The Shapechanger Scenario

by Simon Hawke

  Higgins frowned. "You mean, they did it that way on purpose? I don't understand. Why would they want to do that?"

  "Maybe they wanted to leave us a way out," I said. "They don't want to force us to employ strategic weapons on Draconis 9. The threat that we'll sterilize their home world is the only thing that prevents widespread terrorism on their part, an all-out war waged from within. But they'll keep pushing, as with the explosion at the plant, trying to force us to accede to their demands."

  "Then, for God's sake, why not negotiate?" said Higgins.

  "Because their terms would necessarily be unacceptable," said Breck.

  "How can you know that?"

  "It's obvious. They'd want control over their own destiny, which does not seem like a lot to ask, but unfortunately, the only way they could ensure our good faith would be by their continued presence among us. And that would be unacceptable, you see. Yet, even if the ambimorphs agreed to return home, how would we ever know they hadn't left infiltrators behind? We cannot trust them, you see, and they cannot trust us."

  "So what's the alternative?" said Higgins.

  Breck shrugged. "There doesn't seem to be any. We must try to maintain the standoff somehow, at least until a way can be found to detect their presence among us. In the meantime, they will undoubtedly continue to make that presence felt. It's very much a war of nerves."

  "It doesn't seem to me as if it's a war that we can win," said Higgins. "Even if you come up with a way to detect an ambimorph masquerading as a human, what are you going to do, screen every single human? It's impossible! You simply can't control people like that!"

  "They're working on it," I said.

  FOUR

  After dinner, Higgins drove us to our hotel, located at the hub of Center City, the industrial complex. With the exception of visiting company officials and newly arrived workers not yet assigned to housing, it didn't see much business. We stayed there only long enough to unpack. We had one bag apiece, each containing a plasma pistol and a small, lightweight plastic semiauto chambered for stunners and the small, jet-powered fragmentation rounds. The polymer holster rigs, spare magazines, and disposable charge paks left barely enough room for a change of clothes.

  "Looks like you take your 'game' pretty seriously," said Higgins.

  "Some games are more serious than others," Breck said. He slipped the heavy plasma pistol into his shoulder rig, snugged the semiauto into the cross-draw holster on his belt, then put on an elegant, three-quarter-length black coat, fashionably cut and tailored loosely to conceal the bulges. "And I, for one, don't like to lose," he added.

  "Who's the plant foreman accused of the sabotage?" I said.

  "Gil Cavanaugh."

  I glanced at Breck. "I think we should see him first."

  "I agree," said Breck. "And then, Mr. Higgins, perhaps you'd be kind enough to show us some of the local nightlife, such as it is."

  "I was hoping to get an early start in the morning," Higgins said. "Tyla has agreed to take us out to her tribe and-"

  "It's early, yet," said Breck. "I'd like to get a feeling for the mood of the workers here in light of what's occurred. Ask your wife if she'll accompany us."

  Higgins shook his head. "I don't think that would be a very good idea. I haven't exactly endeared myself to the people here. My relationship with Tyla has only made things worse. I'll show you around if you like, but it wouldn't be smart to bring Tyla along. It would be inviting trouble."

  'Trouble is precisely what I wish to invite," Breck said. "If there are any ambimorphs among the workers here, I not only want them to know we're here, I want them to know we're going out to contact the natives tomorrow. We'll look after your wife, don't worry. She'll be perfectly safe with us."

  "It's not my wife I'm worried about," said Higgins.

  Breck raised his eyebrows.

  Higgins shrugged. "All right, I'll take you over to see Cavanaugh and then I'll drop you off at what we call the 'Red Zone.' I'll go get Tyla and meet you at a bar called Cody's Place. It isn't hard to find. Just ask anyone."

  Gil Cavanaugh was a very angry man. He was also a very big man, with a face like a russet potato, wide and ruddy, the sort of face on which every thought and emotion were plainly written. I didn't think it looked like the face of a saboteur.

  "I'm not going to let 'em pin this on me, the bastards!" he shouted, slamming his hand down on the table. "I told 'em, put me on the goddamn machines, gimme the test and see if I'm lyin'!"

