Rinzler: A Noir Sci-Fi Thriller

by Raya Jones

  Rinzler told her. ‘Shot on your doorstep by a Monday manipulated by someone calling themselves Everild. Do you know Everild?’

  ‘No, but it sounds like a name that April would invent for herself.’

  Angerford started a replay on a large screen. It was the Mineshaft as seen through an April unit approaching Indigo, who sat alone. The table-top had slipped off the cartwheel in front of her, and she was weaving a green sash through the spokes. April’s cheery voice sounded, ‘Sorry to keep you waiting, Indigo. The unit who went on the joyride with you has got damaged in the fire.’ Indigo seemed troubled, her voice strained, ‘What fire?’ April’s voice: ‘Your home was on fire.’ Indigo yanked the sash loose. ‘How come my home was on fire?’ April: ‘Could be the Vesuvians. Your mother did warn you.’ Indigo rolled the sash into a tight coil. ‘Get lost, April. Go serve them, they seem to be in tipping mode,’ she gestured somewhere past April. April merrily informed that another unit would be shortly with those customers, and leaned towards Indigo, whispering.

  The playback went fuzzy and jerky, and cut out.

  ‘Yes, that’s my last memory,’ confirmed the ghost of Indigo, troubled. ‘It was like two minutes ago. That’s April’s record. You really are Cyboratics. Was my home torched?’

  Rinzler replied. ‘There was no fire. You went home and got on with your life for a couple of weeks. The sash you were holding…’

  ‘This?’ She reached for a pocket and pulled out a ghost of the same sash. ‘It belongs to… I mean, it used to belong to Gemini. April killed her. But you already know that.’

  ‘I don’t,’ said Rinzler, glancing at Angerford. Angerford frowned, silent, and reset the replay to half-an-hour earlier.

  Half an hour earlier, April saw Indigo sitting in a different corner of the Mineshaft looking bored out of her mind. She was making overlapping circles with the bottom of her glass on the table’s dusty top. April came to sit next to her. A young woman materialised nearby. She seemed frail, her face very white, her hair and eyebrows shaved. She wore an ankle-length white robe loosely gathered at the waist with a long green sash. Such attire was utterly impractical in P-7. Indigo asked jokingly, ‘What planet did you fall from?’ and the girl replied earnestly, ‘Milton.’ April said, ‘Welcome to Proxima! What can I get you? We offer a choice of mediaeval taverns, English country pubs, Japanese izakayas, cocktail bars...’ The list went on. The Miltonese declined, and chatted with Indigo. She was a Teletek trainee from Ivory Towers, visiting Proxima on a student exchange scheme.

  ‘You can fast-forward this,’ said the ghost of Indigo. ‘We talked about things like parallel universes and time paradoxes, and I was bitching about how things… now! Play it from here.’

  The playback resumed with April declaring, ‘Let’s go ride a conveyor belt! It will take your mind off things, Indigo.’ Indigo retorted sarcastically, ‘By taking my head off my shoulders, April?’ The Miltonese begged to know what they were talking. Indigo told her, ‘Riding a conveyor belt. We mustn’t do it. It’s... what’s the word, April?’ April listed options: ‘Adventurous, bold, courageous, daring, enterprising…’ Indigo interrupted, ‘Stupid. That’s the word I was looking for.’

  Angerford told them that there was no record of the joyride in the April system.

  Indigo insisted that April had come with them on the ride.

  ‘We’ve heard April admitting it,’ agreed Angerford. ‘But you came back alone. What happened to the student?’

  ‘It wasn’t a student,’ mumbled Indigo. ‘I had no inkling.’ She wiped her eye. Her hand was still greasy from the conveyor belt. ‘We rode the stretch between 8W and 6E, do you know it? It’s the corkscrew rollercoaster stretch.’

  Rinzler remembered the joy riders he had seen at 6E. He imagined the two young women hanging on for dear life, their eyes bright and cheeks flush, adrenaline pumping, yelling at the top of their voices, their shrieks drowned by the noise of the belt.

  Indigo told them how she yelled to the girl to jump off. The platform was fast sailing past them, and the containers they were riding headed to the recycling plant. She jumped off herself, fell down and rolled over, and when she looked back up, the girl was still on the container, struggling to free her robe. Indigo ran alongside. April clambered over and got to her first. Indigo told Rinzler and Angerford, ‘I swear I saw April push her away from me. All I managed to grab was this.’ She meant the sash in her grubby hand. ‘She went in… in there.’

