by Raya Jones
‘April saw you somewhere else.’
‘You could change April’s memory, couldn’t you, being her analyst? You could plant a false memory.’
‘Why should I do that, Rinzler? I don’t have any reason to fabricate an alibi for you, and nobody else can have that kind of access.’ Rinzler shook his head, sceptically. Angerford insisted, ‘I’m top of my trade, and I couldn’t spot any tampering.’
‘You are the ace analyst. And Wye Stan’s sent you out here to this lonely planet.’
‘I wish you didn’t keep saying that,’ muttered Angerford. He couldn’t figure out why Rinzler was so hostile. I don’t know anything about him, he reminded himself, except that he probably didn’t kill Indigo. He told him, dryly, ‘You know where you were at the time. Tell OK Justice that April saw you there. They’ll apply for a disclosure of April’s records and we’ll provide the evidence. If they want to check whether the memory is false, they’ll have to ask me to analyse it. I already did. I couldn’t spot any tampering. It’s a solid alibi.’
‘Yeah, that’s good. What are you after? Supposing I believe you, that is.’
‘Why should I lie about it?’
‘I don’t know, you tell me, Angerford. Why are you helping me?’
‘It’s the right thing to do,’ mumbled Angerford, perplexed by Rinzler’s attitude.
Rinzler stood up. ‘I’m starving.’ Stepping to the door, he turned back, ‘Would you like to come along? I know a good place for dinner.’
‘Yes, could do.’ Angerford hoped that he didn’t come across as too eager. He took out his pert.
Rinzler shook his head. ‘Let’s walk out. Suhnan always comes and leaves on foot.’
Angerford was thankful now that the conversation was on record. Following Rinzler out, he called Roke on the phone function of his brain implant. He spoke sub-vocally, ‘Have you been watching? You are going to see me walking around with Suhnan.’ He heard Roke in his head, ‘Yes, I’m following this with interest. Stay close to him and find out what he knows.’
Rinzler led Angerford to a nearby gap between buildings. He insisted that Angerford went in first. The gap was too narrow to walk side by side. Angerford switched on the biosuit light. The monochrome glow showed the gap getting narrower further on. Overhead the walls closed in. ‘Does this go anywhere?’ asked Angerford, nervous.
‘No, it’s a dead-end. But from here you can teleport anywhere using your secret military channel.’
Angerford stopped and turned to face Rinzler. ‘I don’t have access to that.’
Rinzler sneered. ‘Yeah, you’re just a system analyst. And, oh, I forget, a trouble-shooter. Someone tried to shoot me today. I guess that was because I’m trouble. It was the second attempt on my life in one day. The first one was something else, but the second one had your face all over it.’
That explains his hostility, thought Angerford, relieved that there was a rational explanation. He told Rinzler, ‘It’s possible that Cyboratics are after you, but I’m not part of it. My job is to fix technical problems with andronets.’
‘What’s the problem with April?’
Angerford ignored that. ‘I picked your name off a Main Street billboard, Rinzler. I don’t know anything about you or any issue my corporation might have with you. You seem to know the April team better than I do. What do you know about Fernandez and Suhnan?’
Rinzler sniggered. ‘Wouldn’t you like to know? What is the “other matter” you keep asking me about?’
‘The man who approached me on the shuttle,’ said Angerford, surprised that Rinzler had to ask, but thankful to be getting at last to the reason for contacting him. ‘I’ve had another communication from him today.’
The message was encrypted in an advert riding some software that Angerford had ordered. The message disclosed that the anime samurai was deleted by its maker. Angerford wasn’t in the habit of checking ads for encrypted post. But this ad advertised Rinzler Investigations, and it didn’t seem like something Rinzler would design.
‘Why, what was it?’ Rinzler was intrigued.
‘A little goldfish swimming in a glass bowl. I’ll send you a copy. He must have got your link from my system, I’m sorry. I wanted to warn you.’
‘Thanks. Strange it took him a week to let you know that he deleted Miyamoto Musashi.’
‘He probably waited until I ordered something with adverts… How do you know when the samurai was deleted? I didn’t tell you that.’
