The Process Server

  ***

  “You made a few pretty serious mistakes, you know.”

  Hanna Dow was squinting hard. Now it was her turn to look like she was coming out of a hangover. The Prognosticator of the Followers of the Handbook of Joshua was coming around, too.

  “How did you know?” she asked. “His virtual system, the room – it’s perfect. You shouldn’t have been able to see past our avatars.”

  I smiled. I was sitting on a dining room chair that I’d turned around so that I could lean on the back.

  Along the far wall was one part of the ‘L’-shaped sectional, where Jayde was tied up. They’d helpfully left her pistol on the nearby coffee table, and I retrieved it before she realized quite what was going on.

  “The bit with Cardale agreeing to follow me on a walk through the streets of New Tokyo was priceless, for one,” I said. “Really? You think the Millennium Man is going slumming on Earth?”

  She looked down. But then she looked up again quizzically.

  “You had to know before then. The only reason you would have taken us to the SP station was because you knew an online death would crash us out of the MultiNet. So you had to know already that it was a Scenario.”

  I nodded then moved over to Jayde. The knots were nothing special, and a moment later she was covering us.

  “Thanks, Boss. Wanna catch me up?”

  “When we went back to her suite, it occurred to me that she’d probably deliberately mentioned Breck to get us to fixate on Vance Vega as the guy responsible for the Archivist’s death. That was the first mistake, although she got around it cleverly by pointing out that when the original fight had taken place, she’d been unconscious, hoping I wouldn’t focus on Evgeny’s later description.

  “The matter was unresolved when we all lost consciousness, which was convenient in and of itself. But when I woke up in hospital, I really thought I’d just been paranoid, and that both you and Hanna had almost been killed.”

  The Prognosticator had regained his faculties. “I don’t get it, Smith. How did you see past the Scenario? It was perfect. We reproduced Cardale from thousands of images. He should have been perfect.”

  “He was,” I said. “Except that the real Robert Cardale would never call me mister. No one ever calls a Smith ‘Mister’. Nobody. In 42 years, no one ever called me mister … except another Smith or Doe.”

  Hanna looked down at the floor, ashamed. “Bob, I…”

  I shook my head. “Stow it, kid. Fool me once, shame on you, right?”

  Jayde looked puzzled. “I don’t get it. Who has the holo drive?”

  Hanna reached around her neck and pulled out her necklace. A holo drive was dangling from the end. She tossed it over to me.

  I said, “It’s garbage, isn’t it?”

  She nodded. “How did you know?”

  “Again, if you had the plans to the engine, you wouldn’t have been following me around pretending to be Cardale on the promise of coughing it up. That was another mistake. Up until our little bedside interview, no one had ever asked if I knew where the “plans” were. Everyone just wanted the holo drive. But you already had it and knew it was useless. By now, you’ve probably already figured out the rest.”

  She nodded. “I think so. There never were any plans, were there?”

  I shook my head.

  “No. The Archivist learned what Dr. Santiago was working on and arranged to grab the copyright registry by agreeing to fund his research. What the doctor hadn’t told Dregba – but had conveyed to the dean of his department, Dr. Nereen – was that the engine just didn’t work yet. But he kept taking the money.”

  “Eventually, the Archivist figured something was wrong. Problem was, by then he’d already contacted Vance Vega and gotten him to invest as well, a dangerous man to disappoint. Realizing he would lose his massive commission anyway but that he needed to keep Vega off his back, the Archivist suggested to Vega they steal the design and get the entire payout, not just their registration cut.”

  “They paid off the head of the Local of the Intergalactic Workers’ Brotherhood to organize an informational picket outside of Dr. Santiago’s lab, and then Vega’s assassin, Breck, killed Santiago when he came out to check on the disturbance. While the crowd was gathered around the fallen man, the union boss grabbed Santiago’s active holo drive and later passed it on to the Archivist.

