The Resurrected Man (10 page)

Indeed, if her life continued along its present path, she would soon find herself living in such an environment. Common sense suggested that she should move to Artsutanov Station and MIU-ACOC, where she would be theoretically safe from the Twinmaker should he decide to move against her. It would also eliminate one source of d-mat lag from her daily diet. The administrative and operations areas were,
ordinarily, very secure, but with KTI compromised not even they were safe. She figured that if she was going to be at risk wherever she went, she might as well continue to operate from home. Even becoming a skin, cocooned in instruments and never stepping through her door again, would be better than living her life by someone else's rules.

“I haven't had a chance to script the interview properly,” she said. “Do you have anything in mind?”

“Variations on the usual theme. Tell her we detected an anomaly in the jump she took on the twelfth and that we need her help to look into it further. If she wants to know more about the anomaly, we can explain that she was diverted through an irregular node between interchanges and that we suspect someone is rerouting traffic through that point in order to defraud KTI of relay earnings.”

“You think that'll be enough to convince her to hand over her UGI?

“It usually is. There shouldn't be a problem if she thinks money's involved.”

“True.”

“I'll hit her with the juicy bits last, just in case she gets nervous.” He adopted an exaggerated version of his own voice:
“Working for NuSense must have its down-side, right? Lots of prank calls, loonies following you. Experienced anything like that lately?
Even if the answer is no, that's something.”

“We can't make her suspicious, whatever we do. If word gets out—”

“Kuss
, Marylin. I'm no
golya.
I know what I'm doing.”

True. He did. He had been with the MIU since its inception and had spent the previous ten years working for the EJC. Sometimes it was hard to remember that he was both older and more experienced than her, even if she was his superior officer.

“Sorry, Jason. I guess I was reminding myself more than you.”

He shrugged. “That's okay. You've got a lot on your mind at the moment.”

“Too much.” She stirred restlessly on the seat. “No offence, Jason, but I just don't know what I'm doing here. I doubt talking to Suche-Thomas will make any difference. It'll be the same as the others; they're completely in the dark. The Twinmaker only wants their bodies, not their lives.”

“So he's a chauvinist.” It was hard to tell if he was joking or not. “But it's still a lead, and we have to pursue it.”

“I'm not arguing with that. It's just—” She stopped. A
Why me?
would sound churlish and spoilt. She wasn't like that. But she did fail to see why she had been ordered to accompany Fassini on what was basically a one-person plus VTC monitor assignment. Unless it was connected to the “something else” Whitesmith had planned for her. Whatever that was.

Fassini studied her closely, obviously trying to work out what she was thinking. “Is he awake yet?”

“Maybe.” Not a bad guess. She had checked on Jonah's condition shortly before leaving her unit. Mild sedation was helping him sleep while repair agents cruised his body, rebuilding muscles, organs and fat reserves that had atrophied during hibernation. He had recovered ten kilograms, although the gain was barely noticeable. His face above the sheets had still been deathly thin, disturbingly Reaper-like. “I hope not.”

“Do you think we've got him at last? That he's really the Twinmaker?”

“What I think doesn't come into it,” she said. “It's out of my hands.”

“You mean now that we've actually got some evidence?” He nodded. “That's a pleasant change. Even if it doesn't totally incriminate him.”

“Yes.” That
was
true. Where it would lead she could only guess.

At least she still had access to VTC and the MIU workspace. If she really wanted to get on with work, there was nothing stopping her. It
wouldn't be long before they reached their destination and the opportunity would be gone.

Sighing, she brought up the file on the victim and went through it one last time. Forensic examination of the body had revealed particles consistent with those found at its last known location, plus a dozen likely to have come from a low-gravity environment. The latter accorded with analysis of the capillaries surrounding her partially healed wounds, which indicated that the woman had spent a significant amount of time before death in free-fall. Whether she had actually died there was difficult to tell; the time her body had spent on the floor of Jonah's d-mat booth had caused the blood to settle in the usual manner, otherwise it would have provided an important clue.