‘He deleted it from my system too.’ Rinzler sighed, and then said like a man deciding to come clean, ‘I met him three days after he approached you on the shuttle.’
‘You know who he is!’
Rinzler shook his head. ‘No. I only know what he is. He’s the archetypal ronin. He has no name and no master.’
‘Are you sure he has no master?’
‘No, I’m not sure of anything about him. He probably has a name too. Actually, I know for a fact that he has many names.’
‘He must know you’re investigating him. Has he threatened you?’
‘No. Are you an android?’
Angerford stiffened. People say things like that as an insult. When Rinzler repeated the question, Angerford realised it was genuine. ‘No, I’m not an android. Why do you ask?’
‘They could copy you in android form without you knowing, couldn’t they?’
‘They didn’t.’
‘How would you know if it was done without you knowing? It can be done, can’t it?’
Angerford spoke uncomfortably, bewildered by the bizarre turn of the conversation. ‘Technically yes, but I’m in a position to know things.’ Who is Rinzler really? What is he after? ‘Why do you ask?’ Angerford reached for his pert.
Rinzler tensed. ‘Keep your hands where I can see them!’
Angerford kept his hands where Rinzler could see them. ‘I was only getting my pert. Aren’t we going somewhere to eat?’
‘Yes, let’s do that. If you’re not too fussy I know a great selection of vending machines that April has just restocked.’
‘April doesn’t restock vending machines. It’s a Daily job.’
‘No job is too small. That’s what your andronet has told me,’ replied Rinzler, grabbing Angerford’s arm… nothing happened.
Angerford wriggled free from Rinzler’s grasp and got out his pert. ‘Tell me the destination.’
‘End of the world. Don’t you trust me?’ Rinzler laughed. ‘Of course you don’t. We have one friend in common, and he’s a good reason for us to be suspicious of each other.’
‘He’s not my friend,’ murmured Angerford, disabling the pert’s app that prevented being kidnapped by touch.
‘And yet he’s given you a personal contact,’ Rinzler pointed out.
‘How do…’ In mid-speech, they materialised on a footpath somewhere that looked like the end of the world, ‘you know?’ finished Angerford.
Rinzler walked away briskly.
Angerford followed him up the steps.
They passed a shrine for people who didn’t make it out of this place alive.
As soon as they entered the cavern, Rinzler declared, ‘Home away from home, even though they charge per minute to use this workstation. And it’s not exactly private.’ He indicated the camera. ‘But less than an hour ago April brought a selection of popular snacks.’
Angerford stroked his ring. Schematics projected onto the palm of his hand like tangled yarn in constant motion. ‘No unit was dispatched here today.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ Rinzler said. ‘These machines are a Tuesday round. I was here when April came and restocked them. It was definitely an April but the job completion is registered to Tuesday. I checked afterwards.’ Speaking, Rinzler logged into the workstation and accessed the local surveillance. They saw Tuesday come, do its chore, and go.
There was no mistake.
There was no sign of Rinzler being there at the time.
Angerford granted that the sequence could have
been overwritten with an old one showing Tuesday. ‘Could it be his doing?’ he suggested.
‘If you mean Mitzi, I wouldn’t put it past the slimy bastard.’ Rinzler cussed under his breath, realising he was still being charged per minute, and logged out.
Then he walked out.
When Angerford caught up with him down on the path, Rinzler said, ‘I know you meant Samurai Sunrise.’
‘Is that his name?’
‘Probably not. I’ve had the writing on his kimono translated.’
‘Did he tell you that he’s given me a dead contact?’
When Rinzler fell silent and Angerford didn’t speak, it was as if the cold vast emptiness of the place stole away their voices.
Rinzler spoke into the silence. ‘I met him in his hotel room. He checked in especially for our meeting, and used an alias I used to use when I was a teenager. Our meeting was friendly. By his standards it was a social event, I guess. His idea of small talk is Narayana physics. Small talk with him is only slightly less scary than his silence.’
Angerford smiled, trying to imagine it. ‘You know him well.’
‘I don’t know him at all.’ Rinzler sighed. ‘You’ve hired me after two days of trying to pin him down and getting nowhere. I’ve been trying it with the same result since I was 12.’
