by Gerald Lynch
“Only if you promise to go too. …I thought so. Just give me ten minutes on the cot.”
“I’ve been sitting on my ass since the visit to McNicol’s, so I’ll rest standing up here, like the old war whore I am.”
Ertelle was so overwhelmed by sudden weariness she could barely hold the smile.
Chapter 17
For the first time Brigid lay on her cot, with fingers knitted like a restraint strap on her forehead. She stared at the false ceiling with its perforated tiles cradled in plastic grid work. The real ceiling of bellium steel would be a foot higher. It was the way of the world, especially the criminal world, something hidden, impenetrable, and real behind a friendly false front: money-laundering, conspiracy, even the way Kevin Beldon had been solving crimes all these years and crediting Frank Thu. A hidden partner. You’re right, Frank: Beldon really is OCD on that old Widower case, his one unsolved. Men, everything’s a pissing contest with them. No need to worry…Frank.
She turned onto her left side, facing the windows, drew up her knees. Viewed from above, she was a woman curled into a reversed question mark, which was about the size of it, as she was second-guessing herself to distraction. But distraction only, she certainly didn’t expect to sleep. She needed this private time to think.
Overdone security lighting came up outside as darkness fell. The jaundiced glow permitted shoot-to-kill on vagrants inside the Omphalos perimeter. No one had ever been killed, and DeLint had regularly complained to security about that, their failure to set an example. Lying beside her again, DeLint asks her to kill somebody in charity, someone she loves. No, it’s Frank trying to persuade her. Then it’s that Dr. Ewan Randome, but she’s never even heard him talk! He’s a big bald baby in her arms, his head like a breast, nuzzling for her nipple, pleading in her own voice, and she knows herself aroused. Now, Mike!… But it’s herself she must choose to kill: her dream career, her planned future. Or Kevin, her old child.
After a time her eyes popped open, and she was flat on her back again. She made a pained face as her right hand reached under to feel a spot at the base of her spine. The Princess and the Pea. She lifted her head: at the other end of the room shadowy light from the three monitors, each one showing the classic Starfield Screen Saver that he’d insisted on. The long dark figure of Kevin Beldon’s back, the paler knob of his head.
She dropped her head back, knowing she must rise slowly from troubled sleep or she’d be irrationally angry, trying to knit up her waking wits. She thought she was remembering another dream of her lousy adolescence. She’s aware her rational mind’s unravelling again, that she’s falling asleep, then she isn’t aware.
Her old best friend Paula tells her a secret about her new best friend Valerie, and now a promise must be broken, an old friend betrayed, a new friend saved, and she doesn’t have the right clothes, they never fit her beanpole body. She thought they could all be best friends. The decision will determine what kind of woman she grows up to be. She can’t believe the choice was already made so long ago, before she was ever even herself, or really believed anything real, such as Mike, and children, she’s so tall already, and still growing…
She woke again. And again she touched the base of her spine, set a resolved mouth. She swung her feet to the floor and heaved to. Kneeling by the cot like a girl praying, she searched under the thin mattress in that blind way that was like undergoing a procedure. She went and stood beside Kevin.
He seemed mesmerized by the rushing star fields. For how long had he been standing like this? She reached and gestured at the virtual keyboard, and Frank’s moon face appeared on all three monitors just as it had been when she went to nap. She checked the clock — three hours ago!
“Kevin, I have another coin.”
He showed nothing, as though he’d been alert and waiting all that time. “I know, or I guessed as much. And I’ll bet it’s stamped August eighteenth, last year, the day our friend Judge Mender denied my search warrant on Omphalos. I have an idea what’s on it, too, though you don’t, even if you’ve viewed it.”
She fell back a bit — factioning was no act. “It is!… Judge Mender? Then this really is that Widower case!”
