by Jeff Edwards
The senator coasted past at head-level, and snatched a grab rail jutting out from a run of pipes. He was moving too fast, and he didn’t have the skill to absorb the extra energy gracefully. His body smacked into the pipes and rebounded, nearly pulling loose his handhold.
“Now, now my dear,” he said. “There’s no need to resort to profanity.”
He was trying hard to project his usual aura of casual control, but I could tell that his collision with the pipes had pretty much knocked the wind out of him.
Vivien gave him a hard little smile. “Pardon me,” she said in an overly sweet voice. “How about my lying, backstabbing, cowardly murdering fuck-head of a husband? Is that better?”
The senator raised a disapproving eyebrow. “You’ve been hanging out in bad company, Vivien. It’s affecting your manners.”
He was struggling to simulate an air of confidence that he obviously wasn’t feeling. There was something almost pitiful about his attempted bluster. Especially when compared to the courageous example being set by his wife.
Vivien snorted. “You’re cozying up to the criminal scum who killed our daughter, and I’m the one hanging out in bad company?”
A shape sailed past us. Nine-fingers darted ahead to another grab bar, where he repeated his midair catch routine, parking the cocooned body of Messenger-boy close to the transparent sphere.
“I really had no choice,” the senator said. “Once Leanda started talking to that Dancer woman, it was only a matter of time until it all came apart.”
“Until all what came apart?” Vivien snapped.
The body of Arm-twister came floating in. Nine-fingers hung the cocooned thug in the air, next to the inert form of his cancelled partner.
Senator Forsyth chuckled. “This is not an adventure vid, my dear. And we have not reached the scene where the villain explains his master plan to the captive heroes.”
A buzzer sounded, and every warning lamp in the lab began pulsing with yellow light as the two halves of the geodesic sphere began to separate. I had no idea what was about to happen, but I knew that I wanted to delay it as long as possible.
“You don’t have to explain anything,” I said. “I’ve got all the major pieces of the puzzle now. I’m still missing a couple of tiny details, but nothing that will stop the Feds from convicting you. With the evidence I’ve already given them, I’d say there’s a brainlock in your very near future.”
The senator pointed his counterfeit smile in my direction. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, Mr. Stalin. We have also not reached the part of the adventure vid where the intrepid detective bluffs his way out of trouble.”
“I’m not bluffing,” I said. “I can prove it.”
“And how do you propose to do that?”
Jiro swam into my field of vision and began helping Nine-fingers maneuver the bodies of Arm-twister and Messenger-boy between the two halves of the open sphere.
“Simple,” I said. “By telling you what I know, and then explaining exactly how I communicated that information to the Federal investigators. You won’t have any trouble checking my story, by the way. Ninety seconds after I tell you how I did it, you’ll know for a fact that I’m not lying.”
The buzzer sounded again, and the blink rate of the flashing lights increased by fifty-percent. The halves of the sphere began sliding together.
Senator Forsyth’s phony smile was not quite as broad now. “Go on.”
“It started with Rhiarra Dancer’s large data set algorithm,” I said. “She’d figured out how to identify the POV character in a SCAPE recording. No problem so far, right? Because you’re Mr. Law-and-Order. You’re all about waving the justice flag, and marching with the boys in blue. But Rhiarra decided to go after a heavy perpetrator. Her very first target was the most well-known SCAPE criminal of them all: the infamous Dream Snatcher.”
The geodesic hemispheres met with a resounding clunk. The cocooned bodies of Messenger-boy and Arm-twister floated within the sphere.
“You might want to speed up your story,” the senator said. “I’d hate for you to be interrupted just when we’re getting to the good parts.”
“We’re almost to the good part now,” I said. “Because you didn’t really care who turned out to be Dream Snatcher. Whatever his identity, he’d be just another criminal snapped up by the justice system. Grist for a good campaign speech, but otherwise not of any interest to you. Until, that is, Rhiarra Dancer actually identified Dream Snatcher as Akimura Jiro. And that’s when you got the idea…”
“What idea?” Vivien asked.
