Rinzler: A Noir Sci-Fi Thriller

by Raya Jones

  ‘She could be anyone telling you that this was Indigo’s site. But it doesn’t matter what I believe, Louis Huang. She’s a missing person and I’m hired to find her. Did she say why anyone wanted to copy Indigo?’

  ‘April did it,’ Louis insisted. Indigo told him that April had copied her by means of a device that was invisibly woven into a green silk sash that Indigo was carrying with her. When Indigo was ordered to leave Cardiff, Louis escorted her to Cardiff Gate, and she gave him the sash to destroy. He hid it under shrubbery. When he returned to take it to the incinerator, it wasn’t there. At first he thought that Indigo must have returned and took it. He had shown her a way to sneak back into Cardiff. He forged her departure through the Gate.

  ‘Why would you do that?’ asked Rinzler, amazed.

  ‘It felt like the right thing to do.’

  ‘Isn’t a criminal offence?’

  ‘Yes, but we are not executed. The worst punishment is being banished here,’ he indicated the dismal vista with a shudder.

  When he couldn’t locate Indigo in Cardiff, he assumed that she went home after all.

  Rinzler remembered seeing a silken green sash in Indigo’s home. What was the significance of those sashes? To Louis, he said, ‘Right, okay, assuming it was April, what am I supposed to do with this information?’

  ‘Find Indigo, please. I’ll pay.’

  ‘No need,’ said Rinzler. He told him that he was already looking for her on someone else’s account. If he could access her site, he might be able to see whether she had picked up the message without leaving a trace.

  ‘How can you see it if there’s no trace?’ puzzled Louis.

  ‘Tricks of the trade,’ replied Rinzler, thinking Schmidt. Or is it Samurai Sunrise, the sinister one? ‘The Japanese man who sat next to you on the shuttle back…’

  A sudden change came over Louis Huang. He blurted like a man immensely relieved and astonished at the same time, ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I hacked on-board surveillance.’

  ‘You were meant to see a black woman.’

  It was Rinzler’s turn to be astonished. ‘Yes, that’s what I saw, but how do you know that?’

  ‘He told me.’

  ‘Why should he do that? Who are you really?’

  Louis’s young face seemed flushed in the pink glow of the hovering OK balloon. It was difficult to imagine him being anything other than what he seemed to be. ‘I’m just the Junior Immigration Officer and sometime a driver. I also make these.’ Speaking, he reached to his pocket and got out a packet of cards. ‘I play games, role play. It’s not virtual reality like your games but a similar concept. We create characters and have adventures.’ He sifted through the cards and Rinzler glimpsed wizards, sorceresses, goblins, and other fantasy characters. Louis selected a card and handed it to Rinzler.

  It was the true image of Samurai Sunrise, delicately hand-painted, staring directly at you with slit-like eye.

  Rinzler stared back at the image, speechless.

  ‘I call him Hidden Dragon. He’s the one who told me to come to you if I’m in trouble in P-7, not Indigo. I lied about that,’ admitted Louis.

  ‘What else did he tell you?’

  ‘To believe in what is essentially human. Those things can’t be digitised.’

  ‘That’s him alright.’ Rinzler handed the card back.

  ‘Please keep it, I can paint him again.’

  Louis wasn’t so naïve as to trust a stranger on another stranger’s say-so. He paid someone to track Rinzler through public surveillance. He and Latifah followed Rinzler on foot wherever they could. None of Rinzler’s encounters with Latifah were accidental, and it wasn’t a coincidence that Louis left the hotel lobby when Rinzler passed there and was at the Peony Wing when Rinzler reached there. Louis wanted Rinzler to see them, but wasn’t sure yet that Rinzler was trustworthy. Then Louis found out that the Cyboratics man he had met on the shuttle was April’s chief analyst, that Rinzler was implicated in Indigo’s murder, and that Rinzler and Angerford were seen in public together. He also noticed that Rinzler walked a lot, as if avoiding teleportation. He guessed that Rinzler was already piecing together the April connection.

  Rinzler laughed. ‘Good detection! If you get banished I’ll give you a job in Rinzler Investigations.’

