Continuance (12 page)

Out on technicalities,
but eyes are watching. Stay away and lay low. I’ll contact you when it’s safe.

Maybe a trap by the feds to lure
him in? Odd for them to tell him to stay away if that was the case. The real
thing, then? Whichever the case, Jason didn’t intend to wait around to find
out. He checked the date in his smartglasses.

7:23 PM Wed. 9/08/2089

Wednesday
.

With a surge of something he didn’t
dare call hope, he deleted the route he’d just programmed in. A few seconds
later, the M3 was headed west.

REPORTING
AGENT: Lindsay Grieves

 CASE
FILE DOCUMENT: 29-792

SUBJECT:
Alexander Richman                                                                                             

CLASS:
Field Report

Acting on
credible intelligence gathered from routine surveillance, Authority agents, in
cooperation with local Everton law enforcement, apprehended Alexander Richman
on suspicion of felony bio-data theft and intent to violate the Moratorium Act.
An initial photonics sweep returned positive for bio-data signatures on
Richman’s access point device, which was subsequently confiscated. However, due
to unexpected difficulties accessing the necessary evidence, no charges could
be filed, and we had to let the slippery bastard walk. Damn. Damn! DAMN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Lindsay watched the characters
race in repetition across his photoscreen, holding the key down with his finger
as if he were grinding an insect into the keyboard. Frowning, he sighed and
deleted the embellishments, figuring Director Cavanaugh would appreciate them
even less than the rest of the report.

Or maybe not.

“I can’t believe we had to
process him out.” He snapped the case folder closed, shoving away from his desk
hard enough his chair rolled into the cork bulletin board behind him.

“We had nothing on him,” Neal
said in that gravelly voice of his. Dressed in a brown suit with no tie, he sat
at the adjoining desk with his feet up, legs crossed. Unperturbed by Lindsay’s
outburst, he halved another nut with the strange knife he made a habit of
carrying. With a rectangular blade the color of gunmetal, the outer edges were
dull. But a v-shaped wedge removed from the tip formed a double-edged inner
cutting surface sharper than anything Lindsay had ever seen. Macadamia shells
were hard, and the way Neal sliced them in two like paper made Lindsay nervous.
The guys talked about it in hushed tones, saying it was a trophy from one of
Neal’s earlier busts – some kind of Chrysalis artifact. Rumor had it the edge
was graphene, just a few molecules wide and sharp enough to slice diamond like
bread.

Neal popped a nut into his mouth.
He always carried a bag-full in his pocket, but Lindsay had his doubts whether
it was because he really liked them or because he just wanted an excuse to use
the blade. “Let’s take a break,” Neal said. “You look like you could use a bite.”

“They’ve got donuts in the break
room.” Lindsay rubbed the back of his head where it had struck a pushpin on the
bulletin board. This particular pin happened to hold up a faded department org
chart with Neal’s name in the square at the top. The boxes below were out of
date. Several of the agents had transferred to other assignments, with the
positions still pending replacement.

“Donuts.” Neal infused the word
with as much enthusiasm as a three-year-old does for the word “broccoli.” He
rose from his chair, nodding toward the door. “The deli down the street has
sandwiches like stale cardboard. The cookies are good, though. And it’ll give
us some air.”

Lindsay wasn’t hungry, but
decided the walk would be welcome. He grabbed his black suit jacket from the
back of his chair. “Lead the way, boss.” He could finish the report later.

When they emerged through a
revolving door onto the sidewalk into mid-morning sunlight, Lindsay slipped on
his smartglasses. Though officially discouraged, he kept the augmented reality
setting to surveillance mode most of the time. Thumbnail sketches of the people
on the street suddenly floated above them like captions. A man in a navy suit
jacket and wool slacks got into a sleek Lexus by the curb. His caption showed him
as Matthew Fredericks – one prior for crystal dust possession.

Traffic was heavy in the old
heart of town, and the cars crawled along silently through the one-way
bottleneck on the street beside them, even on autonav. Foot traffic on the
sidewalk was almost as heavy, with professionals in suits and smartglasses
talking, even working as they walked. But the fresh air outside seemed to lift
the stifling effect of the office, signaling conversation to resume. “So,
Grieves. Still glad you requested this assignment?” Neal’s voice sounded like a
power sander as he spoke over the street noise. “The Authority’s not what most
expect.”

Just over a month into his first
assignment, Lindsay still hadn’t decided if the Digital Interment Authority’s name
felt anachronistic or iconic. Before the ban of continuance, the DIA’s sole
mission had been to oversee and facilitate the stasis protocol. Originally,
that meant physically dealing with cryo-preserved bodies – hence the
‘interment.’ Later, with better neural scans, frozen corpses had been replaced
by digital biorecords, and Arkive was born. With the Moratorium Act, the
enforcement division had been created to make sure those biorecords stayed
there. And when they didn’t, to track down the resulting retreads and ‘recover’
them.

“Ask me again when we haven’t
just lost a Chrysalis suspect on technicalities,” Lindsay said. “Richman was
lucky. Next time, he won’t be.”

 “Your intel was good, but
Richman wasn’t lucky. We underestimated him. And his contact. His AP, the photonics
in his residence – all of it came up completely clean, He either wiped it or
routed it to an off-shore part of the cloud.”

“One hell of a failsafe routine,”
Lindsay said. He’d been sure they’d confiscated Richman’s gear before he had a
chance to react, but it had all come up blank. Worse, they’d staged the raid on
Lindsay’s intel. The photonics intercepts he’d flagged and decrypted had led –
after sorting through dozens of decoys and false trails – back to Richman’s net
address. Nothing inherently incriminating, but all the pieces pointed to a
compromise in the SLIDe network, which meant biodata trafficking. “He’s got to
be the source of the SLIDe hacks. Everything points back to him. He’s Chrysalis.”

