The Credulity Nexus

by Graham Storrs

  “Keep me posted on progress,” he said, and was gone.

  Celestina continued to watch her model for a moment, then spoke to her.

  “Hello, Rivers,” she said. “Do you have it yet? I'm growing impatient, and you don't want that, do you dear? I'm placing my trust in you. Please don't make me regret it. Call me when you get this.”

  From Omega Point's orbital position at the L4 Lagrangian point, the message signal would take eight minutes and nineteen seconds to reach the Earth. The distance made conversation impossible.

  Celestina stood up on the chaise longue and spread her arms wide, luxuriating in the touch of the gentle breeze on her body. She leapt into the air, transforming as she did into the great and brilliant ba of the ancient legends. With a mighty beat of her rainbow wings, she soared into the sky.

  Chapter 10

  Rivers Valdinger clung to the retracted landing strut of the Virgin Galactic VG3000 suborbital hopper. Ice powdered her robotic body and the air pressure was virtually zero, but neither of those facts bothered her much. Her new body was as comfortable working in hard vacuum as it was in the Earth's atmosphere. What did bother her, very much, was the message that had just come through from Celestina.

  Rivers knew she was in trouble. She'd bungled the robbery at the lab. But the package should have been in the big, refrigerated cupboard where they said it would be. She wasn't supposed to have to tear the place apart searching for it.

  It was their fault. They'd screwed up, not her. And when they sent her to Heathrow to get the guy who was supposed to have taken it, they didn't say anything about a load of British secret agents with machine guns. It wasn't right. Celestina's people were supposed to be the best. They should be giving her better intel – a bit of support, for Christ's sake!

  But, as usual, Rivers was on her own. The story of her life.

  She looked down at the scarring on her abdomen. Whatever her new body was made of, it was tough. That guy had emptied a clip into her at close range, and all she had to show for it now was a sprinkling of little grey marks. Maybe she shouldn't have run for it when the spooks showed up. Maybe she could have taken them. But it had creeped her out, the way that Rik guy had kept firing right at her brain box, like he knew just where it was.

  The roboticist at the hospital had told her that her body could stand a lot of punishment, but that she needed to protect her brain box at all costs. That was the only part that wouldn't regenerate, the only part that could kill her if it was damaged. At the time, she'd thought that made her pretty much invulnerable. Now she wasn't so sure.

  It was a safe bet Celestina also had some way of killing her if she felt like it. She'd worked for the old bitch for enough years now to know she always had some way of getting at the people she wanted to punish. But that had never worried Rivers before. She'd always been the Golden Girl, a star performer, teacher's pet. There wasn't a smarter, faster, more successful cat burglar on the East Coast. At twenty-two, Rivers had been at the top of her game, taking only the best jobs, getting her commissions directly from Celestina herself, with the weight of the whole organisation behind her if she needed intel, or enforcement, or some official to turn a blind eye. They called her the Black Cat, and she had it all.

  Then those asshole cops somehow managed to stake out the museum job, and came bursting in on her and her team, shouting and yelling like madmen. “Police! Drop your weapons! Down on the floor! Do it!” The bastards. It still made her blood boil, remembering it.

  She took down three of them before they managed to return fire. Served them right.

  The engines suddenly screamed into life. Rivers felt her mass shift. Weight was returning, climbing slowly up to one-and-a-half-G. The hopper was braking, falling out of the sky in a controlled arc that would hit Los Angeles International Airport smack on the hopper's designated landing pad.

  She should call Celestina now. She might not have a chance in LA. But what could she say? Celestina's image came into her head as clearly as if she was on a comm link. It was how she had looked when Rivers woke up in the hospital.

  “I thought I was dead,” Rivers had said, looking around. She felt fine. No pain. No wooziness. Just clear, bright hospital light, and that smell of antiseptic chemicals masking something worse. “Where am I?”

