by F X Holden
I know! AJ said, Don’t tell me the obvious. Tell me how the hell you could not have known about this. Tell me how the house biomonitor system didn’t sound an alarm as soon as he went into arrest! He watched the artificial rise and fall of the dead man’s chest, watched his body jerk with consecutive electrical shocks to his nervous system. He wasn’t responding.
Checking that, Cassie said. Give me… oh, clever. You can pull those cables off him.
AJ leaned over and killed the Reviver. He peeled the mask and electrodes from Warnecke’s body. What did they do?
Nothing sophisticated, she said. They hacked his biodata implant. It’s been sending historical data since 0200 last night. I wasn’t watching that closely. I missed the repeating data. It will look like an implant glitch, if anyone investigates.
He sat down heavily on the bed and ran his hand over his face.
They murdered him, he said. And I helped them.
Except it won’t look like murder, Cassie said. A hundred credits says they used an aerosol prescription sleeping agent to knock him out before they filled him full of booze and pills. If we check his medical records, I’ll bet there’s a script for it in there. They’ll probably pay a friendly cop or coroner to come in and write it up as a simple suicide. No foul play. They’re gambling that whatever precautions he took about releasing the manuscript in case of his death, suicide won’t trigger it.
AJ leaned over, and closed Warnecke’s eyes. “You underestimated them, old man,” he said.
Finish up there and get over to my place, Cassie said. I want you here where I can protect you.
Thanks oh mighty Core, AJ said, looking at Warnecke. Cassie had been watching out for Warnecke as well, but a lot of good it had done him. He didn’t verbalize that thought. I have to report this to Cyan and probably wait around until the police come. Anything else will look wrong, he said.
OK, but keep the channel open, she said. I didn’t trust your friends Winter and McMaster before and I’d say their promise to leave you alone isn’t worth a thing.
He looked at the dead man, and sighed. Leon was right, he said. He said they’d try to send me a message and I thought when I saw that goon from the Capitol with Cyan, that was it. But it wasn’t. This is the message. He wound the electrodes and the mask up and then realized the police would probably want everything left exactly as it was now. So he dropped them on the bed again. They can kill whoever they damn well want. So I shouldn’t think I’m safe just because I’m a cyber.
Get back here the minute you’re done, Cassie said in a gentle tone. I won’t be able to relax until I see your big ugly ass sitting at my kitchen table.
How are we going to find his daughter now? AJ asked.
We’ll worry about that when you’re safe, she said.
He walked out into the sitting room and realized now that the stuff on the table was supposed to tell the story of how Warnecke had spent his last hours. Making sure his affairs were in order and reading messages from his dead wife. Just another Citizen who couldn’t face the idea of taking the TGA off-ramp. It made a kind of sad sense, but knowing what he did, it reeked of being staged.
A thought suddenly came to him. They’d searched the place from top to bottom, probably to try to vacuum up anything and everything related to the manuscript and help them stage the suicide. But maybe they hadn’t found everything. And there was one thing in particular he could use right now.
He started looking in the obvious places – Warnecke’s bedroom and guest room. The bedroom had a built-in closet which had some clothes in it and a couple of boxes, but not too many boxes thankfully because his grandchildren had unpacked most of them and taken the empty boxes with them. He went through those and found nothing. He looked at Warnecke’s shape under the sheet and for a moment thought about checking under his mattress, but shuddered a bit and decided he’d leave that for last.
The guest room had a sofa bed and a desk with an office chair. No filing cabinet, just one of those IN/OUT trays that automatically uplinked to the Core the content of any papers you placed in them. There wouldn’t be anything personal or private in there if he was trying to keep it all off-Core. The drawers were all empty and he checked to see if anything might be stuck to the bottom or back of the desk. Nothing. It wasn’t a big apartment, so it only took him another twenty minutes to go through the sitting room, laundry and kitchen cupboards. He even checked the cooler and the freezer. There were only small visual deviations. Nothing else.
