by Mark Budz
"Because I am!" Marta winced. "We have to help her, now. If we don't, the baby will die." She sounded exasperated and desperate, edging a little too close to hysteria for comfort.
"Your baby?" Pelayo said.
"Our baby. That's why I'm having a miscarriage."
She wasn't making any sense. "Is that why you took off without saying anything to Nguyet and Rocio?"
Marta's expression tightened, impatient. "This doesn't have anything to do with them."
"They're worried about you. How do you think they feel? First Concetta leaves, now you."
Marta closed her eyes. She pressed the heels of her hands to her forehead. "I need to find Nadice. Before it's too late." She made an effort to get up, and grimaced. Light scalded her features, leaving her face strained and gaunt.
"Take it easy," Lagrante said.
"I can't take it easy." Marta's breath came in cautious, pain-shortened gasps. "Mateus has Nadice. We have to find her—save her—before he kills her and the baby."
"How do you know she's not already dead?" Lagrante said.
"Because I'd be dead." Marta curled forward, knees tucked to her chest. "If he kills her, he kills me."
"Who's Mateus?" Pelayo said. "A TV?"
Marta shook her head. "The smuggler she was working for as a mule. She was still carrying the illegal ware she'd brought into the country for him. That's why he took her." Marta cradled her stomach with one arm. "And as soon as he gets what he wants there's no reason to keep her alive."
"Took her where?" Lagrante said.
"I don't know." Marta reached for the spex on the sidewalk next to her and held them up. "One of the TVs gave me this. It might help."
Lagrante took the spex. He popped the databead from the stem, then inserted it into an I/O port on his frames.
"Well?" Pelayo said.
"Code." The creases in Lagrante's forehead deepened. "Some sort of encrypted datalib or program."
"What kind of program?" Pelayo asked.
"Hard to say." Lagrante popped the databead, slipped it into a pocket inside his jacket, and turned to Marta. "You think this Mateus might be the person who nixed the place?"
Marta's nod came across as bleak, defeated. "So he could get to her. Keep her from running."
Pelayo's stomach clenched around a feeling of queasiness. "He happen to be a crunkhead, by any chance?"
Marta moistened dry, chapped lips. "I think so. I didn't get a good look at him. But I'm pretty sure."
Lagrante turned to Pelayo. "You know him?"
"I bumped into him earlier this afternoon, in the parking garage across from the hotel." Pelayo ran a hand through his hair. "And I think I saw him putting Nadice in a sedan."
"When?"
"Ten, maybe fifteen minutes ago." He switched over his earfeed. "Tossa? You there?"
"What's going on?" she said.
"You masked the wrong person."
"What do you mean?"
"I'm with Marta. I think the mask is on a friend of hers. Do you know where it is?"
In response, the eyefeed from the mask d-splayed as a heads-up frayed with thin interference lines that threatened to unravel the image.
Pelayo shut his eyes to watch the feed directly. He was moving down a corridor philmed in creamy white marble. Ceiling lights scrawled across his vision, leaving wavy chromatic streaks. He passed a flat-faced wall pillar with a design etched in circuit-board gold on the polished surface.
"The Fairmont," Atossa said. "In San Jose."
"You sure?" The design was gone, obliterated by a nova-bright burst from one of the overhead LEDs.
"Positive." Her voice was firm, unwavering. "We just got a new contract to run masks and FEMbots there."
Marta groaned. "It's not stopping." She slumped onto her side and clamped her thighs together. "You need to find Nadice. Get her to a doctor."
Lagrante nodded. "First, we need to get you someplace comfortable. Least until help arrives. I've got a call in, but it could be a few minutes. Things are a little jammed right now."
Pelayo looked up West Cliff to the hotel. If anything, the chaos there was worse than before.
He turned his attention back to Atossa. "How soon can you be at your place?" he asked.
_______
Ten minutes later, Atossa let them into her Beach Flats cottage, which had been philmed to resemble a Hollywood bungalow, circa 1940.
