Virtual Immortality

by Matthew S. Cox

  Talking with Hayley made her forget her body and be Nina. This child had no idea what she was, and the painful normality of the dialog took her to a place she had not been in months. Nina steered the conversation, getting a good picture of Hayley’s opinion of Joey. It did not fit with what Nina had deduced, and she once again doubted her conclusions. This guy sounded like he had a soft spot, at least for Hayley, and she learned about his associates Kenny and Eldon; names she would run later and check up on. If nothing else, the girl had just saved Joey’s life; now Nina felt hesitant enough to talk to him first.

  Over dessert, she appraised Hayley’s situation. Jacob Roth was guilty of neglect and she had half a mind to remove her from that apartment. With WellTech exposed, there was no imminent risk. An investigation order sent to social services would be enough, and she could let them handle it. Text scrolled over reality as she filled out the form for an official inquest into Jacob Roth for child neglect and saved it as a draft. Someone lower on the food chain at Division 9 would handle that, if she sent it in.

  Nina spent a few hours at the apartment, half to keep Hayley company and half waiting to talk to Jacob when he came home as a last attempt at courtesy to a fellow cop. At least, that was her surface story. Nina found herself as much in need of human contact as the kid. It had been too long since she let her guard down and just interacted with someone without ulterior motive. Her presence distracted Hayley from cyberspace and they watched a video, played some games, and just talked into the night. Nina did her the favor of more laundry and ordered some food for the pantry before she gave up on Roth showing up.

  After a glance at the time, Nina sighed at the door. “What time does your father usually get home?”

  “He hasn’t been here in weeks.” She ground her toes into the rug. “I think he’s got a bed in his office.”

  She glanced at the girl, and walked her to bed. After Hayley fell asleep, Nina used the house phone to call Roth at his desk and got the same usual delaying excuses that his daughter had almost come to memorize word for word. The sound of his voice on the comm channel brought Hayley out of the bedroom, with her mood back to where it was before.

  Nina lifted the girl’s gaze with a gentle hand on her cheek. “Hayley, I’m going to go have a chat with your dad at his office. If I have to, I’ll drag him down here by his shirt.” She smiled.

  The child giggled at the thought. “But he’s bigger than you.”

  Nina smiled. “I know Kung Fu.” She winked and made a fake fighting gesture.

  Hayley’s levity turned to desperation when Nina got up to leave. “Please don’t go. Can’t you spend the night?”

  Not wanting to use the same excuse that her father did, she took a knee to look her in the eye. “Hayley… because of my job, it would not be safe for you if I take you with me right now. Do you think you can wait one day? Would it be okay if I came by tomorrow to see how you were doing?”

  “You mean it? You’ll come back?”

  Nina patted her on the shoulder. “I promise. Here, take my PID. Vid me if you need anything. I’ll stay with you until you’re asleep.”

  On the ride home, she ran background checks on both of Hayley’s parents. The mother lived in East City, toward the northern part. Family court records indicated she wanted nothing to do with her daughter. For a reason not identified in the file, a police liaison had reached out to her about a year ago inquiring about taking Hayley due to the situation with her father. The woman laughed and told him to put her up for adoption if ‘the worthless idiot’ could not handle her.

  Nina pulled over and stared down at herself. How could a woman like that be allowed to have children? Nina slid her fingers through the seam of the ballistic suit and touched skin. Her belly felt normal, but it would never produce a child. She cried a little, right there in the car, mourning the son or daughter she would never know.

  “It’s not impossible.” Vincent’s voice came out of the car’s dashboard.

  Nina clenched her teeth. Not now, leave me alone.

  “Check with Hardin. When they took your central nervous system out of your body, they harvested your eggs too.” Vincent sounded clinical.

  “What?” Nina’s eyes snapped up to glare at the console. “Who is this? What the fuck do you want? If I get my hands on you I’ll beat you to death with your own spine.”

