by Dave Swavely
“While we’re doing that, protected by the rest of the team,” Michael Ares’s voice rang out from all around them, “Terrey and Ni will travel a little farther south and check out the security at the Presidio. I asked them to do that, Lynn, because you said you wanted to start working there sometime soon. And if you’re now saying you might want to stay there, I definitely want them to secure the place as much as they can, find the safest spot for you to stay, etcetera.”
“We’ll do that on Friday morning,” Terrey said, “to give us a full day to prepare. But in the meantime, we need to talk about Stephenson’s dreams.” He looked meaningfully at the little man, who experienced again the same flood of excitement, guilt, and fear. “Maybe we should take them a little more seriously.”
“I hate to say I told you so,” Stephenson said, the emotion of pride now eclipsing all the others.
“I looked at the dream, remember?” Ares’s voice said. “It wasn’t that close to what happened—she was at a table, I think, in the dream, and…”
“Still, it’s rather uncanny,” Terrey interrupted.
“I think you should take my dreams a lot more seriously,” Stephenson spoke up to the two powerful personalities. He also had always been a bold person—some people had even accused him of a Napoleon complex—but his experiences with the Dreamscape rig had made him even bolder.
“Have you had any others that we should know about?” Terrey asked, and it caught Stephenson off guard, because all he could think of at first were the dreams about the triplets. But then he remembered the other one.
“Yes, actually,” he answered. “I had a dream about Mr. Ares dying in a fall from a bridge.”
“Hmmm,” the Protection G leader said, thinking for a moment. “I don’t think we have to worry about that anytime soon. Michael is safely tucked away somewhere, and Jon will be traveling to Marin by aero, so he won’t be crossing any bridges. But maybe you should stay away from them the rest of your life, mate, just in case.”
“I’ll think about it,” the voice said.
“How did they know what we like to eat?” Mrs. Ares asked from the couch, obviously not being able to move on yet from the murder that just happened in her kitchen. “Did you say something about it in a net interview, like with the wine?”
“Not that I remember,” Mr. Ares said.
“Someone here could have told them,” Korcz spoke up for the first time.
“Well, that’s just stupid, Korcz,” Terrey shot back. “Everyone here knows that Jon is a double, and the real Michael isn’t here. What would be the point?”
“Okey, but I don’t like how much you keep from us.” Korcz stared at the Aussie defiantly as he said this.
“Like what, mate?”
“Like what is happening with them,” the big Russian said, pointing to the two triplets, who had just come back into the room. They’re either very fast at autopsies, Stephenson thought, or they’re putting it off till later.
“What are you talking about?”
“Sex,” Korcz said.
“What?” Terrey said, and his gaze fell on Stephenson.
“Don’t look at me,” the little man said, with his dreams about the triplets in mind, but then realized that Terrey was hoping that he, being Korcz’s partner and friend, could translate this for him. So Stephenson added, “I don’t know what he’s talking about, either.”
“Not triples,” the bald man continued. “Sex. How do you say…?”
Everyone stared at each other quizzically, until finally the two female cyborgs shared a look of recognition, and did that weird silent communication with Terrey that ended with a nod from him.
“Sextuplets,” one of the Japanese women said. “That’s the word you’re looking for.”
“Da. You are sextuplets.”
“Not exactly, but you’re very close.” This was Terrey speaking again, never one to let a conversation exclude him for too long. “They were actually octuplets, but two didn’t live very long beyond the origination process.”
“Could someone please explain what the hell you’re talking about?”
Stephenson heard this from the Ares woman, and thought that she must have been seriously stressed, because he had never before heard her use even mild profanity. Something about how she had been raised at that orphanage—the one run by the wife of the mysterious old guy who had started BASS.
“Mr. Korcz has divined the secret of the Trois,” Terrey said. “That they’re more than Trois. Their three sisters live in the packs on their backs. Or actually we could call them ‘half-sisters,’ which would certainly give new meaning to the term, because they only consist of brain matter and some auxiliary nervous systems—all of which have been heavily augmented since they were created, of course.” Stephenson wasn’t really surprised to hear this, because Japan had long been renown for the genetic experimentation that had been occurring there.
“How did you discover this, Korcz?” Terrey asked, and Stephenson noticed that the team leader had changed the way he was referring to his partner—he used to call him Valeri.
“I am from Asia,” Korcz answered. “I know a little Japanese. Ni is the number two, San is the number three, and the other one is other number.”
“Go is five,” one of the girls helped him.
“So is missing one and four, maybe six,” Korcz continued. “And when your sister was burned in the fire, you were mourning a death. But she survived.”
“That’s right, Valeri,” the same girl said. She used his first name, seeming to appreciate the attention he was showing to her and her sisters. “Our sister Roku lived in symbiosis with Go, in her ‘backpack’ as Terrey calls it, and she was killed in the fire. It was she that we were mourning, and that is why Go is still recovering, because losing the symbiotic relationship she had with Roku damaged her own systems severely.”
“Ichi rides with me,” said the other girl, who must be Ni. “And Yon rides with San.”
