Future Americas

by John Helfers

  Somehow he had made it to Steffie’s floor and Steffie’s inner sanctum before security took him down.

  They took him down on the fainting couch, his hand dropping behind it as he tried to hide the sapphire earrings he’d already taken off the desk. It didn’t work, of course.

  Steffie had confronted him, and when she found out why he was in the building, she’d personally escorted him to one of the exam rooms and waited outside while the doctor had injected him with the designer cure.

  Because Steffie’s medical services were mostly free, she used the high-end cures—the ones that would replicate inside a system forever or alter the system to prevent any kind of venereal virus.

  Rumor even had it that her docs had found a way to transmit the cure through previous patients, so if they had sex with someone who had the disease, the new person would be cured. I understood that science. But some others claimed that people who hadn’t been infected would never be infected if they came in contact with Steffie’s designer cure.

  No researcher had found a way to permanently pass along immunity—not even through a mother’s breast milk—so I wasn’t sure I believed that.

  But I did know that Steffie was, in her own way, a do-gooder—or she would have been called one if her gifts hadn’t had political overtones. She wanted the religious nuts and the abstinence fanatics and the judgmental rich to understand that human beings were human beings. It didn’t matter if they chose a life of sexual ecstasy or celibacy. It didn’t matter if they believedin God or believed in nothing at all. It didn’t even matter if they were rich or poor.

  Steffie believed everyone deserved the best life possible. The best life as defined and chosen by the individual—not by the culture around them.

  I’d grown up with people like her. They were the generation just in front of mine, the one forced into retirement now—the hippies turned yuppies turned middle-aged dreamers who had somehow found themselves three times older than the people they’d once claimed were too old to trust.

  Because of them, I had a suspicion of political idealism as well as an attraction to it. Which was why Steffie fascinated me, even though I believed her enterprise to be doomed.

  Which, with her death, it now was.

  Coe’s story wasn’t hard to check out. There were security files in Steffie’s office going up to the day before she died, and he was on them. He was also in the medical records. And even if those hadn’t still existed, his girlfriend vouched for him, declaring herself a former girlfriend now that she’d gotten a taste of his cowardice as it related to his own health and, by extension, hers.

  The chief was disappointed that Coe didn’t turn out to be more than he was, and so was DeAndre, but for different reasons.

  As the investigation got underway, DeAndre remembered what he hated about the way we used to do things—getting lost in the minutiae of information, going through documents and files and records without doing a keyword search, examining hours and hours of security video and researching the history of Steffie’s empire, one long torturous year at a time.

  For a woman who tried to do good, Steffie had a lot of enemies. From the religious leaders who thought her the city’s leading purveyor of sin to the mayor who’d helped her fund the empire before he realized that the sexual revolution of the twenties wouldn’t last, to every last person in her address file, all of whom had something to lose if their connection with her came out, it seemed like everyone she knew had a reason to kill her.

  This could be one of those investigations that would take decades if we let it—and I didn’t have decades. I didn’t really have years either. If I succeeded in solving this one, then I might be able to argue that my investigative methods were at least as good as the methods the chief used.

  DeAndre wasn’t sure we’d ever solve this. Of course, I’d assigned him to filter most of the information on Steffie, with the lie that she was the most important part of the investigation.

  I doubted she was important at all—at least, not to the investigation. The killer had made her the equal of her escorts—whether by design or by accident, I still didn’t know—and that led me to believe her corpse and her personal history held few answers.

  But we still hadn’t identified the man in the operating theater. His DNA wasn’t on record, and no one had identified him from the cleaned-up holographic images we’d sent all over the media.

  I was thinking of him when I caught a nap at the precinct. In the old days, I’d sleep at work for the first month of a big investigation, and I saw no reason to change that habit this late in my career.

  So I pulled a blanket over the cot farthest from the window, put my uninjured arm over my face, and slept for three hours—which was longer than I would have as a young man, but a lot shorter than the six hours I usually got a night now.

  And when I woke up, I knew why that alley had been the turning point in the investigation.

  I studied the scrape on my elbow. The scrape had scabbed over because I hadn’t bothered to go to the precinct infirmary for a healing injection. I’d had more scrapes and cuts and injuries over my career than I cared to think about, and it didn’t bother me to wait a few days for the aches to go away.

  The younger cops, they always fixed any wound immediately, and the middle-aged guys—the ones I considered middle-aged like DeAndre, not the fake-o middle-aged by dint of science guys like me—they always made sure they got their injections so that no virus or bacteria ever tracked them down.

  My immune system was healthier than all of theirs because I let nature take its course. But as a result, I wasn’t aware of all the technologies available to guys like me—and unlike the really young guys, the ones just coming out of the academy, I had no idea how to use those technologies myself.

