The dyson file, p.34
The Dyson File, page 34
“Thanks. An Arete mech helped point me in the right direction. I followed the path this far, and now here I am. Riller would have killed Isaac if I hadn’t intervened, so I’d really appreciate it if you could point the way.”
Raviv’s eyes lit up with barely contained fury. “She’s the one who tried to liquefy his insides?”
“Yes, sir.”
Raviv clenched both of his fists, which caused his mug to shudder in his hand, spilling some of his coffee.
“No one—and I mean no one—hurts a member of my team and gets away with it.” He pointed down one of the tunnels. “You do whatever it takes to bring that piece of filth to justice. You hear me?”
“Loud and clear, sir.”
“Just watch out for the fuzzles,” Damphart warned. “They’re all over the place. Though . . . ” She looked Susan’s combat frame up and down. “I think you’ll be fine.”
“I certainly hope so. Thanks for the help!”
Susan popped off a quick salute, flared her shoulder nozzles, and took off down the tunnel.
* * *
Susan rocketed down the tunnel until it opened into a cross-junction. She cut her thrust and landed, transitioning to a run that slowed to a jog by the time she needed to pick a direction.
She paused at the junction, checked to her left, then right, then straight ahead.
Well, shoot, she thought to herself. Where to now?
A girlish scream echoed through the utility maze, and her onboard sensors placed the source roughly two hundred meters from her location, down the left passage.
Just follow the screams? she mused.
She fired her boosters and shot through the tunnel, following its twists and turns with quick bursts of thrust. The passage narrowed, pinched closed by a cluster of vertical conduits, and she landed before the gap and slid through it sideways.
The passage opened up again, and she continued on foot until she rounded a bend and came face-to-face with a horde of multicolored toys bunched up on the floor or clinging to the walls and ceiling.
“You’re not supposed to be here.”
“Go back.”
“Go back.”
“Go . . . back?”
“How about a hug?”
“Give it a hug!”
A pastel green fuzzle pranced up to her leg and embraced it with a tiny squeak.
“This is new,” Susan said, which was saying a lot in her line of work. She shook the fuzzle off her, then stomped it flat and ground the robot to scrap under the ball of her armored foot.
“You meanie!”
“It’s so mean!”
“So mean!”
“So . . . mean?”
“It needs to be punished!”
“I don’t think so.” Susan lit her incinerator and doused her surroundings with blue flame in a wide, slow sweep. The fuzzles screamed in simulated pain, running around in panicked circles trailing greasy smoke. Some of them dropped and rolled while unlit fuzzles tried to pat down their burning comrades. But the gel her incinerator used wasn’t so easily extinguished, and their efforts only served to spread the flames faster.
“That wasn’t ni-i-i-i-ce . . . ” A burning fuzzle flopped over, and its overheated innards burst open with a loud pop. More of them face-planted and then bulged outward or crackled in twitching, spasmodic death throes.
“Let me give you a kiss!”
A creepy, all-metal fuzzle leaped at her, but she caught it midair and smashed it to bits against the wall.
She advanced down the tunnel. More fuzzles tried to hide in the wall, shifting their positions for what might have been an ambush, but Susan had toggled her sensor suite to active, and the data flowing through her systems tagged each little machine with a red outline.
“Help!” a boy cried out from ahead. “Is someone there?”
“Help us! Please!” a girl called out, followed by a chorus of similar shouts.
Susan hurried down the corridor, only stopping to douse dense clusters of the toys before pressing on. A flood of the little machines poured into the corridor ahead, and she lit them all on fire before stomping their burning carcasses flat.
She arrived at a circular chamber with only one entrance. Thick, vertical pipes lined the walls, interspersed with maintenance access hatches.
Along with six children.
And Riller.
Each child was bound to a pipe using fuzzy, multicolored cords. The toys had placed pastel ribbons in their hair and painted their cheeks rosy colors. Food paste dribbled from their chins or the sides of their mouths, which Susan took to mean the rampant toys had been feeding them.
