by Damien Boyes
Wiser takes another sip of his coffee, rolls it around in his mouth, swallows. “Something about Doralai Wii maybe?”
He’s playing with me, watches for a reaction and I force my face to stay relaxed, to keep the sudden anxiety from expressing itself. At least I hope I do, I haven’t been inside my face long enough to know how it’ll respond under stress.
“You’ll have to ask him,” I say, and my voice hardly breaks.
“Have you seen her recently?”
“No.” I say. Maybe too quickly.
“Funny, she rep-checked for the first time in six months at that discount meat shop your friend Shelt owns. You didn’t see her there when you checked in?”
“You said ‘recently.’”
“It was three days ago.”
“I’ve only been alive for four. I’ve lived three quarters of my life since I last saw her.”
His prosthetic hand whines around the coffee cup, fighting conflicting impulses. “Have it your way, Fin,” he says. “You keep playing your games. I’m going to need you to come back to the station to get to the bottom of this.”
“Anything to help,” I say, smile my most cooperative smile and start walking toward the big black Service vehicle idling in the drive.
Special Agent Wiser stays where he is. “Don’t you want to get a jacket? The sun isn’t up. It’s minus ten out.”
“I’ll be fine, the car’s right there.” I just want them out of here, keep their rithm scans away from Dora. If Wiser is right about me, and my decisions get people hurt, then this is how it starts.
They’ll go upstairs and find Dora and her scan won’t check out. They’ll take her away for a rithm reintegration, pull her mind back into line with where it was when she last synced. Everything she’s done—the person she’s become over the past six months—wiped away.
I can’t let that happen.
“It’s cold,” Wiser says. “You need a coat.”
“I’m not bothered by the cold,” I lie. I can already feel the chill seeping in through the closed lobby doors.
“I insist.” He walks to the elevator. “18th floor.”
“Resident permission is required to access the elevator,” the building’s IMP answers.
“Invite us up?” Wiser asks.
I shake my head and he scowls.
“18th floor. Standards Override: Wiser, Galvan J.”
“Right away, Special Agent,” the building says, and a moment later the elevator doors part for him. He was messing with me when he called up, made me come to him. He could have come straight to my front door at any time.
“You need a warrant,” I tell him.
“I have reason to believe you are harbouring a material suspect, which grants me probable cause to search your apartment.”
“You’re overstepping and you know it. You just finished accusing me of pushing. Getting innocent people hurt.”
He smiles. He knows he’s won. Knows who he’ll find upstairs. “File a grievance. I’ll be happy to answer to a citizen tribunal. After we search your apartment.”
He puts an unnecessary arm across the elevator doors, holding it. “After you, Mr. Gibson.”
I start a slow walk to the waiting elevator. The agents eye me as I approach Wiser. I could grab him, drag him into the elevator behind me, use him as a shield—
Then what? Hostage situation? That gets us nowhere.
They’re going to find Doralai. They’ll know I was lying, but they won’t know why. They’ll scan her. They’ll know she’s shyfting. This is what Saabir warned me against.
Things are going to get bad.
StatUS-ID
[a646:d17e:8670:511f::Finsbury/D//GAGE]
SysDate
[08:20:41. Sunday, April 28, 2058]
Last night I finally found the man who murdered Connie. I dug his face out of my head after dousing my rithm with illegal code, and the AMP came back with a positive match.
His name is Amit Johari, a former world champion in the Top Coder competition who went digital on his twenty-fourth birthday in a radical attempt to ‘cure’ his autism. He disappeared only weeks before he rammed a stolen TACvan through my life.
Everything I had to do to get here was worth it. Every decision I made. The Dwell. The ReCog. Hitting the arKade against orders. Hooking up with xYvYx. All of it was worth it.
I found him.
I was on my way to his last known address when Dora showed up at my door and I was so full of excitement and anger that when she kissed me, I went with it and we fell asleep together afterwards. I don’t regret it, but at the same time I don’t feel good about it.
She was gone when I woke up. Left only the smell of lilac behind.
This morning I didn’t waste any time. I booked a hopper to Amit’s parents’ house—the last address SecNet had on file for him—a quaint little two-storey in a relatively affluent Boston exurb.
It’s only an hour and a half hop and the trip takes me over the kilometres-long mid-lake wind farm, skims the condensed urban centres of Rochester and Syracuse and stops at the edge of the Albany Medical Corridor to recharge. Thirty minutes later I land at the Lake Quannapowitt Hopper Station, hail a Rohk, and give it an address that’ll drop me a half block from Amit’s house.
The Rohk cruises me through the wide, rolling streets of Wakefield and drops me down the street from a modest, tree-shrouded house with a red-tinged phovo-shingle roof and green shutters on the windows.
I tell it to wait and walk along the uneven sidewalk, past Amit’s childhood home with its immaculately tended flower garden of tulips and daffodils in full bloom. I’m half-expecting an army of lurching remote control zombies to pour out and attack me, but except for the birds, the street is quiet.
Satisfied nothing’s waiting for me, I retrace my steps and knock politely on the green front door, even though I’m sure the house has already made my presence known.
