Kirsten fought for the air to yell. “Take… girls… run…”
The ghost’s once-green eyes flared yellow. Ice-cold fingers circled her neck as if she had no cloth between her body and his touch. The mother backed up to her daughters, halfheartedly suggesting they should find a different table. Kirsten’s eyes glowed bright bluish-white as she reached out with her mind and lashed. The impact of the psionic whip launched him into a distant table.
The sight of Kirsten’s glowing eyes made the woman shriek; the table ten yards away flipping over on its own caused her to drag the screaming kids out of their chairs and sprint off.
Static in her ear parted for a brief moment. “Agent Wren, what is your status?”
Kirsten’s radiant psionic energy jammed her electronics, reducing her reply to crackling static. The ghost picked himself up out of the table and growled. The whip glimmered brighter as she wound up another lash. He zoomed to the side as the tendril of energy fell short, and sprinted at a blur into a different waitress.
Kirsten let her power ebb. “This is Agent Wren. He’s here and has a doll on the west side, by Speedy Panda.”
The doll shuddered and danced like a marionette on broken strings. It looked back at Kirsten with a stare of resentment and fear, torn between accomplishing something and fleeing from her. Unlike Deirdre, this thing had no sentience. Kirsten had no qualms about calling on Division 5 here, no more than she would feel bad for destroying an out of control car.
The doll lurched to another table, slapping the fork from the hand of a nearby businessman. A plastic hand around his throat stalled his yell into a gurgle. His face reddened as it squeezed and lifted him out of his seat.
“Drop him!” A deep male voice echoed over a loudspeaker. “Hold your fire, the civilian is too close.”
Six men and one red-haired woman surrounded the doll while two others herded the crowd away. Thick blue armor glistened in the mall lights as they took position around it with weapons trained. The explosive fragmentation slugs in their ABR20 rifles would shred the hostage as well as the doll at that distance.
Kirsten waited. The doll body afforded the ghost more than a fair degree of protection from her astral lash. The amount of effort it would take would not be worth the result; the metal interfered too much. The choking man scrabbled at the doll’s wrist, tearing her sleeve but doing nothing to the synthetic skin.
One flick of an actuator could snap the man’s neck. Kirsten knew it, the cyber-swat team knew it, and judging by the look in his eyes, the suit knew it.
Kirsten held a hand up. “Look, whoever you are, we can talk this through. You don’t have to hurt anyone else.”
Its head sagged to the left as it locked eyes. The ghost could force only so much of a patronizing glance out of its artificial countenance; these androids did not have fully articulated faces. An evil smile appeared as its gaze snapped back to the man.
Kirsten flinched; expecting to hear a crunch―but heard a loud boom.
She jumped back, arms shielding her face, as the doll’s right forearm burst apart in a shower of metal fragments, tattered strands of Myofiber, and green fluid. The female officer had drawn and fired an enormous sidearm before the rifle she dropped had hit the ground. A wire from the handgrip of the pistol to a plug behind her ear waved in the air from the force of its motion.
The man fell backwards with the artificial hand still clutching his throat. As soon as he landed on the tile floor, one of the other Division 5 troops fired his rifle into the doll’s chest.
It disintegrated from the waist up in a shower of fragmented metal and burned cloth. The explosion peeled the doll away from the ghost, leaving him partially exposed. The pelvis and legs of the android swayed back and forth for a second before they fell away from the spirit, spewing sparks.
Kirsten called the lash to her hand and swung the glowing strand of energy sideways. The strike caught him across the back as he tried to leap out of the way. A wail of agony echoed through the area; audible even to non-psionics. Several table terminals and nearby lights winked out as he drew power to restore himself.
Dorian sprinted into the fray, knocking the ghost flat with a lunge from behind.
The ghost fell forward on his face, sliding. Muttering in German, he looked back with desperation and hissed. She coiled the lash in the air above her like a whip.
Kirsten pointed with her left hand. “Stand down and you won’t be harmed.”
He went straight down through the floor.
Dammit, I hate it when they do that!
Kirsten ran past the bewildered Division 5 officers for the emergency stairwell. By the time she reached the next floor down, she found no sign of him.
Dorian trotted over as she sprawled on the floor, out of breath.
“Did you see him?” she gasped.
“I didn’t see which way he went, too many people.”
Trudging back upstairs, she approached the Division 5 team still searching around for the source of the mysterious scream. The redhead cut the arm from the man’s neck with a vibro-knife and checked him for injury.
A man in a cheap-looking teal suit appeared out of nowhere, yelling at all of them for destroying one of his dolls. The incessant nattering foiled Kirsten’s attempt to read the fragments of doll.
Her growl grew into a shout. “Oh, go fuck yourself!”
The man froze, rage gone in an instant. As he turned to walk off with a purposeful gleam in his eyes, Kirsten realized what she had just done.
She could not even imagine what the effect of her accidental psi suggestion would be and ran after him. “Shit, wait.”
The man ignored her, moving as fast as he could walk with a broad smile. Dorian fell into a nearby chair, laughing himself to tears.
“Stop!” Her eyes glimmered.
The man came to a halt.
