Marlowe and the Spacewoman (27 page)

“Long time, no see, box.  Everything going OK for you?”

“Oh, I suppose.  If you exclude the excruciating boredom and loneliness.  Did I mention that I haven’t had anyone to talk to regularly since this accursed holiday started?”

“You know, you could email the other mailboxes-”

“Email!  Email!  Have you gone completely off your nut!?  You can’t trust email!  Hackers snooping, electronic crashes causing reliability issues, messages rife with viruses and other attached computer mayhem, not to mention the fact that email is the very evil responsible for the increase in my loneliness and agonizing lack of intellectual interaction!  Even with the mandatory mail laws, I don’t see much.  Though perhaps your lack of friends is more to blame for those.  If we were sensible and banned the medium, perhaps I’d be filled to brimming every day with important missives and not just those contest entry forms and aphrodisiac ads you callously toss away unread.  Email!  Pah!”

Marlowe winced.  He was definitely not up to his standard form, making a slip like mentioning email to the mailbox.  He must be getting old.  He decided to move the conversation in a more productive direction.  “This letter that was delivered yesterday, it was our normal carrier who deposited it?”

“Yup.  Nice fellow.  Usually willing to spend some time with a lonely box and chat, though not yesterday, the rummy bounder.  Used to be you could count on the civil service people to stop and chat for hours, never in a rush, back in the day.  Hey, have you given any thought to my suggestion about an umbrella?  I really do worry that I get too much sun.”

“It’s October, box.”

“Yeah, I know, but you always take so long to act on any of my suggestions.”

“I’ll move it up on my list of things to do.”  From ten thousand to nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine.

Marlowe grasped the flag, closed his eyes, and pushed it down.  Nothing happened.  So far, so good.  He opened the box.  Inside was the single, slender white envelope he’d seen on the mailcam last night.  He sniffed around the entrance to the box, noticed nothing untoward.  The gas analyzer in his left nasal cavity also detected nothing dangerous.  The infrared filter picked up nothing, and the ultraviolet filter also gave the envelope a clean bill of health.

“Ah, nuts to this.”  Marlowe grabbed the envelope and tore it open.  He was pretty sure he knew what it was, anyway.  That bastard of a brother.  Sure enough, inside was a Pallmark card.  Marlowe slipped the card out.  He frowned and cursed under his breath.

“Happy Spare Parts Day!” chimed the card.  It opened up and continued its message.  “Brother dearest, here’s to the best sack of spares ever.  From,” and here the card paused for drama, “You know who!”  An animation inside the card showed a man being cut open and, arms and legs flailing, his organs pulled out, one by one.  The caricature bore a strong resemblance to Marlowe.  A soundtrack of faint screams accompanied the cartoon.  His brother had a sick sense of humor.  It wasn’t enough to constantly remind Marlowe that he’d originally been created as a set of spare parts.  No, the Governor had gone on to declare a City-wide holiday, Spare Parts Day, and every year, Marlowe got another inane card.  With all the recent excitement, the milestone had slipped his mind.  Until he saw the return address on the envelope last night.  He had almost hoped it was subterfuge, a trap designed to look like his brother’s annual card, but of course it wasn’t.

He tore the card up, which screamed with every shred of its vocal threads, then threw the sobbing bits down on the ground.  

“Excuse me, but I’ve discovered something you might find interesting.”

“What have you found this time, House?”

“Well, this whole undetectable virus issue has me a bit spooked.  Now, obviously, examining that virus is too dangerous for me, and you rightly shuffled that responsibility off on Huggy Bear.  However, I felt a little more confident looking into the other viruses, trojans, and worms, the ones I did detect in Obedere’s email with the terms and conditions for taking Nina into your custody.”

“I’d completely forgotten about those.  Part of the background noise, I suppose, since he’s always sending harmless stuff like that my way.  And you always detect them.”

“Yes, and as in the past, I detected them quite easily.  Then I began to wonder.  What if they were a flood of red herrings, decoys sent to distract my attentions away from a more sophisticated, insidious agent that infected my virus-scanner and eventually worked its way to your PDI?”

House had Marlowe’s attention.  “And?”

