Asimov's SF, January 2012

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “I know, I know. Do you want the executive summary? Even if it's also a work in progress? Okay. First up, nobody other than Coffin was in his flat that night, according to netfeed tracking.”

  “The other night upon the stair,” Ferron said, “I met a man who wasn't there.”

  Damini blew her bangs out of her eyes. “So either nobody came in, or whoever did is a good enough hacker to eradicate every trace of her presence. Which is not a common thing.”

  “Gotcha. What else?”

  “Doyle picked out a partial pattern in your feed. Two power cuts in places associated with the crime. It started looking for more, and it identified a series of brownouts over the course of a year or so, all in locations with some connection to Dr. Coffin. Better yet, Doyle identified the cause.”

  “I promise I'm holding my breath,” Indrapramit said.

  “Then how is it you are talking? Anyway, it's a smart virus in the power grids. It's draining power off the lab and household sunfarms at irregular intervals. That power is being routed to a series of chargeable batteries in Coffin's lab space. Except Coffin didn't purchase order the batteries.”

  “Nnebuogor,” Ferron guessed.

  “Two points,” said Damini. “It's a stretch, but she could have come in to the office today specifically to see if the cops stopped by.”

  “She could have . . .” Indrapramit said dubiously. “You think she killed him because he found out she was stealing power? For what purpose?”

  “I'll get on her email and media,” Damini said. “So here's my speculation: imagine this utility virus, spreading through the smart grid from aptblock to aptblock. To commit the murder, nobody had to be in the room with him, not if his four-dimensional manipulators were within range of him. Right? You'd just override whatever safety protocols there were, and . . . boom. Or squish, if you prefer.”

  Ferron winced. She didn't. Prefer, that was. “Any sign that the manipulators were interfered with?”

  “Memory wiped,” Damini said. “Just like the cat. Oh, and the other thing I found out. Dexter Coffin is not our boy's first identity. It's more like his third, if my linguistic and semantic parsers are right about the web content they're picking up. I've got Conan on it too"—Conan was another of the department's expert systems—"and I'm going to go over a selection by hand. But it seems like our decedent had reinvented himself whenever he got into professional trouble, which he did a lot. He had unpopular opinions, and he wasn't shy about sharing them with the net. So he'd make the community too hot to handle and then come back as his own sockpuppet—new look, new address, new handle. Severing all ties to what he was before. I've managed to get a real fix on his last identity, though—”

  Indrapramit leaned forward, folding his arms against the chill. “How do you do that? He works in a specialized—a rarified field. I'd guess everybody in it knows each other, at least by reputation. Just how much did he change his appearance?”

  “Well,” Damini said, “he used to look like this. He must have used some rightminding tactics to change elements of his personality, too. Just not the salient ones. A real chameleon, your arsehole.”

  She picked a still image out of the datastream and flung it up. Ferron glanced at Indrapramit, whose rakish eyebrows were climbing up his forehead. An East Asian with long, glossy dark hair, who appeared to stand about six inches taller than Dr. Coffin, floated at the center of her perceptions, smiling benevolently.

  “Madam, saab,” Damini said. “May I present Dr. Jessica Fang.”

  “Well,” Ferron said, after a pause of moderate length. “That takes a significant investment.” She thought of Aristotle: As the condition of the mind alters, so too alters the condition of the body, and likewise, as the condition of the body alters, so too alters the condition of the mind.

  Indrapramit said, “He has a taste for evocative handles. Any idea why the vanishing act?”

  “I'm working on it,” Damini said.

  “I've got a better idea,” said Ferron. “Why don't we ask Detective Morganti?”

  Indrapramit steepled his fingers. “Boss. . . .”

  “I'll hear it,” Ferron said. “It doesn't matter if it's crazy.”

  “We've been totally sidetracked by the cat issue. Because Chairman Miaow has to be Niranjana, right? Because a clone would have expressed the genes for those markings differently. But she can't be Niranjana, because she's not wiped: she's factory-new.”

  “Right,” Ferron said cautiously.

  “So.” Indrapramit was enjoying his dramatic moment. “If a person can have cosmetic surgery, why not a parrot-cat?”

