by Rich Horton
I pulled on the uniform: knee-length shorts and a black pullover with long sleeves designed to hide the gel ribbons. I was not a police officer by choice. I’d been drafted into the service, where it became my duty to enforce the Commonwealth’s conservative definition of what it meant to be human: a singular physical existence and no invented quirks—only natural, human physiology, except that aging had been ruled a defect and had been cured, and we were all allowed an atrium.
In my primary duty I was the watch officer at Nahiku, a small celestial city in the inner system, but every cop takes on special duties too. Mine was to investigate other officers. Commonwealth law is strict, punishment is severe, and the unfortunate reality is that cops hold the power of life and death over the citizens of their watch. Some cops are judicious, but others take advantage of their power. It was far more likely that Daoud Pana was a corrupt cop who’d fabricated this case for some kind of payoff, than that Shay Antigo was truly unknown.
Using my atrium, I linked into the station’s surveillance network to get a first look at my quarry. Pana had set a flock of inspection bees buzzing through the levels of the newly arrived ship, each one of the tiny devices sending back datastreams as they used their camera eyes to search every visible space, and their molecular sensors to taste the air and assay the surfaces.
I commandeered an inspection bee that was hovering close to Pana, turning it around so that its gaze fell on him: a man as tall as me—cop height, we called it—with a broad face and wide nose. No smile at all as he questioned the crew. Brusque and imposing in his black uniform. I watched him for several minutes, and found him neither overly friendly nor overly strict. If he was looking for a bribe or a kickback, I couldn’t see it. Maybe he only did favors for those who took care to make arrangements in advance.
The mausoleum was in a warehouse district, so at first I saw only small transport robots in the main corridor, but as I rounded the wheel I encountered people. They looked at me in idle curiosity, until they realized I was not the cop they’d grown used to seeing. Then their expressions shifted—sometimes to curiosity, but often to shock, and even fear, because the appearance of a strange cop at a remote station like this one could only mean trouble.
I was still watching Pana within my atrium, and I found it easy to mark the precise moment someone pinged him with the news that I was there. His jaw tightened. His lips drew back. He looked up, looked around, until he spotted the surveillance bee that I controlled.
“On my way,” he growled in an undertone. Then he barked at the cargo ship’s three-person crew. “Do not attempt to disembark. You have not been cleared and you will not be allowed to pass through the station gate.”
He waved off their objections, and, leaving his flock of bees to continue the job, he left through the ship’s lock. The station gate knew him, and he was allowed back into the wheel with only a cursory surface scan.
Pana worked out of an office with a small reception room in front, and interrogation and lab space in the back—a standard layout for watch officers. I let myself in, did a quick walk-through of all the rooms, checked the storage lockers, and then took a seat on a couch in one of the interrogation rooms to wait for his arrival. A DI had put together a summary of the surveillance recorded on the day the unknown citizen, Shay Antigo, had come in. I used the time to review it.
After Kiel Chaladur’s prospecting boat had docked at the station, Daoud Pana had gone onboard to do a walk-through inspection just like he’d done today with the cargo ship. Inside the Gold Witch, he’d been met by Chaladur, a small man with sharp features and not much flesh beneath his charcoal skin, whose thin shoulders were a little hunched even in Sato’s low-gee. The video identified Shay Antigo as the woman standing beside him. They both wore their hair close-shaven, but that was the limit of the resemblance. Shay stood taller by a few centimeters, with a wide, pretty face, and demure features. My DI confirmed the anxiety I sensed in her gaze as she eyed Officer Pana.
In the video, an alert spoke, notifying Pana that she lacked an ID chip. He drew back. His hand rose slightly, and I knew the gel ribbons he carried under his sleeve were gliding down his forearm to his palm, where they would be ready for use.
But no resistance was offered—not by Shay Antigo, or Kiel Chaladur, or his two-person crew. Shay submitted to every scan and test that procedure required, and in the end Pana certified her as a previously unknown citizen, granting her a Commonwealth ID chip, and a new existence without the burden of a past.