  "Settle down, Cavanaugh," a tinny voice came from a speaker mounted below the single high window. The room was bare save for a table and four chairs. We sat on one side of the table, Cavanaugh sat on the other. There was nothing separating us, but Cavanaugh was wearing magnacuffs which could be activated at a moment's notice.

  "You keep your mouth shut, Evans, I'm talkin' to these people!" Cavanaugh thundered, pointing a meaty finger up at the guard's window.

  "Just settle down, all right, Gil?" said Evans wearily.

  "All right! All right!" He scowled up at the window, then continued at a slightly lower volume. "Anyway, I took the test and I passed the goddamned thing! I wasn't lyin', see? But that's not enough for 'em, the sons o' bitches! They figure I came up with some way to beat the damn machine. Me, a simple workin' stiff, what do I know" about crap like that? I'm no cybernetics engineer! Listen, I tell 'em, what the hell do you think I did, planted the explosives, then beaned myself with a goddamn wrench and tied myself up while I was unconscious? Feel the size of that lump there! Damn near split my head open! So you know what they came back with? 'We know you didn't pull this off alone,' they said. 'You've got an accomplice. Tell us who he is and it'll go easier on you,' they said. 'Confess,' they said. Confess? Confess my ass! Confess to what? I didn't do a goddamn thing!"

  "Cavanaugh, I'm warning you-" Evans's voice came through the speaker overhead.

  "Fuck you, Evans!" Cavanaugh hollered, leaping to his feet and sending his chair crashing to the floor. He pointed up at the window. "Corporate security, my ass! You're just a cheap, imported armbreaker, you union bustin' son of a-"

  The guard activated the magnacuffs and Cavanaugh's braceleted wrists suddenly snapped together with a hard click. He doubled over sharply as the cuffs slammed against the metal magnaplate in the belt around his waist.

  "AAARRGH! Evans, you weasely little runt . . . !" His muscles bunched as he strained against the cuffs. "You wait till I get outta here, I'll rip your goddamn head off!"

  "Release him, please, Mr. Evans," Breck said.

  "I don't think that would be a very good idea, Mr. Breck," Evans's voice came through the speaker. "You've got him all excited. The state he's in right now, I couldn't answer for-"

  "Release him, please."

  The cuffs were turned off and Cavanaugh straightened up, glowering at the guard behind the window. He glanced at Breck and muttered, "Thanks."

  "Please sit down, Mr. Cavanaugh," Breck said. "There's no need for these histrionics. We're inclined to believe you."

  "Yeah?" he glanced at Breck uncertainly.

  "Yes. We have good reason to think you're probably telling the truth. However, we cannot help you at the moment. To do that, we would have to prove that you did not sabotage the plant and that would be difficult, as there are numerous witnesses who saw you."

  "I don't care how many witnesses say they saw me, I didn't do it!"

  "What do you think happened, Gil?" I said.

  "How the hell should I know? I'm bein' set up, that's all I can tell you! If people are sayin' they saw me do it, then they've been paid off. Wouldn't surprise me one bit. Between that damn treehugger try in' to shut us down and the company try in' to stop us from startin' up a union, that's the only explanation I can think of."

  "Well, I can think of another possible explanation," Breck said. "Tell me, did you happen to notice anything unusual before you were struck unconscious? Anything at all?"

  Cavanaugh frowned and shook his head. "No, nothin' speci
al. Why?"

  "Were there any new people on your shift?"

  Cavanaugh shook his head again. "No, it was the same crew I've been workin' with for months."

  ' 'Was anyone not where they were supposed to be?" I said.

  Cavanaugh shook his head. "No. Not that I know of. Why? What are you gettin' at?"

  "We're attempting to find out if any of your coworkers were in a position to assault you," Breck said.

  "There wasn't anybody near me that I could see," said Cavanaugh. "You think if I saw someone comin' at me with that wrench, they'd have knocked me out? The bastard snuck up on me. Believe me, I wish there was something I could tell you, but if I didn't see anything, I didn't see anything. One minute I was just doin' my job, and the next I was out on the floor."

