Dark Mind Rising

by Julia Keller

  Violet stood in the center of the aisle. She was trying to put herself in Amelia’s mind, in hopes of understanding what might have happened. I’m sixteen years old, it’s early in the morning, I’m on my way to school, and I’m feeling …

  “Identification. Identification. Identification.”

  The tinny, annoying voice crashed into Violet’s reverie. She looked down. It was a ConRob, a shorthand term for construction robot. The bullet-shaped ConRobs were built for strength and efficiency, not friendliness or companionship, and this one had an especially nasty streak. Even though he only came up to her waist, she was a little alarmed by his telescoping pincer; he tried to grab her wrist as he repeated his stupid little mantra: “Identification. Identification. Identification.”

  “She’s okay,” Kendall said. He had trotted over from the other end of the car.

  “Authorized personnel only,” the ConRob snapped.

  “She’s authorized,” Kendall said. “By me.” He pulled out his police ID. The ConRob scanned it with a blue light, line by line, and then backed off.

  “Jerk,” Violet muttered at him as he wheeled away.

  She was sure he was a guy, even though ConRobs didn’t have assigned genders. She also knew they didn’t have personalities, and yet she would have sworn he’d sneered at her—and had been a little snarky to boot.

  Kendall laughed. “You know what, Violet? I don’t think you can hurt a robot’s feelings by calling him names.”

  “Worth a try.”

  So this was the second time she made the mistake. Because even if she hadn’t told him when he arrived, this was her next-best opportunity. The mood was temporarily lightened by her attempt to bad-mouth a robot. Kendall was taking a break from his careful analysis of the car.

  It was the perfect spot.

  But she didn’t do it. She didn’t fill him in about Rez’s suspicions.

  Why bother him with something that might turn out to be nothing? I’ll tell him later.

  If she had told him then, everything might have turned out differently.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later, Kendall was still crawling around the floor of the car. Violet was getting antsy. His forensics team had already examined the place. So what was the holdup?

  “Is the autopsy ready yet?” Violet asked.

  “I told my assistants to move it to the front of the line.” He stood up, dusting off his hands. “The moment it’s done, you’ll have it—along with whatever my team found on their initial sweep in here.”

  Violet nodded. “Appreciate it. To tell you the truth, though, I’m not really sure how much an autopsy’s going to help. Obviously, the fall is what killed her. It’s the why—not the how—that I need to figure out.”

  They stood side by side in the wide aisle of the tram car. Instead of channeling Amelia, Violet realized that now she was sort of channeling the car itself. The car was totally out of its element here, marooned and useless. No longer doing its job. No longer part of a smooth line of identical cars, busy and important, racing along a track with cool speed.

  Violet could almost sense the car’s loneliness at being isolated here in a distant corner of TAP, cut off from its destiny.

  Ribbed steel ran the length of the floor. Three seats were grouped on each side of the aisle. The seat in which Amelia had been riding before she fled from the car was covered in a plastic wrap. On the wrap was a label: DO NOT REMOVE BY ORDER OF THE NEW EARTH SECURITY SERVICE.

  “You never know,” Kendall said. “I’ve seen cases turn on the smallest things. You just have to be patient and methodical.”

  Two words that happened to define him perfectly, Violet thought. Running the police forensics lab was the ideal job for him. He was a crusader-scientist with a brilliant mind as well as a deep hunger for justice. That hunger had been honed and sharpened by the years he’d spent as a street cop—and before that, as a kid on the wild, lawless streets of Old Earth. He knew how important justice was because he’d seen what could happen to the world without it.

  He didn’t usually handle cases in the field anymore. But he was doing this for her, Violet knew.

  “How about the toxicology report?” she asked. “Any hair and fiber evidence found in the—”

  “Under way. I’ll keep you posted.”

  “Right. Okay.” Her shoulders rose and fell with a long, slow breath. “This is my first job in forever, so I’m eager to get started.”

