by Jeff Edwards
“Could it be external? Like Jackal’s External Memory Module?”
Lance smiled. “And have an interface cable dangling out of the side of your head? That would attract attention, don’t you think?”
It was all starting to click now. “Not if your EMM was wireless,” I said. “All you’d have to do is connect it to a wireless transceiver.”
“That might work,” Lance said. “But your transceiver would have to be very low-power, and very short range. Otherwise, the transmission might interfere with sensitive electronics.”
“A transceiver with that short a range would have to be kept close to the subject’s body—the puppet’s body, wouldn’t it?”
“Of course,” Lance said.
I sat there, my eyes staring at the final stages of Jackal’s surgery, but seeing nothing. I was stunned.
Tommy Mailo had been right all along. Michael Winter had been a robot, a flesh and blood puppet following a piece of control code like a machine.
“It’s a beautiful setup,” Lance said. “If you want to change your puppet’s programming, all you have to do is walk up to him, and swap his EMM.”
I nodded dumbly. I had been assuming that the woman in Michael’s room had been there to fake his suicide. But she’d actually been there to recover an EMM-transmitter hidden in the pack of cigarettes that Michael had carried in his pocket.
The EMM, coupled with the chip in Michael’s brain, would have given the cops enough evidence to start a witch-hunt. With the chip destroyed by the bullet, and the EMM removed, there was no evidence to point to the real killer. The woman had just been tidying up loose ends.
In Russell Carlisle’s case, cleanup had been even simpler; the bomb had destroyed the EMM and the chip in his head at the same time.
Both cases were perfect wrap-ups: opportunity, forensic trace evidence, murder weapons, detailed confessions, and with one easily dismissible exception, no alibis. There was certainly no reason for anyone to suspect anything as unlikely as mind-control.
A lot of things were starting to make sense, but I still had a ton of unanswered questions.
Had Michael Winter and Russell Carlisle been nothing more than scapegoats, programmed to take the fall for somebody else’s crimes? Or, had they actually been programmed to murder all those little girls? And if so, why?
How did the owner of the AI, the man who hid behind the phony name of Henry Clerval, factor into this? Why had he taken out a contract on me? Could he be the Puppeteer?
Lance cleared his throat. “This is all... hypothetical, right?” There was a wild look in his eyes. This wasn’t a game of ‘what-if’ to him anymore. “You’re not saying that somebody has actually done this, are you?”
“Take it easy,” I said. “It’s just idle speculation. Watching Jackal’s surgery stirred up a few crazy ideas; I wanted to see where they went.”
My lie sounded anemic, even to me.
Lance showed no sign of relaxing; he wasn’t buying it. “Good,” he said slowly. “Because—if anybody actually does build this mind-control chip of yours—it will mean technological slavery on a scale that even Orwell never dreamed of.”
CHAPTER 28
The hours after Jackal’s surgery passed slowly. It would have been safer to wait inside the boutique where no one could see me, but I couldn’t smoke in there. I spent most of my time in the alley, chain-smoking cigarettes and trying to work things out.
I didn’t have a suspect any more, but that sure as hell wasn’t stopping the Puppeteer. He was out there somewhere. Watching me. Making moves. Playing with me. It was playing, too; there was no doubt about that. Why else would he bother to frame me for Kurt Rieger’s murder? It would have been easier to kill me.
I was about to light another cigarette when Lance opened the back door of the boutique. “Jackal’s coming around,” he said.
I pushed the unlit cigarette back into my pack and followed him inside.
The lights in the recovery room were low, presumably so that Jackal could rest.
She lay in a powered bed, the upper half elevated about forty-five degrees, raising her to a position mid-way between reclining and sitting. Five slender cables ran from the back of her head to a bank of dermal stimulator units in a wheeled equipment rack. The flickering green LEDs on the face of the dermal units cast animated shadows on the walls.
Jackal’s head was swathed in elastic bandage wraps, probably to hold the stimulator electrodes in place more than anything else; the incision hadn’t been very large.
She must have reloaded the chip that remembered me, because she tried to smile when she saw me come in. “Stalin...” she whispered. “You stuck around.”
“I had to make sure you were okay,” I said.
She swallowed with visible effort. “Still pushing a pulse,” she said. “But don’t ask me to dance.”
I smiled. “There go my plans for the evening.”
Jackal grimaced and then closed her eyes. “Did we get whatever it was we were after?”
“No,” I said. “But you gave it a hell of a shot. You dove right into the heart of a hostile AI. I don’t know if that was genius, or stupidity, but it certainly was impressive.”
“I’d be willing to hazard a guess on that,” Lance said.
“I’m sorry,” Jackal said. “I remember setting up for the run. I remember...”
She smiled weakly. “I bought you breakfast, didn’t I?”
“Yes,” I said. “Top-shelf, gourmet stuff.” I ran my hand through my blonde buzz-cut. “You gave me a kickin’ hair cut too.”
Jackal squinted her eyes as though she were straining to see something.
“Take it easy, Gwen,” Lance said. “I had to slick the data chips in your implant. I’m afraid that there are going to be some gaps in your memories.”
