She vividly remembered that day. The spaceport had been hot. Something about the heat, and the ships, and the crowds, had made her feel like she was going to yack her lumen. Kind of like how she felt now.
“This young woman immediately puts out feelers for me,” the Forger said, “claiming to be an intel broker looking for a job. But her tie-in socket has a trace of fresh scarring around it, as if it’s brand new. I suppose you wouldn’t like to tell me why.”
Redcholate reached up and touched her socket. Her fingers were trembling slightly. “I had it installed on my thirteenth birthday. Just like everyone else in the galaxy.”
“Tell me about that day. Your thirteenth birthday.”
“I…” Her mind was a blank. Why couldn’t she remember anything about her thirteenth birthday?
He gestured at the tradscreen. “I’m curious what you were doing in that hotel, with that woman. Tell me what mystery the galaxy’s greatest detective came to investigate.”
She shook her head. “I’m telling you I don’t know! Who is that old creepto?”
“For years you traveled the galaxy with the famous teknophobe Twomanrie Ohetto. Investigating crimes. Tell me about her and I can sell the intel for a high price.”
At the name Twomanrie Ohetto, her brain again felt like it was just about to split into two hemispheres. She groaned, cradling her forehead. “Why does that name sound familiar?”
“Watch this,” said the Forger.
She looked up. The vid showed a close-up of the old woman walking down a sterile corridor. Her skin looked like wrinkled cloth, but she still moved like a young woman.
Redcholate’s vid self follow close behind. The two women spoke a few words, then each entered a separate room.
The Forger rapped one handless forearm on the desk. “Pay attention! You come out twenty minutes later.”
The picture jumped, and Redcholate watched herself emerge into the hallway. She’d changed into a frumpy grey suit. She’d never wear anything that ugly. But why would the Forger lie? She wracked her braincase to remember where she’d lived before she’d come to Bituminous Tarsi three years ago, but her mind skittered across a void. Like her past wasn’t there. Why hadn’t she ever wondered about her own past? Fear roiled her lumen.
She watched her vid-self knock on Twomanrie’s door, then lean down to stare at the floor. With a sudden ferocity, vid-Redcholate kicked the door open, screamed, and ran into the room.
Redcholate licked her dry lips. “Wh-what happened? What was inside that room?”
“Oh, the Butcher got the old lady.” The Forger’s voice held no emotion. “Good vid from the local authorities. Look what he did to her body.”
She covered her eyes with her hands. Her cranium throbbed.
The Forger gave his dying-sea-creature chuckle. “Look at this.”
Despite her better judgement she peeked between her fingers. The screen showed a glass a quarter full of red liquid. Something pink and bumpy sat inside it.
“W-what is that?” Her voice sounded thready and weak.
“The old lady’s tongue. The Butcher cut it right out.”
Her gibs tried to crawl up her throat.
“The Butcher is famous for killing the populations of entire planets,” said the Forger. “So I was curious as to why he only killed one person this time. Tell me what you and your mentor were working on when she was killed.”
Redcholate shook her head. “That wasn’t me.” She knew it was false even as she said it. That had been herself she’d just watched. She just couldn’t mem it.
“You recorded that pictula before you went undercover.”
“I’m not undercover! I’m Redcholate Parise. Intel-broker. Best friend Liefe Chinya. Address—”
His sigh brought to mind a piglet with laryngitis. “I feel for you. A pawn of your own making.”
She ran her hands through her hair, her fingers snagging in tangles. “If you know what’s happening, just tell me.”
“You are a construct persona of one Armintor Vess.”
Armintor Vess. The name resonated within Redcholate. Not in a good way. As if she had a toothache, but in her heart.
“…sent here inside her own body for deep undercover work,” the Forger was saying. “Once you’ve received the intel you were sent for, Armintor Vess will no doubt reinstate herself into your body. Or her body, depending upon one’s point of view.”
“But what’ll happen to me?”
He drew one hand stump across his throat with dramatic finality. Static crackled from his speaker.