"Lay her on the bed," Atossa said. "Don't worry about the sheets. They can be cleaned or recycled."
While Lagrante arranged Marta on the bed, Pelayo joined Atossa in the kitchen, where she was rummaging through a drawer filled with blister packs of Chinese herbs, vitamins, amino acids, and other supplements. The kitchen window looked into a mini hydroponics greenhouse blazing with chem-lights. Orchids were visible in the steamy interior.
"Paramedics should be here soon," he said. "If you want, I'll stick around. I can catch up with Lagrante later."
"No. You're set up with the eyefeed. You need to be at the Fairmont to help the police find Nadice."
"You sure?"
"We'll be fine." She took out a tube of antibiotic spray, a half-used blister pack of Flexodeine tabs, a spray bottle of Sponge-Aid absorbent foam, and a tube of antibacterial liquid gloves. "Promise me you'll take care of yourself, okay?"
Pelayo nodded. "You sure you're not going to get in trouble for leaving the mask unattended?"
Atossa slid the drawer shut with her hip. "I'll write it off as accidental damage. Happens all the time."
"You want, I'll try and bring the mask back."
Atossa moved away from the counter. "I'm more worried about you. Now get going, both of you, before it's too late."
53
"That's far enough," a voice said.
Al-Fayoumi halted. Next to him, the girl's fingers tightened around his, moist and afraid.
"Close the door, please," the voice said.
"Who are you?" al-Fayoumi managed. "What do you want?" His indignation and forced bravado sounded counterfeit even to him.
"Police." A palm d-splay shone in the semidarkness, presenting al-Fayoumi with an SFPD badge and a DiNA verification, transmitted via flash-cast.
"Detective." Al-Fayoumi shut the door. The girl shifted position, easing behind him and clutching his pant leg. "What can I do for you?"
A thin smile flamed white above the glow of the d-splay before the curl of fingers snuffed it out. "Funny. I was planning to ask you the same thing."
Al-Fayoumi looked at him blankly for a beat, his mind racing. "Lisette," he said finally. "You're looking for her."
"And these." The detective indicated the terrariums lining the wall immediately to his right.
"Have you found her mother?" al-Fayoumi asked.
The detective frowned in the illumination emitted by the flies. After a moment his stance relaxed. "I think we need to talk," he said. "The three of us."
_______
"Let me get this straight," the detective said, staring across the desk at al-Fayoumi. "The damselfly, nan-omal, whatever, asked you to look after the girl."
"Correct."
They sat at the desk in the middle of the room. Lisette studied the terrariums, tapping the glass, then sneaking a peek at the detective. She inched a little farther from the desk.
"Why does it want you to look after her?" van Dijk asked.
"It didn't say."
"But you went along, anyway. Trusted it for some reason."
"I was already having reservations about contract work for Sigilint. It seemed to confirm those reservations. Validate them, so to speak."
"By letting you know Yukawa was an alias for Titov, and that you were actually working for IBT."
Al-Fayoumi sighed. "It made sense at the time." It sounded ridiculous. Now.
"Any idea what it is?" the detective asked. "The damsel."
"Nanomated 'skin." Al-Fayoumi shrugged. "Programmable matter that is being nanotechnologically animated."
"By what?"
&n
bsp; "I think..." Al-Fayoumi hesitated, struggling to organize his thoughts. "It may be more than that. An emergent collective conscious—or unconscious— perhaps."
"Whose?"
"Ours." Al-Fayoumi shifted, pinched by self-consciousness. "Those of us with nanotrodes that map the neurochemical patterns in our brains—the patterns we record in order to issue mental commands. I think it might be a natural outgrowth of that, like a harmonic. A note that is born out of other notes. It exists because of them and can't exist without them. The sum total of all uploaded neural activity."
"So when I issue a mental query, command, or whatever, I'm actively helping to create and maintain this damsel?"
"Yes."
"Where does it live?"
"Everyware, so to speak. Data paste. Smart fabric. Smart d-splays. Electronic skin, and any other form of programmable, artificially intelligent matter."
