by Jeff Edwards
I moved on to the kitchen. Like mine, it was highly automated, but (also like mine) it showed clear signs of manual cooking. The scratches on the cookware were irregular. A few of the pots and pans had small dents and dings. The kind of markings that came from the imprecise motions of human handling. Leanda liked to do her own cooking, at least some of the time.
I continued to putter through the apartment until I came across a SCAPE deck and a rack of chips. The room looked like a den to me, but—given the exclusivity of the building—there was probably a more impressive name for it.
I traced a fingertip down the spines of the SCAPE chips. Why hadn’t the cops seized them, along with the FANTASCAPE chip? The answer occurred to me immediately. The FANTASCAPE recording was black market; it might conceivably be important to the case. These other chips were off-the-shelf, no more significant than any commercial vid, or piece of popular music.
I looked through them anyway, to get a feel for Leanda’s taste in entertainment. Judging from the titles, two or three of them were immersive romances, and a few were dates with vid stars or other celebrities. There were also several recordings of zero-g ballet performances, presumably from the point of view of one of the dancers. The rest all had one or two word titles which made it difficult to judge their content. High Mojave. Chrysalis. Interlude. Southern Cross. Obsidian. Mysterious Galaxy. Fathom Curve.
I drew the Fathom Curve chip out of the rack and looked it over. There was an image of a dolphin on the label, and a list of five recording tracks, each with a play time of twelve minutes or less. Otherwise, there was no hint at all about the nature of the recorded content.
The original packaging had no doubt included a description of the Fathom Curve experience, couched in smooth marketing lingo, to entice potential buyers. Leanda Forsyth had known—at least in general terms—what to expect when she had loaded this chip for the very first time. I, on the other hand, had no idea.
I held the chip in my palm. It wasn’t a very hard decision to make. As much as I disliked the whole SCAPE thing, this might be a way to gain some insight into Leanda’s personality.
I popped the chip into the loading slot on the front of the deck, and reached for the cranial set. When it was positioned on my head and I was settled into a chair, I fiddled around with the deck’s touch screen, trying to figure out how to set the timer. I gave up after a couple of minutes. The interface would probably be child’s play to someone with the technology gene. I did not happen to belong to that happy subspecies of Homo sapiens.
Finally, I decided to skip the timer, and try out the shortest recording on the chip: seven minutes and four seconds long. I figured that I could stand seven minutes of anything deemed safe enough for sale to the commercial public. Besides, it had a picture of a dolphin on the label. How bad could it possibly be?
I hit the play tab.
Instantaneous shift…
I’m standing in warm water up to my chest. A swell lifts me gently, my feet rising from the sandy bottom, before the following trough lowers me to my feet again.
I am female. I know this instantly, without looking down at my body. I can’t say what particular combination of sensations reveals the change in my sex, but everything feels different. The distribution of muscle mass and flesh across my skeletal frame. The set of my shoulders and the width of my pelvis. The twin weights of small but significant breasts against my ribcage. The lack of other (more familiar) weights below my waist.
I am naked. My wet hair brushes the tops of my bare shoulders, and coils lazily down the skin of my upper back.
The world is strange, taken in through the unaccustomed lens of another gender, but again, this body is unmistakably mine.
The water is startlingly clear, muting to a vibrant blue in the distance. The sandy bottom under my toes is almost silver-white. A thousand or so meters above my head, geodesic panes of transparent polycarbon fracture the sky into facets of blue-gray. This is one of the ocean biomes, either the corporate research site in the Maldives, or the ritzy aquatic playground off of Grand Cayman.
A pair of dolphins broach the surface about fifty meters away, nimble forms cruising effortlessly through the placid artificial waves of the biome enclosure.
I push off from the bottom and swim toward them. My body is long-limbed and lithe. I cover the distance in a surprisingly short number of strokes.
The dolphins do not retreat. When I arrive, they circle me playfully, their smooth wet skin making occasional sliding contact across my own.
I take a deep breath and plunge below the surface. It is a different world. Schools of colorful fish dart and swarm in the near distance. The gradient of the bottom is beginning to steepen, and I see the first outcroppings of coral.
I exhale slowly as I glide through this liquid realm, bubbles tickling the sides of my cheeks. Back to the surface for a quick breath, and then I’m submerged again.
The dolphins pull in close to me, swimming within easy reach of my fingers. I don’t touch them. There is no need. We are a family now, a pod. Three creatures of the water, existing and communing in flawless harmony. Touch cannot bring us any closer. Cannot make us more together.
I broach the surface for another breath, and then I am diving deeper. The pressure on my eardrums increasing, the swarms of tropical fish now close enough to become living curtains of color and life.
The world is beautiful. It is sacred. The ocean is my mother, and I am its child.
I turn back toward the surface again. The sun’s rays angle toward the depths in diagonal spears of cobalt and azure.
Shift…
I was still sitting in Leanda’s chair, but now my arms were pinned behind me. Someone was standing back there, behind the chair—fists clamped onto my wrists like bands of iron, keeping my hands forced together, and nearly pulling my shoulders out of their sockets.
