by Jeff Edwards
“I know what it does,” I said. “It’s a Magic Mirror. An electronic mind-probe. You can skip the dissertation.”
“This is just a little EEG scan,” Dancer said. “You give us any shit, we’ll drag you down town and wire your ass up to the Inquisitor. Then you’ll find out what a fucking mind-probe is.”
Delaney paused for a second, to see if we were finished interrupting, and then continued to read. “It incorporates four dermal sensor pads that measure electrical brain activity, galvanic skin reflex, and fluctuations in skin thermography.”
I noticed that his pupils stayed locked on one spot of the card as he talked. He wasn’t reading; he was reciting from memory.
“Although you are not currently accused of a crime, it is our intention to interview you regarding an on-going homicide investigation.”
He flipped the card over and continued to pretend to read. “You have the right to terminate this interview at any time. If you refuse this procedure, we reserve the option to take you into physical custody and transport you to the nearest Police Forensic Electronics facility for questioning under controlled conditions. You have the right to have an attorney, real or virtual, present during this, and any subsequent interviews. If you desire an attorney and cannot afford one, you will be granted real-time access to a fully cognizant Artificial Intelligence attached to the Public Defender’s office.”
He looked up at me again. “Do you understand your rights as I have read them to you?”
“Whose murder are we talking about here?”
“Just answer the question, Mr. Stalin. Do you understand your rights?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Do you wish to have an attorney present during this interview?”
“Not really.”
Dancer peeled off her jacket. Underneath, she wore a cross-draw shoulder holster strapped over a light blue short-sleeved shirt. Even through the shirt, I could see that the muscles of her arms and upper body were impressive. She could probably bench press me a couple of dozen times. She tossed her jacket across the back of a chair. “Are we done with the formalities?”
“We’re done,” Delaney said.
“Good,” she said. “Then hook him up to the fucking machine.”
Delaney slid the briefcase down to my end of the coffee table and unreeled a set of electrical leads. He plugged one end of each of the leads into his machine, and connected the other ends to self-adhesive sensor pads. He turned toward me, the sensor leads dangling from his left hand. “I’m going to connect these to your forehead. They will not hurt, and the adhesive is hypoallergenic. Do you understand?”
Dancer had angled well to his left. It struck me that she had taken off her jacket to clear the way to her shoulder holster. She was ready to draw on me if she had to.
“Yes,” I said. “I understand.”
Delaney stuck two of the pads to the skin above the outer edges of my eyebrows. The adhesive was cold and had a cloying fake-lemonade smell about it. Delaney glued the remaining pair close to the center of my forehead, just below the hairline. He was careful to stand to the side, out of Dancer’s line of fire.
I was equally careful not to move while he was close to me. The last thing I wanted was for Dancer to show me her quick-draw routine.
Delaney turned back to his briefcase and thumbed a switch. The screen of the analyzer came to life, the electro-tropic crystal wafer strobing with shifting rainbow abstracts for a second or two before blooming into a full-color high-definition display. Two internal cooling fans spun up, each emitting a tone that nearly harmonized with the other.
Delaney sat down and punched a few buttons on the keypad and a data window popped open in the upper right corner of the screen. A series of jagged waveforms appeared in the window, complex, constantly changing, and looking very much like the scribbling of a small child. Presumably, between them, they described my skin temperature, electrical conductivity, and some component of my brain waves.
Delaney gave Dancer a thumbs-up and turned the briefcase to an angle that hid the display from me.
Dancer nodded. “Do it.”
Delaney pulled a stack of trids out of the pocket of his jacket. He handed me the first one: a picture of a building that I didn’t recognize. He watched the display. “Miss.”
He handed me another: the Eiffel Tower lying in ruins, the shot that had become so famous after the European Liberation Front had tried to nuke Paris back into the Stone Age. “Hit. Irrelevant.”
...a young woman eating a slice of pizza. “Miss.”
...a storefront with broken windows. “Miss.”
...a pair of brown shoes. “Miss.”
...a front view of my house from the street. “Hit. Irrelevant.”
...the lobby of the Velvet Clam Hotel. “Hit.”
Dancer and Delaney exchanged glances.
...an overflowing dumpster. “Miss.”
...a matchbook from the Velvet Clam, enough of the inside visible to reveal the last three digits of my phone number. “Hit.”
Dancer flexed the fingers of her right hand slightly. What in the hell was going on here? Was she expecting me to try something?
...a man’s body sprawled on a floor, a lake of blood congealing around him on the tile. “Miss.”
Dancer stepped toward the coffee table. “What do you mean, miss?”
I stared at the image. The man’s throat had been cut. Not just sliced, but hacked open as though someone had been trying to take his head off.
“Have a look,” Delaney said. He pointed to something inside his briefcase. “This is what Mr. Stalin’s recognition-characteristic looks like. He definitely did not recognize that image.”
I continued to stare at the trid. The man was older, somebody’s grandfather. There was something familiar about him. “Oh Jesus,” I whispered. “It’s Holtzclaw.”
Delaney pointed to the screen again. “Hit,” he said. “Delayed.”