  “That left Vance Vega thinking they were partners in a multi-billion credit heist. What was Dregba going to tell Vega, that the whole thing was bogus? So he decided to keep Vega in the dark while he found another client, one he could con into paying him enough – he was wealthy already, remember – that even Vance Vega wouldn’t be able to touch him. So he sent Vega to negotiate with the K’Laar Trade Consortium, fully expecting the K’Laar to double cross him, and in the meantime started looking for a deal himself.”

  Jaye said. “But who was his client here?”

  “Who haven’t we heard from?” I said.

  “He was going to approach Hui-Matsumori with the holo drive,” Hanna Dow said, finishing my sentence. “He knew word was out among the Big Six of something really big, that he could play them off against each other. So he put word out that he was willing to sell Dr. Santiago’s holo drive – he never guaranteed the plans, that was just taken for granted because that was what everyone really wanted.

  “And he had the drive around his neck in plain sight for the entire 10 days that we were here, so that all of the various spies from Cardale, VirtuTech, Vega Personnel, Hui-Matsumori, The K’Laar Trade Collection, and the Avicusians could get a good look at something that seemed tangible. I believe he was going to take off for the Deneleth System, try to rebuild there. He didn’t have many other options, once he’d blown Vega’s investment.”

  Of course, there was no better place than Earth to sell the idea of something as valuable when it didn’t even really exist, a virtual prize worth killing over.

  I said, “But you didn’t know all that, did you, Hanna? You just assumed all along that it was real, like everyone else. You hired the assassin who broke in and so convincingly knocked you out …but left a living witness, so that you were above suspicion, by fighting Evgeny instead of just capping him, as she’d done with the Archivist moments earlier.

  “Then you took the drive and tried to cut your own deal. Originally it was going to be Cardale. You let it be known that you might have information and let him come to you; but by the time he brought you in, you’d had a look at the drive and realized it was all a con, so you told him you’d come up empty.”

  She stared at her shoes. “Cardale was pretty upset when I said I didn’t have anything to offer. But he also figured Vega for the hit, so he grudgingly let me go. He figured I’d fallen short. I don’t think it even occurred to him that the whole plan was for mugs, total bull.”

  One thing I didn’t get. “How did you get hooked up with the Prognosticator?”

  Hanna said, “I realized what I said about Breck as soon as it left my mouth. I’d hoped you hadn’t realized my mistake, but I couldn’t take the chance. I didn’t have any friends here, anyone with any influence. But we’d been working with the Prognosticator on copyrighting the revised Handbook of Joshua. I knew from his talks with the Archivist that he was an ambitious man, that he couldn’t resist the lure of billions, and the power it could give his church. So I called him as soon as you’d left. It was his idea to drug you – it was the coffee. Sorry.”

  “Faith,” the prognosticator said lamely. ‘We’re not a church, we’re a faith.”

  Jayde scoffed. “By the time the Sector Police are done with you, you’re gonna need a lot more than that.”

  I looked at Hanna, sullen and pouting in the lamplight of the hotel room while Jayde was busy dialing the SP.

  I asked her why. I guess I wanted to know what made us so different. What made her willing to go to any length, to kill other people.

  “Why’d you do it, kid? You were already on your way,
you were a…”

  “I’m a Jane Doe.” Her eyes were tired and sullen, but still fiery with anger. “Just like you’re a John Smith. We’ll never be shit. Unless we make our own breaks, we’ll never be middle-management, we’ll never have value in the group, in society. We’ll never have real security.”

  “So you figured the best way to get social acceptance was to murder and steal? Strange theory, kid.”

  She squinted. “It’s only a bad thing if you get caught, Bob. Just take a look around you. Ask the Jofari. Ask the people stuck on this dirtball planet, working off their 40 years of numbness and waiting to be rendered into compost. Ask Vance Vega. Ask your stepfather, beholden to that scumbag Munch; go ahead, Bob, and ask the only man you love as family what he thinks of the rules.”

  “So,” said Jayde, “What you’re saying, when it all comes down to it, is you’re just another douchebag.”