  "Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to do you an injury?" Breck said. "Someone you had quarreled with, not necessarily related to your efforts with forming a union. Something personal perhaps?"

  "Hey, on a job like this, you have your arguments, you have your fights. You go out after work and have a few, somebody mouths off and you dance around a little. It's no big deal. It happens all the time. You don't go hangin' something like this on anyone for that."

  "So what you're telling us, Mr. Cavanaugh, is that you really can't help us prove you're innocent," I said.

  "I don't have to prove I'm innocent, for God's sake, I didn't do it! They have to prove I'm guilty, don't they?"

  "They've apparently got a hell of a case," I said. "Your own friends have testified against you."

  "Yeah, that's what they tell me," Cavanaugh muttered morosely. "I don't understand it. Someone must've got to 'em somehow, threatened 'em, paid 'em off, I don't know, what can I say?" He turned to Breck, anxiously. "You said you had another explanation for all this?"

  "A possible explanation," said Breck, "but it would be very difficult to prove. We'd have to prove that what your fellow workers saw was not you, but someone-or some thing-who looked exactly like you. A creature capable of assuming your appearance, of reading your mind and knowing exactly where to find the explosive charges and how to place them for optimum results. In other words, Mr. Cavanaugh, a Draconian am-bimorph. A shapechanger."

  Cavanaugh's jaw dropped. "That's impossible," he said. "That would mean they broke the quarantine!" His eyes narrowed. "Wait a minute! This is all part of that new game of yours! Is that what this is all about? That's why you're takin' an interest in my case, isn't it? You're tryin' to use me in your goddamn game!" He started to get to his feet.

  "Sit down," Breck said firmly. "Even if we were only helping you to add realism to our game, what difference would it make? You need all the help that you can get. And from where I sit, it doesn't look as if you're getting any. Right now, we are all you've got. As to whether or not this is a game, judge for yourself. Your own friends saw you order everyone out of the plant. Perhaps some of them could have been paid to frame you. It's certainly possible. But all of them? I don't know these people, but you do. You've worked with them. What do you think?"

  "You're sayin' this is for real?"

  "You tell me," Breck said. "But in order to convince your accusers, we'll need to prove two things to our own satisfaction first. We'll be leaving first thing in the morning, to investigate reports of what could be ambimorphs among the Nomad tribes. We've heard enough to make us think there are. But we need proof."

  "You said you'd need to prove two things to get me off," said Cavanaugh. "So what's the second?"

  'That could be even more difficult," said Breck. "We'd have to prove that you are really human."

  "Were you serious in there?" Higgins had watched and listened with Evans in the guardroom. "You actually suspect that Cavanaugh may not be human?"

  "I allowed that suspicion to enter my mind, yes," said Breck. "That way, in the event that Cavanaugh isn't really Cavanaugh, he now knows that we suspect him of being an ambimorph. And now that he also knows our plans, it may force his hand. Unless, of course, he's really what he seems to be, in which case we'll have to try and flush our quarry elsewhere."

  "So then it wasn't just a ploy; you really do suspect him?"

  "I suspect everyone, Higgins," Breck said. He turned to him and smiled. "Even you."

  "Well, that's certainly reassuring."

  "Don't sound so affronted. It's nothing personal," said Breck.

  "You realize, of course, that Evans heard everything you said. That was intentional, wasn't it? You want it to get around. You're setting yourselves up as targets. And that means I'll be a target too, because I'm with you."

  "We are all targets, Higgins," Breck said. "That is the nature of the game. Anyone can be a victim."

  "So everyone should be suspected," Higgins said, shaking his head. "I couldn't live like that. I'd become a raving paranoid."

  "Paranoia has its uses," Breck said. "A useful psychosis," Higgins said wryly. "There's a new idea."

  "In an insane world, sanity has its drawbacks," Breck said with an ironic smile.

  Higgins didn't seem to find Breck's remark amusing. For that matter, neither did I, largely because it was the sort of black humor that was derived from truth. Gallows humor, as it was sometimes called. We were all going to swing together, so we might as well have a good last laugh.