The fuzzles had tied Riller to a pipe in much the same manner as the children. They’d cut off her blue braid before tying a pink bow around her head and coloring her cheeks.
“Hang in there, kids! I’ll get you out!” Susan worked her way through the room, ripping each child free. Some of them stumbled and massaged their legs, perhaps fighting cramps induced by being tied in place for too long. “No one leaves without me, you hear? We’re getting out of this together.”
Susan freed the sixth child, then sidestepped over to Riller. She paused and stared down at the criminal, who looked up at her with a worried, terror-drenched expression, perhaps wondering if the being before her was even more dangerous than the fuzzles. Faint tears trailed down her cheeks.
“Are you going to kill me?” she squeaked.
Susan knelt, a hand resting on her knee, her cameras level with Riller’s face.
“I would,” she said, soft enough for the kids not to hear. “In a different place, under different circumstances. I’ve killed plenty of scum like you before.”
Riller gulped. “You have?”
Susan nodded. “I’ve met my share of monsters. And you? You’re a monster. You might look human, but that’s nothing more than a facade. A . . . cosmetic layer, if you will, draped over the filth you call a soul. Monsters like you deserve nothing better than a merciless death.”
“But you’re not going to kill me?”
“No. I won’t.”
“Why not?”
“There are a lot of reasons.” She placed a hand around the cords holding Riller in place. “Some better than others. For one, my partner would be unhappy with me if I didn’t bring you in alive. But the most important reason is it’s not my role to punish you. When I started this job, my partner told me this: ‘We in Themis do not dispense justice. We indict those we believe are guilty, but we do not decide their punishments.’ Those were his words, and I take what he says very seriously.”
Susan ripped the criminal free, pinned her to the ground, and cuffed her wrists.
* * *
“Chief?”
Damphart nudged Raviv in the arm and pointed down the tunnel.
He looked up from his coffee to see Susan walking into the open, a thin woman tossed over the shoulder opposite her grenade launcher. Six children crowded around her legs, as if fearful she might dart off somewhere if they strayed too far. One of the boys began to sob at the sight of more people, and Susan reached down and ruffled his hair.
“Huh, would you look at that?” Raviv took another sip. “You know something, Grace?”
“What’s that, Chief?”
He nodded slowly, his expression warming. “I think she’s growing on me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Isaac frowned at the gunfire divots spread across the wall. He stuck a finger into one, traced the lip of the recess, and then brought his finger out and inspected the silvery crumbs. He rubbed the flakes between two fingers—they felt like fine grains of sand—then shook his hand out, producing a brief shower of metallic glitter.
“Before you ask,” Nina began with a wry grin, “those were caused by what we in Forensics call an ‘assload of guns.’”
“You realize I was still here when she tore through the place.”
“They didn’t stand a chance, did they?”
“Against Susan? No. Not really.”
SSP had finished clearing out the subdued Byte Pyrates and were in the middle of processing them back at the field command center. They’d also swept the hideout for any traps or other dangerous surprises, but had found none, which freed up Nina and her drones to move in for a forensics sweep.
“Any thoughts on where they stashed Ruckman?” Isaac asked.
“Give me some time, Isaac. I just started!”
“Sorry.” He walked over to a wall crammed from floor to ceiling with heavy-duty infosystem nodes, about a third of which had been blown apart. “I hope he wasn’t kept in any of these.”
“Who knows?” Nina used a virtual interface to queue up tasks for her drones. “You have any idea what they were doing to him?”
“Not really.” Isaac put his finger on the broken guts of a racked node and twanged it. “But if how they treated me was any indicator, Ruckman’s had it rough.”
“Maybe even rougher, given how these people view ACs.”
“I hope not . . . but yes, that thought had crossed my mind.”
“They might have already deleted him once they had what they needed.”
