The Resurrected Man (8 page)

There had been a dead body in his unit. How it had got there was a mystery to him. In his present state, there was little he could do to work out where it had come from, so—

“Okay,” he said, gratified that he had been able to reason
something.
“We have a deal.”

QUALIA's voice expressed gratitude and relief. “I'm glad to hear it.”

He refused to be lulled, if that was es intention. “You go first. I want to know where I stand.”

“Very well, Jonah, but I will be brief. When you have met your side of the arrangement, we can discuss the situation in more detail.”

“Fair enough, I guess.”

“I am about to display an image,” e warned.

Jonah did his best to prepare for the parting of the neutral wallpaper, but was still startled when the picture of a woman appeared before him. The woman was shown from the shoulders up and might have been entirely naked below that point. She was blonde and had green eyes. Her expression was one of relaxed amusement.

“One,” QUALIA stated.

“Should I recognise her?” he asked, puzzled.

“Be patient. There are more to come.” E let him study the picture a moment longer. “Two.”

The picture changed to show another woman in profile from the waist up, dressed this time in a sweater. Also a blonde, although her hair was a touch longer; her eyes might have been green, too, but Jonah couldn't be sure from that angle.

“Three.”

Definitely green in the third photo. This woman was dressed for a CRE orgy—transparent wrap exposing oiled nipples and thighs, with body-art consisting of circles arranged around a bullseye focussed on the clitoris. A typical
kerhane
outfit. Given the lack of body hair, Jonah guessed that the thick mane on her head was probably not real—but it
was
blonde. He was beginning to see a pattern.

“Four.”

“Blonde hair,” he said, “green eyes, slim figures, probably late twenties or early thirties—not that it's easy to tell these days. All women, or reasonable facsimiles thereof. I presume we're going somewhere with this?”

“Five. Yes, Jonah.”

The fifth picture also matched the pattern. “Well?” he prompted.

“Keep watching.” Three more faces appeared in quick succession. “Are you beginning to see a resemblance to someone you once knew?”

He studied the latest face more closely. It did look vaguely familiar. “I'm not sure.”

“Perhaps if I show you a composite image, blending the features of all eight faces so far.”

The face before him changed and rotated to look him in the virtual eye.

“Yes,” he breathed, startled. “It's Mary.”

“Public Officer Marylin Agueda Blaylock,” QUALIA confirmed. “The resemblance is uncanny, and only increases as the features of the remaining faces are added to the composite.” E counted from nine to fifteen in quick succession, changing the combined face as e went. Then e paused slightly before concluding with: “The features of the most recent subject have yet to be added to the database.”

Jonah guessed that the sixteenth woman was the body lying in pieces in his d-mat booth. “They're dead, aren't they?”

“Yes. The first was kidnapped and murdered one month after Officer Blaylock assumed a Class 2 Detective position in the MIU.”

“What's the connection?”

“We don't know for certain. But it is clear that some sort of transference is occurring: the murderer is doing to his victims what he fantasises about doing to Marylin Blaylock.”

“Or someone who looks very much like her.” He recalled the fact that she had changed her hair colour to flat brown and now wore it cropped short. He couldn't blame her for taking that small step away from the composite face before him. “There are bound to be others who have her features. Couldn't it be someone else the killer is after—not her?”

“Unfortunately, that is probably not the case.”

“Oh?”

“There is another connection: the killer uses d-mat to kidnap his victims.”

“So…” Jonah struggled to work it out. After a second or two, he gave in and followed a gut feeling, instead of reason. “The killer is someone who works for KTI?”

“Correct. Officer Blaylock's position frequently brings her into contact with technicians, researchers and administrators of the d-mat network. Any one of these people may have been motivated to perform the crimes, or—at the very least—may have shown someone else how to infiltrate the network.”

“Someone such as me?”

