Active Memory

by Dan Wells

  “Yes,” Hendel hissed. “The hand.”

  “That’s evidence in an ongoing investigation—”

  “Federal statute 7o.3482,” said Bennett. “By running a blood test on that hand, you have violated my employer’s rights, and as such you have opened yourselves to full legal reprisal, even in the instance of an active investigation, as explained in substatute 2.6r4. Surrender the hand immediately and we will not press charges.”

  The desk officer looked back and forth between Bennett and Hendel. “I’ll have to talk to the chief.”

  “I’ve already talked to her,” said Hendel, barely containing her anger. “Do what she says.”

  “Please move quickly,” said Bennett. “I don’t have all night.”

  The desk officer turned and hurried through an unmarked door. Hendel practically growled her next words to Bennett.

  “You can wait here,” she said. “He’ll be back in a second. Carneseca, you’re with me.” Carlo Magno started to protest, but Hendel cut him off with a glare. “Don’t even start with me, sir. Miss, in here, please.”

  Marisa looked at her father one more time, seeing the pain in his eyes; she saw the confusion in Omar’s, and the passionless triumph in Ramira Bennett’s, and the grumpy fatigue in Hendel’s. Marisa grabbed her purse from a chair and went into the office.

  Detective Hendel closed and locked the door behind them.

  “What on earth is going on?” asked Marisa.

  “I wish I could say it was just another day in the LAPD,” said Hendel, “but this is unusual even for me.” The detective sat in a chair behind the desk, and gestured at another chair for Marisa.

  Marisa stayed standing. “Why does she want the hand?”

  “I’m supposed to be the one asking you the questions.”

  “It’s not evidence,” said Marisa, ignoring the comment completely. She planted her fists on the desk. “It’s human remains.”

  “Please don’t argue about laws that you’ve obviously never read.”

  Marisa’s eyes went wide, and then she narrowed them in a tight scowl. “Those laws sound stupid.”

  “I’m glad you’re reacting so maturely,” said Hendel. “Now: I need you to calm down, and stop asking questions, and answer just a couple of minor—”

  Marisa wasn’t done. “How are you supposed to find out what happened to Zenaida de Maldonado without the only piece of evidence that she might still be alive?”

  “I assure you that we are doing everything in our power,” said Hendel. “Which is precious little these days, but even with megacorps running the government, we can still investigate a murder. And we are still very good at it.”

  “So, Bennett works for a megacorp,” Marisa said. The slight change in Hendel’s expression told her she was right. “Which one?”

  Hendel straightened up, fixing her posture and taking a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Miss Carneseca, but there are certain aspects of this case that I am not at liberty to discuss. Let me tell you the part that I can discuss, and we’ll see if maybe you can shed some light on it.”

  “We can try,” said Marisa, and after a moment she sighed and sat in the chair. “But I was only two when it happened, so I don’t know what I can tell you.”

  “You people are all so hung up on that car crash,” said Hendel. “That was fifteen years ago; this attack happened last night. And I wanted to talk to you because the attack went down involving a gang called La Sesenta.”

  The words hit Marisa like a punch in the stomach. “That’s my brother’s gang.”

  “It is,” said Hendel. “My research tells me that most of your family has no communication with Jesús ‘Chuy’ Carneseca, and your very angry father confirmed that. But I understand that you stay in touch with him.”

  “Is he okay?” asked Marisa. She didn’t talk to her oldest brother often, but the detective was right—she was probably the only one in the family who talked to him at all.

  Was this what her father didn’t want her to know? That Chuy was somehow involved with all of this?

  “As far as we know, your brother is fine,” said Hendel. “The severed left hand was the only bodily remnant recovered at the scene, aside from a few blood spatters that our forensics team is still sorting through. It’s possible someone was shot, but we’ve been watching the hospitals—if any of the gangsters from either side were hurt badly enough to need one, they haven’t gone.”

  “They probably can’t afford it,” said Marisa. “I know Chuy can’t.” She hesitated a moment, then quickly sent him a message: Are you okay? Call me.

