by Jim Nelson
“Never saw a company go under with money in the bank,” I said, weighing the data brick in my hand.
“Male lead in the short film titled Detachment. Convicted on eighteen counts of digital targeting and electronic intrusion. Banned from the Internet and by extension the Nexternet. Fled United States in 2012, making him a parole violator as well.” He smartly returned the notepad to his pocket. “Last suspected residence: Sapporo, Hokkaido. Until now.”
I dropped the data brick of my memories on the beech table as though damaged merchandise well past its warranty. The way he'd read my list of particulars, it made my soul not so weighty.
Clift said, “You continuously relive your past. Those painful memories are strong and severe enough to be transmitted from your memex back to your retention server. Your memories have become a constant part of your daily record. You are so filled with remorse and anger, it’s become a daily part of your life. You would have no need for a time machine. You live in the past hourly. You should have chosen a more secure location to store your retention server. Or at least considered letting a proper data center administer it."
“Where would you store a backup of every unguarded thought you make?” I said.
Clift pointed to the back of his neck with a smug smile. "I never had my spine tapped, so that's not a decision I have to worry over." He looked to the ceiling and took in a deep breath. "I suppose I should have known it would end like this. I know you made contact with Faye Justin. I imagine she made a convincing offer for you to destroy the film rather than bring it to me."
"I have zero sympathy for her," I said. "In fact, returning the brick to you was supposed to have the fringe benefit of seeing her suffer a little."
"A real knight you are," he said.
"Yeah, well, she won again, it seems. For the last time: I did not destroy the brick."
He nodded, swirling his drink. "No one could blame you. You had ample motivation. Why didn't you?"
I stepped forward. "Because you murdered Aggaroy," I said. "And I didn't want to give you a single piece of blackmail to hold over me. When I turn you in, I couldn't have you point the finger at me."
He chuckled. "I murdered Mr. Aggaroy?" he said, making doe-eyes. He popped a slice of cheese in his mouth and drank deeply from his bourbon. "Well, what's done is done," he said with a pronounced exhalation. "Considering the money I've already forwarded you, I don't suppose it would be too much to ask how the brick came to be stolen in the first place."
"Gannon Chancellor played a part in it," I said. "Leigh explained it to me—"
“One moment.”
Clift exited the room carrying his bourbon. Brill remained close by, his dead gray eyes on me.
Clift returned, leading Leigh Blessing by hand. She trailed him with her head hung and shoulders drooped, like a schoolgirl caught playing doctor behind the biology building.
“I think Ms. Blessing should hear your story,” Clift said to me.
I don’t know what expression I held at that moment. Leigh made an apologetic look for me. I’m sorry, she mouthed.
“Sorry for what?” I said.
“I should have done the right thing long ago,” she said.
“Max killed Gannon,” I said. “Not you. Not me.”
“I came here to confess.” She smiled weakly, the weight of guilt finally freeing itself. “I damaged the Old Internet. I need to make clean about it.”
"Aggaroy stole the data brick,” I said to Clift. “Leigh had nothing to do with it.”
“Leigh tells me she moved all copies and variants of the film to a single data brick,” Clift said. “For easy transport off the island. And she’s confessed to being a party to the planning of the theft. We know of the political embarrassment the film can cause.” He motioned toward my data brick with his bourbon. "You told us, after all."
I stood before Leigh. “Get off the island,” I told her. “You’re not safe here.”
Clift’s hand snaked over the back of her neck and across her shoulders. He pulled her close.
“Leigh’s asked to repay her debt to us,” he said. “I asked she spend another internship with us. She’s to work off her sins. She’ll live on the island and continue her research into the history of the Internet.”
She looked as happy as a shamed nun. I could all but hear her heart leaping from her chest. She leaned her head down to avoid my gaze.
“I’ve made my decision,” she murmured.
I said to Clift, “You told her she’d face prison time unless she lived with you.”
“I don’t care for the insinuation,” Clift said, quite serious.