He walked away.
Angerford decided not to follow.
Chapter 28
Rinzler walked on for the sake of walking. The path wound down into deep gloom. There was something eerie about the place. After a while, satisfied that Angerford wasn’t following, he lay down in a cranny and tried to sleep.
He couldn’t sleep.
It kept hitting him, hard, that he would have been dead for sure if it weren’t for Angerford’s second call. Or was it the call made by the second Angerford? Or more exactly the first Angerford, the genuine one? If there was an evil impersonator, why wasn’t Angerford eliminated like Kendall?
Anyone can see how Cyboratics’ rivals could benefit from making an agent of theirs look like Angerford, but why make anyone look like Kendall? Why make it appear that he, Rinzler, killed Kendall — and then get rid of the body so there’s no evidence of a crime?
Why plant a make-believe bomb in his room, and then try to shoot him dead for real?
‘Maybe someone wants me dead and someone else doesn’t want me dead yet,’ he told his inner Schmidt.
It occurred to him that 1Step Teletek wouldn’t be as careless as to erase his signal. Such an ‘accident’ would look bad on their safety record. They’d want to make it look as if he was assassinated by another corporation. What’s better than have it on public surveillance that Angerford of Cyboratics shot Rinzler?
Schmidt used to say, ‘The key is the technology. Nine out of ten mysteries boil down to technology.’ When young Rinzler asked him about the one in ten that couldn’t be explained by technology, his mentor said that this would likely be science fiction.
Like alien body-snatchers, Rinzler thought now.
He eliminated technologies from his list of suspects. Cloning was unlikely. Those doubles were the same ages as Kendall and Angerford. They’d have to be created when the men were born. The doubles could be androids, but Rinzler was used to androids. You might mistake a Gen-5 for a human if you don’t know the model, but you don’t get the feeling that they are sinister. Rinzler trusted his gut-feelings. It felt as if the Kendall who confessed and the Angerford who tried to assassinate him were the same person.
Later, back at the cavern, he closed down his office until further notice.
He returned to the hotel to find himself locked out of the room. The hotel management had found out that OK wanted him for murder. It wasn’t their intention to turn him in, but they didn’t want him on the premises. They put his boxes in a storage facility that charged by the hour.
Homeless, business-less, and losing money by the hour, Rinzler left the Only Hotel like a man cast out to the wilderness.
On the wall across the lane the larger-than-life Suzuki gazed at him unseeingly for a few seconds, and morphed into the Phyfoamicals logo. Rinzler thought about Schmidt, Samurai Sunrise, the man-of-many-names and no name. He had known the man’s true face since their meeting in Clay Valley, and yet over the years the Schmidt that grew in his mind became less Japanese, more Caucasian, sometimes looking like Helmut Schmidt, sometimes like Rinzler himself. Mostly it was just a presence. He told the presence in his head, ‘You don’t need a shape-shifting cloak, mister. You shift shapes in people’s memories.’
Walking aimlessly, Rinzler turned into a busy lane with many stalls, some real and some not. A cacophony of jingles and tunes assaulted his ears, and cascades of constantly changing façades and adverts made it impossible to see the way clearly. It was crowded. When he stopped abruptly near a stall that sold food out of a portable replicator, he was knocked off his feet by high-spirited youth charging from behind him. He swore at them as he fell into a nearby hotdog stand. The hotdog stand flickered and reassembled itself a short distance away.
Stumbling up to his feet, Rinzler was grabbed by two men with gangster tattoos. They pushed him behind the virtual façades and pinned him to the wall.
The black man punched him hard in the stomach, warning-like. Rinzler doubled up in pain.
The white man demanded, ‘Where’s Free Spirit? We know you know him, Rinzler, don’t say you don’t. We saw you coming out of his place last week.’
Rinzler grimaced painfully. ‘Somebody fixed the video to look like me. How do you know my name?’
‘Who said anything about a video? You tell us right now where that bastard thief is hiding if he’s still alive. If you killed him you pay us what he owes the boss!’
‘How do you know my name?’ Rinzler repeated.