  Detective Hendel watched her. Had she noticed when Marisa sent the message?

  “Do you know where your brother is now?” asked Hendel.

  “No.”

  “Do you know where he lives?”

  Marisa paused, wondering if she should tell the truth or not. She didn’t want to be the reason her own brother ended up in jail, but if he’d hurt someone—if he’d killed anyone, let alone Zenaida de Maldonado—then he needed to be stopped.

  She thought about Chuy’s girlfriend, Adriana, and their little boy, Chito.

  She thought about a woman’s severed hand.

  She felt torn in half.

  “Hmm,” said Hendel, watching her. “Let me ask you another question while you think. Has your brother ever mentioned anything about a chop shop?”

  “Is that another gang?”

  “A chop shop is a type of gang,” said Hendel. “The one that shot up La Sesenta last night is called Discount Arms.”

  Marisa frowned. “Are they arms dealers?”

  “Please don’t.”

  “Please don’t what?”

  “I’ve heard every joke you could possibly make,” said Hendel, “and they’re all bad, and it’s very late, and I’d rather we just skip over them and focus on the useful information.”

  Marisa narrowed her eyes, staring at the detective. “What are you talking about?”

  Hendel narrowed her eyes back. “Do you genuinely not know what a chop shop is? I thought you had to, what with your prosthetic and everything.”

  Marisa looked at her metal hand. “Are they—” And then the pieces all clicked into place. “Holy crap, they really are arms dealers!”

  Hendel rolled her eyes. “The black market for replacement body parts—either natural, cybernetic, or gengineered—is booming. How much did you pay for your father’s liver?”

  “More than we could afford.”

  “You could have bought it off the street for half the price. But it would have come from someone else, someone in the wrong place at the wrong time, who someone like Discount Arms or Body Style or half a dozen others kidnapped and literally broke down for parts. They’re kidnappers, murderers, and dealers of the worst kind.”

  Marisa’s jaw was hanging open. “And you think—I mean, these are real?”

  “Unfortunately. They’re a much bigger problem in Asia, but we’re starting to get offshoots and copycats popping up on the West Coast as well.”

  “And you think they have something to do with Zenaida’s hand?”

  Hendel watched her for a moment, probably looking for a new way to say stop asking about the details of the case. Then, to Marisa’s surprise, she answered the question. “Maybe. Probably. Our forensic people couldn’t figure out how or when the hand was severed from the rest of her body, but there is evidence that it was kept on ice for at least a day, which implies a chop shop.”

  “One day?”

  “Maybe more.”

  “Fifteen years?”

  Hendel shook her head. “Three, four days at the absolute most.”

  “So maybe . . .” Marisa still couldn’t believe that something this disgusting—this reprehensible—could be real. With a shock, she realized that that was probably why Hendel had been so open: she’d shared this one detail of the case to help convince Marisa that Chuy was either in real danger or the cause of it. She was trying to make her doubt Chuy enough to give
her his address.

  “Maybe Chuy and his friends were trying to stop them,” said Marisa.

  “Maybe,” said Hendel. “Or maybe they’re fighting for territory. Black-market body parts can be more lucrative than drugs if the gang can hold on to their market.”

  “Chuy would never do this.”

  “Chuy’s in a gang,” said Hendel, her voice rising. “Chuy makes his living by ruining people’s lives—no matter what he’s told you about the group all hanging together, looking out for each other, blah blah blah, that’s the truth at the core of it. He might not be murdering homeless people for eyes and livers, but he’s not exactly planting flowers and teaching kids to read, either.”

  Marisa stared at her, and frowned at a sudden thought. “You don’t need the address,” she said.

  “Yes we do.”

  “His ID is public,” said Marisa. “His address is easily searchable, along with every other aspect of his life. With police access, you can probably tap into his apartment computer and find out what he had for breakfast.” She looked at the detective. “What do you really need?”

  “We need to know where they are,” said Hendel. “Not where they live, but their current location—we’ve already looked, and they’re completely off the grid.”

  “His family?”

