The Resurrected Man (9 page)

“Yes. Separate analyses of the gel, which was replete with toxic waste-products at your point of awakening, and the maintenance agents, which had mutated gradually with time, concur that you were in hibernation for approximately thirty-six months. The dates between which you have no memory encompass thirty-eight months, well within the bounds of reason.

“In addition, InSight provides us with another means of ascertaining when you underwent hibernation. Its agents consist of self-replicating artificial viruses designed to infest and stimulate specific locations in the human brain. Their modified DNA contains markers that change every generation. From these markers, we can extrapolate the date on which InSight was first installed within your system. That date is April nineteenth, 2066—eight days after the death of Lindsay Carlaw.”

Eight days.
Jonah was unexpectedly relieved by that fact. The only conscious time he had lost was little more than a week, not the three years he had originally assumed. Even if he still had no idea what he had done in that time, the thought of finding out was a little less daunting.

“But—” The relief was followed by puzzlement. “If I was in the maintenance gel for that long, how can I be the killer?”

“I will answer that question directly,” e said. “Suffice it to say that you
are
still considered a primary suspect, and will continue to be until the EJC comes to terms with the more unusual aspects of the Twinmaker crimes. You must help us prove your innocence, if that is what you want to do.”

“Of course it is. I'm not a serial killer.”
And I have more important things to do—like finding out why my father is dead.

“Then you can begin that process now by letting us have your current UGI. I know you can't remember it, but you can apply to GLITCH for it to be revealed to you. If you give it to us, in turn, I will explain why we need it.”

He was about to agree when a nagging doubt made him reconsider. “I must have chosen Privacy for a reason,” he said. “Until I know that reason, I'm reluctant to revoke it.”

“You don't have to revoke it at all, Jonah. The information will go no further, I swear.”

“I don't see how you can live up to that promise given the situation you're in—with KTI infiltrated by someone from the outside.”

“True. However, there is an alternative. You can give us your UGI, then when you leave Artsutanov Station you can change it to another. That way, your Privacy will remain unviolated.”

The puzzlement remained. On an intuitive level, he suspected that QUALIA's reasoning was flawed. His anger flared again at the thought that he might be wasting time. “And what do you get from this? Why is my UGI so bloody important?”

“It is important because it will allow us to check whether the Twinmaker has used it in the last thirty-eight months.”

“But you can't steal a UGI,” he protested. “Every use is checked against file records to ensure a match with the holder. Short of radical surgery, there's no way anyone could—”

He stopped there. His mind had raced ahead of him, giving him a glimpse of where QUALIA was headed.

“There is a way,” e said in a voice as grave as the realisation that had just struck him. “The same way that enables the killer to copy his victims, one by one, leaving the originals to go about their everyday lives completely unaware that they have been horrifically tortured and murdered.”

The thought made him feel dizzy. “They're still
alive?
”

“Yes, Jonah. Can you see now why we call him the Twinmaker?”

He did, all too well, but was too stunned to speak.

“We want you to explain how he's doing it,” QUALIA said. “Or failing that, how
you
would have done it. In the end, that may amount to one and the same thing.”

“No—that's impossible.”

“Is it?”

“But
how?
”

“You tell us, Jonah. If Officer Whitesmith's theory is correct, the Twinmaker
is
you—another you copied illegally three years ago by the d-mat process. That's how he can use your UGI. The only difference between him and you is a matter of time and memory.”

Jonah floundered; he felt like he was thinking through a fog, so unreal was the scenario he found himself being asked to consider.

QUALIA asked him: “Are you beginning to understand, now, why it's so important for us to have your cooperation?”

It hit him then: “You want me to help you to hunt him down.”

“Exactly, Jonah,” QUALIA said. “Who better to catch a serial killer than the killer himself?”

Once the decision was made, he set immediately to work, letting his pattern-matchers in GLITCH follow the woman while he attended to the details. Ordinarily he would have planned for days before striking: preparing the transfer with obsessive care, rehearsing the capture over and over until he was certain nothing could go wrong. In reality, however, there was very little he needed to do in advance; the procedure had been surgically imprinted onto his amygdala, and he could rely on it to respond correctly and rapidly to any
contingency without need for conscious intervention. Besides, he had practised many times—in the dry and the wet, as EJC agents said. All he had to do was decide, and it would be done.

