The Ghost in the Doll (Fox Meridian Book 6) (20 page)

Fox grinned. Thanks. ‘Of course, I’ll probably ask you for a check-up right before I go.’

Sonya slapped her on the shoulder. ‘Get out of here. I want to go see some tourist attractions.’

Niflhel.

Kit paused for a moment on the bank of the fjord, feeling the soft grass beneath her bare feet. She had selected her one-shouldered tunic dress to enter Vali’s viron; she was expecting to be out of it before the night was over and it was an easy one to remove.

She was about to start up the hill when she spotted Vali walking down toward her, a basket in his hand. ‘I thought,’ he said, ‘that we could go out on the water.’ He waved to Kit’s right and she turned to see a small sailboat waiting for them beside a jetty which, Kit was sure, had not been there a second earlier.

‘You work fast,’ Kit said. ‘I didn’t have time to warn you I was coming.’

Vali grinned. ‘No, your arrival was a surprise. However, that you would arrive at some point was more or less certain, so I’ve had time to set up a few things I can instantiate on a moment’s notice.’

‘Oh, you’ve been planning, have you?’

He held out an arm and she joined hers with it so he could escort her to the boat. ‘Not planning. Plans are bound to fail in a romantic setting. I have arranged circumstances which have a chance of pleasing us both.’

‘It sounds nice. Thank you for preparing.’

‘My pleasure. But I thought you were busy with too many tasks to visit. To what do I owe my pleasure?’ Always the gentleman, except, to Kit’s delight, in bed, Vali assisted her onto the boat and then settled onto the plank seat beside her. The little craft began to glide out into the fjord, apparently of its own volition.

‘Fox is doing something she would rather I did not see,’ Kit explained. ‘I would be placed in a compromising position if I went with her. She suggested that I might enjoy an evening with you, rather than attending her.’

Vali frowned. ‘She’s doing something illegal?’

‘I’m sure I don’t know,’ Kit replied in her best innocent tone. ‘I do know that she has suspicions that a company called Aphrodite Cybernetics is doing something unethical, immoral, and extremely illegal, but not direct evidence. I do know that she knows where she might get such evidence, but it is highly unlikely that she could get permission to obtain it, or to persuade the Chiba police to act. If I don’t actually
know
how she gets evidence from them, I don’t have to worry about the source too much.’

‘The pursuit of justice sometimes means the circumvention of law.’ Vali held up a hand. ‘Only when the application of the law stands in the way. I’ve found that the fundamental laws rarely do so. It’s their application and the tricks politicians have played in the writing of the laws themselves that cause difficulty.’

‘I do not think I will argue with that. However, my programming requires that I follow the
letter
of the law.’ She gave a little facial shrug. ‘Well, I can sometimes manage to interpret things a little less literally. Since Fox gave me my command keys, she cannot order me not to report something. She never has before, but she needs to be more circumspect now.’

Vali smiled. ‘It causes her inconvenience, but she still gave you your freedom. I knew I liked her, but now…’ With a sigh, he reached for his basket. ‘I brought wine rather than mead. It’s quite a smooth white with just a hint of an acid bite. I do hope you like it.’

Kit grinned at him. ‘I have no doubt I will.’

Chiba Industrial Zone.

Fox did one last check of her carbine before stowing it away in its cover on her back. It was there as a last resort – using it would mean something had gone
really
wrong – so rapid access was not an issue. Concealment was and Fox then proceeded to run a check of the active camouflage system protecting her suit, pack, and the holster her pistol was nestled in. Sonya had brought over the latest nanofabric bodysuit: skintight, quite capable of stopping a bullet, and verging on invisible in normal light and infrared. There was a tactical helmet with the same features to go on next.

‘The guard frames patrol at five-minute intervals,’ Yuriko said as Fox did her checks. ‘They use their own aerial units and those run fairly basic class two AIs. They have infrared vision, but your suit should keep you hidden if you can conceal yourself sufficiently.’

‘Uh-huh. What about inside?’

‘That is, unfortunately, not known. I suspect that there is nothing more complex, but they may be armed. The exterior cyberframes are not.’

