Omphalos

by Gerald Lynch

  “The back is just a black blur,” she said. “And then the occupants of the last rows are completely confused in the rush to exit.”

  “You do know this vid. Freeze.”

  She was coolly self-possessed. “There.” She half-turned her head. “Kevin, MYCROFT has given us a complete profile of every permanent and temporary employee who has ever so much as thought about DeLint, cross-referenced ad infinitum. Just what are we looking for here?”

  “Can you launch the old-style grid, the ANANSI? Or do I need to take over?”

  “The ANANSI? Sure, but why would we? Like I said, I’ve already analyzed this one with MYCROFT’s full array of tools, there’s nothing!”

  “Stop stalling, launch.”

  “Nobody’s stalling,” she again mumbled, turning forward, her fingers still. “I’m just saying you have the latest version of MYCROFT PIXELRITE, integrity no problem, way less distortion. Then you’ve got REIMAGINE for the reconstruction.”

  “Integrity no problem, I like that. But I know the old ANANSI. There’s less chance anyone would think to password-protect it from certain scan-and-reconstruct tasks.”

  “What are you talking about, Kevin?”

  “Bring it up, now, or leave.” He was breathing hard.

  She stiffly addressed the monitor, but her fingers were soon flying.

  She had to close repeated prompts asking if she was sure of this and that, so it took a while for the ANANSI to launch. Kevin watched her hands closely. When the older grid appeared, it sectioned the blurred back of the Omphalos auditorium in white webbing.

  “Kevin, there is nothing there. Especially with this dinosaur tool that no cop in his right mind would still use. A ten-dollar DIGIVID would give better resolution.”

  “Centre five left.”

  Ertelle smirked and had to touch the left-arrow virtual key five times. “Okay, I’d guess there’s a couple of lonely losers still sitting in the very back row. Or their shadows are.”

  “Move in seven. Good. Centre five left again — no, left. Thank you. Two more in. Define. Good.”

  She said singsong through her teeth: “I’m telling you, we’ll get nothing. Besides, it’s the least important people who get stuck back —”

  “Three right, in another five. Define. In three and hyper-define. Yes: we can wait and reconstruct. You’re very good when you want to be, Sergeant Ertelle, and probably better when you don’t want to be.”

  “Thanks…I think. But if we keep this up, Kevin, we’re soon going to be looking at two fat black pixels. And this ANANSI’s version of RECONSTRUCT will give us dick.”

  “Dick? Well, I hope not a bad dick. But who knows, eh, Ertelle?” Nothing. “Now, forget ANANSI’s RECONSTRUCT. Bring up mighty MYCROFT’s REIMAGINE program.”

  “You can’t do that. They’re not compatible. Okay-okay…There, see, no can do.”

  Kevin’s brow lowered. “Don’t sound so happy about it.”

  Ertelle dropped her hands onto her lap. “Did you ever hear the joke, what do you call a female detective?… A Dickless Tracy.” She laughed like a laugh track, and alone. “Get it? Dick Tracy was an old cartoon detect —”

  “Copy what’s on the monitor.”

  “I don’t think —”

  He flared: “Copy it or go find me someone who can follow orders!”

  “Orders…partner?” Her hands steepled, pinkies crossed then flattened. “Okay, done.”

  “Do we have a reliably secure flash stick handy?”

  “In my purse, I use it only for personal business.”

  “Get it.”

  She stood to attention and walked stiffly to the cot. She fiddled too long with her faux-alligator purse. She returned mock marching, with a pinched mouth and head slightly, bemusedly shaking no. The act could not disguise her nervousness. She pinched a pink flash drive at her chin, and her eyes showed nothing now.

  (Mammy had owned a faux-alligator purse for a long time, and pink was her favourite colour too. He’d never had time for Kelly, when little or big. He’d been saving the world and his own soul. As now.)

  He murdered his feelings. “Good. Now, copy the image onto the stick. Close ANANSI.” He’d lowered his voice. “Okay. Re-boot… Launch REIMAGINE. Good. Now paste what you copied to the flash stick into REIMAGINE.”

