The Resurrected Man (20 page)

The edge he heard in her voice could have been concern, but not necessarily for him. More likely for the job he was supposed to be doing for them, for the time ticking away.

He didn't answer her directly. “House?”

“Yes, Jonah.” The voice of the unit's housekeeping AI was a contralto of indeterminate sex.

“I'd like you to retrieve your maintenance records from April 11, 2066, to now, and copy them to an unrestricted directory. On no account will you erase or alter any archived data until otherwise instructed by me.”

“Understood.”

“Also, do you remember Marylin Blaylock?”

Marylin glanced at him.

“I have that person on file, yes,” said the housekeeper.

“She is to be granted access to the data I just asked you to copy, along with any other information she requires to verify the authenticity of, or to clarify, that data. No one else. Her security clearance is to be downgraded to Blue-2.”

“Understood.”

“Downgraded?”
Marylin asked in surprise.

“You used to have full access,” he explained in an aside. “It would've talked to you if you'd only asked. Not one of your flunkeys, though.”

“So how much access do I have now?”

He waved her quiet. “House? You are to accept no incoming d-mat transmissions unless I am their source. Anyone else attempting to use this address will be denied entry and requested to contact me for clarification.”

“Citizen Lindsay Carlaw is to be expunged from the record?”

Jonah winced. “Yes. He is deceased.”

“I will expunge his name from the entry record. Otherwise, your instructions will not alter my response to incoming d-mat transmissions.”

Jonah had half-expected that. Access had been limited to Lindsay and himself. Since Lindsay was dead that implied that the body of the woman had been d-matted into the unit under his own security code.

“Lastly, then, all previous security codes are to be erased upon our
departure. I will provide you with replacements before then. If anyone attempts to use the superseded codes, even me, you will immediately notify Officer Blaylock or Officer Whitesmith of the EJC Matter-transference Investigative Unit. All security preferences other than the ones I have mentioned are to remain unchanged. Understood?”

“Yes, Jonah.”

He slumped back into the chair. It was done. The MIU would have the data they wanted and his security now had a loophole for them to pry open, if they wanted the lot. But at least he had taken the first small step towards proving his innocence.

Marylin was watching him from the other side of the table. Her expression was unreadable.

“Thanks,” she said. Her tone was ambiguous, too.

Before she could say anything else—or he could change his mind—he directed the wheelchair around a dividing wall and into the lounge.

The booth stood open on the far side of the room. Jonah had expected to see some sign of the grisly remains it had contained, but it was spotless, as was the floor around it. Clearly, once the MIU away team had examined the body and recorded every detail, the housekeeper had been allowed to dispose of the mess. Nonetheless it captured his attention; in his mind's eye, he still saw the blood.

The booth was a single, the bare minimum required of units in
Faux
Sydney, but sufficient for two people who had led separate lives—especially when one of them hadn't used d-mat at all. Its interior was little different to that of any other compact unit: matte black and ribbed with the many sensors and emitters required in order for it to function as both a transmitter and a receiver. The only distinguishing feature was that he had replaced the customary mirror with a single light-emitting diode that normally glowed green. The light was off.

“It's powered–down,” Marylin said, following the direction of his gaze. “We ran a diagnostic check through it, hardware and software. It passed.”

Jonah accepted her word on that; he doubted that the Twinmaker would infiltrate the booths where he planned to dispose of his victims' bodies.

“You can have it if you want,” he said. “I don't think I'll be using it again.”

“I couldn't afford the operating costs.” She pulled a disgruntled face. “You should be able to off-load it easily enough. The secondhand market is a seller's dream at the moment.”

He forced himself to think about something other than the dismembered remains he had glimpsed three days before. “The cost hasn't come down much, then?”

“No. They keep promising a next generation, but it keeps getting delayed. You know how it goes.”

He did. When KTI had gone public, it had introduced d-mat to a sceptical market slowly, initially targeting just the rich and influential. Costs and turnaround times had been high per journey, more than conventional forms of transport around the globe. Only for those who wanted to travel off-Earth had the technology been cost-efficient. But the word had spread, arousing interest in the general population. The second generation, released five years later, allowed trips that had been cheaper than air-travel and of slightly lesser duration than an intercontinental flight. More people had begun to show interest. The third and fourth improvements had killed the large air carriers forever, and the fifth had rendered most forms of long-distance road transport obsolete. Only for short journeys did the car remain a feasible option in terms of both time and cost.

But it was still too expensive for most people to lease and operate private booths, let alone own them outright. That was reserved for the wealthy and the powerful. Most people made do with public booths maintained by local councils, paying a modestly high fee charged by KTI for the use of its network. While KTI retained the stranglehold
on the network, or until a new generation drove the costs down even further, that situation was unlikely to change.

Whether the delay was caused by design difficulties—which Jonah could understand, having enough of an idea how the process worked to appreciate its complexity—or by greed, didn't matter. D-mat wasn't going anywhere in a hurry, and the social changes it had already engendered were likely to be permanent. Those few who disagreed had been in the minority three years ago, and he felt safe to assume that their position had only worsened during his hibernation. In the case of such quasi-legal organisations as WHOLE, that would make them more desperate.

But did it make them killers?

The placement of WHOLE literature at each disposal site in such a way that it could not be missed certainly implied an awareness of WHOLE's activities and goals, but Jonah was unconvinced that it
proved
the Twinmaker's involvement in anti-d-mat activities. Just as plausible was the theory that it was another smokescreen, an attempt to keep the MIU looking in the wrong direction. Until more evidence surfaced, he intended to keep his mind open as to the motives and beliefs of the killer—especially if it was
him.

“I don't see anything unusual in here,” he said.

“Neither did I,” Marylin said, “but it's best to have you confirm it.”

