The Administration Series (36 page)

They sat in silence as the car drove them across the darkened city. Warrick seemed to be thinking, and Toreth was already imagining his bed.

As Toreth let himself into the building, he heard Warrick call his name. He went back to the ground-car and leaned down to the window. "Yes?"

"There's something — " Warrick stopped.

"What?"

"Nothing. Or nothing relevant. Ah — I thought I should mention that I'm not planning to be at SimTech first thing tomorrow. I need my beauty sleep."

Toreth, who knew that he himself would have to be at work in less than four hours, glared at him.

Warrick smiled slightly. "So, the answers to the questions are that there was no homeostasis log on Jon Teffera's machine, but we installed full logging on all the external machines, including Pearl Nissim's, after Kelly's death. Also, no one has authority to alter the logs, and that all the data recording is tamper-proofed." He spread his hands. "Although if someone understood the security system on a fundamental level . . ."

Before Toreth could say anything, the car drove away.

When he arrived at I&I Toreth called the division computer experts at SimTech and informed them that Doctor Warrick had suggested checking the control call logs against a comparable data set. There was no point in prejudicing them with Warrick's conclusions. It took them two hours to find the homeostatic control evidence, another two hours to work out what it meant, and half an hour on the comm to explain it to Toreth. Warrick had told him the unvarnished truth.

Almost a pity — he would have liked an excuse to drag Warrick out of bed and ask him some searching questions.

Once Knethen finished explaining things Toreth already knew, he promised a more thorough analysis.

Toreth nodded. "And —" Tillotson's suggestion rose in his mind — better to cover all angles. "Check for a mechanism for the sim to cause the neural damage in the first place. If there's any possibility, no matter how small, I want to know about it."

"Yes, Para. While we're doing that, could someone find out for us whether the sim machines not in the AERC building had session logs and who, if anyone, had the necessary security permission to alter the logs?"

Feeling slightly better disposed towards Warrick, Toreth spent an hour asleep in his office while he pretended to hunt down the information.

The short day at work had made a pleasant change of pace, Warrick reflected. At least, it did until he allowed himself to think about why it was pleasant. He'd always loved SimTech, looked forwards to waking up and coming in to work. His sister had teased him about it for years. Now, waking up to the knowledge of how close they were to losing everything made every day an ordeal. Over the last few weeks, he'd found himself looking for excuses not to get up.

Leaving the flat was the worst part. Setting off, knowing that there would probably be more bad news waiting for him when he arrived at the AERC.

Now, finally, there was hope of a way through the nightmare.

Before he went home, Warrick looked at the file for the fiftieth time and wondered what to do with it. When he'd first found it, he'd been reluctant to say anything to Toreth because the man was so clearly ready to clutch at straws. Anyone who was willing to pull in and question someone like Tara Scrivin would certainly go a lot further with Marian Tanit.

He'd told the truth to Toreth when he'd said that, personally, he had nothing against Marian. He respected her, on many points, and he'd always made an effort to accept criticism within the corporation — it was healthy, in fact, as long as it wasn't out of control or commercially damaging.

He'd almost mentioned the file to Toreth in the early hours of this morning, but he'd stopped himself. The logic he'd used then was that he'd done his duty as a loyal citizen by bringing the murder method to Toreth's attention, and that made the omission acceptable. It had worked at the time. In the cold light of day — or the fading light of the November afternoon — it sounded hollow.

The thought of Marian at I&I still held him back. The thought of anyone in that place. The techniques of the Interrogation Division weren't public knowledge, but the Administration found rumours to be a useful way to remind people of the penalties for open defiance or serious crime.

However, unlikely as the information was, he had to check it out for SimTech's sake, never mind any theoretical obligation to Toreth. Short of telling Toreth, he could find no way of doing that except talking to Marian.

As he opened the office door, he realised how infrequently he visited her without a summons. The surprise on her face reflected that, but she offered him a seat without comment.

"I have a question I must ask you," he began. "I received some information about your qualifications."

No flicker of a reaction. "From the para-investigator?"

"No. I'm talking to you now because I'm trying to decide what to do with it. Whether to tell him."

"Is it relevant to the investigation?"

"I can't imagine that it would be. It's a suggestion that you once worked for Psychoprogramming, or at least for their predecessors. That they sponsored your training. It is true?"

"Yes."

He'd been so confident of a denial that he couldn't think of a response.

"They sponsored me through university," she continued. "Then they employed me for four years and after that I left. I've had no dealings with them since. I want to tell you now, before you say or decide anything, that I never wanted to work for them."

The defensiveness might have sounded odd except that she was well aware of his feelings about psychoprogramming, interrogation and other allied arts. "So what the hell were you doing there for four years?"

Marian looked down at the desk with a slight frown.

"I wanted to be a psychologist. To help people. To do that, I had to get into university and I couldn't afford it without finding a sponsor. So . . . I faked my psych test to give myself a psychoprogrammer profile." She smiled sadly. "I thought I'd spend a few years there, find a corporation to repay my training debt, and then I'd be free."

"And?"

She looked away. "I couldn't do it. I stuck it out through the training, but when I qualified, when I was assigned, I couldn't do it any longer."

"What happened?"

"I tried to fake my way out again. I had a 'breakdown'. I was hoping for a reassignment, but I'd have been grateful enough if they'd dismissed me and thrown me out onto the streets. I was lucky, in a way. They saw right through it, and then it all came out — how I'd got there in the first place. They didn't want the embarrassment of dismissing me officially, because that would have meant acknowledging that I'd beaten the psych tests. Instead they found me a university post and wiped the records. A clean parting of the ways. It was the only time I felt grateful to them."