Daoud Pana was scowling when he strode into the interrogation room. He didn’t bother with introductions. “It’s the unknown, isn’t it?” he demanded. “I knew trouble was coming when I filed that report.”
“You filed it anyway.”
“It was my job to file it. I conducted the required investigation and I drew the only conclusion I could. She was legit. No record of her in the system. I didn’t write her a free pass.”
Every celestial city operated under its own charter, but in matters of molecular science, biology, and machine intelligence, Commonwealth law applied, and it was merciless. For most violations, those found guilty-with-intent faced death as a penalty. Their only recourse was to disappear and become someone else.
Cops had been bribed before.
I studied Pana. My DI had flagged no lie in his words, but some people learned to fool the DIs.
Pana’s lip curled. “You’ve done this before? Investigated another cop?”
“I’ve been called out a couple of times.”
“Yeah? And were they experienced cops that you investigated? Or were they new?” He shook his head. “You don’t have to answer. Only the new-issues are dumb enough to think they can pad their accounts and no one the wiser.”
It was true that most cops who leaned toward corruption were exposed in their first years, but I saw it as a Darwinian process. Those who didn’t get caught early were the smart ones, and the longer they survived, the smarter they got, and the smarter they got, the more they tried to get away with. People believe all the time in the magic of their own success.
I guess I believed in magic too. “Tell me about her,” I said, confident that I could discern his thoughts and intentions by watching his face, hearing his voice, even though I knew moods could be quirked, and voice rhythms could be steadied with tranks.
He scowled and shook his head again, making it clear I was wasting his time. “It’s all in the report. Everything. You’ve watched it, haven’t you? The detainment vid?”
“Tell me anyway.”
Pana understood that the best way to get rid of me was to cooperate, so, sitting on the couch opposite mine, he started talking, his deep voice flat and fluid, as if he was reading the words.
“I meet every ship that comes in. It’s not strictly required—I could just send the bees to inspect the cargo—but it’s my policy. We’re spread thin out here. Indies working out in the rocks, they’ll try out illegal biomods, figuring it’s long odds on getting caught—but eventually everyone comes in. If they know I’m going to be down at the gates every time, they might think a little harder before they push the wall.”
I hated to admit that this made sense to me. People get in trouble when they think no one’s looking. But did the threat of a cop waiting at the station gate really balance out the temptation that grew in the dark, in those years when you were out in the rocks, alone with your thoughts, and free to run any experiment your tools allowed? Pana must have seen a lot of mods over the years, but his arrest record was thin. Sometimes that’s a sign of a good watch officer—someone who knows how to make a mess quietly disappear before it’s ever official. I’d done it myself. People who understand their jeopardy willingly cooperate, and life goes on.
Pana leaned back in his chair and scowled again. It seemed to be his default expression. “So, this prospecting boat came in. The Gold Witch. There’d been chatter about it. They hit big. Found a snowball. Auctioned it for a nice gain. That was over a year ago.”
“It took them that long to come in?”
He nodded. “They were way out in the dark. God knows what goes on out there.”
“What did go on?”
He shrugged. “No one patrols the Belt. There’s no way to really know, but everyone’s heard stories. Sometimes these prospectors let the dark inside their heads, and they decide they don’t want to come back. They find a rock far away from everything, and they tunnel it, set up housekeeping, declare themselves beyond the bounds of the Commonwealth.”
The legality of independent holdings was heavily debated, but the cold fact was that the Commonwealth police could establish jurisdiction simply by force of arms. It was only ever a matter of time.
“And Shay Antigo? She came from an indie holding?”
Doubt shadowed his face. I caught it before my DI did.
“That was her story. I couldn’t refute it. The DI picked up a low level of deception, nothing clear cut. I think she’d been in a station, but not one with a police presence.”
“So she wasn’t scanned.”
“That’s my guess. I couldn’t ask for a full history without cause.”