  Her fingers knitted the air. “Still won’t go, neither front door nor back. Of course. MYCROFT’s security protocols would refuse to copy Bill Gates’s obituary, let alone some porous antique ANANSI doc. MYCROFT determines what becomes part of self-sufficient MYCROFT. It’s only been that way for the last two versions, Kevin.”

  With his left hand covering the top of his small white head, Kevin walked to the other end of the room. For the first time he made his bed. He went to the windows and, up on his toes, leaned on his fingertips against the glass, moved his head close. He breathed the briefest fog and cooled his forehead on the damp PANOGLAZ. The condensation cleared. He rocked back on his heels. With thumbs hooked under his cheekbones and all eight fingers rubbing slow circles on his temples, he stood there oblivious, his eyes closed and his face like constipation.

  Abruptly he returned to the business end of the room, where Brigid Ertelle had been following his performance as someone might watch a caged ape take brush and pan and sweep up his own mess.

  “Remove the external device, your flash stick, then revert to the earliest version of MYCROFT.”

  “I’m afraid MYCROFT won’t let us do that either.”

  Oh yes, she’d sounded way too pleased. “Code it Priority Test.”

  “We’d need a highest-clearance access code for that. Looks like another dead —”

  “B-e-l-c-y-n-1-7-1.”

  Her fingers were a cat’s cradle of flesh. She closed with a double hitch of her head.

  “I would have thought only Frank could code a command Priority One. What the…hey, it worked.”

  “You don’t sound overjoyed, Sergeant… Now, shut down again. Good. Let’s wait for every electron to cool its jets… Okay, now insert your external and boot up, three-timing the old Control-Alt-Delete function. When you’re asked which version of MYCROFT, which you will be this time with the foreign device booting up and the repeating commands, you first check Priority One, enter my code again, and select the earliest available version. Then we’ll see about compatibility protocols.”

  She looked up at him like a child caught. “Where did you learn all this?”

  He met those widened glassy-grey eyes. “More to the point, Sergeant Ertelle, where didn’t you? Or did you?”

  Blankly, Ertelle turned to the monitor.

  “Good. Now open the auditorium image and paste it into the old REIMAGINE.”

  “You know a lot more than just the old ANANSI, don’t you, Detective Inspector?” Her voice was flat.

  Detective Inspector, like a slap. “As do you, Sergeant Ertelle.”

  “I do?”

  “Pay attention to your work, and note this: I may not know everything but I’m watching your hands, and I do have a reliable knowledge of ESPERHAND. Now: highest definition on those few pixels — do not thumb-tip the other forefinger’s knuckle, Ertelle! If you do anything like that again, I won’t be responsible for what I do.”

  “It was a slip, Detective Beldon; this is as tricky as earning my Junior Mounties nautical knots badge.”

  “Reconstruct.”

  MYCROFT chortled in the way of working computers everywhere, if much more than the most recent version did. A message appeared:

  UNABLE TO RECONSTRUCT. HISTORICAL PROXIMITY MATCH?

  “Sign no. Go to tools and options. Okay, now compatibility preferences. Good. Take that fucking check off the pre-set parameters, it shouldn’t even be there. And excuse my language.”

  “Such an old-fashioned gentleman. But even the earliest MYCR
OFT won’t allow —”

  “Sign whatever would equal holding down an old shift and F8 in succession, and keep doing it methodically.”

  “It worked! Really, Kevin, I am impressed.”

  “Check global for preferences and specify Here Comes Everybody.”

  “That’ll slow things down — okay, okay. But where on earth did you learn all this? Frank said…”

  “Did he now? Well fancy that… Okay, what’s it matter: I played with MYCROFT last night when I woke to take a leak and couldn’t get back to sleep. It’s a game I made up with my kids way back when. By thinking like my son Bill at age twelve, so by not thinking, using a combination of the virtual keyboard and my clumsy ESPERHAND, I got Mr. MYCROFT here to REIMAGINE Bill’s face from only a few more pixels than this. And he was almost as far from the stage as this at Kelly’s graduation from law school, sitting by himself; we’d not even known he was there…very sad. I just had to remember the steps of the game. Remember accurately and imagine, just as a human should.”