She pummeled her braincase for memories of her mother, her father. But it was all a black void. With a piercing pain in her cranium a hazy memory came through and she latched onto it; trees towering high overhead, a skimmer crash, bodies burning on a beach. The pain became almost too much to bear. She groaned and closed her eyes.
“I suppose,” the Forger said, “I should be flattered that a protégé of Twomanrie Ohetto sacrificed three years of her life so you could live in her body and get close enough to gain my trust. But she didn’t plan well enough. You have blundered around, broadcasting your intel search. Sylvey is dead. Tanto is dead. And you are next.”
She tried to swallow but her mouth was too dry. “What should I do?”
“You have to leave,” the Forger said. “The Butcher has a penchant for tying up loose ends.”
Tying up loose ends. “I don’t want to die,” she whispered.
“I acknowledge your fear. But you did this to yourself. And I have worked too hard for too long to have an unpopped kernel like you endanger my operation. You will leave this planet, so that when the Butcher takes his revenge upon you, it will be somewhere else.”
Redcholate’s head rang. Everything felt hollow, unreal. She slid from the chair and slumped against the Forger’s cold desk.
He continued speaking, a pitiless voice deciding her fate from above. “This is what will happen. You will take the bus straight to the spaceport. A ticket will be waiting there for you at ShuntHop. The shuttle leaves at midnight for StarCruise’s embarkation planet. I have booked you on a cruise ship.”
At the realization that he was sending her away without giving her the intel, Redcholate’s entire body convulsed. She fell to her back, doffing her head on his desk. Pain blossomed through her cranium, and she saw white lights like stars.
“No,” she grated between clenched teeth. She didn’t know if she was denying the Forger’s words, or her stupo magical power, or her situation. With a supreme effort she twisted to her tum and raised up to her hands and knees.
“Please,” she said, crawling around the desk toward him. “Please. I need the intel.”
Without warning the Forger lunged forward and captured her right wrist with a metal loop that had emerged from one stump. Wrenching her arm almost out of its socket, he forced her right thumb to his forearm.
OS! she screamed, desperate. Deny all incoming data!
His kahuna code bypassed her OS’s custom defenses in a milli. The intel packet he pushed through her thumb implant strained the capacity of her cranial embed.
He released her and she fell backward.
I apologize, said her OS. It sounded slightly stunned. I was overwhelmed.
“You need a memory upgrade, Armintor Vess,” he said.
Redcholate stared at the Forger. “What did you just send me?”
He laughed. “I sent you the intel you need. All the intel that will satisfy the compulsion Armintor Vess put upon you. Only I doubt you are intelligent enough to find it. Now, go straight to the spaceport.”
At his words, the pain in her cranium and the shivering of her gibs ceased. Redcholate gasped with relief. She felt… normy. She had the intel. And now she had it, she didn’t have to listen to the Forger. And the compulsion to travel off-planet, that compulsion she’d felt as soon as Watson’d told her about the 25,000 creds, returned. But she wasn’t going to go on a cruise. Only fringe-dwelling yokels and old far
ty gas giants went on cruises. She’d sell the berth, go somewhere else. Maybe Vega-2. Or Forest.
“You will go on that cruise,” he said, as if he’d read her mind. “As of a minute ago, I stripped all your accounts. You don’t have a single cred to your name.”
“But that’s not fair!”
“What is not fair is that you brought the Butcher’s wrath down on two innocent people. Well, neither was innocent, yet neither was deserving of death.”
Redcholate looked up at him. “Did I… did I really do all this to myself?”
He nodded his scarred, inhuman head.
So she’d created an undercover persona, given it no useful intel, and set it up as a sucker. No. That wasn’t right. She hadn’t done it. Armintor Vess had.
She hated Armintor Vess.
The door to the Forger’s office slid open. “Go,” he said.
Redcholate pushed to her feet and steadied herself against the desk. Her body felt strange, as if it already weren’t her own. But there was nothing here for her anymore. The Forger wouldn’t help her.