“Or working for them, yes,” Neal
said. “That’s clear from your intel, too. What I don’t get is how his contact
knew to skip out.”

“Richman could have warned him,”
Lindsay said.

Neal shook his head. “If Richman
knew, why stay around to get busted? He didn’t exactly look like he was
expecting us. Something tipped the other guy off, though. Maybe it was just the
perks.”

“The what?”

They paused at a corner, waiting
for the light to turn green. “Wait,” said the old-style audible signal, a
soothing recorded voice that repeated every few seconds as the crowd swelled on
the curb. “Wait.”

“The
perks
.” Neal looked
at Lindsay as if expecting some sort of recognition. “Talents? The latent
abilities most retreads have? Didn’t your granddad Darren fill you in?”

“
Great
granddad. And we
don’t really sit around and talk over tea.” Lindsay gave Neal a skeptical look.
“Sure, there are rumors out there. Retreads with special powers or near enough.
I chalked it up to paranoid conspiracy kooks. Dad mentioned something about
optimized neural pathways or something, but the way he kisses Darren’s ass, I
never know what to believe with him. Are you telling me you actually believe
that stuff?”

“Dunning Avenue,” the recorded
voice said. “Signal is green to cross Dunning Avenue.”

Neal raised an eyebrow as they crossed.
“Guess I assumed you’d know all about this. You should listen to your old man.
See, the retreads – they aren’t just as good as new – in some ways, they’re
better than new. Something about the neural vectoring process they use during
continuance to seed and imprint the neuromap. It wires everything back up with
all the same connections, but in the most efficient way possible, without all
the crap from the original.”

As if to illustrate, Neal kicked
a soda bottle lying on the sidewalk, drawing a disapproving look from a woman
beside them.
Jennifer Summers. 305 Peachtree Court.
Pendleton Village.
Rich suburb.

“Crap?” Lindsay asked.

“Like the streets in the older
parts of town.” Neal waved a finger in the direction of the avenue beside them.
“Most are warrens of curves, one-ways and dead ends. The layout makes no sense,
because it built up over time, helter-skelter. But in newer areas, the ones
planned from the start, the streets are wide and laid out all nice and neat.”

He’s serious,
Lindsay
realized. “Okay, I get it. You can get where you’re headed in either, but it’s
faster going in the new part of town.”

“Like your dad said – optimized. It’s
not the same for every retread, but most have at least one perk – that’s what
we call them in the division. Depending on how things get wired up, physical reflexes,
mental speed, even metabolism – any of it can be enhanced. Or all of it. Makes
the job a little more interesting. And it cuts both ways, so watch out. You get
a retread to show you a perk, something most normal people couldn’t do, odds
are, you’ve got him.”

“But?”

“But it makes them a lot more
elusive, a lot more dangerous too, so you have to be sharp. Don’t underestimate
them.”

Lindsay furrowed his brows as Neal
fingered his collar and his voice trailed away to a sandpapery whisper. “You’re
not telling me something.”

Neal gave him a pointed look, eyes
sharp as the graphene blade he carried. Suddenly uneasy, Lindsay decided to drop
it, steering back to safer ground. “So these perks. That’s why they passed the
Moratorium Act then. The real reason.”

The menace on Neal’s face
disappeared as he snapped a pointed finger at Lindsay. “The government and
everybody else kept it quiet, including the Authority. Didn’t want to stir up
more trouble, or a mob, especially with the handful of legals out there. Still,
it scared some people shitless. Powerful people.”

Several photoscreens hovered
beneath an overhang. Neal stopped at one that simply read “Deli” in the same
animated block font as the rest. Inside, Lindsay pulled up the menu in his
smartglasses, eyeclicking an order for a cheese steak to take back to the
office. Then he took a seat with Neal while they waited.

Strange as it was, the perk angle
made sense. Objections to continuance came from lots of directions. There was
the expected flak from religious types. What did it all mean for their outdated
concept of the soul if people were stored as bits in a database? Did they even
have
a soul once they were continued?

Those questions were ridiculous. More
real were the practical issues. Fourteen billion people and counting, riding
the winds of technology just to keep from running out of natural resources.
Everyone knew it couldn’t last forever. Eventually, the winds would fade and the
whole world would sink in the storm born of exhausted supply. Adding retreads
to the mix would just tie an anchor to the hull. The planet was small enough
without having to share with people who’d already had their time.

And that was just scratching the
surface. If people could just come back from the dead like reloading a video
game, wouldn’t that cheapen life? Encourage needless recklessness? Besides, how
would you re-integrate people with obsolete skills into productive roles in
society? Who would handle the costs for those who couldn’t afford to be continued?
The list went on.

But now he realized it really came
down to one thing – self-preservation. The fear of a world filled with people who
had mental and physical advantages, decades more life experience, and time to
amass all the wealth and power those advantages could give. Carried to its
logical conclusion, things would fall into the hands of a powerful, immortal
elite. They’d control everything.

And it’s already
happened to me. Just on a smaller scale.

“Now you see,” Neal said.

“So you’re saying Richman’s
contact has some kind of sixth sense or something? These perks? That’s how he
knew to stay away?” The thought set Lindsay’s jaw in disgust, but not at
Richman’s contact.

Like it wasn’t
enough to have the advantage in experience and money.
Now my great
grandfather’s got super powers, too. No wonder he acts like he owns the world.

“Not a sixth sense, exactly,”
Neal said. “But who knows? Maybe he put together some set of clues that tipped
him off – bits of random information no one else would have paid any mind to. But
taken together, maybe they tipped our hand.”