Slab City Blues: The Collected Stories

  “Just like that,” I said. “Sure, give me five minutes.”

  The Chief loomed closer, tapping the gun and ID. “These can disappear any time, don’t forget that.”

  “I won’t work this case with anyone else,” Janet said, drawing a stern-eyed squint from the Chief. “Just so you know,” she added with one of her best smiles.

  “Dr Vaughan’s assistance is crucial,” Sherry put in. “If we’re going to end this.”

  “Vampires,” the Chief grated, a curl of distaste on his lips. He turned back to me. “What do you have? And no card-holding. All of it. Spill.”

  I looked at Janet. “You spoke to the wife?”

  She nodded. “They each had one. Devant had highly placed friends at MEC.”

  “Had what?” the Chief demanded.

  “Show them,” I told Janet. “It’s in my coat.”

  She fished out the neural immersion band and briefly explained what it was.

  “And DeMarco had one too?” the Chief asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “The only link we’ve been able to find between any of the victims. And DeMarco wasn’t abducted. He jumped off the Pipe and walked to his death, all on his own.”

  “You think this thing somehow made him do it?” Sherry asked. “Input some kind’ve suicidal impulse. If that’s the case, why bother free-falling down a ventilation shaft just to off himself in his own slaughterhouse? He could do that any time.”

  “Because whatever made him do it only activated when he put on his band to record his visit with Daniel. Also, DeMarco’s bodyguards were operating under strict Duress Protocol. Insurance companies insist on it these days. Basically makes the protectee a prisoner of their own schedule. Every meeting, visit and journey has to be planned out a week in advance and can’t be changed. It’s designed to prevent clients acting against their own interests when they get a call from scary people claiming to be holding a chainsaw to their daughter’s forearm. No way they were just going to stand by whilst he dived into the meat processor.”

  I turned to the Chief. “Anyone who’s been playing around with MEC’s new toy is a potential victim. They need to recall it and we need a list of whoever they gave it to.”

  “Because MEC are such an easy company to deal with,” he said.

  “Threaten to leak it to the news feeds,” I suggested. “Do wonders for their share price.”

  “Karnikhov didn’t have one,” Sherry pointed out. “And there’s nothing to indicate he was complicit in his own death.”

  “He was killed by a bot,” I replied. “Probably chained to that rock by one too. We’ve seen what our boy can do with bots.” I turned to Janet. “Did Devant’s wife give you anything else?”

  “Not much. She’s in pretty terrible shape, as you can imagine. Seems she and Devant had an afternoon benefit gig on Yang One. She worked as his stage assistant. Mr Devant was something of a perfectionist, they’d both wear their bands during the show then swap afterwards to critique each other’s performance. The last thing she remembers is putting on his band in their dressing room, the lights go out and she wakes up a few hours later holding a bowl full of acid over his face, surrounded by servo-bots. When it was… over, they herded her into that maintenance room to wait for us.”

  “The bots must have been controlled through high-level programming,” Sherry said. “Pretty impressive coding too. Goal oriented, tactical awareness, reactive to threats. Even the UNOIF military bots weren’t that smart. The techs say they’re mock-ups, constructs made to look like power company equipment. Convincing job, as long as you don’t check for serial numbers.”

  The Chief eyed me closely. “I’m told the great carcinoma itself has an interest in this. What did it tell you?”

  No card-holding? Ah, fuck him. “Seems it caught wind of Dr Vaughan’s research and took an interest, wanted to make sure I was taking it seriously. Said it’ll run some numbers, pattern recognition, that kind of thing. Haven’t heard anything yet.”

  “Unusual for it to be so civic minded,” the Chief observed. “All attempted contacts from city and CAOS officials have been ignored since that silly bitch toasted herself.”

  “We have a special relationship.”

  “Well you might want to tell it that this lack of interaction is making people nervous. The kind of people you don’t want to get nervous.”

  “You think it doesn’t know that already? It’s probably listening to this conversation right now.”

  The Chief blinked, involuntarily scanning the room. In truth I had no real idea quite how extensive Freak’s surveillance ability was, or whether s/he’d even care enough to listen in. But I did enjoy giving him a scare.

