Severance (8 page)

Ten seconds later, Bruce had crossed the street and gently
set some of his weight down on Charlotte Redelso’s windowsill. After a few
frantic moments fumbling with the window’s edge, he finally felt it slide up.
Quietly, Bruce lowered himself into the apartment and its blessedly solid
ground.

The plan entered its marginally less crazy second phase of
snooping around to see what there was to see. Bruce trusted that like most
people, Ms. Redelso kept some information about herself offline. Every device
on board the ship was networked, sharing a common, instantly accessible storage
space. All totally private — every desk and terminal was capable of identifying
immediately who was using it, rendering private information inaccessible to a
malicious third party. Yet, few people trusted this security with their most
personal information, and almost everyone stored some information offline on
dumb, non–networked terminals, even paper in a few cases. This desire for
enhanced privacy ironically made the information much less secure, at least for
someone with a knack for prowling around the physical world.

Bruce pulled out his own terminal and flipped the camera to
scan in infrared, a useful utility familiar to few people other than
maintenance workers. A light glow from the bedroom was Charlotte, still
evidently asleep. He surveyed the apartment, picking out the few locations he
had already spotted as potential hiding places, then switched from the infrared
scanner to another, far more interesting application. He placed the terminal in
his chest webbing and proceeded to search the apartment, checking all the
drawers, cupboards, and other nooks and crannies.

Ten minutes later he had found it: a dumb–terminal stuffed
in a desk drawer. Although the main interface of the terminal was password
protected, this security feature had been broken two hundred years earlier. No one
capable of fixing the problem had ever been willing to do so, leaving all such
terminals highly vulnerable to people like Bruce. Using his own terminal, Bruce
made a copy of the contents of Redelso’s before returning it to its hiding
place.

That done, and satisfied he’d seen everything interesting in
the apartment — at least everything not in a room occupied by a sleeping woman —
he examined the application he’d set running earlier. It was an image–recognition
and logging program that scanned the apartment as he searched it, identifying
and cataloguing all the objects within. Then, using a database created from
publicly listed recycling values and estimated uniqueness, it calculated an
estimated value/weight ratio for each object and presented a ranked list to
him. An efficient way of deciding what to steal, though it had a hard time
determining the value of items it had no record of. Which wasn’t that big of a
problem; those were typically the items rare enough to be worth stealing. Bruce
scrolled through the list, then retraced his steps, picking out the fifteen
pounds he felt confident would make it back across his sideshow of an escape
route.

Ill deeds done, Bruce carefully stepped outside the window
and closed it behind him to do the second–stupidest thing he’d done that day:
return across the street. With an exhalation of relief far more audible than was
appropriate to the current level of subterfuge, he alit onto the neighboring
roof for a minute or so of shaking before he detached and reeled in his
apparatus, and retreated into the shadows.

§

Stein stayed up late that night, hoping that Bruce might
spring up with some fantastic news about what M. Melson was all about, solving
the mystery without her having to get off the couch. But her terminal stayed
resolutely silent. She kept an eye on the news feeds in case the headline “Fat
Man Arrested for Horrible Activities” cropped up, but that also didn’t happen.

Crawling into bed, but not yet tired, she began hurling
general searches at the network, looking for clues about what she’d seen in the
bright blue light. “Bright Light + messages” mostly returned tips about
advertising, mixed in with a handful of stories about near–death experiences.
Stein was pretty sure that wasn’t what happened to her, as to date, no
theologians had identified any greater powers claiming the handle ‘Vlad.’

A search for ‘eyeball messages’ uncovered a lot about
corneal tattoos, which had gone in and out of fashion at various points in
Argosian history, usually by people whose idea of a message worthy of being
permanently branded on their eyeballs was “Fuck the Police.” That was decidedly
not what Stein had, but she amused herself for a few minutes with images of people
who had gone down this road. This search led to the history of tattoos, from
the painful early methods with burning charcoal, through the ink and needle glory
years, and up to the genetic tattoos of skin cells manipulated to form what
were essentially artificial birthmarks. That article came with some pretty
upsetting pictures of lab mice and other test animals, and she turned off her terminal
before she saw too much.

