The Tau Ceti Transmutation (Amazon)

by Alex P. Berg

  Paige snickered at me. Perhaps she doubted my commitment to professionalism with regards to Valerie. Admittedly, I might’ve expressed my feelings to Carl with exaggerated verve, but I did intend to stick to the facts when I talked to Val—even if my eyes might sometimes stray south of her neck.

  The cab stopped, and Carl and I let ourselves out onto the sidewalk. The warm Tau Ceti rays slapped me on the neck as heat from the pavement reflected off the ground and rocked me with a stiff uppercut.

  Before me, sandwiched between a perfumery and a quaint boutique advertising designer clothes for toddlers, Valerie’s store baked, both literally and figuratively, in the afternoon Tau Ceti sun. White and pastel yellow drapes hung from inside the windows, framing stacks of baked goods and a vintage chalkboard listing the day’s specials. I glanced at the sign above the front door. It read ‘The Cooling Rack.’ I wondered if the double entendre had been intentional or not.

  As I stood there admiring the sign, Valerie stepped out the front door, which swept shut behind her, puffing slightly as it locked. A display in one of the windows reading ‘Open’ blinked over to ‘Closed.’ Valerie had changed since our encounter earlier in the day, opting for a pair of white butt-huggers and a tank top that were slightly more work appropriate and better at hiding errant dustings of flour than her previous ensemble, though they did nothing to mar her delicious curves.

  Valerie, perhaps not spotting us, started to walk away. I stopped her with a mild shout. “Valerie! Hey! There you are. We’ve been trying to get hold of you all day. When you didn’t answer your Brain, I...” I stuffed my hands into my slacks pockets. “Well, this might sound silly, but I thought something might’ve happened to you.”

  Valerie stopped in her tracks, glancing at me and Carl. “Um…do I know you?”

  “What do you mean, do you know me?” I said. “I’m Rich. The detective? You hired us to investigate that break-in of yours.”

  Valerie shook her head. “I’m…sorry. I think you must have me mistaken for someone else.”

  I blinked, then I turned to Carl and frowned. “Did you set this up? Hire her to act the part of a needy client? Was this all an excuse to get me out of my seat and moving around, and now that she’s been paid she wants nothing to do with me?”

  “What? No,” said Carl.

  “Then what?” I asked as I faced Valerie. “Are you feeling ok, Val? Have you been hitting the mescaline martinis? Suffering from walking blackouts?”

  “Excuse me?” She blinked and shook her head violently. “How would you—? No. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please, go away.”

  Valerie turned and walked down the street. I followed her.

  “We followed the trail from that token, you know,” I said. “Led us to a Veesnu Chapel staffed by a cute Diraxi couple and then to a Professor of Exoneurobiology, name of Fran Castaneva. Any of that ring a bell?”

  Valerie didn’t stop walking, but she did glance back at me. “Wait, Diraxi? Veesnu?” Her eyes darted back and forth furiously. “I… I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please leave me alone.”

  I pressed forth. “We stopped by your apartment on our way back from the spaceport. Someone busted in and tossed the place. We were worried.”

  Valerie stopped and turned, her face flush with rage. “You broke into my apartment?!”

  Her anger forced me back a step. “What? No. The door was ajar. Someone else got there first. We were just looking for—”

  “That’s it! I’m calling the police!” she said, her eyes acquiring a wild sort of look. “I don’t know who you are or what your game is, but I don’t want anything to do with you! If you so much as take one step closer to me I’ll scream for your droid to help. Now STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM ME!”

  Valerie turned and scrammed, fear and dignity taking their turns wrestling over her actions as she vacillated between a hasty jog and a brisk walk.

  Carl, who’d stayed rooted to the ground near Valerie’s shop, joined me. “That didn’t go so well.”

  “You weren’t kidding, right?” I asked him. “This isn’t a weird game you drew up to keep me on my toes?”

  “Sadly, no,” said Carl. “Although now I know what to get you for your birthday.”

