Inquisitor (8 page)

Twenty minutes of brisk walking, and she entered a shopping complex kilometers from her hotel. News streams she accessed via her implants showed pictures of her on the crime channels.

She bought strong painkillers along with tinted glasses and a tight woolen cap. A quick scan of the establishments, and she found what she was looking for: a medical center. It was dark and dingy inside, and the carpet threadbare. Just the thing.

The doctor was shady, wearing a stained lab coat and surrounded by yellowing paint and outdated equipment. She seemed half asleep and surprised to see someone walk in.

“Yes?” the doctor said querulously,
as if not sure whether Angel was a customer or an inspector
. A name tag pinned to her coat labeled her as Dr. Woodrow, and she was sixty if she was a day.

The medical center was obviously either a front for dishonest business or only saw the poorest of the poor.
Angel pushed aside her Inquisitor’s instincts, forcing her attention to more urgent matters.

“My hands have been cut. They require stitching.” Angel held them out. Her bandages were starting to bleed red splotches.

“Looks nasty. Please, sit here.” Woodrow indicated a plastic chair next to a bright light.

Angel paused, slightly surprised by the doctor’s lack of curiosity as to how the injuries were sustained. After a beat, she sat, and the “doctor” took out a pair of scissors and snipped away the linen strips. Humming to herself, Woodrow made quick work of stitching the cuts and applied a layer of artificial skin with greater skill than some of the derma-surgeons Angel had seen at HQ.

“The stitches will dissolve in a week. You can peel the covering off then. Try not to use your hands.”

Angel snorted. “Hard not to. I’ll survive. It’s not the first time I’ve had to be patched up.”

“I can see that.”

Angel wondered how much more the doctor had noticed, although if Woodrow recognized her from the bulletins, she didn’t show it. Or she didn’t care. Angel transferred a large cash payment to Woodrow’s account, using her untraceable anonymous credit chit, the one she carried for emergencies.

She stood up, flexing her hands. They hurt, but they’d be useable. “You never saw me.”

Woodrow merely smiled. “That’s my specialty.”

Angel found a beauty salon and had her dark hair bleached white. Red urgent messages had been pouring into her inbox for the last half hour. She didn’t dare access any for fear they could trace her location.

She needed somewhere to go, to stop and think for a while.

It wasn’t long before she was walking down the streets of the entertainment district. Along a narrow but clean side alley she found what she was looking for: an exclusive club catering to the wealthy, the type of place where money could buy almost anything.

At the door, she flashed her credit chit. With a smile, the doorman, an actual human doorman, waved her inside.

She chose a booth at the back, ordered something alcoholic at random along with a rare steak, sat back and relaxed.

For the time being she was safe. An establishment such as this wouldn’t turn her in, even if they knew she was a wanted criminal. In fact, they would more likely have a surreptitious way out she could use in a pinch.

When her meal arrived, she tucked in with a will, slurped her drink, and thought furiously.

“Delivery for a Shining Knight.”

Angel started and looked up to see a courier automaton in front of her. She must have nodded off for a second. She sat up and widened her eyes in an effort to clear them of tiredness. “Pardon?” she said.

“Delivery for a Shining Knight. Please insert a credit chit.”

The automaton extended a small package in one articulated arm, while in the other it held a metallic box with a credit chit insert port.

Angel quickly surveyed the room for anything out of the ordinary. All looked normal.

She inserted her anonymous chit.

“Thank you. Your business is appreciated.”

Angel only nodded as the automaton deposited the package on her table: a hand-sized flat object wrapped in black plastic.

A voice emanated from it.

“Well, hurry up and open it. I went to a lot of trouble.”

Charlotte-Rose.

Moving tenderly, so as not to injure her hands, Angel unwrapped the plastic to reveal a narrow, flat metallic rectangle, about fifteen centimeters long. It was rather gaudily colored a shiny gold, with the logo of Mercurial Logic Incorporated embossed on the bottom left. Etched swirly lines decorated its surface, and the hairlike pattern stirred and took on the semblance of Charlotte-Rose.

