Soulminder (23 page)

Diaz stared at him, some of the color draining from his face. “You’re lying,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “Bluffing. You wouldn’t do something like that.”

“You have two choices, General.” Slowly, carefully, Sommer pulled a sheaf of papers from his coat pocket and laid it on the table. “Choice one: you can take this amended contract to the Presidential Palace and have General Santos sign it. It has a clause expressly forbidding any form of servitude as the price for Soulminder access, under penalty of complete cancelation if violated. And believe me, we
will
monitor your compliance of that clause.

“Choice two”—he braced himself—“is to call my bluff.”

There was hatred in Diaz’s eyes. Dark, blazing hatred, both for Sommer himself and for the legacy of economic domination of which, in his view, Soulminder was just one more example. For a half dozen heartbeats Sommer wondered if he’d pushed the man too far. Wondered if pride alone would now force him to kill and then die in turn.

And then, slowly, the gun barrel lowered to point at the floor. “I will take the contract to General Santos,” he said bitterly. “I will also announce that you have taken charge of Manzano’s revival. From now on any delays will be upon
your
head.”

“Understood,” Sommer nodded, a wave of relief washing over him. Relief, and a strange sadness. “You might inform General Santos that he and the other members of the junta have also been erased from Soulminder’s files. In case that has any bearing on his decision.”

For a moment the two men locked eyes. Then Diaz reached down and picked up the amended contract. “This was a battle, Dr. Sommer,” he said, very quietly. “Not the war.” Without another word, he strode from the room.

Sands shook her head, lips pursed tightly together as she hefted the new contract. “That was, without a doubt,” she said, “the noblest damn fool thing you’ve done in years.”

“You’d have preferred letting the Chilean government perfect this new brand of slavery?” Sommer countered.

“To you meddling with their politics?” Sands snorted. “As a matter of fact, yes, I
would
have preferred it. My God, Adrian—you all but assassinate an Archbishop, and then compound the risk with that crazy IV trick. What if one of the doctors had tried switching glucose bottles?”

“It wouldn’t have mattered,” Sommer said, walking over to his desk and sitting down. Suddenly, he was very tired of having to think and talk about Chile. “All the bottles available to them had the same lacing of neuropreservative, and with that continually dripping into the Archbishop’s system they didn’t have a hope of remelding his soul.”

Sands eyed him. “Don’t get me wrong,” she said, a note of caution creeping into her voice. “I don’t quarrel with your motives—I realize you had the best interests of the Chilean people in mind. But it sets a dangerous precedent.”

“What, that we want to maintain control over how our invention is used?” Sommer demanded pointedly. “That’s hardly a dangerous precedent.”

She gave him a patient look. “Look, Adrian. We’re not set up to function as the world’s ethical policeman. As long as there are warped and power-hungry people in high places, there’ll always be attempts to pervert Soulminder into something we don’t like. Diaz was right: we’ve won a battle, not a war.”

Sommer shook his head. “Diaz was wrong, and he knew it. We’ve won the war, all right.”

“Because the government wasn’t willing to risk death over their servitude project?”

Sommer gazed at her, a strange melancholy tightening his stomach. “You’re missing the point, Jessica,” he said quietly. “Diaz and the others were generals.
Military
men, who’d probably faced the prospect of death dozens of times throughout their careers. And yet they caved in when they found I’d erased them from Soulminder. Why?”

Sands’s eyes were steady on him. “You tell me.”

“Because they’d gotten used to the idea that they could be immortal,” he said. “They saw themselves living forever … and they weren’t willing to risk that.”

For a long minute Sands was silent. “If that’s true,” she said at last, “it means Soulminder has suddenly inherited a great deal of political muscle.”

Sommer nodded. “I’m not at all sure I want us to have that kind of power.”

“I’m not at all sure,” Sands said quietly, “that we have a choice.”

CHAPTER 5

Guilt by Association

They came at her
out of the dark and gloom of the night shadows: ghostly and indistinct, walking with an almost-normal gait that was somehow more chilling than an exaggerated, movie-monster lurch would have been.

They were the walking dead, and they were coming for her.