  Louis and Latifah were visiting Markus when Rinzler called Markus to meet him in the warehouse. The gangsters’ compound was not far from the front entrance of the dance club. Latifah went to the club in case Rinzler left through the alley on foot. Louis waited near the street entrance. Latifah called him when she saw Rinzler in the club, and Louis headed there. April stopped him. It wasn’t the first time that the android approached him offering assistance, and he knew that it’s what androids are programmed to do. He already used her assistance when he had to collect two Vesuvians from locations that couldn’t be accessed on foot, and the andronet didn’t even charge him for the service, which Louis thought was odd — and Rinzler thought it was very odd. But this time April asked him whether he needed assistance locating Indigo’s missing Vesuvian. ‘For the first time in my life I wished I could teleport away that instant,’ Louis confided in Rinzler. He told April that he didn’t need any more help, and the android went away, but he was shaken to realise that April was monitoring his movements. That’s why he sought refuge with the gangsters, and Latifah came along out of solidarity. ‘April even knew this Vesuvian’s name.’

  ‘No mystery there, mister.’ Indigo used to hire April to look after the Vesuvians when she was away. That’s how April was able to enter the crime scene. The andronet would know which one was missing from the group that Jan had put for sale, and could easily find out that Louis was collecting them. ‘I wonder what happened to Orangestreak Yellow Fury.’

  ‘Indigo brought her to Cardiff.’

  ‘She took only one knowing it would die on its own? The real Indigo wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘She didn’t say why.’ Louis glanced furtively up and down the balcony, his face aglow green and orange in the illumination of the OK balloon still hovering nearby.

  ‘What’s the point of these balloons,’ Rinzler wondered aloud for the sake of saying something.

  Watching you is the point of my balloons, Jeremiah silently answered. Rinzler’s image floated above his glass desk. He switched off the balloon’s audio-visual surveillance when Rinzler and Louis parted company.

  Having overheard Louis’s account, Jeremiah had no doubt that Indigo had been digitally kidnapped by Cyboratics. The motive was obvious. The means too, thought Jeremiah. Clearly, Cyboratics were abusing technology that their takeover of Spare Lives put at their disposal.

  Recalling what Counterespionage had uncovered about February Mars, it was also obvious to Jeremiah that Angerford was not what he was claiming to be.

  Chapter 40

  Angerford sat on the stone steps in the Edge of the World when Rinzler finally got there. He quietly asked, ‘Did the essencist say anything useful?’

  ‘Interesting for sure, but how useful it is I don’t know yet.’ It seemed to Rinzler that Angerford was staring past him as if expecting someone. He automatically glanced over his own shoulder.

  There was only the metal rail, and beyond it was emptiness like the oblivion of death. He turned back to Angerford, and the shrine for the dead entered his field of vision.

  Ill at ease, Rinzler asked Angerford why he had taken April offline.

  ‘It wasn’t me.’ Angerford added with passion, ‘But no damage’s done. April came back online less than ten minutes later. There’s no memory of the lapse in its system. Even people’s reactions to its units switching off have been wiped out retrospectively. It’s awesome programming.’

  ‘Yes, I see that all this is very exciting for you.’ Rinzler fingered his pert, thumb on Go. ‘It was highly inconvenient for me. Everild was about to reveal his identity, next thing out comes some bushido shit…’

  ‘Bukimi no tani. It means “uncanny valle
y” in Japanese. The Uncanny Valley Hypothesis is ancient android history. In the 20th century the robotics engineer Mori…’

  ‘Yes, yes, I learned it in school too. He believed that androids would give people the creeps. He was wrong. We find them warm and friendly.’ Except for creepy April in the alley. ‘Except for that thug Thursday.’

  ‘They are what we make them. Rinzler, someone has planted a switch-off command that kicked in when April threatened you.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m lucky that way.’

  ‘I’ve been told to ask you why you are lucky that way.’

  ‘Who’s asking?’

  ‘Wye Stan Pan.’

  ‘You’re kidding! Your president personally told you to personally ask me? He called you on a hotline in your head the moment April went bukimi?’

  Angerford nodded, unhappily.

  The spooky silence engulfed them like the souls of forgotten dead.

