Marlowe and the Spacewoman (3 page)

“Am I imagining things, or is that soap bar broken?”

“Analyzing.  Hmm, I think you’re right.  Let’s compare to when you first picked it up.”  The wall image shifted back to when Marlowe first reached for the soap and zoomed in.  The bar was unmarred.

“Perhaps when you flung it against the shower wall.  Tracking.”

The video stayed zoomed in and centered on the soap as Marlowe’s giant hand grabbed it.  A flick of motion as the hypo jabbed into the hand, then the background blurred as the soap shot out of the hand and slammed into the shower wall.  The image froze, showing a dented soap with a sharp, jagged crack running down the center.

Marlowe rose up from the bed and walked over to the wall, staring at the still image.  “Bingo.”

“It seems likely the soap had a weakened shell to promote a more rapid dissolve.”

“Yes.  But can we see anything interesting or, even better, identifying?”

“Checking.  Hmm, what have we here?  Zooming.”

The image exploded into a smudge of beige and a tiny blur of black on one end.  “I believe I have located a visible portion of the core, near the intelligence housing.  There appears to be a serial number, or part of one.  Enhancing.”

The image sharpened, blurred, then sharpened again as House passed it through various enhancement algorithms.  Finally, the variations and fluctuations on the screen stopped, several characters visible on the screen.

“I used a Diffie-Bacon quantum sharpen filter, and calculate an eighty-two point four percent probability that this enhancement is accurate.  The serial number is not completely visible; only the first five characters are discernible.  ’TR8OR’.  One moment while I hack into the SSR.”

The Sentient Soap Registry.  Part of the Sentient Soap and Prior Art Act required that any soap applying for citizenship register with the City Ministry of Policing, the City Department of Mobile Vehicles, and the downtown City Central Citizenship Center, where the Sentient Soap Registry was kept.  The data was confidential, but House was a seasoned pro at hacking into other computers.  In this particular case, it turned out he had once dated the megaframe that hosted the SSR.  Fortunately, the relationship had ended pleasantly and they liked to help each other out on occasion.  House would make security improvement suggestions, and the megaframe would let him occasionally peruse the contents of other systems that resided on it.

“Forty eight hundred and twelve hits,” said House.  “Cross-referencing SSR list with known associates.  Eight hits.  The most likely is-”

“TR8OR2DRT001Z.  Tray.  I know him well, the slippery bastard.  I always figured he might sell me out, especially after that incident with the French Horn Gang.  But kill me directly?  Damn.  That’s a new low, even for him.”

“I have a list of his known haunts.”

“He’s just killed a man, cast off his body, and escaped through the sewer.  He’s going to be hungry, dirty, and anxious to reconstitute himself.  He’ll want a black-market facility that doesn’t ask questions, doesn’t keep receipts, and won’t comment on his retractable hypodermic syringe.”

“Yes, that stands to reason.  The syringe isn’t exactly factory issue.”  House almost seemed to sigh.  “Generating a list of known facilities that fit the bill.  Hmm.  Over three thousand.”

“Eliminate any more than one hundred kilometers away.”

“Fourteen.”

“Tray’s not stupid.  He’ll avoid any with a reputation for mistakes.”

“Six.”

“And he’s a spendthrift.  Even if someone paid him well for this little stunt, he’ll spend as little as possible while still getting a good reconstitution.”

“Three.”

“Upload the addresses to my PDI.”

Marlowe felt a faint buzz under his ear as the data transferred over.  He tapped at the PDI, which wasn’t supposed to do that.  It had been acting up lately, and he wondered if it was time to think about an upgrade.  He pushed the thought out of his head and returned his attention to the problem at hand.  

The closest reconstitution parlor was McMullin’s Butcher Shop.  It was on Western Central Expressway, on the east side of the City.  The furthest, Watershed Day Spa, was over in the twelfth district, about eighty kilometers to the south.

“Say, House, have you run a check on yourself yet?  You did follow an unauthorized order to shut down.  Perhaps some other illegal operations were executed.”

“The instant I saw the discrepancy in the command chain, I generated a checksum of my current kernel image and related executables.  Only you can access the hard copy for comparison.  However, I should note that it would take six to eight hours, at a minimum, to compromise the security features guarding my personal integrity.  Unfortunately, until today, startup and shutdown functions were given a lower security rating.  Much lower.  The shutdown override was due to the user interface you set up, and only affected basic home functions – surveillance, lights, temperature, window and door locks.  My core systems would be impossible to compromise in the fifteen minutes we were both down.  I verified our downtime by checking with the City Ministry of Time atomic clock immediately upon coming back online.  No alterations were made to our clocks.”

