The Rig

by Roger Levy

  Bale was a natural. The unexpected seam of empathy and that unyielding concentration. He could have been so much. She could imagine him with some sort of real life, someone to share it –

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘You don’t stop at all, ever. Even now, you’re doing it.’

  – and if he ever achieved it, he’d screw it up. Angrily, and not quite knowing why, she said, ‘No, I don’t stop. You’re right. But I’m not judging you, Bale.’

  ‘Understand me, then.’ He started to walk along the shore. She had to work to catch up, her feet always sliding away.

  ‘Tell me what you do,’ he said. ‘Really.’

  Her legs were starting to ache and her eyes were streaming. ‘I write. I’ve told you all this before. I make stories you could believe, or that you want to believe. You’ve heard of TruTales? That’s me and a lot of others. I bring people to life.’

  He said, ‘And I try to make sense of it when they die. You can’t stop. I can’t stop. Nothing to be done about it.’

  She said, quietly, ‘I might think you’re acting stupidly, but I always listen to you. You said the K was ex-military. He wasn’t running, he was moving steadily. You could tell that from his trail. He was following a plan. You said it makes no sense, someone that good leaving a trail, and a trail that backed him into a dead end. So maybe he was drawing you. He expected to kill you, but he would have known you’d be the first of many after him. He was crazy, but he wasn’t disorganised. They don’t have to go together, any more than sane always goes with organised, but the organised crazies are always following some kind of plan, something that makes some kind of sense to them.’

  ‘Okay, you were listening.’

  ‘So you listen to me. You want to understand his plan? You can’t, Bale. Even if he were alive, it wouldn’t be comprehensible to you.’ Out to sea, the brilliant light spun and swirled.

  Bale shook his head firmly. ‘The survivor –’

  ‘Tallen remembers nothing but corrupted fragments. He’ll never get it all back.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Memory can destroy you and it can protect you. From what you told me, forgetting’s a good thing.’

  ‘Memory can be retrieved.’

  She said, ‘No. Is that where you’re taking this? AfterLife? There’s no access to AfterLife data, and you know it. Not ever, under any circumstances. Not everyone carries a neurid and no one knows if they have a live one or a placebo. No one can ever find out. If one person can gain access, hope’s gone for everyone.’

  He bent forward and rested his hands on his knees. ‘Shit. If he’d been any more damaged –’

  ‘He’d have been put into a sarc, dropped out there and maybe loaded onto the AL database. But anonymised.’ She held up a hand to stop the interruption she saw coming. ‘Search criteria are deliberately limited. AfterLife’s not a Pax or Tax database. They’ve both challenged it in law and failed to get anywhere. Individual data first comes up between one and five years, at random. When it does, you’d never identify an individual. Tallen would be categorised male, age twenty-six years, no surviving parents, no partner, no dependents, no steady employment, victim of near-fatal criminal assault, currently irreversible brain injury, plus whatever finally put him in the sarc.’

  She wondered how far to go, and decided to take all the wind from Bale in one hit. ‘You think you could pick one man up from that? There are thousands fitting that dataset, Bale. This is the System, population eight billion, not including Gehenna and the unsaid planet, AfterLife registration maybe eighty per cent, viable neurids maybe two per cent of that, are you with me?’

  ‘We’re losing numbers.’

  ‘But we’re still high. Of the viable implantees, many will die irretrievably before they get to the sea. It’s a rough life everywhere, Bale. We aren’t on Earth any more. Explosions, destruction-associated brain deaths, thousands more irreversible end-events. So of the viable implantees, maybe point zero zero six per cent ultimately end up in the sarcs.’

  The stones at the sea’s edge turned and turned, colour over colour, endlessly unique. She glanced at Bale. ‘Not what you thought, is it?’

  ‘I thought most people were registered. I thought –’

  ‘They are. And sure, the irretrievably dead get their lives on the database too, if the neurid’s salvageable, but just as anonymously as the viable returnees. They get their eternity, and we get to know them even if they can’t come back.’

  Razer took his hand. Cold, calloused fingers. ‘It’s a good thing, Bale. We’d be lost without it. We were lost before it. It gives us hope, purpose and community. AfterLife holds the System together.’