That left the bed. No avoiding it anymore. He took a deep breath and went into the bedroom. He felt like he was about to commit a heresy, but he pushed that aside and got down on his knees, looking under the bed base. Nope. Then he got up, reached under Warnecke on the mattress and on top of the bed base on the left side, the bottom, looked under the pillows and went around the right side too.
Nope.
He stood up, went into the corridor for one last look around. The back door, and the small courtyard outside. May as well check it all.
He opened the door and stepped out. A chair, a table, a coffee cup, dirty. A plant, in the same place it had been when he had last visited. The anti-rad scrubber, humming away. He turned. And stopped.
Looking at the scrubber. Comparing the images in his cache. Four screws on the access plate. Now three. Four. Three. One was definitely missing.
He pulled his multitool from his belt and removed the plate. Pushed his arm in and felt around until his hand hit something that shouldn’t be there. A cloth bag, tied with a string to the A-frame inside.
Warnecke’s gun.
AJ pulled the gun out of the cloth bag, tucked it into his waistband under his shirt, and then went back inside and picked up the document box he’d brought in with him. He looked at the pile of papers and other photos scattered conveniently on the desk and read the will again all the way through, to be doubly sure there was no reference to the daughter there. He tapped his earbud and called Cyan’s ID.
“Hey AJ!” she said. “Missed you in the Garden today. You been sleeping late again?” she asked. “Look, could you…”
“Cyan, there’s been a suicide. Number 96. Seems he probably did it sometime last night.”
“Oh no. Citizen Warnecke? Did you…”
“I tried to revive him. But he’s been dead a long time I’d guess.”
“OK. Poor guy. You just happened past?”
“Yeah. He asked me to fix a light last week, I was just here to check it was all OK. You call the police, or should I?”
“I’ll do it,” she said. “Don’t touch anything, alright? And don’t…”
“I know the drill,” he interrupted. “It’s not my first.”
“Oh, shit, AJ. Just … you stay there, alright. I’ll let the police know and I’ll be over straight away.”
The police came, they looked around and spoke with AJ and a few people, and the police went. It was hard to know if they were being deliberately superficial or just lazy, because after all, some old guy checking out early from TGA Central wasn’t exactly a high priority incident.
He knew he might have to account for his movements after a death like that and the vision from the VR surveillance cameras outside could be pulled by the police, but he wasn’t worried about walking out of there with the document box, seeing as he’d been carrying it with him when he went inside. He told the cops that after he’d met with Cyan he’d gone back to his workshop to stow his stuff, have a coffee and wait for them to arrive. Which he had. But he hadn’t told them the stuff he’d stowed was the gun and the document box, and they hadn’t seemed at all interested in him as he and Cyan had walked them out again.
Cyan gave him a hug, “You call it a day, OK? Go surfing.”
“Sure,” he said. “Good idea.”
“You got someone to go home to, right?” she asked. “I don’t like the idea you’ll be alone.”
“I called Cassie,” he said. “I’ll go round her place.”
She hugged him a
gain, longer this time, “That’s nice AJ. You and her - I’m glad.” She let him go and pushed a stray lock of hair behind her ears. “OK, I better go in and call the family. I hate this part.” With a sad smile at Brownie, she disappeared.
“Suicide?” Brownie asked in a low voice after Cyan’s door closed. “Citizen Warnecke?”
“Yeah. It happens,” AJ said. “You remember Citizen Olsen in 177? Two years ago?”
“Was that suicide?” Brownie asked, surprised.
“Wasn’t any energy leak I could find,” AJ said.
“Damn, it’s so sad,” Brownie said. “That’s our first exit this month. I really thought we were going to go the whole month without any exits. I hate the exits.”
“Yeah,” AJ said. “So much admin.”
“I know, right?” Brownie said, then sighed. “I know you’re joking. You go get some sleep, OK?”
14. RIVER DEEP, MOUNTAIN HIGH
AJ had taken Warnecke’s gun, wrapped it in a clean rag, and put it beside the document box. There was a risk the police could have searched for and found it, but AJ was scared now. Hell with the risk.