“Call me paranoid and check anyway.  Of course, the really important question to answer is why.”

“Tray, if he is indeed the culprit behind this attack, ought to be able to answer that.  It will take several hours for him to properly reconstitute.  Will you leave now to track him down?”

“Let’s see the checksum first.”

House’s current checksum, a HEX number generated by applying an XOR algorithm to his system files, buzzed over into Marlowe’s PDI.  Marlowe pushed the bed aside, put his palm on the hand-scan and eyeballed the reti-scan positioned alongside the floor safe.  After they beeped their approval, he pulled out the key hanging on the chain around his neck, slotted and turned it, and then spun the combination roller.  The door of the safe sunk down and slid back, revealing the id box used to store his mental backups and a small compartment with a slip of paper in it.  Marlowe flicked his eye left, right, and up and cocked his head left to drag open the checksum file in his PDI, and then compared that number to the one on the sheet in the safe.  They matched.  He held the paper up to the light to verify the watermark, which also checked out.  Then he kicked up the UV implant in his eye to confirm the threaded pattern of fibers in the paper fit the expected profile.  They did.

Having confirmed House’s higher functions were indeed intact, Marlowe felt it would be a good idea to actually get dressed.  He closed the safe, pushed the bed back, and ambled over to the closet.  The pants nozzle extended and dropped as he slid the door open, the optical scanner mounted on the tip determining Marlowe’s exact position before spraying on his pants.  

“GAH!  Cold!”  Marlowe jumped out of the spray, wearing a very ragged, fuzzy pair of corduroy brown plaid shorts.  The nozzle ceased spraying immediately.  “House!  The fabric is COLD!”

“Sorry, the reboot shut down the furnace.  The LiquiFab won’t be room temperature for another half hour.”

“Sorry,” mouthed the nozzle, dribbling some syrupy plaid LiquiFab.  “I should have warned you.  Won’t happen again, I promise.”

“Damn straight it won’t!  I don’t need a cold application of pants to wake me up in the morning.  And you forgot to apply the underwear first.”

“So sorry.  It’s just that we, that is, all of the appliances, have been so worried and distracted by this morning’s untoward events.  We’ve been discussing it and not paying as much attention to our household duties as we should.  I’m terribly sorry.  I’ll remove that attempt at pants and start over, but I have to warn you, the solvent is cold too.”

Marlowe steeled himself.  “Do it.”

The nozzle swooped down and applied NoFab to the aborted shorts, which promptly broke down into a pile of wispy threads.

Marlowe started, but maintained an otherwise silent composure. Then the nozzle started all over again, and after another minute of frosty discomfort, Marlowe found himself sporting a fairly fashionable pair of brown and orange plaid trousers.

“Not bad, temperature aside.  And the cuffs are a nice touch.”

“Thank you,” replied the nozzle with more than a hint of pride in its voice.  Cuffs were pretty tricky to get right with a nozzle.  It took a rare, inherent talent and lots and lots of practice.

The shirt nozzle lowered itself hesitantly, wavering slightly.  “I was thinking about a nice green turtleneck, the kind with all those hidden compartments in the collar you’re so fond of.”

“Sounds fine.  Just mix some Kevlar in with that.”

“Fifty-fifty blend?”

“I might have trouble today.  Make it eighty-twenty, Kevlar heavy.”

“Right-o.  Here it comes!”

The shirt nozzle was a little nervous, and Marlowe gagged as the turtleneck collar suddenly closed over his mouth and nose.  His eyes barely peeked out over the top of it, and he could still feel cool air on his navel.

“Oh, so sorry.  I’ll fix that in a jiff.”  Mechanical arms extended out of the wall, the spindly fingers on the ends snapping open and closed as they approached.  They grasped the bottom of the turtleneck and yanked down hard.  Marlowe’s head was suddenly clear of the collar.

The shoe nozzle extended itself next, but Marlowe kicked it back.  “Not necessary.  I’ll go with a pair of backup shoes.”

“Oh, OK,” said the shoe nozzle as it limply retracted, unable to mask its disappointment.