  “Hey sweetie, easy. It’s me.” He stammered. “I can tell what you’re thinking. You were mad at that bitch for turning her back on her own kid when you can’t have them.”

  Nina’s hands shook with anger and grief. Vincent would never talk to her like that. Whoever this was must know she stopped believing him. It would be easy enough to ask Hardin if that was true, but how could this voice know what she thought? She stared at the console for a minute before the freakish feeling fell away. Emotion gave way to reason and she pieced it together. Someone watching her net activity could tell she looked at that file and then cried while touching her stomach. That also meant that someone watched her now in real time.

  Nina jumped out of the car and swept the area, finding nothing but a few startled pedestrians backing away from her waving gun.

  Vincent’s voice came out of the car. “Are you feeling okay, hon?”

  Nina growled. “Where are you, fucker?”

  “That hurts, Nina. How can you talk to me like that after what I did for you?”

  She flew back into the car and slammed the door. “What exactly did you do for me? “Vincent”-if that’s even your name.”

  A period of silence came, long enough for Nina to wonder if the phenomenon of the voice departed for good that night. Then he spoke again, making her jump.

  “In hindsight, it was stupid of me to run at you like that. I should have moved the car and hit him with the Starburst again… maybe twice more. I wanted to draw his attacks away long enough for Div 5 to get there. All that matters is you are alive.”

  Nina squinted. “Wouldn’t you have rather I joined you?”

  “How could you think that?”

  “That’s not what you said a few days ago.” Nina’s tone verged on patronizing. “What happened to you’ll be waiting for me on the other side.” She powered the car up and drove.

  Vincent chuckled. “You took it the wrong way. I didn’t mean for you to do that! However long it takes, whatever time that fate gives you… when it ends, I’ll be here.”

  Nina was thankful that cybereyes did not blur as she cried. She did not believe that this was Vincent, but she also did not convince herself that it was not.

  That would be up to that blonde from Division 0.

  “Lieutenant, do you copy?” Samantha Cole’s image appeared on the console with an urgent look.

  “Go ahead, Cole.” Nina flipped on hover mode and pulled into the sky.

  “Whisper 6 has eyes on your guy. It looks like he and his Asian friend are dropping off a truck full of chemicals at a warehouse in Sector 47. We have confirmed Rafi Vas on site.”

  The face appeared in her vision. A freelance bomb maker that worked for whoever cared to pay him, several countries wanted him. Maybe she could talk Hardin into trading him to the Mossad for the real story on Itai. He had ties to every terrorist organization known to man, and cared little about the political agendas of his clientele.

  “Have the containment team set up a perimeter right away.” She shot a glance at the NavMap screen. “I’ll be there in four minutes.”

  Nina slammed the accelerator forward, pushing the car up its limit of almost four hundred miles per hour. Only a doll, or the boosted, had the reaction time to control a car at that speed within city limits.

  She wanted to be damn sure she did not miss the party.

  he hovercar rounded a corner, hurtling at a perpendicular stream of traffic emerging from a side street, higher than normal for this area. Her boosted reflexes turned instant death into several perceptible seconds to react. She rolled the car on its side, aiming for a gap between the bumpers of two c
ars. She jammed on the vertical thrusters, making the car slide sideways to match pace with their lateral motion until she cleared on the other side and leveled off.

  “Now that’s more like it!” Vincent cheered.

  She ignored him. What would have been a deadly blur of color to a normal person had slowed to the point where it felt like a high-speed drive. The poor bastards in the cars she just passed probably had no idea why their vehicles spun like tops. Nonetheless, she pulled up higher to avoid another close call. A minute away from her destination, the comm link crackled to life in the form of the holographic head of someone from Samantha’s team.

  “Lieutenant, there’s been a complication. Holy shit, is that speed right?” He blinked. “Your guy got into a car with a foreign national. Not just any foreign national… Masaru Kurotai.” The name made him cringe.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Nina sighed her way around a corner that left dozens of windows shuddering. “Let me guess, the son of Hideo Kurotai?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “I don’t understand how we can ‘retire’ people like that once we prove their culpability, but we can’t even investigate them officially without a whiff of something. From one extreme to the other.”