SecNet’s records show the Joharis were tech workers: Vivek Johari a systems analyst for the Indian company that built the Rohk that brought me here, and Bela Johari an AI handler. Both well-educated people who provided their son with every resource they could. Even to the point of trying to cure his autism by rewriting his brain.
I wonder if they would’ve done anything different if they knew what he’d grow up to become. If they knew they were creating a murderous, inhuman monster.
Mrs. Johari answers the door, drying her hands on a yellow tea towel. She’s slight. Even with me standing down a step she barely reaches my shoulders. The Joharis had their son late in life, she was forty and her husband nearly fifty, but though she’s closing in on seventy her hair is still dark, lustrous, without a trace of grey, and with skin a twenty-year old would envy.
Her age doesn’t show until I hold up my badge and ID, tell her the reason I’ve come—the reason I’ve made up, anyway—and grief drags decades into her face.
“Come in,” she says, barely glancing at my out-of-state badge and ID. She stands aside to let me pass and closes the door behind me.
She asks me to take off my shoes and leads me into the bright kitchen where her husband and their housebot are washing up the remains of the breakfast dishes. Vivek Johari is wearing an orange-striped apron over flannel pajamas that hang on his bony frame. His dox image showed he once had a full head of brown hair, but grey roots have taken over and the brown faded to a pale orange.
“Who was at the door, Bela?” Mr. Johari asks without turning, his arms wrist-deep in the sink.
“Viv,” she says to her husband’s back, “We have a visitor. Mr. Gage. From the police. He’s come about Amit.”
Mr. Johari whips around, flinging suds across the kitchen, a frying pan still in his hand.
“You’ve found him?” he asks, expectation and soap dripping from his face.
I shake my head. “No, sir.”
He nods, disappointed in himself for letting the hope show, and wipes his face with his sleeve. “Then you have news?”
He blinks into the distance and nods, hands the pan to the bot and dries his hands on his apron before slipping it off.
“Why don’t we go out to the other room?” he says. “Would you like coffee? Tea?”
“No, thank you.”
“I’ll have the bot make some,” he says anyway.
He instructs the bot then gestures out to the living room. Two grey couches are arranged in the centre of the room, parallel to each other. Between them a large vase of dried flowers rests on a low, dented wooden table, the polish worn matte from years of use. A small, clean stone fireplace is built into the far wall, flanked by two narrow display cases each with five shelves. On each shelf rests a trophy from the Prime Coder Championship—a platinum hand with a prism clutched between its index finger and thumb—one for each year Amit was eligible to enter. Over the fireplace is the massive award they gave him for winning with a perfect 4000 score ten years in a row. Never done before or since.
I sit and they arrange themselves side-by-side across from me, wait patiently for me to start.
“You’ve received no further communication from your son?” I ask.
“None,” Mr. Johari says, shaking his head slightly.
I’ve got my tab out, and I tap it as though taking notes.
“Can you go over the circumstances of his disappearance for me?” They must have been over this with officers before, but if having to retell it is a burden they don’t let it show.
Mr. Johari takes a deep breath, as if trying to figure out where to start. “You know the circumstances of Amit’s restoration?” he asks.
I nod. “It was intended to even out his brain function. Make him more…” I stumble to find another word but nothing comes, “…normal.”
“‘Normal’, yes,” Mr. Johari says. I hear the quotations around it. “The day he disappeared, we argued. The first real argument we’d ever had. After his restoration, Amit became—difficult—but our little boy had been returned to us. The boy we’d never known. He was able to speak to us.” He leans over, touches his wife’s knee. “That first night home, he told his mother he loved her. He gave me a hug. The first one in twenty-four years. It was—” he cuts off, tears in his eyes.
Mrs. Johari is staring past me, out the window. She hasn’t looked at her husband once since they sat down.
“But almost immediately,” he continues, “Amit became withdrawn. He wouldn’t leave his room, spending his time back on the link, always on the link. He began acting strangely, coming and going at odd hours. His moods changed. Wildly. He was—I didn’t know who he’d be from one day to the next. If I hadn’t known it was impossible, I’d have thought he was using drugs. We tried to get him help, counselling.” He looks at his wife. “We did everything we could.” He sighs, heavily. “Then he announced he was moving out. We had only just got him back and he was leaving us. We argued. He gathered a bag and left in his car. That was the last we saw him.”
“Did he ever mention anyone?” I ask. “Friends? People he was in contact with? Someone you might not have mentioned to the original investigating officer?”
Mr. Johari shakes his head and looks at his wife. She shrugs slightly and shakes her head as well. “Growing up it was difficult for him, he had no real friends, it was too hard for him,” he says. “And even after, he never mentioned anyone. There was never time.”
“But you’ve heard from him?”
“Once,” Mr. Johari says, nodding.
“What did he say?”
“That he was fine, but that he wouldn’t be coming home. That he was—” his voice catches and Mrs. Johari lowers her eyes. He clears his throat to cover. “He didn’t want us to worry. He said we should consider it as if he died during his recovery. That he was someone else now.”
Sitting there, hands clasped in their laps, shoulders hunched, it’s clear to see what a toll their son’s disappearance has had on them. I feel a stab of shame for dragging them through this. Just for a second.