“Maybe,” Isaac conceded, “but he remains our best lead at the moment. We might get lucky and find other evidence in all of this”—he indicated the nodes—“but I’m doubtful. Riller’s blackmail cache won’t help us either because it’ll point back to Fike. I expect most of the Pyrates will either keep quiet or be purposefully unhelpful, which leaves Ruckman’s copy as our best path forward. The Ghost needed the information in his head. Which means Ruckman was interacting—either directly or indirectly—with the criminal behind all of this, and if we can narrow down who that is . . . ”
“We can solve this case?”
“I hope so. I’m not sure where we’ll turn if this lead goes nowhere.”
“Don’t sound so glum. If Ruckman’s in here, I’ll find him.”
A pair of her drones worked their way down the infosystem wall while two more headed to the next room, which was also packed with hardware.
An SSP conveyor floated in, and Trooper Parks appeared.
“Detective Cho,” he said with a curt nod.
“Parks.” Isaac hurried up to the abstract trooper. “Any news?”
“Yes, sir. Encephalon has been transmitted to the CWC, and they’ve finished their preliminary analysis.”
Isaac nodded at the news, tentatively hopeful. The CWC was the Connectome Wellness Center, located within the city of Ballast Heights high atop Janus. There was no better place in the entire Saturn State for treating connectome injuries.
“And?” Isaac prompted.
“The initial prognosis is promising. The doctors believe they can reconstruct the damaged sectors of her connectome using a recent save. The good news is the mindbank has a copy of her connectome that’s only a few weeks old, and the doctors have already reached out to the bank to release her save state. For the medical procedure, I mean. Not replacement. Once they have it, they’ll splice in healthy versions of the damaged sectors. There’ll be some drift between the save and her running connectome—there always is—but the doctors sounded confident, especially given how recent the save is.”
“Good.” Isaac let out a slow, relieved sigh. He hadn’t realized how tense he’d been until the stress of worrying began to ease off. “That’s good. What kind of state do they think she’ll be in after the procedure?”
“There might be some short-term memory loss, but other than that, she should be fine. They project a nearly full recovery.”
“Given the circumstances, I think we can manage a few forgotten moments.” Isaac nodded to the trooper. “Thank you for letting me know. And thank you for resuscitating her when she transmitted over to you and Susan.”
“Just doing my job, Detective.”
“You’re doing a bit more than that, if you ask me. Great work out there.”
Parks gave him a bashful smile then nodded and vanished. The conveyor floated out of the room.
“What a relief!” Nina said.
“Yeah, I know.” Isaac put his back to the bullet-riddled wall and pressed the back of his head against the cool prog-steel. “I wasn’t sure what to think when Susan told me her connectome had been garbled.”
“Me, too. I—” Nina paused in the middle of entering a command, then expanded an alert from one of her drones. She turned to her twin brother and raised an eyebrow.
“Find something?” he asked.
“Would an abstraction labeled ‘Custom_Ruckman_001.UAM’ count as something?”
“I’d say so. Does it have any ACs attached to it?”
“One. And, at first glance, the connectome appears intact. The abstraction is running right now.”
“Can we get him out?”
“Not yet. The Pyrates have some unusual code running in parallel with the abstraction. If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say its purpose is to keep him locked in. I need to go over the setup some more, but I’ll probably need to shut the node down and then extract his connectome manually while it’s in a suspended state. But, that said, the abstraction can be accessed from the outside. Want to dive in and give Ruckman the good news? At the very least, we can let him know we’re working to pull him out.”
“Yes, let’s do that.”
“All right.” Nina’s fingers danced across her screen. “This part’s easy enough. Their system’s designed to let people on the outside in.”
“Just not the opposite.”
“Right. Bringing up the abstraction now.”
An alert appeared beside Isaac, asking him if he’d like to access a dodgy connection request. He selected “partial-mode,” which would overlay the abstraction on top of his normal senses rather than completely replacing them, then hit the commit icon.
A virtual chamber materialized within the real room, its surfaces expanding outward, flexing until they matched the physical room’s dimensions. Perhaps that was a part of its programming? The color was different—a clinical white instead of metallic gray—but other than that, the two rooms lined up perfectly once the adjustments finished.