There were ways around that. The interview of the murdered woman's original would reveal whether she had been in orbit or deep space recently; if she hadn't, that would reduce the number of locations the killer could have kept her to a more manageable number.

But only relatively
, Marylin thought with a grimace. There were thousands of probes and stations equipped with d-mat, any one of which could have provided the Twinmaker with a suitable site. In the late twenty-first century, there were easily enough inhabited places across the solar system to hide one man and a body. Especially if he had help…

She pushed the thought from her mind. This wasn't the first time a low-gravity environment had been implicated in the Twinmaker killings, nor the idea of conspiracy raised. On the face of it, the killer's resources did seem prodigious. Not only was he able to infiltrate KTI's supposedly impregnable defences, but he also either owned or had access to a safe haven off-Earth; it was therefore easier to ascribe such feats to a group of people rather than to one. But the model was too fragile. The chances of a conspiracy disintegrating increased with every new person added, the greatest leap being from one to two. In her opinion, anyone possessing even half the Twinmaker's intelligence would never tolerate such a risk.

He was a genius. She was certain of that fact, and never let herself forget it. An amoral, solitary genius, who, if the MIU profilers were correct, wouldn't even work with a copy of himself. That certainly explained why he might have kept such a copy in a state near death for three years and erased a significant amount of the copy's memory simply to keep his pursuers off his back—if Odi was right. And the only way to tell that was to see what the search through GLITCH's archived records revealed. If Jonah's UGI produced a match, then that was confirmation enough. There was no way he could have been in the bath
and
roaming the world, free, at the same time.

They drove in silence for ten minutes, she unable to hide her unease and he apparently content for the moment to leave her be. The car took a side ramp off the freeway and slid down into the suburbs. A series of right-angle turns through unremarkable streets finally brought them to a two-metre-high perimeter fence topped with nanowire. The wire was invisible; only the occasional glint of sunlight reflecting off taut threads revealed that it was there at all. Anyone trying to climb the wall at night would lose a finger or worse before realising their mistake.

The car swung through an open gate in the wall without stopping. No doubt it had been checked by some sort of intelligent system on the way in, identifying the vehicle, its occupants and their destination.

Inside, their surroundings became decidedly more cramped. The streets were narrower, the buildings taller. Much was concealed behind shrubbery and trees, and the sidewalks were empty, but there was no hiding the fact that a lot of people were crammed into a relatively small space. Unlike other similar suburban blocs Marylin had visited, though, it looked fairly clean; either the collective owners still took its upkeep seriously or it was too new for rot to have taken a visible hold.

“Not far now,” Fassini said. “You ready?”

She nodded stiffly. Whitesmith hadn't called, which was probably a good thing. “I'll be fine.”

“You sure?”

“It hasn't been
that
long, Jason.” The last time she had been on clone patrol had been following the discovery of the Twinmaker's seventh victim, almost a year earlier. Nowhere near long enough.

He craned his neck as the car began to slow. “This is it: number twenty-six.”

She followed his gaze and saw a white-painted triangular building four storeys high partially concealed behind a giant oak. The yard was unadorned apart from the tree, a local variant of permagreen lawn and a hedge acting as a front fence. Low-upkeep, she thought, perfect for people with demanding lifestyles, or for a society too self-involved to bother maintaining its immediate environment.

“Looks better in real life,” Fassini commented on the view.

“Everything does, Jason.”

“She's in Unit 14. The public booth she used to get home from Africa is just up the street, around the corner. KTI techs examined it earlier today, but we can check it again on the way back if you like.”

The car came to a smooth halt outside the block of units. A knot deep in her stomach started to twist. She reduced the MIU workspace to an unobtrusive icon and reached for the briefcase.

He unsealed the door. “After you,” he said. “You're the boss.”

“Keep reminding me.” She took a deep breath and squeezed past him, back out into the heat.

