David Walton, page 10
“I met Keith at a net security symposium,” said Marie. “It has to be, what, seven years ago now? He sought me out, knew me from an article I’d written. He drilled me with questions; I could hardly shake him off. He was intense, knew his stuff, asked questions about scenarios I’d never considered. Finally, I agreed to have dinner with him, hoping to exhaust his questions and get free. By the time our check came, I didn’t want to be free.”
Pam and Marie sat at the kitchen table in Marie’s apartment. Though it was only blocks from the building where they both worked, this was the first time Pam had ever been inside.
Pam held Marie’s gaze, her expression unreadable. “Whose idea was it to have children?”
“Just mine at first. Keith was reticent: we both had careers, and he didn’t want to give up any freedom. Eventually, he gave in, for my sake, but it wasn’t until Sammy was born that he understood. As soon as he saw his baby and held him in his arms, he changed. He spent more time at home, did everything with Sammy. Bought him toys, took a million pictures, you know how it is.”
Marie started to cry again. Not like when they’d first come back from the clinic. Then the tears had overwhelmed her, and she’d cried for what seemed like hours. She was past that now, but the tears were still there, slipping into the conversation, catching in her throat. Her eyes and throat stung, but she had to talk, had to work out the questions crashing through her mind.
“It didn’t last,” she said. “After a year or so, he found a new hobby and lost interest in Sammy. In us.”
“What was the hobby?”
“Oh, a business proposition. Some ‘genius’ from California with a new model for an immortality machine. Even back then, uploading a human mind was going out of vogue, but Keith believed in it. He started spending more and more time at the lab. I probably didn’t support his choices as well as I could have, but I resented his absence, especially with Sammy getting old enough to need a father’s care. We fought a lot. Then he died.”
Pam studied her for a moment. She leaned forward, more intense than Marie had ever seen her. “We’re going to solve this,” she said. “Let’s start with the clinic. Whose idea was it to use that particular clinic?”
“His. He insisted on it. I would have been happier with a midwife, but Keith didn’t trust them. I think he picked Geneticare because he’d met one of the board members, played tennis with him or something.”
“A board member could probably get your voice and signature put into the official files.”
“But why would Keith do it? I can’t believe he would steal the embryo just to spite me. It must have been someone else. An employee of the clinic, maybe, someone infertile who couldn’t afford the technology themselves.”
Pam shook her head. “That doesn’t add up. The theft happened on the day of the crash. It’s too much of a coincidence. It had to be Keith.”
“I don’t understand how. What would he want with it?”
“Marie…” Pam hesitated. “What if there was another woman?”
“Another…? You mean…with my baby? No.”
“Why not? The embryo was half his, genetically. He might consider it his own. If he was involved with another woman, he might have given it to her.”
Marie slapped her palms on the table and pushed herself to her feet. “That’s crazy. Why would he do that? Why stay with me at all, then? If he loved someone else, he could have just left me. Why would another woman want to have my baby?”
“Who knows? He might stay because he felt sorry for you. Or guilty for leaving Sammy. I don’t know all the whys and wherefores. But I know how we can find out.”
“How?”
“Find your husband’s boss. The ‘genius’ who ran the lab. If Keith was leaving work at odd times, he might know. Do you remember his name?”
Marie started pacing. “Yes—wait, I know it. It was a rich-sounding name, something aristocratic. Trelayne, or…Tremayne, that’s it. Alastair. Alastair Tremayne.”
“Know what happened to him?”
“His lab shut down less than a month after Keith’s death. I remember thinking Keith must have been such an important player they couldn’t continue the research without him. Give me a sec.” Marie closed her eyes and pulled up her Visor display. If anyone knew how to find information on the net, she did. A brief moment later, she opened her eyes.
“Alastair Tremayne, 41 Pine Street, Philadelphia. Looks like he moved there just after the lab shut down, two years ago. He’s registered as a family physician, with a specialty in mods.”
“Bit of a step down from immortality entrepreneur.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Sounds like we have a starting point.”
Marie sat down at the table again. “You don’t have to do this with me. You’ve already helped a lot.”
“Don’t even think about it. You can’t throw me out now. I’m with you to the death.”
“Ugh. I hope not.”
“Well, to the truth and a happy ending, then. What’s your plan?”
“I don’t think these are questions we can ask in a net message.”
“I agree.”
“I have quite a bit of leave saved up.”
“So do I.” Pam’s voice was serious, her gaze steady.
Marie stared back, fire in her eyes. “Pack your bags, then,” she said. “We’re going to Philadelphia.”
Alastair jogged up the wide, marble staircase of City Hall, his long legs covering three steps at a time. Unlike most of the buildings on the Rim, City Hall had an aura of permanence. The airy architecture of most of the mansions seemed precarious, as if a strong wind would smash them, but City Hall was dug into the slope, entrenched, its façade composed more of marble than fabrique.