“So that’s why you seem to be able to do the work of six people,” Stephenson said, “because you really are six people.”
“It’s actually exponential rather than additional,” Ni said matter-of-factly. “We all have the same DNA structure and compatible augmentations, so we are all able to share and process informational and sensory input simultaneously.”
“Did you say ‘Yon’?” the disembodied voice of Michael Ares asked.
“Yes, Yon is the number four in Japanese, and she is our fourth sister, who rides with San.” She nodded toward the back of the other girl.
“Well, that solves a mystery for me,” Ares said. “I’ve met Yon, she talks to me on my screen sometimes.”
The two cyborgs looked at each other and smiled. Then Ni said, “Yon has an independent streak. She likes to sneak off and do things that we can’t control sometimes. We’re not surprised that she picked you to talk to.” They smiled at each other again.
“Why?”
“Because she’s always had a thing for good-looking men.”
“Really?” said Ares’s wife. “How can she know what he looks like when she has no eyes?”
“She sees through ours, of course.”
“But she’s just a … brain, with no body. So I can’t be jealous of her, right?” She laughed for the first time since finding the body. “Why would she even care about how someone looks?”
“We’ve wondered that, too,” the cyborg said. “And we think that it is precisely because she has no body of her own—she tries to act as if she did.”
“She just typed on my screen,” Ares said. “‘Good men prefer brains over beauty.’”
“Yeah, well, obviously she doesn’t,” Ares’s wife joked.
“Touché, Lynn,” he said.
“We’re sorry about that, Mr. Ares,” Ni offered. “We try to stop her from drawing outside the lines, but she’s persistent.”
“That’s okay,” the BASS CEO said, “but why didn’t you tell us about all this, Terrey?”
> “We’ve found that it tends to freak people out and lose us business before they know what we can do,” he answered. “Too much of an education is required for people to understand that they are people too. Right or wrong, humans do base a lot on physical attractiveness, and in case you’ve never seen it, brain tissue is not very attractive.”
“Yon says ‘Speak for yourself,’ Terrey.” Ares laughed, but Terrey didn’t. He gave Ni and San a look that said they should keep their sister under control.
“It still worries me,” Korcz said, staring Terrey down again. “They are people, and they should not be hidden away. So I think you have other things to hide, danyet?”
Terrey gave Korcz a look that was not too different from the one he had given his assistants, and Stephenson wondered what else was going on between his boss and his partner. The next day he would find out, and on the day after that, another one of his dreams would come true.
40
BAD FEELINGS
I spent most of Thursday morning in a virtual meeting with Terrey, preparing for the Marin trip that we had planned for the next day, and a lot of that time was spent looking at the security measures already in place at the Presidio, plus the ones that could be added. I don’t know if I had a subconscious premonition of what became conscious later on, or if I was merely motivated by a husband’s love and concern, but I wanted to make use of Terrey’s expertise in personal protection, and he was very willing to oblige—probably because he was now being paid another $500,000 per day to ensure Lynn’s safety as well as mine.
After Friday, when she went to stay at the orphanage, that would be the easiest fortune ever amassed, because she would now be far away from the double, who was the kaleidocide’s target, and out of harm’s way. I was so relieved that she was finally willing to go someplace else that I found it hard not to be happy about the cause of it, which was Tyra’s death. I had noticed that the little man, Stephenson, also seemed to be suppressing some delight at that unfortunate occurrence, though for a different reason. He wanted to believe that his dreams were prescient, while I was thinking of what a nightmare it would be to lose Lynn and our baby as collateral damage in this vendetta against me. I could honestly say that I would rather die myself than see that happen.
One of the reasons for my increased gratefulness for Lynn and our domestic life was the time I had spent with Angelee and Chris over the last few days, in between conducting my business at BASS through the double and dealing with Tyra’s death. We shared most of our meals together, and spent time together playing games and watching Pilgrim and some other holos that I had upgraded, much to the delight of the little boy. The sexual tension had all but disappeared, thanks to Angelee’s cycle—another example of bad things working out for good, which seemed to be a recurrent theme in the religious entertainment that they enjoyed. But the emotional attachment they both had toward me was palpable—especially the boy, who had no episodes of self-destructiveness or defiance as long as I was spending some time with him each day. I was almost overcome with sadness when I thought of them returning to a life without a father figure in the house, and I began to realize like never before how important it was for children to have two loving parents, which was another theme in some of the holos that Chris’s own father had left for him.
So later in the day I called Lynn to comfort and encourage her, and we talked face-to-virtual-face in our bedroom like we had earlier in the week. This was the last time we would be alone before the fateful events of the next day.
“I just have a bad feeling right now,” she said after I asked her how she was doing. “I told you we shouldn’t have kept Tyra here, and that we would be responsible for her death.”
“And I disagreed with you,” I said. “And still do. That could have been you. She did the job she was hired to do, and she didn’t even want to leave.”
“It’s just so horrible. And to think that we were joking around with each other right after she died. How are we any better than our enemies? I’m telling you, Michael, I feel like a hammer is going to fall on us, and we’ll deserve everything we get.”