  Sickened, Rinzler imagined thumps of guillotines and whistles of pressure valves deep inside where no human was meant to go, a girl horribly screaming and her screams drowned by the crunching shredding acid-dissolving mechanical hell, the regular clanks, whines and drone of machinery, and flapping of the opaque plastic strips.

  ‘There were no screams,’ Indigo continued, choked. ‘It was as if that noisy place was dead silent. I was thinking, I told April, “I didn’t even get to know her name.” And April told me it was Gemini, a Zodiac X100, a prototype created by Moore-Dent CyberTech.’

  She stuffed the sash back into her pocket, and pulled herself together. ‘I understand why your product terminated it,’ she told Angerford.

  ‘What did April say to you afterwards in the Mineshaft?’ he asked.

  ‘Go ask April!’ She was clamming up, and the para-dock interface wasn’t designed to read her thoughts. It was designed to allow medical technicians to talk with their rich clients.

  Rinzler inquired, ‘Do you know about the SL para-docks?’

  ‘You mean the Sad Liar paradox or the paradox of Sorry Lines or…?’

  ‘Spare Lives. The matrix you’re in right now is what they call a para-dock. It’s for storing their clients’ pattern. Your friend Cerise has a job with them.’

  ‘She’s no friend of mine. The bitch, she’s only a receptionist for Spare Lives. She stole my Ken and then hooked up with some nobody from the back of beyond, from Ronda or…’

  ‘Ronda,’ confirmed Rinzler. ‘Sorry to take you back to the miserable days of the red gang,’ he watched her wince, ‘but in those days you had a secret den, didn’t you?’ He saw her nod slightly. He spoke the password that Louis had given him, and watched her expression change dramatically.

  For the first time, she seemed afraid. ‘I’ve never told this to anyone. I haven’t thought of it in years. It wasn’t in my stream of consciousness for you to pick up.’

  ‘You’ve given it to Louis Huang.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You don’t know him. Your last memory is from 32 days ago. He met you 15 days ago in Cardiff.’

  ‘You won’t catch me dead going to Cardiff. That commune of anachronistic technophobe throwbacks is the last place in the whole wide…’

  ‘I get the idea,’ Rinzler interrupted, and told her everything he knew about the woman who went to Cardiff. He pointed out how she had taken a single Vesuvian with her. ‘You wouldn’t do that to your pets.’

  But Indigo disclosed that this was exactly what she’d do under those circumstances. She’d figure out that another replica might be downloaded. Everything would be tidied up so that the new Indigo would be none the wiser. The only thing out of place would be the missing Vesuvian, and she’d be worried sick. ‘That will be my opening to contact my future double,’ explained Indigo, ‘if I were that double. Is Fury safe? A Vesuvian can survive alone only a few days, and you’re saying it was, how long ago?’

  ‘Too long. But she’s reunited with her sisters.’ He told her how Louis had collected them one by one, and left her a message that hadn’t been picked up.

  ‘Then my double is already dead. That’s the only reason why I wouldn’t check on my Vesuvians. April got her. Don’t look at me like that,’ she told Angerford. ‘You may be Cyboratics but I know April better than you, whoever you are.’

  ‘Angerford, Chief Analyst for April Proxima.’

  She stared at him pityingly, and spoke mockingly, ‘Wye Stan’s ace trouble-shooter, and you have no idea how your t
rouble is going to shoot you.’

  Rinzler cut in, ‘The other you told Louis that April had copied you. You don’t really believe that, do you?’

  ‘Obviously I do in all my versions. I’m going to tell you this only once: April plays games.’ Rinzler opened his mouth to say, it’s applied mathematics, but Indigo was quicker: ‘And I don’t mean mathematical game theory. That cyber-mind plays mind games. It plays humans the way that humans play computer games. Don’t shake your head at me,’ she rebuked Angerford, who wasn’t shaking his head, and turned back to Rinzler, ‘How much was I altered?’

  ‘Not much, but your mother didn’t recognise you. Maybe because the hair effect was gone and the facial tattoos were switched off.’

  ‘I never switch them off. There’s your proof that April did it. When we got back to the Mineshaft just now… whenever it was, April told me that it wants me on its team. I said, “If ever I get on your team, I’ll wipe that smile off your face.” And April said, “If you join me, I’ll erase those rainbows under your eyes”.’

