The Woman Who Died a Lot

  “We’ll leave it in your capable hands,” remarked Kitchen, and he beckoned to the officers to back away.

  “You have acted . . . wisely,” said Stig as he parked the massive weapon back in his jacket. “Hold perimeter and call when our transport arrive.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the sergeant as he saluted smartly, glad to be spared the responsibility of command.

  While Stig called his brother-in-law to bring a van to take away the body, I stared at the latest Synthetic. She was the seventh we knew of and the third since my accident. The pre-accident ones had all been killed by Stiltonistas thinking they were me, and of the post-accident batch one we’d found in the house going through my stuff presumably in order to better emulate me and the other was arrested when it tried to cash a check on my behalf. Both of them had been questioned but could explain little and were helped into long eternity pleading that they were me— but without being able to answer anything except rudimentary Thursday trivia. Landen and Spike had disposed of them. I think they’re in the Savernake Forest, where the Stiltonistas disposed of the earlier ones. None of them had seemed that smart, and none of them—until now—would have fooled anyone. But maybe that wasn’t the point. Maybe the early ones were simply testing the waters.

  The small data plate under her eyelid had simply stated that she was a TN-v7.2. The last one had been a v6.6. There was a serial number, and I jotted it down. We stared at it for a while. It was kind of weird, seeing me lying dead on the floor with half a head. It was a waste of a good body, too. Boy, could she run. And although I’d not had a chance to put it to the test, she probably could have given Landen a seriously good run for his money in the sack.

  “Do you have any of her memories?” he asked. “I mean, she didn’t pop into existence here at Booktastic. She must have walked in the door like the rest of us.”

  I thought hard. I knew nothing of her being her before she was me being me. My memories were simply of me. “Nothing.”

  “Shame. Stig?”

  “Physically, specimen excellent,” he said, “good muscle tone, firm all over—almost no fat.”

  “It was a great body,” I said, somewhat wistfully.

  “But it made hastily,” he said. “Look at legs.”

  He showed us an athletic yet hairless leg.

  “Stretch marks on the knees and shin?” said Landen, leaning closer and putting on his reading glasses. “And why is the skin so smooth otherwise?”

  “No sweat glands. On a hot day, she’d boil.”

  “How quick did they grow her?”

  “Our guess ten weeks,” said Stig as he showed us her hands. The fingernails looked long, but they were stuck on. He pulled one off to reveal a real nail below, and only a quarter way down the nail bed. He pointed to the side of the scalp still remaining, which at first glance seemed to have a goodly amount of long hair, which was in fact manmade fibers stuck into the scalp.

  “Six brushings and no hair left,” Stig said. He prodded the stomach—which was flat, I noted. He then grunted with interest, looked in her throat, rolled the body over and pulled down her trousers and pants.

  “No digestive tract. Not designed for longevity.”

  A tract wasn’t the only thing she—or it—was missing.

  “She was going to be seriously frustrated with that libido, too.”

  “Not what she designed for,” said Stig. “See here?”

  He pointed to what looked like a thin scar on her upper back. It wasn’t, though—it was a flap.

  “Umbilical went here,” he said. He wiped his finger on the flap, then smelled it. “Activated two hours ago, give/take. Not seen this sort of Synthetic before. Cheap body.”

  “But excellent brain,” added Landen.

  “Indeed,” agreed Stig. “She sent here find out something, do something, see something—perhaps report back, then die.”

  “The BookWorld,” I said. “Goliath has always wanted to get in there. I could easily have read my way in with this body. Do you think that’s what they were up to?”

  No one answered because no one knew.

  Stig peered into the skull cavity and poked a chubby finger into the the remains of the brain stem. “Dismantle it when back at lab. Shame you shot it through head, Landen. We could have learned more.”

  “Note to self,” said Landen sarcastically. “Don’t shoot wife through head.”

  Landen and I walked out of the bookshop after offering our apologies for the mess, and I told them to send a bill for any damaged books to Braxton Hicks.

