Please Do Not Taunt the Octopus

by Grant, Mira

  It was honestly a miracle that Tom’s trigger discipline was so good he didn’t shoot her with a tranq dart right then and there. She stopped punching the bed and said, in a suddenly toneless voice, “I’m tired now. I think I’m going to sleep some more. Thank you for the saline, and for letting me sleep here. If you kill me while I’m sleeping, that’s okay. It’s what I deserve. I won’t be mad.”

  “What’s your name?” I asked again.

  She didn’t answer.

  2.

  Jill met us outside the door. “She’s asleep,” she said, voice tight and somewhat agitated. “She literally went to sleep the second she stopped talking. This is someone who’s had training for that sort of thing.”

  “Ex-military?” I asked.

  “Not unless she was Black Ops and got herself deleted from the system,” said Jill. “Your hacker would have found her by now if she was in the military databases. That’s one of the first places anyone with a lick of training goes to look for someone like this.”

  “Fair,” I allowed. “All right, keep an eye on our guest, and if she wakes up again, call me. I’m going to go see if anything else has come to light. You.” I turned, looking past Jill to not-Daisy, who was still standing in the spot she’d been in when we entered the observation room. “Go feed the lab animals, make sure everyone is still doing their jobs. We need to be operating at top capacity.”

  “Why?” asked not-Daisy, blinking at me. She looked like a sheep, easily led and even more easily confused. My hands itched to slap the stupid off her face. I tucked them into my lab coat pockets. I don’t hit my staff, no matter how much they might sometimes aggravate me. There are lines that should not be crossed. They separate reputable underground establishments, like mine, from the black market free clinics, where sure, you might get your vaccinations, but you also might get to become an uncredited and unwilling part of someone else’s experimental testing pool.

  It’s a hard world these days, and no matter how hard we try, it just keeps on getting harder. “Because life goes on, even when there’s a mystery to be solved. Maybe especially when there’s a mystery to be solved. And because you work for me, and I just told you to do it. So unless you’re interested in exploring other employment opportunities, you’ll scoot.”

  Not-Daisy’s eyes went very wide in her wan face. She nodded, quickly, and scurried away down the hall, leaving me standing alone with Jill and Tom. I turned to face them.

  “Jill, I need you to go over all the personnel records for people whose origins we have not absolutely confirmed, and check them again,” I said. “Zelda there may be our only current CDC plant, but it’s possible she’s not our only potential mole, and there’s something about this situation that doesn’t smell right to me. I want to be sure that whatever happens next, it’s because we fucked up, not because somebody fucked us.”

  “I love the conviction that we’re about to get fucked,” said Jill. “It’s real comforting.”

  “There are three constants in this world, Jill,” I said. “One, you don’t know everything. Two, what you don’t know can absolutely hurt you. And three, someone’s getting fucked. The only question is, who’s wearing the strap-on? Tom, while Jill is going over our records, I want you to look at those synthetic cannabinoids she isolated from our mystery woman’s blood. I don’t expect you to be able to replicate them exactly, but if you can come up with a way to synthesize something similar, that could be an enormous help. I don’t think she’s going to talk to us until we start offering her what she wants, and what she wants are those pills.”

  “We don’t know what those drugs do, and there isn’t time to do proper testing if I’m just trying to synthesize a batch based on what we already have,” Tom said. “We could be giving her just about anything. Those chemicals aren’t toys.”

  “No, but neither is a woman who somehow got my name and had the resources to track us down without leaving a trail,” I said. “Our location isn’t a state secret, but we’re pretty good about not saying, ‘Here we are, come rob us blind.’ Depending on the quality of the places she’s been asking around, however…”

  “You’re afraid she’s the precursor to a raid?” Jill couldn’t quite keep the disbelief out of her tone. “Her? I don’t care how much she wants to offer to kill people for aspirin, she’s not someone’s advance spy. No one sends somebody in that poor of physical condition to scout for them. There’s no guarantee you’ll get your scout back when you starve them half to death.”