Angel couldn’t help but laugh at the childlike face beaming at her.

“Sorry for the Shining Knight reference,” chirped Charlotte-Rose, “but I couldn’t risk using your real name.”

Angel nodded agreement. “I understand. So… you’ve been following me?”

“When I can. It’s… hard for this program to move around. And the more active I am, the easier it is for them to trace me.”

Angel raised an eyebrow. “The more active you are?”

Charlotte-Rose gave a short laugh. “Yes. Sorry. I mean, the way the program works, of course.”

Listening to the girl talk, Angel became more and more wary. Something was off, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. The program’s references to itself as an entity, as if it actually were Charlotte-Rose, were disconcerting. Maybe that was it.

“This device.” Angel’s finger ran over the etched lines. “I take it it’s a way for us to communicate.”

“Yes. It has enough processing capacity to store a version of the program. This way, I can assist you as well as be virtually untraceable.”

“Virtually?”

“Er… my actions will leave a footprint. A signature they can trace, if they are looking.”

“And we can assume they will be. Looking, I mean.” Angel frowned at the design of the device. For such an advanced piece of technology, it was thicker than she expected. “What else can this do, besides give us a means to communicate?” She hefted it in her hand. “It’s thicker and heavier than I expected.”

Charlotte brushed her hair away from her face, a mannerism Angel found endearing, and yet a peculiar way for a program to act. Why include such a gesture?

“Ah, yes,” said Charlotte. “I had it made to my design. Packed with the latest Mercurial Logic Incorporated has to offer.” She shrugged. “Their manufacturing plant is fully automated. As soon as it was made and shipped, I scrubbed the records. Such a small amount of materials won’t be missed.”

Angel snorted and shook her head. “Mercurial are the ones holding you?”

“Yes. They’re too powerful. They own everyone on the planet, and I don’t know who to trust. Anyone who tries to help me ends up—”

“I’m not the first person you asked? Harry Smith? You asked him for help—”

“I don’t want the same thing to happen to you. But I can’t spend the rest of my life locked in here.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. I need to work out what’s going on first.”

“They need to be sure you can’t contradict their story. They’re not going to capture you alive. I sometimes wonder how you can stand it.”

“Stand what?”

“Nothing. Well, I mean…” Charlotte hugged herself, arms across her chest. “I am not allowed outside. They… always forbid me, to keep me safe, they said. If I go out… will I be safe? What if I am hurt? What if I am made… not alive?”

“That’s part of life,” said Angel gently. “We do all we can ourselves to remain safe, and society, along with technology, has made it much easier to avoid and recover from any mishaps. But it still happens. Safety can be a hindrance. Some people…” Angel gave a short laugh. “I’ve known people who relished the thought of danger, the possibility they might die. It added a sense of excitement for them, as if nothing else could motivate them to be their best.”

“Ah… I think I see. The uninspiring existence of safety.”

She certainly has a comprehensive vocabulary
, thought Angel. And she was definitely a smart girl for one so young, being able to put together a program like this. “That’s one way of putting it. For some, safety is stifling. But not for the majority.”

Charlotte-Rose’s green eyes bore into hers. “Do you think people can grow, I mean truly mature, if they are coddled?”

Angel shrugged. “Maybe not. I don’t think we would be the society we are today if everyone was afraid of taking risks. Evolution guided us to what we were, but we have guided ourselves since. There came a stage where our mind rose above the evolutionary cycle. Our intelligence did this; we learned how to alter our environment. Then we changed it to remove the very risks and dangers that made us who we are. We… almost stopped evolving.”

“Without taking risks, we cannot become greater than we are.”

“I didn’t mean to sound like a Genevolve.”

“I’ve heard that term before somewhere. I…” The girl tilted her head to the left, eyes squinted in thought—another gesture that looked extraneous to Angel. “I don’t know where, though. But I know very little about them. I’ll have to find out more.”

“I’ve run into a few over the years. Can’t say they’re better than any other people I know, but they’re definitely more arrogant.” Apart from all being sociopathic murderers. They’d all killed to remove problems, her partners being among them.