Almost perfectly.
A heavy chair sat in the middle of the room. It was turned away from them and the back was high enough to prevent them from seeing the occupant.
A wide grid of interfaces covered much of the wall beside the chair. Isaac inspected some of the screens, reading off labels like BIOCHEMICAL SIM EDITOR and CONNECTOME SPLICER. He frowned in disgust when he spotted the PAIN SIMULATOR.
“Isaac?”
He joined Nina in front of the chair and took a long, hard look at Ruckman. The man’s avatar sat in the chair, naked and strapped in place, his head slumped forward.
“Mister Ruckman?”
The man raised his head slowly. Drool trickled from the corner of his lip.
“Mister Ruckman, I’m Detective Isaac Cho. Can you hear me?”
Ruckman’s copy looked up until he made eye contact with Isaac, who wasn’t sure what to make of the man’s expression. The eyes were . . . eerily vacant.
“Hello?” the copy asked.
“Hello, Mister Ruckman. We’ll need some time to retrieve you from this abstraction, but rest assured you’re safe now.”
“I am?”
“Yes. The area is under SSP control, and the Byte Pyrates are now in custody.”
“Who?”
“The Byte Pyrates. The people who kidnapped you.”
“No.” Ruckman shook his head like a slow metronome. “Who are you?”
“Detective Cho, SysPol Themis.”
“Do I know you?”
“No, sir. We only just met, though I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing your original.”
“My original?”
“Sir, are you aware you’re the victim of a copy-kidnapping?”
“Am I?”
“I’m afraid so. The Byte Pyrates kidnapped you while you visited the Divided-By-Zero hotel.”
“Am I?” He shook his head once more with that slow, unnatural rhythm.
“I’m sorry, but it’s the truth.”
“Am I?” He stopped shaking his head and met Isaac’s gaze. “Who am I?”
Isaac grimaced, unsure what to say to the man.
Nina leaned over and whispered, “Is this supposed to be your star witness?”
“I believe so,” he sighed more than said.
* * *
Isaac had Nina transfer Ruckman’s copy to the Connectome Wellness Center immediately after she extracted him from the Byte Pyrate infosystems. Susan rejoined them soon after and shared the good news on Riller’s capture. She and Isaac then headed for the CWC to check on both Cephalie and their “star witness,” though not by physically traveling to the Center.
The CWC did possess a physical location, but it lacked a physical interior. Or at least a conventional interior, not counting the many maintenance accessways and giant infostructure columns that took up most of the building’s internal space. The site did feature a small logistics center full of racked caskets where synthoid patients could store their bodies during treatment, but that was about it.
Instead, the two detectives headed back to the 103rd Precinct Building, where Susan switched back into her general purpose synthoid. Isaac reserved a meeting room equipped with abstraction recliners, and together they connected with the CWC’s abstract realm.
* * *
Cephalie came out of abstract surgery first.
Isaac spent his time waiting as productively as he could. He studied the Byte Pyrate interrogation reports filtering in from SSP (unhelpful), he read the updates Nina was drip-feeding him (incomplete but showing promise), and he reviewed his own case notes (no grand insights to be found).
At least the realm is free of distractions, he thought.
The waiting room wasn’t so much a room as a terrestrial landscape complete with rolling, grassy hills and a bright, cloudless sky. He and Susan sat on a park bench underneath the shade of an apple tree. A pleasant breeze cooled his skin, and a discreet menu in the tree’s bark controlled the wide selection of birdsong. He’d muted the birds once the incessant chirping began to grate.
A white doorway formed beside the tree, and Isaac looked up from his work. Cephalie’s chief surgeon—an AC named Ixtlilton—walked through the glowing portal. The AC used a baseline human avatar in a long white coat, her short black hair in a white cap and her mouth concealed behind a white surgical mask. She wore white gloves over her delicate hands and clutched a clipboard to her chest.
