Continuance (22 page)

She lowered her eyes. “You’re
right. We shouldn’t be talking about this.” She tucked the pendant back into
her shirt, feeling the cool sensation of the metal and glass against her skin.

“Okay. That’s fair. Just answer
me one question, then. Do you ever wonder what it might have been? If circumstances
hadn’t gotten in the way?”

She felt her face crumple. An
invisible hand squeezed her throat as she struggled to master the flood of
emotions. Looking away from him, she watched the setting sun as it bathed the
violinist in shades of gold.

“It doesn’t matter. We don’t get
second chances, Patrick.”

“I know. But if we did, would you
have wanted things to turn out differently?”

Concern filled his face, and she
realized tears were welling in her eyes. She swallowed hard as she struggled to
speak. Or not to.

With an effort, she regained her
voice. She’d gotten what she wanted. It was time to end this. “
If
we
did, you’d have to promise me one thing,” she said.

“Or course. Anything.”

“That you’ll have something
better than that Mirage for…spending time in.”

He let her off the hook with a
knowing smile. “I promise.”

2089

“Thanks for your
cooperation, Principal Webber. We’ll have this sent back to you as soon as we
finish with it.” Lindsay slid the book, an inch thick and heavy, into a black
leather satchel, and offered a hand.

“My pleasure, Agent
Grieves.” Middle-aged, with a generous waistline, Nathan Webber had the sort of
weary face one might expect of a man who’d spent nine years running a class 8A
high school in this part of town.

Eager to be out of the stale
warmth of the school office, Lindsay strode through a pair of sliding glass
doors into the fresher air outside. His car, an eight-year-old department-issue
Hyundai sedan, sat parked in a visitor space beside a squat stone monument
engraved with the words
San Marcos High School
. He activated the car,
and a red flashing light appeared on the HUD. He hadn’t bothered with a
recharge today, and with all the stops he’d had to make since his meeting with
Dr. Fairchild, he’d pushed the batteries to their limits. He set the autonav
for the division office and put a call through to Neal.

Coverage was good here, but
Neal’s raspy voice made it sound like a bad connection. “Did you get them?”

“Yeah. I’m on my way back in
now. What’s the big rush anyway?”

“We’ve had a busy afternoon
while you were out.” Neal’s voice became muffled for second as he spoke to
someone else on the other end. After a moment, he asked, “Did you get things
taken care of at Chariot yesterday?”

“We’re good. I was able to
ice their Arkive access for now. Fairchild’s likely to fight it, though.”

“I have to drop off, Grieves, but I need you to review
some footage on the way back. You should have the link in a few minutes. See
you when you get here.” The call ended with a digital chirp.

Looking at the battery gauge,
Lindsay diverted for a quick stop at a recharge station not far from the school.
To his surprise, this one had a single gasoline pump in operation alongside the
chargers, a rarity these days. He cabled up, and with his charge level at green,
he headed north again.

Once upon a time, San Marcos had
been a thriving suburbia, a scenic college town with an ocean view, nestled in
the foothills above the Pacific. Though not completely gone, its former charm
seemed a little dingy around the edges, and a worn, slightly overused vibe
covered its streets and shops like a residue. Once-desirable neighborhoods
blanketed the hills, crammed with oversized houses neither new enough to be
chic, nor old enough to be elegant. Lindsay smiled as he looked out the window.
It felt a lot like the town he’d grown up in with his father and sisters. Like
home – before Darren had changed everything. Still, the errand out here provided
a nice diversion from the usual.

Tracking down retreads without a
lead usually meant relying on net surveillance programs like the ones he’d
configured for the guys at the office. The routines sifted through petabytes of
data, setting aside interesting transactions for review by human eyes. A cloud
search for a flagged relative or descendant here. Messaging chatter with the
wrong keyword there. Even with all the filtering, thousands of leads piled up, most
leading nowhere. But eventually, something interesting bubbled to the surface, like
the chatter that had lead him to Richman’s meeting at Java 101.

Then there were the human tips. Lots
of people were willing to turn in a retread, especially retreads careless
enough to confide in someone. Realizing you lived next to or worked with – sometimes
had even slept with – someone who’d once been dead tended to freak a person
out. And that’s when the phone in the office usually rang.

But this was the first time
they’d gotten a lead from Oriole. The call from Neal had come in around five
this morning. A possible lead from the Laurensen asset, and he’d sent Lindsay
out to San Marcos to follow up. Seeing dividends from Oriole was good enough,
but Neal had also hinted the target was a UCE student with ties to Fairchild.

If they could prove retread
activity inside the Chariot lab, this could finally be the break he needed to
bring Darren down. The business world wouldn’t look kindly on a Hermetica
Corporation that had helped fund a project with connections to illegal
continuance, even unknowingly.

An icon flashed in his
smartglasses, and Lindsay opened a message from Neal marked
Oriole: Sequence
38401
. The message had no text, just a secure link to a video file on the
DIA cloud. With an eyeclick, Lindsay started the playback. He ran through the
first five minutes wondering what was so special, but then he saw it, almost
too quick to catch.”
So Neal was telling the truth.
Analysis would have
to confirm, but it looked pretty solid. He was still a ways from the office, so
he reviewed the rest of the file, just to be thorough.

Soon, the cityscape took on a
more open feel, and Everton’s downtown high rises grew taller on the horizon. When
Lindsay reached the division office, Neal wasn’t at his desk. A query through
the department’s presence management system showed his location as a red dot on
the floor plan. It placed him down the hall in a series of rooms officially
called the Facilitated Interview Facilities. The guys just called them the White
Rooms.