Jonah moved past her, systematically exploring through the house. The bathroom was clean and empty, the maintenance gel either removed by the MIU or drained by the housekeeper. His room was cluttered, preserved in its final state by an AI that could clean but not tidy beyond certain guidelines. None of his clothes appeared to be missing. Lindsay's possessions had been packed away, so his room looked even neater than normal. Someone must have made sure all his affairs were in order after his death; it may have been Jonah himself, but he couldn't remember doing so.

Lindsay's study lay on the far side of a shut door leading from the
bedroom deeper into the hill. Jonah went to palm the lock and was surprised to find the door ajar.

“You opened this?” he asked Marylin.

“No. That's how it was found.”

“Are you positive of that?”

“It's in the report. I've no reason to doubt it.”

“You need a catch-up lesson in paranoia, Marylin. Lindsay's work was worth millions, maybe
billions
, of dollars, and this room is where he coordinated most of the research. The cost of the equipment alone could buy
Faux
Sydney a couple of times over.” He edged into the study. “Believe me, he always locked the door.”

“You have the master codes.”

“Yes. Are you implying that
I
left it open?”

“There's no one else.”

He grunted. The room was as large as two bedrooms combined and crowded with equipment in shielded boxes. He'd never known exactly what they contained, but he had a rough idea. Standard Human Equivalent AI processors, scanners, flatscreens and 3-D tanks; the sort of things required by someone who built high-tech minds for a living. The only people who would know exactly what the equipment was used for were in SciCon—and SciCon didn't tell anyone
anything
about their work. Rumours abounded as to how far SciCon would go to protect its secrets; it was occasionally compared to the now-defunct US Central Intelligence Agency.

The air in the study was dry and cool; a dozen different hums combined to give the room an industrious atmosphere.

“Director Trevaskis thought you might be using this setup to infiltrate KTI,” Marylin said, running her finger across one of the anonymous boxes. It came away clean.

“I wouldn't have the first idea where to start.”

“That's what I said.” She looked at him. “Do you even know how Lindsay made it work?”

“Vaguely. Sometimes he'd call if he needed me to do something manually. Not very often, though; it was designed to be self-sufficient, or teleoperated at worst.”

“See if you can bring it online.”

He approached the central work-station, a U-shaped desk heavily loaded with complex paraphernalia. On his left was a simple hand-reader designed to pick up the motions of a user's fingers. He waved once to get its attention. The screen-saver, which he presumed had been running continuously for three years, cleared, revealing an empty green screen.

Above the screen there had once been a hand-carved wooden sign that read:
There is no such thing as unnecessary death.
It had been Lindsay Carlaw's dream to make that statement true. Where the sign currently was, Jonah didn't know. Presumably the MIU had moved it while trying to activate the setup.

“Hello, NAHI,” Jonah said. “Access Code 3834.”

He waited a second for the core AI to respond. When it didn't, he repeated the command.

“Access Code 3834.” He snapped his fingers directly in front of the hand-reader. When nothing happened, he tried typing the command on the keyboard. It appeared on the screen as alphanumeric text, but hitting Enter provoked no response. Within thirty seconds, the screen-saver returned.

He leaned back in the wheelchair and looked up at Marylin. The smell of her was still strong in his nostrils, a hint of musk coming from beneath the body armour. Reality was much more disconcerting than VTC. “Is that what you expected?”

“We had a tech run over it yesterday,” she said. “There was nothing he could do. Even rebooting from scratch made no difference. The core program's been erased, apparently.”

“So why ask me to get it working?”

She shrugged. “I was hoping you might pull something like you
did with the housekeeper. After all, it resisted everything we threw at it to get those maintenance files, and you just asked it politely—”

“It's no ordinary housekeeper.”

“Obviously not.”

“Lindsay designed and installed it himself, just like this.” He waved at the hand-reader again. It still didn't respond. He swivelled to study the bank of unmarked boxes, feeling completely out of his depth. He might as well try to find a hardcopy book in the Library of Congress with his eyes closed.

The incessant hum was hypnotic, suggestive.

“It's running,” he mused.

“Part of it is a node in the Pool,” she said. “We can tell that much. It's ticking over nicely, no problems, but doesn't contain anything we'd be interested in.”

His attention was sparked by that. “A node. Do you have its address?”

“It's not ACHERON.”

He grunted again. “Worth a try.” Confronted by the unresponsive screen, he was filled with a sense of futility. “I can't understand why Lindsay would've done this.”

“It might not have been him,” she said. “Could
you
have erased the core program?”

He thought about it. “Maybe. I don't know. I've never had cause to try.”

“Our tech thinks you could've, if you'd got in.”

“I didn't get in.”

“But you thought you could. You've been in before. If nothing had changed and you had the know-how, this wouldn't be beyond you.”

“Thanks a lot. But I've already told you I don't
have
the know-how.”

“Unless you learned it in your blank spot—the week after Lindsay died.”

He looked away, unable to pursue the thought. Everything in the
room reminded him of his father. Or, more importantly, of his father's work. The quest for immortality, for an end to
unnecessary death
, had been such a driving force that it was hard, even now, to separate the man from the dream. He could feel the grief building, strong and irrational, like a bubble of blood behind his eyes.

“I'm sorry,” Marylin said, her voice much softer than before.

He turned back to her. “What?”

“I'm sorry about Lindsay.” Her expression was hard to interpret. “I know I haven't said it before, but—” She shifted awkwardly on her feet. “His death must've come as a terrible shock.”

He didn't know how to respond at first. It
had
been a shock, yes. But what did she care about his feelings? It jarred with the image she was trying to project—of a cold, professional EJC officer just doing her job. He was amazed that she had even noticed.

“Thanks,” he ventured, “but I really don't need your sympathy.”