  * * * *

  “Chairman Miaow?” Ferron called, as she led Indrapramit into her flat. They needed tea to shake off the early morning chill, and she was beyond caring what the neighbors thought. She needed a clean uniform, too.

  “Miaow,” said Chairman Miaow, from inside the kitchen cupboard.

  “Oh, dear.” Indrapramit followed Ferron in. Smoke sat demurely in the middle of the floor, tail fluffed over his toes, the picture of innocence. Ferron pulled wide the cabinet door, which already stood ten inches ajar. There was Chairman Miaow, purring, a shredded packet of tunafish spreading dribbles of greasy water across the cupboard floor.

  She licked her chops ostentatiously and jumped down to the sink lip, where she balanced as preciously as she had in Coffin's flat.

  “Cat,” Ferron said. She thought over the next few things she wanted to say, and remembered that she was speaking to a parrot-cat. “Don't think you've gotten away with anything. The fox is getting the rest of that.”

  “Fox food is icky,” the cat said. “Also, not enough taurine.”

  “Huh,” Ferron said. She looked over at Indrapramit.

  He looked back. “I guess she's learning to talk.”

  * * * *

  They had no problem finding Detective Morganti. The redheaded American woman arrived at Ferron's aptblock with the first rays of sunlight stroking the vertical farms along its flanks. She had been sitting on the bench beside the door, reading something on her screen, but she looked up and stood as Ferron and Indrapramit exited.

  “Sub-Inspector Ferron, I presume? And Constable Indrapramit, how nice to see you again.”

  Ferron shook her hand. She was even more imposing in person, tall and broad-chested, with the shoulders of a cartoon superhuman. She didn't squeeze.

  Morganti continued, “I understand you're the detective of record on the Coffin case.”

  “Walk with us,” Ferron said. “There's a nice French coffee shop on the way to the Metro.”

  It had shaded awnings and a courtyard, and they were seated and served within minutes. Ferron amused herself by pushing the crumbs of her pastry around on the plate while they talked. Occasionally, she broke a piece off and tucked it into her mouth, washing buttery flakes down with thick, cardamom-scented brew.

  “So,” she said after a few moments, “what did Jessica Fang do in Honolulu? It's not just the flame wars, I take it. And there's no warrant for her that we could find.”

  Morganti's eyebrows rose. “Very efficient.”

  “Thank you.” Ferron tipped her head to Indrapramit. “Mostly his work, and that of my archinformist.”

  Morganti smiled; Indrapramit nodded silently. Then Morganti said, “She is believed to have been responsible for embezzling almost three million ConDollars from her former employer, eleven years ago in the Hawaiian Islands.”

  “That'd pay for a lot of identity-changing.”

  “Indeed.”

  “But they can't prove it.”

  “If they could, Honolulu P.D. would have pulled a warrant and virtually extradited her. Him. I was contracted to look into the case ten days ago—” She tore off a piece of a cheese croissant and chewed it thoughtfully. “It took the skip trace this long to locate her. Him.”

  “Did she do it?”

  "Hell yes.” She grinned like the American she was. “The question is—well, okay, I realize the m
urder is your jurisdiction, but I don't get paid unless I either close the case or eliminate my suspect—and I get a bonus if I recover any of the stolen property. Now, ‘killed by person or persons unknown’ is a perfectly acceptable outcome as far as the City of Honolulu is concerned, with the added benefit that the State of Hawaii doesn't have to pay Bengaluru to incarcerate him. So I need to know, one cop to another, if the inside-out stiff is Dexter Coffin.”

  “The DNA matches,” Ferron said. “I can tell you that in confidence. There will be a press release once we locate and notify his next of kin.”

  “Understood,” Morganti said. “I'll keep it under my hat. I'll be filing recovery paperwork against the dead man's assets in the amount of C$2,798,000 and change. I can give you the next of kin, by the way.”

  The data came in a squirt. Daughter, Maui. Dr. Fang-Coffin really had severed all ties.

  “Understood,” Ferron echoed. She smiled when she caught herself. She liked this woman. “You realize we have to treat you as a suspect, given your financial motive.”