At the top of the stairs stood two Enforcer security guards. They recognized him and let him pass. Alastair marched under the open archway, through the atrium where the two halves of the Liberty Bell were displayed, down the central hallway, and straight into Jack McGovern’s offices. A tweedy secretary impaled him with her gaze and barked, “Do you have an appointment?” Alastair ignored her. He strode past her desk, waving aside her flustered protestations, burst into the back office, and closed the door behind him.
Jack McGovern was alone. He glared up from his desk, surprised at the intrusion.
“I think it’s about time you put me on your staff,” Alastair said.
“And why is that?”
“I have useful skills.”
He fished a crystal from his pocket and inserted it into the Councilman’s hologrid. The display sprang from the wall, showing a three-dimensional array of thousands of thumbnail holographs.
“Enforcer Security is good for crowd control,” Alastair said, “but their detective staff is incompetent.”
The array of holographs rotated, each springing to the fore and then jumping back in place at a dizzying speed. Each showed a single human face, the shots taken from a large variety of angles and distances.
“The number of images being flashed into storage on the net is staggering. But if you know how to look…”
The ocean of thumbnail images dwindled as he talked, taking up less and less of the total display. Without seeming to, Alastair paid close attention to its progress. He was trying to time the end of his sentence to maximum effect.
“…you can find just about anything.”
The torrent of photographs suddenly froze, and a single face remained at the fore. Alastair smiled. Perfect timing.
The face was Darin Kinsley’s. Of course, it was the slicer who’d found him, before the McGovern boy had destroyed it, but Alastair was glad to take the credit.
McGovern rose to his feet. “When was this taken?”
“An hour ago.”
“Where?”
“A disreputable establishment called The Rind, also known as a gathering spot for amateur revolutionaries.”
McGovern laughed. “You’re hired,” he said. “Tell my secretary your salary requirements. She’ll draw up the paperwork. But first, talk to Justice down the hall. Have them send some Enforcers and bring that boy in.”
Mark rang the bell at the Kumar mansion, uncertain how he’d be received. He hadn’t seen Praveen since the prank on the hillside, and he didn’t know if his friend resented being involved. Praveen stuck to the high ethical standards his parents had drilled into him and put great stock in his reputation. What if he turned Mark away?
He needn’t have worried.
“Come in, please, come in!” said Praveen. “What an anxious day. We have been so worried.”
Praveen’s parents and three sisters fussed over Mark and kissed him and asked about his ordeal, their attentions seeming not at all strained. Praveen’s mother pressed some masala buns on them all; his father chatted about the new, denser memory crystals. An hour later, they finally left him and Praveen alone together.
“What do you know about slicers?” Mark asked.
“Not a lot. A rare type of malicious code.” He squinted thoughtfully at Mark. “They say you wrote that monster that destroyed so much, but I know you did not. Do you think it was a slicer?”
“I do.” Mark explained everything that had happened since the night on the hillside, how the slicer had been released through their prank, how he’d attacked it and apparently destroyed it.
“But now I don’t believe it,” he finished. “It’s not just gone; it’s like it never existed. I can’t even retrieve the log of that night from my own system history. If it had been destroyed, there would still be traces. I think it’s gone into hiding.”
Praveen shook his head. “Slicers do not plan. Their minds are too altered. They just destroy and destroy until they destroy themselves.”
“What if someone found a way around that?”
“I do not know. If so, why do they not market an immortality machine and make trillions? Perhaps this is not a slicer, but very clever code of some other sort.”
Mark sighed. “They’re trying to pin it all on Darin,” he said.
“And you wish to find the real criminal.”
“Yeah. But it’s hopeless. There’s no data left at all, no evidence. I don’t even know where to start.”
She arrived promptly at eight. Darin waved at her from his table near the wall, and she came toward him, smiling. It annoyed Darin how aware he was of his own body: his posture, where he put his hands, what expression his face held. Why couldn’t he just relax? He tried to slouch in his chair, but the pose felt awkward; he couldn’t figure out if it looked natural or not.
“Hi.”
“Hi. Thanks for coming.”
She sat down. Darin had had all day to prepare for this moment, but now he couldn’t think of one thing to say. She didn’t seem to notice; her eyes ran all around the room, exploring the surroundings.
“Hey,” she said. “That’s Vic.”
Darin twisted to look at the piano. Vic sat there in his glory, flanked by sax and sitar, driving the rhythm forward while the sax took lead. Then the lead came back to the piano, and Vic attacked the keyboard, hands a blur, his savage chords seeming random, but coalescing into a complex, surprising variation of the tune.
“He plays here often,” said Darin. “One of the best.”
“He’s amazing.”
“And how much Comb jazz have you heard before?”
“Not much,” Lydia admitted. “It does sound strange, but I can still recognize talent.”
“It’s about all he can do anymore. A victim of society.”