“Forget it.”
He blinked and stared about as though he had forgotten his own name. Within a few seconds, his mood returned to where it had been before, and he resumed ranting about his fifteen-thousand-credit waitress.
Kirsten grumbled at him. “Hire a real teenager, they work cheap.”
She left the Division 5 team to deal with the manager and returned to the wreckage. Copious amounts of anger radiated from the parts, turned inward, as if it had been directed at the doll itself.
What the hell is wrong with this guy?
It could just be coincidence that Intera Corporation had made all of the targeted dolls. As the largest manufacturer of cybernetics in the known world, it could be pure chance. However, with each new attack the statistical probability plummeted.
Kirsten found one of its eyes floating in an abandoned bowl of soup a few tables away. Silver type around the iris confirmed the waitress as an Intera unit. She exchanged a glance with Dorian, as he struggled to regain his composure. He could not look at her without falling back into convulsive fits of laughter.
irsten nudged the patrol craft into the parking deck below the police building, cringing as it bottomed out where the incline leveled off. No matter how many times she came in, it always scraped. Samir called it harmless, but it sounded bad. The young man grinned from the booth, amused by the face she made every time the car scratched into the garage. The voices of a pair of Division 2 techs by the entry drifted over the sound of her closing door.
“It’s a pain in the ass to have to walk all the way down here.”
The other one shrugged. “It’s for security. They can’t let the delivery bots just fly in. What if we get a bomb disguised as pizza?”
“You’d probably eat it.”
The heavier man swatted the hat off the first.
Kirsten’s growling stomach reminded her of the horrible mess that impersonated food at the mall, and she walked up the exit ramp typing on her NetMini. Her presence sucked the volume from their conversation and they edged away. She glanced over the screen at them, sensing their stares.
“What?”
Th
ey looked at each other. “Nothing.”
The one on the left took a step back and looked out to the street.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” She gave them a wounded glance. “You think I’m going to eat your soul or something because I’m from Zero?”
The thin one flashed a nervous smile. “Naah. You’ll do it coz you’re a woman.”
“Whatever.” Isolation became indignation, and she moved to the opposite side of the three-lane doorway.
A delivery bot brought their food a moment later after which they left as fast as they could without too obvious a hint they fled in fear.
“You can’t blame them.” Dorian had walked up behind her while she pouted at the traffic. “Throughout mankind’s history, the first reaction to things beyond understanding was fear. At least they’re not testing to see if you float.”
Kirsten studied her boots. “Sometimes I think dunking would be less painful.”
“Oh, come on with the melodrama. You’re not like that.”
“Yeah, I know, but…” She paused, rubbing her arms.
Dorian nodded. “Your mother again? Is everyone who shies away from you just a lesser shade of her?”
Her head snapped around to look at him. “That’s not fair.”
“She couldn’t understand your special gift, and the only frame of reference she had was her belief system.”
Kirsten fell into a lean upon the wall. “Yeah. Too bad for me the church burns everything it can’t explain.”
Dorian sighed. “Someday you may be forced to admit your mother was just crazy and there is nothing wrong with you.”
“I feel like we’ve had this conversation before.”
A boxy droid the size of a shoebox flew up to them, sniffing like a dog at her belt by her NetMini. Satisfied, it opened a hatch on the front revealing her turkey wrap.
Dorian walked alongside her to the elevator with a concerned look. “We have it at least once a month.”
Samir held the door for her and grinned as she shared the elevator. He improved her grey mood and she managed a smile back at him. His parents dumped him here, but at least they had not been cruel, just overwhelmed. Rumor had it he still called them now and then.
Halfway to her floor he got up the nerve to speak. “How’s the car working for you?”
“Fine, no problems at all.” She picked at the clear plastic around her food. The scent leaked through the carton, making her want to eat it right there.
“Wow.” He blinked. “That’s so messed up. She gave the others such a hard time.”
Kirsten flashed a pixie grin at him. “I guess he just likes me.”
“Yeah, I guess she does.” Samir shivered. “Damn, it just got cold in here.”
Kirsten giggled.
The elevator chimed as the silver door snapped open with a hiss. At her desk, the holographic view pane stretched out in space, waking as she sat down. With one hand on her lunch, she pulled up records of anyone affiliated with technology or medicine that died under mysterious circumstances over the past sixty years.
Dorian settled into his seat. “The boy likes you.”
She dropped her food. “I know, but he’s fourteen, he likes anything with boobs. He’ll get over it.”
“He’s got your picture in his locker.”
Four hundred eighty thousand-some odd results came back.
“Mmmk.” The wrap muffled the four-letter word.
Dorian laughed. “Better get started.”
Duh, I’m an idiot.
She filtered the results to men only, between the ages of twenty-five and forty with the general physical appearance of the ghost she saw. A more manageable pool of about ten thousand came back. With a sigh, she set the terminal to cycle through their photos and sat back with her wrap.
A stream of pixelated faces stared at her for seconds at a time. Murder, accident, suicide, murder, unknown; the words flashed in bold red letters.
Each one had a story and an abnormal death, not always solved. As image after image appeared, her mind meandered along a twisty path. She wondered how many people each man left behind; family, parents, and friends… how many of them were missed?