  Real psychos, as opposed to the entertainment kind, were all too often merely people who couldn't handle the psychosis of society. They caved in to the pressure and became buried in their own delusions, which were different from those of society only in degree. Sanity was relative. It all came down to how much you could handle. Survival of the fittest translated into how much madness could you take?

  It was all a matter of conditioning, something Coles was expert in. He was a product of the system, a system that insidiously conditioned us all through the news and entertainment media to gradually accept greater and greater levels of abnormality as being normal. More violence, more death, more decadence, more editing of our reality by those we placed in charge of us. It was a chain reaction, out of control and growing exponentially. Like grading on a curve, the scale of sanity kept moving farther and farther into the red zone of psychosis, but since we were all taking that trip together, nobody really noticed.

  The ones who broke down, we labeled mad because they couldn't take our level of insanity, which became "sanity" by virtue of being shared by the majority. I empathized with those who didn't want to play the game. Who was to say they weren't the sane ones, the ones who saw what we were doing to ourselves and opted out in the only way they could?

  Part of our audience was going to believe that all of this was real; part would think it was a game, only a harmless psychocybernetic entertainment; and part wouldn't have known the difference either way, perhaps because they had stopped caring. It was that last segment of the audience Coles was trying to expand, because they were the ones whose realities would be the easiest to manipulate, who would be the easiest to control. Was there a worse sin in the modern world than to be useless? No, it was far better to be used. Much like Cavanaugh, who was being used by both sides. And much like me. After all, I was to some extent a product of their fantasies. I couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't anymore, so it all became reality to me. It made me wonder, was that insanity or merely self-defense?

  The Red Zone reminded me a little of the Ginza Strip, only on a far smaller, more compartmentalized scale. Like the workers' residential villages, it was laid out in a tri-level mall on the west side of the industrial hub known as Center City. Only here, there was no effort made to create a "balanced living environment," as the planners liked to put it. The Red Zone was definitely unbalanced.

  The atmosphere was raucous. Flashing lights and blasting music competed with the amplified shouting of the pitchmen as they tried to snag passersby into their saloons. Feral-looking hookers cruised the mall, cyberpunked to the core, charging all the trade could bear-which was considerable-thinking to score big and return to whatever urban warren
they had come from. They'd probably wind up just as lost in that dream here as they would have been at home. Few of them would ever make it out again.

  Company-town morality ruled in the Red Zone. Enterprising business people came in and for a small licensing fee paid to the consortium, a rental and utility agreement, and a percentage of the gross, they opened up establishments to service the workers-in much the same way that stallions serviced mares. The consortium paid its employees generous wages to offset the hardships of working on Purgatory. The Red Zone furnished entertainment and the means for the consortium to recover some of those generous wages. The consortium could afford to pay the workers well partly because, one way or another, much of that money went right back into the company coffers.

  As Higgins had promised, we found Cody's Place without any trouble. It was located at the far end of the mall, on the third level. Cody's Place was a bit different from most of the other funplexes on the mall. For one thing, it didn't have a flashing sign or speakers blaring music or a pitchman or any kind of video display. There were no nymphettes cavorting in the windows; in fact, there were no windows. There was just a black wall with the words "Cody's Place" painted on in large gilt letters. The door was an unpretentious metal slab and there was a glassed-in notice posted on the outside that read,

  "NO HUSTLERS, NO HOOKERS, NO CREDIT. PATRONS WILL BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR BREAKAGE."

  "I suspect this place has what they call 'character,' " said Breck.

  We opened the door and went inside.

  The bar was immediately to our left and it ran the length of the entire establishment. You could have held races on it. If it came in a bottle and was alcoholic, it looked like Cody's had it. There were several bartenders, both male and female, and they were all being kept busy by a mixed crowd of laborers just off shift. It wasn't a gaming establishment, but there were a number of friendly card games going on at several of the tables. I stifled my natural urges and swore that I would merely observe. A holojuke was playing a plaintive ballad as the life-size, three-dimensional images of the singer and her backup band were projected on the stage.