  They waited. He wondered what it would be like to end his own life. Say, with a bullet to his heart.

  She said, “You found your way in the dark?”

  “What?” It was like a living thing had fluttered briefly in his tomb of a chest. “Uh, thanks for looking after my shoe —”

  “But that’s Fra…Chief Thu. Of course he’d be in the earliest Scanbank, but what’s he doing at — How can MYCROFT recognize Frank at Omphalos way back then? Hey, your bad-cop dick joke! How’d you know?”

  He inhaled sharply through his nose. “I didn’t. But earlier when I saw you and Frank in the hall together…I have pretty good recall of every vid I’ve looked at, and when I returned I noticed disturbance in the viewed pile of coins, and then that this particular one had been moved. Added to that: why was Frank so upset at McNicol’s death? Or just call it a hunch, it doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “Me and Frank in the hall? Should I be taking notes?” She laughed awkwardly.

  “Please, Sergeant Ertelle. Over these past two days we’ve both had to wade through enough DeLint bullshit for two lifetimes’ running in Pamplona.”

  “Wha —”

  “Why was Frank at Omphalos seven years ago?”

  “I’m lost.” She sounded like she meant it, she was that good. “Maybe Frank was DeLint’s off-duty rent-a-cop?”

  “No one from outside was ever admitted to Omphalos functions. I tried to get in for this very event. The most that non-Omphalos family members got were highly edited vids.”

  “Is it that relevant, Kevin? Frank’s there, so what? Wasn’t he — isn’t he an old family friend? Maybe DeLint just made an exception with Frank for Kelly, maybe even to make up for refusing you?… And that way got his free rent-a-cop? Not a bad cop.”

  Kevin paid her no mind. His face scrunched as at a bad smell. “Frank helped by DeLint too? But why? His sudden rise? The racism: how did he overcome it?… Frank, a bad cop? Frank connected to DeLint…the Widower?”

  “The Widower? Hello-o? What’s that old case got to do with Eugene DeLint’s murder and Fr —”

  “Cut the crap, Detective Ertelle. The immediate questions are: who reset the parameters on even the earliest MYCROFT preferences? Why would someone try to hide this coin?”

  She was formally cool. “When we set up here, MYCROFT became part of the super-secure Omphalos network. That’s why the AI boys, and girl, were stymied. If it was important to someone, any competent hacker at a highest-clearance Omphalos terminal could have rigged a worm and inserted the changed parameters as an automatic default setting. I could teach even you to do that in five minutes. So, McNicol still, or the mysterious Anna Kynder.”

  “Good explanation, all of a sudden, Sergeant Ertelle. You can go home now.”

  “What!”

  “Before you leave, though, would you tell me: what else did Frank order you to do? Or not to do? That information would be a big help to me. It could well save some lives, perhaps punish a murderer, maybe even lead to the arrest of a serial killer.”

  “Kevin, I cannot believe what you’re —”

  “It was nice almost getting to know you better, Sergeant Ertelle. Goodnight, or morning, or whatever the hell it is out there.”

  “But —”

  “Goodbye. Don’t sign to MYCROFT again, please, or I’ll have to hurt you, and I don’t want to do that, old-fashioned gentleman that I am. Make fists of your hands, stand away… Thank you.”

  She faced him. She must be close to six foot. There couldn’t be an ounce of fat on her, yet her face was fuller than Kelly’s. Her slightly dilated grey eyes gave nothing away. Then she ground her molars once and the jaw jutted sideways like something alive trapped in her mouth. She took a step towards him, halted. He moved aside. She proceeded towards the door. Halfway there she stopped and stood staring at her feet for the longest time. She turned.

  “Chief Thu said it was for your own good. He said he cared only about you, and that if I cared about you I should keep you from making any connection between DeLint’s murder and that old Widower case, because there isn’t any…Chief Thu said.”

  Perhaps he imagined the slightest tremble in the strong chin.