The detective fingered one cheek thoughtfully. "What would happen if I stopped issuing mental commands? If we all stopped? Would it die?"
"In theory."
"Something tells me it doesn't want to."
Al-Fayoumi took a deep breath. "Not only that, I think it wants to be born."
Van Dijk cocked his head. "Come again?"
"It wants to make sure that it lives. The best way to do that is to evolve, to acquire traits and adapt. That's what it's been doing with the flies—trying out various modes of inheritance and expression. That way, when it is born, the mechanisms for survival and reproduction will already be in place."
"Tell me more about your contract work," the detective said, changing tack again. He'd already switched gears several times, twisting the threads of the conversation to the point where it was getting almost impossible to keep them straight. "Exactly what sort of experimental 'skin are we dealing with?"
"Quantum-entangled," al-Fayoumi said.
"With what?"
"Quantum electronics. Superposed components that oscillate in phase to create coherent resonance states."
"Could you run that by me in lay terms?"
"Of course. Sorry." He seemed to stumble over himself. "It provides a way for people in a philm cast to connect... to experience sensory input and ware as if they were all one person, or the same person."
"How does it do that?"
"If the programmable matter and the wetronics in the 'skin are entangled, then they are essentially the same 'skin. Each individual 'skin is no longer separate. It is connected to—is part of—a single unified 'skin."
"So even though there might be a million individual 'skins, they're still physically connected by"—the detective consulted his palm d-splay—"EPR effects."
"Right. And any differences between 'skins are just different information states—modalities of existence, you could say—for the 'skin. One large non-collapsed wave functiqn."
"So Yukawa, Titov, wanted you to figure out a way to program all these various shared states."
"To predict their behavior," al-Fayoumi corrected. "Determine how information—philm images in this case—would be inherited and expressed in the new 'skin."
"Which ties back to your research with the flies. The appearance of the idolons."
"Yes." Finally, he seemed to have satisfactorily explained things.
"The future of philm," the detective mused. "Everyone part of the same cast, or something like that."
Al-Fayoumi wasn't sure what to say, the question struck him as rhetorical', so he kept his mouth shut.
"What about side effects?" van Dijk said. "Is there any indication that this new 'skin might be unhealthy?"
Al-Fayoumi frowned. "Unhealthy?"
"You know. Dangerous." The detective waved a hand. "Deadly."
"No." Al-Fayoumi was at a loss again, perplexed... uncertain what, exactly, the detective was implying or getting at. "I mean, I assume the 'skin has been thoroughly tested—properly debugged."
"Why?"
Al-Fayoumi shifted in his chair. "Because if there were no safe clinical trials, the 'skin would never be approved for sale."
"Legal sale," van Dijk said.
Al-Fayoumi blinked rapidly several times. "Are you saying it might be marketed illegally?"
"You tell me."
"I have no idea."
Van Dijk smiled. "Maybe you should check with the black-market rip artist you contacted."
A hot flash prickled through al-Fayoumi, leaving behind damp palms and sticky armpits. "Research only," he heard himself mumble.
"Of course. Was that what the young woman was?"
"What woman?"
"The one I found dead in her apartment last night. Same apartment building as Lisette. Same floor. Same hall."
Al-Fayoumi stared, unable to speak. His face felt frozen in horror, or rather some parody of horror the detective would surely misinterpret as a lack of sincerity. And yet he had nothing real of his own to offer up in place of this pseudoexpression. This falsity—imprinted on him, unconsciously, from some philmscape he'd seen—was all he had. He had become it—or it had become him.
Instead, the detective stood up and went over to the terrariums. The girl flinched but didn't leave. Together, they watched the clouds of flies.
"I need to know what you saw," the detective said after a while, without looking at the girl. "Last night. I need to know what happened." , Lisette tucked her chin to her chest.
"You saw or heard something, didn't you?"
The girl refused to look at him. She could have walked away but something kept her there.