  “I don’t think she’s a scout.” I glanced over my shoulder at the closed door. “She’s too disjointed, for one thing. Whether it’s the drugs or whatever she’s been taking them to treat, she needs help. I think she’s a distraction, and a tracking dog. Sometimes when I need to flush out specimens, I’ll send Joe into the woods with the retrieval team. He likes running into groups of the infected and starting to make a ruckus. I know they can’t hurt him more than he can hurt them, so it’s a good way to collect zombies for my research. Do you understand what I mean?”

  “You’re saying that when you want to find a doctor, you send in a sick person,” said Tom slowly. “One that you’re not too concerned about losing.”

  “Exactly.” I turned back to the pair. “We need to know where she came from, we need to know how she got here, and we need to know who pointed her in our direction. Until we know all that, we can’t afford to trust that everyone who’s here has our best interests at heart. Remember what happened last time?”

  Tom and Jill exchanged a look. “We remember,” said Jill. “We’re on it.”

  “Good,” I said. “Report back in an hour, just so I know where we stand—and call me if she wakes up again. I’ll be in my office.” I turned and started down the hall before they could ask any more questions. Sometimes I think the worst part of being in charge is all the questions. They never end, and somehow, I’m always expected to be the one who has all the answers.

  Joe was still on the floor with his head on his paws, sulking, when I made it back to the office. I started counting silently as I walked to my desk, and made it to twenty-three before his delight overwhelmed him and his tail started wagging. “You’re no good at sulking, Joe,” I scolded. “If you want me to really believe in your suffering, you need to suffer for at least thirty full seconds. I’d recommend trying for an entire minute. Just for realism.”

  His tail continued to wag as his head came up off his paws. I wasn’t just back in the room, I was back in the room and talking to him. Truly, this was a banner day. I sighed.

  “You’re a good dog, Joe, but you’re a terrible negotiator. You could have held out for anything you wanted, and instead I’ve been forgiven with a tail wag and a goofy smile. You need to learn to look out for your own interests.” I opened the top drawer of my desk, pulled out a dog biscuit, and tossed it to him. He caught it out of the air and began the ecstatic process of reducing it to so many gooey crumbs on the carpet.

  Crunching sounds accompanied me as I turned back to my computer, typed in my password, and sent Tessa a chat request. She was better about allowing those through normal channels when she was actively on a job: there was only so much cloak-and-dagger that either one of us could handle as a part of our daily lives. I had no way of knowing whether or not she was at her computer, so I opened one of the files Jill had e-mailed to me and began reading about the drug cocktails isolated from our guest.

  I was on page three, and was beginning to really agree with the “if you told me she was dead, I wouldn’t argue with you” diagnosis, when my chat client beeped to signal an incoming call. I minimized the file and opened the chat window, revealing Tessa’s face. She was wearing a surprising amount of glitter smeared around her eyes, and she wasn’t smiling.

  “Tell me you got me something to work with, because I still got nothing,” she said.

  “Nice to see you, too,” I said. “She woke up for a little bit. She didn’t tell us her name, but she talked, and I have video. Will that
help?”

  “Speech patterns and accent might let me start narrowing in on an origin, and an origin would help me figure out her identity, so yes, that’ll help.” Tessa shook her head, curls bouncing. “This is starting to haunt my dreams. I’ve never had a missing person this determined to stay that way who hadn’t been intentionally scrubbed from the Internet.”