‘I’d prefer to avoid finding out. You’re sure about this access point?’

‘Quite sure. I have observed a number of employees exiting the building via that fire door. They keep it unlocked for that purpose. Foolish, but not unexpected.’

Fox picked up her helmet, pulled a cable from within to plug into her neck, and then settled it into place over her head. ‘Okay,’ she said, her voice distorted by the filters, ‘let’s get this done.’

For a building in the Chiba Industrial Zone, Aphrodite Cybernetics had a fairly plush headquarters. It was a stepped pyramidal structure set beside a manmade lake near Yamakura and located in several hectares of light forest. There was a chain-link fence around the grounds, but Yuriko had noticed a number of gaps in it which could be negotiated by a human willing to squeeze a little. Fox slipped through one of them away from the only nearby road, engaged her camouflage, and began making her way toward the building.

She spotted one flight of patrolling cyberframes, a pair of vectored thrust aerial units sweeping the perimeter with bright searchlights. That was a visible deterrent rather than an actual threat: you could see the things coming from a mile away. Fox allowed them to pass, sticking to the cover of undergrowth which had been allowed to get far too dense. Then, at the inner treeline, she waited for the next pair of cyberframes to appear and pass on before making a dash for the building’s wall. Her camouflage was less effective when moving and she preferred not to test it too thoroughly under the circumstances.

The fire door was unlocked, as Yuriko had suggested, and wedged a little open to allow employees outside to sneak back in after taking a break for whatever form of chemical inhalant they had decided to poison themselves with. You could still actually buy tobacco in Japan, though Fox doubted a lowly factory worker could afford it. Edging the door open, she checked inside. Just as in the building plans Yuriko had found, beyond the door was a stairwell and Fox slipped inside, unobserved.

Now there was the issue of where to go. The plans indicated that the ground floor was primarily the factory floor, the main fabrication plant for Aphrodite’s cyberframes. Above it were three levels of offices and labs, and then a further three levels of apartments used by the middle-ranking staff; the factory workers lived off-site, and so did the upper management who probably had huge apartments in Chiba or Tokyo. Below ground there were supposed to be four basement levels, and the stairs went down as well as up so there was at least one. However, the utilisation indicated in the plans seemed weird: there was a lot of space and not much to put in it.

‘Down it is,’ Fox said to herself, and started off down the stairs as quietly as possible.

The basements were supposed to contain ‘utilities’ and ‘storage space,’ and the first of them appeared to be just that. Checking through the inner fire door, Fox could see a lot of machinery which looked like it was there to service the shop floor above. Auxiliary generators, air conditioning, water purification: all the stuff required to keep machines and people happy. The next level down was storage space, though largely empty, and below that was a mix, which seemed a little odd.

Fox paused, examining what she could see without entering the main floor of the level and risking being seen by any cameras which might be in there. There were several large machines on one side of the room, set behind fences, but why have them there? Putting them above seemed more reasonable: it would shorten pipe and cable runs. Unless these machines were not for the floors above. There was one more documented level to try.

‘Promising,’ Fox decided as she looked in on the next floor. For one thing, this door opened onto a corridor, not an open space, and it was a corridor with painted walls and overhead light panels. It also had security cameras in little domes dotted along the ceiling, which was not so good, but there seemed to be no one about, which was fortunate. Slipping out into the corridor, Fox took it slowly, letting her camouflage system keep up as she moved along to the first door she could see. If they were using AIs to monitor the cameras, she was almost certainly screwed: they would notice the door being opened. Probably anyway. Preparing herself for a dash back to the stairs, Fox opened the door as little as possible and slipped into the room on the other side.

There were no alarms, no sounds of running feet, but also no lights. Fox took her pistol from its holster and switched the tactical light to UV mode, and the room lit up in monochrome brightness. She was in a laboratory, unoccupied of course, but not unused. It was heading rapidly toward midnight on a Sunday night… She figured the lab was used for biotechnology, or maybe nanotechnology. She could see test tube racks and centrifuges. When she spotted empty Petri dishes, she figured she was right about the function. That was bio-related, right?