“Your squeeze,” I said. “Your soft touch. Cassandra Chancellor sent her into the lion’s den and you’re pulling the cell door shut.”
“Leigh is no lamb,” Clift said. “She’s a responsible and cognizant adult.”
“I want to hear her say it.”
“She already has,” he said.
“I want to hear it again.”
Clift squeezed her shoulders. Head down, he whispered to her, “Tell him.”
Leigh lifted her head slightly. Her bangs were splayed like wild hay.
“I need to stay here,” she said. “What I did was wrong.” She added, in almost a whisper, "Ms. Chancellor wants nothing more to do with me. Her assistant informed me this morning."
I broke away from them with a fah. I circled back and brushed past them to reach the bar. I filled a glass with ice and Scotch, all while eyeing the teardrop bottle of Blue Pharjé.
“These men have killed,” I called to her across the bar. “These are not people you need to apologize to. You owe them nothing.”
“We have killed?” Clift said, his mirth returning. “Which of us? Dr. Warwick? Or Dr. Marker?” He slopped his glass of bourbon toward the Rip Van Winkles slumbering at the fire.
I pointed to the data brick on the beech table. “They broke into my office and stole my memories while I was attempting to crack a safe.”
“While you were cracking a safe?” Clift said with a scoff. “And you’re accusing us?”
I sidled up to Brill. “I suppose I should thank you. You broke into the office while I was trapped in the rabbithole. The office door has an old-fashioned lock. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re skilled enough to pick a lock. Can you?"
“Some hackers take a perverse pride in studying lock-picking,” Clift said. “As way of better understanding computer security.” Clift waved his bourbon like shooing a fly. “It’s a tradition from back in the day.” He smiled to Leigh. “One you might consider studying during your next leg here as an intern.”
“Well, however Brill got in the office, he must have found a strange sight," I said. "I was trapped in the rabbithole, brain connected to the safe and quivering on the floor of the closet like an epileptic, and there was Brandt with a gun and a silencer. Brandt was going to kill me as soon as I got the safe unlocked.”
"If you got the safe unlocked," Clift said.
“Well, your data brick was in that safe. Every copy of Detachment in existence. See, I don’t think you or your man here knew that. At least, not at that point. That’s the real reason Brandt hired me, to get that data brick. But once the safe was open, I would be a loose end. He could either kill me or buy me off. He probably didn’t trust using money.”
“Because you would just come back and ask him for more money,” Clift said. “His uncle would have no choice but to pay. And after enduring a rabbithole, you would probably want more money than Donahue Brandt could offer without arousing suspicion.”
“Assuming my brain wasn’t pureed completely.” I nodded once at Brill. “Your man here killed Brandt. From what I’ve seen, he could do it without much effort. Certainly he has no soul to burden. He appears to have lost it when the Russian took his tongue.”
“So Brill disconnected you from the rabbithole?” Leigh said.
“Well, not immediately," I said. "With me trapped and Brandt dead, he had the opportunit
y to burgle my office at his leisure. He had some help from—Thierry? Your chef?"
"Cooking is Thierry's second love," Clift said. "Hacking is his first."
"Only after they'd stolen my memories did Brill return and unplug me."
"And saved your life," Clift added.
Leigh had a quizzical look on her face. I guessed what she was thinking.
"You're wondering why they couldn't break into Lund's safe themselves?" I asked her.
Still bruised at our exchange, she nodded once.
"Not with their memex sockets soldered," I said. "Using a micro-drill to break into my safe doesn't require a memex. Cracking an engram-locked safe does. And they couldn't hack the data brick out of Lund's safe the way they hacked my retention server. It was cold. No power applied to it. They needed to physically remove it." I said to Clift, "That's why you didn't fire me at the tennis court. You still needed me to break the rabbithole and get that safe open. That's why you pressured me to look into Lund's office. And why Brill tried to get his hands on the brick as soon as he could." I nodded across the room at him. "You tried to break into the office the second time I went in, didn't you? I blocked the door thinking you'd try it again. And last night, you tried breaking into my apartment. Well, I wired the security to my room myself."