A second man stood a few meters away, the cranial rig dangling from his right hand. His features were Asian. Handsome, with a very hard edge, as though the surgical robot’s face-sculpting software had been programmed for charming contract assassin. His left little finger was missing from the second knuckle. When he spoke, his voice carried an odd accent that was almost familiar.
“Sorry to interrupt your skinny dip,” he said. “But it’s time for us to have a little chat…”
CHAPTER 12
My brain rushed through the obvious questions… Who the hell were these guys? How many of them were there? How had they gotten in here?
Then something clicked, and I remembered where I’d heard the voice of Mr. Nine-fingers before. He was the shooter from the FANTASCAPE chip. I had watched him—no… I had been him—as he had gunned down five strangers in a Chicago office complex.
He was part of the Dream Snatcher crew. One of the unidentified perpetrators of their unsolved string of criminal acts. And a killer.
“What are you doing here?” Mr. Nine-fingers asked.
I thought about not answering, then decided that the truth couldn’t hurt.
“Investigating the disappearance of Leanda Forsyth.”
Nine-fingers grinned, showing very white teeth. “By swimming naked with the dolphins?”
I tried to shrug, but my shoulders were pulled too far out of shape to manage it properly. “I like dolphins,” I said. “Sometimes I swim with them in the bathtub. I’m usually naked for that too, if you want to buy tickets or something.”
The thug behind me torqued my left wrist, sending a lance of pain into my elbow. “You’re a funny little fucker, aren’t you?” he growled into my ear.
I didn’t recognize the second man’s voice, but he had the same strange accent as his partner. The underlying phonemes might have been Korean or Japanese, fused with some unfamiliar non-English dialect that didn’t seem to be based in any Asian language.
Nine-fingers waved a hand, and the pressure on my elbow receded. “How much are you getting paid?” he asked.
I didn’t say anything.
Nine-fingers knuckle-punched me in the solar plexus, robbing me of breath, and flooding the nerves of my upper torso with an oddly stunning pain.
“How much are you getting paid?” he asked again.
I coughed and tried to catch my breath. “Oh… You mean me? I thought you were asking the asshole with the hand-holding fetish.”
The thug behind me twisted the arm again, and my left elbow threatened to explode.
Again, Nine-fingers waved him off.
His white-toothed grin was back. “Here’s what we’re not going to do,” he said. “We’re not going to have that old cliché discussion about doing things the hard way or the easy way.”
He returned the cranial rig to my head, and reached into his pocket for a roll of surgical grade nano-pore tape.
I saw what he was about to do, and I tried to make it hard for him, shifting and turning my head, trying to buck the SCAPE rig off of my scalp. Trying to twist away from his hands.
Nine-fingers worked swiftly, despite my best efforts to interfere. He clearly had experience with doing this to unwilling participants. He got seven or eight good wraps of tape around my head, the adhesive pulling my hair and threatening to tear my skin in several places.
When he was done, he backed up to evaluate his handiwork. Satisfied that I couldn’t jar the cranial rig out of place, he ejected the Fathom Curve chip from the SCAPE deck, and pulled an unmarked replacement chip out of his jacket pocket.
He slipped the new chip into the loading slot of the SCAPE deck, and then turned back to me. “Let’s just skip the ‘easy way’ shit, and go right to the hard part.”
He reached out and hit the play tab.
Instantaneous shift…
My body is male this time. Again, I just know it, without being able to say why.
I’m strapped to a table, and my head is locked into some sort of clamp that holds it perfectly still. My jaw is free to move, but the rest of my skull is utterly immobilized.
Despite the restraints, my body is trembling. Sobs and senseless whimpers slip past my quivering lips.
Some kind of machine hangs just above my face, not more than a centimeter or two from the tip of my nose. A tapered ceramic ring extends below the machine, to center over my left eye, uncomfortably close to my cornea. At the core of the ring is a hollow metallic cylinder, encircling a disc of translucent glass or crystal.
It’s some kind of nozzle. No… Something optical. Some sort of lens.
I try to close my eyes, but my eyelids are held open by something I can’t see. I strain against my bonds, my pulse racing, my muscles cramping with futile exertion. I’m not going anywhere. Whatever is about to happen to me, I cannot escape. I can’t even shut my eyes to block out the sight.
Something clicks inside the machine, and I hear the faint whine of charging capacitors. I know what this is now. It’s a laser. Not a low-intensity pointing device, or an optical alignment tool. This is the real thing.
The output won’t be a few milliwatts. It will be something in the kilowatt or megawatt range.
The reek of ammonia fills the air as I feel my bladder cut loose. I have pissed myself. Soiled myself like an infant, but I don’t care, because the laser’s diode flares to life.
The beam that stabs into my eye is so brilliant that it defies description. No sun is this bright. No nuclear flash could ever be this searingly intense.
My head is flooded with impossibly powerful green light, and the pain is more nauseatingly brutal than anything I have ever imagined. It is beyond anguish. Beyond agony.