The goons had him cornered and they knew it. They relaxed. The black man said, ‘We know all about you. We saw you coming out of his place.’
Rinzler folded his arms, his fingers resting on the emergency pert. Not yet, he told himself, resisting the urge to escape. He said defiantly, ‘You were there? Maybe you killed him, March.’
The man’s face contorted angrily at the insult. The March androids are the likeness of a muscular African male. He gave Rinzler another warning punch in the stomach. ‘The name’s Markus.’
‘Close enough,’ retorted Rinzler, bracing himself for another punch.
But Markus went on speaking calmly. ‘We’d hand you to OK except that their reward won’t cover his debt. Too bad if you killed Free Spirit. He had money that belongs to Lex Ludovic. We hold you responsible for his debt, got it?’
His associate chimed in, ‘And since you’ve got yourself a Mu Tashi, as a special for you since you’re so rich we double what Free Spirit took from Boss Lex.’
Markus asked, curious, ‘Did you do the OK woman too?’
A small voice in Rinzler’s head advised that now was a good time for an exit. His finger hovered on the emergency pert. And then something else came over him.
As if immense power coiled inside him, he narrowed his eyes to slits.
The effect doesn’t work too well with a Caucasian’s round eyes. It came across like a strange grimace that baffled his opponents. They hesitated long enough for him to intone in a voice that had a scary edge to it, ‘That’s right. Give me one good reason not to kill you two right now on the spot.’
The thugs exchanged glances, wondering how Rinzler was going to carry out his threat with folded arms and unarmed as far as they could see. Having conferred in quick glances, they decided to call his bluff, and laid into him… ‘Stop it!’ yelled Latifah.
Rinzler stopped himself from punching empty air where his attackers had stood seconds ago.
He stared into Latifah’s large brown eyes.
‘Are you alright?’ she asked, concerned.
‘I’ll live, thanks.’ He winced in pain and smiled warmly at the same time. ‘But that was a foolish thing to do. They could have turned on you.’ He notic
ed an embroidered patch on her coat’s sleeve. It bore the Chinese characters he recognised. Hi no de, he thought in Japanese.
She walked away.
Rinzler tried to follow. Walking was painful and he was too slow. She was soon lost from sight amidst moving images of skyscrapers and jungles, nebulae and street merchants.
A few turns further on, the lane became quieter. Here the rough edge of the Arcades seamlessly melded into the Greys. He sat down leaning against a wall to nurse his injuries, wondering about Latifah. Passers-by glanced at him and quickened their step.
Sooner or later someone will decide to collect the reward from OK.
Rinzler used his regular pert to jaunt to the place he decided to call Edge of the World. Lying on the cavern’s floor, he mulled over the facts.
Fact: he was nowhere near Kendall’s door last week.
Fact: those thugs said they’d seen him there. He believed them.
April said that Kendall was killed like Indigo. It’s still the same case. He felt it in his gut. Hypothesis: April knew about Kendall because Monday cleared away the body. How does April know Monday’s business?
Fact: April lost its Chief Analyst and has gained a trouble-shooter, the best in Cyboratics. Yet even their ace analyst can’t find a memory trace of April taking Rinzler to Indigo’s apartment. April sent one of its units to do a Tuesday job, and Angerford can’t find a record of that either. Someone must have infiltrated the andronet at a very deep level indeed.
He looked up information about shape-shifting cloaks. Most of the products had a fixed selection of costumes. Some could be programmed to create new appearances. Knowing that it could be done didn’t help Rinzler to know why it was done and by whom. ‘So much for technology being everything,’ he argued with the imaginary Schmidt. ‘This is the one percent.’
The real Schmidt — who wasn’t really Schmidt and wasn’t a figment of the imagination although he sometimes felt like one — once told his apprentice that he grew up in cyberspace wastelands. He spent his childhood logged into domains where corrupted codes swirl aimlessly in eddies, where history ceases, and human hopes and sorrows become mere chunks of codes and bits of binaries. But then he really grew up, he told his apprentice, and realised that it’s our hopes and sorrows, all those things that can’t be digitised, that make us human. ‘We are not our technology, Rinzler.’