“You’ll have better luck finding some dick if you check out living men.” Nicole draped herself over Kirsten’s back, being nosy.
“Oh, for the love of…” If not for Nicole on top of her, Kirsten would have jumped out of her seat. “You scared the crap out of me.”
Nicole swung around and sat on the desk next to the terminal. “You laugh at ghosts but I scared you?”
“I believe you mean startled, not scared,” said Dorian.
Kirsten sighed. “Whatever.”
“What?” Nicole cocked her head.
“I’d jump if a ghost snuck up on me like that too.”
“So what’cha doin?” Nicole swiped a carrot stick from Kirsten’s lunch. “Oh, hey, that one’s cute… too bad he’s dead.”
Crunching.
Dorian scowled at Nicole. When he saw her looking at Kirsten’s screen, the glare left his eyes.
“I’m trying to figure out who this ghost is, from the mall. The only thing I have to go on is the face…” She slouched over the desk. “So I resorted to cycling through images. Wanna help?”
“Sure, I can for a bit. What’s he look like?”
Kirsten made eye contact. “Take a peek.”
Nicole found the image of the mall ghost in Kirsten’s thoughts. The close up shuddered down her spine, riding the memory of cold fingers around her throat. For half an hour, the walls flashed in silence as three terminals cycled through faces.
Morelli limped by, offering a brief, polite nod at Kirsten and a wave at Nicole. He stopped, staring with a lifted eyebrow at Dorian’s flickering terminal.
Dorian picked at his eye with his middle finger aimed at him.
“Hey, Tom, how you feelin?” chirped Nicole.
He shot Kirsten a look, grew paler, and scurried off without a word.
Nicole leaned back over her chair, looking at Kirsten upside down. “How old do you think he is?”
“Bout thirty.”
Nicole bounced a goofy-eyed foam stress skull off Kirsten’s head. “No, dumbass, I mean as a ghost.”
“Oh, right. Well…he’s strong enough to take over a doll, not to mention I lashed him twice and he didn’t stop moving. He still ran like hell so he can’t be ancient. Maybe fifty or so if I had to guess.”
“Some can get powerful fast if they’re exceptionally angry,” added Dorian. “I got the feeling this guy was rather perturbed.”
Kirsten exhaled. “Yeah.”
“What?” Nicole looked at her upside down again.
“Nothing.”
The afternoon blurred into a sea of lonely faces. Less than an hour later, Nicole ran off to some mandatory training session or meeting. Kirsten had not paid enough attention to her prattle to remember which. Despite being only a year younger than Kirsten, she rambled on like a caffeinated tween.
“Back up.” Dorian got out of his chair, waving his finger at the screen. “Back three faces, is that him?”
Kirsten cycled back and blinked. “Dammit, you’re right. Good eyes.”
The apparition had a name―Albert Motte.
irsten basked in the blue glow of her terminal screen, poring over every detail she could find about Albert. The fact he had been dead for only six months shocked her; considering his strength, he had to be raging. Most spirits took that long just to be able to learn how to whisper to a living person or make a candle flutter. The files had little additional useful information. She now knew his grandparents had emigrated from ACC-controlled Germany and she found his addresses and banking records, as well as dates of birth and death. It lacked mention of an employer and, most surprising of all, the department file on his murder investigation looked empty.
“Think there’s an international angle? We might have to get Division 9 in on this.” Dorian leaned over her shoulder.<
br />
Kirsten sputtered a halfhearted tongue-less raspberry at the terminal. “I dunno. Would the Allied Corporate Council send a spy into the UCF to infiltrate Intera after a one-generation delay?”
Dorian made a pensive face. “I doubt it. Besides, Nine would have been all over them.”
Kirsten frowned at the file. That can’t be right. They have this marked as murder, there has to be a record.
She locked her terminal and left the Division 0 wing. After a brief chat with Robin at the front desk, she went off toward the central hub. At the end of the hospital-white corridor, a pair of sliding transparent plastisteel doors moved out of her way, sensing her approach.
The nexus of the UCF Police command complex contained a swarm of semi-structured chaos as people went about their duties. She wanted to take this file to Division 9, knowing no place existed where they could not go in cyberspace. Every so often, as someone noticed her uniform, they would go out of their way to give her room. Sometimes the space came from a man being courteous to a cute blonde, but most times from people spooked away from a Zero.
The din faded as she got closer to that part of the building and by the time she walked over to a pair of men in black suits, the air hung silent as a tomb. They flanked a door marked with a simple black ‘9’. Both wore sunglasses, their faces traced with the lines of implanted neuralware. A faint glow lit their cheeks beneath their glasses as their cybereyes came to life and checked her out. She felt living minds, but stopped short of reading their surface thoughts. Division 9 got edgy about telepaths; rumor had it they had classified cyberware capable of harming anyone who tried.
She tried not to look like a lost schoolgirl. “I need to get a file checked. I think someone hacked into our system.”
The man on the left tilted his head. “ID?”
She held it out. “I just need help finding out why one of the files in the system is empty. Who better than you guys?”
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