She looked down at the table for a moment. When she lifted her head, the desperation in her eyes shocked him. "Warrick, you don't know what goes on there. Most of the psychoprogrammers are barely human. I've never forgotten the things I saw there. I won't for the rest of my life. The things they do to people . . ." She actually shivered. "But more than that, it's the way they do it. Their technology isn't so different from the sim, you know."

So much about her hostility towards the sim was becoming clear now. "The sim is safe."

"So you keep saying. I was there when the first neural manipulation machines went into service. I've seen people destroyed by them —
destroyed
, Warrick. Not just a single memory blocked or implanted here or there, but their entire lives torn away from them, piece by piece. Broken down and rebuilt into different people who willingly betray their families, their friends. They call it 'reeducation'. It takes weeks for every victim who survives. Months sometimes, back then. Cliche or not, the people who die in those places really are the lucky ones."

"Marian . . ." No point in repeating the assurances she'd heard so often. "It's too late now. Even if I agreed — which you know I don't — the sim exists. We can't uninvent it. We can only make it as safe as possible. Besides, as you say, it's not new technology, in a way. They can do . . . what they do, already."

She didn't answer. This was the unbridgeable gulf between them.

"The sim can't be used like that in its commercial form," he said. "And I have no intention of making it easy for Psychoprogramming or any other part of the Administration to get hold of it. They can't afford it, and as long as the directors have control of SimTech we won't drop the price."

She looked at him for a long moment, eyes narrowed, then said, "Are you going to tell the para-investigator about it?"

"I — " He'd been so confident that the file was a mistake that he hadn't thought it through. It took him only a few seconds to decide — his first loyalty was to his employees, not to a man he'd known for only a few weeks. He'd failed Yang — he wouldn't fail Marian. "No, I won't. It doesn't have anything to do with the investigation. I'm happy to keep it as our secret. Now they know for sure it's murder — "

Marian stared at him. "It is?"

"Oh, Christ — I shouldn't have said."

"I'll treat it as confidential, of course. What have they found?"

"They suspect poisoning. No — they're sure of it. They've found a bioengineered toxin. The sim was used to keep victims alive for a while, but that's all the connection it had."

"Not the sim." Marian leaned back, slowly, her face pale. After a while, she nodded. "Not the sim."

"Definitely not. It was Yang, actually."

Her brows knitted. "What was?"

"He found the evidence in the data logs. He left a time-delayed copy for me — he must have been worried that something would happen to him."

"He didn't say — " She stopped abruptly.

"What?"

Marian shook her head. "He came to see me last week. About stopping work in the sim — about leaving the company, really. He never said anything about logs."

"Don't blame yourself. I had exactly the same thought — if only he'd told me. But it's no use dwelling on things like that." Odd to be giving her advice. If it were someone else, he might have gone over to touch her, comfort her, but he had no idea how she would take such an approach.

Instead, he stood up, brisk and professional. "Hopefully they'll clear everything up soon. I'll instruct the legal department to press I&I for a preliminary release of the findings, if they don't make a quick arrest. It should be enough to reassure the sponsors. Toreth thinks it's corporate sabotage, and the sponsors will unite in the face of that; if the sim is valuable enough to kill for, it's valuable enough to invest in."

She nodded again. "Yes. Yes, I'm sure they will."

He'd never seen her so subdued. Had she placed that much hope in her theory about the dangers of the sim finally being proved true? Healthy diversity of internal viewpoints was one thing, but perhaps, when it was all over, he should speak to Asher and Lew about finding a new senior psychologist.

"Marian? Can I get you something? A drink?"

"No, I'm all right." She checked her watch. "Goodness, I'm afraid I have some calls I really must make. Was there anything else?"

"No. And don't worry about your — about it. Not a word to anyone, I promise."

She smiled, relief evident. "Thanks. But . . ."

"What?"

"Perhaps —" She closed her eyes briefly, and then carried on. "Perhaps you ought to tell the — to tell Toreth what you found out. Better to have things like that out in the open. It's certainly better to be as honest as possible with people like that." Another smile, more like the usual Marian. "Aren't I always telling you that repressing the past is unhealthy?"

Late in the afternoon, Toreth was snatching another nap at his desk when Sara woke him to announce the arrival of the lab results for the first three bodies. They were better than he had hoped. Despite a list of technical problems that filled most of the report, O'Reilly had finally produced clear positive traces in Nissim and Kelly, although nothing for Teffera. Even Tillotson would have to drop his sim theory now.

By taking the time of the first red line on each log, he also had definite — and now hopefully correct — times of 'death' for both Kelly Jarvis and Pearl Nissim. Nissim's was half an hour into the sim session, when she had been alone in the room except for Keilholtz, and both of them were in the sim couches. However, that made a low dose of the toxin contained in the anti-nausea injection a perfectly plausible theory.

The red lines in Kelly's session started at seven-thirty-three and some seconds, which was when Toreth had been changing in his room at Renaissance Centre, and Warrick would have been in the SimTech car on the way there. That appeared to put Warrick in the clear. He must have known that last night, and Toreth spent a few minutes wondering why he hadn't said anything. Then he remembered the second question the techs had asked. The logs could've been altered, and Warrick had the ability to do it.

At least now he had an indisputable suspect for Kelly's death — Tara Scrivin. The respiratory control whatever-the-hell-it-was had activated fifteen minutes after she had entered the room to speak to Kelly.