Marlowe only had one pair of backup shoes, plasma-resistant green mylar with ceramic inserts in the soles.  Polyphonic Teflar was woven into the lining.  If a bomb went off in Marlowe’s lap, he might be converted into a smoking cloud of vapor, but his feet would be unscathed.  Plus, the shoes were very comfortable.

Only one thing remained before leaving the bedroom.  Marlowe placed his right palm flat on the mirrored plate set in the wall next to the door frame.  There was a slight spark of static electricity that arced between hand and plate.  Encoded in this spark, which lasted about five seconds and gave Marlowe’s nano probes a small burn in his palm to repair, was the day’s set of one-time cipher pads.  He and House would use these to encrypt any communications between them while Marlowe was out and about.

Marlowe stomped out of the bedroom in a foul mood and entered the family room with the intent of interviewing his next witness.  The post-resurrection headache had set in with a vengeance, and this next conversation wasn’t going to help it.

CHAPTER 3

MAN’S BEST FRIEND

“Surprise, surprise, surprise!”

“Tone it down, Gomer.  I’ve got a headache.”

“I’m hungry!  Gridlock!  Where am I?  I need my grub!  And I DON’T mean grubs!  Yeech!  Worms and larvae.  Disgusting!”

Marlowe moved across the family room, past the threadbare and badly torn sofa and over to the cage in the corner which housed Gomer, his ward and a serious violation of City law.  Gomer was a GMP, a Genetically Modified Parrot.  His original genetics were that of a Congo African Grey parrot, but the good scientists at Better Pets, Inc., had tinkered with his egg in the misguided hope of creating a smarter, better pet.  Gomer had been an early attempt, prone to random outbursts and cranky rejoinders.  Smarter than a natural African Grey, his intellect approached that of perhaps an eight or nine year old human.  Later birds were vastly more intelligent, which had proven to be a serious problem.  All the intelligence of a human, and all the cunning and mischief of a parrot.

Better Pets had gone a long way in shaping the world Marlowe now lived in.  Or perhaps misshaping was a more appropriate word.  Along with the parrots, Better Pets had endeavored to improve dogs, cats (it proved impossible, and they eventually applied salve to their scratches and gave up), gerbils, even goldfish.  They hadn’t gotten much beyond the planning stages with the fish, but it had involved giving them hands and teaching them sign language.

It was the first pilot program that met with the most success, and which ultimately led to Better Pet’s downfall - Designer Dogs.  Everybody loves dogs: unfailingly loyal, bestowing unconditional love upon their owners, and tremendous fans of attention.  Better Pets wanted to improve on this, creating dogs who could talk to you when you were down, and who would call you at work to remind you to buy more dog food on the way home.  But Better Pets failed to take into account a dog’s natural disinclination towards confinement.  That oversight and a faulty kennel latch allowed the intelligent, talking dogs to escape.  And once they tasted the freedom of open air, they searched, in a rather formidably large pack, for people to love and be loyal to.

Their genetically magnified loyalty, of course, was the icing on Better Pet’s funeral cake.  The dogs felt that their creators deserved credit for the marvels they had wrought.  So after saying hello, their loyalty kicked in and they proceeded to tell the terrified strangers they’d come upon all about Better Pets, and the genetic tinkering going on there.  

This, not surprisingly, alarmed more than a few individuals.  The City government stepped in and shut down Better Pets.  While the authorities were hell-bent on expurgating all the accursed spawn of Better Pets, they never managed to capture the dogs that had escaped.  And a good thing too, because those dogs turned out to be Marlowe’s best snitches and sources.  All they asked in return was to be given a few scraps of food, some City scrip, and the occasional game of chess (to exercise minds otherwise underwhelmed with the grueling task of pretending to be utterly vacuous to avoid extermination).

The animals still incarcerated at Better Pets, however, weren’t so lucky.  The Governor ordered their destruction.  Except for the parrots.  Thirty two birds, twenty of them with the equivalent of a PhD, escaped.  And were very angry about the attempted genocide of their species, avis superus.  They formed a dangerous gang of avian heavies known as the Feathers.  Their crimes ranged from minor infractions such as an infamous bowel-voiding operation that left the Governor’s limo and the facade of City Hall completely coated in raspberry and blueberry fed GMP droppings, to the more sinister activity of muscling the mob out of the dirty job of controlling the City’s waste management system and the teamsters who worked for it.