“Yes, Mr. Stalin,” the senator said. “Do enlighten us. What idea are you speaking of?”
Jiro floated over to a lab table, and extracted a familiar-looking object from an open rack of twenty or so. Heavy gray plastic, resembling a shock rod melded into the body of a flashlight. I’d found one just like it in his desk, but I still had no idea what the thing was for.
“The big idea,” I said. “The one that changed everything. The idea that made you cross the line.”
The senator nodded. “Get on with it…”
“Jiro wasn’t just the son of a rich man,” I said. “He was the son of a secretive rich man. A veritable hermit, who’s burrowed so far out of the public eye that the human race has practically forgotten his existence. A man you could blackmail, not just for a few million, but for a lifetime of unending wealth. The riches of a very old and extremely insular family empire, with pockets so deep that your own fortune must have seemed paltry by comparison. Perhaps even enough to buy a presidency…”
This last was pure supposition, but not too much of a stretch. Forsyth struck me as the kind of guy who always wanted more than he had. More money. More prestige. More power.
Vivien’s normally impassive face clouded over. “You bastard! You rotten, treacherous bastard! You did this for money? How fucking rich do you need to be?”
Jiro plugged the nozzle end of the device into a matching receptacle in one of the metal bands that subdivided the sphere. This done, he pulled out a data pad and began working the screen with rapid finger motions.
“It isn’t blackmail,” the senator said. “It’s more of a partnership. A long term relationship, with benefits flowing in both directions.”
“Yes,” I said. “You sacrificed Rhiarra Dancer to protect the only living son of Akimura Hideaki. I guess that must have seemed like a fair trade to you. One run-of-the-mill police technician for the heir to an empire. But then Leanda got involved. And you didn’t know how much Rhiarra had told her.”
Now it was the senator’s face that was clouding over. “She wouldn’t leave it alone! After that Dancer woman got her stirred up, Leanda would not leave the goddamned story alone.”
I would have shrugged, but the cocoon wouldn’t let me. “She was an investigative reporter,” I said. “That was her job.”
“Not to investigate me!” the senator shouted. “Not her own father.”
I didn’t bother to point out the irony of what he’d just said. My attention was drawn to the sphere.
A mist was coalescing inside the chamber, billowing and roiling like tendrils of restless smoke. It swirled around the two cocooned bodies, darkening as it spun.
Comprehension dawned on me slowly. I’d heard of nano-assemblers. These were the opposite. Nano-disassemblers.
That writhing cloud was a swarm of nano-machines, programmed to take apart matter one molecule at a time. And in this case, the matter in question happened to be the bodies of two recently-deceased human beings.
The next words of the senator’s rant died on his lips as he caught sight of what was happening inside the chamber.
The lab filled with a low whistling noise that might have sounded like a cyclone if not for the acoustic barrier of the spherical enclosure. The bodies of the two thugs began to erode before our eyes. Flesh, hair, fingernails, and every other external surface etched away at an incredible rate—like a ludicrously-powerful sandblaster working at top spe
ed. The spiraling cloud took on a sickening pink-red hue as the ravenous machines tore away microscopic particles of human tissue, and then ripped apart the very cells from which the tissue was made.
The whistling sound was joined by grinding and squelching noises that triggered profound feelings of disgust.
In a handful of seconds, the exposed surfaces of both corpses were slick with blood and lymph. All traces of skin eaten away by the voracious biomechanical whirlwind. The subcutaneous fat layers lay bare, with sections of muscle, bone, and tendon starting to show through. Then the connective tissues began to fail, the fascia gnawed too thin to maintain compression of the entrails. The bodies literally came apart, loops of intestine and other internal organs oozing out through the ends of the plastic filament cocoons like meat being squeezed out of a tube.
The spectacle was horrifying and brutally fascinating at the same time. It was the classic train wreck situation: too revolting to watch, but too compelling to look away from.