  Celestina looked stunning. She always dressed like she was at a film première, in slinky, revealing designer dresses and fabulous jewellery. But Celestina could do that, because she wasn't real any more. She was an upload, her mind running in a computer somewhere.

  She had said, “You're with me in Omega Point, dear. Don't worry, only your body died.”

  Automatically, Rivers looked down at herself. Apart from the hospital gown, she looked perfectly normal. She touched her left arm with her right hand. It felt exactly the way it should.

  Celestina was smiling. “Don't let that fool you, dear. Nothing here is quite what it seems.”

  “I can't afford this.” It surprised Rivers that this was the first thing she thought, but it was true. Her skills had earned her what most people would consider riches, but nothing like the kind of wealth needed to make it to Omega Point.

  “No, you can't,” Celestina agreed. “But I need a special job doing, and you are the one who is going to do it for me.”

  That's how she'd got into this mess. Celestina's generosity. She opened a call to her benefactor's private netID while she was still feeling angry and resentful enough to do it.

  “Celestina? It's Rivers. I'm en route to LA on the same flight as the target. Everything went pear-shaped in London. He had government agents protecting him. I almost didn't get out alive. What's going on, Celestina? When I get to the States, will I have the fucking FBI shooting at me, too? This little project of yours isn't looking as simple as it did a few days ago. You'd better tell me who this guy is and what his connections are, 'cause right now I have no fucking idea what I'm up against.”

  There. The message was sent. Let the old tranny chew on that. Maybe if Rivers had made more of a fuss about this from the start she'd be getting better support right now.

  But she had been so astonished by Celestina's offer, so glad to be alive again, that she had let her guard down.

  “Just one job, and I get keep the body?” She'd kept checking because it had seemed too good to be true.

  She had even got to choose the robot, have it customised to her own specifications. She'd insisted on the gecko skin for her hands, feet, forearms and shins, with an eye to making a living afterwards. Celestina had suggested incorporating another little trick skin addition, so she could change colour at will.

  All that had been great. Picking the body with Celestina, trying on different shapes, was like going shopping with a girlfriend. That was something Rivers had never done before. She'd practised with the robot while she stayed in Omega Point – everything simulated, of course, but so like the real thing that the transition to the actual body was completely smooth.

  It was only on Earth, after spending the long trip down crated up in the hold of a company freighter, that she began to realise she might have been misled about how simple the job was.

  But there was no time to fret over that now. She could hear a thin keening from outside. The aircraft was falling through atmosphere, just a few miles up. They would be landing soon. When they hit the tarmac in LA, she had to find a way to get off the hopper and keep the target in sight.

  She climbed up the landing strut so she wouldn't be dangling out in the open when the gear went down, and hoped that she'd have plenty of time to work out her exit before the passengers disembarked.

  Chapter 11

  Somewhere over the North Atlantic, Rik decided to dump all his half-formed plans for escape and do the sensible thing: co-operate. Whatever Cordell was up to, if Rik's attempts to shake off the government led to the upload and whoever she represented getting hold of this bioweapon, the outcome could be something he didn't want on his conscience. He wasn't that keen on the governmen
t – any government – having it either, but he had to admit it was probably safer with them than with some unknown killer, or with Cordell, for that matter.

  So he stopped scowling out the window and told his new best friend, Agent Fariba Freymann, that he'd do whatever he could to help her get the package. It didn't stop her frowning, and it certainly didn't make her chatty. She kept on eyeing him with closed-mouthed suspicion all the way from London to LA. But it made Rik feel better. In fact, he felt like a huge weight had been lifted from him. It could just have been his body finally adjusting to Earth's gravity. He preferred to think it was his conscience feeling glad he was no longer doing something so morally dubious as transporting a weapon of mass murder around the system.

  Of course, the fact that he wouldn't get paid would complicate his life in all kinds of ways he'd rather not think about, but for now he felt OK, and that was good enough. All that remained was to take his grumpy watchdog to Blake and get the package. Then maybe he'd call Greet-Greet, threaten to pull his pointy little head off, and get a good night's sleep.

