, casting Kendall as the killer didn’t feel as right.

  Rinzler watched a train pass by on its way to the surface. The el
usive eyewitness could have easily gone to Cardiff from this very spot. ‘Cardiff can wait,’ he decided. If she went there, she’d lie low for a while.

  It’s not my job to chase her anyway, he added in thought, wondering why Acid Burns didn’t check out 6E, find out how it was possible to disappear from there, and follow the trail to Cardiff. Because she’s a hacker and I’m the foot patrol, he silently answered.

  Schmidt used to tell his apprentice: very little of human life is not captured digitally. One way or another, there’s always a trail in cyberspace. But sometimes you have to find it in inconsistencies and gaps in the flows of information. When Rinzler next logged into his office, he checked out Indigo’s teleportation log on the day she died. She jaunted from home to OK’s HQ to start her work shift. A couple of hours later the 1Step matrix recorded her teleporting again into HQ, this time from the capsule hotel.

  There was no record of Indigo ever entering that hotel. Someone under the name of Everild had checked in directly into the capsule from which Indigo teleported out a few moments later. The entry pattern was identical with that of an April unit. ‘Whoever Everild is, he’s a master of electronic camouflage,’ Rinzler concluded.

  Chapter 20

  Rinzler was shaving when Angerford entered the gym’s changing room. They stared at each other as if surprised by what they saw. Angerford was taller and projected more authority than Rinzler had imagined him. He seemed formal and stiff in his grey corporate biosuit. Rinzler couldn’t know that the Cyboratics man didn’t own a ‘civilian’ suit and that until now had lived all his life in Cy cities on Earth and Mars, where residents wear biosuits only for travel. In P-7 it was regarded reckless to leave home dressed otherwise, and many wore their biosuits at home too, like a second skin. Disasters that might undermine the urban life-support were always waiting to happen.

  The idea of imminent disasters played on Angerford’s mind ever since arriving in Proxima. He was taken aback to see ugly patches of decaying nano-fabric on Rinzler’s biosuit, as if the man didn’t care about his own survival.