The Resurrected Man

by Sean Williams

  If not, she would soon find out. One of her would, anyway. This he promised her as the seconds slowed down and time paused in the instant between here and there, as measured by the girl in the booth. The girl who looked so remarkably like Marylin Blaylock…

  In the all-too-brief moment of reflection, there was an instant where he seemed to be looking at himself, seeing his own fears and doubts in the woman's face.

  Was he afraid too?

  Did he truly know what he was doing?

  Then the moment passed and his implants triggered the capture routine. Searing white light filled his visual feed as the d-mat booth began to analyse her body and its accoutrements. The girl melted into the blaze like a candle in a furnace, then disappeared entirely from sight.

  He severed the VR line as his own booth hissed into life. With his assistant's help he took her—yes, he thought with relish, he took her!—further than she had ever gone before.

  Not just across, this time, but into the thin red line between life and death…

  The door to the d-mat booth opened with a hiss, and Marylin stepped out of it. Barely had she registered the scuffed grey corridor outside when she almost walked into Jason Fassini, the plain-clothes MIU agent she partnered with when working away from the rest of the team.

  “Jabolo, Marylin,” he said, holding up his hands to prevent them from colliding.

  She stopped in time. “Didn't see you there, Jason.”

  “I've been waiting for you.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No worries. I have an unmarked car on standby outside.” He nodded at the bulky briefcase she held in one hand. “Ready for clone-patrol, zsaru?”

  “As ready as I'll ever be.” She looked around to get her bearings. If she remembered the floor plan correctly, the secure d-mat area was on the basement level of the EJC building; there were elevators leading to ground level around the corner, or fire stairs behind her. She chose the stairs. “And kill the CRE argot, will you? I'm not in the mood.”

  He followed her, boots clomping heavily on the steps. His long limbs, free-flowing red-brown hair and untucked floral shirt hadn't changed since they last worked together; she felt like an anal-retentive next to him just for being in her black-and-greys.

  “Rough night?” he asked.

  “Not your problem.”

  “Aye, ma'am. I can take a hint.”

  He fell silent, and she cursed herself for being so abrupt. He was just trying to make conversation, and there were better ways to let him know she wasn't feeling up to it.

  Her day had started badly the moment her internal alarm went off, warning her that she'd overslept. That in itself wasn't unusual. D-mat hangover was a way of life for those in the MIU, even though it operated on a 25-hour schedule to account for missing time. It also paid its senior officers enough to afford lipid balancing. Theoretically, she should have managed. Occasionally, however, it caught up with her, and when it did, it was always a shock.

  Crossing time-zones several times a day caused the problem. Living in Melbourne, she was seven hours out of sync with Goliath time, which, in yesterday's case, had been five hours ahead of Jonah's apartment in Faux Sydney. Every time she went through a d-mat booth made it half an hour worse. She could stick to the MIU's schedule as strictly as she liked, but there was little she could do about external cues, such as the sun, and the way they affected her body. And here she was standing on the other side of the planet, sixteen hours behind her home time.

  Perhaps, she thought, the shock wasn't that it affected her once in a blue moon. The shock was that it didn't affect her every morning.

  That morning, she'd somehow struggled through breakfast and a brisk warmup before logging onto the MIU workspace and letting her sentry know she was awake. The two-room unit she occupied was one of a block of eight suburban safe-houses leased to the EJC by the Melbourne City Council. It didn't have its own d-mat booth, but there was a block of six down the hall that serviced the entire building. Its fittings weren't fancy, and nowhere near as advanced as the latest fully interactive apartments enjoyed by the well-off, but that suited her. As long as she had somewhere she could sleep alone and listen to the occasional polka without neighbours complaining, she was happy.

  Two minutes after she'd logged onto the workspace, while she was in the middle of doing her dishes manually, Whitesmith called to give her the news. The Twinmaker victim in Jonah's booth had been identified, and Marylin had been chosen to conduct the initial interview. That annoyed her for a start—she had better things to do than waste time on a task anyone in MIU could have done just as well—but it only got worse. They wanted her to do it in person.