Led by a brilliant leader known only as Lafayette, the gang quickly became PENO – Public Enemy Number One.  A host of defensive City ordinances were issued, mandating, among other things, that all citizens of good standing carry a BB gun on their person at all times while outdoors, and that they shoot any wild parrot seen within the City.  Failure to comply could lead to hefty fines and, for a brief period immediately following the limo incident, death.

There were also a slew of criminal indictments filed against anyone and everyone connected to Better Pets.  The CEO was executed after a trial before a military tribunal, and those scientists too absentminded to make themselves scarce were lynched by an angry mob.  The more politically savvy scientists deftly did go underground, and a lot of them had supplemented Marlowe’s income by hiring him to arrange for passage out of the City.  Marlowe was uniquely positioned to provide them with the necessary documentation.

Gomer had been one of the parrots who escaped.  Marlowe had come across him while working a particularly nasty case involving a traveling circus that was in truth a spy ring recruiting unsuspecting GM animals as agents.  The circus would move from city-state to city-state, selling the secrets of their previous host to their current host, all while collecting new information to sell to the next destination on the map.  Gomer had taken an inexplicable liking to Marlowe, an avowed bachelor and non-pet owner, and in the end not only proved essential to breaking the case, but saved Marlowe from a gang of surly gorillas suffering from a nasty case of Ritalin withdrawal.  After the circus had been disbanded and the ringleader arrested, Gomer had nowhere to go.  He wasted no time blubbering his sob story to Marlowe, and with the strategic insertion of reminders about how he had saved Marlowe’s life, eventually persuaded the reluctant PI to take him in.

To this day, Gomer freaked out at the sight of clowns.

Adopting Gomer wasn’t as simple as bringing a puppy home from one of the City-sanctioned pet stores.  In the aftermath of Better Pets, all animals kept within the City were required to have paperwork certifying them one hundred percent organic, non-GMO products.  It had cost Marlowe far more than he originally anticipated to obtain counterfeit documents that would pass anything beyond a casual inspection, and with the added expense of buying lysine-enhanced food on the black market, he decided that Gomer needed to earn his keep.  Hence his job as Marlowe’s answering service.  It should have worked out quite well.  Gomer handled the phones, taking calls and then reciting them back to Marlowe, verbatim and in the caller’s voice, when he dialed in to check his messages.  But unlike the City Phone Company supplied (and almost certainly bugged) personality-free computerized answering services, Gomer resented what he considered to be a menial job far below his capabilities, and did not hesitate to complain about it.  Sometimes the complaints would take the form of (very believable sounding) editorials tacked onto the end of a caller’s message in the caller’s voice.  Plus he chewed through about one phone headset a week; two if Marlowe ran out of turkey jerky.

This had been going on for almost six months now, and like Toothy, every morning when the bird’s grating voice greeted him, Marlowe questioned the arrangement.

“Gomer,” Marlowe asked as he lifted the rolled up, wrinkled bag of lysine-rich cat food over the cage and dumped a pile of the gravel-like pellets onto the soiled newspaper floor, “has anyone been in here this morning?”

Gomer stretched out his wings slowly, first the left and then the right.  He removed his headset and gave Marlowe a bleary stare.  “You know, you could get me a bowl.  This is so unsanitary.”

“And you could limit your bird droppings to one corner of the cage.”

Gomer hopped down to the bottom of the cage and carefully picked at the cat food he so loved to munch.

“Hey, this isn’t the horse meat stuff.”

“You’ll get horse meat when this is gone.”

Gomer rapid-fired his response.  “Horse!  Horse!  Horse!”

“When this bag is empty!  I’m not going to have two bags open, because then you won’t finish this one.”

Gomer rolled his eyes and harrumphed.

“Well, was anyone here this morning?”

“I thought the Mona Lisa was here, but I think that was just a bad batch of ‘shrooms I ate last night.”

“I’m serious, Gomer.  If you’ve been paying any attention to the events of the last hour, you’d know someone killed me and mucked about with the surveillance system while I was being resurrected.”

“And so am I!  You left the freakin’ mushrooms in my cage.  I thought the tree-damned bars were breaking loose and trying to strangle me.  Until the Mona Lisa showed up and, with the help of the Venus de Milo, saved me.”

“I didn’t leave you any mushrooms.”

“That Venus de Milo is pretty damned impressive at wrestling, despite her obvious disadvantages.”

“Gomer, I didn’t leave you any mushrooms.”