“Goddamn it,” Dancer said. “Are you sure?”
“I’m certain,” Delaney said. “Mr. Stalin recognized the victim, but he was clearly not aware that Mr. Holtzclaw is dead.”
“When was he killed?” I asked quietly.
“Some time around four thirty this morning,” Delaney said.
Dancer snatched her jacket off the back of the chair and jammed her left arm down a sleeve.
“Who killed him?” I asked.
“That’s a stupid fucking question,” Dancer snapped. “If we knew that, we wouldn’t be dicking around with you, would we?”
She wrestled her right arm into the other sleeve and looked back to Delaney. “Pack it up, Rick. Let’s get out of here.”
I peeled the pads off my face and handed them to Delaney. The skin where they had been felt cool and prickly.
Delaney rolled up his leads and closed the case.
Dancer began buttoning up her jacket. “Let’s slide, Rick. There’s a killer out there somewhere.”
CHAPTER 7
I stepped into the shower stall; the door slid shut silently behind me. I didn’t feel like going back to bed, and a hot shower seemed like the next best thing.
“What will it be this morning?” House asked.
“Let’s go with Program Six,” I said sleepily.
“Starting program now. Enjoy your shower, David.”
“Thanks, House.”
The walls and ceiling of the shower stall cycled from featureless high gloss white to shifting patterns of mottled green and then, with a rapidity that was almost startling, the projection snapped into focus and I was standing in the middle of a rain forest. The footage had been shot in the eco-modules in Dome 7, and the trees and foliage were a lush and vibrant green. Vines hung in fat loops from the branches overhead. The shower floor under my feet was the only flaw in the illusion; it remained its usual white porcelain, rectangular self, a safety feature designed to keep me from walking into the walls or shower doors that were now invisible behind the projection.
I could hear birds singing in the distance, the chittering of monkeys, and wind blowing through the leaf canopy. House added those parts himself; there were no monkeys, or birds, or wind in Dome 7.
A fat drop of water hit my left shoulder, followed a couple of seconds later by another drop that struck me square on the top of the head. Suddenly, drops were falling all around me, gaining in speed and density. Except for the temperature, which I kept as hot as I could stand, it was as much like an actual squall in a forest as I could imagine.
No, that wasn’t quite true. I’d been caught in several downpours, in a real rain forest, at Iguazu, in Argentina. But that was an experience so far removed from the make-believe forest in my shower as to seem like something from another planet.
At Iguazu, we’d worn snow cammies, because the dappled grays had blended in with the dying vegetation better than green jungle camouflage. The sky had been the color of old concrete and the dead leaf mulch had been thick under our boots. We’d slathered our skin with protective ointments against rain with a pH factor so low that it bore little resemblance to water, and we’d been damn careful not to swallow any.
A psychiatrist would probably say that Program Six was my way of denying Argentina, or that showering in a rain forest signaled my refusal to face the realities of our ruined ecology. Personally, I think it was simpler than that. I think I just liked it.
After my shower, I was half way through shaving when I decided to call Ms. Winter. I was naked except for a towel around my neck and shaving cream on half of my face, so I selected voice-only for my end of the call.
It took her about six rings to answer.
She had a wild, disheveled look. Her hair was mussed, her cheeks were puffy, and her eyes were rimmed with red. For a second, I was afraid that I’d caught her with a client. I reached for the disconnect, thankful that she couldn’t see my face.
She let out the tiniest sniffle and I jerked my hand back from the button. This wasn’t the aftermath of passion; she’d been crying.
She tried to focus on the phone, her eyes bleary. “Who is it? Can I have video please?”
“It’s David Stalin. You can’t have video, I’m naked.”
She sniffed again and tried to smile. “Is this an obscene phone call, Mr. Stalin?”
“No. I called to invite you to lunch. My place, around one... If you like seafood.”
This time she did smile. “A call from a naked man who wants me to come over to his house. This is an obscene phone call. My day may be looking up.”
I angled the camera so she could only see me from the waist up and switched it on. “If I’m going to make an obscene call, I want to get it right.”
She smiled as soon as she saw me. “I didn’t know that anyone still shaved that way.”
I touched my cheek and grinned when I felt the smear of shaving cream. “I’m a little old fashioned.”
Her grin matched mine. I was glad to have chased her tears away, even if only for a few moments.
“You’re not old fashioned, Mr. Stalin. I think you like to do things the hard way.”
“About that lunch...” I said.
She ran her hands through her hair. “Are you asking me out on a date, Mr. Stalin?”
“No,” I said. “Not at all.” I paused for a second. “I’ve got a friend coming over, and I thought you might like to join us.”
It was her turn to pause for a second. “Okay,” she said. “One o’clock? Do you want me to bring anything?”
I shook my head.
“One, then.” She hung up.
I washed the rest of the shaving cream from my face and punched up John’s number.
The phone screen filled with the logo for Neuro-Tech Robotics: the winged staff and entwined serpents of a medical caduceus laid out in drab green and striped with shiny foil runs like a circuit board with no components attached. Hundreds of tiny data chips flew in from random corners of the screen and affixed themselves to the circuit board until the letters NTR were spelled out in silicon.