  “Are you okay?” asked Landen as we hobbled back toward the car.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I just miss running.”

  “You will again,” he said, but I knew, despite the conviction with which he said it, that it was going to take a while.

  “Sure,” I said, “and your leg is going to grow back.”

  He said nothing but squeezed my hand.

  “We’ve got to be home at three,” I said. “Finisterre is taking me up to the Sisterhood to view the contents of their scriptorium.”

  Then something occurred to me.

  “Wait a moment,” I said. “That Synthetic wouldn’t have been activated without help, and she was barely two hours old.”

  “What are we looking for?” asked Landen. “A cobwebby basement with ancient electrical equipment and a mad scientist? Or just a really large jar?”

  “She’d certainly have been sealed in something. Hang on.”

  I delved through my pockets—I was wearing her clothes, after all—and found a key card from the Finis Hotel.

  15.

  Tuesday: The Finis

  The Finis Hotel remains not the most luxurious or stylish of Swindon’s many hotels, but it is certainly the most notorious, with the ballroom and guest rooms host to more attempted coups, murders, formations of political splinter groups and subject to police raids than any other. It had become so notorious, in fact, that people came to holiday here simply to witness what management refers to as “the Finis’s diverse clientele and their antics.”

  Swindon Tourist Board leaflet

  The receptionist greeted me cheerily as we walked into the lobby.

  “Welcome back,” she said brightly. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  “In a manner of speaking. How long am I booked in?”

  “Let’s see,” she said, looking at the screen set into the desk. “Two nights.”

  “Did I arrive with anyone?”

  Her eyes flicked to Landen. We were a recognizable couple in the city, and the Finis prided itself on its discretion.

  “I’m a very understanding husband,” said Landen.

  The receptionist said that someone named Mr. Krantz checked us both in, but we didn’t arrive together. I asked for a photocopy they had made of his ID, and she added that she had seen me only once recently—just before midday.

  “Is Mr. Krantz okay?” she asked anxiously.

  “Did he appear unwell?”

  “A little. I offered to call a doctor, but he said it wasn’t necessary. Do you not remember any of this?”

  “I’ve been having memory lapses. Which room am I in?”

  “Jacob Z. Krantz,” I read from the copy of his ID as we took the lift to the top floor, “Laddernumber 673, based in Goliathopolis.” Anyone under a thousand was way up high in the upper echelons of the Goliath corporate structure. Last I heard of my old adversary Jack Schitt, he had entered the Goliath Top One Hundred at eighty-eight.

  “Krantz is easily high enough to be involved in the Synthetic Human Project,” I murmured thoughtfully. “We’re here.”

  The Formby was the largest and most luxurious suite in the hotel, right on the top floor. The room didn’t contain a large jar as Landen had suggested, but rather a human-size sarcophagus made out of Tupperware to ensure freshness. There was a large quantity of cellophane wrapping, an empty wooden crate that had once contained the sarcophagus, and several items of medical equip
ment. All the towels were sodden, and almost everything was covered with splashes of thick, fetid-smelling slime, the bathroom especially.

  “This has a very military feel about it, don’t you think?” said Landen, rummaging among the bric-a-brac.

  “I think even an idiot like me could bring one of these to life,” I replied, referring to a pictorial instruction card.

  “If neanderthals were designed by Goliath as experimental medical-test vessels,” he said, “why not a disposable soldier? Volume trumps longevity if you’re thinking of a quick conflict.”

  “It doesn’t explain what a corporate highflier like Krantz is doing in Swindon with a Synthetic,” I said. “What is Goliath up to?”

  Landen said he had no idea, then opined that we shouldn’t be found here, to which I agreed. We took the elevator back to the lobby, but it was too late. The doors to the lift opened to reveal six Goliath operatives, all dressed in the signature navy suits and sunglasses of Goliath’s Internal Security Service. The one in front was holding a clipboard, and he would have been the boss.