Had she imagined it? It all seemed a lot blurrier now. She
closed her eyes and rubbed her knuckles into the sockets, sending flashes of
lights up her optic nerve. There. That was kind of a shape. A shoe–shaped shape.
Was that then a secret message about shoes? That seemed just as plausible as a
message about Vlad, which was to say, not plausible at all. She checked the
time, decided that it was past even Bruce’s bedtime, and reached the lights.

As she was drifting off, another image appeared, this one
deliberately, as she imagined a mouse with “Fuck the Police” emblazoned on its
back. She laughed herself to sleep.

“There’s no way you’re getting 850 babies a year out of your
bakery.”

Harold exhaled and looked at the curved ceiling of Kinison’s
office. He couldn’t stand Kinison when he was lecturing. “I know that, Lewis.
But if the radiation starts coming in again, the poor things are getting zapped
in the womb. At least the cans can shield them from that. I get it; we don’t
need to match the whole replacement rate. But we can get at least a fraction of
that surely? Maybe a hundred?”

“A hundred a year? Never happen. And you know it,” Kinison
said. That wasn’t a lie; Harold did know it. First impressions count, especially
when they’re impressively violent, and the first few can–born souls had
certainly been that. Even when the kinks had been worked out of the process,
the stigma around canned babies still stuck. It was kind of a weird hobby for
him to have taken up. Not that the ship was lacking for those.

“Look, Harold,” Kinison said. “You’ll get some. It’s a good
safety net if nothing else.” He smiled, with only the slightest hint of
condescension detectable. Dr. Kinison was one of only two or three people on
the ship capable of speaking with Harold intelligibly about his work. Where
Harold had stumbled upon his career by accident, Kinison had been homing in on
the role of senior naval medical officer for decades, responsible for the long–term
health of the ship’s current and future generations. “We can’t ignore your
research,” Kinison continued, “or the results you’ve had thus far. But we can’t
do what you’re proposing. Not at that scale. We’ll stick with the conventional
methods. End of discussion.”

Harold bit his tongue. It was the end of this phase of the
discussion, but he wasn’t prepared to concede any future phases just yet. “All right.”

§

Outside Kinison’s office in the aft core of the ship, Harold
tried to get his bearings in the curving hall. He hated this part of the ship.
So obviously a space ship up here, it made him claustrophobic. Picking a likely
direction for an elevator, he set off.

He guessed right and shortly thereafter spotted Chief
Hatchens, the head of ship’s security, standing in front of the elevator doors.
The chief looked up at him, eyes flickering in recognition. A small lump of
fear pinballed through Harold. He hadn’t had many dealings with the famously
heavy–handed security department and preferred to steer clear of them when he
could, but an abrupt U–turn would only bring more attention to himself.

“Dr. Stein. How are you?”

Harold swallowed and hesitated, concerned that Hatchens knew
him by name. Then he worried that his hesitation made him look suspicious, and
hesitated some more. Finally, in a hurried voice, he said, “All right.”
Because
taking five seconds to come up with ‘All right’ doesn’t sound suspicious at
all.

Hatchens looked at him intently. Harold wondered if the man
ever blinked. “That’s good.”

Harold swallowed again.
This is going well
. They
stood quietly for a while, Harold passing the time with silent curses about the
elevator’s speed.

“I was sorry to hear about your friend,” Hatchens said. “Kevin
Delise? You two were fairly close, right?”

Harold blinked. “Pardon?”

Kevin, the first canned baby on the ship since it launched,
was not his son, just the next closest thing: one of his success stories. They
were not in any way genetically related — Harold wasn’t that mad of a scientist
— but he was still the closest thing the boy had to a father.

Hatchens’ eyes widened, but Harold got the impression that
his surprise wasn’t genuine. “I’m sorry. You don’t know.” His mouth twisted
into a knot. “I’m sorry to tell you, but Mr. Delise has been murdered. I
thought someone would have contacted you about it by now.”

