“Nanos?”
“No. Even they would leave a slight trace. Also, the paper hasn't been scorched or stained by ink. It's changed colour on a molecular level.”
“How?”
“By d-med.”
He leaned back onto the bed. “Ah.”
“You get it, don't you? If it was put there by d-med, then that means someone from KTI really is involved. So if you've got any information I should know, please tell me.”
He looked at her as though she had helped him reach some sort of internal decision. “It doesn't seem to be anything to do with the Twinmaker case. After all, you've just demonstrated that he wasn't anywhere near any of the victims during the times they were killed. But it may connect with Lindsay. I remember someone being here after Lindsay died—”
“Here?”
“In the lounge. He was threatening me, or implying some sort of threat. I can't remember what it was all about, or what he looked like, but Herold Verstegen's name keeps circling through my head—as though the two are connected somehow.”
“You think it might have been him?”
“I don't know for certain; I could even be imagining things—you know, plugging new data into old problems regardless whether they fit or not.”
“Spurious associations?”
“Yes. You see, when I first met Verstegen, I thought he looked familiar, although I couldn't, and still can't, remember where from. Maybe I'm trying to answer that question by connecting it to the flashback.”
She nodded, understanding why he had been reluctant to admit to it. It was tantalising yet frustratingly vague. Almost worthless, in fact, except as a sign that perhaps Jonah's memory was returning.
“What about QUALIA? Any flashbacks there?”
His expression changed to one of bemusement. “Why would there be? QUALIA wasn't around when I took the plunge.”
She explained about the memory spikes. He listened, but she could tell the answer before she had finished.
“No. I can't explain how I could've heard QUALIA's voice,” he said. “There must be another reason for the spikes. You interpreted the data wrong, perhaps.”
“There isn't another explanation. Not even QUALIA can find one.”
He leaned forward to wave the note at her. “Then it's probably irrelevant—whereas this note is important. It's proof that someone from KTI is involved.”
“I know,” she said, taking the note back from him. “That's what worries me.”
He sagged back onto the bed. “Why?”
“Because the Twinmaker left it there for me to find. He wanted me to find it. He doesn't care if we know about him, or his contacts—or you, for that matter. That's the scariest thing; he thinks it won't make any difference.”
“Then we'll just have to prove him wrong.”
“Yes, but—what if he's right?”
He met her eyes and didn't look away for what felt like an eternity. “He can't be. The only way to be sure he'd never be caught would be to stop now and lay low while the investigation peters out—which he might have done, had he been me. This me. The whole hibernation thing could've been nothing more than a ruse: I wiped my memory, went into the goop, made it look like I'd been in there a lot longer than I really had been, then led you right to me.”
She remembered Trevaskis' theory along the same lines. “That's not an option any more. There's been another murder.”
“Exactly. So he's still out there. We can still find him.”
“And he could still be a copy of you.”
He nodded. “Yes, he could. Or I could be a copy of him. Is there any way to tell if I'm the original?”
“I doubt it.” She floundered for a second; this was something else she'd never considered. “The markers in your spine would tell when you took your last few jumps. The only one before the last couple of days would have been on the nineteenth of April, when you returned here. Presumably you would've been copied by then.”
“Is that information on file? It must've been checked during d-med.”
“I'll ask. Hang on.” She e-mailed a text query for Indira Geyten to check the files. It didn't seem terribly important. It smacked of an exercise in existential semantics.
“Speaking of d-mat reminds me,” she said when she was finished. “Why would Lindsay have taken a jump?”
“He wouldn't.”
“Not even in an emergency?”
“No, never.”
“But according to the housekeeper records he did.”
That flustered him. “Are you sure?”
“Check for yourself.”
She gave him the date and time and waited while he looked it up.
“It can't be right.”
She shrugged. “Why would the housekeeper lie? Or who could have changed its records?”
“No one except Lindsay, to the last. And I can't think of a reason why he'd want to.”
“Unless he used his UGI to conceal someone else's.”
“But how did that person arrive? The jump is only one-way, remember.”
“I don't know.”
“Can we check with QUALIA?”
“No. KTI was running on mundane AIs back then. QUALIA had yet to reach ometeosis. In other words, e wasn't alive—”
“I know what it means. It's just a poor reason for not having access to the information we need.”
“Exactly. And now you know why KTI built QUALIA in the first place.”
“I guess.” He looked away. His expression hinted at annoyance, as though he had forgotten something. Which, she supposed, he had. Many things.
She went back into the hall to collect the remaining items of her uniform. He was quiet while she did so. On her return, she realised that this was because he was making or receiving a call via his overseer. She patched in to overhear.
“—of possibilities,” QUALIA was saying. “The Twinmaker may be diverting traffic elsewhere in order to cover the extra mass. If he knew the weight of his victim, a similar mass could be diverted, undelivered, to cover the discrepancy.”
“Have there been any complaints about late deliveries?”
“None that have not been accounted for.”