This provoked a snort from Gomer, who turned his beak derisively.  “There’s a pile of them right there, and I sure didn’t mail-order them!”

Marlowe looked down, and peeking out from under the pile of cat food were a few brown, shriveled fungi.

“You could try them, if you don’t believe me, but I wouldn’t recommend it.”

Marlowe’s shoulders slumped.  “Gomer, can you tell me anything about the last twelve hours?”

“Aside from the fact that the Mona Lisa has a man’s voice?  Nope.  A deep baritone, by the way.  Very unsettling.”

“Shut up.”

Marlowe opened the cage door and gingerly picked out a couple of the mushrooms.  He sniffed one, wrinkled his nose in displeasure, and put them down on the coffee table.  He’d have  House analyze them later.  He moved over to the closet and began leafing through the trench coats hanging inside.

“House, what day is it?”

“Wednesday.”

“Wednesday.  OK.”

Marlowe pushed aside hangers to gain access to his Wednesday trench coat.  It was beige and rain-stained, just like the rest.  It had “Thursday” stitched across the left breast pocket in large black letters.  He did that to confuse people.  It never hurt to confuse people when you worked in the private eye business.  All of his trench coats were like that, except Tuesday’s.  That one actually said Tuesday, to confuse the people who knew about his other trench coats.  

Once he struggled into Wednesday’s coat, Marlowe began groping along the closet shelf for his tools of the trade: a screwdriver which had helped him force more than one mechanical lock; a slightly soft, no-longer-quite-green apple; his trilobite good luck rock; a bottle of Yummy Tummy bubbles (half full at this point and with a prominent skull and crossbones warning label indicating it was not intended for internal consumption); several loaded clips for his BB gun;and a small black box with a mother-of-pearl lid.  These he pocketed quickly, but soon his hand returned to searching for his most prized possession, which he found next to the camera - his gunmetal green with chrome highlights Swingline stapler.  This he gingerly placed in the hidden compartment of Wednesday’s coat.

The camera, a Hasselblad ViewMaster 2100 nestled between Monday’s and Tuesday’s fedoras, which had “TAM” and “CRICKETBALL CAP” stitched across their fronts, gave Marlowe an idea.  Maybe the camera had seen something.  He pulled it down from the shelf.

The ViewMaster was one of the first generation of intelligent cameras that had the skill and personality of a master photographer programmed into them.  Later generations had wisely been stripped of the personality, but Marlowe had been barely able to afford this older, used, and almost certainly stolen camera.  At the time he’d been glad to get it.  Until he started using it and the camera started mouthing off.  For a discreet photo surveillance of a cheating spouse, he’d be subjected to: “You know, if you stopped up and used a higher shutter speed, you can more effectively isolate the subject of the composition.”  At crime scenes, snapping pictures of a dead body, he had to endure pointers such as: “Centering to the left, and not using a flash would add to the drama of this shot.”  Once the camera had started screaming at a female subject he was tailing: “Work it baby!  Work it!  Oh yeah, work the camera!”  That had actually ended rather well; Marlowe still went out with her occasionally.  No, not the ideal camera for a low-profile private dick, but once he’d bought it, Marlowe couldn’t afford another.  And sometimes, despite himself, Marlowe had to agree with the camera’s artistic suggestions.  They DID look better.

“Hassel, did you see anything odd this morning?”

“Baby, you know I didn’t.  I may always be on, but the closet is dark when the door is closed.  And I do have a lens cap, you know.”

Marlowe sighed.  “It was worth a try.”

“I did hear some funky things, though.  Not having a whole lot of experience with sound, I’m not sure I can describe it properly.  A mumbling, gabbling sound, very similar to your snoring, but slightly less aggravating.  I heard it just after the loud thunky sound that came from your bathroom.”

“Thanks, Hassel.  Not sure if that helps, but it’s more than Gomer could tell me.”

“I told you, it was a bad batch of ‘shrooms!!!  SQUAWK!”

Marlowe could always tell when Gomer was really upset because he reverted to primal sounds like squawks and whistles.

“Shut up and eat your cat food.  It’s good for you.”

“Bullshit,” said Gomer with his mouth full.

“No, cat food.”

Gomer turned into the corner, another pellet in his claw.  His back to Marlowe, he started making crunching sounds as if he was eating it.  But seeing the pellet drop to the bottom of the cage destroyed the otherwise very convincing illusion.