Jackal’s face held its tension for a few seconds, her concentration written clearly in her eyes, and then she relaxed back into the pillow. “I’m sorry,” she said. Her voice was tired and breathy. “I guess I lost a lot. I can’t really remember the run at all. It’s just... gone.”
My heart sank like a stone in my chest. I realized that I’d been harboring a secret hope that she could give me the name of the AI’s real owner. The name of the Puppeteer.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’ll just fall back on Plan B.”
“What’s that?” Lance asked.
“I don’t know yet,” I said.
“You should have downloaded the data from my implant before you slicked it,” Jackal said.
“I tried,” Lance said. “Most of what I got was gibberish. That AI hit you pretty hard.”
Jackal closed her eyes for a few seconds. When she opened them again, she said, “let’s try it anyway.”
“Try what?” I asked.
“I want to have a go at reprocessing the data files Lance downloaded from my CPU. I know the data is corrupted, but we might get lucky and catch a little piece of something.”
Lance shook his head. “You’re not in any shape for it. And you don’t upload known-bad software into your brain. It doesn’t make sense.”
“It can’t hurt me,” Jackal said.
Lance crossed his arms. “You don’t know that for sure. What if that code has a virus and it screws up your CPU again? Or it kicks you into a neural-feedback loop that spikes your central nervous system?”
“It won’t” Jackal said. “You said yourself that the code was corrupted. If it had a virus, it’s dead already.”
“I have to side with Lance,” I said. “It doesn’t sound like a good idea to me.”
“It’s my brain,” Jackal said in a voice that was part croak, part whisper.
“It’s my implant, and even the code that Lance downloaded from my CPU belongs to me.” She breathed heavily for a couple of seconds. “Do it.”
Lance looked at me. “What do you think?”
“Don’t ask him,” Jackal said. “It’s not his decision.”
Lance c
ontinued to stare at me.
“Do it!” Jackal hissed again.
Lanced sighed, and rubbed his eyes. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
As soon as he was gone, Jackal relaxed back into her pillow and closed her eyes.
“If you’re set on doing this,” I said, “at least wait until you’re in better shape.”
“What about the price on your head?” Jackal whispered. “I remember that much. If we don’t do this now, you may not have a later. And I put too much work into that kickin’ new hair-job of yours to let it go to waste.”
“Why are you doing this?” I asked. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful, but why are you taking such a risk?”
Jackal lay for a moment without speaking, then she sighed. “Every time a jacker punches into the net, he’s taking a chance with his life. It’s the nature of the beast.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But they do it for the money. You don’t have to worry about that. You made the run. Your money is already earned, whether you do this or not.”
“The run isn’t finished yet,” Jackal said. “Not till we get what we went in for. How would you like to be the PI who almost cracked the case?”
I didn’t say anything.
“That’s what I figured,” Jackal said. “And I’m not going to be the jacker who almost drilled an AI.”
I started to say something, but she cut me off. “Shut up, Stalin. I’m tired, and I want to get a couple of minutes rest before we do this.”
She lay with her eyes closed until Lance returned.
He walked in with an External Memory Module tucked under one arm and a coil of ribbon cable in his hand. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
“I’m certain.”
Lance laid the EMM on the bed next to Jackal and held up the connector end of the ribbon cable. “You know the drill.”
Jackal turned her head to the side.
Lance peeled the elastic bandages away from the jacks in the back of her skull and plugged the gold-pinned connector into an empty socket.
Lance picked up the EMM. “Ready?”
Jackal swallowed, and whispered, “go!”
Lance punched a key on the EMM.
The LEDs on the unit began to flash sporadically, and Jackal’s back arched in instant response, lifting her body until only her shoulders and heels made contact with the bed. Her head jerked to one side and then the other, her eyes rolling back until only the whites showed. Saliva sprayed from her parted lips. She released a raw, throat-rending growl through clenched teeth, and her arms began to jerk and twitch.
Lance stabbed his finger at the EMM, aiming for the button that would purge the bad code from Jackal’s implant, but a violent spasm sent her left arm lashing out, knocking the unit out of his hand. Another jerk of her arm tipped the wheeled equipment rack over, sending the dermal stimulator units crashing to the floor.
Lance and I both dove for the EMM, which dangled and jerked at the end of the ribbon cable.
After two seconds of scrambling, Lance got a grip on the EMM. He reached out to shut the unit off, but Jackal’s hand lashed out again. Her fingers locked around his wrist and squeezed.
“Don’t...” The word came out as a strained hiss. “Don’t... touch... it...”
Her arms stopped flailing and went as rigid as her spine.
We stared at her frozen body for perhaps ten seconds, the passage of time marked only by the tense and rapid breaths she took through her nostrils. Then slowly, her body began to relax. The tension went out of her muscles and surrendered her to gravity. She settled back into the bed.
“Getting...” Her ocular muscles relaxed, letting her eyes roll downward until the corneas were visible again. “I’m getting... a handle on it... now.”
“We’ve got to flush that code out of there,” Lance said.
“No...” Jackal said. “It’s okay... I’ve isolated the... dangerous parts, now.”