She had turned away from them, and was slogging slow motion through something that felt like waist-deep ice water, when they inexplicably began buzzing.

The dead froze for a moment, as if they too were listening to the buzzing. Then the nightmare shattered, and with a jerk of taut muscles Carolyn Blanchard was awake.

For another long moment her mind spun dizzily as it tried to fit the feel of the thin mattress beneath her and the dim features of the room around her into the pattern of her apartment. Then, from beside her head the buzz came again, and with that the disorientation finally cleared. Levering herself up onto an elbow, heart thudding hard in her chest and neck, she poked at the flashing button on the tabletop intercom. “Yeah—Blanchard,” she said.

“McGee,” the transfer supervisor’s voice came. “We’ve got a floater, just came in.”

“Right.” Blanchard sat up and swung her legs off the cot, waiting for her head to adjust to the sudden change in altitude. A floater. Such a wonderfully innocuous term, she thought bleakly, for someone who’d just died. “Have you woken up Walker yet?” she asked, reaching down to pull her shoes on.

“He’s being prepped,” McGee said, and this time she was awake enough to hear the mid-level tension in his voice. “He was already down here when the trap triggered.”

Blanchard glanced at the clock on the Soulminder MiNex console beside her cot. Three thirty-eight in the morning, yet Walker Lamar had still been awake. Awake, and roving Soulminder’s halls. “Swell,” she grunted.

“Yeah,” McGee agreed grimly. “We’re in Transfer Five. If you want to see him before he goes under, you’d better hurry.”

“On my way.”

She got her shoes fastened and hurried out of the room, breaking into a fast jog. The corridors, so busy during normal working hours, were practically deserted, with only an occasional office worker or armed guard visible.

It was an illusory sort of emptiness. Even at this hour two to four of the transfer rooms would be fully manned, as would the satellite monitor stations that watched for the emergency signals that could pinpoint a newly dead Soulminder client. At the center of the building, in the Core, there would be a full complement of highly-placed managers and techs making sure that the Soulminder computers and software and traps performed with their usual flawless efficiency.

And if Blanchard never saw any of that elite cadre, it was for sure they were always watching her.

She almost made it in time. Almost, but not quite. Even as she pushed through Transfer Five’s swinging doors Dr. Wilkom Ng was already lifting his hypo from the man laid out on the padded table in front of him. Blanchard moved forward, eyes automatically flicking to the bank of monitors behind them, and before she was halfway to the table, the trace lines simultaneously went flat.

The man on the table, Walker Lamar, was dead.

Blanchard gazed down at the body, feeling that eerie sense of unreality that still sometimes hit her at this point in the operation. By all the legal and medical definitions of barely ten years ago, Walker was dead—completely and irreversibly dead. And yet, through the technological miracle that was Soulminder he was now, by current definitions, just as legally and medically alive. His soul, its complex Mullner pattern recorded months ago on the giant computers back in the Core, had been recognized, identified, and snatched away as it departed his body. Locked safely away in one of the hundreds of traps back there, floating in some sort of semi-existence that she’d never been able to get adequately described, it could remain protected indefinitely. And, provided his brain and body were similarly protected by neuropreservatives and full life-support gear, soul and body could be remelded at any time.

But those neuropreservatives had to be administered within a very few minutes of body death. If they weren’t, if the brain tissue deterioration was allowed to progress past a critical point, then there would be no functional body left for him to return to.

At which point—living soul or not, Soulminder magic or not—Walker Lamar would be effectively dead. The trap would have to be turned off, and his soul would depart. Going wherever it was souls went.

“You ready?” Ng asked.

Blanchard shook away the introspection. “Sure,” she said, hoping she sounded more confident than she felt. Of all the difficult parts of this job, dealing with floaters was easily the worst. “What do we have on the floater?”

“Name’s Jack Thornton,” McGee told her. He was standing off to the side, next to the tech seated at the transfer room’s MiNex terminal. “Fifty-one, professor of electrical engineering at Caltech, lives in Pasadena. Lives alone, unfortunately—divorced—so no possible help there. He triggered the trap just over two and a half minutes ago.”