  “Very funny.”

  I sighed and rubbed a hand through the hair at the back of my neck. In the heat of the moment, I’d been focused on trying to make sense of Valerie’s change of heart, but as I watched her run away, clearly rattled, I felt a crack in my insides. The fantasy I’d been working on outside Val’s door caught flame and disappeared in a puff of smoke.

  “So…what now?” asked Carl.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I think I need a drink.”

  11

  Feeling any better? asked Paige.

  “Not really,” I said. “That’s the thing about alcohol, though. It makes you more depressed. Honestly, you’d think in all the millennia humans have been around we’d have figured out a better drug of choice, but I guess scientists still haven’t found another chemical cocktail that makes people want to strip down to their birthday suit, party, and kill themselves all at the same time.”

  I sat in the sitting room of my three-story penthouse apartment, my feet propped up on a padded ottoman, a glass of rye and bitters clutched in my hand. Sunlight streamed in through the windows on my left, spilling onto the blended silk and wool fibers of the rug beneath me. Despite my limited case load, the spoils from my grandpappy’s land lease afforded me a few luxuries the majority of out-of-work schmucks couldn’t otherwise afford.

  Carl sat on a divan across from me. He swirled a tumbler of whiskey in his hand, the ice cubes clinking against the side of the glass. He wouldn’t consume the beverage, but drinking alone made me feel more pathetic than I was, so his empathic sensibilities forced him to play along.

  “So is that it?” he asked. “Are we really done for the day?”

  “Done with what? Drinking?” I glanced at my Old Fashioned. “Not by a long shot.”

  “I was referring to the case,” said Carl. “Look, I know drowning your sorrows after a perceived rejection is a time-honored human tradition, but we have work to do.”

  I sipped my cocktail and engaged my neurons. “Wait…are you under the impression we’re still employed?”

  “Well, not as such,” said Carl. “But our investigation is far from over.”

  “You do remember when Valerie told me to get lost, right?”

  “That turn of phrase works better on someone whose memory is fallible,” said Carl.

  “Then you’ll also remember how she threatened to call the police,” I said. “I may not be the best at reading members of the opposite sex, but I’m pretty sure Valerie doesn’t want us involved in her business anymore.”

  Carl stood and started to pace, his footfalls alternating between claps and silence as he moved between the rug and the bare floor. “I know, but aren’t you in the slightest bit intrigued? The planted evidence at her home, the trail leading us to the spaceport and back, and now Miss Meeks’ own change of heart? I know you’ve doubted your own deductive abilities, and perhaps I haven’t been encouraging enough of this private investigation venture, but you have to admit—this is by far the most interesting case we’ve ever had.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Is this an attempt to get me to stop drinking?”

  “It’s not only that,” said Carl. “Come on, Rich. Where’s your sense of curiosity?”

  I tapped my chin as the liquor soaked into my brain. Carl did have a point. I hadn’t entered private investigation because of the earnings prospects, or for the cachet it might provide me with the ladies—which, contrary to my experience with Professor Castaneva, was usually around the order of absolutely nothing. I’d decided to take up my new enterprise because of the mystery, the intrigue, and the promised thrill of the hunt—that, and the knowledge that by doing so I might be able to help people and make a difference in their lives. Carl was right about that f
act. I did care about others. More than I wanted to admit, most of the time. And I still cared about Valerie—a point my handful of whiskey could attest to. But could I help her by solving the case she’d tasked me, even though she wanted nothing to do with me anymore?

  “You know, if we stick with this, we’re probably not going to get paid,” I said.

  “Our payment was scheduled to be in bear claws,” said Carl.

  “A vital resource, if there ever was one.”

  Carl raised both eyebrows.

  “Fine. You’ve won me over,” I said. “I’m curious. And a sense of honor compels me to finish this case, glazed pastries or no. But despite your stirring appeal, we don’t know where to turn next.”