“He could be arranging the missing transfer himself, then. That way a complaint wouldn't be registered.” Jonah second-guessed the obvious next step with an ease that showed how much improved his reasoning faculties were. “There's only one problem. GLITCH doesn't give accurate information on weight, so he would have no way of knowing what sort of compensation he would need in advance. And to arrange something on the spur of the moment, while in the process of kidnapping someone—I don't believe he could do it quickly enough.”
“Perhaps you are right,” was QUALIA's reply.
“Perhaps.” Jonah sniffed. “Tell me, out of curiosity—what is the total mass/energy reserve at the moment.”
“Precisely 0.499 MLu.”
“One person's-worth short, in other words, of what it was yesterday, or a week ago?”
“Yes.”
“Is there any limit to how far back you can give me figures for the reserve?”
“Not in essence, although a certain level of secrecy does apply to information of this sort.”
“That's okay. I'm just curious to know if there have been any dips that haven't already been accounted for.”
“Other bodies?” Marylin intruded on the conversation.
“Or a copy that wasn't a body,” he replied. “Me.”
“Good point.”
“There have been other drops in the m/e reserve,” QUALIA said. “However I am not permitted to provide you with information regarding them all.”
Jonah sucked air in through his lips. “Is this something to do with Schumacher's secret archive?”
“Yes.”
“I thought it might be.”
Marylin suppressed an annoyed response, unwilling to go down that path again. “Are there any drops,” she asked, “that you cannot account for?”
/> “No,” QUALIA replied.
Jonah snorted and dropped out of the conversation.
“If that satisfies you,” he said aloud, “then you've gone even softer than I thought.”
“Not at all. I trust QUALIA, who has been programmed not to lie, and I trust Schumacher, who has the best interests of KTI at heart.”
“I don't trust anyone, and why should I? Schumacher's human, just like anyone. So's QUALIA, too, for that matter.”
“E's an AI, not human.”
“‘Not human’ doesn't mean mechanical, Marylin. Any being complex enough to be considered intelligent must by definition be capable of lying.”
“Why?”
“Because—” He stopped, rethought what he was about to say. “Because that was the way Lindsay worked. His designs always included a capacity for ‘negative information,’ as he called it. He used to say that self-deception is one of the surest signs of true consciousness.”
Marylin almost shot back a comment about who Lindsay Carlaw might have learnt that from, given that Jonah had been adopted as a human guinea pig, but chose tact over old habits.
“Not QUALIA,” she said. “SciCon redesigned the QUIDDITY matrix when KTI commissioned a governing AI for the d-mat network.”
“How?”
“I don't know the specifics. They weren't after a human-analogue, so they took out the unconscious and some of the more esoteric features. The ability to lie must have been one of them. It had to be if QUALIA was to be trustworthy. Verstegen would never have allowed a loophole that large in his precious security net.”
“He had a say in this?”
“Schumacher brought him in specifically to oversee the installation. He was some sort of bigwig security specialist with heaps of experience in AIs. He ended up staying on permanently afterwards. I wasn't here then, and QUALIA was still being trained when I joined. There were bugs; people complained. People still resented Verstegen, even though he fixed the problem in the end. We haven't had a problem for a long time.”
“Apart from the Twinmaker.”
“That's hardly the same thing.”
“Isn't it? What sort of problems were they?”
“Record-keeping, mainly. Files going missing, transfers not recorded, IDs not registering. Minor glitches, but annoying. It was a matter of settling the database in, building up the world map, whatever. That takes time, just like with a person.”
“Exactly.” He leaned forward with one finger pointing. “And that's my point: QUALIA was once human enough to make mistakes, so why not, now, human enough to lie?”
She sighed and looked away. He was going in circles and dragging her along with him. “It's a moot point, I guess, without evidence.”
That made him smile. “At least I've got a hope of being proven right.”
“True.” She stood. “Are we done confessing secrets now? I'd like to get on with looking at the data”
“I thought that's what we were doing.”
“Hardly. There are still reams of housekeeper records to be double-checked with your recollections, plus details of the previous murders for you to familiarise yourself with. The more you know about the case, the more likely you're going to be any use to us, right?”
He shrugged. “If you say so. But I take your point. Best to keep busy. The wait must be killing you.”
She grimaced, uncomfortably aware how apt the comment was.
Before she could suggest a specific task, however, a red light began to flash in her visual field, indicating that an urgent call was waiting for her. It was, furthermore, a conference call with at least three participants.
She knew instinctively that this was the call she had been both dreading and anticipating. It had come much sooner than she had expected.
Without saying anything, she stood and took the call where Jonah couldn't see her face.
Jonah watched Marylin suddenly get up and leave the room. He immediately comprehended that this was it: confirmation of the seventeenth murder in the series. He could understand her wanting to be alone while she took the news.
He had seen enough of the files to know how much the killings escalated in savagery from the first one to that of Yoland Suche-Thomas. A large part of him dreaded what they would find when they viewed the latest body. How much worse could it be? There was little the Twinmaker hadn't already done to his victims, including using the last body as a goad.