“Go,” he repeated. “If you remain on Bituminous Tarsi, I will kill you myself to prevent the Butcher from coming here to find you.”
Redcholate dashed from the Forger’s office, hurried past the silent Juan, and emerged into the pale orange sunshine.
Chapter 26
Gallawaygg
Date: 2419
I am your OS, said an androgynous voice in Armintor’s head, as she emerged from the hook booth.
Armintor muffled a surprised scream. She had voluntarily installed a mecha inside her body. Of course, she understood that in theory. The practical ramifications, though, made her shiver in fear that she’d made a terrible, irrevocable mistake.
“P-please,” she stammered, “don’t talk to me out loud.”
The words, May I converse with you via written word? appeared at the bottom of her right eye’s field of vision.
Armintor hurried into the lobby of her hotel and sank onto the closest chair. “Okay.”
You do not have to speak aloud for me to understand, her OS wrote.
“I know,” Armintor said aloud, then grimaced. “It’ll just take me a little time.”
Her OS didn’t answer. Perhaps it could sense her utter overwhelmedness. She took a moment to breathe, and run her hands through her hair. When her fingers came to the still-tender incision site on the right side of her head, she hissed.
The cranial embed incision site and the area around your tie-in socket will be sore to the touch for several days, her OS wrote.
“I know,” Armintor gritted between clenched teeth.
“Do you require assistance?” a voice asked.
Armintor looked up to see the mecha with the round, twelve-toed feet standing at the side of her chair. “No,” she said. “I’m fine.” She stood and hurried toward the elevator.
Back in her room, she sat gingerly on the couch. OS, she experiment-thought.
The words, Yes, I am ready to assist you, appeared.
Just… just checking. Nervous energy coursed through her body. She jumped to her feet, cracked open the front door, and peered out.
The door across the hallway had been repaired, and now hung securely in its frame. All Twomanrie’s possessions were inside there. All the possessions she’d left to the Alphahood. Everything, including her most recent journal. And her copy of The Collected Work of Sherlock Holmes. For some reason, having the Alphahood take possession of Twomanrie’s annotated copy of her detection manual felt worse than anything else. How could she get inside? Maybe the round-footed, twelve-toed mecha would let her in. No. Mechas never broke the rules, unless you reprogrammed them. And then, they still wouldn’t be breaking rules. They’d just be following new ones.
Her mind went back to that terrible day long ago on Terry’s New Earth. She’d written a program to get inside the hook booth. An infiltration program.
OS? she asked.
Yes.
I… I should have an, um, a few programs I stored in my thumbnail drive.
Yes, I see them.
She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. One is an infiltration program I wrote a long time ago. Can you look at it? And tell me if I could use it to break into the room next door?
After a moment, the OS wrote, This program seems capable of overriding the locks in this hotel.
Okay, use it.
This program is incapable of working over the sphere. You will need to jack in to the room’s control panel.
Armintor winced. She’d forgotten that.
The room’s control panel had a tie-in jack with a short cord. It wasn’t capable of connecting with the Underworld, just interfacing with the hotel. She pulled out the jack. A long black hair was twisted around its base, and it had several grimy orange fingerprints. She shuddered.
I can order a tube of jack sanitizer from the hotel, offered her OS.
She nodded, relieved at the reprieve, and spent the time before the sanitizer arrived in disentangling the hair and scrubbing off the fingerprints.
To her disappointment, it wasn’t the twelve-toed mecha who delivered her sanitizer, but a low boxy wheeled mecha who popped its lid to reveal the tube inside its otherwise empty cavity.
“Thank you,” she said.
“You are welcome, guest,” it replied as it departed.
Armintor wished she could find another excuse not to plug the ominous-seeming jack into her socket, but none occurred. She’d have preferred to sit on the couch and obsess over the monumental-seeming decision, but she had a mecha inside her head, and she felt like it was watching her. And judging her.
I am incapable of judging human behavior, wrote her OS.