  He said, ‘But the numbers. I never really thought about the numbers.’

  ‘You’re unusual, Bale. It underpins the lives and thoughts of most of us. It’s only a few hundred thousand sarcs a year going in the sea, but most people think they’re good odds. Against death, maybe they are.’

  That was enough, she reckoned. Time to let him down more gently. ‘The point is, Bale, you could trawl for a decade and never find a specific subject. I guess you could try to use one of the illegal search programs, find someone that way, but none of them work.’

  Larren Gamliel’s Life dropped suddenly into her thoughts again, the metal shard tossed high and caught. What was that name? Mardle? Only her own memory could find him. Why did it nag at her so? Cynth had never behaved like that before. Why now? Was she malfunctioning?

  Beside the sea’s bright fraying edge, Bale dropped into a squat. ‘You know a lot about AfterLife.’

  ‘I write for a ParaSite. I know everything there is to know about AfterLife. Can you imagine how useful it is to me? AfterLife is limited and imperfect, yes, but in its Lives, it is true and pure. Maybe it’s the only thing that is. What’s on AfterLife isn’t tainted by the fabrication of recollection or the desires of tellers like me. The tellers in the sea can’t lie. It’s the one true thing.’ If Razer believed in anything, she believed in AfterLife. Not the extras and the ParaSites, but all its wonderful, terrible Lives. She was its perfect acolyte. The all but endless trove could always comfort her. To her, the possibility of return didn’t matter so much as the Lives. Everything she wanted or needed was there.

  She told Bale, ‘I use it all the time. I try to understand how to convey the truth. The humanity. Those lives.’

  He stood up. ‘This killer.’

  She almost screamed at him. ‘Forget it, Bale. Did crime stop that night? Did your job freeze? The killer’s dead and so are ten others, but Tallen’s alive, and that’s because of you.’

  ‘There’s something else.’

  ‘There’s always something else. Nothing is purely of itself. The killer was made into that by the military, by his childhood, by something in his brain. That isn’t for you.’

  ‘The plan –’

  ‘Was in his head, Bale. It was a brain-fucked plan.’ She wanted to shake it out of him, this stupid refusal to let the incomprehensible alone. ‘It will never make sense. You want to know what happened? I’ll tell you. A moth told him, or a reflection in a window, or a cloud or a pebble or his dead brother or a blank screen or a grain of rice, it makes no difference; something ordinary or absurd told him, quite clearly and in detail, to kill ten people and take another into the sewers and cut ribbons out of him with a cold blade and then start burrowing into his skull with a chisel.’

  Bale started to walk again, onward along the shore. Some distance away, a fence ran down from the wall and carried on into the sea. Beyond it, a high stubby spur of qualcrete pushed out from the wall and disappeared into the water. Good, Razer thought, following a few paces behind him. Bale would have to turn round.

  Not slowing yet, he said, ‘You have a fine imagination, Razer.’

  ‘You have to give up, Bale. Can’t you see that?’

  ‘Why did he take Tallen down there?’

  ‘You aren’t listening to me. If you knew the reason, it wouldn’t help you.�
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  He stopped, shifting from foot to foot, and said, ‘I know this. There’s a huge gulf between the onground spree and what he did to Tallen down in the sewers. They were quick. Kill and run, kill and run. But Tallen was totally different. Not just because he wasn’t killed.’

  ‘You told me the K forensically matches all the deaths. You found him with Tallen. Isn’t that connection enough?’

  The breakwater was closer. Soon they’d have to leave the shore.

  Bale said, ‘Most of the forensics was guesswork. Lookout’s streetcams are patchy, no real help. We don’t know how long Tallen was down there. Could have been hours. We only know for sure that Fleschik was there at least a few minutes before me.’

  Razer said, ‘We know Tallen had a habit of going to the sea at night. So how about if Fleschik had been watching him every night, targeted him ahead and took him down one of the sewer traps a few hours before starting the spree. That way, Tallen could have been the first. Fleschik did what he did to him, didn’t get what he wanted. Or perhaps, in his own head, he did get it. Tallen screams something, Fleschik thinks it means go upside and kill a few people. Either way, he comes out and starts killing, then goes back to Tallen, intending, I don’t know, to see if it’s made any difference. Only you turn up and save him.’