“I was wrong.  As near as I can tell, there is only one real virus of sinister intent.  All the other trojans and worms are well-known in the field and easily detected.  Only one virus posed what might have been a challenge to detect, but my backdoor into Obedere’s computers warned me of its existence and evened the playing field, as it were.  Supposing that to be the virus intended to successfully infect your PDI, I sandboxed it in a disposable computer and remote executed it.  The infection characteristics are quite interesting.  At first glance, it looks like a corrupter that kills the PDI host.  But when I actually ran it on a simulated PDI, I made a very disturbing discovery.”  House paused.

Marlowe cleared his throat impatiently.  “Well?”

“It changes the id box restoration path.”

“No, no, no,” said Marlowe.  “You can’t do that.  It’s impossible.”

“Well, as loathe as I am to contradict you,” said House, “this virus does.  If you had been infected and then killed, the PDI would have restored the contents of another id box into your brain.”

“Son of a parrot!  Obedere would be able to hijack my body!”

“Yes,” said House.  “I subsequently delved into the research out there on non-native id restoration, but there isn’t a lot.  The City frowns on this kind of research, so a lot of it is underground with questionable credibility.  What I have scanned indicates that the process, while possible in theory, most likely would not be permanent, nor would it last long, for that matter.  Most views hold that the brain would eventually reject the non-native personality.”

“Well that’s a relief.  So Obedere’s got a black box op going, eh?”

“It appears so.”

“Wonderful.”  Things just keep getting better and better, thought Marlowe.

“Fortunately for you, I have a counter-measure for the virus.  One, in fact, that we might want to think about distributing to others if we wish to blunt its effectiveness.”

“My brother, at least,” said Marlowe.  “Of course, it will beg the question of how we found out about it.  I’m more worried about Obedere’s quest for an answer to that question than anything else.”

“Yes, that is a risk, but I would think a successful infection of your brother or someone close to him is the greater threat.”

Marlowe mulled that one for a moment, but no easy solutions to the problem came to mind.

House politely waited the requisite amount of time required by decorum, and then continued.  “The undetectable virus aside, this id box virus alone merits further investigation.  Think of the consequences.  While your paranoia about how Obedere would use the virus against you isn’t entirely unwarranted, there are loftier objectives the Chief Minister of Policing might pursue.  What if Obedere supplanted your brother’s id backup and put a copy of his own into your brother?  It might not last forever, but certainly long enough for the Governor to ‘abdicate’ or commit a treasonous act that can’t be overlooked by the Joint Chiefs.”

“It’s starting to look more and more like I’ll have to pay another visit to the Ministry of Policing.  Technically, with the powers my brother gave me, I have the authority to demand entry.”

“I agree, but there are two immediately obvious problems with that approach.  First and foremost, those powers only relate to your investigation of Nina’s history.  In fact, your contracting out to Huggy Bear might not withstand detailed auditing, since there’s no clear connection between the PDI virus and Nina.”

“Nonsense,” said Marlowe.  “I meet her, the only person I’ve ever met without a PDI, and then my PDI dies.  You could make the argument that perhaps, as the only person immune to such a virus, she might be behind it.  A course of investigation I would be remiss not to explore.”

“Maybe so, but is making Nina look suspicious the wisest course of action?  And then there’s the other problem.  Even with the authority to enter the Ministry of Policing, Obedere would never let you near anything of value.  If you followed proper channels to obtain the necessary warrants, Obedere’s spies would tip him off and he’d take care to hide or destroy any evidence of his unlawful projects long before you were on-site.”

“So my investigatory powers aren’t worth squat when it comes to investigating Obedere.”  Marlowe frowned.  “Not exactly a surprise, now is it?  It seems like we’re at an impasse.”

“Yes, and I’ve been thinking about that,” said House.  “There might be another way.”

“Another way?  What did you have in mind?”

“The idea occurred to me after yesterday’s field trip with Huggy Bear.   One particular aspect of that incident reminded me of our encounter with Toulene two weeks ago.”

“Neither experience struck me as terribly uplifting or positive, Toulene’s meager payment and the Internet evidence we uncovered aside.  I’m not going to be thrilled with where you’re headed, am I?”

“I have calculated a probability of 97.48 percent that you won’t like the sound of this.”