“From the lack of signal,” the tech added, “best guess is that he’s under water somewhere.”

“Right,” Blanchard nodded, the tightness in her stomach easing a little. In her past experience she’d always found middle-aged highbrow types relatively easy to deal with: generally polite and disinclined toward anything as undignified as hysteria.

Of course, none of those she’d dealt with had been freshly dead. “How long?”

“We’re ready,” Ng said. “Stand by.”

On the console behind him lights changed color … and, with a suddenness that Blanchard was never quite prepared for, Walker Lamar’s body jerked alive. “Wha—wha—?”

Blanchard turned her head to peer straight down into the confused face. “Dr. Thornton? Jack? Can you hear me?”

The eyes focused uncertainly on her. “Who—I mean, where—?”

“You’re in Soulminder Los Angeles,” she cut him off. “There’s been some sort of accident. Where were you when it happened?”

The forehead creased. “Where was I … ?”

“You were in some kind of accident,” Blanchard repeated. That was only a guess, but a fairly safe one. And from the almost-foggy look in his eyes— “Had you been drinking earlier? Did you drink and then get in your car and drive somewhere?”

A sudden look of horror flooded his face. “It wasn’t a dream,” he hissed. “It was—I was
dead
.”

“Jack, your body is missing,” Blanchard told him, putting steel into her voice. If he slid off into panic or denial now, their chances of saving him would go straight to zero. “It’s missing, and your Soulminder wristband isn’t signaling its location. We need to know where you died, and we need to know it
now
.”

For a long second she thought it hadn’t worked. Those eyes stared at and through her … then, abruptly, they gave a little twitch. “I was coming back from Coldbrook,” he murmured. “Along Thirty-nine.”

The tech at the console was already punching keys, and a second later the full-wall display behind Ng lit up with a detailed map of the San Gabriel Wilderness and Angeles National Forest regions. Highway 39 snaked through the middle of it, and at the lower middle— “Had you passed the San Gabriel Reservoir yet?” she asked. “Jack?”

The eyes defocused again. “Yes,” he said, his voice stronger and more sure of itself. Starting to catch up with the emotional shock of it. “And … yes, I’d passed the Morris Reservoir, too.”

The map display shifted, enlarged. “Gotta be the river,” someone said.

“Do you remember anything else, Jack?” Blanchard asked. “Anything that might help us to find—”

“I went off the road.” A hand came up, seized her arm in a panic grip. “I went off the road, and the river was there—oh,
God
.”

Blanchard reached her free hand over to grip his. “It’s all right,” she assured him, hoping fervently that wasn’t a lie. On the display a small white circle had suddenly appeared, heading toward the target zone from downtown Los Angeles. “It’s all right,” she repeated. “An emergency team’s on the way.”

“I must have drowned,” he whispered. “Oh, God. Oh, God. I drowned. I’m
dead
.”

Blanchard clenched her teeth. Thornton was losing it again. Hardly surprising, under the circumstances, but in her mind’s eye she could see the adrenaline surge that all that panic was pumping into Walker Lamar’s body …

She caught Ng’s eye. He nodded back, the hypo already prepared. “Now, just relax, Jack,” she said soothingly, keeping her grip on his hand. “We’re going to have to let you go back into Soulminder for a little while. But it’ll be all right.”

The eyes looked at her, not understanding. She braced herself for the reaction when that understanding finally came.

It did, and the eyes were suddenly filled with shock. But by then it was too late for any reaction. Ng withdrew the needle from the other’s arm, and with welcome anticlimax the eyes rolled up and the grip on Blanchard’s arm loosened.

Walker Lamar was dead. Again.

Blanchard took a shuddering breath and lowered the limp arm back to the table. Out of the corner of her eye she saw McGee step to her side, his stance that of someone who wanted to talk. “What are his chances?” she asked, keeping her eyes on Ng.

“Thornton’s? Hard to say.” He looked over his shoulder at the map display. Already the circle marking the rescue team was almost to the suspected accident site. Dimly, Blanchard wondered what kind of speed that helicopter was making. “The water there should be pretty cold, which will help slow down neural deterioration,” Ng added, turning back to Lamar’s body.