  He gave Freymann a good, long look. She had a fine-featured, intelligent face, with big brown eyes, and lips that would look a lot nicer if they smiled once in a while.

  “I suppose you didn't want this job,” he said, trying to empathise.

  She gave him a suspicious look. “What do I care? I get a trip back to the States.”

  “You sound like a New Yorker. LA isn't exactly home.”

  She shrugged and turned away.

  “I'm from Palo Alto originally,” he went on. “Moved to LA as soon as I could afford the bus fare.”

  “I know, I've just been reading your file.”

  “What? The CIA's got a file on me?”

  “It does now.”

  Rik sat back in his seat and thought about that for a while. It didn't bother him much. Everybody had files on everybody. It was the Information Age. Still, he wondered what the latest entries would be, and how that might affect him in the future.

  “What made you join the Company?” he asked, still trying to be nice.

  “I've got a natural talent for keeping my mouth shut. I bet you could do it too, if you tried.”

  “Nah, I don't think it would work. I just love asking questions. I like to know things. I have a probing intellect.”

  She gave him a tight smile. “Gee, I suppose that's why you became a rocket scientist.”

  Rik held up his hands in surrender. “OK, if you're going to be nasty about it, I'll just sit here and read a book. I won't bother you again.” And he didn't, all the way to LA.

  Freymann had an autolimo waiting for them when they cleared customs at LAX. As soon as they were on the road, Rik put in a voice-only call to Blake. The call diverted to Blake's wife, Brie. Rik glanced at the silent woman sitting beside him, wanting to share the concern that had gripped him. Freymann gazed back at him with the same cool disdain to which she'd treated him since they met, and Rik changed his mind.

  “You! You fucking bastard!” Brie's voice was loud inside his head, and he recoiled at the wild emotion he was hearing. “I don't know how you have the fucking nerve to call after what you've done. What've we ever done to you, you bastard? Blake has always been your friend, for Christ's sake. And you pull a selfish, stupid stunt like this!”

  It was a while before he got a word in. “What happened, Brie? Are you OK? Is Blake OK?” They'd opened one of the phials, he thought. They were sick. They were both dying. Maybe the whole neighbourhood was affected. What had he done? To his friends! To hundreds of strangers!

  “They shot him, Rik. That's what. They fucking shot him, and he's in a coma, and–” Her tirade ended in a sob.

  Rik was stunned and, to his shame, relieved. He pulled his thoughts back into line. “Who shot him, Brie? Did they get the package?” He hated himself for asking, but he had to know.

  There was silence on the other end. When Brie spoke again she was no longer shouting. “You bastard,” she spat at him, and hung up.

  “What was that all about?” Freymann asked.

  He ignored her and gave the limo a new destination.

  Freymann read it off the display. “The Cedars-Sinai Medical Center? What's going on?”

  “Are you really CIA?” he asked her. It had suddenly struck him that she should have known about Blake already.

  She sneered at him. “Are you really a PLEO? 'Cause you ask some really dumb questions. Now tell me what you're doing.”

  They cruised up the San Diego Freeway and along Santa Monica Boulevard. Rik explained the situation to Freymann in-between attempts to get a medical update on his friend from the hospital's systems, and from old acquaintances in the LAPD. He even tried to call Brie again, but she was barring his calls.

  “You sent a potential bioweapon through the post?” Freymann's level of contempt seemed to be reaching new heights.

  “It was a specialist courier service, and the phials were very securely packaged.” Which didn't sound like much of a defence, even to himself. “And I didn't know it was a weapon at the time. I didn't know what it was. Can we focus on the important issues here?”

  “Which are?”

  “That somebody sent a gunman round to get the package from Blake. Somebody knew I'd sent it to him. God knows how! Which means that robotic psycho-chick isn't the only one working against us. Now, if I didn't have my very own Company girl in tow, I'd suspect the good ol' US of A had a hand in this. So, is there anything you'd like to tell me?”