  The guy in the operating theater had died with his face against a control panel and his arms wrapped around a robotic surgeon. The average man of his age, in the throes of something that killed him as messily and violently as whatever had killed this guy, wouldn’t have gone to the technology for help because he wouldn’t know how it worked.

  But this guy had.

  And he actually thought he had time to save himself.

  Which meant he knew what was going wrong—and it probably also meant he knew, at least theoretically, how to fix it.

  I got up, showered in the precinct locker room, and put on some clean clothes that I kept there for just these kinds of occasions. The clothes barely fit, which told me how long it had been since I’d last pulled an investigation like this.

  But fortunately I’d lost weight instead of gained it, so I just swam in my clothes and didn’t worry how I looked.

  Instead, I went to my desk and pulled Callan’s autopsy report.

  Our deceased wasn’t in the system. He had no recognizableDNA at all, which led Callan to speculate that the guy was a foreign national who had somehow snuck across our borders, so his DNA wouldn’t get added to the database.

  The guy had no rebuilt parts and had no evidence of rejuvenation treatments, particularly of the skin (which usually left some residue). His eyes were naturally brown, as was his hair. He hadn’t altered his look in any way that showed up on Callan’s genetic tests.

  Nor had all that spilled fluid contained any true foreign matter. No drugs or nuclear residue. No poison. No suspicious viruses or bacteria or evidence of bio-weapons.

  While Callan could pinpoint a time of death, he couldn’t pinpoint a cause. Except that our man had a violent and sudden purging of every vital fluid in his system—which would be enough to kill anyone.

  But what caused that purging? Callan couldn’t even guess.

  But I couldâ�
�”and I wasn’t a scientist at all. Maybe that’s why I could entertain strange possibilities. Maybe that’s why I went to Callan’s office first.

  Or maybe I went there because I knew Callan would take me seriously, no matter how fanciful my supposition.

  We both remembered what it was like to bat ideas around, before certainty became the norm. We both longed for those days, even though he rarely admitted it except to me.

  I had to catch him alone, or he wouldn’t play.

  I had to talk to him, dinosaur to dinosaur, to see if we could resolve this together.

  I used to dread going to the ME’s office. In those long-ago days, the place smelled of formaldehyde and rot, no matter how hard the cleaning staff tried to cover it up.

  But now the place smelled faintly metallic, as if the heating and cooling system had recently been installed.The place sparkled, and unless someone told you that it was a morgue, you wouldn’t be able to tell.

  Callan was in autopsy, just finishing up. I watched him through the double-glass window as he removed his outer gear, tossing the lab coat, gloves, and mask into a biohazard wash bin. Then he scrubbed thoroughly—showing his last century training—before he rubbed the regulation nano-cleaner all over his skin.

  He’d had some rejuvenation treatments—his skin didn’t have that leathery look of a modern eighty-nine-year-old. His hair was silver, like mine, only his was thick and rich, making him look like the TV doctors I’d grown up with—Marcus Welby and the like, men who knew everything and were damn close to gods.

  No one treated us older folk like gods anymore. We weren’t the nuisance our parents had been to us— people that we just wanted to hide from sight—but we weren’t exactly welcome either.

  Callan pushed open the door, releasing a wave of stink from the autopsy room. It was the only place in the morgue that still allowed smells of decay—mostly for what they could tell a well-trained medical examiner.

  He seemed surprised to see me.

  ‘‘I got a theory,’’ I said, ‘‘and I need your help hashing it out.’’

  He raised his bushy silver eyebrows at me, and then he grinned. ‘‘Just like old times.’’

  I grinned back. ‘‘Just like.’’

  He grabbed another lab coat from the pegs beside the door and led me up the stairs to his office.

  He had the biggest, best office in the place, which angered the younger medical examiners. He wasn’t in charge of the morgue any longer—he wasn’t even in charge of the section, having refused to go through some year-long training program to ‘‘re-educate’’ him on various techniques that he used to teach.

  But he wasn’t willing to give up the office, and I knew why. It was twice the size of the other offices, and he’d crammed it full with books, shelves, couches, and dead desktop computers that were more than thirty years old. Beneath it all were stacks of file folders filled with paperwork that someone had decreed out of date, but that Callan believed still had value.

  He cleared off one leather chair for me, then went behind his desk, which was covered with hand-held devices of varying size. Most of them had more computing power than all of the dead desktops behind me. I knew why he had more than one hand-held, too. Screen size.

  After age fifty, a man needed an eye upgrade every ten years or he’d lose bits of his sight. Our city insurance paid for upgrades every twenty—figuring we’d all retire before we got the ones for age 90 and they’d only have to pay for one upgrade.

  The younger guys were threatening a class-action suit, but it would happen too late for me and Callan. We just made do the old-fashioned way—with glasses and a magnifying glass and progressively larger screens.