“Being an unknown citizen isn’t sufficient cause?”
“Didn’t seem like it at the time.” His eyes narrowed, and he leaned forward. “You think she’s a fake because she doesn’t look like a freak, because she could hold a human conversation, because she knew what a cop was, and what it meant to get through a station gate.”
I nodded. “She grew up in the dark.”
He shrugged. “She has an atrium. You know how indies get by out there? They live through their atriums. They spend all their downtime in virtual worlds, a lot of ’em based on real places. It’s the damnedest thing. They interact with machine personas, learn the accent and habits of some city they’ve never seen, and you’d swear they were birthright citizens. Indies can masquerade as anyone they want to be.”
A DI brought a report into my atrium. I’d sent it hunting through Pana’s background. He’d saved up a good-sized nest egg. He had family, but none that were close. He’d been married twice, both had ended when the contract expired. He held citizenship in two celestial cities and one Earth nation. Nothing in his record was suspicious . . . but he would have known to keep his record clean.
He was studying me, no doubt using the same interpretive DI that I was using to assess his mood. “You won’t find anything,” he told me in a satisfied tone. “Because there’s nothing to find.”
I took a walk around the ring of the station. Eight ships were docked to the gates, one of them the Gold Witch. Kiel Chaladur had ordered it cleaned and refurbished immediately on his return. It had been on the market a little more than forty hours when it sold to an experienced prospector. I found her supervising the loading of food and supplies for what looked to be a long expedition. Pana must have warned her I was on my way, because she didn’t look surprised when I came through the station gate—a small, gray-eyed woman, soft and plump, with a smile sincere enough to hide mass murder behind it.
Most people don’t smile when a Commonwealth cop comes to ask them questions.
“Do you want to inspect us?” she asked me without preamble.
The cleaning crew had been through. We both knew there would be nothing to find. “Did you know Kiel Chaladur?” I asked her.
Her eyes were fixed on me with eerie intensity. Despite her smile, my DI picked up hostility, but I didn’t think it was directed at me. “I knew him. I crewed with him twice, way back. He had no luck then, so I moved on.”
“He had luck this last trip.”
“You never know when it’ll hit.”
“What do you know about Shay Antigo?”
She crossed her arms and her smile disappeared. “It’s hard to believe sometimes, what goes on out there.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just what I said. Some stories are hard to believe.”
“You’ve been prospecting a long time, haven’t you?”
“Nineteen years. Six expeditions. Maybe this time I’ll finally hit gold.”
“You must have seen a lot out there.”
Her smile flashed, fierce and bitter. “I wouldn’t say that. The Belt’s a big place. But it’s mostly empty space, and you know what? There’s nothing much to see out there. There aren’t any mysteries. Just a few rocks and a whole lot of silence.”
“No mysteries? No unknowns?”
“Not that I’ve ever seen.”
Pana’s report included a copy of the Gold Witch’s log file, which had a few entries from the start of the voyage, but nothing more. As an owner-operator, Chaladur wasn’t required to keep a log and I guessed that if he’d kept a record at all, it was locked up safe inside his head. I knew that he’d set out with three souls aboard and returned with four, and that there was no data gate on the Gold Witch, and no crèche in which a fresh husk could be grown. So Shay could not have been regenerated. She had come from somewhere: either an independent holding as she’d claimed, or from another boat.
I sent a DI to look for any discrepancies in ship crews: a list of the dead and the missing, all those who had never come back. I set another DI to assembling a map of radio chatter recorded over the years, to see if a pattern could be recovered suggesting a habitation in the sector where Kiel had found his strike.
Then I went over the DNA evidence collected by Pana. He’d run a standard assessment of Shay’s profile and had found no matches in the Commonwealth central library. I decided to look deeper.
