Distant Worlds Volume 1

by Benjamin Sperduto

  The train dumped Rees a few blocks away from his destination. It took a few minutes to push through the crowded loading platform to get down to the street, but once he was there, it was easier to get around without bumping into someone. The busy sidewalks gradually cleared out as he moved farther away from the station. By the time he’d gone a block, the number of pedestrians had dropped to a trickle

  Heavy, chemical laden clouds generally covered the city like a cotton-lined roof, but today there were more gaps in the shroud than normal. The harsh sunlight punched through and baked everything it touched. Rees pulled his jacket’s hood over his head to keep the harmful rays off his skin. Most of the people he passed wore a wide-brimmed hat or held an umbrella aloft. Those going without protection already had the telltale patches of discolored skin or were losing clumps of hair. Either they couldn’t afford treatment or they’d simply resigned themselves to the slow death of skin cancer.

  Sizzle Street was quieter during the day, but it was hardly dead. Most of the shops there were open around the clock, and there were always street dealers set up in the mouths of alleyways or roaming up and down the sidewalks. The place really lit up at night, though. That was when the street filled up with folks from the surrounding blocks looking to get all sorts of business done. Some of it was legal, but most of it wasn’t.

  The sheer number of people there made it a good choice for face-to-face meetings and there were so many signal scramblers set up that it was almost impossible for either city or corporate authorities to listen in unless they knew exactly when and where to focus their efforts. Bribes and moles proved more effective means of keeping tabs on what was going down at any given time.

  Rees entered an old apartment building and took the stairs up to the fourth floor. Most of the rooms there were empty, or had been the last time he’d visited. He stopped outside apartment #483 and knocked.

  The tiny cameras positioned at the corners of the doorframe whirred to life and scanned him from head to toe.

  “Open up, Squibby,” he said. “It’s Rees.”

  No answer. The cameras went silent.

  Rees knocked again.

  “I’m not here to arrest you, asshole. Will you just open the fucking door?”

  The something inside the door clicked. Rees turned the handle and slowly pushed the door open.

  There were no windows inside the apartment. Most of the light came courtesy of a small lamp resting on the desk in the center of the room, but it wasn’t strong enough to reach the walls or corners. Dozens of tiny lights in all sorts of colors glowed and blinked in the darkness, each of them likely connected to a larger piece of computer hardware. The room smelled of solder, static, and old fast-food wrappers.

  “Squibby?”

  She sat in a large, cushioned chair on the opposite side of the desk. The chair was so big that she looked like a child sitting in her father’s office. Her attention remained fixed on the multiple monitors set up on the desk, but she waved one of her hands up when Rees called out to her.

  “Mind the door, will you?”

  Rees shut the door and walked over to the desk. Each monitor screen displayed lines and lines worth of encrypted data. Additional information was being transmitted to Squibby’s cyberoptic implants, but her workload was obviously much too large for just one display feed. Her fingers danced across three physical keyboards and occasionally reached up to tap on the virtual interface that Rees couldn’t see. It looked overwhelming to him, but Squibby juggled the tasks effortlessly.

  But there was obviously a cost to such efficiency. She looked like she hadn’t left the room in days, maybe weeks. Her hair was greasy and tangled and Rees wondered when she last washed her clothes. If it hadn’t been for the wisps of warm air rising from her cup of tea, he might have wondered if she ever left her chair. Even though the floor around her workstation was covered with food wrappers and empty cups, she was frightfully thin.

  “Been a while, Squibby.”

  She shrugged one shoulder, never taking her eyes off the monitors.

  “Nice of you to notice,” she said.

  “Come on, now, don’t be like that. You told me to keep my distance.”

  “Keep your distance,” she said. “Not disa-fucking-ppear.”

  Rees wanted to argue, but deep down, he knew she was right. More than a year had gone by since Squibby’s dismissal from the force. He’d tried to keep in touch with her at first, but her close association with an active detective was making it hard for her to find work so she’d asked him to back off. It didn’t take long for Rees to fall into a habit of forgetting to contact her at all.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have called or something, just to check up with you, see how you’re doing.”

  She bobbed her head slightly. It might have been intended as a nod.

  “Morgan says ‘Hi’,” Rees said.

  That got a smile out of her.

  “No, he doesn’t,” she said. “Now you’re just being an asshole.”

  She spun her chair around to face him rather than the monitors.

  “So,” she said, “what do you need? This have something to do with the murder over at the Sircotin building?”

  “How do you know about that already?”

  Squibby sighed and pointed to her collection of monitors as Rees fished Morgan’s report out of his pocket.

  “Morgan did an autopsy and tracked the murder weapon to a guy named George Vandun. I got to question him for a few minutes before a Sircotin lawyer hauled him off and slammed the case shut. He gave me a name that I need crosschecked in all the relevant databanks along with the results of Morgan’s autopsy.”

  “What are you looking for, exactly?”

  “Anything,” Rees said. “According to Vandun, the stiff’s name was Aran Kurush. Vandun seems to think he was up to something… strange.”

  “And you believe him?”