  Bale said, ‘That was off the top of your head?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about it. Anything wrong with it?’

  ‘It’s good. But what if the K wasn’t alone? What if someone else was working on Tallen?’

  ‘Two of them?’ She stopped. ‘Is there any evidence of another person?’

  ‘No one saw Tallen being attacked and abducted from the street. That can’t have been quick if there was just one man. If he was organised like you said, he left a lot to chance. Easier if there are two of you. And Tallen definitely remembers being stabbed. There were no forensics from Tallen on the streets, anywhere between the beach and where he lives. There should have been a huge pool of blood. There was nothing at all.’

  They were nearly at the qualcrete spur blocking their way. Razer saw a stairway back up to the promenade. ‘Let’s go back up.’

  ‘Not yet.’ He started treading heavily up and down in the stones. She watched the depressions of his bootmarks disappear, the stones moving lightly as bubbles.

  ‘No tracks,’ he said. ‘You notice how we’ve been walking? How everyone walks on the stones?’

  She said, ‘What?’ and then, ‘Oh,’ realising she was unconsciously moving her feet, constantly climbing out of the stones. Bale stopped doing the same and after a few seconds he began very slowly to sink, only stabilising when he was ankle deep. He pulled himself out in a rasp of stones and walked on towards the spur, saying, ‘We can’t tell where Tallen came off the beach that night. We have no idea of the route he took back into town.’

  ‘I don’t care. I’m tired.’

  He pointed ahead. ‘Look.’

  The breakwater’s security fence was close enough for her to make out its titanium struts, each tip split three ways, splayed and barbed. Beyond it, beside the breakwater, a great broad curve of weathered pipe ran out of the high promenade wall and sank into the sea.

  ‘The waste tunnels exit here,’ he said. ‘Sewage.’

  ‘You think he took Tallen into the pipes here? Not from the town? There’s no access.’

  ‘See the gate? Emergency access. Beyond it, there’s a trap hatch at the top of the pipe. You could drag someone up there. Two of you could do it easily.’

  ‘There must be cams.’

  ‘They haven’t worked since a week after they were set, and that was years back.’

  Razer thought of Tallen standing here and staring out at the sea, night after night. It was beautiful in the changing light, like metal, like velvet.

  Bale said, ‘Another thing. His memory was confused, but he remembers footsteps.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘The sound of them, as he describes it, wasn’t a thudding or a stamping.’ Bale stepped up and down. ‘He said it was a crunching sound.’

  ‘Maybe there was gravel on the street.’

  ‘And the beach keeps itself clean. No blood. Everything, anything, gets swallowed, and the stones scrub themselves.’

  She was acutely aware of herself pacing on the spot. ‘So Tallen never even made it off the beach? It’s possible.’

  ‘Okay. But why would you do that if you know your target’s heading for solid ground? Dragging someone over these stones would be really hard. And he’d hear you coming.’ Bale stamped again. ‘Maybe he’d fight you off.’

  Razer glanced towards the promenade. ‘But up there you’re more likely to be seen. Just as risky.’

  ‘At that time of night? And you’re crazy anyway, remember?’

  ‘You’re organised crazy,’ she said. ‘It’s not the same as stupid.’

  Bale grinned. ‘Organised enough to want to leave no trace, perhaps.’

  ‘Again, why does that matter? An hour or two later he was leaving pretty big traces. You’ll never understand his logic, Bale.’

  She followed him up the steps to the promenade and looked at the waste pipe extending across the stones to fall away into the water and disappear about a hundred metres inside the shield. She said, ‘What about the K? Fleschik.’

  ‘Everything he had was wiped clean. His room was like the wind had gone through it. He arrived on Bleak two months ago. All we have is his arrival and his death. Between the two, he’s invisible.’

  ‘Okay.’ She considered it. ‘He was ex-military, and he was crazy. Paranoid behaviour’s understandable, and he had the training.’