The plastic cocoon fibers were not being eaten. Nor were shoes, or articles of clothing, or belt buckles, or the inner surfaces of the chamber, or anything else that wasn’t organic human matter. The nano-bots had been programmed to disassemble human tissue, and leave everything else intact.
My stomach rebelled and my mouth flooded with saliva. I had never seen anything like this. Not even in the jungles around Iguazu, during the worst days of my Army combat tour. And somehow, the fleeting memories of those past horrors broke the spell.
I closed my eyes and turned my head as far as I could, fighting to quell the gorge rising in my throat before my stomach could empty itself. Whatever fate was in my near future, it would not be improved by vomiting in zero gravity. Perhaps my single saving grace was the fact that I couldn’t smell what was happening inside the sphere. The wet copper odor of blood and the stench of perforated bowel never reached me. That would have definitely pushed me over the edge.
From behind the safety of my tightly-closed eyelids, I could hear Vivien sobbing quietly, the sound nearly masked by the noises from the churning nano-cloud. My body was still bound by the cocoon, so I couldn’t reach out to her. And there were no words of comfort that I could offer, because I knew that her agile brain had rushed ahead of mine to the logical conclusion.
This was the secret of her daughter’s disappearance. Leanda hadn’t climbed out a window, or sneaked out of the building in disguise. Her body been smuggled out of her apartment one molecule at a time. She’d been torn to microscopic pieces by some countless number of nano-disassemblers, programmed to gobble up anything with her DNA signature, and nothing else.
Where had all the nano-bots gone? Down the drain? Out through the ventilation ducts, or some window left open for exactly that purpose? I didn’t know, and it didn’t really matter.
Jiro and his boys must have taken a chance, loosing a swarm of rapacious nano-machines outside of the containment sphere. But maybe it hadn’t been that much of a risk. If the software controlling the nano-bots was good enough, the swarm would ignore anything that didn’t perfectly match the target criteria. And maybe there was even some kind of self-termination program, ordering the bots to disassemble each other after their primary task was complete.
I couldn’t be sure of that, of course. I knew practically nothing about the technical limitations of nanotechnology, but—if such things were possible—Akimura Nanodyne would know how to do them.
The sounds of the mechanical cyclone dropped to a whisper, and then faded to silence.
I mentally counted to ten before opening my eyes. If the nano-disassemblers weren’t done with their work, I didn’t want to watch the final act.
The sphere was empty, except for countless circlets of free-floating plastic filament and the shoes, belts, and garments of the two dead thugs. As far as I could tell, no trace of the bodies remained. Not so much as a speck of blood or an eyelash. The nano-machines had eaten them, from teeth to toenails.
Where had the bots gone? Had they been sucked out through the capillary pipes at the poles of the chamber? That seemed logical, or at least possible.
A sideways glimpse at Vivien showed that her eyes were still clamped shut. So were the senator’s.
It was time for me to seize the verbal initiative again. The chances that I could bluff our way out of here were effectively zero, but I simply didn’t have any other cards to play.
“My first major clue was the Crime Scene Forensics Report,” I said. “It was right there in the evidence notations from Leanda’s apartment.”
The senator opened his eyes and blinked rapidly, carefully not looking in the direction of the spherical chamber. His face was the color of rice paper. “What are you talking about? What was there?”
“The trace evidence,” I said. “Or rather, the lack of trace evidence.”
“I’m not following you,” the senator said.
“There were no signs of Leanda’s blood in the apartment,” I said. “And no stray hairs. That’s how I knew. I can’t believe LAPD missed something so obvious. They should have taken one look at that report and classified the apartment as a murder scene.”
“You’re talking in circles,” the senator said. “The lack of blood suggests the absence of violence. Why should that make the police suspect homicide?”
“Because there should have been blood,” I said. “Tiny traces of it, all over the apartment. From every time Leanda nicked a finger, or brushed her teeth a little too hard, or had any of the other countless tiny accidents that happen to every one of us. Not to mention blood from her menstrual cycle. I’m not talking about a puddle on the carpet from a stab wound or a bullet hole. I mean dried droplets and stains that are nearly microscopic. The stuff you never quite get rid of completely, no matter how carefully you clean. Quantities too small to see, but not too small to be detected by hemotropic scanners.”