  “His whole gang, and all of their families. We can’t find any of them anywhere.”

  “I don’t know where they are—”

  “But you know how to find out,” said Hendel. “You’ve probably already messaged him about this just in the last couple of minutes. Am I right?”

  Marisa said nothing.

  “Chuy trusts you,” said Hendel, “in a way that no one in La Sesenta will ever trust anyone who works in this building. And after what you just learned about the chop shops, and about what probably happened to Zenaida, now you understand exactly how important it is that we find them.”

  FOUR

  Marisa pulled the trigger and held it, feeling the rifle buck in her hands and watching the stream of bullets eat through the drone like a firehose spray through a sand castle. The magazine emptied and the rifle clicked, and Marisa snarled as the drone fell to the asphalt with a clatter. She slapped a new magazine into the well and fired another burst into the dead drone.

  “Easy there, sparky,” said Anja.

  “Sorry,” said Marisa. She gritted her teeth and fired one last, short burst. “I just really needed to destroy something.”

  “In that case,” said Anja, and her eyes glinted wildly behind her glasteel visor, “I’ll join you.” She fired a burst from her own weapon—not bullets but a hot stream of liquid fire, melting the shattered drone fragments into slag. “This game is the best for that.”

  Marisa looked around at the blasted landscape: a virtual reality simulation of a postapocalyptic city, inside of a video game called Overworld. The game had dozens of different maps—a fantasy castle, a pirate island, a space station—but Marisa and her friends had grown obsessed with the apocalyptic one lately because it gave them a chance to cosplay as characters from their favorite book series.

  And, of course, it was a really great way to work out some stress.

  “Come on,” said Marisa. “Let’s go find some more gun drones to murder.”

  “You watch your mouth,” said Anja, slinging her flamethrower over her shoulder and following Marisa through the ruins. “When a true AI finally emerges and we have to start recognizing drones as people, that kind of talk will be super racist.”

  Sahara’s voice crackled through the comm system, shouting their in-game call signs. “Happy! Heartbeat! Do you two intend to actually play the game at some point? Quicksand and I just got triple-teamed by some enemy agents, and some backup would have been, you know, your gorram jobs.”

  “Sorry,” said Anja. “We were punishing a nuli for its species’ future insolence.”

  “It’s okay,” said Marisa, “we’ll be right there.”

  “Right where?” asked Sahara. “The fight’s over now; we lost a whole wave of minions.”

  “Lighten up,” said Quicksand—their friend Jaya, who lived in Mumbai. Virtual reality made the distance meaningless. “It’s not like this is a real match.”

  “Two points for Jaya,” said Anja. “This was specifically established as a blow-off-steam match.”

  “I don’t know about the rest of you,” said Fang, the fifth player on their team, “but I blow off steam by winning.”

  “Exactly,” said Sahara. “Losing is only going to ruin your night.”

  “Day,” said Fang. “Some of us live in real cities.” Fang hailed from Beijing, a full fourteen hours ahead; while the girls in Los Angeles were pushing midnight, Fang was already well into tomorrow afternoon.

  “Heads up,” said Anja, and pulled Marisa down into cover. “Enemy agent in the fallen silo.”

  “Take him out,” said Sahara.

  “The most dangerous game,” Anja whispered dramatically. The drones on the map were neutral, guided by the game itself, but the agents were other players: five on five, on a mission to destroy each other’s vaults. Anja grinned. “This is how you blow off steam.”

  Marisa had been near a few real-world firefights, and she’d even been shot at a couple of times, but she’d never been an active participant outside of Overworld. She propped her gun across the top of a ruined wall, and closed one eye while she looked down her scope. The other agent was alone—the enemy Sniper or Spotter, she wasn’t sure which—and easy pickings for a team of two. Anja slithered forward, hidden by rubble, trying to get into range with her flamethrower, and Marisa watched the agent approach, oblivious. His in-game avatar was some kind of fantasy ranger, with a black cloak and a spiky longbow, which wasn’t a perfect fit for the postapocalyptic city but didn’t feel out of place, either. She watched through the scope, waiting for Anja’s signal, as he passed in front of a crumbling brick wall.