  ‘It’s the degree of it, Razer, not the idea. There’s nothing. It’s not that we can’t link him to anything or anyone. We can’t even see him. He didn’t go to bars, buy food, use screenery. It took us a week to find his room, and that was only luck. His cash payment was valid for another month but the renter got greedy and broke in, found it like I said, then told someone, who told a Paxer, who made a connection. Pure chance.’ He rested his elbows on the promenade wall, then turned his head to her again. ‘Do you record all this, or what?’

  ‘I have a good memory.’ She shook her hair away from her neck and showed him the blistered scar behind her ear. ‘An expensive one.’

  ‘Like the neurid.’

  ‘You don’t give up, do you? No. This isn’t organic and I haven’t had it since I was born. It shows up on scans, it’s limited and it’s a nuisance.’

  ‘How?’

  A wind was starting up, rolling dust across the paving. She said, ‘You want to talk about this now?’

  ‘Now’s fine. You never talk about yourself.’

  ‘And you only talk about your work. It seems to suit us both pretty well. Not that you have a job any more.’

  ‘I’m interested in your memory. I know how expensive augmems are. We don’t get them in Pax and we could use them.’

  ‘There’s a reason for that. It isn’t always such a great thing. It stores some of what I say, see and hear. No context. That’s why Pax won’t use them. Cynth – my AI – takes it, chops it up and uses it as background for stories. It goes wrong a lot. Maybe I’ll get a cancer from mine.’

  He grunted.

  ‘My AI clears it at the end of every day. I don’t even have access to it.’

  He said, ‘How much did you pay for it, this extra memory?’

  She flushed. ‘Maybe I just slept with a few people. Fuck you, Bale.’ She stared at him, the anger directed mainly at herself for not having seen this coming. ‘I write stories. You know that. Not under my own name. You’ll find them under the tag Kestrel Dust, and I get paid well. Real money from a real corporation. I’ve told you all this. “AFTERLIFE gives you lives, but TruTales gives you stories.” That sort of thing. I –’

  She stopped cold, suddenly realising that wasn’t where he was headed at all. ‘You think I’m involved in this? You think I’m Fleschik’s accomplice?’

&nb
sp; ‘I’ve seen mercs with less training than you,’ he said evenly. ‘You travel a lot, Razer. Just to write stories?’

  ‘I said. They pay. You want details?’

  ‘I’ve checked.’ He shook his head. ‘People pay for that stuff?’

  ‘They subscribe.’

  ‘They subscribe to AfterLife,’ he said. ‘What you do gets clipped on for a few more dolors a month.’

  He’d done his research. She should have expected that. The wind seemed colder now, and she pulled up the collar of her jacket. She said, ‘Not just clipped on. You can be an asshole, Bale. What they see on AfterLife isn’t often happy. Eight per cent of the audience go on to read one of my stories before they leave. Mine and those of all the other contributors. It makes people feel better. That’s so bad?’ She took a breath. ‘Am I still under suspicion? On the basis of that?’

  ‘Tallen was at the end of his annual leave. Usually he went away. One of the last things he did before he went out and nearly got killed was register with StarHearts. Another AfterLife ParaSite.’

  ‘So you connect it with me? Everyone in the System cruises StarHearts, Bale. I don’t work for them, anyway.’ She slowed down. ‘Was there something specific he was doing?’

  ‘He was looking for a woman, that’s all.’

  ‘He get any response?’

  ‘No. Two evenings later he went out, dot dot dot.’

  ‘And where does that leave me?’

  ‘I needed to ask.’

  ‘You can be hard work as well as an asshole, Bale.’ She waited. ‘I’m not under suspicion, then?’

  ‘You’re suspicious as hell. You spoke to Tallen in the hospital. You knew him too, didn’t you? And you didn’t mention it.’

  ‘The red bar’s a popular place. I saw him there. That’s all.’

  She felt her cheeks grow hot. Cynth had connected her with both men. Was something going on, here? She almost told Bale about the link with Cynth, but that would feed his paranoia. Instead she said, ‘I work for TruTales. StarHearts is a totally different entity. And it’s a long stretch to link it with the attack, let alone with me.’ She took a breath, trying to steady herself. ‘You were saying Emel Fleschik was good.’