  Carl sat back down, his face bright and eager. Perhaps he secretly wished to solve the case, too. I sometimes forgot that in addition to his base layer of subliminal programmatic coding, he had his own wishes and desires and curiosities, as well.

  “The key is Miss Meeks,” he said. “I can think of three reasons why she might’ve treated you as she did. The first is she’s crazy—which is a possibility, though that option doesn’t match with her displayed behavior earlier today. Despite the claims of many human males, only a miniscule fraction of all women are, in fact, psychotic. The second plausible scenario is she doesn’t remember contacting you, and the third is that she’s lying. Either of the last two possibilities are compelling.”

  I rubbed my chin some more. “I have to admit, Valerie did seem nervous when we met her outside her bakery—even more so than an average woman would be when accosted in a street by a lout like me. So either Valerie is suffering from delusions, or she no longer wants us to solve the mystery she contacted us about. Even if the former is true, she must’ve had a reason for searching us out in the first place.” I snapped my fingers and held up a triumphant digit. “That’s it. That’s our next avenue of investigation. We need to discover the real reason Valerie contacted us.”

  “Precisely,” said Carl.

  I set my drink down on the end table next to my sofa and rubbed my hands in glee, my despondency disappearing like the chill between my warming fingers. “Well, this should be fun. Just like in the old stories. So, what should we do first? Tap her comm links? Find her and tail her? Put the squeeze on her?”

  Oh, I’m sure you’d like to squeeze something of hers, said Paige.

  “Tapping into her communications is both beyond our abilities and illegal,” said Carl. “Tailing her might be productive but would require too much ‘legwork,’ as your antiquated detective inspirations might say. I was thinking we’d start with something a little more orthodox. A research report.”

  “You want to put together a dossier?” I asked. “Well, that’s not quite as much fun, but we’ve got tools at our disposal that shouldn’t make it too painful. Paige, you want to help?”

  Given Paige’s nearly limitless computational power, a slew of information on virtually any person in existence was but a thought away. Of course, Paige could only provide me with data present in the public record, but thanks to the tireless efforts of marketing and solicitation companies as well as freely shared tidbits people posted to social media, that included quite a bit of information.

  Alright, let’s see here, said Paige. Miss Meeks’ full given name is Valerie Constance Meeks, age two hundred and nineteen—

  I whistled. “She’s almost two bills and a score?”

  Modern medical technology is a miracle, isn’t it? said Paige. As I was saying, she’s two hundred and nineteen. A Cetie lifer. Been off planet a few times, based on her photo streams, but hasn’t left in over a decade. Bought her condo about forty-five years ago. Paid a share over market price, but given the housing boom Pylon Alpha and its suburbs were suffering at the time, it’s been a pretty good investment. Price has gone up about three-fold since—

  “Hey, Paige, this is great stuff,” I said, “but seeing as you’re overflowing with algorithms whose primary purposes are filtering information, why don’t you put those circuits of yours to good use and just relate the juicy bits.”

  Paige sent me the digital equivalent of a sigh. Oh, Rich. What would you do without me?

  “Probably fail to get the coffee machine started and lock myself out of my own apartment,” I said. “But that’s neither here nor there. Now—the useful stuff, please.”

  Well, there is something interesting I’ve gathered from Miss Meeks’ public profiles, she said. Apparently she recently broke up with her boyfriend, one Gerrold Stein.

  “And, other than telling me she’s available, this is interesting how?” I asked.

  Because Mr. Stein only shows up in a few standard public government records. Other than that, he’s a virtual ghost. The only mentions of him are through Miss Meeks’ feeds, though I did manage to scrape a photo of him from Valerie’s PhotoHog app. Here.

  Paige flashed me the image via Brain—that of a suntanned, bearded guy with a hook nose and long, black unwashed dreads.

  “Oh, dear lord,” I said. “He’s one of those anti-establishment types. Who wants to bet he grows his own food in a hydroponic vat powered off the fumes from his hookah and his own idealism?”