  “Right,” Kendall said. “But before we talk any more about the case, tell me how you’re doing. You didn’t answer my console call yesterday. Or the day before.”

  Because I knew you were going to ask me how I’m doing. And I don’t want to talk about anything … personal.

  “Well,” Violet answered, “the thing is, I’ve been busy. With work.”

  “I thought you said this was your first job in a long time.”

  Oops.

  “Well, yeah. Yeah, it is. I’ve been busy with … other stuff.” She tried to recover her footing in the conversation. “How about you?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You look good. I mean it. Your uniform … it almost looks ironed.” Violet leaned back, as if the concept was so totally amazing that she needed a little distance to fully appreciate it.

  “Yeah,” he said. He grinned. “My clothes are getting a little more attention these days. But not by me.”

  “So the Ironing Fairy stopped by your place? Any chance she’d make a detour over to mine one of these days?”

  He shook his head. “I hired somebody to help out. Frees me up to spend more time at work.”

  “Just what you need,” Violet murmured, her sarcasm friendly but pointed. “More time at work.” Kendall was a notorious workaholic.

  He ignored the dig. “I think you know her—Sara Verity. Used to work at the Old Earth transport site until she lost her job. She’s great.”

  Violet nodded. She liked Sara, too, and she’d heard about her misfortune. Layoffs in the Old Earth transport division had escalated sharply over the past several years, ever since Ogden Crowley had opened the borders of New Earth. Now that anybody from Old Earth who wanted to come had already been allowed in, there was no need for a large staff at the checkpoints. No need for people to review the credentials of legions of travelers or operate the pods or keep the tracks in good repair.

  Violet felt a surge of sympathy for Sara. She knew how much her friend had loved her work in transport logistics. Ironing tunics and sweeping floors didn’t sound like much of a substitute. But then again, it was surely temporary. Sara would find something better soon. And everybody had to deal with change.

  Especially me and Kendall.

  Violet realized he was looking at her … in that way.

  For a long time, she’d wanted so much more than a friendship with him—but that was back when Kendall was passing as his brother, Danny.

  She had forgiven him. She knew that he and Danny had had a good reason for switching their identities when they emigrated to New Earth from Old Earth: Danny—the real Danny—wanted to protect his brother. Kendall was a dazzlingly bright scientist who had invented the Intercept.

  Over the next three years, after they’d destroyed the Intercept together, Violet and Kendall had hung out. She needed to see if she was still in love with him. She’d recently decided that the answer was probably … no.

  He was the same person she had been in love with before, when she knew him by another name—but somehow he wasn’t the same person, too.

  Sometimes, she thought, everything she was doing these days—running around like crazy as she tried to make a go of her detective agency, dancing all night until she was so tired the next day that she could barely stand up—was just a way to distract herself so she wouldn’t think about what had gone wrong with her and Danny.

  With her and Kendall, that is. Kendall, not Danny. Because Danny—the real Danny—was long dead. And she couldn’t even mourn him, because she’d never really
known him.

  “Do you want to grab a coffee when we’re done here?” Kendall said.

  “Wish I could. But I’ve got a ton of work to do.”

  “Okay.” His face revealed nothing. “Got it.”

  A long, fraught moment went by.

  * * *

  “So,” Kendall said. He was ready to return to the case. “I’ll send the toxicology report to your console, but the bottom line is—Amelia Bainbridge was clean. No drugs, legal or otherwise. No medications. No antidepressants. And no evidence of any sort of neurological condition. No brain tumor, no seizure disorder, no concussion, no infection. She was sound in mind and body when she took her own life.”

  “Obviously not.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because she took her own life,” Violet said, repeating his words back to him. “Nobody kills herself for no reason.”

  Kendall snapped on a pair of gloves. He stepped toward the row of seats that included Amelia’s.

  “Okay,” he said, crouching down in the aisle on one knee, facing the seats. “So you’ve added psychiatry to your many fields of expertise.”