The senator said nothing, so I forged ahead. “The real giveaway was that there was none of Leanda’s DNA in the apartment at all. Not any. No hairs. No saliva on a drinking glass. No skin cells. The human body sheds nearly half a million epithelial skin cells every day, but police forensics didn’t find a single one from your daughter in her own apartment. Not one.”
Senator Forsyth wore a stunned expression.
I did my best to bore into him with my eyes. “Does that strike you as a bit strange, Senator? Because it was driving me crazy until I realized that Akimura Nanodyne is at the cutting edge of nanotechnology. They build nano-disassemblers that can take apart anything. And then it occurred to me that the favored son of the Akimura family had a personal interest in making your daughter disappear. Forever. After that, all the pieces of the puzzle started to come together.”
“It sounds like you’ve got everything all figured out,” the senator said dully.
Again, I wanted to shrug, but couldn’t. “I’m still missing the odd detail or two.”
“Like what?” he asked.
“Well, I don’t know exactly who was in the apartment when Leanda was murdered. I know for a fact that Jiro was there, and his friend here with the missing finger.”
I cut my eyes toward Nine-fingers. “Sorry, buddy. I don’t know your real name.”
I looked back to the senator. “There were also two others that I haven’t identified yet. According to Jiro, he just stood around and recorded it all on SCAPE. It was the other guys who committed the murder.”
“I never said that!” Jiro snapped.
“Yes you did!” Vivien said just as loudly. “You even gave us their names. Aoki, Masami, and Toju.”
She looked at Nine-fingers. “You’re Yoshida Aoki, right? I mean, we know that’s not your real name. But that is the false identity you’ve been using, isn’t it?”
Nine-fingers was staring at Jiro now.
Jiro said something to him in Japanese. I didn’t understand the words, but the tone was placating.
“I’ve got a question for you, Aoki-san,” I said. That wasn’t his real n
ame, but Nine-fingers, knew that I was talking to him. “Have you ever wondered why Jiro suddenly decided to give up the Dream Snatcher role? He was the star of the show for the first dozen or so recordings, right? Then he handed the ball to you, and he never touched it again. Doesn’t that make you curious?”
“You’re dead,” Nine-fingers growled. “I don’t talk to corpses.”
I couldn’t resist the obvious jab. “Corpses? You mean like your two pals, who just got atomized? Funny how often that happens to people who associate with Jiro, isn’t it? One minute, they’re laughing and scratching. The next minute, they’re ground up too small for fish food.”
I kept going before Nine-fingers could respond. “Let’s get back to the SCAPE thing for a second. Jiro has been pulling his own Dream Snatcher recordings off the street, did you know that? Don’t take my word for it. Check your distribution channels, or whatever. Your recordings are flooding the market. Jiro’s are quietly disappearing. Want to know why? Ask Jiro.”
The buzzer sounded again, and the two halves of the geodesic sphere began to separate.
“I think we’ve heard enough,” Jiro said.
My eyes stayed locked on Nine-fingers. “He doesn’t want you to know why, but I’m going to tell you anyway.”
“I said that’s enough!” Jiro shouted.
“Because Rhiarra Dancer might have emailed her algorithm to a friend, or stored it on some server outside of LAPD’s influence. Somebody could be using it right now to track down the Dream Snatcher. And Jiro wants to make damned sure they go after you, instead of him.”
Jiro pushed off hard, and started floating in my direction. “That’s a fucking lie!”
“No, it’s not,” I said. “You make your friends as expendable as your enemies.”
When he was about an arm’s length away, Jiro latched onto a grab bar and braked to a halt. He gave me a shove that sent me floating toward the open sphere.
It took every gram of willpower to keep the rising fear out of my voice as I sailed toward the site of my death. I had no weapons left but words. All I could do was keep talking, and hope that something I said would alter the balance of the situation.