  “Of course,” Morganti said. “I'm bonded, and I'll be happy to come in for an interrogation under Truth.”

  “That will make things easier, madam,” Ferron said.

  Morganti turned her coffee cup in its saucer. “Now then. What can I do to help you clear your homicide?”

  Indrapramit shifted uncomfortably on the bench.

  “What did Jessica Fang do, exactly?” Ferron had Damini's data in her case buffer. She could use what Morganti told her to judge the contract officer's knowledge and sincerity.

  “In addition to the embezzling? Accused of stealing research and passing it off as her own,” Morganti said. “Also, she was—well, she was just kind of an asshole on the net, frankly. Running down colleagues, dismissing their work, aggrandizing her own. She was good, truthfully. But nobody's that good.”

  “Would someone have followed him here for personal reasons?”

  “As you may have gathered, this guy was not diligent about his rightminding,” Morganti said. She pushed a handful of hair behind her shoulder. “And he was a bit of a narcissist. Sociopath? Antisocial in some sort of atavistic way. Normal people don't just . . . walk away from all their social connections because they made things a little hot on the net.”

  Ferron thought of the distributed politics of her own workplace, the sniping and personality clashes. And her mother, not so much alone on an electronic Serengeti as haunting the virtual pillared palaces of an Egypt that never was.

  “No,” she said.

  Morganti said, “Most people find ways to cope with that. Most people don't burn themselves as badly as Jessica Fang did, though.”

  “I see.” Ferron wished badly for sparkling water in place of the syrupy coffee. “You've been running down Coffin's finances, then? Can you share that information?”

  Morganti said that Coffin had liquidated a lot of hidden assets a week ago, about two days after she took his case. “It was before I made contact with him, but it's possible he had Jessica Fang flagged for searches—or he had a contact in Honolulu who let him know when the skip trace paid off. He was getting ready to run again. How does that sound?”

  Ferron sighed and sat back in her chair. “Fabulous. It sounds completely fabulous. I don't suppose you have any insight into who he might have been expecting for dinner? Or how whoever killed him might have gotten out of the room afterward when it was all locked up tight on Coffin's override?”

  Morganti shrugged. “He didn't have any close friends or romantic relationships. Always too aware that he was living in hiding, I'd guess. Sometimes he entertained co-workers, but I've checked with them all, and none admits having seen him that night.”

  “Sub-Inspector,” Indrapramit said gently. “The time.”

  “Bugger,” Ferron said, registering it. “Morning roll call. Catch up with you later?”

  “Absolutely,” Morganti said. “As I said before, I'm just concerned with clearing my embezzling case. I'm always happy to help a sister officer out on a murder.”

  And butter up the local police, Ferron thought.

  Morganti said, “One thing that won't change. Fang was obsessed with astronomy.”

  “There were deep-space images on Coffin's walls,” Ferron said.

  Indrapramit said, “And he had offered his Ganesha an indigo scarf. I wonder if the color symbolized something astronomical to him.”

  “Indigo,” Morganti said. “Isn't it funny that we have a separate word for dark blue?”

  Ferron felt the pedantry welling up, and couldn't quite stopper it. “Did you know that all over the world, dark blue and black are often named with the same word? Possibly because of the color of the night sky. And that the ancient Greeks did not have a particular name for the color blue? Thus their seas were famously ‘wine-dark.’ But in Hindu tradition, the color blue has a special significance: it is the color of Vishnu's skin, and Krishna is nicknamed Sunil, ‘dark blue.’ The color also implies that which is all-encompassing, as in the sky.”

  She thought of something slightly more obscure. “Also, that color is the color of Shani Bhagavan, who is one of the deities associated with Uttara Bhadrapada. Which we've been hearing a lot about lately. It might indeed have had a lot of significance to Dr. Fang-Coffin.”

  Morganti, eyebrows drawn together in confusion, looked to Indrapramit for salvation. “Saab? Uttara Bhadrapada?”

  Indrapramit said, “Andromeda.”

  * * * *

  Morganti excused herself as Indrapramit and Ferron prepared to check in to their virtual office.