  Rinzler turned to Angerford. ‘Can April do that, recruit to your team from outside Cyboratics?’

  Angerford shook his head. ‘No. It can’t even recruit from inside Cyboratics. It only thinks it can.’

  ‘This game April is playing with Indigo, is it out of its illusion of free will?’

  Angerford said nothing. He seemed worried.

  He was worried.

  Rinzler was telling Indigo, ‘We have an idea who Everild might be, but he’s very slippery. Will you stay around to help us solve…’ he stopped himself short of saying your murder.

  ‘Solve my murder? How dead am I?’

  ‘As in cremated or recycled, whichever OK does,’ replied Rinzler as kindly as he could.

  Her face clouded with doubt and sadness. ‘Do I have a choice staying around?’ she asked bitterly. ‘You can switch me on and off.’

  ‘You have a choice whether to talk to us or not.’

  ‘Do I? Someone told my mother once that what makes us human can’t be digitised, it’s our sorrows and hopes and dreams… what? Why are you looking at me like that?’

  Rinzler realised that he was staring intently, wondering whether she was Schmidt’s daughter after all. There wasn’t the slightest resemblance, he decided. ‘You are still you. We can’t read your thoughts.’

  ‘I’m a ghost. My thoughts are digital. If it’s digital, someone can read it. Maybe that’s how you’ve dug out the password from my childhood. I have a memory of it, and you found it. Or maybe you retrieved it from cyberspace wastelands. Sure, I’ll stay around. I need to know how the breeze is blowing… What are you doing to me?’ she demanded of Angerford, who was busy interfacing the workstation with his ring.

  ‘Giving you stealth access into April,’ replied Angerford without stopping, working against the clock. The lab time he had bought on false pretence, having written himself and Rinzler into the facility as trainee technicians, was running out. He explained that it would be read-only, and April wouldn’t detect the intrusion if Indigo was careful.

  Indigo’s face showed awe. Some part of her ghost consciousness must have become aware of the andronet. ‘Wow, I am on the April team!’

  ‘No,’ Angerford stressed. ‘Nobody in the April team must know about you. You can help in a very specific way.’

  Angerford had suspected for some time that the andronet was deliberately shifting sections of itself out of sight whenever he scanned it. Now he intended to initiate extensive diagnostics, a procedure that would take about 24 hours and must not be interrupted. The April team will oversee it. Angerford will assign to himself the task of monitoring April’s ongoing operations to ensure that the diagnostics don’t compromise the andronet’s capacity to go about its business as usual. His monitoring will make April shift its secrets, and Indigo might be able to home in on what April is shifting out of Angerford’s sight.

  Indigo understood.

  Angerford touched his ring, and her ghost was gone.

  Chapter 41

  Should he tell Jan that Cyboratics have her daughter’s soul? Jeremiah slept on it, woke up, had disappointing sex with his androids, and found the cruelty in his heart to tell her. He summoned her to his office. It was the middle of her night. She had to be woken up, but came almost instantly. He was barely into his second croissant. He didn’t offer her any breakfast or beverage. She sat still and silent on a chair in front of his desk, watching him sip his coffee.

  At last he dabbed the corners of his mouth with a napkin, and disclosed that the trespasser who had claimed to be her daughter really was her daughter.

  She heard him out and burst, ‘Nonsense, Chief, with all due respect, she was nothing like my daughter. Her mannerism was all wrong. I’d know my own daughter. I’m her mother.’

  ‘How well do we really know our children?’ mused Jeremiah, who didn’t have any children, and told her, ‘The imminent danger is the fact they have her soul. We must ensure that it’s deleted before they rummage too deeply. They might already have done that. We must get Indigo deleted and find out if they’ve retrieved anything we should worry about. Don’t fret, Jan. I have a plan. We’ll kidnap Angerford.’

  He derived perverse pleasure in watching her fight the urge to tell him that he was out of his mind.

  She gave up the fight. ‘You are out of your mind.’

  ‘Tut-tut, Jan, that’s no way to talk to your superior,’ he smiled disarmingly. ‘I leave it in your capable hands. Draft a plan. I want it by…’ he consulted the clock, and set a deadline that should allow her ample time to warn Cyboratics.