"No one's going to hurt you," the detective said. He settled into a crouch and tapped the glass. "In fact, if you tell me everything you saw, it'll make it a lot easier for me to protect you because I'll know who to look for. If you don't tell me, I won't know."
The girl's stare seemed to harden into a glare.
"She was like a big sister, wasn't she?" van Dijk said. "Easier to talk to than your mom, because she listened."
The girl dug her chin farther into her chest.
"It's hard to lose someone like that," the detective said. He watched the flies. "Someone you admire. You want to be like them when you grow up, and then suddenly they're gone. It feels like they left and you don't know who you are anymore. You don't know who you should be, or how you should act. It's like you lost a part of yourself and you can't get it back. For a while, you even tell yourself you don't want that part of who you are back. You tell yourself that you're better off without it. You don't need it, or the person, anymore. You never did. The thing is, it's not true. That's the part of yourself that you need to try and get back the most. Because without it, something will always be missing from your life. And the only way you get that part of who you are back is to remember the person who's gone. Once you let them back into yourself, they bring the missing part of you with them. It's kind of like they borrowed it for a while, 'cause they needed some part of you inside of them, the same way you needed them. You feel what I'm saying?"
The girl sniffed. "She told me... She said if I told anybody about the warewolf, he'd come back. If I didn't say anything, there wouldn't be any reason for him to come back and hurt her or me."
"Who?"
"Apphia."
The detective turned to Lisette. "That was good advice. It got you this far. But it won't get you any farther, 'cause there's no place else to go. That's why the damselfly brought you here."
"I heard them arguing," she said.
"Apphia and someone else?"
The girl nodded but continued to stare at the flies. "The warewolf. They were in her apartment talking loud. So loud it woke me up."
"Fighting, you mean."
"Uh-huh."
"What were they arguing about?"
"Apphia said she was going to go to the police."
"Did she say why?"
"I'm not sure." The girl wrinkled her nose, creasing the nanoFX paint. "I think the warewolf was trying to get her to do something, and Apphia said no. She didn't care about the r
esults."
"The man didn't like that?"
"No. He got mad. He said he was going to tell her father where she was living, and what she was doing."
"Can you tell me what she was doing? Did she say?"
"She told me she was a model. She said people paid her to screen new philm. I wanted to do that, too. But she said I couldn't, I wasn't old enough yet. Besides, it was dangerous, even for her."
"Had the warewolf been there before, or was this the first time?"
"The second time. The first time was a few weeks ago. That was when Apphia said not to tell anyone about him."
"Okay. What happened next?"
"The warewolf left."
"Is that when you went to see her?"
The girl mashed her mouth, crumpling the green dragon scales around her green lips. "No, I was afraid he would come back. I didn't want him to see me. So I waited."
"How long?"
The girl didn't respond. Al-Fayoumi moved to her side. It was time to put a stop to this. She had pulled into herself, or more likely away from van Dijk. Tears formed in her eyes.
"Just a couple more questions," the detective said, his voice gentle. "That's all, I promise."
Al-Fayoumi glared at him, but Lisette wiped her nose and nodded.
"This warewolf. Did you see him?"
Lisette straightened under al-Fayoumi's hand and shook her head. "I just heard him. I didn't look."
"That's all right." The detective paused. "Do you know if anyone else saw him?"
Another shake of the head.
"Is that it?" al-Fayoumi demanded. Enough was enough.
The detective sighed and unfolded from his crouch.
"Uri," the girl whispered.
Van Dijk dropped back into his crouch, elbows propped on his knees and hands loose.
"That's what Apphia called him," Lisette said. "It got him all pissed 'cause she knew who he really was and no one else was supposed to know he was there."
The detective glanced quickly at al-Fayoumi, then back to the girl. "You're positive?"
Lisette's nod was firm, her jaw set. "She said it was spelled just like urine, but without the N-E on the end."
The detective smiled. Al-Fayoumi blinked, at a loss. "I don't get it."
Lisette rolled her eyes. "Because he's such a dick-head."