  While Ferron organized her files and her report, Indrapramit finished his coffee. “We need to check inbound ships from, or carrying passengers from, America. Honolulu isn't as prohibitive as, say, Chicago.”

  They'd worked together long enough that half the conversational shifts didn't need to be recorded. “Just in case somebody did come here to kill him. Well, there can't be that many passages, right?”

  “I'll get Damini after it,” he said. “After roll—”

  Roll call made her avoidant. There would be reports, politics, wrangling, and a succession of wastes of time as people tried to prove that their cases were more worthy of resources than other cases.

  She pinched her temples. At least the coffee here was good. “Right. Telepresencing . . . now.”

  * * * *

  After the morning meeting, they ordered another round of coffees, and Ferron pulled up the sandwich menu and eyed it. There was no telling when they'd have time for lunch.

  She'd grab something after the next of kin notification. If she was still hungry when they were done.

  Normally, in the case of a next of kin so geographically distant, Bengaluru Police would arrange for an officer with local jurisdiction to make the call. But the Lahaina Police Department had been unable to raise Jessica Fang's daughter on a home visit, and a little cursory research had revealed that she was unEmployed and very nearly a permanent resident of Artificial Reality.

  Just going by her handle, Jessica Fang's daughter on Maui didn't have a lot of professional aspirations. Ferron and Indrapramit had to go virtual and pull on avatars to meet her: Skooter0 didn't seem to come out of her virtual worlds for anything other than biologically unavoidable crash cycles. Since they were on duty, Ferron and Indrapramit's avatars were the standard-issue blanks provided by Bengaluru Police, their virtual uniforms sharply pressed, their virtual faces expressionless and identical.

  It wasn't the warm and personal touch you would hope for, Ferron thought, when somebody was coming to tell you your mother had been murdered.

  “Why don't you take point on this one?” she said.

  Indrapramit snorted. “Be sure to mention my leadership qualities in my next performance review.”

  They left their bodies holding down those same café chairs and waded through the first few tiers of advertisements—get-rich-quick schemes, Bollywood starlets, and pop star scandal sheets, until they go
t into the American feed, and then it was get-rich-quick schemes, Hollywood starlets, pornography, and Congressional scandal sheets—until they linked up with the law enforcement priority channel. Ferron checked the address and led Indrapramit into a massively multiplayer artificial reality that showed real-time activity through Skooter0's system identity number. Once provided with the next-of-kin's handle, Damini had sent along a selection of key codes and overrides that got them through the pay wall with ease.

  They didn't need a warrant for this. It was just a courtesy call.

  Skooter0's preferred hangout was a “historical” AR, which meant in theory that it reflected the pre-twenty-first-century world, and in practice that it was a muddled-up stew of cowboys, ninjas, pinstripe-suit mobsters, Medieval knights, cavaliers, Mongols, and Wild West gunslingers. There were Macedonians, Mauryans, African gunrunners, French resistance fighters, and Nazis, all running around together with samurai and Shaolin monks.

  Indrapramit's avatar checked a beacon—a glowing green needle floating just above his nonexistent wrist. The directional signal led them through a space meant to evoke an antediluvian ice cave, in which about two dozen people all dressed as different incarnations of the late-twentieth-century pop star David Bowie were working themselves into a martial frenzy as they prepared to go forth and do virtual battle with some rival clade of Emulators. Ferron eyed a Diamond Dog who was being dressed in glittering armor by a pair of Thin White Dukes and was glad of the expressionless surface of her uniform avatar.

  She knew what they were supposed to be because she pattern-matched from the web. The music was quaint, but pretty good. The costumes . . . she winced.

  Well, it was probably a better way to deal with antisocial aggression than taking it out on your spouse.

  Indrapramit walked on, eyes front—not that you needed eyes to see what was going on in here.

  At the far end of the ice cave, four seventh-century Norse dwarves delved a staircase out of stone, leading endlessly down. Heat rolled up from the depths. The virtual workmanship was astounding. Ferron and Indrapramit moved past, hiding their admiring glances. Just as much skill went into creating AR beauty as if it were stone.