He had very little choice, anyway. Time was passing, and if it wasn't to be her, he would have to find someone else. Although the sense of anticipation careful planning had once given him would be absent this time, there was just as much pleasure in a patient prowl followed by a blitz attack. Besides, the anticipation was more than compensated for by watching the MIU chase its tail in a futile attempt to track him down. It was worth the risk to keep Jonah McEwen destabilised, before the aftershock of his awakening abated.

He scanned the girl's file once again as she walked through Konigsplatz to make sure he hadn't missed any warning signs. Despite being a Full-Disclosure Citizen, she was protected by the von Trojan Laws—legislation modelled on the Uncertainty Principle that guaranteed even the FDC's a measure of privacy. As a result, at any given time he could know some things about her but not all: her available credit or which establishment held it for her but not both; her age or her date of birth likewise; where she lived or her profession, and so on.

This was fine by him. He didn't want to know anything about her. He didn't even need her name to do what he wanted. The point was that the victims looked the same. All he really needed to know was by which method she travelled, and he had correctly guessed this within minutes of first seeing her. There was nothing in her file to suggest that she wasn't the ideal target.

His heart beat measurably faster as she left Konigsplatz and headed for a public d-mat facility on Regenstrasse.

The booths weren't busy at that time of day. Of ten, three were vacant, their matte-black doors unsealed and partly ajar. Their interiors were dark, a green strip along the upper frame of each indicating that it was available for use. She strolled casually in their direction, not deciding until the last moment which she would choose. When she
did, she picked the second from the end. The door slid open at the touch of her palm, and she stepped inside.

He moved rapidly, switching from GLITCH to the KTI network. The booth, not much larger on the inside than an average closet, had barely activated its sterile interior before he knew its registration number and precise location. From there he patched into its feed and installed the program designed to divert the transmission.

All of this was highly illegal, of course. He knew better than anyone the risks involved in tampering with KTI infrastructure; those risks had united most countries in passing laws to prevent them arising. But some things were more important.

He watched the girl as she closed the door to the booth, shutting out the rest of the world.

“Prepare for delivery,” he instructed his assistant. “Begin on my command.”

Not wanting to interrupt his view of the girl, he made his way by feel from the chair he had been occupying and into his own private booth. With one palm on the I-R link and a small part of his brain coordinating the transfer, he watched her perform similar actions in her own booth.

First, she keyed in her UGI and confirmed it with a retinal scan. The booth then responded with a request for information from KTI: it wanted to know where she was going and whether the trip was urgent. She fed it an address and selected an ASAP route, one that would get her home quickly but not override any emergency services. The booth ran the request through KTI, which checked her debit account and judged that she could indeed afford such an option. KTI also notified a nearby Global Access Point inlet of the Pool that its services would soon be required. The inlet in turn allocated a buffer to accommodate the expected data and began clearing its output lines.

He marvelled, as always, at the complexity of the process and the ease with which it was performed. From booth to KTI to Global
Access Point inlet to the Pool at one end of the transfer; from node to node within the network of supercomputers, along the uBNS—ultra high-speed Backbone Network Services—and across interchanges where legislative lines were involved; then back again in reverse, from Pool to booth, at the other end. There were so many places and ways in which something could go wrong—yet it rarely did. And even when it
did
, who missed a few molecules anyway? That was all the data represented. The accumulated mass of tissue lost in five years of commercial d-mat operation amounted to little more than a toenail.

He smiled at the oft-quoted statistic, so loved by d-mat proponents and so hated by its detractors. Nothing was ever quite so simple, as he of all people should know.

The girl removed her hand from the I-R input and leaned the plastic bag against one wall of the booth. There was a mirror on the back of the door. Facing it, she locked eyes with her reflection and folded her hands across her stomach. Then she assumed an expression that very few people saw on anyone but themselves. KTI technicians called it “grazing.”

D-mat transfers were sometimes “incoherent” between each terminus and could interrupt a chain of thought in mid-flow, which could be inconvenient or distressing for the person experiencing it. Many techniques—from counting sheep to inducing a v-med state—claimed to neutralise this effect; all gave the user a vacant expression similar to that of a cow in clover.