  “What do you need?” he growled.

  “Mrs DeMarco gave us the name of her husband’s contact at MEC. We need access, and sanctions if they don’t co-operate.” Campaign contributions notwithstanding, I didn’t say, knowing I’d pushed him far enough for one day. “You could mention Freak’s interest. Might focus some minds in the right direction. Profit margins’ll suffer if their net access suddenly goes down.”

  “I’ll do what I can.” He nodded at the gun and ID. “Don’t forget what I said.”

  “Certainment, mon General.”

  He bit back an angry rebuke and stalked from the room. Joe gave me an encouraging smile and followed him.

  “Saved him from a Fed-Sec black-ops squad during the war,” I explained to Janet. “He’s never forgiven me.”

  *

  “You speak French?” Janet asked. The Pipe was carrying us past the Axis towards Yin One and our meeting with MEC. I hadn’t been Yin-side in years and didn’t relish the prospect. Everything over there is so disgustingly clean.

  “Mais oui,” I said. “Et toi?”

  She shook her head. “Ancient Greek, Latin, Norse, Aramaic, Etruscan and Phoenician only.”

  I snorted. “Pathetic.”

  “I know, I really need to apply myself more.” I was disturbed by the fact that she sounded entirely sincere.

  “Why the switch?” I asked, knowing further discussion on our comparative abilities would only make me feel even more inadequate. “From Greek to Norse. Any ideas?”

  “It could be that his religious attitudes mirror those of the ancient world. The concept of exclusivity in belief really dates from the Christian era. The Romans, for example, ridiculed the Egyptians for, as they put it, worshipping cats and dogs, but they never claimed that Anubis and company didn’t exist. Perhaps whoever’s doing this doesn’t see a conflict between the mythologies. To him, it’s all the same thing.”

  “Just another god to worship.”

  “If that’s what he’s doing.”

  *

  The Slab City HQ of the innocuously named Multi-media Entertainment Corporation was as impressive as an office complex could be when limited to only three storeys. It took up most of Quad Alpha on Yin One in a sprawl of elegant glass and chrome, intersected with lush patches of neatly groomed garden and decorative lakes complete with ducks and swans.

  “Can they fly?” I enquired of the security guard escorting us towards a building bearing the sign ‘Welcome and Direction.’

  “Sure,” he replied. “But the urge is spliced out when they’re in the egg. Clipping their wings spoils the look, I guess.”

  ‘Welcome and Direction’ turned out to be a warehouse sized collection of conference rooms, each partitioned by frosted glass, MEC suits moving behind the opaque walls like spectres as they did whatever it is they do. The security guy led us to a room marked as the ‘Resolution Suite’. Inside about twenty suits sat at a large table, each smiling near identical smiles of welcome.

  “Inspector McLeod!” A tall, broad shouldered man came forward to shake my hand. “Bruce Atwood, Head of Direction.”

  I ignored his hand and went into the room, pointing at the assembled suits. “Who are they?”

  “Oh, we’ll do a quick round table, shall we? Sally, could you start?”

 
A severely pretty Asiatic woman on the left of the table nodded and spoke in precise tones. “Sally Choa, Deputy Head of Assurance.”

  “Matt Dalquist,” the neatly coiffured young man seated next to her said. “Acting head of Efficiency…”

  “Yeah, enough of that,” I broke in, consulting the file the Chief’s office had sent to my smart. “Ryan Van Pelt, Elise McKinnon. Raise your hands.”

  They were at the far end of the table, a plumpish middle-aged woman and a muscular young man. I noted the fact that her hand shook as she held it in the air but his was steady as a rock.

  “You two can stay,” I said. “Everyone else can fuck off.”

  Atwood started to bluster, spouting phrases like ‘professional conduct’ and ‘mutualised co-operative networking.’

  I waved my smart at him. “Got a friend at the Axis knows all about networks. Don’t make me call them.”

  The room seemed much bigger cleared of corporate flotsam, leaving McKinnon and Van Pelt diminished and vulnerable at the edge of the gleaming expanse of real oak table.