  “Why, Odi?” she asked. “What's different about this one?”

  “On the surface, nothing. Have you seen the autopsy report?”

  “Not yet, but—”

  “Have a look then, to bring yourself up to date. Follow the usual drill. There's something else we might want you to do while you're in the field, but don't ask what. It might come to nothing.”

  She simmered for a moment. “We” obviously excluded her. “What about Jonah?”

  “QUALIA's expecting to finish the REM probe in half an hour. KTI wants him to rest awhile, then they'll bring him up to real-time so we can interrogate him properly.”

  “And what have you learned so far?” she asked, curiosity temporarily overriding her annoyance.

  “We have his UGI and are applying for a search warrant as we speak. Shouldn't be long before we know what that tells us.” He smiled. “QUALIA's also pinpointed dates for the memory loss. They concur with his earlier statements. We'll be checking for slipups later.”

  “Even if you find any, that won't prove anything.” It would always be contentious in a courtroom whether verbal discrepancies were the result of genuine error or inconsistent lying. “Got any hard evidence at all?”

  “We've mapped the brain damage and confirmed that it was caused by InSight agents. That's about it.”

  “Did he say anything?

  “That he knows nothing about the Twinmaker, of course.”

  “What sort of idiot wouldn't, guilty or not?”

  “We had to ask, Marylin,” Whitesmith said, a thick edge of weariness in his voice. His image in her workspace, however, looked alert.

  “You really should use a voice synthesiser, Odi,” she said. “Did you get any sleep at all last night?”

  “A couple of hours, here and there.”

  She doubted it was that much. “I'll do what you want this time. Out of pity.”

  “That's very kind of you.”

  She walked from her kitchenette to the bathroom and turned on the shower. “Let me get ready. I'll call you in fifteen minutes with a list of hardware.”

  “Do that. But don't go overboard. There really is nothing special about this one. I hope there won't be any more surprises waiting for you today.”

  I won't bet on it, she had thought, stepping into the shower to scrub herself clean and to apply nanofood to her scalp. If there was one thing she had learnt in the last forty-eight hours, it was to assume nothing.

  The foyer of the EJC building was empty apart from two sentry robots guarding bulletproof glass doors leading out into the street. The sentries were slim, matte-grey machines suspended like sleeping bats from runners in the high ceiling, weapons folded at their sides in perpetual readiness. Neither of them moved as she and Fassini approached, but she knew they were being closely watched.

  “Do we need to check in with the locals?” she asked.

  “All done.” Fassini grinned at her breaking of the silence. “They're pretty relaxed here. It's not as if we're making a bust or anything else that might encroach upon their jurisdiction. That doesn't mean they'll let us d-mat to the site, but it's no big problem taking a car the rest of the way.”

  The glass doors slid open, letting in a blast of hot, humid air. Marylin winced as sunlight struck her full in the face. Her partner touched her arm, guiding
her to where the vehicle—a white four-seater sedan—waited for them.

  “Give me the rundown. You're more used to this than I am.”

  “Yeah, it feels weird having you here instead of piggybacking.” The street-side door of the car opened to let them in. Fassini slid across the rear seat, dragging his shirttails after him. “Can't help but wonder why.”

  “Likewise.” Marylin chose to sit on the same seat as Fassini, placing the briefcase between them. She preferred to see where she was headed rather than where she had been. “Blame upstairs, not me.”

  “They're checking up on me?”

  “No, but it's not a social visit either.” The door slid shut, enclosing them both in a bubble of cool air. As soon as they had settled, the car slid silently away from the curb. He had obviously programmed the destination in advance. “The rundown, Jason.”

  “Right, right.” He winked. “Her name is Yoland Suche-Thomas. You know that already, I presume?”