  Freymann shrugged. “We're a bit out of my jurisdiction, here. You might want to try the FBI.”

  “Great idea. I'll give them a call. Better still, why don't you get your buddies at Langley to do it?”

  They pulled up outside the hospital's main entrance and got out. The car synced with the building's parking system and drove itself away to wait for them. Meanwhile a nurse appeared to guide them to Blake's bedside – not a real nurse, of course, just a rather poor cogplus-mediated hallucination – a lucie, as they were popularly known. Despite the scale of the hospital – a gigantic campus that grew a little taller and a little denser each decade – it employed just a few hundred human nurses. To be sick these days meant being in the hands of robots and administrative AIs. The fact was, most patients insisted on it, not to mention the insurance companies.

  Their nurse avatar was certainly friendly as it led them along endless corridors and up and down levels, chatting non-stop about how good the hospital was, how nice it was for the patients to receive visitors, and what this week's special offers were on body augmentations and upgrades. The distraught and dishevelled figure that barred their way when they finally neared the intensive care ward stood in stark contrast to the neat and chirpy lucie.

  “Brie! My God, are you all right?” Rik was shocked at the sight of her. Her hair was uncombed, her blouse torn and bloodstained, and her right arm was in a sling.

  “This?” She glanced down at her injured arm. “This is nothing. If Blake's shot hadn't gone through my arm, he'd have missed the bastard's heart. Then we'd both be dead.”

  “Jesus, Brie, I'm so sorry. I never meant–”

  “Just fuck off, Rik. I don't ever want to see your stupid face again.”

  “I just wanted to see if Blake was OK.”

  “Oh, what? You're concerned now? You weren't so worried about him when you sent that shit through the post. You damned well knew someone would come looking for it, didn't you?”

  Rik moved to take her by the shoulders, to try to calm her, but she wrenched herself out of the way. He'd known Brie for years, and it hurt like hell to see the fury in her eyes. He found himself pleading for her understanding. “Honest, Brie, I didn't know.”

  “Tell it to the police, asshole. They want to know what the hell's going on, too.”

  “Mrs. Bonomi.” Agent Freymann stepped forward. “I work for the Government, and I need to ask you a few questions about the package your husband received.”

  Brie's ey
es never left Rik's. Her nostrils flared, and he could see her jaw working behind tight lips. “This is the real reason you're here, isn't it? You don't give a damn that Blake's probably dying in there, do you? You just came to find out about the fucking poison you sent him.” Rik was helpless with pain and guilt. Brie turned her head and focused on the woman beside him.

  “As for you... I've told the police everything. I have no idea what he did with it, and he's in no state to tell anybody. Go and read the fucking file.”

  Her final words were for Rik. “And don't come back.”

  “Brie!”

  But she had gone, storming into one of the side corridors without a backward glance.

  Freymann moved to follow her, but Rik caught her arm and held it. He felt hollow and shaky, the reality of what he had done to his friends gouging out his insides.

  “We should go,” he said.

  “Are you nuts? We haven't got a clue where the package is! We can't leave it like this.”

  “She doesn't know anything. Leave her alone.”

  “Like hell I will!”

  Rik tightened his grip and pulled her closer. “We should go. We'll work it out, somehow.”

  Freymann's cold stare told him she was considering her chances of disabling him, maybe getting to her gun before he broke her arm. It wasn't a pleasant look. He held her firmly and waited for her to think it through. When she spoke, her voice was calm.

  “OK. You're right. She doesn't know anything. Let's get out of this dump. Hospitals give me the creeps.”

  By the time they got to the exit, the limo was waiting for them, having retrieved itself from the car park. Rik took control of the vehicle and directed it through a series of complex manoeuvres around the back streets of LA, just in case they'd picked up a tail.