I ordered the sample pulled from storage and subjected it to a more detailed profiling. The new report turned up a fair amount of radiation damage—nothing that couldn’t be repaired, but highly indicative of time spent in the rocks. More suspect were the splices: well-known segments of artificial DNA with no actual function. They’d been devised as copyright marks, but they’d been adapted for use as placeholders that could throw off a basic DNA match. It was possible Shay had inherited the splices, but a smart amateur with the proper molecular toolkit could easily achieve the result.
The two reports I’d requested earlier had come back while I was working. The radio map failed to show any consistent point source of chatter in the sector Chaladur had been prospecting, but the list of the dead was more interesting. It was longer than I expected: a hundred ninety-seven who’d had to be restored from backups. Most had died of injuries or air loss, with a few suicides in the mix. Nearly all the bodies had been recovered and the organics recycled.
A single exception caught my eye. Thirty-two years ago a prospecting boat had disappeared with its crew of three. No one had ever reported sighting the ghost ship. No word had ever come of its crew.
The radiation damage in Shay’s DNA sample had indicated a long time spent in the rocks.
I sent a DI hunting information on the missing crew—and in seconds it returned an initial report: only one of them had been female, her name was Mika Brennan, and the last time the local database had been synced with the Commonwealth central library, the version of her that had been restored from backup was living with her family in one of the oldest celestial cities, Eden-2. I compared her video ID with that of Shay Antigo and found marked differences. Mika’s face was more slender, her features sharper than Shay’s, her eyes green not gray . . . but people changed their features all the time.
I wanted to hear what the surviving Mika Brennan knew about her long-ago disappearance. So I generated a ghost within my atrium and, leaving my physical presence behind to continue searching the historical records, I passed through the station’s data gate.
There is no awareness during the journey between data gates and none in the receiving platform. It’s like stepping through a door, from one world to another. In my next moment of awareness I existed in a virtual reality within Mika Brennan’s atrium, one that perfectly reflected the hard reality around her.
Most people get nervous when a cop comes to talk to them. Mika Brennan only seemed per
plexed. “Officer Zeke Choy?” she asked, her head cocked to one side. “The request said you had questions? About my death?”
We were in a park in Eden-2. Not far away, two young girls were climbing boldly through a jungle tree. They shared Mika’s lean features, her thick, dark hair, and the deep, clove-brown color of her skin. “Mommy, watch!” one of them shouted.
My ghost existed within Mika’s atrium. I was written onto her reality, so that from her perspective, I was as solid and real as the two kids—but from the kids’ perspective I did not exist. At best, I was a phantom that only Mommy could see.
“I’m talking,” she called back to them. “We’ll play in a minute.” Then she cocked an eyebrow at me. “At least I hope you don’t plan to detain me?”
“I’d like to hear the story of what happened to you out there. It might have some bearing on a current case.”
“I went out there more than once, you know.”
That surprised me, but then I hadn’t bothered to pull a complete dossier.
She nodded. “I don’t remember what happened that first time, of course. That branch of my existence ended. I presume there was an accident. After a couple of years with no word from me, no word of my ship, my parents sought permission to restore me from a backup made before I left.” Her gaze followed the progress of the girls as they clambered around the jungle tree. “It shook me up, knowing I’d died out there. But that other me, she’d sent a lot of video journals to my parents. I watched them, and I came to understand that I’d loved it out there in the raw, cold dark. We went places where no one had ever been, where no one was ever meant to be.” She grinned. “And anyway, she’d left me with a lot of debt. So I went out again, and twelve years ago, I got lucky. We found a rock loaded with rare metals. Everything I owed to anybody was paid off, with wealth to spare, so I came home.” She nodded at the two kids. “And started the next phase of my life.”
I asked her if she knew anything about indies living in holdings out in the rocks, raising families there. She snorted. “Fables. People like to tell stories, but that’s all they are. I remember one time, a couple, a man and a woman, were marooned on a rock. They did some excavating. Lived there a few months, while their ship self-repaired. And then they got the fuck out of there as soon as they could.” She looked up at me, with an open, honest gaze that I admired. “No one lives out there. Not that I ever saw, or heard, and I was out there more than twenty years.”