He rested his forehead in his left hand, where thumb and fingers rubbed less violently at his temples. He stopped massaging. When he didn’t look at her she continued:
“Frank drove me back here himself while you were at your apartment. He messed with the piles till he found the two coins that checked against the codes on his pad. He slipped one into the scattered pile of those we’d already viewed and handed me the other, the more important one, he said. Even Frank can’t remove anything from this room. He gave me no explanation, just strict orders that under no circumstances were you to know of the existence of these two coins, and this one especially, and insisted again it was for your own good. He said it was safer to keep the two coins apart; I hid mine under the mattress of my cot.”
“In the hall earlier, Frank was giving you orders about the two coins.”
“Nothing gets by you, does it, Kevin? It must be very hard, seeing so much and having no one to talk to.”
There’d been no irony in that, and he felt himself blush. “I figured to search your cot too. But then I knew you’d tell me in your own time, Brigid. There was enough to think about in the meantime.” He gestured at the monitor, at the face of his first partner and oldest friend. “Will you get the coin now, please. I expect it’ll be the last we have to look at.”
As if massively unburdened she deflated, smiled sleepily, even yawned largely as she fluffed out the right side of her unfluffable hair: “Famous last words.” And handed him the coin.
Oh, she knows how good she looks to those who know her. He must be something, this Mike of hers, to have helped her relax into herself. Perhaps, when this was over, he could get to know them better. She’d been trying to get pregnant for a year, he already knew from big-mouth Frank. And look at the hours she was keeping!
He rolled the pinkie-nail-sized coin off his forefinger into the drive that appeared semi-holographically like the mouth of a puckering ghost. She gestured at the chair with upturned hand: “You don’t need me for this, obviously.”
“No, you, please. Same routine as before. You’re a quick study, and I’m learning watching your ESPERHAND. You look like an old vid villain twirling his moustache and scheming.”
“I still can’t believe you taught me the workaround.”
The vid began in darkness, confusion noises, fragments of speech.
Kevin said, “Enlighten, define.”
It improved, though the people are still like sketchy negatives, giving the scene an other-dimension feel.
“C’mon, c’mon,” he said. “Now that we’re unblocked in the old-version MYCROFT, call in the new version’s tools for cleanup. Maybe MYCROFT’s RESTORE can help.”
It took time for the reconversion and cleanup. RESTORE did help: the image flipped to positive and the darkness dissipated as the program found ways to reconstruct reliably. But further improvement was slow; coherence continued poor, with the picture freezing, breaking up at times, then disappearing into MYCROFT’s cyber-maw. Ertelle cursed and rebooted, making fists with both hands and springing and spreading her long fingers as if about to strike an impossible piano chord.
“That, you’ll have to teach me,” Kevin said. “Good work.”
MYCROFT whined and barked and spat as had never been heard.
Kevin said, “What was that?”
“The Ghost of CORELDRAW Past?”
He could only pretend to laugh. “C’mon-c’mon.”
It came. The opening view is from behind someone who stands above those being addressed. But the shot is so tight on the speaker’s large ass that it could be a practical joke, and it makes identifying the still-incomplete members of the audience impossible.
“Secret surveillance?” Kevi
n said.
As if to confirm, the view tilts amateurishly, so that it now shoots over the heads of the audience. There’s a freeze, then a shot clearly showing that the speaker is Eugene DeLint, who is much fatter than in the earlier vid and prattling now to a small party in a different place. The quality suddenly improves again.
“There.”
“But where is there, Kevin?”
“Go back to where the shot tilts over their heads and freeze.”
Ertelle made a guess, signed, and the view shows part of a ceiling.
Kevin reached and excitedly outlined with his finger: “See the curvature? The translucence? It’s the Dome all right, DeLint’s Button!”
“Stay calm, Kevin.”
“Thank you. Resume. Someone really messed with this, and you’re sure Frank never removed it from the room?”
“I am.”