“You seem pretty sure about it,” said Marlowe.

“I am.”  And then House told Marlowe of his plan.  He was right.  Marlowe didn’t like it.  Not one bit.  But rather than stand idly by his mailbox, alone in his discomfort while the nano probes combated the elevated churning in his stomach, he tromped back into his home to share the pain.

CHAPTER 16

INTO THE VALLEY OF DEATH

“House, there’s no way it will work!”  Marlowe had worked himself into a lather in the family room, Gomer cowering in his cage, Nina and Jebediah watching quietly but alertly from the tattered sofa.  “Even if we managed to completely bypass the external security, which, frankly, I have my doubts about, they’ll be able to track us the instant we get inside.  It’s insane!”  Marlowe turned to his father.  “Am I right?”

“Why are you asking me?  Just because I’ve spent the last eight years in an asylum doesn’t make me an expert on insanity.”

“If you’ll let me finish,” continued House, “I have found a way around the internal security.”

“Really?  And just how is that?  As soon as our feet touch the floor in there, their internal sensors will zero in on our PDIs.  And though you’re rather fond of calling me paranoid on matters Obedere, I know for a fact I’m on his watch list.  He’ll know I’m inside the Ministry building before I do.”

Nina leaned forward, hands steepled over her lap.  “He won’t know I’m there.  I don’t have a PDI.”

Marlowe spun around, not for the first time wishing there was a central point in his home that could be said to be House’s face.  He so wanted to glare and jab a finger in House’s direction at that moment.  He fixed his focus on a particularly large floor lamp.  “Is that your brilliant plan?  Send Nina in, a lamb to the slaughter?”

Nina bristled with indignation.  “Lamb?”

“You know what I mean.  Sure, you can handle yourself in a fight, but this is Ministry of Policing headquarters!  The place will be crawling with troopers.”

“I wasn’t planning on sending Nina alone into peril.”

Marlowe spun around again, searching for something a little less inanimate than the floor lamp with which to argue.  He briefly toyed with giving one of the wall pictures the evil eye, but at that moment it was displaying a picture of a very, very young Marlowe smiling up from his bath, his nanny holding a rubber ducky out to him.  He settled on the coffee table, which had two mildly sinister cups of steaming tea squatting on it.

“I’m certainly all ears.  Just how will we bypass the PDI tracking?  Have you located some black market PDI that doesn’t have a T-chip in it?”

Nina looked blankly at Marlowe.  “T-chip?”

Jebediah patted her on the wrist.  “Tracker chip.  Government mandate issued during my administration.  All PDIs are manufactured with a built-in tracking ID and transponder.  It also, and this is slightly less well known, allows for backdoor access by the Ministry of Policing.”

“Slightly less known, yes,” said House, “but not completely unknown.  I found a workaround for the backdoor access years ago.”

Nina smiled.  “So we don’t have to worry about this T-chip after all.”

“Marlowe doesn’t have to worry about government intrusion into his PDI, but he still has to worry about the T-chip.  Any efforts to tamper with it trigger an email alert sent to the Ministry of Policing.”

Marlowe shook his head.  “Then why are we having this conversation, House?”

“Your misadventure yesterday in the sewage treatment plant provided a bevy of ideas and information.  Not only did it provide me with the method of your entry into the Ministry building, but it provided a crucial piece of information.  When your PDI died, the T-chip shut down with it, and no alert went out.  Even after startup, no signal was sent.”

“House, that’s a very interesting academic point, but what good does that do us now?  My PDI is, thank the Governor, back up and running.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.  I thought my intent was self-evident at this point.”

Nina bounded up from the sofa.  “I get it!”

Jebediah frowned, looked to Marlowe, and then shrugged.  “It’s eluding me too.”

Nina stared at both the men.  “Oh come on, isn’t it obvious?”

“No,” said Marlowe stiffly, “it isn’t.”

“Your continued bewilderment contrasted with Nina’s easy comprehension simply demonstrates the effectiveness of my plan.  We deactivate your PDI.  And dad’s.  It’s so ingrained into our cultural identity to never go without a PDI that the authorities never bothered to take that possibility into account when they designed their security system.  A lack of a PDI won’t trigger any alarms.”