“Don’t read my thoughts,” she whispered, opening the tube and smearing sanitizer all over the jack.
That is my purpose, the OS said. If I cannot read your thoughts, I cannot assist you.
Irritation spurred Armintor to yank the control panel’s cord out from the wall. “Well,” she said, “am I going to have any adverse effects from jacking in?”
That is doubtful, yet conceivable.
She closed her eyes and huffed out her mouth. “All right. I’m doing this.” Taking the jack in her left hand, she drew her long hair away from her neck, and then winced. She was going to stick a five-centimeter piece of metal straight into her cranium.
“Just do it, Armintor,” she said. Squeezing her eyes shut, she jammed the jack into her socket.
Nothing happened. No text or images appeared on her eyescreen, no voices appeared in her head.
My socket isn’t working! she said.
It is working. I am blocking the aud/vid from the hotel, as I infer that you would find it overwhelming at this time. I am currently running your infiltration program. The door to the room across the hallway is unlocked.
Thank you, she said, grateful.
You are welcome.
Armintor unjacked and tiptoed back to the door, peered out. Nothing seemed different about the door. She should just go across the hallway and open it like she belonged in there.
Um, OS? Can you tell if anyone’s coming?
I would have to use your infiltration program to access the hotel aud/vid.
She shivered. She didn’t want to jack in again. No, that’s okay. Taking a deep breath, she stepped across the hallway and entered Twomanrie’s room.
The child is finally improving into a truly useful assistant. Sadly, she lacks enough intellectual capacity, as well as a certain spark, that would allow her to become truly exceptional. Alas, she is no Alpha.
Armintor stared at the words. Twomanrie had written them in her journal mere days before her murder. She lacks enough intellectual capacity. So Armintor had always been right. Her mentor considered her stupid. But why was she surprised? Twomanrie had admitted as much the evening of her death. It was the tenet upon which the entire society of Variegor existed: there were Alphas, and then everyone else.
Y
et the words burned deep in her heart. She lacks enough intellectual capacity. Twomanrie had written those words. About Armintor.
She angrily riffled through the journal, stopped at an earlier entry.
I miss the company of other Alphas. Of course I’ve come across wild Alphas on other planets, but even a wild Alpha is not steeped in our traditions. I miss all the anticipation in Varie City the night before the culling. I miss the excitement of choosing season. The dusty nighttime air once the crops have been harvested. I miss Variegor.
Tears burned Armintor’s eyes, but she was too resentful to let them fall. She lifted the journal. “You longed for the company of murderers,” she hissed at its closely-written pages. But of course there was no answer.
She flipped through the pages in a slow, mournful cadence, reluctant to see any more unflattering references to herself, yet unwilling to set it down. Near the end, a name caught her eye. Butcher. Flipping back, she scanned the page.
Once again, the Butcher’s ingenuity has surprised me.
Twomanrie had then described the destruction of the vacation planet Kêr Ys, which had fifteen moons of varying hues and sizes. Its seven continents were home to thousands of species of moths and nocturnal butterflies, which fed on fragrant night-blooming flowers and trees. Armintor had heard Kêr Ys described as the most beautiful planet in the known galaxy. Two months ago the Butcher had deorbited all the moons. One by one, they crashed into the planet’s surface. In a wrenching twist, many of the inhabitants had escaped. It hadn’t been the human population the Butcher had been targeting, but the planet itself.
As she’d written, Twomanrie had dwelt on the most bizarre or gruesome details, almost sounding as if she’d admired the Butcher.
I have often thought that I must someday turn my sights on the Butcher, and now, I think, is the time. The destruction of Kêr Ys is a rampant display of nihilism that I cannot allow.
The skin tightened on Armintor’s scalp. The Butcher had been inside this very room. Had murdered Twomanrie in this spot. She looked around as if the Butcher would step out from the shadows. No one was there. She turned back to the journal, scanned the final few pages.
The Disk Mirror Solution (Galaxia Mortem Book 1) Page 18