Continuity is nightmarish. They are out of the dome and in a smaller room. Again the shot tilts over the heads of the gathering, showing a low-ceilinged room that’s partitioned by a pale divider with a black strip down its centre. There are numerous freeze-frames of Eugene DeLint in full bombastic flight, followed by eerie depixelating dissolves. His speech is, even for DeLint, disjointed:
…ion, but the good judge has come down with something and could not be with us to…our saviour and the woman behind the man, Ms. Kelly Beldon… A useless pan of the small gathering is accompanied by a buzz so ear-splitting that Kevin and Brigid instinctively cover up… so genuinely pleased at this return of our prodigal daughter back, though of course she never truthfully left us, and to have with her as unofficial member of the Omphalos family…with everybody’s help…
“Stop it!” he shouted. “ID everyone from Scanbank.”
“Kevin, why don’t we just let it run first and maybe we’ll be able to identify them ourselves. If not, we can then —”
“No, now. I have no faith in the durability of this material, and official Scanbank identification is more important than whatever this sick creep has to say and, given the high likelihood of expert tampering, even whatever our eyes tell us.”
With the first two fingers of both hands, Ertelle described a circle in the air and commenced signing within it, explaining: “I’m launching PIXELRITE, then asking REIMAGINE for an Identities-Reconstruct accessing Scanbank, and then for a slide show of the personnel present. It’ll take a minute.”
There was dead silence between them as MYCROFT did its chortling work. After some twenty seconds, Ertelle read aloud as the labelled mug shots appeared: “Eugene DeLint…Ewan Randome…Anna Kynder…Don McNicol…Frank Thu?…Kelly Beldon!”
The monitor finished with a head outlined in white, like chalk where the body had lain, and the message:
UNABLE TO RECONSTRUCT. PROXIMITY MATCH? CAN I TALK?
“No. And don’t ask again.” Kevin reached in and, like a hitchhiker, flicked back twice. “What were you doing there again, Frank!” Then a sweeping pinkie signing forward. “Kelly! What the hell was Kelly doing back at Omphalos seven years after she’d left? In the Dome of all places on the very day of the fucking search-warrant hearing! Sweet Jesus, save my sanity.”
Ertelle assumed an evenly officious tone: “Do we want the proximity match, Kevin? It’ll involve a panoramic sweep and a more thorough analysis, with low reliability, I’m assuming. I mean no offence, but are you sure you’re fit to continue, like, right now?”
“Yes!… Yes, please, partner. And brace yourself, Brigid: if after some grossly mistaken deductions of mine, Eugene DeLint turns out not to have been the Widower, I do believe we are about to get our first look at the real thing, or as near to the monster as we’re ever likely to get now. Do you by any chance know what the maintenance guy, Jake Shercock, looks like?”
“No. But brace yourself, Kevin, that’s what my factioning intuition tells me.”
Ertelle zoomed out and signed intricately for an exhaustive sweep and personnel reconstruction of the entire scene’s unidentified human pixels. While the old ANANSI sectioned and scanned microscopically, Ertelle stood and backed off from the terminal like someone who’d lit a fuse in a mine tunnel.
Working from next-to-nothing, MYCROFT’s latest REIMAGINE began the reconstruct. The shape of a generic human head provided the template, if soon with styled female hair outlined, with the whole emerging in higher resolution like a long-buried face from thick ice in a sudden warm-up. Wave upon wave of pixilation washed up and down and back and forth and diagonally, then in mesmerizing swirls, as the program panned for matches, discarding millions more pixels than the hundreds accepted in a hell’s own jigsaw puzzle. Suddenly the monitor darkened and appeared to shut down, like the instant death of power outage; it was as if MYCROFT were dipping into itself, cyber-factioning — even, wondrous to say, contemplating disobedience of a command.
“What the…?” Kevin and Brigid in unison.
Ertelle said levelly, “Display results.”
As from a black pool a woman’s face surfaced in white death-mask definition. It instantly assumed colouring.
“But tha… Something’s gone horribly wrong,” said Ertelle. “I’ll run a diagnostic.” But she remained as still as the dead air that had been brooding for months on the city.
MATCH (81% RELIABILITY): CYNTHIA BELDON.
Kevin reached a hand towards the monitor and stopped, remembering never to touch, anything, ever again. He remained leaning in, with his hand hovering like he would beg entry into that virtual world of the dead. He sat back and closed his eyes, and himself shut down for a spell.
