The Resurrected Man

by Sean Williams

  “I see,” he said.

  “The first body was accompanied by the opening page of the most famous of all the anti-KTI propaganda. I think you will be familiar with it. It quotes in its title a twentieth-century scholar by the name of Daniel C. Dennet.”

  “‘The Murdering Twinmaker,’” he recalled. “Lindsay helped draft that pamphlet.”

  “Precisely. Yet another connection between the Twinmaker and you.”

  “If this keeps up, you'll have me believing it, too.”

  QUALIA didn't laugh, but neither did he.

  “You actually call him that?” he asked. “The Twinmaker?”

  “Yes. It is suprisingly appropriate,” e said. “But that is all I will tell you for now. Officer Whitesmith is keen to obtain information only you can provide, and I am under increasing pressure outside this conversation to wrest it from you. Are you willing, now, to answer some of our questions?”

  Jonah resigned himself to the inevitability of being interrogated.

  “Okay. I'll do my best.”

  “That's all we can hope for. Firstly, I want to check that we are correctly interpreting the processes occurring within your brain. As you may remember, I will be unable to tell if you are lying, only whether the memories you accessed are genuine or invented. I will need to ask you some simple questions to which we already know the answers in order to calibrate the cage properly.”

  “Just get on with it.”

  “Very well. Let's start with your profession. How are you registered on the United Republics of Australasia electoral database?”

  “As a freelance investigator.”

  “A private eye?”

  “If you prefer that term, yes. I don't.”

  “You operate under your real name?”

  “Yes. I have my own data-acquisition company.”

  “Do you recall your license number?”

  “No. I normally keep that sort of business information on my overseer, and you tell me it's been wiped. It should be on file somewhere.”

  “What about your universal GLITCH identifier?”

  “My UGI is…” He thought for a long minute. The memory itched at him, but wouldn't surface. “I don't know.”

  “Would you recognise it if you were to hear or see it?” QUALIA asked.

  “There's only one way to find out.”

  Barely had he finished speaking when an alphanumeric code appeared in place of the composite victim.

  “FFDLB,” he read aloud, “01458927. Yes, that's it.”

  “Are you certain of that, Jonah?”

  “Positive. I've had it since I turned eighteen.”

  “The memory is genuine, according to the cage,” QUALIA confirmed. “At least, it looks more genuine than fake or suggested. However, I'm afraid you're wrong. This is your old identifying code. On choosing the Non-Disclosure Option, you were given a new UGI.”

  Jonah did his best to recall another number, but failed; not even a tickle. “You keep talking about me choosing Privacy,” he protested. “To be honest, I can't imagine why I'd ever have done that.”

  “Most people do it because they have strong ideological or emotional needs that can only be satisfied by setting themselves apart from the majority of voting citizens and the bureaucracies that serve them; they want their information to be unobtainable and are prepared to pay for the privilege. Others do it in order to hide.”

  “Neither fits me, I'm afraid.”

  “Neither fits your memory of you,” QUALIA said. “At some point, you obviously changed your mind. Can you think of any reason why you might have done so?”

  “Off the top of my head, no, I can't.”

  “Maybe it will come to you later. What was your date of birth, instead?”

  “May fifth, 2034.”

  “Your parents' names?”

  “My birth mother was Margaret Janette McEwen.” That information was as clear as it had ever been, much to his relief. “I was fertilised in vivo from an anonymous donor egg, with sperm provided by my genetic father, Vincent Karl Apolloni. He died before I was born.”

  “Lindsay Carlaw was your father by adoption?”

  “Yes. He was a friend of my mother's. She lost custody when I was two, and I went to live with him.”

  “Is he still alive?”

  The grief rose again. “No.”

  “Do you recall how and when he died?”

  “Yes. Look, I don't want to talk about this.”

  “Do you remember what you did after he died?”

  “For Christ's sake—”

  “Please answer, Jonah.”

  He stopped, thought seriously about the question.

  “No,” he eventually said. The answer surprised him. He knew he had been escorted by a member of the bomb squad out of the QUIDDITY lab and into the hallway outside, where a medic had dressed the shrapnel wound in his shoulder. Everything up to that point seemed as vivid as though it had happened yesterday. Beyond it, however, he drew a blank. “I don't remember anything after then.”

  “Until now.”

  “That's right. Until I talked to Mary in the bath.”

  “Interesting,” QUALIA mused. “I'm beginning to see a pattern, Jonah. Your long-term memories are intact up to a point. You can't recall your new UGI address, for instance, or what you did after Lindsay Carlaw died. The date of his death—April eleventh, 2066—appears to be a boundary of some sort. Yet your short-term memory seems to be functioning well since your awakening. How much do you recall about that experience?”

  To hell with it: I want to know what happened after my father died! He came so close to uttering the words that he was amazed the prevocal monitor didn't pick them up. There must have been an investigation, an inquest, some sort of conclusion reached—he must have grieved—but he couldn't remember any of it. The question of why someone had killed Lindsay along with his brainchild, QUIDDITY, was as open and as driving, to him, as if it had happened only days ago. Had anyone been convicted of the murder? Had his father died for nothing? What had he, Jonah, done to avenge the crime? Surely he must have done something.