  Rees thought back to the look on Vandun’s face when he spoke of his last meeting with Kurush.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I do.”

  Squibby held out her hand.

  “Give me the file.”

  It had been a long time since Rees watched Squibby work.

  He’d forgotten how good she was.

  She started with the easy stuff, sorting through the various national identity registries for hits on Kurush. While the search was running on a few of the monitors, she downloaded Morgan’s report and took it apart piece by piece, feeding each bit into powerful compiler programs that would scan trillions of datafiles for any similarities.

  But that was just the groundwork. After the automated programs started cranking out leads for her to follow, she removed the synthskin plug covering her neural datajack and plugged herself into her rig. Once she interfaced with the system, she plunged into the datastream, slicing through any firewall or AI countermeasure that got in her way. She worked quickly, almost in a state of hyperactivity as her eyes darted from screen to screen and her fingers keyed in hundreds of commands every minute.

  Rees watched her closely for the first ten or fifteen minutes of the search, but once it was clear she wouldn’t be finishing any time soon, he found an empty chair and sat down. He was still running through his conversation with Vandum when he drifted off to sleep.

  Rees didn’t sleep well.

  He should have known better. Fifteen years on the street had gone a long way to desensitizing him to the nastier sort of crime scenes, but the human brain didn’t just forget the things it saw. It tucked them away, to be sure, locked them behind the iron doors of logic and covered them with veils of denial. During the waking hours, the mind kept those barriers strong, but during the night, when the tidal force of dreams flooded in, it started springing leaks.

  The process began slowly, an image here, a conjecture there. But before long, the dreaming subconscious would start connecting points that were better left disjointed, finding patterns and ideas that eluded the more limited, systematic reason
ing of the waking mind.

  Each dream brought Rees back to the unfinished rooms of the eighty-eighth floor. But the place was different somehow, or maybe he was the one that was different. He noticed the seams in its construction, the architectural gaps that offered a glimpse into something else, somewhere else. A queer sort of light spilled out of unfinished corners, casting bizarre shadows across the room.

  Someone was there with him, always lingering on the edge of his vision. A faint electrical hum filled the air, like there was loose wiring connection in one of the exposed conduits. When he listened closely, Rees thought it sounded almost like whispering.

  Vandum was there, or what was left of him anyway. His severed limbs were nailed into the wall in some haphazard geometric pattern, his entrails tracing a crooked circle around them. Vandum’s head rested on the floor just a few feet away from the rest of his remains. The eyes had been removed, leaving nothing but empty, dead sockets behind.

  Rees felt something cold in his hands. He looked down to see the thin, fiberoptic cables dangling from each of his closed fists. They glistened with blood.

  Trust those eyes of yours…

  “Rees?”

  He came around slowly, like his consciousness had to traverse a vast gulf just to return to his physical body. When Rees finally opened his eyes, Squibby was standing over him, her hand resting on his shoulder. Somehow, she looked older than when he first entered the room. Maybe it was a trick of the light, but he didn’t recall ever seeing so many wrinkles on her face before.

  Once he was stirring, she stepped back and slumped into her chair. She’d brewed another cup of tea and had stuffed her arm elbow-deep into a bag of chips. The strain of the direct neural datafeed was hard on the body. Squibby probably burned off almost a thousand calories every time she plugged in, so she always had a craving for something with a lot of fat and salt whenever she disconnected.

  “How long was I out?” Rees asked. Without any windows, the apartment seemed to exist in a tiny pocket of space unaffected by time.

  Squibby put just enough space between her mouthfuls of chips to answer.

  “About four hours,” she said.

  He was more tired than he thought. If not for the dreams, he might have actually felt refreshed after such a long nap.

  “You just finish up?”

  “Yeah,” Squibby said. She crunched another handful of chips and washed it down with a gulp of tea.

  “So what’d you find?”

  Squibby didn’t answer right away. She took a deep breath and seemed ready to answer, but didn’t. The second try failed as well.

  Rees had never seen her at a loss for words.

  “What is it?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “Rees, I think you need to let this one go.”

  “What?”

  She shook her head.

  “Well, let’s start with what I know. Whoever this Kurush guy is, that can’t be his real name. There’s no trace of anyone by that name prior to him showing up and pitching the tower project to Sircotin. Somehow, though, he’s got all kinds of references from various companies that don’t seem to have any previous connection to him. There are pictures of him floating around here and there over the last few years, but they’re all slightly different enough that it’s impossible to construct a verifiable image of the guy. It’s weird, almost like every picture has been altered after the fact to make him hard to pin down.”

  “You think someone’s trying to cover his tracks?”

  “No,” Squibby said, “this is something different. Far as I can tell, the problem is in the photos themselves. I found a few raw images pulled straight from camera feeds. No post-shot alterations or anything.”

  “Video records?”

  Squibby grunted.

  “Sucks. All of it. I’ve never seen a messier video trail. Not a single clear shot of his face. Either something passes through the frame just as he turns or there’s a lens flare or the image integrity breaks down.”

  “What about the DNA scan Morgan ran?”