Marlowe starting pacing.  “Deactivate my PDI?  But I just turned it back on!”

“You’re right, House,” said Nina.  “It is ingrained.  He’s horrified at the idea of turning off his PDI again.”

Jebediah chimed in.  “I’m not terribly thrilled by the idea myself, and all my PDI does is send me soothing messages about doing what the nice doctors say.”

“But House, if we turn off our PDIs, well, our PDIs would be off!”

“Big deal!” snorted Nina.  “I don’t have one, and as I keep telling you, I’m just fine.”

“But you’ve never had one!  I’ve had one all my life.  It connects me to the whole City.  It would be like losing an arm to turn it off!”

“Please!  We’ll turn it back on when we’re done.  You’ve already demonstrated you can survive without it.”

“I just don’t like it.  We’d be completely cut off for several hours at least.”

Jebediah scratched his head and sighed.  “You know, Spares, they’re right.  Our PDIs need to go.”

“Don’t call me Spares!”

Two hours later, the Studebaker rolled to a halt under the shade of a tall, gently swaying building.  The  cables running up to the support zeppelin groaned ominously in the wind.  Marlowe, still a little shaky because of his now intentionally dead PDI, got out first.  The planned outage proved just slightly easier to deal with than the earlier unplanned one, and though he wasn’t happy about it, he understood the need to be completely and totally undetectable electronically.  Absolute severance from the CityNet could only be attained by shutting down the PDI and all its subsystems.

Nina exited the car next, and being utterly devoid of a PDI to start with, experienced none of Marlowe’s discomfort.  Jebediah, who had sworn certain death on Gomer if left alone at home, came out last.  Given his PDI’s previous nefarious purposes, his induced electronic exile did not disturb him nearly as much as he had feared.  He lugged a chestsack out of the car, grumbling as he put his arms through the straps and put it on.

“You consign to me the task of lowly pack mule?  Have you no sense of who I am or where I’ve been?”

“It’s where you are now.  Stop complaining, it’s not that heavy.  Besides, I’m navigating and Nina needs a free hand in case she has to defend us unexpectedly.  You’re the only choice left.  We’re depending on you.”  It was a weak effort.  Marlowe knew it, and he suspected Jebediah knew it too, but he hoped the thought would count for something.

 Marlowe actually marveled at his calm demeanor as they walked past the front of the dilapidated, gray apartment tenement.  He would never have dreamed that he’d deliberately shut down his PDI.

Jebediah snorted as he surveyed the neighborhood.  “What a slum!  Couldn’t you find another entrance in a better area?”

“No, and be quiet.  If you aren’t part of the solution, you’re off to the asylum again.”

They turned a corner and a sense of deja vu struck Marlowe.  It was a little brighter this time around, during the day and with partly cloudy skies instead of a torrential acid rain storm, but the alley still exuded an unpleasant sense of gloom.  House had suggested the alley where he’d met Toulene because it had a known access point to the old sewer system.  Trudging through a large, scum-encrusted puddle, the trio came upon an apple green dumpster with peeling paint and a warped lid propped up by a multi-colored mound of foul-smelling garbage.

“This place stinks!”

Marlowe was forced to agree with Nina.  Without his PDI, he didn’t have any nasal filters to block the stench.  Jebediah snorted.

“Ha, this place isn’t half as bad as the cell they had me in at the…other place.”  He took a deep, sustained breath.  “Smells like a bed of roses in the middle of a peach orchard, compared to that place.  Yes indeed, quite nice.”

Marlowe shrugged.  “It’s only going to get worse where we’re going.”  He walked over to the sewer access cover that led to the old City sewers.  Nina thrust her fingers into the small fingerholes in the metal disk and lifted it effortlessly.

“Will wonders never cease!”  Jebediah leaned in close to Marlowe.  “As I said before, Spares, you could go far with a powerhouse like that by your side.  And she’s even attractive!”

“Don’t call me Spares.”

“You and your one-track mind!  You should recognize a term of endearment when you hear it!  Some great detective!  Harrumph!”

Nina smiled ruefully as she stared down into the darkening hole.  “Sewers again, eh, Marlowe?  You sure know how to show a girl a good time.”