  The sarcasm stung. “Just my opinion,” she clarified. “I’m only saying that it’s unusual. Amelia had everything to live for. Jumping off that track doesn’t make any sense.”

  Kendall unwrapped the plastic from the seat. He went over the surface with a sweeping hand. The seats were covered with black fabric and bolted securely to the floor. “So the eyewitness accounts are all in agreement. Amelia’s sitting right here.” He tapped the back of the seat. Then he stood up and pointed toward the open door of the car. “The car stops at Hawking, and the doors open up and off she goes—running as fast as she can, almost knocking down a woman who’s boarding the tram. Amelia can’t wait to get to the edge. She’s frantic. But why?”

  “Did she get a call on her console? Some kind of bad news, maybe?”

  “No call. That’s what the witnesses said and her console record confirms it.” Kendall walked slowly up and down the aisle, checking each row of seats. “It all looks normal. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

  “Except for the fact that a girl with her whole life ahead of her suddenly rushes out the door and jumps to her death.” Violet shook her head in exasperation. “And nobody saw or heard anything that was unusual.”

  “One person did.”

  “Who?”

  “The woman Amelia bumped as she ran out. I interviewed her on my way over here.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  “She said Amelia was murmuring something about New Earth being awful. And about hearing a scream.”

  “A scream? None of the other passengers said anything about hearing a scream.”

  “No. They didn’t. But the woman wasn’t certain about Amelia’s exact words. She was too shaken up by what happened just after that, she said, to be sure of anything.”

  Violet thought about the word scream. It was such a brutal word. There was nothing soft about a scream. Had Amelia meant that she wanted to scream? Or that she had heard a scream? Or—

  “Hey.”

  A third voice.

  Violet looked up.

  Somebody else had entered the car.

  6

  Rez’s Request

  The entryway was thickly webbed with shadows, and thus Violet couldn’t make out the visitor’s identity right away. All she knew for certain was that it wasn’t the pesky ConRob, back to torment her once again. The new arrival was too tall.

  “Oh—hi, Sara!” Violet said, the moment she realized who it was.

  Kendall’s greeting was less friendly. “Sara, what are you—”

  “I came by to apply for a job at TAP and saw you guys in here,” Sara said. She looked quickly around the car, up and down, back and forth. The motion made her copious reddish curls bounce in a nervous cluster, like a bunch of grapes somebody was trying to shake dry. Violet had not seen her in several months—honestly, she couldn’t remember how long it had been—but Sara looked basically the same. She had a round, pretty face, with a paintbrush-swipe of freckles across her nose and cheeks. “I’m not going to be a housekeeper forever, right? And this is my area of expertise—transport. I just finished the application paperwork.”

  “That’s great, Sara,” Kendall said, “but this is a restricted area. I’m conducting an official police investigation.”

  “Investigation?” Sara said. “Into what?”

  Kendall and Violet exchanged glances.

  “Come on, you guys,” Sara said. “You can trust me.”

  In a quiet voice, Kendall said, “The girl who committed suicide this morning. Amelia Bainbridge.”

  Sara closed her eyes and shook her head. “Oh, right. That was awful. Just awful. I saw it on my console feed.” She opened her eyes. “But if it’s a suicide, what’s to investigate?”

  “Just wrapping up loose ends,” Violet said.

  Sara gave Violet a sharp look. “You’re not a cop.”

  “I was hired by the victim’s mother to investigate her death.”

  Sara smacked her forehead with the heel of her hand. “Oh, geez. Of course. Sorry if I sounded rude. I just didn’t expect to see you here. And I’m pretty nosy.”

  “Me too,” Violet said with a smile. “But in my case, I get paid for it. Being nosy is sort of a detective’s job, right?”

  The smile wasn’t forced or fake. Two years ago, Sara had risked her job in transport systems—the one she now missed so much—on Violet’s behalf. That was a gesture Violet would never forget.