  “Sending the file over now.” I opened the drive where our feeds from the isolation room were stored, selecting the twenty-minute segment that included my conversation with the mystery woman and dropping it onto the chat box. A small status bar immediately appeared, displaying the status of the transfer. “She’s still not too lucid. Part of it’s probably the drugs, and part of it’s probably withdrawal from the drugs. I have Tom working on synthesizing something to help her through the next few days. That’ll give us something to bargain with, even if it doesn’t do anything else.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Well, she offered to kill people for me. And that ‘Kitty did a bad thing,’ but that she didn’t think Kitty had made it out of the house. I don’t know whether she was talking about a pet or a person, but—” I stopped talking. Tessa was sitting suddenly ramrod straight, her eyes gone wide in their circles of club makeup, her mouth gone suddenly slack with something that might be shock, or might be plain and simple fear. “Tessa? You want to tell me what you just figured out? Because honestly, I’m getting a little tired of not knowing what’s going on.”

  “You’re sure she said ‘Kitty.’ She didn’t use some other word, or a proper name.”

  “No, she said ‘Kitty.’ She said it multiple times, she was very clear.” The status bar turned blue and then disappeared. “See for yourself, you should have the file now.”

  “Hang on.” Tessa bent her head and started to type. I heard my own voice through her computer speakers, distorted by distance and compression. We always sound strange to ourselves when heard in playback. This was especially strange. I might not have recognized myself, if not for the mystery woman’s voice speaking a second later, answering me, confirming the provenance of the file. Tessa began shaking her head. “No,” she said. “Nyet. No.”

  “What?” I tapped on my computer screen, hoping the noise and motion together would be enough to catch her attention. “Tessa, what? You can’t freak out without inviting me to your ‘everything is ruined forever’ party. It’s not nice, and it’s not productive. What’s wrong? Why are you trying to refute reality? Refuting reality never works out in the long run, trust me.”

  “This woman…I may know who she is.” Tessa looked up, shaking her head again. “I think she used to work with the competition. A man from Seattle, who did the kind of work I do, but I will be honest: he was better than I will ever be. I have more patience for legwork, I am happier to look for missing people and use the skills I have, but this man? He could wipe you from the world if you told him where to start. He could build an identity out of nothing, put a person in cracks that no one even realized were there until they might as well have existed all along. He was an artist.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “What happens to all the artists in this world? He died.” She kept typing, her eyes fixed at a point below the level of her webcam. I could see the roots of her hair, dark brown showing through her carefully cultivated blonde. “The community was in an uproar for months. Some people even said it was a hoax, that he was doing the ultimate ID scrub and scrubbing himself right out of reality. Nobody knows for sure. I’ve seen the autopsy reports. They look legit to me, but what do I know? I’m no doctor.”

  “Besides, they could have autopsied a clone.” Tessa’s head snapped up, eyes even wider this time. I shrugged. “What? I did physiological examinations of the second Georgia Mason, remember? Clone tech is more advanced than we like to think it is, especially when you don’t need your clone to do anything but die. Let me tell you, that doesn’t take any special skills.” Anybody could die. It was almost the only thing that every person on Earth had been designed to do with equal proficiency.

  “I didn’t even think of that.” She bowed her head as she resumed typing. “They called him ‘the Monkey.’ If he had a real name, he scrubbed it years ago—maybe before he did anything else. The best always experiment on themselves, you know? Means you have time to be sure that whatever it is you’re doing really works, that it’s not just chance. He had the resources to get himself a clone, if he really wanted one. If he needed to disappear.”

  “This is all fascinating, but what does it have to do with my mystery woman?” I asked.

  “He always lived with at least two women. They were…let’s call them his ‘public relations team.’ That’s what you call your lovers who sometimes kill people for you, right?” Tessa’s scowl was visible only in the way her cheeks distorted, tightening and pulling at the sides of her face. “A friend of mine worked for him for a while. He deleted her whole original identity, just wrote her out of the world and wrote her back in as part of his private menagerie. He called her ‘the Wolf,’ and when she fell out of favor, he deleted that identity, too. We’ve never found her body. I don’t think we ever will.” She was still typing, more fiercely now, like she thought she could bring her friend back from the dead through sheer force of anger.

  “So what? You think our guest was one of the Monkey’s girls?”