Marlowe found it somewhat startling, as he stared down into the dark abyss before him, that there were so many holes in the ground with ladders.  “Come on, don’t dawdle.  We are trying to be stealthy.”

Marlowe climbed down into the darkening, deepening stench.  Jebediah followed, then Nina, who dragged the sewer access cover over the opening before joining the rest of the party.  Marlowe was prepared for no optical extras this time, and already had a lightbead out.  Nina pulled out what she called a makeshift “flashlight” from one of her zippered pockets.  She had made it before they left House, taking some transparent StickAll and gluing a lightbead into the center of one of Marlowe’s ultra-stylish chrome wine glasses.  She held the glass by the stem, pointing the mouth out in front of her.  When she activated the bead, the parabolic shape of the bowl focused the light into a rough ellipse that rippled on the brackish water before them.

Marlowe peeled his eyes away from Nina’s contraption, reached into his hidden pocket and pulled out a thin, flimsy tube.  He gingerly unrolled the tube to reveal a series of lines and squiggles printed on vellum.  The lines and squiggles, taken as a whole, formed a map.  They’d lost almost an hour trying to find a way to make a physical copy of the map House had generated.  Fortunately, Marlowe’s attic held another useful toy – the Li’l Bolshevik Revolutionary Printing Press.  A toy once marketed at eight year olds, it now served Marlowe for, he hoped, one last time.  Though finding it did evoke pleasant memories of leaving subversive and slanderous missives stapled to his brother’s bedroom door while growing up.  

The act of holding a map printed on physical material felt alien to Marlowe.  Two-dimensional and non-interactive.  Well, not entirely.  The corners he wasn’t holding kept curling over the rest of the map.  Marlowe didn’t like it at all.  He made a mental note of the positions of the street and alley above them, and rotated the map to match.  It showed the surface streets and underneath those, a string of tunnels and interconnects, all part of the old sewers system before the City switched to mandatory closed-loop recycling water systems and composting in all buildings.  This did not mean, however, that the system they were in was clean or dry.  Stagnant water lapped at their ankles and slowly seeped into his supposedly waterproof shoes.  The tops of Nina’s boots rose well above the line of water.  Marlowe really admired those boots.

The voyage through the old sewer tunnels proved remarkably unpleasant, with the trademarked ankle (and sometimes knee) deep sewage sludge, and the ever-present thick, cloying stench.  Dead rats and occasionally other, less identifiable carcasses rotted while bobbing on the surface of the vile slime.  The poorly marked tunnels caused Marlowe to lead his party astray more than once.  This invariably ended in a stream of invective issuing forth from Jebediah, who, while showing signs of steadily improving mental acuity, did not exhibit any symptoms of being cool-headed.

About thirty minutes in, while rounding a bend in the tunnel, they were suddenly enveloped in a shrill squeaking sound.

Jebediah started shouting first.  “Frats!  Frats!  Everyone duck, it’s frats!”

Nina squatted beside Marlowe, trying to keep as much of herself out of the brackish water as possible.  “Why are we ducking for rats,” she asked over the now quite loud squeaking.

Just then the roar of hundreds of wings flapping beat down on them as red-eyed, sharp-nosed creatures soared overhead, a solid gray mass.  Tiny pink feet swiped at their hair and thin pink tails slapped against their heads.

“Not rats,” said Marlowe.  “Frats.  Flying rats.  Just keep your head down - they like grabbing fistfuls of hair.  Tiny fistfuls to be sure, but it can still hurt.”

A faint ammonia smell began to compete with the overall stench of the sewers as the grasping cloud of claws streaked by, some of the flying rats practically tumbling on their heads as they soared past.  Marlowe could feel the heat of the undulating mass as it zipped by, angry squeaks and trills cutting into his ears.

Less than a minute later the frats had completed their transit and vanished behind them.  Jebediah was the first to rise, visibly shaken.  “Frats.  I hate frats.”

“When the hell did rats develop the ability to fly,” asked Nina.

“They were helped,” said Marlowe as he raised himself up.  “During a particularly low point in our relations with Mirth City.  It wasn’t all out war, but they felt justified in flooding the City with thousands and thousands of genetically modified flying rats.”