He watched her graze for what felt like an eternity. During the hiatus between request and transfer, when thoughts were still, time could seem to stretch forever. He considered checking the booth's scheduling processor to calculate to within a microsecond when the analysis would begin, but he preferred not to. Grazing was an experience he could share with his victim, thereby bringing them subtly together. It gave him time to consider what she might
really
be thinking. Did she wonder whether she was being watched? Was she
afraid? Had she ever thought about what happened inside the d-mat booth she left behind as she transferred?

If not, she would soon find out. One of her would, anyway. This he promised her as the seconds slowed down and time paused in the instant between
here
and
there
, as measured by the girl in the booth. The girl who looked so
remarkably
like Marylin Blaylock…

In the all-too-brief moment of reflection, there was an instant where he seemed to be looking at himself, seeing his own fears and doubts in the woman's face.

Was
he
afraid too?

Did he
truly
know what he was doing?

Then the moment passed and his implants triggered the capture routine. Searing white light filled his visual feed as the d-mat booth began to analyse her body and its accoutrements. The girl melted into the blaze like a candle in a furnace, then disappeared entirely from sight.

He severed the VR line as his own booth hissed into life. With his assistant's help he took her—yes, he thought with relish, he
took
her!—further than she had ever gone before.

Not just
across
, this time, but
into
the thin red line between life and death…

The door to the d-mat booth opened with a hiss, and Marylin stepped out of it. Barely had she registered the scuffed grey corridor outside when she almost walked into Jason Fassini, the plain-clothes MIU agent she partnered with when working away from the rest of the team.

“Jabolo
, Marylin,” he said, holding up his hands to prevent them from colliding.

She stopped in time. “Didn't see you there, Jason.”

“I've been waiting for you.”

“Sorry.”

“No worries. I have an unmarked car on standby outside.” He nodded at the bulky briefcase she held in one hand. “Ready for clone-patrol,
zsaru?
”

“As ready as I'll ever be.” She looked around to get her bearings. If she remembered the floor plan correctly, the secure d-mat area was on the basement level of the EJC building; there were elevators leading to ground level around the corner, or fire stairs behind her. She chose the stairs. “And kill the CRE argot, will you? I'm not in the mood.”

He followed her, boots clomping heavily on the steps. His long limbs, free-flowing red-brown hair and untucked floral shirt hadn't changed since they last worked together; she felt like an anal-retentive next to him just for being in her black-and-greys.

“Rough night?” he asked.

“Not your problem.”

“Aye, ma'am. I can take a hint.”

He fell silent, and she cursed herself for being so abrupt. He was just trying to make conversation, and there were better ways to let him know she wasn't feeling up to it.

Her day had started badly the moment her internal alarm went off, warning her that she'd overslept. That in itself wasn't unusual. D-mat hangover was a way of life for those in the MIU, even though it operated on a 25-hour schedule to account for missing time. It also paid its senior officers enough to afford lipid balancing. Theoretically, she should have managed. Occasionally, however, it caught up with her, and when it did, it was always a shock.

Crossing time-zones several times a day caused the problem. Living in Melbourne, she was seven hours out of sync with Goliath time, which, in yesterday's case, had been five hours ahead of Jonah's apartment in
Faux
Sydney. Every time she went through a d-mat booth made it half an hour worse. She could stick to the MIU's
schedule as strictly as she liked, but there was little she could do about external cues, such as the sun, and the way they affected her body. And here she was standing on the other side of the planet, sixteen hours behind her home time.

Perhaps, she thought, the shock wasn't that it affected her once in a blue moon. The shock was that it didn't affect her
every
morning.

That morning, she'd somehow struggled through breakfast and a brisk warmup before logging onto the MIU workspace and letting her sentry know she was awake. The two-room unit she occupied was one of a block of eight suburban safe-houses leased to the EJC by the Melbourne City Council. It didn't have its own d-mat booth, but there was a block of six down the hall that serviced the entire building. Its fittings weren't fancy, and nowhere near as advanced as the latest fully interactive apartments enjoyed by the well-off, but that suited her. As long as she had somewhere she could sleep alone and listen to the occasional polka without neighbours complaining, she was happy.