“Yes. Evidence given by Officer Blaylock indicates that you and she parted on unfriendly terms five days before you opted for Privacy. When she tried to contact you later, you had disappeared. Your continued absence made us more suspicious, especially when the murders persisted and no other leads were forthcoming.”

He wanted to ask:
She tried to contact me?
Instead, he concentrated on what QUALIA was telling him. “No leads at all?”

“None, Jonah. You are it—especially now that we have found both you and the body of the latest victim in the same location.”

Jonah absorbed this in silence. He had to admit that the situation did look incriminating, in context. Almost
too
incriminating.

“I didn't think that was possible,” he said. “Infiltrating the network, I mean.”

“Neither did I.” QUALIA's tone of voice hinted at self-deprecation; given es stated position as overseer of the KTI network, Jonah could understand that. “There are many safeguards in place to prevent such a thing from occurring, even from within KTI itself. The killer has somehow evaded them all.”

“Do you think that I'm capable of doing this?”

“On the available evidence, no,” e admitted. “And Officer Blaylock agrees.”

“Well, then.”

“It's not as simple as that, Jonah.”

He sighed. “I didn't think it would be.”

“Of course not. Remember that you could have an accomplice within KTI or be employing someone else's knowledge.”

“True.” He conceded the point with reluctance.

“Perhaps you can see, now, why Officer Whitesmith was under such stress at the disposal scene this morning. Until the killer is caught and brought to justice, KTI is operating on the assumption that it has been infiltrated by persons inimical to its operation. This, as you can imagine, is taking its toll on the relationship between KTI and its supposed watchdog, the MIU.

“And there is another disturbing detail of which you should be aware, Jonah. The murderer has several unique signatures; one of them is the presence of WHOLE hard-print literature at the disposal scene.”

“I see,” he said.

“The first body was accompanied by the opening page of the most famous of all the anti-KTI propaganda. I think you will be familiar with it. It quotes in its title a twentieth-century scholar by the name of Daniel C. Dennet.”

“‘The Murdering Twinmaker,'” he recalled. “Lindsay helped draft that pamphlet.”

“Precisely. Yet another connection between the Twinmaker and you.”

“If this keeps up, you'll have
me
believing it, too.”

QUALIA didn't laugh, but neither did he.

“You actually call him that?” he asked. “The Twinmaker?”

“Yes. It is suprisingly appropriate,” e said. “But that is all I will tell you for now. Officer Whitesmith is keen to obtain information only you can provide, and I am under increasing pressure outside this conversation to wrest it from you. Are you willing, now, to answer some of our questions?”

Jonah resigned himself to the inevitability of being interrogated.

“Okay. I'll do my best.”

“That's all we can hope for. Firstly, I want to check that we are correctly interpreting the processes occurring within your brain. As you may remember, I will be unable to tell if you are lying, only whether the memories you accessed are genuine or invented. I will need to ask you some simple questions to which we already know the answers in order to calibrate the cage properly.”

“Just get on with it.”

“Very well. Let's start with your profession. How are you registered on the United Republics of Australasia electoral database?”

“As a freelance investigator.”

“A private eye?”

“If you prefer that term, yes. I don't.”

“You operate under your real name?”

“Yes. I have my own data-acquisition company.”

“Do you recall your license number?”

“No. I normally keep that sort of business information on my overseer, and you tell me it's been wiped. It should be on file somewhere.”

“What about your universal GLITCH identifier?”

“My UGI is…” He thought for a long minute. The memory itched at him, but wouldn't surface. “I don't know.”

“Would you recognise it if you were to hear or see it?” QUALIA asked.

“There's only one way to find out.”

Barely had he finished speaking when an alphanumeric code appeared in place of the composite victim.

“FFDLB,” he read aloud, “01458927. Yes, that's it.”

“Are you certain of that, Jonah?”

“Positive. I've had it since I turned eighteen.”