  “Yes. Age thirty-four, no dependants, an employee of NuSense. I gather she writes CRE scripts—which should please you.”

  “Wrong genre. She's into romance, not drama.”

  “Not so far apart, sometimes.” She slid the briefcase onto the seat opposite. “Go on.”

  “We got her address from a contact in NuSense itself. GLITCH says she works from home, so the chances are good we'll find her there.”

  Marylin nodded, inwardly cursing the von Trojan laws that prevented them from tracking the woman's UGI directly without her permission. “We'll manage.”

  “I guess we'll have to.” His grin flashed. “You've seen the autopsy report?”

  This time she could say she had. Yoland Suche-Thomas was blonde, attractive, and bore more than a passing resemblance to the other victims. She had also been tortured over a prolonged period, maybe as many as five days, and had ultimately died from thirst. Her tissues contained traces of common pharmaceuticals and repair agents, confirming that the Twinmaker had administered enough first aid to keep her alive until he had finished with her. The barely visible scars on her arms that Marylin had noted during her inspection of the body had, however, turned out to be nothing more sinister than marks left behind by tattoo-erasers.

  A key part of the pathologist's examination had been the removal of inert markers in the body's spine. These markers, installed by KTI the first time a person used d-mat and updated on every subsequent passage, recorded the time and termini of each d-mat jump plus a partial UGI of the individual. This information, combined with genetic code plucked from her dead cells, had enabled the MIU's forensic laboratory to identify the victim.

  She had been kidnapped on June 12, while in transit from a private booth in Johannesburg. Why she had been in South Africa, who she had been visiting and where she presently was, remained unknown. Her file listed a Significant Other in Johannesburg—maybe family or an ex-partner—but there was no way to be sure who it was without her input. Not even the EJC could violate her basic rights without giving a good reason and KTI was keen to avoid having to go through such a process. The MIU data-miners had already exhausted their available options by finding out this much about her, reducing them to old-fashioned guesswork.

  “The match is good,” Fassini said, his tone strictly professional and face no longer smiling.

  “Very,” she agreed. She, too, found it hard to forget that this woman, apart from the hair, looked exactly like her. “How far away are we?”

  “I'll take that to mean ‘How long are we going to be cooped up in here?’ Not long, I promise.”

  “That isn't why I asked.” Although it was annoying that regulations forbade them from d-matting directly to their destination, the pause in proceedings was giving her time to think. “To be honest, driving has become something of a novelty for me, lately. It's nice to really travel again.”

  “The pleasure is all mine.” He tipped an imaginary chauffeur's cap and put his feet up on the seat opposite them. “She lives in a high-density block on the site of the old Bush Intercontinental Airport. Nothing fancy, but as tight as a worm's arse. Security obviously bothers her more than Privacy.”

  “That's ironic. The one we're dealing with is much more dangerous than a Bert or a Mudilo.”

  “Actually, the biggest problem in this neck of the woods are the Vankas.”

  She didn't recognise the term, but the assonance was blatant. “After the obvious?”

  “No. It's the name usually given to the village idiot in Russian folk tales. They adopted it principally for that meaning, although the pun does give it extra credence.” He leaned his head on one hand and looked at her sideways. “You're out of touch, Marylin. It's dangerous.”

  “Not really. I doubt I'll ever work the streets again.”

  “Doesn't matter. You have to go out there sometime, whether you're working or not. That's why I follow the CREs and learn the argot. If a Zonta bails me up in a dark alley, I want to be sure we speak the same language.”

  She didn't respond. It wouldn't be fair to criticise his version of reality, grungily naive though she thought it, when hers was no less subjective. Yes, she was isolated from the desperate demographic levels of society, the gangs and dope-pushers and tech-mongers that named themselves after village idiots and masturbators, but she was hunting much more refined prey these days. She had earned the right to do so. Eighteen months with Jonah had been more than enough, and she had no desire to return to that world.

