The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2013

by Linda Nagata

  “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 got 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 select
ion 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.

  The ice cave gave way to a forest glade floored in mossy, irregular slates. Set about on those were curved, transparent tables set for chess, go, mancala, cribbage, and similar strategy games. Most of the tables were occupied by pairs of players, and some had drawn observers as well.

  Indrapramit followed his needle—and Ferron followed Indrapramit—to a table where a unicorn and a sasquatch were playing a game involving rows of transparent red and yellow stones laid out on a grid according to rules that Ferron did not comprehend. The sasquatch looked up as they stopped beside the table. The unicorn—glossy black, with a pearly, shimmering horn and a glowing amber stone pinched between the halves of her cloven hoof—was focused on her next move.

  The arrow pointed squarely between her enormous, lambent golden eyes.

  Ferron cleared her throat.

  “Yes, officers?” the sasquatch said. He scratched the top of his head. The hair was particularly silky, and flowed around his long hooked fingernails.

  “I’m afraid we need to speak to your friend,” Indrapramit said.

  “She’s skinning you out,” the sasquatch said. “Unless you have a warrant—”

  “We have an override,” Ferron said, and used it as soon as she felt Indrapramit’s assent.

  The unicorn’s head came up, a shudder running the length of her body and setting her silvery mane to swaying. In a brittle voice, she said, “I’d like to report a glitch.”

  “It’s not a glitch,” Indrapramit said. He identified himself and Ferron and said, “Are you Skooter0?”

  “Yeah,” she said. The horn glittered dangerously. “I haven’t broken any laws in India.”

  The sasquatch stood up discreetly and backed away.

  “It is my unfortunate duty,” Indrapramit continued, “to inform you of the murder of your mother, Dr. Jessica Fang, a.k.a. Dr. Dexter Coffin.”

  The unicorn blinked iridescent lashes. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re talking about something I have killfiled. I won’t be able to hear you until you stop.”

  Indrapramit’s avatar didn’t look at Ferron, but she felt his request for help. She stepped forward and keyed a top-level override. “You will hear us,” she said to the unicorn. “I am sorry for the intrusion, but we are legally bound to inform you that your mother, Dr. Jessica Fang, a.k.a. Dr. Dexter Coffin, has been murdered.”

  The unicorn’s lip curled in a snarl. “Good. I’m glad.”

  Ferron stepped back. It was about the response she had expected.

  “She made me,” the unicorn said. “That doesn’t make her my mother. Is there anything else you’re legally bound to inform me of ?”

  “No,” Indrapramit said.

  “Then get the hell out.” The unicorn set her amber gaming stone down on the grid. A golden glow encompassed it and its neighbors. “I win.”

  “Warehoused,” Indrapramit said with distaste, back in his own body and nibbling a slice of quiche. “And happy about it.”

  Ferron had a pressed sandwich of vegetables, tapenade, cheeses, and some elaborate and incomprehensible European charcuterie made of smoked vatted protein. It was delicious, in a totally exotic sort of way. “Would it be better if she were miserable and unfulfilled?”

  He made a noise of discontentment and speared a bite of spinach and egg.

  Ferron knew her combativeness was really all about her mother, not Fang/Coffin’s adult and avoidant daughter. Maybe it was the last remnants of Upping, but she couldn’t stop herself from saying, “What she’s doing is not so different from what our brains do naturally, except now it’s by tech/filters rather than prejudice and neurology.”

  Indrapramit changed the subject. “Let’s make a virtual tour of the scene.” As an icon blinked in Ferron’s attention space, he added, “Oh, hey. Final autopsy report.”

  “Something from Damini, too,” Ferron said. It had a priority code on it. She stepped into an artificial reality simulation of Coffin’s apartment as she opened the contact. The thrill of the chase rose through the fog of her fading hypomania. Upping didn’t seem to stick as well as it had when she was younger, and the crashes came harder now—but real, old-fashioned adrenaline was the cure for everything.

  “Ferron,” Ferron said, frowning down at the browned patches on Coffin’s virtual rug. Indrapramit rezzed into the conference a heartbeat later. “Damini, what do the depths of the net reveal?”

  “Jackpot,” Damini said. “Did you get a chance to look at the autopsy report yet?”

  “We just got done with the next of kin,” Ferron said. “You’re fast—I just saw the icon.”

  “Short form,” Damini said, “is that’s not Dexter Coffin.”

  Ferron’s avatar made a slow circuit around the perimeter of the virtual murder scene. “There was a DNA match. Damini, we just told his daughter he was murdered.”

  Indrapramit, more practical, put down his fork in meatspace. His AR avatar mimicked the motion with an empty hand. “So who is it?”

  “Nobody,” Damini said. She leaned back, satisfied. “The medical examiner says it’s topologically impossible to turn somebody inside out like that. It’s vatted, whatever it is. A grown object, nominally alive, cloned from Dexter Coffin’s tissue. But it’s not Dexter Coffin. I mean, think about it—what organ would that be, exactly?”

  “Cloned.” In meatspace, Ferron picked a puff of hyacinth-blue fur off her uniform sleeve. She held it up where Indrapramit could see it.

  His eyes widened. “Yes,” he said. “What about the patterns, though?”

  “Do I look like a bioengineer to you? Indrapramit,” Ferron said thoughtfully. “Does this crime scene look staged to you?”

  He frowned. “Maybe.”

  “Damini,” Ferron asked, “how’d you do with Dr. Coffin’s files? And Dr. Nnebuogar’s files?”

  “There’s nothing useful in Coffin’s email except some terse exchanges with Dr. Nnebuogor very similar in tone to the Jessica Fang papers. Nnebuogor was warning Coffin off her research. But there were no death threats, no love letters, no child support demands.”

  “Anything he was interested in?”

  “That star,” Damini said. “The one that’s going nova or whatever. He�
�s been following it for a couple of weeks now, before the press release hit the mainstream feeds. Nnebuogor’s logins support the idea that she’s behind the utility virus, by the way.”

  “Logins can be spoofed.”

  “So they can,” Damini agreed.

  Ferron peeled her sandwich open and frowned down at the vatted charcuterie. It all looked a lot less appealing now. “Nobody came to Coffin’s flat. And it turns out the stiff wasn’t a stiff after all. So Coffin went somewhere else, after making preparations to flee and then abandoning them.”

  “And the crime scene was staged,” Indrapramit said.

  “This is interesting,” Damini said. “Coffin hadn’t been to the office in a week.”

  “Since about when Morganti started investigating him. Or when he might have become aware that she was on his trail.”

  Ferron said something sharp and self-critical and radically unprofessional. And then she said, “I’m an idiot. Leakage.”

  “Leakage?” Damini asked. “You mean like when people can’t stop talking about the crime they actually committed, or the person you’re not supposed to know they’re having an affair with?”

  An urgent icon from Ferron’s mausi Sandhya—the responsible auntie, not the fussy auntie—blinked insistently at the edge of her awareness. Oh Gods, what now?

  “Exactly like that,” Ferron said. “Look, check on any hits for Coffin outside his flat in the past ten days. And I need confidential warrants for DNA analysis of the composters at the BioShell laboratory facility and also at Dr. Rao’s apartment.”

  “You think Rao killed him?” Damini didn’t even try to hide her shock.

  Blink, blink went the icon. Emergency. Code red. Your mother has gone beyond the pale, my dear. “Just pull the warrants. I want to see what we get before I commit to my theory.”

  “Why?” Indrapramit asked.