Then it passes. Their son killed my wife.
“And you have no idea where he might be now?”
He shakes his head sadly. Ms. Johari is back watching the window.
“About a week after he left, we got a call from a commuter lot, somewhere up north,” Mr. Johari says. “His car was parked there and the permit had expired. Either we could come get it or it would be claimed.”
“Which lot?” I ask calmly, trying to keep the excitement from my voice.
“72,” he answers immediately. The same lot the TACvan that killed us originated.
“Did you retrieve the car?” Maybe there’s something in it, something that would lead me to him.
“We tried. We went up there to get it but by the time we arrived it was already gone.”
“Claimed?”
“That’s what we thought, but they said they hadn’t touched it. It was just…gone.”
Shit. Likely another dead end. Still, I make a note to run it down.
“Do you have any idea why he left?”
“Amit was—” he corrects himself quickly, “is an extraordinary boy. Maybe if I had realized that instead of pushing, instead of—”
“Vivek,” Mrs. Johari looks up suddenly, grabs his hand forcefully. “You can’t keep blaming yourself. We did what we thought was right, for him, and for us.”
He nods, slightly, as though they’ve had this conversation many times, and after a moment looks up at me, but he isn’t seeing me.
“You know, when Amit was five, I gave him an old techwand to play with. It barely worked anymore, it was so out of date, but I thought he’d like the games. Instead, he used it to access our apartment’s internal control systems and lowered the temperature in his room. Do you remember, Bela? He was five. Hadn’t said a word, but he was somehow able to reconfigure that ancient piece of technology—a toy, really—to change the climate control in a modern apartment’s internal system. I had always wondered, but that’s when I knew—that’s when I knew he was special. After that, I let him use my computer, and the things he could do without being taught, intuited on his own. It’s like he was more comfortable with machines than with people. He could talk to them. Easier than with us.”
Mrs. Johari’s jaw is clenched. She’s squeezing her husband’s hand like she wants him to be quiet.
“We wanted to give him the chance of a real life,” Mr. Johari says. “A career. Relationships. Love. But we were selfish. He was happy with who he was. He didn’t know any different. He was successful. A genius—” He waves his hand at the rows of awards. “You see the trophies. He won those competitions like they were nothing. He earned millions of dollars. He had sponsorship offers. They wrote articles about him, people wanted to meet him, to shake his hand. He was a hero. People sent him letters from around the world. But even with all that, he wasn’t who we wanted him to be. We couldn’t accept what we had so we drove him away.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, thinking about Connie, and how his special boy took her away from me. “I know how difficult it is to lose someone you love.”
Mr. Johari shrugs. “I’ll do whatever is necessary to find him.”
“The trouble is,” I say, “from an official standpoint, he isn’t missing.” They nod. They’ve heard this before. I pact my tab, lean in. “I can’t do anything on the books, but I’d like to help you if I can. Maybe I can track him down. At least give him a message for you.”
Mr. Johari’s eyes widen, but his wife puts a restraining hand on his arm.
“Thank you, detective,” she says. “But when Amit is ready to come home, he will.”
“What can it hurt to look?” Mr. Johari says. “To give him a message? To let him know we love him and we want him to come back to us.”
“He knows we love him,” she says.
“H
ow can it hurt?” he protests.
“We’ve already pushed him away once. If we give him his space, he may one day come back to us. We keep pushing and he may never return.”
“Yes,” Mr. Johari says to me, ignoring his wife. “We would like you to find him. To give him a message.”
“What will it cost?” Mrs. Johari asks. “To ‘help’?”
She doesn’t trust me. I wonder how many others have been through here, saying the same things, offering to find their lost son. With a high-profile disappearance like Amit’s, it couldn’t have been an insignificant number. The badge must have got me in the door, but I won’t get anywhere with Mrs. Johari.
Her husband, on the other hand…he’s wasting away from grief, he’ll do anything to get his son back. I only need to give him the slightest cause to believe I might be able to.
Mr. Johari looks at his wife, then at me. His eyes narrow.
“No, no,” I assure them. “Nothing like that. I just—I lost someone myself. I know how you must be feeling.”
Mr. Johari nods. Yes.
Mrs. Johari slides her hand from her husband’s arm, stands and walks from the room. I hear a door shut softly somewhere in the back of the house.
“Can I see his bedroom?” I ask.
“Of course,” he says. We stand and he shows me to a closed-off room on the second floor. It’s cooler inside than the rest of the house. The blinds are drawn. Low, indirect lighting engages as we enter.
The room is neat, spartan. The walls are empty, plain white paint, no posters or pictures of any kind. A tidy single bed sits along the wall by the door. The one nod to the fact that a teenager had ever lived here is the headboard, jammed with trophies and ribbons and prizes from a myriad of coding contests.
A closet takes up another wall and a long, L-shaped desk dominates the rest of the room. The long edge runs under the window and contains a number of displays, assorted fine-tipped tools, a SenShare cable, diagnostic gear, slim volumes of redundant storage and input devices all meticulously-arranged, a curious pile of paper books. A high-backed rolling chair is tucked in at the end.