  Outside the window of the car, urban scenery glided by with hypnotic smoothness. Trees whipped past on a regular basis, genetically modified to thrive in a CO-rich atmosphere; green islands were gradually taking the place of lanes that, even as recently as ten years ago, had been full of cars. In the middle distance, the city centre showed many signs of demolition. Business was moving out and the buildings were being torn down or abandoned unless declared “aesthetically relevant.” This was less a lingering after-effect of the Slow War than just another indication of changing times. If VTC had weakened the argument for centralised administration centres, then d-mat had killed it entirely. Cities like Faux Sydney, which existed in isolation from any other urban center, connected to the world only by d-mat and name, had been an inevitable development.

  Indeed, if her life continued along its present path, she would soon find herself living in such an environment. Common sense suggested that she should move to Artsutanov Station and MIU-ACOC, where she would be theoretically safe from the Twinmaker should he decide to move against her. It would also eliminate one source of d-mat lag from her daily diet. The administrative and operations areas were, ordinarily, very secure, but with KTI compromised not even they were safe. She figured that if she was going to be at risk wherever she went, she might as well continue to operate from home. Even becoming a skin, cocooned in instruments and never stepping through her door again, would be better than living her life by someone else's rules.

  “I haven't had a chance to script the interview properly,” she said. “Do you have anything in mind?”

  “Variations on the usual theme. Tell her we detected an anomaly in the jump she took on the twelfth and that we need her help to look into it further. If she wants to know more about the anomaly, we can explain that she was diverted through an irregular node between interchanges and that we suspect someone is rerouting traffic through that point in order to defraud KTI of relay earnings.”

  “You think that'll be enough to convince her to hand over her UGI?

  “It usually is. There shouldn't be a problem if she thinks money's involved.”

  “True.”

  “I'll hit her with the juicy bits last, just in case she gets nervous.” He adopted an exaggerated version of his own voice: “Working for NuSense must have its down-side, right? Lots of prank calls, loonies following you. Experienced anything like that lately? Even if the answer is no, that's something.”

  “We can't make her suspicious, whatever we do. If word gets out—”

  “Kuss, Mary
lin. I'm no golya. I know what I'm doing.”

  True. He did. He had been with the MIU since its inception and had spent the previous ten years working for the EJC. Sometimes it was hard to remember that he was both older and more experienced than her, even if she was his superior officer.

  “Sorry, Jason. I guess I was reminding myself more than you.”

  He shrugged. “That's okay. You've got a lot on your mind at the moment.”

  “Too much.” She stirred restlessly on the seat. “No offence, Jason, but I just don't know what I'm doing here. I doubt talking to Suche-Thomas will make any difference. It'll be the same as the others; they're completely in the dark. The Twinmaker only wants their bodies, not their lives.”

  “So he's a chauvinist.” It was hard to tell if he was joking or not. “But it's still a lead, and we have to pursue it.”

  “I'm not arguing with that. It's just—” She stopped. A Why me? would sound churlish and spoilt. She wasn't like that. But she did fail to see why she had been ordered to accompany Fassini on what was basically a one-person plus VTC monitor assignment. Unless it was connected to the “something else” Whitesmith had planned for her. Whatever that was.

  Fassini studied her closely, obviously trying to work out what she was thinking. “Is he awake yet?”

  “Maybe.” Not a bad guess. She had checked on Jonah's condition shortly before leaving her unit. Mild sedation was helping him sleep while repair agents cruised his body, rebuilding muscles, organs and fat reserves that had atrophied during hibernation. He had recovered ten kilograms, although the gain was barely noticeable. His face above the sheets had still been deathly thin, disturbingly Reaper-like. “I hope not.”

  “Do you think we've got him at last? That he's really the Twinmaker?”

  “What I think doesn't come into it,” she said. “It's out of my hands.”

  “You mean now that we've actually got some evidence?” He nodded. “That's a pleasant change. Even if it doesn't totally incriminate him.”