  This place is the uncanny valley, thought Rinzler. His own voice sounded to him as if drowned by the silence. ‘The problem with April must be really serious for your president to monitor it directly. I still don’t get it: why should he tell you to ask me? How does he know I exist?’

  ‘The switch-off command had your name on it, Rinzler. It was meant to protect you. He wants to know why.’

  ‘Doesn’t he want to know who did it?’

  ‘I think he knows that.’

  ‘Then he knows more than I do. I appreciate you had to ask me, but why did we have to do it here of all places?’

  Rising to his feet, Angerford indicated the abyss below. Down there was a Spare Lives facility with the equipment to interact with the soul file. He started to walk down the path.

  ‘I’ll come with you!’ Rinzler heard himself say immediately, his legs following Angerford against his better judgment.

  ‘I was hoping you’d say that. Thanks.’

  ‘No problem. We do a discount on bodyguard services for regular clients,’ Rinzler joked, suppressing panic. He didn’t even carry a gun.

  ‘It’s not a bodyguard I need.’

  ‘Yes, I know that.’ A gun won’t be any good against corporate security. ‘Wye Stan has authorised you, right?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ mumbled Angerford, pressing ahead. ‘But the facility is unmanned.’

  Those facilities are unmanned because they are impregnable. There are no physical doors, no access by public teleport, and if intruders somehow got in, they’d be zapped by an automated defence. Rinzler hoped that Angerford had a plan. Striding down the path, he spoke to Angerford’s back, ‘When you interact with the soul file, will she know it?’

  ‘From what I gather, she’ll experience it like anyone communicating in cyberspace.’

  ‘She is dead.’

  ‘The file is intact.’

  Only the body is gone, thought Rinzler, imagining an OK spy being told by a Cyboratics man that she’s been murdered. He resigned to his own participation in the misadventure. ‘I could break the news to her.’

  ‘Yes, that’s why I want you along.’

  ‘I won’t miss it for the world,’ said Rinzler, and it felt like the truth. To bring a person back from the dead!

  The path wound down and down as if forever.

  They were soon out of teleport range. If they were injured, there’d be no rescue. Some stretches of the path were in bad repair due to landslides. Occasionally they had to negotiate treacherous slopes with only their biosuits’ light. Rinzler wondered why the path was lit at all, since hardly anyone ever came there. But most of all, all the way down, he wondered how to tell Indigo that she was dead.

  They reached a section where the path connected to narrow metal footbridges leading to unlit buildings, barely visible in sparse monochrome illumination. Rinzler gingerly followed Angerford onto a catwalk that seemed to stretch to infinity over a bottomless chasm.

  Angerford stepped onto a large flat roof. He was receiving the Spare Lives teleport signal there, and had a backdoor key, a code that could be activated only at close range. He wouldn’t divulge to Rinzler how he had got hold of it.

  ‘I get it,’ said Rinzler, ‘if you tell me you’ll have to kill me. Does your president know you’re doing this?’

  ‘That depends on whether I get caught.’

  They stood in silence.

  Angerford broke the uncomfortable silence. ‘We can jaunt in as soon as you’re rested.’

  ‘Sod “rested”, I’m parched! You should’ve brought water. Let’s die inside within sight of a water dispenser.’ Rinzler tried to sound jovial, but could hear his voice faltering. There was a tight knot in his stomach.

  This was precisely the situation he had specialised in avoiding since his brush with Goodwell Mining.

  He held on to Angerford, and they teleported.

  ‘There’s your water,’ Angerford pointed to the water dispenser at the corner of an empty room where they materialised. The lights instantly came on.

  The room had no exits. The walls were plastered with panels of equipment, several seats in front of them. Rinzler took his water to the nearest seat, and sat down watching Angerford studying various instruments. Eventually Angerford too sat down and got busy.

  Indigo’s head appeared in the workspace in front of him.

  And still the security system wasn’t activated. That’s unnatural, thought Rinzler, wondering whether he was trapped in virtual reality. Maybe he had died without noticing it.

  Angerford explained, business-like, that he was setting up a live feed of the room into the digitised consciousness encoded in the soul file, but he was fixing it so that she could see and hear only Rinzler.