“Good morning, Neuro-Tech Robotics, how may I help you?” The voice was flatly artificial. It belonged to the AI that ran John’s company offices on Hawthorne Boulevard. John had never bothered to give the AI a name, or even the rudiments of a personality. As far as John was concerned, his research needed every byte of memory that could be squeezed out of his computer’s data cores. When he had to address the machine, John just called it Mainframe.
I didn’t bother with niceties, because I knew that Mainframe was programmed to ignore them. “Let me speak to John,” I said.
“One moment, please.”
Ten seconds later, the NTR logo was replaced by John’s face. He smiled when he saw me. “Hey, Sarge! Que pasa?”
“I’m just getting ready to throw a pan on the stove. Got time to join me for lunch?”
John looked back over his shoulder at a partially disassembled surgical robot. “I’m kind of in the middle of something here. Can I take a rain check?”
I gave him an exaggerated grimace. “I’d rather you didn’t. I’ve got a guest coming, and I don’t want her to think I’m hitting on her.”
John’s eyebrows went up a millimeter. “A lunch guest? It’s about time you let a woman into that mausoleum. Who is she?”
“Sonja Winter. The woman from Falcon’s Nest the other night.”
John’s eyebrows went up again.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “And she’s probably thinking the same thing. But it’s not like that.”
John grinned. “You need a chaperon?”
I sighed, and then grinned myself. “Okay,” I said. “If that’s what you want to call it. I just want to make sure that she doesn’t think I’m trying to get into her pants.”
“Here’s a stupid question for you,” John said. “Why aren’t you trying to get in her pants? That woman is a knockout!”
“Fine,” I said. “She’s a knockout. Are you coming to lunch, or what?”
“I think I can make a window in my schedule,” said John. “What time?”
“About one o’clock.”
John narrowed his eyes as though trying to look past me. “Did you call her just before you called me?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Why?”
He nodded at something over my shoulder. “Ask her how she liked the show.”
“What show?”
John winked at me. “See you at one, Sarge.” He reached out to terminate the connection.
His image was replaced by static. What show?
When I turned around, I saw what John meant. My camera-angle modesty was a failure. The sliding doors on my shower stall were set to mirror-mode. By looking over my shoulder, Ms. Winter would have had a clear view of anything she wanted to see.
Had she looked? Probably not, I thought. In her line of work, she saw a lot of male flesh. I wasn’t vain enough to think mine was anything special.
I busied myself in the kitchen, digging out spices that I hadn’t used in ages.
House had come up with a couple of dozen tiger prawns, each the size of a child’s fist. They’d probably come from the tank farms in Dome 16, but I didn’t ask. House was in charge of procurement. I just handled the consumption end of things.
I timed it so that the first handful of prawns went into the pan at one o’clock. They were just beginning to sizzle when Ms. Winter showed up at the door.
House had to let her in; by then I had my hands full with the prawns. They tend to smoke a bit when you cook them the way I do, and you have to be really careful not to scorch the butter.
She walked into the kitchen wearing a hound’s-tooth jacket over a champagne-colored jersey dress. Her hair was pulled back and around so that it spilled over her left shoulder like a dark waterfall. The effect was simple, but stunning. She set her purse on the kitchen counter and smiled. “Hi. Am I early?”
“Just in time,” I said. “Lunch is almost ready.”
She looked around. “Am I th
e first to arrive?”
“John will probably be late,” I said. “He usually is.” I smiled. “You met him at Falcon’s Nest the other night. He was late then too. Don’t worry; we don’t have to wait for him.”
She looked surprised. “Won’t he think we’re rude?”
“Not at all,” I said. “It’s the only way to get him to show up.”
Her eyebrows narrowed.
“Really,” I said. “It’s a cause-and-effect relationship. Like lighting a cigarette to call a bus. That one works, by the way. If you’re ever in a hurry, and you don’t want to wait for a bus, just light a cigarette. The bus will show up within about thirty seconds and you’ll have to put the cigarette out. It’s a natural law, I think.”
“I don’t smoke,” she said.
“It works for the shower too,” I said. “If you’re ever lonely and you want someone to call you, just climb in the shower. As soon as you’re soaking wet and your hair is full of soapsuds, your phone will ring. Cause and effect. You can’t stop it.”
Ten minutes later, we sat down to ice-cold pasta salad, piping-hot Cajun garlic prawns a la Dave, and a fairly good bottle of wine.
House was kind enough to serenade us with a little Robert Johnson.
I watched Ms. Winter’s face carefully when she first tasted the prawns. Her look was one of total surprise. “What’s in this?”
I grinned. “Garlic, butter, onions, cayenne pepper, lemon, a dash of wine. The rest of the ingredients are a family secret, handed down to me by my grandmother. Do you like it?”
“It’s wonderful!”
I laughed. I can be modest about most things. My cooking isn’t one of them.
I speared a prawn and was in the act of raising it to my mouth when House played a little chime and announced John’s presence at the door. I smiled and set my fork down. “Told you. It’s cause and effect.”
“Shall I let him in, David?” House asked.