Harold’s mouth went dry. He leaned against the wall. The
colors around the edge of his vision started to fade.

“When was the last time you heard from Kevin?” Hatchens
asked.

“What? I don’t know. A week ago?” Harold looked down, then
up at Hatchens. “Yeah, a week or so ago. We talked about work. My work. My god,
are you sure it was Kevin? What happened?”

Hatchens studied him for a second before turning his
attention to the elevator door. “It was a knife. The neck, you see?” Hatchens’
hand moved up towards his own neck as if to demonstrate, before he seemed to
think better of it. “First deck,” he said instead. “No idea who might have done
it, but we’re checking the feeds now.”

The elevator finally arrived. Harold blinked, lurched into
the car, and turned. Hatchens remained outside, looking at something on his terminal.
“Oops, looks like I have to go. I’ll be in touch. Sorry again.” The doors
closed, obscuring Hatchens’ face and an expression that didn’t look very sorry
at all.

As the elevator accelerated downwards, Harold’s legs gave
out. Finding himself sitting on the floor, he looked at his shaking hands.
Oh,
Kevin, my boy. Oh, Kevin, Kevin, Kevin…

Ron Gabelman had an excellent excuse for missing work; his
head had been nearly lopped off. Stein found this out when she arrived at the
maintenance office to find a red–eyed Curts already there in the company of a bulky
security officer, Sergeant Hogg.

Hogg asked Stein what she knew about Gabelman’s activities
over the past few days. She explained the task she had assigned to Gabelman the
last time she had seen him, when she sent him to investigate the hot and cold
complaints in the aft government offices. She pulled up the complaints on the
Big Board for them to observe, although from the dismissive glance Hogg gave
them, she got the impression that Curts had already walked him through this.
The two complaints were both flagged as ‘Resolved.’ One had a brief note
attached to it: “Adjusted air balancing.” The other simply said, “No Issue.
Complaint was mistaken.” A couple of taps on the screen indicated Gabelman had
made these notes shortly after ten in the morning the day he disappeared, at
which point he should have reported back to the maintenance office.

“So, he should have returned here at, what, 10:30?” Hogg asked.

“Sure. But it isn’t unusual for techs to take their time
walking back,” Stein replied. She exchanged a glance with Curts, who nodded.

Hogg eyed Stein carefully for a few seconds. Finally he
said, “His body was found this morning on the first deck, off 45
^th
and Fir Street. Do you know of any reason why Gabelman would be in that part of
the ship?”

She shook her head — she really had no idea what the kid did
for kicks.

Hogg nodded, and continued, “We also found a couple tabs of
guru on him. Did you ever know Mr. Gabelman to use narcotics? Did he ever
arrive at work intoxicated? Tardy or absent often?”

“He was new, so I can’t be completely sure. Not necessarily
a model employee, but I never saw him doing anything like that.”

“How was he not a model employee?”

Stein waved her hands back and forth defensively. “I don’t
mean anything bad. He was just a little slow. Sometimes took longer, needed
more help with tasks than I’d prefer. That’s all.”

Hogg stared at her for a few seconds more, waiting to see if
she would elaborate further. She recognized the ploy and stayed silent. Hogg
frowned, looked down at his terminal, then the door. “Okay. If I have any
further questions, I’ll be in touch.” With a nod, he turned and left.

Curts slumped forward on the table, head resting on one
hand. He yawned, then repeated all of Hogg’s questions, apparently checking to
see if Stein had decided to withhold information from the security man that she
would for some reason share with him. She answered his questions, not bothering
to hide her annoyance. Eventually, satisfied that Stein wasn’t omitting
anything, Curts stood up and straightened his ridiculously clean orange jumpsuit.
Whatever he’d been doing the past few months, it clearly hadn’t been very dirty
work. As he tucked away his terminal and adjusted his webbing, Stein detected a
hint of indecision in his movements.

“Let me know if we have any more w–w–weird calls like this,”
he finally said. He gestured at the board. “Hot and c–c–old complaints right on
top of each other. That’s weird. I don’t like seeing that.”