I feel the burning away of my outer cornea, hear the sizzling rumble as the liquids in my eyeball begin to boil. Perhaps I feel the bulge as the tender orb expands, or perhaps it is my imagination. But I hear it when it ruptures. Feel it when my eye bursts from its tortured socket and explodes into pink mist and darkness.
My shrieks are so loud that I can actually feel them damaging my larynx. My back is arched off the table in the rigor of uncontrollable muscular contraction. The tension against my pinioned feet is so extreme that I feel the ligaments tear, and the bones of my ankles begin to separate.
All control of my sphincters is gone. I am shitting myself like an animal. Thrashing within the limits of my restraints with bone-breaking frenzy, and the intensity of the pain in my ruined eye has only begun to climb toward its zenith.
But this is not over. The laser is moving to the right. Centering itself over my remaining eye.
There is no time to prepare. No way to prepare. The laser fires again, and my agony is multiplied by some exponential factor that far exceeds the laws of algebraic increase.
The world is total blackness, shot through with illusory flashes of surreal colors as my brain tries vainly to cope with the loss of both optical sensors.
I am screeching, crying, surging wildly against the restraints, and then I am choking on my own vomit. I cannot breathe, cannot turn away to clear my throat, cannot even scream as the scalding contents of my stomach are aspirated down my windpipe and into my lungs.
And then there is the tiniest blip, like the discontinuity of a badly spliced piece of video.
I’m back where I started a few minutes ago, strapped to the table, with the laser lens hovering above my left cornea.
It is all happening again, and it’s not better the second time around. It’s worse.
And the third time is somehow worse again.
I lose count of the repetitions. Each time it is real. Each time it is me. Each time it is more excruciating and humiliating than anything I’ve ever imagined.
And each time—with the tiny blip of discontinuity—it starts again, and I find myself sliding into a deeper layer of Hell.
My right eyeball explodes for the fifteenth time. Or is it the fiftieth?
Shift…
I was back in the chair in Leanda Forsyth’s apartment, with Nine-fingers standing a few meters away.
“Just so you know,” he said, “that little clip you just experienced is not as ugly as this can get. In fact, it’s not even close.”
I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t even sure that I could still talk.
Nine-fingers retracted his hand from the faceplate of the SCAPE deck. “You believe me, don’t you?”
I tried to find my voice. I had no idea where it had gone.
He patted his jacket pocket. “We can move on to something nastier, if you need more convincing.”
The first sound out of my throat was a muffled croak. I swallowed and tried again. “Nnn…”
Nine-fingers showed me his best grin. “What was that? I didn’t quite catch it.”
“Nnnn… Nnnnn… Noooo…”
“See?” said Nine-fingers. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
I didn’t respond.
“Now that we’ve got some calibration, we can get back to my original question,” he said. “How much are you being paid, Mr. Stalin?”
My brain was still reeling. I searched it for an answer, and blurted out the first thing that popped into my mind. “Two hundred and fifty K…”
That number wasn’t right, and Nine-fingers seemed to know it immediately. “A quarter of a mill? For a missing persons case? That seems a bit high to me...”
It wasn’t a bit high. It was ridiculously high, even for a client with Vivien Forsyth’s means.
Nine-fingers reached for his pocket, and I tried frantically to remember the correct figure.
Before I could speak, he keyed something into his phone. “I’m not going to quibble over details,” he said. “If you say you’re getting a quarter of a mill, I’ll double it. Five hundred K.”
“For what?”
Nine-fingers looked annoyed for the first time. “What do you think, shithead? For swimming naked with the fucking dolphins? I’m talking about a half a million to go home and forget this case. Let the cops handle it.”
I couldn’t help myself. It slipped out before I could stop it. “Or what?”
Nine-fingers rolle
d his eyes. “Don’t be stupid, okay? You know what the ‘or-what’ is… First, you spend a couple of days examining the nastier parts of my private SCAPE collection. And then, when your brain has been reduced to jibbering mush, you get to take a walk out of a high window. Or you get minced by a runaway hover-car. Or maybe go for a swim in a bathtub. Without dolphins.”
I didn’t know how to respond, so I kept my mouth shut.
“I think we should just off you,” he said. “And I still can, if you make me do it. But my orders are to try simple bribery first.”
Nine-fingers looked at his watch. “In about three hours, a messenger is going to knock on your door with a package. A half mill, in non-sequential bills of medium denomination. If you accept the package, then you accept our deal. You call your client and say you’re off the case. Give her any excuse you want. Tell her you’ve come down with terminal hangnails, or you’ve been abducted by aliens from fucking outer space. I don’t give a shit. But you stay the fuck away from Leanda Forsyth and anything related to her case, and everything will be fine.”
“If you don’t answer your door, and the messenger comes back with his package, we’ll know you’ve rejected our deal. If that happens, you’re fucked. The same goes if you take our money, and don’t keep your end of the bargain. Either way, we’ll be coming after you. And this little dance tonight is nothing compared to what we’ll do then. Understand?”
I nodded.
“Good,” Nine-fingers said.