  “You should know,” Van Pelt said, voice reedy and whiny enough to tell me his original body had been heavily modified into its current form. “I have retained legal counsel and formally object to this interview proceeding in their absence.”

  “And yet here you are,” I observed. I’d taken a seat at the head of the table, enjoying the luxuriant feel of the swivel chair, the way it contoured itself to one’s posterior was quite delightful. “Which tells me MEC promised to terminate your contract if you didn’t co-operate. So shut your trap until you’re spoken to.”

  I called up Freak’s trinary code graphic and placed the smart on the table, display set to broad-beam, the symbols swirling in the holo-cone. “This mean anything to either of you?”

  Van Pelt shook his head, expression blank. McKinnon sat, hands clasped together on the table, tight and white-knuckled. I put her somewhere over fifty, greying hair, wrinkles in the right places. The money she makes here and no rejuves. Different priorities maybe. Her tenseness dissipated a little as she watched the code dance. “Trinary,” she said. “Looks like a refinement of the Brusentsov syntax. Haven’t seen it since college.”

  “Know what it says?”

  She closed her eyes, shaking her head. “Of course not. You’d need a compiler and a super-computer for that.”

  I turned off the smart. “You’re Technical Project Leader on the neural immersion system, right?”

  She nodded. “Four years now.”

  “You know why we’re here?”

  She swallowed hard. “Compliance said something about a homicide.”

  “Homicides,” I corrected. “Plural. Thomas DeMarco and Alan Devant. Both advance recipients of your new toy, courtesy of Mr Van Pelt here.”

  Van Pelt flushed a little but kept quiet.

  “Ryan was just doing his job,” McKinnon said. “Seeding the product amongst high profile users, a stimulus to word of mouth marketing. Necessary given the likely unit price.”

  I looked at Van Pelt. “So you went to them?”

  “It’s my job to cultivate the right kind of relationships,” he replied, a small but discernible sneer of superiority creeping into his tone. “Ensure enough information is circulated to stir up interest. When the rumours about the band reached a certain point, they came to me. It wasn’t forced on anyone.”

  “It’s perfectly safe,” McKinnon insisted, looking at me for the first time. “The test period was extensive and exhaustive. No recorded adverse effects. It even had a fifteen percent effectiveness rating in reducing migraine discomfort.”

  “I’ve got two spectacularly messed up corpses that say it’s not so harmless. One of whom was definitely complicit in his own demise.”

  “People kill themselves all the time,” Van Pelt said.

  I called up a crime scene holo of DeMarco’s remains. “Not like this.”

  McKinnon closed her eyes tight with a gasp and Van Pelt managed to keep himself rigid for two seconds before bolting from the table to bury his head in a waste basket, retching loudly.

  “That’s terrible,” McKinnon said in a whisper. “But the band didn’t cause it. It can’t have.”

  “Explain it to us,” Janet said, voice soothing, encouraging.

  “It’s really no different in essence from any playback device,” McKinnon went on. “It records the neural impulses generated by the wearer and either transmits them in real time to a paired device or replays them later, coded into an enhanced immersive format. It doesn’t - can’t do anything else.”

  “Let’s say for the sake of argument,” I said. “I was feeling like I wanted to end it all and that feeling got recorded to the band. Wouldn’t someone who played it back later feel the same thing?”

  She gave an emphatic headshake. “Suicidal thoughts are abstract, they’re ideas. Ideas can’t be recorded, or even if they could, when you played them back in someone else’s head they wouldn’t make any sense. Touch, taste, smell, sight, even language, all light up the same very specific regions of the brain, so the sensations can be recreated. Thoughts, feelings, emotions, that’s another universe worth of complexity.”

  I watched her closely, finding no indications of deceit, and she wasn’t enough of a practised interviewee to fool me. But there was something more, I could see it in her white-knuckle hand clasp and the reluctance to meet my gaze.

  “You a religious person, Ms McKinnon?” I asked.

  She blinked, almost suppressed a shudder, but I saw it. “What?”

  “Religious. As in neo-Catholic, Bhuddist, Hindu and so on. I hear there’s also a new brand of paganism if that floats your spiritual boat. The Mythos Movement. Ever hear of it?”