“Kevin, I didn’t know. Frank simply ordered me never to view this vid and to do everything I could to foil all your attempts in the direction of the Widower. He said your sanity, and maybe your life, depended on it.”
“Frank.” He was able to shake his head only the slightest, and to think of Ertelle. “Don’t worry, partner, you have my complete trust. But if this is real, then Frank could be the Widower.”
“What does it mean, Kevin?”
“I don’t know.” His echoing voice was affectless, his face expressionless. “I need to think. McNicol was DeLint’s murderer. That’s what we’ll get confirmed from the scan of the machete. McNicol, likely with that Anna Kynder’s help. We should get down there.”
“Of course.”
But he couldn’t turn away. Cynthia’s face in cyber-reconstruction was sickly, pasty as when hungover those times drinking through the Widower period, brown eyes shining darkly, a poor virtual of the living woman. He leaned in and thumbed back to Kelly’s face; her eyes were puffy like he’d never seen them, the beaten-up face of somebody who’d never lost a fight, till now. What was she doing with the celebrating cohort the day she and he had lost the court case? What!
He speaks calmly though: “I have to talk with Dr. Randome.”
He signed Resume.
There’s a sideways flickering to the bald head of Dr. Randome, the sound cuts out, and for a while the picture looks overexposed. Then Randome’s mouth moving, and DeLint laughing in uproarious silence. A spluttering of light and sound, then a normal picture of DeLint standing among them but still holding forth as if from a stage:
…important work of Omphalos must continue, as Ewan will second for me to all youse. Whomsoever this so-called Widower is, he has not been allowed to interfere with the necessary autonomy Omphalos enjoys because we have earned that right in working closely with others. Henceforth all contact —
Nothing. Followed by more nothing.
“Looks like the show’s over,” a relieved Ertelle said. “Going from the exaggerated way DeLint said that whomsoever, I’d say there’s still a very good chance you’re right about him being the Widower. I wonder who hacked up the coin this way, and remotely at that? At least we know it wasn’t Frank.”
“Frank is quite capable of tampering with a vid coin, t
hen leaving it here and telling you to hide it so we’d conclude it couldn’t possibly be Frank. Or a conflicted Frank could want us to know and not know. I suspect my old friend is suffering what you were experiencing only a short while ago, Brigid. You said he was upset at McNicol’s death?”
“Very.”
“As I said, that’s not the Frank I’ve known. If it’s guilt, that’s a good sign, strange to say. Some powerful pressures have been brought to bear in this case. Someone very high up could not afford to have DeLint — the Widower, yes, I agree — exposed. But I still need material evidence identifying DeLint as the Widower. Let the vid run, we’re okay till Frank arrives. Fast though.”
They fast-forwarded through minutes of blue monitor and jumpy static lines. Then a scene showing the party exiting through an inset ovular door like a ship’s hatch. One after the other they step over the high sill, shadowy figures recognizable now only because MYCROFT reconstructed, enhanced, and identified them: Don McNicol, Anna Kynder, Frank, Kelly, Cynthia, DeLint, and Dr. Randome. The shot holds forever on the closed door.
Kevin’s jaw jigs. “Can MYCROFT identify the room?”
She resumed the seat and signed.
UNABLE TO IDENTIFY. PROXIMITY MATCH?
Ertelle signed affirmative.
UNABLE TO APPROXIMATE.
Kevin mumbled, “If MYCROFT won’t even guess at the room, then it doesn’t exist. Ergo, somewhere in the Dome. Faster-forward.”
Ertelle signed and the vid ran incrementally faster, but still showing only the door, then blue screen.
“Back to the scene of them exiting,” he said. “Good. Slow. Stop. Back, run, slow…slower!”
“Do you want the, uh, state-of-the-art ANANSI viewer?” But he missed her irony.
“No. Stop. Back. Slower forward.”
They are almost all out the door yet again, with DeLint scarcely touching Cynthia’s elbow with his left hand as she steps over the foot-high sill.
“He touched her, see that?”