"This is all beside the point," Clift said.
"Yeah, well, if your man found me with the safe open that second time, I doubt he would've saved my life. It would be my turn on the bathroom floor with my windpipe enlarged free of charge. And if I failed to defeat the rabbithole the second time, I'd be dead and the police would think I'd killed Dr. Lund. Not as good as having the data brick in hand, but a fair prize for second place. Isn't that right?"
Clift acknowledged nothing, only sipping his bourbon.
"Some time in all of this, Brill managed to try and move Ellis Brandt's body out of the doctor's office. The building must have better security than he expected. After several attempts, he could only leave the corpse for the police to find."
I sauntered over to Leigh. "Just so you don't think Clift and Brill are saints in all of this," I told her.
"I don't," she said.
I pointed at Brill. “He killed Brandt, and he did it without thinking twice. You’ll be living with this murderer every day if you stay on this island," I said to her. "Don’t think he wouldn’t dream of hurting you. You’re not safe.”
“I’m safe,” she said softly. “Elgin has promised.”
"And I've had about enough of your accusations," Clift said in a haughty voice.
"There was another witness in that office, Clift."
He let Leigh see he was amused at all this. "A third man?"
"Ellis Brandt, of course."
I drew close to Clift and Leigh. I took a long drink of the Scotch. My breath was rank with peat and age.
I told Leigh, “He has Ellis Brandt’s memories, after all.”
34.
Brill wheeled in an equipment cart, the same cart I watched him use to replace data bricks a couple days earlier. Atop it was an assortment of transformers and neural transformers. The setup was functionally identical to Gillette Dalt's séance contraption but lacking the gimcrack illusions, no gilded birdcage or egg of blue neuro-mimetic gel.
Brill produced Brandt’s memex and inserted it into a transformer. The unit was connected to a holographic projector on the ceiling. The flat gray projection disc was mounted so high, I failed to notice it before. After ten minutes of preparation, Brill lowered the lights in the room and supplied power to the transformer.
“Take us to you slicing Brandt's throat,” I told Brill.
“Let’s begin with Ellis Brandt meeting Dr. Lund,” Clift said.
Brandt’s memories played out in three-dimensions, the projections translucent mannequins before us. I stood on one side while Clift and Leigh stood opposite. It was like experimental theater in the round, the actors composed of photons and ions, their script an orchestral of neural patterns suspended in a mercury-doped hardened gel. The puppets spoke and moved as though unaware of our presence, and we were their captive audience.
The stage became Dr. Lund’s private office. On the periphery stood a doorway with the patient’s couch and bookshelves of the counseling room visible beyond. The thick blue hardback of Shakespeare’s sonnets rested on a middle shelf, easy not to notice if one did not know to look.
Lund sat behind her desk in a high-backed padded chair. She was a decade and a half older than me. Time had made her completely gray and wrinkled, but in a way that gave her a seasoned appearance. The projections started midsentence with them arguing.
“—not a matter of money,” she explained to him.
The projections played out through Brandt’s eyes. A slight motion sickness came over me as my mind attempted to track his scattered vision. He leaned forward on her desk with the knuckles of both hands, apparently to hover over her while she remained seated.
“I’m required by law to keep my patient list in complete and secure confidence,” she said, looking him in the eyes. By association, it appeared she was looking me square in the eyes. It was unsettling. I had no warm memories of her. I’d abandoned San Francisco explicitly to avoid ever seeing her again.
"I know he was your patient," Brandt said. "It was reported in the newspapers. I found them on the Old Internet. The court ruled he could either go to prison or undergo therapy and the newspapers reported you were his therapist—"
"Which they weren't supposed to print," she said.
"But they did."
"Even so, I can't give you any information on him." She spoke wearily as though she'd already told him a dozen times. "Besides, you're asking about a sentence handed down nearly thirty years ago. What is your interest in all this?"