Which was not insignificant. It was illegal for a cyber to possess a gun – the penalty was death. He’d be unchained from the Core, and that would mean within 48 hours he’d be curled in a ball on a floor somewhere, completely unresponsive. He’d be left in a cell, unconscious, to die of thirst. It was a brutal and barbaric punishment and one born of fear, of a conviction that if the Core was a learning system, then it should learn this – that its cyber manifestations should never bear lethal weapons.
AJ was aware of only one case in which a cyber had been punished this way, and it had been a case which the counsel for the defense had argued was not pre-meditated, was clearly a case of self-defense where the cyber had disarmed their attacker and used the weapon to stop themselves being killed. It had not mattered, the death sentence was passed because the cyber should have disarmed the citizen but not used the weapon against them. The judge concurred that a citizen in exactly the same situation may have been found not guilty as there was no prohibition on citizens carrying weapons, but as long as it was forbidden for cybers, then the law was absolute. Would the cyber have been sentenced to death if they had disabled the citizen and then killed them in self-defense by breaking their neck? The point was moot, the judge had said.
He still had a way back. He could just hand the weapon over to Cyan, tell her he had found it in Warnecke’s apartment when he was cleaning up. Something, maybe that human intuition Cassie said she prized in him, stopped him. Maybe intuition was just a fancy word for fear. Whatever it was, he had closed the tool cabinet and thought, later.
Time to get over to Cassie’s place.
“You finishing early today?” said a voice at the door, and AJ turned to see Leon.
“Oh hey,” AJ said, putting his bag down and smiling at Leon. “Didn’t expect to see you this week.”
Leon came in, looking his usual self. He gave AJ a hug though, which was not the usual Leon, and pulled two beers from a bag he was carrying. “Yeah, well. I thought maybe I could catch you before knock-off time. Need a beer?”
“Nice,” AJ said, taking a beer and holding it up in a salute. “Perfect timing. Thanks for coming by.” He wanted to get out of there, but this was a chance to tell Leon he could stand down, now that he had reached a detente with McMaster. But had he really? The murder of Citizen Warnecke made that look pretty shaky.
“Going crazy stuck at home,” Leon said. “She’s a good woman, Maria, but you know.”
“I know, yeah,” he said.
“So, Citizen Warnecke checked out,” Leon said.
AJ frowned at him, “You heard?”
“Talking to Brownie on the way through - she dropped it,” he said.
“Suicide,” AJ said.
“You believe that?” Leon asked, raising an eyebrow.
“I don’t know,” AJ said. “It’s kind of convenient, for the Congressman, you know.”
“Suicide,” Leon shook his head, “Yeah, right.” Leon leaned on his elbows, low over the table, and started talking fast. “Hey, I ask you something?” Leon said. “That document you took to Winter, you cache that?”
AJ was raising his beer to drink it, but stopped, “Yeah. Why?”
“Just wanted to read it again. It’s pretty crazy stuff. You print me a copy, I promise I’ll keep it off-Core like Warnecke wanted.”
“Sure,” AJ said.
“Like, now?” Leon asked, nodding at the digital paper printer in a corner of the workshop. “I can take it with me. Don’t worry, I won’t show Maria. She’d just get all worried again.”
“OK,” AJ said, sending the cached version of Warnecke’s original document to the printer. He hadn’t promised the old man he’d delete that particular page – in fact he’d forgotten he even still had it. He peeled it off the printer and handed it to Leon. “By the way, I spoke with McMaster this morning,” he said. “He thanked me for my help again. I used the chance to make it clear I don’t want any reward, so there’s no doubt. It seems everything there is cool.”
“Warnecke’s dead, of course it’s cool,” Leon said and stood, folding up the page and putting it in a trouser pocket. “I gotta piss.”