  We stopped and stared at one another. They knew who I was, that much was certain, but I think they were wondering which I was. I felt Landen’s hand move in the pocket where he kept his pistol. The man with the clipboard took off his sunglasses and looked at Landen. He’d seen him move, too. They’d all be armed. I thought the world of Landen but didn’t see how he could outshoot six highly trained Goliath security officers. I shifted my weight and might have winced. The Goliath agent looked at my stick, then smiled.

  “Miss Next,” he said, “so very glad to make your acquaintance, and congratulations on your new appointment. I am Swindon’s Goliath representative: Lupton Cornball. Don’t laugh. We’ll be formally introduced tomorrow at the library, but today I’d like to talk to you about some stolen property that might make itself available to you.”

  They were definitely after the Synthetic, but Goliath always spoke euphemistically, as it afforded deniability. I wasn’t going to play along.

  “What sort of property?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “Then how will I know when it has made itself available to me?”

  He stared at me for a moment, lost for words. But it told me what I needed to know: If these guys meant to do us harm, we’d both be unconscious in the back of a van by now with flour sacks over our heads.

  “We’re done,” I said as they parted to let us through. I had often bested the Goliath Corporation in the past, and because of this I had a protocol all to myself. It was numbered 451 and declared that I was not to be approached for any purpose. I had probably cost them a trillion pounds in lost revenue, and they had no desire to lose any more. I was the thorn in the side that you didn’t touch—you simply left it alone and dealt with the pain.

  “I love the way you talk to them,” said Landen with a chuckle. “What’s the next step? Look for Mr. Krantz?”

  “I guess.”

  “I hope that’s the end of it,” he murmured. “One sarcophagus, one Synthetic.”

  “Don’t be too sure,” I said, handing him some paperwork I had fished out of the waste bin. It was a Gravitube ticket all the way from the Tarbuck International, the most convenient place to depart from the island corporate city-state of Goliathopolis, situated in the middle of the Irish Sea.

  “At least we’re no longer in doubt the Synthetic was from Goliath,” said Landen.

  “Yes,” I replied, “but look at the luggage manifest.”

  “Shit,” he muttered, once he’d examined the ticket stub.

  “Right,” I replied, “five crates came by Gravitube Freight. I don’t think we’ve seen the last of Synthetic Me.”

  16.

  Tuesday: Tuesday

  The mandatory hermit requirements for estates larger than eighty acres was one of the many “Inverse Consequences” directives undertaken by the Commonsense Party. The theory was not sound, but that was the point: Bearing in mind that well-meant ideas often had negative unforeseen consequences, it was argued that daft, pointless or downright bizarre ideas might have unforeseen positive outcomes. Hence mandatory hermits. Aside from the weekly gruel allowance and the construction of a damp cave, it cost little.

  The Commonsense Party Inverse Consequence Directive Explained

  Tuesday was already back home when we got there at a little after one-thirty. She and the Wingco were in the far paddock with a quarter-size mockup of the anti-smote field generator. The Wingco was readying the high-speed camera, and standing around were assorted observers and representatives of various interested parties. Landen and I exchanged new passwords, and while he made a sandwich, I took the golf buggy down to see how things were going. The far paddock was the place usually reserved for Tuesday’s tests, partly because it was a good distance from the house but mostly because there was a useful screen of mature leylandii to absorb blast damage.

  “I thought I told you to go to school this morning,” I said, making sure we were out earshot of the small crowd.

  “Mum, like, duh, I did go to school. I went into math class and proved that there actually is a highest number, and then I helped Derek in the chemistry lab to make a new type of quick-setting PVC substitute from potato starch and an enzyme readily grown on onions. During the break I figured that Janice Lovegrove was up the duff and probably by Scooter Davis, that Debbie Trubshaw is now putting it about in a big way, and that Sian Johnson’s new hairstyle was pinched from page nine of the Swindon edition of Vogue.”

  “Anything regarding Gavin Watkins?” I asked, considering that Friday was destined to murder him on Friday and had yet to have a motive.

  “He didn’t offer me any money to see my boobs again.”

  “That’s good.”

  “No, he said he’d give me five pounds for sex.”