“The memory is genuine, according to the cage,” QUALIA confirmed. “At least, it looks more genuine than fake or suggested. However,
I'm afraid you're wrong. This is your
old
identifying code. On choosing the Non-Disclosure Option, you were given a new UGI.”

Jonah did his best to recall another number, but failed; not even a tickle. “You keep talking about me choosing Privacy,” he protested. “To be honest, I can't imagine why I'd ever have done that.”

“Most people do it because they have strong ideological or emotional needs that can only be satisfied by setting themselves apart from the majority of voting citizens and the bureaucracies that serve them; they want their information to be unobtainable and are prepared to pay for the privilege. Others do it in order to hide.”

“Neither fits me, I'm afraid.”

“Neither fits your
memory
of you,” QUALIA said. “At some point, you obviously changed your mind. Can you think of any reason why you might have done so?”

“Off the top of my head, no, I can't.”

“Maybe it will come to you later. What was your date of birth, instead?”

“May fifth, 2034.”

“Your parents' names?”

“My birth mother was Margaret Janette McEwen.” That information was as clear as it had ever been, much to his relief. “I was fertilised
in vivo
from an anonymous donor egg, with sperm provided by my genetic father, Vincent Karl Apolloni. He died before I was born.”

“Lindsay Carlaw was your father by adoption?”

“Yes. He was a friend of my mother's. She lost custody when I was two, and I went to live with him.”

“Is he still alive?”

The grief rose again. “No.”

“Do you recall how and when he died?”

“Yes. Look, I don't want to talk about this.”

“Do you remember what you did
after
he died?”

“For Christ's sake—”

“Please answer, Jonah.”

He stopped, thought seriously about the question.

“No,” he eventually said. The answer surprised him. He knew he had been escorted by a member of the bomb squad out of the QUIDDITY lab and into the hallway outside, where a medic had dressed the shrapnel wound in his shoulder. Everything up to that point seemed as vivid as though it had happened yesterday. Beyond it, however, he drew a blank. “I don't remember anything after then.”

“Until now.”

“That's right. Until I talked to Mary in the bath.”

“Interesting,” QUALIA mused. “I'm beginning to see a pattern, Jonah. Your long-term memories are intact up to a point. You can't recall your new UGI address, for instance, or what you did after Lindsay Carlaw died. The date of his death—April eleventh, 2066—appears to be a boundary of some sort. Yet your short-term memory seems to be functioning well since your awakening. How much do you recall about that experience?”

To hell with it: I want to know what happened after my father died!
He came so close to uttering the words that he was amazed the prevocal monitor didn't pick them up. There must have been an investigation, an inquest, some sort of conclusion reached—he must have
grieved—
but he couldn't remember any of it. The question of why someone had killed Lindsay along with his brainchild, QUIDDITY, was as open and as driving, to him, as if it had happened only days ago. Had anyone been convicted of the murder? Had his father died for nothing? What had he, Jonah, done to avenge the crime? Surely he must have done
something.

But he knew there was no point forcing the issue now. He had to cooperate if he was going to get any answers at all. Once he had demonstrated that he wasn't the Twinmaker—which he anticipated wouldn't take long—he could focus on the issues concerning him more.

He thought back to the nightmare, tried to recall exactly what had happened. “I was in the spa, in my unit.”

“Do you know what you were doing in there?”

“I'm not sure. I was in some sort of fluid. I felt like I was drowning.”

“Not quite. You were immersed in protein gel, held in a state of artificial hibernation by a high dose of maintenance nanomachines. Similarly, your mind was in a vegetative-meditative state under the influence of the InSight agents I mentioned earlier.”

“I told you I don't know anything about that.”

“Which concurs with the cut-off date. You obviously entered hibernation after the death of Lindsay Carlaw. Furthermore, you can't even have
considered
doing so prior to then—or else you would remember doing that, at least. The entire hibernation incident, from immersion to your awakening this morning, has been completely erased.”

“Are you telling me that I was in hibernation the entire time? For
three years?
”