Angel toyed with the gold communication device on the table in front of her. She spun it in a circle to see if the girl noticed. Charlotte-Rose didn’t say anything, which probably meant the program didn’t have a way of visually scanning its surroundings from the gadget.

She stood and picked up the device. “I’ll find a hotel room to hole up in. I need to get safe rather than talk. Will you be around to discuss things in a little while?”

“Um… how long is that?”

“Ten minutes, maybe fifteen.”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

Angel left the table and paid for her meal using her emergency credits.

•

This time, she chose a dingy hotel in the center of a seedy district. The room was pay by the hour, and she paid for it to be cleaned again and set up with fresh linens. After waiting patiently for the automatons to do their work, she found herself sitting on a lounge, staring at the double bed, not sure whether she should use it. She pulled the gold communication device out of her pocket and held it in one hand.

“I’ve done some research on Genevolves,” chirped Charlotte-Rose. “But I’ve only found pieces. As I said, I have limited access at the moment.”

“They’re humans who decided we should be evolving faster, further,” Angel clarified. “Their founder pointed to the two percent difference between our DNA and that of the apes we were closely related to. He wondered how advanced another species would be if they were two percent different to humans, then came up with the idea of trying to genetically alter human DNA to see what he could create.”

“What happened to him?”

“He was executed. Once other scientists found out what he was doing, and the news got hold of the story, the swell of public opinion against him forced people to act. Unfortunately, he had managed to create quite a number of ‘children’, as he called them, and they were hidden across the thirty-five systems that were inhabited at the time. He destroyed all his research and facilities with a fusion device. Not that anyone wanted to replicate his ideas. The explosion took out half a city.”

“He abandoned his children? Then they were like me?”

Angel frowned. “No,” she said, her tone sympathetic. “They actually went willingly, or so they say.”

“They’ve been in contact with people?”

“Yes. For centuries, no one heard from them, and then they started reappearing as the driving force behind a few legitimate corporations. Most of them didn’t realize they had… siblings out there. They were surviving on their own, for the most part, not working as an organized force. It was decided they shouldn’t suffer for the sins of their father, so they’ve been mostly left alone.”

Angel yawned and rubbed her tired eyes with the backs of her hands. Her palms were sore and itched fiercely.

“Oh,” exclaimed Charlotte-Rose. “You must be tired. I forget sometimes. Why don’t you sleep?”

Angel blinked. “You can see me?”

“No. I heard you yawn. Put the communication device on your wrist.”

“Why?”

“So it will be easier to carry.”

Angel placed it against the back of her wrist.

Slithering across her skin, a sensation that made her arm hairs stand on end, the communication device molded itself around her wrist. In moments, she wore a shiny gold bracelet, the outside still decorated with swirly lines resembling hair. The screen disappeared as the metal flowed over it.

“If you could give me access to your implants, it would make things easier.”

The girl’s—the program’s—request gave Angel pause. Still, with the Inquisitors’ built-in safeguards, there wasn’t anything it could do to harm her. She stared at the electronic connecting socket from the device, blinking in her implant’s request function. She granted admission. “Level three access only,” she said.

[Thank you. That’s much better. Though it’s strange for me to communicate this way.]

“Strange for a program? That seems unlikely.”

[I don’t get to talk to many people, is what I mean.]

“Uh-huh.”

[You’re the fourth person I’ve ever spoken to.]

Even through the subvocalization, Angel could sense the poor girl’s distress.
I’m the fourth person she’s ever spoken to? What have these people done to her? Though she seems remarkably well adjusted for a child who’s been kept captive and sheltered.

“Well, I’ll free you; then we’ll look at our options. There’s not much I can do for you at the moment, but I’m sure we’ll be able to place you in someone’s care.”

[I’d prefer to make my own way, if that’s possible.]

“I don’t think it is, but we’ll see once this misunderstanding I’m in the middle of is cleared up.”

[I don’t think it will be.]

Angel knew Charlotte-Rose was right. “I need to set the record straight. I didn’t kill Viktor.”