  “That was a tough one,” she said. “There’s nothing like it on record in any public or private database, secure or otherwise. But if you go back further, back before DNA screening scans, you start to find some similar cases. Nothing concrete, but circumstances that resemble this one: disfigured body, strange amount of influence for a John Doe, some politician, preacher or businessman always swooping in to make any problems go away.”

  “How far back are we talking?”

  “Last known case was back in the twentieth century, but there are some that go back even longer. I even found mention of cases from fifteenth century Spain and tenth century Iraq.”

  Rees doubted the extreme cases could be of much use. They were probably coincidental matches anyway.

  “What about Sircotin itself? Anything useful there?”

  Squibby shook her head.

  “They transferred most of their servers to the new building a few weeks back. I don’t know what’s going on at that place, but it’s got security like I’ve never seen before.”

  “AI?”

  “I… I don’t know,” Squibby said. “I don’t think so. AI’s adaptive; most of the time it responds to what you do or what it thinks you’re going to do. This stuff, though, it’s like it doesn’t give a shit what you’re doing. It comes at you in weird ways, does things I’ve never seen or heard of before.”

  “So you can’t break through?”

  “Not yet, leastways. I’ve got some sweepers sizing it up now. It’ll take them a while to get a clear picture, but once they’re finished I’ll have a better idea of how to crack it.”

  “How long will that take?”

  Squibby shrugged.

  “A week or two? Maybe a month at the most?”

  That wasn’t going to be much help. Sircotin would have scrubbed anything useful from its records by the time Squibby got access to them.

  “Isn’t there any way to speed that up?”

  “Not from here,” she said. “If I was on-site or had a hardline tap into the system that I could access remotely, then I could probably force my way in. Trying to access it from the outside is tougher; kind of like sizing up a perp through a window instead of standing in front of him.”

  Rees thought for a moment. The building’s upper levels would be locked up tight now that Sicrotin’s lawyers were undercutting the investigation.

  “What about Vandum?” he asked. “Anything unusual there?”

  Squibby bit her lip and sighed.

  “Dead.”

  Rees blinked, dumbfounded.

  “What? How?”

  “Suicide. Sircotin put him on house arrest in his apartment, but he threw himself out the window just a few hours ago. Some pedestrians made off with pics of the body before some security goons scraped him off the pavement.”

  “Shit,” Rees said. “Anybody file a report?”

  “Of course not,” Squibby said. “Looked pretty messy, though. He hit the ground so hard that his eyes popped out.”

  “Wait, his eyes were missing?”

  Squibby nodded.

  “The images weren’t the best quality, but the eyes were definitely gone.”

  Rees was still trying to digest that bit of information when he phone rang. He pulled it from his pocket and checked the screen. There was a message waiting for him. The phone didn’t recognize the number.

  “Squibby,” he said, “run a number for me, will you?”

  She punched the numbers in as he relayed them.

  “Holy shit,” she said.

  “What? Who is it?”

  “That number’s registered to George Vandum.”

  Rees tapped the screen to open the message.

  Southeast elevator. 816-121-5225-318-1620. Trust those eyes of yours, detective.

  The first three floors of the Sircotin Technologies building were open to the public, with stores, workshops, and med-clinics all hawking the latest gadgets and goodi
es the corporation had to offer. There was still plenty of security, of course. Armed guards were positioned near the exits on each floor and the security checkpoint at the main entrance ran a detailed risk assessment scan on everyone that walked through the doors. Left to his own devices, Rees wouldn’t have made it two steps inside before a security officer in riot gear met him to confiscate his gun and assign an escort to take him wherever he needed to go. If he wasn’t there to shop and didn’t have a warrant on file, the guard might even show him outside then and there.

  Fortunately for him, he had help from Squibby. She’d fixed him up with a scrambler that intercepted every external scan directed at him and bounced back a preprogrammed, adaptive signal that left him looking as innocuous as a file clerk. Security personnel still might have flagged him as suspicious, but they were used to trusting whatever the scanners fed into their optic implants. Short of walking through the door with a gun in hand, Rees could do just about anything without drawing undue attention.

  He headed for the elevator at the southeast corner of the building. It stood by itself, far from the cluster of elevators used by the shopping public. He activated the keypad next to the doors and punched in the number from his phone.

  816-121-5225-318-1620.

  The doors hissed open and Rees stepped into the elevator.

  “I’m in.”

  Squibby guided him from there. She had a copy of the building’s blueprints handy and knew where he needed to go to tap into the main Sircotin network. It was a simple matter of finding the right floor, opening the elevator door, and deploying the splicer drone, which was small enough to fit in Rees’s pocket. Once the device hit the floor, its spidery legs snapped into position and it scurried along the floor almost too quickly for the naked eye to follow. It would hunt down the closest network cable and cut in, inserting itself into the connection and transmitting a clean access point back to Squibby’s apartment. By the time Sircotin hacked through the scrambler signal to find the drone, Squibby would already have everything she needed and the drone’s self-destruct trigger would melt down its nano-circuitry into a puddle of toxic wax.