  Your guess is closer than you think, said Paige. His public record lists an address way outside the city smack dab in the middle of an agricultural field, as far I can tell from satellite imagery. Nighttime images of the same area don’t show any light pollution, and…yup, Pylon Power and Main doesn’t even service that area. This guy’s totally off grid.

  Something clicked for me upstairs. “What kind of odds do you want to offer me this guy’s Brainless?”

  Extremely poor ones, said Paige. Mostly because I already looked him up in the personal listings and found nothing.

  “And if he’s Brainless,” I said, “that would mean there’d be a number of things he could and couldn’t do. He couldn’t, for example, play interactive Brain games. He might, instead, be forced to play ancient, token-powered arcade cabinets if he needed a fix. On the other hand, he could break into someone’s apartment without there being any police Brain record of his presence.”

  Carl nodded, having followed Paige’s half of the conversation through his own feed. “I suppose that’s plausible, though I’m struggling to see why an unBrained, anti-technology type would suffer through, in all likelihood, multiple cab rides, a tube ride, and a climber ride all so he could get to a spaceport to play a vintage video game.”

  “Admittedly, it seems like a stretch,” I said. “But someone went to that trouble, Brain or no. And this Stein fellow’s breakup with Valerie might be the motive that spurred the break-in. Paige, how long ago did these two lovebirds call it quits?”

  About three months ago, if you can believe Valerie’s profiles, Paige said.

  “Hmm. That’s more than I would’ve expected for a passion-driven retaliatory action,” I said. “But who knows. Maybe it took that long for Stein to walk to Val’s place from his dirt farm.”

  “You do realize this is all blatant speculation,” said Carl, “and none of this explains why Mr. Stein would plant evidence in Valerie’s apartment. Or why someone would later turn her place inside out in an attempt to find said evidence. Or even what said evidence is supposed to point to—which, despite our sojourn to downtown Pylon Alpha and the thermosphere, we still don’t have any idea about.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “It doesn’t. But seeing as my lady-crush Valerie expressed interest in rearranging the position of my testicles if I talked to her again, I figure asking somebody else some questions might be a worthwhile avenue to pursue. This Gerrold guy seems like as good a choice as any. So what do you say? You up for a trip to the country?”

  12

  Our car rumbled over the dirt road, transforming every pebble and divot into a jerk that sent me bouncing to and fro over my bench seat.

  “This is ridiculous,” I said to Carl, as we hit a bump that sent me a good two centimeters into the air. “I knew these unBra
ined hippies were anti-technology, but pavement? Really? I thought they drew the line at electronics.”

  The jostling didn’t bother Carl, but he didn’t have various fluid-filled organs inside of him. “I doubt they get around much, to be honest. And it’s not merely the unBrained who travel these paths. They’re meant for agrarian transport. Tractors and plows tear up roads.”

  After leaving the tube station, we’d hopped into a cab and directed the car to take us to the spot Paige had found in her surveys—the purported home of Gerrold Stein. We’d found smooth sailing for the first half hour, travelling along blissful traffic-free stretches of elevated roadway, but eventually we’d exited and turned into a maze of corn and wheat fields stretching as far as the eyes could see—which amounted to about the length of my arm. The stalks of grain were nearly three meters tall.

  “Still, it seems terribly inconvenient,” I said. “You’d think the urban planners would’ve taken the occasional city slicker corn field expedition into consideration when they planned their agrarian supply chains.”

  Stop your grousing, said Paige. We’re almost there.

  With all the subtlety of a kick to the face, the stalks outside my window ended, and my fore field of view was restored—at least partially. In the place of the tall, maize-laden stalks, a grove of mangos—a short and squat breed considering the genus—stretched into the seemingly never-ending fields. After passing a few rows of the trees, their boughs heavy and low to the ground with fruit, our car skidded to a halt.

  “This is it?” I asked.

  This is it, said Paige. Or at least as close as we can get in a moving vehicle. You’ll have to cross the rest of this harsh terrain using those paddle-like implements attached to your ankles.

  “I don’t see anything but mango trees,” I said.