  “Now!” shouted Anja, leaping up and letting loose with her flamethrower. The ranger cast a wind spell that launched him up and backward, and at the apex of his leap he nocked and fired an arrow back at Anja. She dodged, but only barely, and screamed at Marisa to take the shot. “Get him! He’s getting away! Shoot him!”

  Marisa thought about her brother Chuy, trapped in a real shootout, Zenaida’s hand lying on the ground beside him, and her hands shook so much that when she finally squeezed the trigger the bullet went far to the side. The ranger landed behind a crumbling building, disappearing into the ruins, and Marisa dropped her rifle.

  “I’m sorry, girls.” She blinked, opening the Overworld interface, and left the game. “I can’t do this.” The city disappeared, and she hung in black emptiness for a moment before appearing in their team lobby. She trembled, remembering the video of the shootout—thinking of the chop shop, and Zenaida’s hand, and of the rest of her body, and it was too much, and then her friends appeared in the lobby with her: first Jaya, then Anja and Fang. Jaya wrapped her in a tight hug, no less comforting for being in virtual reality—she could feel it, and she could appreciate the love behind it, and she hugged Jaya back. Last of all came Sahara; she’d probably stayed behind to apologize to the other team for jumping out before the match was over.

  “I’m so sorry,” said Marisa. “I just couldn’t.”

  “No worries,” said Sahara. “We can forfeit a game without the whole world ending.”

  “Who are you?” asked Fang. “And what have you done with Sahara?”

  “It’s a blow-off-steam game,” said Anja. “That’s different.”

  Fang feigned disgust. “This is why your nation isn’t a world superpower anymore.”

  “My nation is a verdammt Wunder,” said Anja. “Don’t lump me in with the Americans just because I live with them.”

  “This is how I blow off steam,” said Jaya, smiling and holding Marisa tightly. “Listening to my best friends argue about stupid crap.”

  Marisa laughed. “It is kind of comforting, isn’t it?�
��

  “You heard the girl,” said Jaya, scowling fiercely at the other girls. “She finds pleasure in your antics! Dance, monkeys, dance!”

  Anja blinked, and her apocalyptic avatar was replaced with a chimpanzee, complete with a tutu and a tiara.

  “Yes!” shouted Jaya. “Now say something stupid about things that don’t matter!”

  “Fang!” shouted the Anja Chimpanzee. “That’s it. Just, Fang.”

  “Tā mā de,” growled Fang, and blinked herself into a VR tiger. The two girls chased each other around the room, while Sahara rolled her eyes and Marisa and Jaya laughed themselves silly.

  “Okay,” said Sahara, walking toward the center of the room. “Okay. Calm down. Everybody ca—” A chimpanzee flew by her head, and she glared at it for a second before speaking again. “Everybody calm down. We have an actual job to do here, you know.”

  “Blow off steam!” chanted the chimp, dangling from a light fixture while the tiger leaped after it again and again, missing by millimeters. “Blow off steam!”

  “I’m not talking about the game,” said Sahara. “I’m talking about this severed hand.”

  Fang immediately turned back into a human, peering at Sahara suspiciously. “You have my attention.”

  Sahara blinked, summoning a table in the center of the room. It bore a 3D model of the Overworld map, designed for teams to plan their strategy, but Sahara swept it away, leaving only their team logo: the Cherry Dogs.

  “We’ve brought down a digital drug dealer and a frakking megacorp,” said Sahara. “I think we can figure out what’s going on with this Maldonado business—and when we do, then it can end. The secrets can be out, and the stupid feud behind the Maldonados and Marisa’s family can finally be put to rest.” She looked at Marisa. “It’ll be a start, at least. Marisa’s always there for us, no matter what the problem is. Let’s solve this thing and give her her life back.”

  Marisa felt a renewed surge of affection for the other girls. This was what she’d been searching for, for years: the truth behind the night her life, and her family’s lives, had changed forever. And they were going to help her find it.