  “I know nothing else, just moving vid coins around… Thanks for allowing me to assist, Detective Beldon, though obviously I’ve done nothing but hamper. Regardless, it has been an honour, the high point of my career to date. Good luck with the case. And, uh, take care of yourself, especially now. I don’t like what I’ve seen taking shape, I’m afraid.”

  She waited. He waited. She turned away.

  How many times had he made this mistake? Make it again. Let her go. One, two —

  But she had to stop and turn again at the door. “Before I go, will you tell me one thing, please? When you made your cot and leaned against the window, then came back with all those fancy moves on the computer, was that factioning?”

  Dear God, she was about to cry. And she would always only be about to. Crying he could handle, but not this, not a woman like this on the threshold of crying and what that said about her not wanting to be a woman crying, not that in a woman like Brigid Ertelle.

  Invite her.

  “Detective Ertelle, I really don’t know what factioning is supposed to be. It’s a silly word made up by an A1 bullshit artist impersonating a criminology professor. I was thinking desperately in a snowstorm back there. I was praying. Whatever. As I said, the fancy computer moves started with a game I’d almost forgotten, a game called Something from Nothing I used to play with Kelly and Bill in the old ANANSI program: a few pixels at a time till we had an animal, then characters who’d get the kids’ names, then a story involving them all. They could read by the time they were three. If that’s factioning, then so be it.”

  “No, I think that’s called love.”

  That was not a sniffle.

  “My late wife said that whatever success I’ve had was because I am that rare thing: a man with strong intuitions who trusts them. She may have been joking. But she insisted that smart women will eventually make the best detectives, you’ll be pleased to hear.”

  Oh, please, do not start smiling as you fight crying, like a rainbow against storm clouds. Women who do that must emit some concentrate of estrogen directly at my gut! Kelly as a girl had a genius for it.

  “I knew there had to be a great woman be — alongside the great detective.”

  She turned back to the door, was reaching for the handle. She was too tall, actually, legs like poles from too short a torso, legs as bad as his own albino batons. But that woman’s widening at the pelvis, that muscled rump, real female…and those lovely eyes turning away forever, those grey eyes that, in leaving, promised he would never have a partner again. What was wrong with him? How does one human ever shoot another in the back?

  “You can stay, Sergeant Ertelle.” She
held the doorknob. “If you are willing to disobey your chief’s orders and work with me. That is: risk your whole career just when it’s getting interesting.”

  She stood stock-still and hung her head, taking stock. What he said was true. She turned and looked directly at him. Across fifty feet of blue tile they could as well be face-to-face.

  “I will.”

  He didn’t wonder, already he trusted her completely. “But do I want a partner who disobeys her chief’s orders?”

  She smiled, and he felt something like one of his hunches, as if a personal helical galaxy went twirling through him gut-to-crown and out. They moved towards each other at the same sure pace, eyes fixed, left hands coming up.

  “Partner,” she continued, smiling, saying it as only cops can, the way old friends say friend.

  He took her hand, waxy cool, skeletal, strong. “Partner.”

  They shook once, disengaged easily. They moved back to the worktable.

  But she was one cool customer with a hand like that after such intensity, was Sergeant Brigid Ertelle. In a coffin — that’s where he’d touched such a hand. His mother’s, Mammy’s. That’s factioning for you, Sergeant: there’d be more death in this before they’re done. He knew that now. And this: he would take a bullet for Ertelle.

  She smiled tight-lipped. “Partners with the great Detective Beldon, eh? Shouldn’t you have been taking your turn going out for decaf and bagels? I take mine black, in case you’ve not noticed; cream cheese and chives, the real stuff, lots of it.”

  And this: make sure she never takes one for you.

  “Only if you take up smoking, Junior. Let’s get back to work.”

  “Can we take a short break first, please, Kevin? I just need to lie down for five minutes.” She palmed a yawn. “Geez, this came on suddenly. Look at the time. Where is Frank?”

  Of course: she’d been through a wringer, yet showed little. “Fine, I need a break too. It’s late, Brigid, why don’t you go home.”