“At least they won’t have any problem finding him,” McGee put in. “Not now. His wristband can’t transmit far enough through water to reach the satellites, but the rescue chopper’s detector will pick it up at least a mile away. At that point”—she sensed him shrug—“it’ll be a matter of how fast the team can pull the body out of the car and get it onto neuropreservatives and life-support.”

Blanchard nodded. McGee’s politely confrontational stance hadn’t changed. “I presume you want to talk about Walker,” she said.

She looked at him in time to see his lips pucker. “This makes at least four times we’ve seen him wandering around in the wee hours,” he reminded her.

“I can count,” Blanchard growled. “Has it ever occurred to you that it might be nothing more than an occasional touch of insomnia?”

McGee’s eyebrows lifted. “It has, yes. But I somehow doubt you’d be quite so defensive if that was all there was to it.”

Blanchard dropped her eyes to Lamar’s motionless face. His motionless,
dead
face. “This happens to people in high-stress occupations,” she said doggedly. “He’ll get through it okay.”

“Probably. Question is, will
you
?”

She forced herself to look back at him. To meet that steady gaze. “I’ve done things that were
lots
harder than this, Mr. McGee. My year as bottom-rung police psychologist in St. Louis, for obvious example. Compared with getting into a serial killer’s head, handling a Professional Witness is a stroll through the park.”

For a moment McGee studied her, as if somehow divining the nightmare she’d been having when he’d woken her up. But then a timer on the console pinged gently, and one of the techs handed Ng a fresh hypo, and—almost reluctantly, she thought—McGee turned his attention back to Lamar’s body. “If you say so,” he said. “If I were you, though, I’d watch out for muggers on this particular stroll. Serial killers may scare the pants off you, but at least you never had to watch any of them die over and over again.”

Blanchard didn’t reply. Behind Ng a set of indicator lights flicked on, indicating that the neuropreservatives that had protected Lamar’s brain and nerve cells from damage during the crucial first minutes of his induced death had now been adequately flushed from his body. Ng double-checked everything, then nodded to the tech at the Soulminder console. The latter nodded in return, touched a switch—

And with a shudder that ran up his entire body, Walker Lamar returned to life.

“Hi,” Blanchard said, forcing a casual smile onto her lips as Lamar’s eyes focused on her. “How are you feeling?”

“Oh—” the eyes defocused again, just for a second. “Fine. I guess. Fine. I guess.”

“Then I guess you must be fine,” she said, striving for a note of levity. “Doctor?”

“Everything looks good,” Ng nodded. “Blood pressure’s a little high, Walker, but that’s a normal part of your post-transfer profile.”

“Great.” Blanchard found Lamar’s hand and squeezed it. “So. Excitement’s over; I guess it’s back to bed for—”

“Is he going to be okay?” Lamar interrupted, twisting his head to look at the map display.

“They’re pulling the body out of the car right now,” the tech at the communications console spoke up. “Everything else is ready.”

“They probably won’t know for sure for at least an hour,” Blanchard reminded him. “Maybe longer. I’m sure that if you ask Mr. McGee he’ll have someone wake you up whenever they have something.”

Lamar looked at McGee, as if only just noticing his presence. Then he shrugged, a strangely jerky movement of his shoulders. “Yeah, well … I’m not all that sleepy. I guess I’ll just hang around.” Abruptly, he sat up all the way, swinging his legs clumsily over the edge of the table. “Maybe I’ll take a little walk first,” he added as Blanchard and McGee each grabbed an arm to help steady him. “Get used to having legs again, and all that. Unless you need me here, ’cause I
could
stay.”

Almost word for word the same speech he always gave. Behind her smile, Blanchard felt her teeth clench up. Needing some time alone to recover from such an experience was neither abnormal nor unhealthy. But to try so hard to pretend he didn’t really
need
it was something else again. “No, go ahead,” she told him. “Someone’ll call you as soon as they know about him.”

“Don’t worry,” McGee said soothingly. “Dr. Thornton’s got a really good chance.”

“Thornton,” Lamar said thoughtfully, almost as if tasting the sound of the name. “I knew someone named Thornton once.”