Two minutes after she'd logged onto the workspace, while she was in the middle of doing her dishes manually, Whitesmith called to give her the news. The Twinmaker victim in Jonah's booth had been identified, and Marylin had been chosen to conduct the initial interview. That annoyed her for a start—she had better things to do than waste time on a task anyone in MIU could have done just as well—but it only got worse. They wanted her to do it in person.

“Why, Odi?” she asked. “What's different about this one?”

“On the surface, nothing. Have you seen the autopsy report?”

“Not yet, but—”

“Have a look then, to bring yourself up to date. Follow the usual drill. There's something else we might want you to do while you're in the field, but don't ask what. It might come to nothing.”

She simmered for a moment. “We” obviously excluded her. “What about Jonah?”

“QUALIA's expecting to finish the REM probe in half an hour.
KTI wants him to rest awhile, then they'll bring him up to real-time so we can interrogate him properly.”

“And what have you learned so far?” she asked, curiosity temporarily overriding her annoyance.

“We have his UGI and are applying for a search warrant as we speak. Shouldn't be long before we know what that tells us.” He smiled. “QUALIA's also pinpointed dates for the memory loss. They concur with his earlier statements. We'll be checking for slipups later.”

“Even if you find any, that won't prove anything.” It would always be contentious in a courtroom whether verbal discrepancies were the result of genuine error or inconsistent lying. “Got any hard evidence at all?”

“We've mapped the brain damage and confirmed that it was caused by InSight agents. That's about it.”

“Did he say anything?

“That he knows nothing about the Twinmaker, of course.”

“What sort of idiot wouldn't, guilty or not?”

“We had to ask, Marylin,” Whitesmith said, a thick edge of weariness in his voice. His image in her workspace, however, looked alert.

“You really should use a voice synthesiser, Odi,” she said. “Did you get any sleep at all last night?”

“A couple of hours, here and there.”

She doubted it was that much. “I'll do what you want this time. Out of pity.”

“That's very kind of you.”

She walked from her kitchenette to the bathroom and turned on the shower. “Let me get ready. I'll call you in fifteen minutes with a list of hardware.”

“Do that. But don't go overboard. There really is nothing special about this one. I hope there won't be any more surprises waiting for you today.”

I won't bet on it
, she had thought, stepping into the shower to scrub herself clean and to apply nanofood to her scalp. If there was one thing she had learnt in the last forty-eight hours, it was to assume nothing.

The foyer of the EJC building was empty apart from two sentry robots guarding bulletproof glass doors leading out into the street. The sentries were slim, matte-grey machines suspended like sleeping bats from runners in the high ceiling, weapons folded at their sides in perpetual readiness. Neither of them moved as she and Fassini approached, but she knew they were being closely watched.

“Do we need to check in with the locals?” she asked.

“All done.” Fassini grinned at her breaking of the silence. “They're pretty relaxed here. It's not as if we're making a bust or anything else that might encroach upon their jurisdiction. That doesn't mean they'll let us d-mat to the site, but it's no big problem taking a car the rest of the way.”

The glass doors slid open, letting in a blast of hot, humid air. Marylin winced as sunlight struck her full in the face. Her partner touched her arm, guiding her to where the vehicle—a white four-seater sedan—waited for them.

“Give me the rundown. You're more used to this than I am.”

“Yeah, it feels weird having you here instead of piggybacking.” The street-side door of the car opened to let them in. Fassini slid across the rear seat, dragging his shirttails after him. “Can't help but wonder why.”

“Likewise.” Marylin chose to sit on the same seat as Fassini, placing the briefcase between them. She preferred to see where she was headed rather than where she had been. “Blame upstairs, not me.”

“They're checking up on me?”

“No, but it's not a social visit either.” The door slid shut, enclosing them both in a bubble of cool air. As soon as they had settled, the car slid silently away from the curb. He had obviously programmed the destination in advance. “The rundown, Jason.”

“Right, right.” He winked. “Her name is Yoland Suche-Thomas. You know that already, I presume?”

“Yes. Age thirty-four, no dependants, an employee of NuSense. I gather she writes CRE scripts—which should please you.”

“Wrong genre. She's into romance, not drama.”

“Not so far apart, sometimes.” She slid the briefcase onto the seat opposite. “Go on.”