  “The last two recorded members of his little zoo were ‘the Cat’ and ‘the Fox.’ A hacker and a killer, according to all reports.” Tessa glanced up. “The Cat’s body was recovered at the same time as the Monkey’s. The Fox’s body never was.”

  I paused. “I know why I’ve heard that name before. The Masons went to the Monkey. He was supposed to get them new identities. Instead, he fucked around and nearly got them all killed. Shaun really hated that guy.” Had he mentioned women working for the Monkey? I felt as if he had, at least once, at least in passing. He’d been a little distracted by the time he and the others made it back down the coast to me—something about finding his dead sister reborn in a CDC holding facility had taken his mind off things he would have once considered to be of the utmost importance.

  “Well, your Shaun may have had good reason. This woman seems really fixated on the idea that someone she calls Kitty ‘did a bad thing.’ If that bad thing involved your friends, that could explain why things went so sour at the Monkey’s place.”

  “That would make the woman I have the Fox, correct?” When Tessa nodded, so did I. “All right, keep digging, and if you find anything, I want to know about it. I’m going to drop a line to the folks I still know at After the End Times, and see if any of them can confirm your ID.”

  “If they do, let me know, okay? Finding the last of the Monkey’s girls would be a pretty big deal in the circles I move in.” I must have made a face, because Tessa put her hands up, and said, “I wouldn’t tell anyone where she was until after she’s not with you, I swear. I value your business, and I value you not sending people to close my mouth permanently. I’m not going to go spilling your secrets all over the Internet just because I want to look cool for my friends.”

  “I pay you for secrecy,” I said coldly. “Just remember that.” Then I killed the connection, before she could make any more excuses. If there was any chance at all that our guest was worth something to someone, getting a confirmed ID had just become even more important. And now I had to do it before Tessa did.

  “I hate subcontractors,” I muttered, and reached for the phone.

  3.

  It’s possible to maintain a landline in today’s day and age, and there are even reasons that it can be considered superior to having a cell phone, if you do it right. Old phone cables run through the entire North American continent, laced through earth and stone like veins through the human body. Most of them haven’t been used, or consistently monitored, in decades. One person with a decent understanding of how they work and a few skills picked up from an old telephone company repair manual can set up safe, secu
re, off-the-grid communications. It’s kind of funny, in a sideways sort of way: People used to go for burn phones and cell blockers, thinking that they were keeping themselves secure, and now those same people would kill their own mothers for a black market landline and the tech to keep it clean.

  I held the receiver between my cheek and shoulder as I typed, listening to the ringing. Finally, the line clicked, and an amiable female voice announced, “Kwong-Garcia residence, Maggie speaking.”

  “Tick tock says the clock, when the watch runs down,” I said.

  There was a pause. “I don’t really like this cloak-and-dagger bullshit, okay? I’ve got a scrambler on the line, courtesy of Daddy, so if you’re calling for Alaric or whatever, you can stop with the weird code phrases and the pretending that this sounds even remotely normal. It doesn’t. Anyone who happens to be in the room with me would know something was up if I gave you the countersign, so how about we just don’t?”

  “When did your father get you a scrambler good enough to trust?” I asked.

  “It was a wedding gift,” said Maggie. “Dr. Abbey? Is that you?”

  “It’s me,” I confirmed. “Congratulations on that, by the way. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to attend. You know how it is. Underground virologist, fugitive from the law, all that.”

  “We really liked the KitchenAid you sent,” said Maggie. “I would’ve sent you a thank-you note, but we didn’t so much have a mailing address.”

  “I was thanked in spirit,” I said. “Is Alaric around? I need to ask him some questions.”

  “He’s working right now, but I can get him if it’s important.” Maggie paused. “What am I saying? You picked up a phone. This isn’t just important, it’s cause for a ticker tape parade.”

  “I don’t think they have those anymore,” I said dryly. “As to the rest, I take your point, and will try to be in touch more often, if only so you don’t decide to mount some sort of expedition to my place of work and take me out. Now, can you please put Alaric on the phone?”