The interview took place in an editing suite, where a project midway through had been interrupted by their entrance. Yoland Suche-Thomas was an easygoing woman who dressed about the house in a silk dressing gown that had seen too many manual washes. Light reflected off her fish-white scalp, revealing slight indentations where a professional VTC helmet had rested moments before. The helmet now lay on its side by a bank of card readers, a red light blinking to indicate that it was on standby. Inside the helmet—which provided noninvasive
inputs to subdermal implants—it would've been difficult to hear or see anything apart from whatever the woman had been playing when they'd arrived. Now, as though the helmet resented the intrusion of reality, its blinking light kept catching Marylin's eye, breaking her concentration.

Marylin was profoundly relieved that the woman had no hair. From a distance that would make them look even more alike, but from her perspective it made the woman look unfamiliar. She still associated herself with blonde hair—with the features the Twinmaker hunted.

“Off-Earth?” Suche-Thomas said in response to Fassini's question. “No, not at all. If I needed to go somewhere like that, I'd VTC for sure.”

“The trip worries you?”

“Well, you know—d-mat is complicated enough down here, not to mention expensive, without all the interchanges you need to go through to get into space.”

“It's only marginally more difficult, I'm told,” Fassini reassured her. “Most of the work is done by the time you've left the booth. From there it's just a matter of routing the data, which is essentially the same anywhere.”

The woman smiled as though she thought he was lying, or greatly oversimplifying the truth, when in fact he wasn't. “I know the risk is small,” she said, “but the thought of bouncing around in transit still bothers me.”

“You're not alone there, Ms. Suche-Thomas.”

“Tell me about it.” She rolled her eyes. “I went to Africa with a friend of mine. She'd been nagging for months to meet my ex-partner, but neither of them like to use the booths.”

“Your
ex
-partner?”

“Yes. Nari and I parted some time ago, but we're still friends. Emily was watching an old CRE I put together for our separation, and thought she might like to start up a friendship. Or whatever.” The
woman smiled disarmingly. Her openness regarding personal affairs was a welcome change to the many resistant interviewees Marylin had encountered in her career. “Anyway, it boiled down to which one would cave first—use d-mat, I mean. In the end I forced the issue by taking Emily with me. Has she been rerouted too?”

“We'll check. Can you give us her surname?”

“Ahmadi. Only she'll be even more worried if what you say turns out to be true.”

“We don't know that it is, yet,” said Marylin. “We can let you know. Obviously we'd appreciate it if you could keep the information to yourself, regardless of Ms. Ahmadi's feelings.”

“Sure.” The woman tipped back her head and beamed. “What do I look like? An alarmist? This is just the sort of information WHOLE would love to get their hands on.”

“Exactly.” Fassini returned Suche-Thomas' grin with an air of casual coconspiracy.

Marylin rubbed her eyes and leaned back into the seat, letting Fassini do most of the work, her thoughts punctuated by the flashing light. As expected, the interview was turning out to be a dead-end: the woman hadn't been off-Earth, had only visited her ex-lover for a holiday, had not been followed that she could recall, and seemed in every respect oblivious to the fact that a copy of her had been horrifically murdered, just like the others. As the d-mat hangover—exacerbated by sudden shifts in temperature from the EJC building to the car to the woman's apartment—became a stabbing headache that Marylin's endorphin regulators could barely keep in check, she found herself wishing she hadn't got out of bed that morning. Or, perhaps more effectively, hadn't gone to bed at all. While she had been absent from MIU-ACOC, she had been relegated to shitwork without her realising.

Worst of all was the thought she couldn't shake:
I've seen your naked body, Yoland Suche-Thomas—tortured beyond recognition—and it looked just like mine
…

Finally it was over. As the woman showed them cheerfully to the door, Marylin instructed the car to meet them at the curb. They'd had to find a spot in a car-park a block away from the woman's unit, as they were forbidden by local ordinances from parking on the street. She didn't want to waste another moment in Houston, if she could avoid it.