“We got her address from a contact in NuSense itself. GLITCH says she works from home, so the chances are good we'll find her there.”

Marylin nodded, inwardly cursing the von Trojan laws that prevented them from tracking the woman's UGI directly without her permission. “We'll manage.”

“I guess we'll have to.” His grin flashed. “You've seen the autopsy report?”

This time she could say she had. Yoland Suche-Thomas was blonde, attractive, and bore more than a passing resemblance to the other victims. She had also been tortured over a prolonged period, maybe as many as five days, and had ultimately died from thirst. Her tissues contained traces of common pharmaceuticals and repair agents, confirming that the Twinmaker had administered enough first aid to keep her alive until he had finished with her. The barely visible scars on her arms that Marylin had noted during her inspection of the body had, however, turned out to be nothing more sinister than marks left behind by tattoo-erasers.

A key part of the pathologist's examination had been the removal of inert markers in the body's spine. These markers, installed by KTI the first time a person used d-mat and updated on every subsequent passage, recorded the time and termini of each d-mat jump plus a partial UGI of the individual. This information, combined with genetic code plucked from her dead cells, had enabled the MIU's forensic laboratory to identify the victim.

She had been kidnapped on June 12, while in transit from a private booth in Johannesburg. Why she had been in South Africa, who she had been visiting and where she presently was, remained unknown. Her file listed a Significant Other in Johannesburg—maybe
family or an ex-partner—but there was no way to be sure who it was without her input. Not even the EJC could violate her basic rights without giving a good reason and KTI was keen to avoid having to go through such a process. The MIU data-miners had already exhausted their available options by finding out this much about her, reducing them to old-fashioned guesswork.

“The match is good,” Fassini said, his tone strictly professional and face no longer smiling.

“Very,” she agreed. She, too, found it hard to forget that this woman, apart from the hair, looked exactly like her. “How far away are we?”

“I'll take that to mean ‘How long are we going to be cooped up in here?' Not long, I promise.”

“That isn't why I asked.” Although it was annoying that regulations forbade them from d-matting directly to their destination, the pause in proceedings was giving her time to think. “To be honest, driving has become something of a novelty for me, lately. It's nice to really
travel
again.”

“The pleasure is all mine.” He tipped an imaginary chauffeur's cap and put his feet up on the seat opposite them. “She lives in a high-density block on the site of the old Bush Intercontinental Airport. Nothing fancy, but as tight as a worm's arse. Security obviously bothers her more than Privacy.”

“That's ironic. The one we're dealing with is much more dangerous than a Bert or a Mudilo.”

“Actually, the biggest problem in this neck of the woods are the Vankas.”

She didn't recognise the term, but the assonance was blatant. “After the obvious?”

“No. It's the name usually given to the village idiot in Russian folk tales. They adopted it principally for that meaning, although the pun does give it extra credence.” He leaned his head on one hand and looked at her sideways. “You're out of touch, Marylin. It's dangerous.”

“Not really. I doubt I'll ever work the streets again.”

“Doesn't matter. You have to go out there
sometime
, whether you're working or not. That's why I follow the CREs and learn the argot. If a Zonta bails me up in a dark alley, I want to be sure we speak the same language.”

She didn't respond. It wouldn't be fair to criticise his version of reality, grungily naive though she thought it, when hers was no less subjective. Yes, she was isolated from the desperate demographic levels of society, the gangs and dope-pushers and tech-mongers that named themselves after village idiots and masturbators, but she was hunting much more refined prey these days. She had earned the right to do so. Eighteen months with Jonah had been more than enough, and she had no desire to return to that world.

Outside the window of the car, urban scenery glided by with hypnotic smoothness. Trees whipped past on a regular basis, genetically modified to thrive in a CO-rich atmosphere; green islands were gradually taking the place of lanes that, even as recently as ten years ago, had been full of cars. In the middle distance, the city centre showed many signs of demolition. Business was moving out and the buildings were being torn down or abandoned unless declared “aesthetically relevant.” This was less a lingering after-effect of the Slow War than just another indication of changing times. If VTC had weakened the argument for centralised administration centres, then d-mat had killed it entirely. Cities like
Faux
Sydney, which existed in isolation from any other urban center, connected to the world only by d-mat and name, had been an inevitable development.