While Leon went out back, AJ tried to think his way out of the dead end they were in – no pun intended - regarding Warnecke’s daughter. The guy hadn’t even included her in his will! She really was a ghost. Their only lead now was probably either of the two grandchildren. As Cassie had pointed out, the daughter might be a master of Deep Core data manipulation, but she couldn’t delete biological memories. The grandchildren, Sarah and Ben, had both mentioned her, and told him she had taken a contract ‘up north’, which could be anywhere in the three States of Tatsensui. Was that real? Or just a cover story she had given them? If it was real, they might have a work or home address. It was a something at least, however thin.
He was lost in thought when Leon sat back down. “I was just thinking something while I was on the john,” Leon said, talking fast, “How you turned down that reward. You know, all that time I was on NS, I must have moved hundreds of millions of creds. My nickname was The Paymaster. Anyone had an operation they needed to fund, they came to me. I had full access, all the authorization codes to move funds wherever I wanted and you know what? I never touched it. There was guys up to their elbows in it, everyone had some kind of scam going. They kept saying Leon, man, you deserve some of this action. My Captain used to introduce me to people, ‘This is Leon, the only honest man in this whole dirty war.”
“Because you and me are the same, we got principles,” AJ said, nodding. AJ had seen Leon like this before. He’d been to visit Leon during one of his extended sick breaks. Took him some work stuff to sign and arrived about 11 in the morning to find Leon up and dressed, sitting in a lounge chair, VR switched off, blinds drawn and just a small scanner radio on the table in front of him, set to a police or emergency services frequency, scratching away in the background. He’d explained to AJ how it helped him drown out all the other noise - cars, ambulances, voices of neighbors and their kids. So he had the scanner, not because he cared what was happening really, but because it gave him something familiar to focus on. He’d been talking fast then too.
“No. Because I was stupid, mano,” Leon said. “Look where my principles got me. Our HQ gets overrun, I spend two years in a New Syberian prison doing whatever it takes to survive. The guys who had money, they paid off the guards to give them the best food, the easy duties. I was treated like a dog. We won that war, I got out of there, but I aint never going to be well again, AJ. I aint never going to have a real job.”
“You have a real job,” AJ said.
Leon laughed, “How long you think they going to let you carry me on those big wide shoulders of yours? Cyan’s a good woman, but she’s running a business. This place needs two service techs, not one, and one day she’s going to say ‘Leon, this isn’t working out�
�.” He took a pull on his beer.
AJ understood the man’s dilemma. He’d thought about it himself, many times. Like, what would happen to Leon when AJ turned 30 and had to re-integrate? Who’d cover for Leon then?
They sat with their thoughts for a moment, “This Warnecke thing. Did you know,” Leon said suddenly, “A vet kills himself somewhere in this Commonwealth every 15 minutes?”
AJ started, “Hey, come on Leon…”
“No, I mean it. I read that in a government report, so you know it’s probably worse than that, right?” He sucked in a breath, “And I aint going to be one of them.”
“No, good,” AJ said.
“I’m going to get the best help money can buy and I’m going to get my head straight.”
“Sure.”
“I’m going to do a business degree or some shit, get a real job, work the next sixty years like any normal citizen and give Maria and the kids a good life - maybe one day take her someplace off world you can stand on a real beach, feel an actual sun on your skin, what do you think about that?”
AJ felt like patting Leon on the arm, but couldn’t reach him, “That’s great Leon. You’ll get there one day.”
“Yes I will, mano, yes I will,” Leon said. “OK, I gotta get back to my lady.”
When he and Leo were done talking, AJ grabbed a car and paid the extra for a solo trip. He didn’t feel like sharing. In fact, he didn’t feel like talking to anyone at all, so he also cut his comms channel to Cassie after warning her nothing was wrong, he just wanted to be alone a moment. To think, at Citizen speed, because that way, it was easier to feel.
He thought about Warnecke.
It wasn’t like he’d really developed any sort of personal friendship with Warnecke but he vividly remembered the old guy’s pain and confusion, could feel his creeping panic as he saw TGA closing in on him and his time running out. He had turned AJ’s nice quiet life upside down, but it was classic Taoism - if he hadn’t, there would be no Cassie. She would never have come to him, but for Warnecke. No yin without yang. He kind of felt he owed Warnecke … something.