  “I hear that.” He chuckled. “The warehouse perimeter is now secure, but Kurotai and the other guy slipped out. Rafi is still there trading shots with our ground team.”

  “Lieutenant?” Cole’s voice came through. “We got positive contact on Itai Korin there as well. I got him on video shaking hands with your boy.”

  “Thanks.” Nina grumbled. “You’re going to tell me next that no one saw him leave… and I know he won’t be there.”

  “There’s nothing on the cams that show him exiting the containment area. There’s no way out of that building without being seen by Whisper 6.”

  “I’m not blaming you or your team, but that’s what you said last time.” Nina’s voice was flat. “This guy must have some kind of optical cloaking… try an EM spectrum scan.”

  “I’m not as young as I look. I did that already.” Cole grinned. “Nothing.”

  Nina backed off on the throttle as the warehouse came into view. Airbrake flaps opened all over the exterior of the car, sending the vehicle into a shuddering wobble. She rolled in a wide sweeping left and glanced down at a junkyard full of barrels and metal junk. Small puffs of blue flame flashed where rifles traded shots from both sides. Up ahead, the whispercraft hovered, silent and motionless; its angular lines an ebon crack in the sky.

  Its narrow front end drew out to a point from a thick body studded with sensor equipment. From the thrust pods at the back, two fins almost large enough to be called wings ran up and to the side while one went straight down and to the rear. A long feeler swiveled from either side above the troop doors like the antenna of a giant insect; twelve foot long railgun sniping weapons. A line of blur smeared through the air from one, to the ground where a man firing on police exploded like a stepped-on roach. She tapped into the feed coming from the whispercraft, opening a tactical overlay in her vision. The whisper’s sensors were surpassed only by what C-Branch refused to share with the rest of the government; the thermal outlines of the men in the building had such detail she could tell how well hung they were.

  One man hid in an upstairs office, scurrying away from the gunfight with two others moving in a guarding posture between him and the hostilities.

  That’s gotta be Rafi.

  Nina programmed the autopilot for a nice gentle landing on the roof and opened the door. Still thirty feet up, she jumped as the car passed over a skylight closest to that point. Her coat trailed behind her like a cape as she smashed boots-first through the transparent pyramid, coming down amid a rain of fragments and debris in the hallway.

  Myofiber muscles in her legs absorbed the incredible shock of her landing, transferring it into a forward roll that cracked the tile floor. As the somersault became a leap, she put three bullets into the man on the left before her momentum carried her into a flying forearm bash. The speed of her unexpected entrance had caught them both off guard; the second man barely had time to inhale a pre-scream breath before her elbow slammed into his chest, crushing his armored vest and everything under it.

  The strike connected before her feet hit the ground, turning him into a battering ram that blasted through the steel door behind him. He landed dead on top of the detached slab, sliding into a desk.

  Nina leapt the dead men and went after Rafi who had one leg out the window. He turned on her as she burst into the room; firing. She slalomed between three bullets, leaning just enough to lose only two strands of hair as she sprinted up and swatted the gun out of his hand.

  He raised his hands. “Don’t kill me! I surrender.”

  Her somatic response system detected duplicity.

  She grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him close. “We’re going to have a nice long talk, Rafi.”

  “Of course!” He blurted, and exhaled a yellow mist in her face.

  “Gasbag. Cute.” Nina bounced his face off the desk, twice, and held him back up to look him in the eye as blood trickled out of his nose.

  “Doesn’t work too well through a tox filter, Rafi. Didn’t they teach you anything in terror school?”

  He stared at her, seeming to lose the will to fight. Then, in a spritz of blood, a trio of Nano claws burst from his right hand and went for her side. Her one handed grip on his shirt released, and she rolled into him. Her hips slid away from the blades as she caught his wrist with the hand that half a second ago held him by the collar. Rafi was quick, but not faster than a military grade doll.