"He disappeared about a year after he began seeing you," Brandt said. "I bet you knew where he was headed to."
"If I did, I would have reported it to the police. Leaving San Francisco would have been a violation of his parole agreement."
Brandt produced a folded cashier’s check from his blazer pocket.
“Put that away,” she told him. “I’ve already told you I will not accept any money.”
“You won’t even let me tell you how much it’s for?”
“Absolutely not,” she said.
“What do you want, then?”
With that, she popped. She removed her glasses, rose, and glided around the desk. With her approach came the opening to a lecture on professional ethics. Lund’s grating voice reminded me of listening to her lecture me years earlier on my attitude and negativity, my alcoholism and my self-loathing. She could do that psychiatrist’s trick of telling me what I was thinking before I said it. This was a woman who’d seen it all, it seemed, and I was just another cookie-cutter patient for her to collect her one hundred and seventy-five dollars per hour.
Brandt’s soapy personality certainly did not help, and I couldn’t blame her for her impatience with him. He was a rich kid bored by the world and its rules and procedures. When he didn’t get what he wanted, he assumed it was simply a matter of asking again.
Something about her lecture triggered him now. The holographic stage fuzzed and a living room appeared, the living room of a wealthy family. A prune-faced nanny with oversized glasses and heavy lipstick leaned into the young Ellis Brandt’s face and lectured him—and then she was Dr. Lund lecturing him. The nanny slapped young Ellis Brandt across the side of the head. The nanny became Dr. Lund slapping a young Ellis Brandt.
Brandt’s holographic arms gripped Lund by her shoulders and shook her. He shouted she needed to listen to him, that he was sick of people not listening to him. She fought him—she fought hard, I’d say—but he was in the summer of his life and she her winter. He got his hands around her neck. Lund’s gaze froze and the blood drained from her face.
She fell from his grip like sand from a fist. She rolled onto her back toward the rear wall. Her temple struck an exposed steam heating pi
pe with a clang. Her neck twitched. He took her by the shoulders and rolled her on her back. Her eyes stared up at him, seemingly unable to blink, and she expired. Her limp body was in a pile at Brandt’s feet with him repeating over her Are you all right? Are you all right? His out-of-breath voice could only muster one word thereafter: Shit…shit…shit…shit…
Clift leaned around the holographic corpse with a sick smile. “Would you care to enjoy that again?” he asked me. “I know of your history with Dr. Lund.”
Brill manipulated the transformer’s panel like an impatient man with a remote control. He took us forward a few hours. Rifling through Lund’s desk, Brandt found instructions from the safe manufacturer on how to configure the engram-lock along with written notes clipped to the sheet. I recognized Lund’s handwriting immediately—she’d prescribed various anti-depressants for me—and Brandt pieced together her note to mean the lock was composed of twelve of Shakespeare’s sonnets. He located the tome on the bookshelf in no time. He flipped through the book repeating the same four-letter word he’d been repeating since Lund died in his hands.
“He knows my file is in that safe,” I said. “And now he’s facing manslaughter charges."
"Manslaughter at best," Clift added.
"Better to get what he came for than leave empty-handed.”
Then came the unexpected. As Brandt stood in the rear closet daring himself to open the safe with Shakespeare's sonnets, a figure appeared in the entry hallway. A large man in a rumpled brown suit sauntered in with both hands deep in his trouser pockets.
"Who's there?" Brandt called out. He held Shakespeare's tome in his hands like a baseball bat.
"Just call me nosy." Aggaroy strolled into the light of the closet. "And your name is Ellis Brandt."
"How do you know that?"
Aggaroy smirked and shrugged, his hands still deep in his pockets. "I know a lot of things about you. I know that you do a lot of work for your uncle's election campaign, for example. And I know you booked a ticket for San Francisco last week, which is strange because you've never visited this city before in your life so far as I can tell."