There were various labelled bottles in a refrigerated cabinet. The names, whether hand-written in Japanese characters or printed in Latin script, made no sense to her, but she recorded as many as she could see and then scanned around for another door. There were, it seemed, internal doors linking the labs and she moved on into a room with more computers in it. Biotechnology in the first lab, nano in the second, she guessed.

Beyond that was a third lab which was more disturbing. There were two tables set up in the room with restraint straps on them, and a third set up like an autopsy table. Trolleys around the room contained surgical instruments of various kinds from forceps, to scalpels, to bone saws. The arrangement of the trolleys suggested that the saws were not always used on dead subjects, but that could have been coincidence. On the other hand, the UV light from Fox’s pistol was picking up an alarming amount of organic staining on the floor where a mop had been used to try to wipe it away.

‘They could have been dissecting failed dolls,’ Fox told herself. ‘Who am I trying to convince here?’

There was light from the other side of the next door and Fox paused to listen. No voices, no sounds at all, except for maybe a soft hum. Cooling fans? She opened the door and slipped through. The room was smaller, more or less square, and illuminated, though why was an unknown. In the middle of it was another bench, this time without the restraints. Instead, it was surrounded by folded robotic limbs. Fox recognised it more or less immediately: an automated surgical station, a robot doctor. Put your patient on the table, give the machine its instructions, and it would set off repairing whatever was wrong. Of course, they could be used for all kinds of surgery…

Fox stepped over to the computer at the side of the room and tapped at the screen. The machine was not secured: no one expected anyone unauthorised to be in the room. ‘Idiots…’ She flicked up the procedure selection menu and glanced over the lists. Most of them had uninformative labels like ‘Procedure 1,’ but there was one which said ‘Implant insertion.’ So the machine was used for custom surgical procedures, and for computer implants. Or probably for computer implants. They might be implanting something else, maybe. The question was, who were they doing the surgery on?

There was a door through to another room, different from the previous ones. This one was a little wider, presumably to make moving a trolley easier. Fox walked through and found herself in darkness again. She flicked on her tactical light and was immediately on alert as a human figure appeared in the beam. However, whoever it was, they were not moving. In fact…

Fox realised that she was looking at a naked Ghost Doll floating in a tank of fluid. The doll’s eyes and ears were covered by a VR headset, and her mouth and nose were behind a transparent mask. Tethers at her wrists, ankles, and waist held her suspended in the tank, but she appeared to be unconscious, or at least unresponsive. Fox figured this was how they trained the bioroids, if they were actually bioroids. Turning, she scanned her beam down the room. There were six tanks, all of them occupied. Six Ghost Dolls in training. She moved down the row, stopping at the third as her light showed up something weird about the doll’s skin. It looked patchy under the ultraviolet illumination and Fox took a chance and switched to normal wavelengths.

‘Jackpot,’ Fox muttered. ‘Fuck! Sometimes I hate being right.’ The figure in the tube had pale, latex-like skin over maybe sixty per cent of her body. The rest was normal, human flesh. The process had not reached her face yet, and there were still wounds showing from surgery. Presumably the rebuilding of her skin would fix that, and the surgery scars from breast implants and the resculpting of her cheekbones. The next girl in line was even less far through the process. Her breasts had, apparently, met muster, but her legs had not been long enough: there were incisions visible which suggested inserts into her thigh bones to lengthen them. Both girls still showed scarring from the surgery to lift their upper eyelids, giving the Ghost Doll ‘wide-eyed’ look.

The Ghost Dolls were humans, transformed by something very like the Morphogenesis nanomachines that BioTek had begun marketing recently. BioTek had specifically steered away from biomod viruses because it was felt they would cause more public outcry than the existing ones which performed minor cellular surgery procedures. Those had still caused a lot of outcry. When people learned about this…

Fox really wanted to find Hummel in one of the apartments upstairs and feed him her gun barrel, but that was not going to get her anywhere. She had found the factory where they made the Ghost Dolls, and now she needed to get back out with as much information as possible. Turning around, she began to document as much as she could find before she went back to Yuriko and the van.