  His eyes widened with astonishment as she spun him in a violent tango and wedged his blades into the wall. He screamed as he fought against her, the look on his face contorting to legitimate fear as he realized she was too strong to be human. She winked as understanding dawned, and then wrenched her hand to snap his claws off in the wall. For a doll, having Nano claws shattered would be the nuisance of losing a weapon. Rafi, however, lacked plastisteel bones; the blade housings mounted to living tissue. The torque required to break them also disintegrated the bones in his right arm. He screamed through clenched teeth, cradling the sack of flesh that dangled from his elbow.

  “Wana go for the other side jackass?” Nina flung him to the ground.

  He slid into the desk, hard enough to dent it.

  “What… what do you want?” He coughed, dragging himself across on the floor.

  Nina walked after him, putting her gun under her arm. “Let’s start with who you’re making the bomb for.”

  “I don’t know his name. He’s got a French accent.”

  “French?” Nina lifted an eyebrow.

  “Yes.” Rafi screamed.

  “Are you sure? It couldn’t have been anything else?”

  Rafi stared at her. “What are you saying?”

  She stopped and folded her arms. “Could he have been an Israeli?”

  To her surprise, his fear seemed to fade for just a moment. “It… no… it didn’t really, well I suppose it could have sounded like someone trying to fake a Hebrew accent.” He was all of a sudden quite cordial, out of place for the situation.

  “Fake an accent?” Nina squinted. “Why would an ex-Mossad agent need to fake the accent of the country he came from?”

  “How should I know?” Rafi offered a believable smile. “Maybe to throw you off?”

  In the corner of her eye, the fight wound down on the tactical overlay. Blue friendlies swarmed downstairs. “Where did he go?”

  Rafi braced himself against the desk as he sat up. “He was never here, just talking on a holo call with the Russian.”

  “A Russian was here?” Nina pulled Rafi to his feet.

  He nodded. “Anatoly―”

  “Nemsky.” Nina finished for him. “Dammit. Where did he go?”

  “He left before the chemicals showed up.” Rafi waved his intact arm to emphasize his words.

  �
��We have him on video standing with you when the truck arrived. Where did he go?”

  Rafi shook his head. “Maybe one of the mercenaries I work with?”

  “No.” Nina showed him the footage, pointing at Itai. “This guy.”

  “I have never seen him before.” Rafi grew alarmed. “That video is fake! What is this, the ACC? What are you trying to set me up for?”

  Nina stared at him. The sweat dripping over his forehead patted into the floor like clapping hands. Hairline glows of light measured pupil dilation, widening of the eyes, breathing, perspiration; her somatic system confirmed his truthfulness. She scowled.

  A tactical team led by SO Carter entered. Her white hair made the black armored visor it framed even darker.

  Nina shoved Rafi over to them. “Take him in for processing. Carter? What are you bored? Why is a senior operative taking point with an insertion team?”

  Carter helped Rafi along with a shove. “Hardin’s vagina is throbbing about the sniper re-qual.” The rest of her team got rigid at her casual demeanor with a Lieutenant.

  Nina laughed. “Why not just get it out of the way?”

  “Don’t even get me started…” She grumbled. “Lieutenant. The test parameters are skewed, it is an unrealistic scenario. Besides, I did it five months ago.”

  “You’re making a big deal out of one bullet. 89/90 isn’t bad.”

  “It’s the principle of it.” Carter left with the escort, taking Rafi downstairs.

  Nina would leave the interrogation to the pros. She had other things to deal with.

  “Whisper 2, this is Lieutenant Duchenne, do you copy?”

  “Go ahead LT.” A confident male voice came back over the comm.

  “Do you have eyes on the package?”

  “Roger that LT. The subjects went in two different directions. The foreign national dropped your boy off in a grey zone and left. Nearly ran a civilian down trying to get out of there.”