  ‘‘I take it that the theory is about Steffie’s murder,’’ he said.

  I nodded, and stretched my legs as best I could given the number of books surrounding them on the floor. My ankles ached from that ill-considered four-foot jump of the day before.

  ‘‘You know that the crime scene techs couldn’t pull any information from the fibers or the walls,’’ I said.

  ‘‘Oh, do I know it,’’ Callan said. ‘‘One would think the world had ended.’’

  ‘‘For them, it has,’’ I said. ‘‘But here’s the thing. Steffie’s security had information in storage from the day before. They’d downloaded just like they were supposed to and put it in hard storage, just like they were supposed to.’’

  He templed his fingers and leaned back as he listened.

  ‘‘DeAndre’s investigating why no one was at work that night in the building. Steffie usually kept a skeleton staff.’’

  ‘‘I know,’’ Callan said, then looked at me guiltily. How many of us had ties to Steffie? And how many of us were ashamed of them?

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to ask.

  ‘‘We found a very fine blood spray near Steffie’s body,’’ I said.

  ‘‘That’s the thing that protected the wall so you got that kid yesterday,’’ he said.

  ‘‘Yeah,’’ I said. ‘‘The spray interests me a lot more than the kid. How come it was there when there wasn’t any other trace except what the killer planted? And how come it protected that section of the wall?’’

  Callan swiveled his chair so that he could look at me directly. ‘‘You asking me or are you being rhetorical?’’

  ‘‘Neither, really,’’ I said. ‘‘I’m thinking out loud.’’

  ‘‘Meaning you have an answer.’’

  ‘‘I have a guess,’’ I said. ‘‘I want you to tell me if I’m off-base before I talk to anyone else.’’

  ‘‘Okay.’’ He folded his hands and rested them on the desk.

  ‘‘I think the spray belongs to the dead man in the theater.’’

  ‘‘It doesn’t,’’ Callan said. ‘‘We already tested.’’

  I held up a finger. ‘‘Let me finish. I think that spray was the beginning of what killed him.’’

  ‘‘I told you, it doesn’t match,’’ Callan said.

  ‘‘I thought you were going to be my sounding board,’’ I snapped.

  ‘‘The tests—’’

  ‘‘Might be the wrong tests.’’

  That shut him up. He frowned at me.

  ‘‘I think he was posing Steffie’s body when whatever it was caught up with him. He felt the beginnings of the . . . eruption, shall we call it? . . . and hightailed it to the operating theater. There he or he and his accomplice tried to cure him of whatever it was, only to fail miserably.’’

  ‘‘Nice theory, but I still don’t see how,’’ Callan said.

  ‘‘The key is in the empty fibers,’’ I said.

  He blinked, as if he hadn’t considered that.

  ‘‘Remember viruses?’’ I asked. ‘‘Y’know, computer viruses, the things that we used to hate when we had computers like those?’’

  I waved a hand at his dead desktops. Viruses got tamed a long time ago—both the computer kind and most of the human kind as well. Now we only worried about mutated superbugs which usually bred in folks who didn’t believe in treatment. And even then, we only worried briefly. It didn’t take someone long to genetically modify a cure or to use a nanocreature to
clear them out of our systems.

  ‘‘The whole miniature data collection business came about after we tamed the technological viruses,’’ I said. ‘‘The fail-safes were theoretically built into each little nanocell.’’

  ‘‘Yeah,’’ Callan said, sounding skeptical.

  ‘‘But what if someone devised something that would shut off the nanocells. Something that would replicate like a virus run through all the data collection systems in a building.’’

  ‘‘Hmm.’’ He templed his fingers again. I was beginning to intrigue him.

  ‘‘What if Steffie’s murder was the first place to test this thing, and what if the guy accidentally infected himself?’’

  Callan’s frown deepened.

  ‘‘Could that spew we found all over the theater be his body purging itself of anything it considered to have information?’’

  ‘‘No,’’ he said. ‘‘What you’re talking about would have cleaned out his system on the cellular level. But if such a ‘virus’ existed, in theory anyway, it wouldn’t do the same work on an inanimate object as it would on an animate object.’’

  ‘‘Or the corpses would have spewed, too,’’ I said.

  ‘‘Crudely put,’’ he said. ‘‘but the stuff you find in carpet fibers and in couches and in paint chips are tiny machines, actual data collection devices, not an organic part of the fiber or the paint or the ceiling tile.’’

  ‘‘Okay,’’ I said.

  ‘‘So if such a thing existed, it would take out the machines and leave the organic material intact.’’ He was beginning to sound excited.

  ‘‘And what happened if someone infected himself with it?’’ I asked.

  ‘‘Probably nothing,’’ Callan said. ‘‘Unless, for some reason, he already had some nanodevices in his system.’’