  “Oh shit!” Van Pelt breathed, looking up from his vomit filled receptacle. “I knew that crazy little bastard would come back to haunt us.”

  “Shut up, Ryan!” McKinnon rounded on him. “Just shut the hell up!”

  “No Ryan,” I said. “Don’t do that.”

  He wiped his mouth and came back to the table, sitting down, hands rested flat and finger-splayed on the oak as if worried he might suddenly lose his balance. “Erik Lasalle,” he said, voice hoarse. “Former lead programmer on the Neural Immersion development team. Dismissed eighteen months ago due to… erratic behaviour.”

  “He was a member of the Mythos Movement?” Janet asked.

  “Oh yeah. Big time devotee, filled his office with Celtic amulets, 2Ds of the old gods, most of his body was covered in tattoos. All the same weirdo pagan shit. Once he started on it you couldn’t shut him up, ranting on about the lost wisdom of the ancients. People generally avoided him.”

  “They didn’t understand him!” McKinnon insisted, fierce if a little shrill. “Someone so - so brilliant. Normal modes of behaviour were irrelevant.”

  “Elise, he was writing runes on the mainframe in his own blood the day they fired him. I’m all for tolerating the eccentricities of genius, but the guy was a loon.”

  McKinnon put her head in her hands and began to weep, soft, rasping sobs. I looked at Janet and inclined my head at McKinnon then gestured for Van Pelt to follow me to the door.

  “I need everything from your HR files on Lasalle,” I told him, keeping my voice low. “Plus details of every project he worked on.”

  “He only worked on neural immersion. Truth be told we couldn’t have done it without him, the algorithms he came up with for the enhanced immersive format were groundbreaking, took years off the development cycle. Elise is right, he was brilliant.” He glanced back at the table where Janet had rested her hand on McKinnon’s doubled fist. The plump woman was speaking in a flat tone, barely audible words tumbling from her mouth in a torrent.

  “What’s she doing to her?” I was impressed by the concern in Van Pelt’s voice. Maybe they really were just one big happy family in MEC.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I told him. “She and Lasalle were close?”

  “She recruit
ed him. Found him coding sims in an immersion arcade on some Yang-side shit-hole.” He paused at my sudden glower. “No offence.”

  “The HR records,” I said.

  “Already on it.” He tapped his temple. “Sub-dermal smart implant. Had it for a year now. Don’t know how I coped before. The SPI gets a little grating now and then though, but upgrades cost a fortune.”

  “Spy?”

  “No. S-P-I. Simulated Personality Interface, like a voice in my head. Relays data, suggests content.”

  “You mean you’ve got an artificial intelligence living in your brain?”

  “Nah, just in the smart. It’s not a true AI anyway, maybe a six on the Turing scale.” He blinked. “All done. I’ll need your ID to transfer the data.”

  I held up my smart with the ID displayed. It beeped almost immediately.

  “So he’s really started killing people, huh?” Van Pelt said. “The gods demand sacrifice.”

  “What?”

  “One of his favourite sayings, even had it tattooed across his chest. Crazy little fucker.”

  Chapter 8

  The 2D in the MEC personnel file showed a sallow faced youth in a black t-shirt that hung on his bony frame like a wind-blown sheet finding purchase on a sapling. The eyes, dark and a little unnerving in their evident intelligence, gleamed from behind a weeping fringe of lank dark hair.

  “Off the charts IQ and problem-solving abilities,” Janet said. We’d perched ourselves on a bench overlooking one of the ornamental lakes, MEC security lingering nearby. “No surviving family, all lost in the war. According to Ms McKinnon. She misses him terribly. Deeply felt maternal feelings, I’d say.”

  “Van Pelt said she brought him in,” I said. “He was a freelance sim-coder for Yang-side arcades. Big numbers on the download sites, hefty royalties. He was already rich before he got here. So why’d he take the job?”

  “McKinnon said he needed challenge, needed to be tested. He was terrified of boredom.”

  “Fear of tedium is an indicator for sociopathic behaviour.” I drew back at her raised eyebrow. “Hey, I can read too.”