  But he knew there was no point forcing the issue now. He had to cooperate if he was going to get any answers at all. Once he had demonstrated that he wasn't the Twinmaker—which he anticipated wouldn't take long—he could focus on the issues concerning him more.

  He thought back to the nightmare, tried to recall exactly what had happened. “I was in the spa, in my unit.”

  “Do you know what you were doing in there?”

  “I'm not sure. I was in some sort of fluid. I felt like I was drowning.”

  “Not quite. You were immersed in protein gel, held in a state of artificial hibernation by a high dose of maintenance nanomachines. Similarly, your mind was in a vegetative-meditative state under the influence of the InSight agents I mentioned earlier.”

  “I told you I don't know anything about that.”

  “Which concurs with the cut-off date. You obviously entered hibernation after the death of Lindsay Carlaw. Furthermore, you can't even have considered doing so prior to then—or else you would remember doing that, at least. The entire hibernation incident, from immersion to your awakening this morning, has been completely erased.”

  “Are you telling me that I was in hibernation the entire time? For three years?”

  “Yes. Separate analyses of the gel, which was replete with toxic waste-products at your point of awakening, and the maintenance agents, which had mutated gradually with time, concur that you were in hibernation for approximately thirty-six months. The dates between which you have no memory encompass thirty-eight months, well within the bounds of reason.

  “In addition, InSight provides us with another means of ascertaining when you underwent hibernation. Its agents consist of self-replicating artificial viruses designed to infest and stimulate specific locations in the human brain. Their modified DNA contains markers that change every generation. From these markers, we can extrapolate the da
te on which InSight was first installed within your system. That date is April nineteenth, 2066—eight days after the death of Lindsay Carlaw.”

  Eight days. Jonah was unexpectedly relieved by that fact. The only conscious time he had lost was little more than a week, not the three years he had originally assumed. Even if he still had no idea what he had done in that time, the thought of finding out was a little less daunting.

  “But—” The relief was followed by puzzlement. “If I was in the maintenance gel for that long, how can I be the killer?”

  “I will answer that question directly,” e said. “Suffice it to say that you are still considered a primary suspect, and will continue to be until the EJC comes to terms with the more unusual aspects of the Twinmaker crimes. You must help us prove your innocence, if that is what you want to do.”

  “Of course it is. I'm not a serial killer.” And I have more important things to do—like finding out why my father is dead.

  “Then you can begin that process now by letting us have your current UGI. I know you can't remember it, but you can apply to GLITCH for it to be revealed to you. If you give it to us, in turn, I will explain why we need it.”

  He was about to agree when a nagging doubt made him reconsider. “I must have chosen Privacy for a reason,” he said. “Until I know that reason, I'm reluctant to revoke it.”

  “You don't have to revoke it at all, Jonah. The information will go no further, I swear.”

  “I don't see how you can live up to that promise given the situation you're in—with KTI infiltrated by someone from the outside.”

  “True. However, there is an alternative. You can give us your UGI, then when you leave Artsutanov Station you can change it to another. That way, your Privacy will remain unviolated.”

  The puzzlement remained. On an intuitive level, he suspected that QUALIA's reasoning was flawed. His anger flared again at the thought that he might be wasting time. “And what do you get from this? Why is my UGI so bloody important?”

  “It is important because it will allow us to check whether the Twinmaker has used it in the last thirty-eight months.”

  “But you can't steal a UGI,” he protested. “Every use is checked against file records to ensure a match with the holder. Short of radical surgery, there's no way anyone could—”

  He stopped there. His mind had raced ahead of him, giving him a glimpse of where QUALIA was headed.

  “There is a way,” e said in a voice as grave as the realisation that had just struck him. “The same way that enables the killer to copy his victims, one by one, leaving the originals to go about their everyday lives completely unaware that they have been horrifically tortured and murdered.”

  The thought made him feel dizzy. “They're still alive?”

  “Yes, Jonah. Can you see now why we call him the Twinmaker?”

  He did, all too well, but was too stunned to speak.

  “We want you to explain how he's doing it,” QUALIA said. “Or failing that, how you would have done it. In the end, that may amount to one and the same thing.”

  “No—that's impossible.”

  “Is it?”

  “But how?”

  “You tell us, Jonah. If Officer Whitesmith's theory is correct, the Twinmaker is you—another you copied illegally three years ago by the d-mat process. That's how he can use your UGI. The only difference between him and you is a matter of time and memory.”

  Jonah floundered; he felt like he was thinking through a fog, so unreal was the scenario he found himself being asked to consider.

  QUALIA asked him: “Are you beginning to understand, now, why it's so important for us to have your cooperation?”

  It hit him then: “You want me to help you to hunt him down.”

  “Exactly, Jonah,” QUALIA said. “Who better to catch a serial killer than the killer himself?”