As was usually the case when she was driven by emotion, there were too many questionable ideas in what she said to address the logic of all of them. So I simply tried to make it easier on her by telling her to stay in her room and hang on until tomorrow, when she would be out of the house and away from the immediate surroundings that were constantly reminding her of what happened the day before.
“I do want to go to the Presidio,” she said, “but I’ll miss the house and want to come back, in spite of everything.” I was glad to see that she was thinking rationally about that issue. And then she added, “Can we redo the whole kitchen?”
I said, “Of course,” and then was saved from a long discussion of renovation details by Terrey, who texted me that he was sorry for the interruption but had two important matters to talk to me about. I said good-bye and “Loves” to Lynn, blowing kisses to her and the baby, and soon was looking at Terrey on the screen in front of me.
“Sorry again, mate,” he said, “but this is really important.”
“Live forever, man,” I said, giving him the two-fingered salute.
“Getting right to the point,” he said seriously, “we have another issue with Korcz. Because of him being from that city with all the colors, and because of his attitude—I feel he’s been trying to sow discord among us—I had the Trois examine the OutPhone that we took from him when he arrived. And they found this.” He manipulated some controls, and a display packed with figures and code that I couldn’t immediately decipher appeared on half of my screen. Then he circled part of it, and I could tell it was a phone number. “While Korcz was on the plane coming here, after we hired him in New York, someone called him from this number. It was encrypted, of course, and it was also deleted from his phone, but my Sheilas are very good, as you know.”
“Who called him, Terrey?”
“We don’t know exactly, but we do know that the call originated in China. I’m so sorry, mate, it looks like I may have made another dim decision when I hired him, though if I did it was an honest mistake. The only thing I can think of is that Sun’s people knew the kind of team members we look for and ran a massive parametered netscan like we did to find the double. Maybe they turned up Korcz because he’s someone that you met before and dealt with favorably, I don’t know. But if they did find out we hired him, they must have crapped their pants when they found out he was from Gdańsk.” He paused for a moment. “You know, I’m starting to really think there’s something to this color thing. Are you sure you won’t do the ritual with me?”
“Hold on a second, Terrey,” I said. “We don’t know anything for sure about Korcz.”
“Right, but do you want to take any chances, knowing all this?”
“So what do you suggest we do?”
“Well, we can’t just let him go, in case he has somehow figured out where you are. And we can’t even let him walk around without keeping an eye on him at all times. But I don’t think we need him for the Marin trip tomorrow—we’ve already eliminated the full-on assault team they had planted, so any further threat would likely be up close and personal, and the three team members with the double can handle anything like that. So I say we lock him up for now in his room in the hill, where he can’t do any damage, and then see if he really is the traitor.”
“How would we do that?” I asked.
“When we come back from Marin, we’ll say that you’re coming to the house just for the night to see Lynn—conjugal visit, you know. And we’ll have Jon do that—not the conjugal part, of course, but pretend to be you, fly into the hangar in an aero, with the team there to meet him. Korcz won’t know the difference, ’cause he’ll have been locked up with no net before that. Lynn will be at the Presidio, safe and sound, but he won’t know that … we’ll tell him she’s up in the house waiting for you, to be with you one night before she goes to stay down there. Korcz will have an opportu
nity to move on the double when he’s coming through the base, and then when he’s staying in the house alone that night.”
“So if Korcz is the traitor,” I said, “then Jon will be killed.”
“Not necessarily. We’ll rig up some kind of surveillance and security before we let Korcz out, and try to save Jon if we can. But if he does die, it’s a small price to pay for exposing what might be the last attempt in the kaleidocide.” He smiled and nodded. “I can see the light at the end of the tunnel from here, mate.”
“What about motive?” I asked. “Why would Korcz be working for the other side?”
“Well, you did shoot him, Michael.”
“But only a little,” I said, repeating my joke from when we first hired the man.
“The right amount of money is always enough motivation,” Terrey said with another wry wink. “Hell, I would probably betray you if someone could pay me more than one point five a day.”
After a few more questions, I agreed to Terrey’s plan, and he went to talk to Korcz along with both of the remaining triplets, in case the big Russian caused some kind of problem. It wouldn’t have been wise if he did, because even with his considerable size and weapons skills, I had the feeling that just one of the cyborgs would be way too much for him. I watched the confrontation initially through Terrey’s contacts, but the blinking effect eventually bothered me enough that I switched to the room where they met.
Fortunately, Korcz was basically copacetic. He protested the implication that he might be disloyal to his employer, which he said he never had been in his life, but did confirm that he had been called from an unknown number on the flight in. He said that he didn’t answer the call, however, because it was from an unknown number, and that he didn’t remember deleting it. Like the time I had interrogated him in the castle a year before, during the “silhouette” incident, my gut feeling was that he was telling the truth. But my gut feelings had been very wrong before, like with other people in that same incident, so I was still okay with Korcz being confined to his room until the Marin trip was over. Fortunately, he was okay with it, too, especially after we reminded him that he would be fully paid for the time that he would be doing nothing, and not risking his life or health in any way.