  Alone again, Jeremiah summoned one of his androids to pour him more coffee. The android’s rococo attire — a wig of bleached hair piled high, richly decorated vermillion gown over an embroidered skirt supported by wide hoops, etc. — was an unsavoury reminder of the day his Life/Style was violated.

  He drank his coffee thinking about Jan the Pan. She probably already knew about the soul file, he speculated. She could have engineered the whole thing herself, colluding with Angerford. If she was innocent, she ought to have protested against deleting Indigo’s soul. What mother wouldn’t instantly realise that the existence of such a file meant the possibility of bringing her daughter back to life?

  Less than an hour later Jan informed him that Angerford was spotted alone in the Arcades. ‘Let’s grab him now,’ she said, and Jeremiah told her, ‘Make it so.’

  A moment later she reported that she had Angerford suspended in the covert PertNet operated by Division.53. She advised against downloading him into Jeremiah’s office. That could be traceable.

  ‘Good thinking, Jan. I can always count on you. Use Location X,’ he ordered, pleased that the site would get used before it expired. A few months earlier, in a flash of inspiration, he illegally secured premises that had become vacated in the recent quake. Jan reminded him that the site was still owned by ET, and this might give Angerford an advantage. He could blackmail OK about it — unless Jeremiah didn’t intend Angerford to leave there alive. Was that the plan?

  Privately wondering how far she’d go to protect the Cyboratics man, he ‘gave in to her wisdom’ and suggested using a certain bar in the Greys.

  To call it a ‘bar’ was an exaggeration. It was a small sitting area behind a stall selling drinks from a replicator. Shortly afterwards, Jan informed him that everything was ready. Jeremiah walked up to the emergency exit at the back of his apartment, and teleported directly to the other side using the PertNet. The public teleport field was already blocked.

  The bar was as dismal as when he had purchased the reconditioned androids from Bin Abdullah, but now mercifully the sights and sounds of the tribal yard were blocked by a mobile MirXperma wall. Jan and an armed guard stood in front of the opaque and soundproof virtual wall. Angerford sat by the single table like a man with a gun to his head.

  ‘Leave us alone,’ Jeremiah ordered and, before Jan could protest, reassured her, ‘He won�
�t attack me. That would amount to a violation of the Ganymede Convention. The same if I were to harm you,’ he told the sullen Angerford. ‘We need to talk and then you’re free to go.’

  Jan and the guard walked out through the barrier. It flickered, briefly showing the yard teeming with OK armed personnel, and resumed its opacity.

  Jeremiah sat down opposite Angerford. ‘Nice to meet you, Ambrose darling. In the flesh you are prettier than your avatar, I must say.’

  Angerford spoke coldly. ‘You are holding me hostage. This is a serious violation of the Ganymede Convention.’

  ‘Would you have come if I invited you?’

  ‘I might have.’

  ‘I doubt it. But let’s cut to the chase. Obtaining the soul of an OK citizen without our consent is a most serious violation. It borders on an act of war.’

  Angerford shook his head, dubious.

  ‘It’s a violation of the first degree for sure,’ insisted Jeremiah. ‘You see, Angerford, we know about the Indigo file.’

  Angerford remained silent.

  ‘You are not denying it.’

  ‘I’m not dignifying an absurd allegation with a denial. The name Indigo rings a bell. Wasn’t she a clerk of yours who was murdered recently? Why should we have any interest in her?’

  ‘Don’t test my patience and goodwill. We know and can prove that you’ve copied her through April. You tell me what your interest in her is,’ he said, not waiting for Angerford’s non-reply. ‘Perhaps you were just following orders. Perhaps your president is taking a personal interest in a lost relative of his. You see, we know about that too.’

  Angerford was silent and expressionless.

  ‘Let’s make a deal for the sake of inter-corporation peace,’ Jeremiah said. ‘Show me proof that you’ve deleted the Indigo file irretrievably, and I won’t report this, shall we call it a minor act of hostility, to the CSG.’

  ‘I can’t do that,’ said Angerford, stonily. ‘I don’t have the file you think I have.’

  ‘I understand perfectly that you can’t admit to having it,’ Jeremiah granted, knowing perfectly well that Cyboratics would never provide proof for deleting the file, since such proof would prove that they had it in the first place. He rose to his feet. ‘I’ll call off my personnel and let you get on with your day. If I don’t hear from you within three hours, I’m taking it to the CSG.’