  Once the decision was made, he set immediately to work, letting his pattern-matchers in GLITCH follow the woman while he attended to the details. Ordinarily he would have planned for days before striking: preparing the transfer with obsessive care, rehearsing the capture over and over until he was certain nothing could go wrong. In reality, however, there was very little he needed to do in advance; the procedure had been surgically imprinted onto his amygdala, and he could rely on it to respond correctly and rapidly to any contingency without need for conscious intervention. Besides, he had practised many times—in the dry and the wet, as EJC agents said. All he had to do was decide, and it would be done.

  He had very little choice, anyway. Time was passing, and if it wasn't to be her, he would have to find someone else. Although the sense of anticipation careful planning had once given him would be absent this time, there was just as much pleasure in a patient prowl followed by a blitz attack. Besides, the anticipation was more than compensated for by watching the MIU chase its tail in a futile attempt to track him down. It was worth the risk to keep Jonah McEwen destabilised, before the aftershock of his awakening abated.

  He scanned the girl's file once again as she walked through Konigsplatz to make sure he hadn't missed any warning signs. Despite being a Full-Disclosure Citizen, she was protected by the von Trojan Laws—legislation modelled on the Uncertainty Principle that guaranteed even the FDC's a measure of privacy. As a result, at any given time he could know some things about her but not all: her available credit or which establishment held it for her but not both; her age or her date of birth likewise; where she lived or her profession, and so on.

  This was fine by him. He didn't want to know anything about her. He didn't even need her name to do what he wanted. The point was that the victims looked the same. All he really needed to know was by which method she travelled, and he had correctly guessed this within minutes of first seeing her. There was nothing in her file to suggest that she wasn't the ideal target.

  His heart beat measurably faster as she left Konigsplatz and headed for a public d-mat facility on Regenstrasse.

  The booths weren't busy at that time of day. Of ten, three were vacant, their matte-black doors unsealed and partly ajar. Their interiors were dark, a green strip along the upper frame of each indicating that it was available for use. She strolled casually in their direction, not deciding until the last moment which she would choose. When she did, she picked the second from the end. The door slid open at the touch of her palm, and she stepped inside.

  He moved rapidly, switching from GLITCH to the KTI network. The booth, not much larger on the inside than an average closet, had barely activated its sterile interior before he knew its registration number and precise location. From there he patched into its feed and installed the program designed to divert the transmission.

  All of this was highly illegal, of course. He knew better than anyone the risks involved in tampering with KTI infrastructure; those risks had united most countries in passing laws to prevent them arising. But some things were more important.

  He watched the girl as she closed the door to the booth, shutting out the rest of the world.

  “Prepare for delivery,” he instructed his assistant. “Begin on my command.”

  Not wanting to interrupt his view of the girl, he made his way by feel from the chair he had been occupying and into his own private booth. With one palm on the I-R link and a small part of his brain coordinating the transfer, he watched her perform similar actions in her own booth.

  First, she keyed in her UGI and confirmed it with a retinal scan. The booth then responded with a request for information from KTI: it wanted to know where she was going and whether the trip was urgent. She fed it an address and selected an ASAP route, one that would get her home quickly but not override any emergency services. The booth ran the request through KTI, which checked her debit account and judged that she could indeed afford such an option. KTI also notified a nearby Global Access Point inlet of the Pool that its services would soon be required. The inlet in turn allocated a buffer to accommodate the expected data and began clearing its output l
ines.

  He marvelled, as always, at the complexity of the process and the ease with which it was performed. From booth to KTI to Global Access Point inlet to the Pool at one end of the transfer; from node to node within the network of supercomputers, along the uBNS—ultra high-speed Backbone Network Services—and across interchanges where legislative lines were involved; then back again in reverse, from Pool to booth, at the other end. There were so many places and ways in which something could go wrong—yet it rarely did. And even when it did, who missed a few molecules anyway? That was all the data represented. The accumulated mass of tissue lost in five years of commercial d-mat operation amounted to little more than a toenail.

  He smiled at the oft-quoted statistic, so loved by d-mat proponents and so hated by its detractors. Nothing was ever quite so simple, as he of all people should know.

  The girl removed her hand from the I-R input and leaned the plastic bag against one wall of the booth. There was a mirror on the back of the door. Facing it, she locked eyes with her reflection and folded her hands across her stomach. Then she assumed an expression that very few people saw on anyone but themselves. KTI technicians called it “grazing.”

  D-mat transfers were sometimes “incoherent” between each terminus and could interrupt a chain of thought in mid-flow, which could be inconvenient or distressing for the person experiencing it. Many techniques—from counting sheep to inducing a v-med state—claimed to neutralise this effect; all gave the user a vacant expression similar to that of a cow in clover.

  He watched her graze for what felt like an eternity. During the hiatus between request and transfer, when thoughts were still, time could seem to stretch forever. He considered checking the booth's scheduling processor to calculate to within a microsecond when the analysis would begin, but he preferred not to. Grazing was an experience he could share with his victim, thereby bringing them subtly together. It gave him time to consider what she might really be thinking. Did she wonder whether she was being watched? Was she afraid? Had she ever thought about what happened inside the d-mat booth she left behind as she transferred?