  Presently the Indigo head vanished — and immediately Indigo stood in the middle of the room, life-size and almost solid-looking in her black biosuit, multi-coloured hair, and rainbow tattoos shimmering under her eyes. She darted quick looks around, and confronted Rinzler, ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Hello, Indigo. I’m Rinzler of Rinzler Investigations. You may have seen my signpost.’

  ‘I don’t care what you are programmed to think you are. Is this salt or pepper?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  She fixed him with a stare that reminded him of her mother. ‘You’d say that if you are a salt or pepper cartoon.’

  Rinzler knew that ‘cartoon’ was gamers’ jargon for a computer-generated character. She wouldn’t believe anything he’d tell her, but at least she recognised that she was in virtual reality. He told her, ‘I don’t know a “salt or pepper” game. I guess they’ve left it out of my programming. Please, I don’t know how long we have. I need to tell you something.’

  ‘We have all the time in cyberspace, which is eternity for those trapped in it. If you must know, SALT is the Special Agent Liability Test. I don’t need to speak,’ but she spoke anyway, angrily. ‘I know you’re reading my thoughts. You are picking up my sub-vocal speech like a phone signal, except that it’s hooked into your closed circuit. PEPPER is what we call the real thing. It’s the enemy’s trap. PEPPER makes you sneeze, tricks you into remembering things. Well, let me tell you: I don’t remember anything, zilch nil zippo! Maybe I was being prepped for something but the memory’s got wiped out in your meddling with my consciousness.’

  A spy wouldn’t be revealing all that unless she was desperately fed up with her job, thought Rinzler. If this were SALT, she spectacularly failed the test. If it were PEPPER, she didn’t care anymore. He turned to Angerford, ‘Let her see you.’

  Angerford hesitated.

  ‘Trust me. Let’s not hide anything.’

  Startled, Indigo suddenly saw Angerford sitting there. She immediately took in the Cyboratics uniform. ‘It is PEPPER.’

  ‘No,’ began Rinzler, suspecting that his denial had the credibility of a cartoon.

  ‘Of course not, it could be a SALT simulation of being captured by Cyboratics. Or PEPPER wanting me to believe that it’s a SALT simulation.’

  Rinzler met her contemp
tuous gaze steadily. ‘You don’t have to believe me, but please hear me out. I’m investigating a murder and I need information that you may have. Maybe I’m just programmed to believe it, but humour me please. CrimSol referred your case to me after… what I mean to say…’ he fumbled. How do you tell someone she’s dead?

  ‘You mean to say that I’m dead?’ she said.

  Rinzler nodded. ‘But I might be telling you this to trick you. Do you feel dead?’

  ‘Yeah, logged out of life, link-dead and the game whirls on regardless,’ she said, her face clouding.

  ‘Which game?’

  ‘The Game capital-G, the Game you’re in, everyone is in, the unus mundus, the everything-is-connected Game.’

  ‘Oh, that one,’ Rinzler responded dismissively, as if he knew. He had no idea. ‘But what matters is how exactly things are connected. Especially the things that don’t seem to connect. I need information about…’

  ‘Save your energy, switch this off right away. Whatever you and you,’ her sweeping gaze took in Angerford too, ‘are programmed to think that you “need to know” is a cover story for what your designers want to know. Well, I’ll tell you. I have an auto-delete on all memories of any so-called mission. It’s like waking up from a dream you instantly forget and can’t remember anything except that there’s something you’ve forgotten. You have this feeling of forgetting something vital, like losing essential warez in your bag of tricks when your deck unexpectedly runs out of working memory and you’re caught out on the freeze like a duck under Jammer breeze without so much as a Reflex 61 utility installed and no Vidar’s Scream to go on the offensive. Awesome data looming invisibly nearby like the hubbub of a corporation not my own, must be yours,’ she glanced daggers at Angerford. ‘I know it’s there but I can’t access it, I can’t fix it, because I woke up and forgot the dream. You may as well switch me off now.’

  ‘Not just yet,’ spoke Angerford. ‘Do you remember chatting with April in the Mineshaft?’

  ‘I’m always chatting with April in the Mineshaft!’ she turned to Rinzler, ‘How was I murdered?’