“I knew this was a bad idea,” Lance said.
“Maybe,” Jackal said. “But I think... it worked.”
“What have you got?” I asked.
“I don’t know yet,” Jackal said, still breathing heavily. “I’m running through the data now. There are some pretty serious gaps where the code got scrambled, but I think I can piece it together.”
I might be only heartbeats away from learning the name of the Puppeteer. Then the worm would turn, and the hunter would become the hunted, just as soon as I knew the name of my enemy.
“It looks like I was avoiding the protected core data,” Jackal said. “I was concentrating on peripheral information flow. Trying to swim with the data stream, blend in.”
She grimaced. “Big block of data missing there... I was skimming some unclassified correspondence files. Whoa... Gotcha!”
“Can you get a name?” I asked.
“I couldn’t find out who that mainframe officially belongs to,” she said. “They cover their tracks too well.”
“Damn!”
“But I can tell you who’s using it,” Jackal said. Her voice, tired as it was, had a child-like taunting quality about it.
“Who?”
“A medical R&D company over on Hawthorne Boulevard,” Jackal said. “It should be pretty simple to find out who owns it.”
I almost smiled. Here it was: the payoff. “What’s the name of the company?”
“Neuro-Tech Robotics,” Jackal said. “Does that ring a bell?”
“Neuro-Tech?” Lance asked. “No kidding? That’s the same company that built my surgical robots.”
My knees nearly buckled. I groped for support, blundered into a wall, and leaned heavily on it. Henry Clerval—the man behind the murders of twenty-something teenage girls, the man who was offering a fifty-thousand mark reward for my own murder, the man I had come to call the Puppeteer—was the owner of Neuro-Tech Robotics... my life-long friend, John Hershell?
I felt like the floor had dropped out from under me. “No,” I said. “You’re wrong. It’s not Neuro-Tech.”
“I’m sorry,” Jackal said softly. “But that’s the way it stacks up.”
“There are holes in the data,” I said. “Big holes. You said so yourself. Go back and look at it again.”
“I can re-run the data,” Jackal said. “But it won’t play out any different. We traced the murder callback to the AI, and the AI belongs to Neuro-Tech Robotics. That’s where all the arrows point.”
“I don’t give a damn where the arrows point! Re-run the fucking data. It’s not Neuro-Tech.”
Lance grabbed my left arm just above the elbow. “Come on,” he said. “Gwen needs to get some rest.”
He gently tugged me toward the door.
I almost snatched my arm away from him, but on some level, I realized that he was right. I let him lead me out of the room.
Lance released my elbow when we were in the hall. “You’ve obviously got some things to work out,” he said. “But don’t take your problems out on Gwen. She nearly died chasing your riddles through the net. And then she was willing to risk it again when you didn’t get what you wanted.”
“But she’s wrong,” I said. “She’s got to be.”
Lance turned back toward Jackal’s recovery room. “I really couldn’t care less whether she’s right or wrong,” he said. “My concern is her health. You’re not helping any by climbing up her ass.”
I found my way out to the alley and lit a cigarette. Okay, okay. Think it out. Work it through...
It was a coincidence. It was some kind of frame-up. Something. I would call John, talk to him. He would tell me the truth. I knew he would.
But what could he say? That he just happened to be the owner of the company that was trying to murder me? That there was a perfectly good reason that all those little girls had to die?
Emptiness settled in my belly like an icicle. It brought with it a comforting numbness. I leaned against the wall of the boutique, staring off into nothing. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t feel. I did
n’t want to.
The pain seemed to come from far away. At first, I couldn’t locate it; I couldn’t even tell if it was real. But it grew stronger and more insistent. It was a burning, in my hand, my fingers. The burning refused to be ignored. It reached down into my fog of self-pity and brought me around like a slap in the face.
“Ow! Jesus!” I shook my right hand until the cigarette butt fell free and rolled on the pavement. I ground it out with the toe of my shoe.
I looked at my hand. The cigarette had burned down to my skin, blistering the backs of my index and middle fingers. For such a small injury, the burns hurt like hell.
I was glad for the pain. It had shaken me out of my stupor. It helped melt the icicle in my stomach, helped me turn it to fire.
Jackal was still awake when I opened the door to the recovery room. She tried to smile. “I didn’t know if you were coming back. You left your bag.”
I picked up the travel bag and slung it over my shoulder. “Thanks.”
“I’m going to re-run that data,” she said. “Maybe you’re right. I could have made a mistake.”
“You don’t need to re-run it,” I said. “We both know you were right. I just wasn’t ready for it.”
“Is it somebody you know?”
“Yeah,” I said. “An old friend.”
“I figured it was something like that,” Jackal said. “I’m sorry.”
“No,” I said. “I’m sorry. I asked the questions. It’s not your fault that I didn’t like the answers.”
Jackal closed her eyes.
“Sleep now,” I said. “You done good.”
Down the block from Second Looks, I bought a news printout from a vending machine. The top story had moved on to a terrorist attack on the Russian Royal Family. There was still no mention of Rieger’s murder. That might mean that the body hadn’t been discovered yet. Or, it might mean that the police were sitting on the story.