  “He did what!?!” I yelled, outraged. “You said no, right? I’m going to report him to the headmaster.”

  “ Mu-u-um! Of course I said no. Please don’t do that,” she implored. “I’m already a geek and a teacher’s pet and a brainiac and a smart aleck. I don’t want to be a snitch as well. Besides, I punched him in the eye.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes. Quite hard. I may even have detached his retina. I left school after that and got back in time to do a test of the defense shield for this bunch of suits.”

  “Well, okay,” I said, looking over her shoulder to where they were all milling about. “Who are they anyway?”

  “The guys in the raincoats are from the Ministry of Theistic Defense, and the two in tweeds are from Tobin & Scott, the anti-smite tower build contractors. The guy in the lab coat is from Health & Safety, and the three on the left are from the Swindon City Council.”

  I noted that one of the women in the last group was Bunty Fairweather. I needed to talk to her about alternative plans for Swindon if the shield didn’t work, but this, I noted, was probably not the time.

  “Leave you to it, then.”

  But I didn’t leave completely. To watch the test, I stopped the golf cart above the long steps, where the landscaped water cascade tumbled into the lake, one of the many garden features within the eighty-eight-acre estate.

  “Every journey begins with the first step,” came a deep voice tinged with wisdom and august pronouncements.

  “Hello, Millon,” I said, greeting our ornamental hermit with a friendly nod. “How’s the hermitage?”

  “Drafty,” he said simply, “but the discomfort of one man is mere sand upon the beach to the iniquities undertaken by the few to many.”

  “You won’t want central heating put in, then?”

  “Comfort is the measles of modern man,” he said in a halfhearted manner, “and only through cheerless discomfort will the mind be clear and unfettered.”

  I smiled. My ex-stalker and biographer Millon de Floss had recently volunteered to be our ornamental hermit, part of the Commonsense Party’s Inverse Consequences directive. If we were going to have som
eone living on the estate who was to wander around aimlessly spouting quasi-philosophical nonsense, we far preferred it to be someone we knew.

  “When’s the hermit exam?” I asked.

  “Next week,” he said nervously. “How am I sounding?”

  “I’ll be honest—not great.”

  “Really?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Damn! I was hoping six months of silent contemplation would suddenly imbue me with sagelike intelligence, but all I seem to be able to manage is a strange fungal growth on my shins caused by the damp and lukewarm aphorisms that would scarcely do good favor to the back of a matchbox.”

  “I don’t really get the whole intellect-through-isolation thing,” I said. “I’m not sure anyone can claim to understand the human condition until he’s talked two people out of a fight, smoothed over a best friend’s marital breakup or dealt effectively with a teenager’s huffy silence.”

  “I’d include an appreciation of Tex Avery cartoons in that list,” added Millon sadly, “along with Gaudí, David Lean’s later movies and a minimum of one evening with Emo Philips. But the hermit elders are traditionalists. The City&Guilds Higher Hermiting Certificate is based mostly around Horace, the Old Testament, Descartes and Marx.”

  “Groucho or Karl?”

  “Harpo. I think it reflects the ‘silent’ aspect.”

  “Ah. Couldn’t you just smear yourself with mud and excrement and mumble Latin to yourself in a corner?”

  “What, now?”

  “No, no—during the exam.”

  Millon shook his head. “Everyone tries that old chestnut. Instant disqualification.” He nodded toward the far paddock. “What’s Tuesday up to?”

  “Another Anti-Smite Shield test.”

  “Will this one work?”

  “Hope springs eternal.”

  We watched as the observers were shepherded into the concrete viewing bunker while Tuesday made some trifling adjustments to the defense shield. It was identical to the full-size versions dotted around the country—a large copper-domed head like a mushroom atop a lattice tower. Above the test rig was the smite simulator, a single electrode twenty feet higher than the copper dome, suspended from three towers. This was charged to several trillion volts and would discharge on cue in an attempt to simulate the sort of high-power groundburst that was the Almighty’s favored attempt at cleansing.