  “I hope you get a position here,” Violet added. She wished she could hire Sara herself. But at this point, she still had no idea how she was going to pay Jonetta’s salary, much less add somebody else to the payroll.

  “Thanks,” Sara said. “But it’s a long shot. I don’t really have the right experience. I’ve never supervised robots. I worked on transport to Old Earth, not transport here on New Earth.” She shrugged again. She seemed to be cheering herself up. “But no matter what, I’ll keep looking.”

  Violet gave her a thumbs-up. “Let’s hang out sometime. Okay?”

  “Great. I can tell you funny stories about this guy and how many of his socks straight up go missing every week.” She pointed at Kendall, who threw up his hands as if he’d been caught doing something naughty.

  Sara moved toward the exit. She paused. Her face was somber again.

  “Found any clues yet?” she asked. “Anything to tell you why Amelia Bainbridge would want to end her life? She seemed like a nice girl.”

  “Nothing yet,” Violet replied. “Did you know her?”

  “No. Only what I read in the news stories. But I think I sort of get her. Life can be hard sometimes, you know? For everybody. Even on New Earth—which is supposed to be almost perfect.” Sara waved and ducked out through the doorway.

  * * *

  “It’s exactly what the investigating officers said in their preliminary assessment,” Kendall declared. He had finally finished his examination of the car and now stood in the middle of the aisle. He gave a last appraising glance fore and aft. “Amelia Bainbridge died of injuries sustained when she plunged from a tram track at 9:02 A.M. today. No foul play involved.”

  “But why did she want to die?”

  He paused. “Not all questions have answers, Violet. Anybody who works in science will tell you that.”

  She shook her head. “No way. There’s always an answer. But sometimes it’s not the answer you want to hear.” She sighed. “It’s going to be really tough to go back and tell Amelia’s mother that her daughter died because she didn’t want to live anymore. If that’s what I find out, I mean. After my own investigation.”

  “You owe her the truth.”

  “I know.” Violet could tell that he was trying to wrap things up so he could get back to the station. “Listen, Kendall. I need a favor.”

  “Aren’t we already in the middle of me doing you a favor?”

&nbs
p; Violet ignored that. “Rez called me today.” She watched Kendall’s face to see if she could spot any reaction. The tension between Kendall and Rez was subtle, but it was there.

  “How’s he doing?” Kendall’s expression didn’t change.

  “As well as can be expected. I mean, it’s Old Earth, you know? He’s enduring it.”

  “His probation must be up soon.”

  “Year and a half.”

  “Wow,” Kendall said, his voice somber. “Sounds pretty far away.”

  “Exactly. The thing is, he needs clearance to do any quantum computing.”

  “Given the nature of his crime, I guess I’m not surprised.”

  “Yeah,” Violet said, “but he’s paid a high price for that. And now he has some good ideas for Old Earth. He’s already started on them. That’s why he wants to do quantum computing.”

  “Ideas?”

  She paused. “An amusement park.”

  “A what?” Kendall made a sound that was halfway to being a snicker.

  “An amusement park. Remember the Culture Portal in history class? Does the word Disneyland ring a bell? Or Six Flags?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, they do. You forget, I was raised on Old Earth. I’ve seen the remnants of a bunch of Disneylands—a lot of dangling wires and empty lagoons and crushed pop cans and twisted coaster tracks that break off and go nowhere. And by the way, even if I had gone to school on New Earth, I would’ve automatically skipped anything called a Culture Portal.” He scrunched up his face. “I would’ve subbed it out for molecular biology.”

  “It was a requirement.”

  “Then I would’ve quit school. On the spot.”

  Violet laughed. “Yeah, you’re such a dropout. Anyway, that’s what Rez wants to create down there. Some really cool rides. Things like coasters and Ferris wheels and haunted houses. Real retro stuff.”

  “Why?”

  “He thinks that maybe it could turn a dead place into a living one. So people will want to go back down there again and again. They’ll have a stake in keeping Old Earth fixed up and halfway decent. It’ll become a vacation spot.”