The bodies had been dumped, usually, in the homes of moderately well-off, law-abiding people who either leased or had professional access to a private booth. Never in public places. It was clear that the killer didn't choose his disposal sites at random, but until Suche-Thomas the MIU had preferred to assume that placement meant little.
Jonah wondered if the truth might be more complex; if the killer was the person who had put Jonah in the gel, then he might have been biding his time, waiting to bring Jonah back into the picture. During this time, the gaps between murders had been roughly three to five weeks, and the degree of violence had increased steadily—almost as though the killer had started out simply to murder his victims, but had learned to enjoy torture along the way. Now that there was no pressure to wait, for whatever reason, the killer could allow himself, not an increase in violence alone, but greater frequency and more significant placement. Jonah's apartment in Faux Sydney could be, he thought, just the first in a series of rapid strikes designed to confuse or even embarrass the investigators by catching them off-balance.
He wondered what could have happened to trigger the shift from murder to mind-games. Something in the killer's private life, perhaps: rejection, loss of status at work, the death of a loved one, even illness. There were many possibilities. Or an external influence. Politicians and publicity-seekers had been known to trigger violent episodes in others. That was just as much a possibility as anything else in this case. But Jonah didn't have the background knowledge to guess at what this might have been. Three years unconscious had left him seriously out of date with respect to world affairs.
The only significant change he could think of was the development of d-med—which demonstrated just how far behind he was. Every representative on the World Council could've been assassinated and replaced with CRE stars for all he knew. That would've been enough to drive anyone to murder.
The MIU investigators had been able to come to some conclusions regarding the killer, or his accomplices. His intimate knowledge of MIU, KTI and GLITCH data, and activities, suggested either extraordinary powers of espionage or contact at high level on the inside of one or more of these organisations. He knew Marylin Blaylock, although he had never referred to her by name nor attempted to communicate with her until the alteration of the note. He liked implicating WHOLE in the murders by leaving its literature with the bodies he mutilated. And he was frustratingly fastidious. No genetic trace had ever been found on any of his victims.
The picture was hauntingly vague, and begged many more questions than it answered. Jonah, by nature, was more interested in who and how rather than why, but he guessed that the last two would be the key to the first. Motive and incriminating technical details would have to suffice, given the paucity of forensic data. He would've given back his sudden recovery in exchange for someone who could hack into Schumacher's hidden file for him…
He felt restless waiting for Marylin to return. “QUALIA? I'd like to move. Have you finished examining me?”
“Yes, Jonah, although I recommend you remain prostrate. You have a slight fever, the source of which I cannot determine without taking a physical sample.”
“Well, I feel fine.”
“That is unsurprising. Your body is producing natural opiates under the instruction of your overseer.”
“Why?”
“It will take some time before the grafts are fully absorbed by your body. Although the genetic match is perfect, the sudden acquisition of such a large mass of tissue requires significant restructuring of circulatory, nervous and lymphatic systems. This
restructuring continues apace, performed by natural repair agents and nanomachines introduced to your body during the d-med procedure. The healing process would leave you moderately uncomfortable without some sort of pain relief, hence your raised endorphin levels. Also, I recommend you eat solid food within the hour to avoid hypoglycaemia.”
“I can't stay in bed and eat,” Jonah protested. “And I can hardly ask Marylin to bring me food on a tray.”
“That would be the simplest solution,” the AI said matter-of-factly.
“You suggest it, then.” Jonah grimaced. “I'd rather go hungry.”
He sat up, provoking a wave of dizziness that took some seconds to subside. He felt around in the gloom for his dressing gown, and put it on. The sound of Marylin muttering under her breath came from the next room, a sign that she was still busy with the call. He thought he heard his name mentioned, but resisted the temptation to eavesdrop. While he was alone, there was one other place in the unit he wanted to look.
His legs supported him as far as the door to Lindsay's study—a vast improvement on even an hour ago, but still worryingly weak. He crawled the rest of the way on his hands and knees. When he reached the chair, he levered himself into it with a grunt then sat still for a few minutes to catch his breath.
Under the lip of the desk was a slight indentation that marked the entrance to Lindsay's private cache. He found it, and pressed hard. The fake wood resisted for a moment as a pressure-sensitive nanofilm registered his fingerprint, then clicked inward. A panel slid up and to one side, exposing the secret compartment. Free to fall, a slim, bound book dropped into his hand.
Jonah brought his father's diary out into the light with a feeling akin to guilt. Although Lindsay had told him about the cache—and, more significantly, to look inside it in the case of emergencies—Jonah had sworn he would never violate his father's privacy. Tempting though it had been at times, he knew that would have been the first step down a path from which he could never return. Emotional deprivation was no excuse for exploitation and industrial espionage.
He opened the diary. The spine crackled and gave off a smell of ozone. It obviously hadn't been activated for some time. Each of the six pages inside was made of thick plastic, the surface of which acted as a simple colour display. Molecules changed shape and colour at the application of microcurrents directed by the data stored in the flexible plastic, sending images and words scattering across the page. Only one side displayed an image while the back remained blank.
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