Damn!
How long ago
since he’d hung up with Neal? He hadn’t had the chance to be in on a Ninety-five
session yet, and he didn’t intend to miss one now. He grabbed the satchel again
and hurried to the other side of the wing, to an area labeled Interview
Facilitation. The SLIDe over the entry registered his bioprint, and he shoved
through the door almost before he heard the photonic lock snap open.

The room inside was dim. A couple
of agents flanked Neal where he stood before a large window, idly rolling a
macadamia nut between his finger and thumb. Most of the illumination in the
room poured through from the other side of the window, casting strong shadows
across the three men like a TV in a dark room.

The small room on the other side was
white. White floor. White walls. White ceiling. In the middle of the floor sat
a plain white table, flanked by a pair of white metal chairs. The entire
ceiling glowed white, one big light source flooding the room with a sterile
radiance, scouring away every shadow. Even the seams between the walls and
floor were almost indistinguishable.

The only relief from the white, a
young woman in a gray coat, sat in the far chair looking as if she were
suspended in some virtual landscape of nothingness. Her arms dangled motionless
at her sides, immobilized by the invisible
force
restraints
around her hands and wrists. Her head
was bowed, spilling long black hair down the collar of the coat to brush
against the tabletop.

The window wasn’t real – just a
one-way, sound-proof photoscreen. As Lindsay came to stand beside Neal, the
woman lifted her head, showing red-rimmed eyes. Even though he knew she
couldn’t see through, Lindsay almost felt like she’d looked up to stare at him.
He recognized her. He’d seen happier-looking versions of her during his visit
with Principal Webber, and on the Oriole feed.

Without taking his eyes from the
woman in the chair, Neal held out a hand. Lindsay handed him the satchel, and
Neal glanced down long enough to pull it open by the handles and glance inside.
Turning to face Lindsay, he gave a satisfied nod, the light hitting his face
from one side, leaving the other hidden in shadow.

“Good work, Grieves. These show
what we’re looking for?”

“Discrepancies with the digital
master in all three.” Lindsay nodded toward the woman in the chair. “I saw her
little trick on the clip you sent. Has Central verified it falls outside
baseline?”

Guillermo Costilla, a veteran
agent in his mid-forties with a pinched face and black hair, came over to stand
beside Neal. His head moved in a slight side-to-side motion as he read from the
overlay in his smartglasses. “Report says ‘spontaneous synaptic response display,
consistent with advanced premotor cortex function.’” He shrugged, taking off
his glasses. “I read it as: ‘Girlie got perks.’”

“Wright picked her up late last
night,” Neal said. “Oriole and two others she was with have access to Chariot,”
The detail wasn’t lost on Lindsay. Too much activity seemed centered on that
lab.

“We ran her UCE net account to do
an education background,” Costilla said. “But when we tried, it turned out to
be a forged shell account. She’s not even officially enrolled. So we sent you
after the hard copy.”

Lindsay pursed his lips in thought.
Chariot again.
“Do we know what her angle was? Did she have contacts?
Oriole, maybe?”

Neal shook his head. “Don’t know.
That’s why she’s here. We need to find out before we Ninety-five her.”

Like
a twisted version the old Miranda rights of the past, they’d drilled Directive
95 into Lindsay’s head during training. An outflow of the Moratorium Act, it
defined
“
a
legal framework to clarify the limited status of continued individuals and
expedite their recovery and re-interment.”

“You got it, boss,” Costilla
said. “Time for a little chat.” He turned for door to the white room, but Neal
laid a hand on his shoulder.

“Why don’t we let Grieves take
point on this one?”

Costilla eyed Lindsay for a
moment, then shrugged. “Kid’s gotta learn some time, I guess. Don’t worry,
Grieves. The big boys will be out here to help you out if you get in trouble.” With
a snide chuckle, he moved to his place at the window.

Neal ignored the jab, and his
eyes filled with a probing intensity. “Grieves. Remember the other day? When
you said I was keeping something back?” He spoke quietly, not much louder than
a gravelly whisper. Lindsay nodded.

“When I first joined the
Authority, I learned something. Something not even the retreads realize. The
first one I ever brought down seemed pretty harmless. But from the second I saw
him, I knew something was wrong.”

“What?” Lindsay asked.

“He was…different.” Neal had that
blade out again, using it to slice open another macadamia. “Sure, his
appearance was altered – Chrysalis does that to dodge us. He had perks, too.
Amazing physical coordination, sharp cognitive abilities. Things you and I
couldn’t do in an hour with a calculator, this guy did in his head while he
read a book.”

Neal looked at the woman in the
room. “But the looks, the perks – those weren’t the real problem. He was
missing things. Things he should have known but didn’t. His mom’s favorite TV
show. The secret hideout he shared with his brother when they were kids. Parts
of who he should have been. All gone.”

Neal fingered his collar, a
pained expression on his face. “Those optimized pathways I told you about?
Something’s not making the digital transition. Something that makes us who we
are. Whatever’s coming out of those Chrysalis cloning tubes – whatever’s in
that room,” Neal pointed at the dark-haired girl, “It’s not the same as the
person who went into stasis. It’s not even human.”

He picked up the satchel, handing
it back to Lindsay. “Remember that when you’re in there.”

A SLIDe above the door scanned
him, and Lindsay stepped into the white room. The woman startled as he entered,
eyeing him as he took the chair across from her and set the satchel on the
floor. She shrank back in her chair as far as the restraint field allowed,
looking wary, fearful. Outside, he’d felt eager. Now that he was alone with her
– close enough to see her bloodshot eyes – he felt his resolve soften.
Irritated, he remembered Neal’s words.
She doesn’t belong here. She belongs
in the past.
Left to her own ends, she’d be another Darren, manipulating
with her power and perks. And if Neal was right, she wasn’t even the same
person she thought she was.
Not even human.
Folding his hands on the
table, he steadied himself.
I got this.