Her gaze drifted back to him, a frank look with no nervousness that he could discern.
“Why of society? From what you said before, he was the victim of a bad man.”
“Society set the trap. This mod artist was offering his services for a quarter of the going rate, and with no contracts to sign, no paperwork. Very suspicious. But Vic was young, and trusting, and hopeful; he believed people would act purely out of kindness. He was foolish. Society rewards self-serving pragmatism. Virtues like trust and hope it tramples in the dust.”
Calvin Tremayne watched the visual feed of Darin Kinsley and his girlfriend with growing excitement. About time they had some action. Staking out a dangerous criminal suited him far better than guarding the flood line. He was a captain now, with a squad of his own to command. He rested his hand on the R-80 in his holster. Nice to be packing a real weapon for a change, too.
The order had come from his brother Alastair, apparently on Jack McGovern’s staff now. Moving up in the world. That’s how it had always been, even when they were children. Alastair had been the boy genius, the prizewinner, the pride of the family. Everything Alastair tried, he accomplished. Everything he wanted, he took. Calvin had learned from an early age that Mom and Dad always took Alastair’s side. Alastair, four years older, had been Calvin’s ticket to praise and success—provided he did everything Alastair told him to do.
And nothing had really changed. Calvin’s position in Enforcer was mostly due to Alastair. His brother had more money, influence, and intelligence than Calvin could ever hope for. Maybe someday Calvin would leave, just disappear and start life over on his own terms, in another country, far away. But not today. Today, he hunted a dangerous criminal with his own squad and a lethal weapon in his hand.
His eyes closed, Calvin used his Visor to scan the interior of the Rind. The club was nestled deep in the bowels of the Combs, with no windows or outside walls, so the only way to scope out the territory was with a man on the inside. One of his soldiers, sitting at a table wearing street clothes, panned the room with his eyes and sent the video feed to the rest of the squad.
“That’s him,” Calvin said. “Northwest corner, facing the door. He’s talking with a girl in her twenties, medium height, dark hair. Instructions are to take this guy alive, but any resistance from the establishment should be met with due force. Barker, Dodge, you take the west entrance; Sanchez and I will take the south. Don’t enter until I give the word.”
“How would a change in society make any difference?” Lydia asked. “People try to take advantage of others in any society.”
Darin found himself relaxing into a familiar subject, one he’d spoken about often in the past several days. “A society that rewards virtue instead of selfishness would produce fewer selfish people.”
“What system do you want, then? Socialism?”
“No. Socialism rewards laziness. Or in practice, it rewards nothing at all; you receive the same reward whether you succeed or fail, so there’s no motivation to succeed. What I’m talking about is a society that rewards success, but without the accumulation of wealth that gives some inordinate, unearned power and others no hope for betterment.”
“Sounds like a paradox.”
“Not at all. Take a company model. Let’s say you have twenty people in a team at a certain company. Of these twenty people, five perform very well, five perform very poorly, and the remaining ten are in the middle. Their boss naturally gives most of his attention to the five top performers. He courts them with more money, more incentives, more attention and praise. The middle performers get very little attention at all. However, all the competitors also want those top players, and lure four of them away with better offers elsewhere. The company has now invested considerable portions of its assets into a dying resource. And those employees don’t stay with their new companies, either, because they have an inflated sense of their own worth, and always think they should be treated better. The middle performers, however, stay at the same company and do consistent, dependable work for decades.”
“So society should reward its mediocre contributors, but not its high contributors?”
“No, it should reward its high contributors and its mediocre contributors the same.”
“But then the high contributors have no incentive to excel.”
“Exactly. High contribution is not a behavior we should encourage. It’s divisive, elitist, unproductive in the long run. The top performers should see themselves more like the middle players: steady and dependable, though maybe a little more productive than most. That’s what society needs. The contribution of a top performer seems extraordinary because only one person accomplishes it, but reward that person with riches, and what happens? He and his descendants live off the profits, hoard resources, contribute nothing more to society, and spend all their efforts maintaining the illusion they’re more valuable than those who actually produce.” Darin grinned sheepishly. “I’ll get off my soapbox now,” he said. “This probably isn’t the best way to show a girl a good time.”
“No, it’s fascinating,” said Lydia, “What about the American Dream?”
“What about it?”
“Isn’t that a big incentive, even for the middle performers? The dream that you could strike it rich and live the rest of your life in luxury?”
“But it’s a pipe dream. For most people it’s not possible.”
“It doesn’t matter; it still motivates people. Look at the fascination with vid stars—everyone likes to imagine being fabulously rich. Most people who start a new business do it dreaming that their product will be the newest craze, and they’ll never have to work again.”
“On my mark,” said Calvin. “One, two, now.”
He crashed through the south entrance, adjusting quickly to the change in perspective. There, in the corner, still sitting at that table.
Kinsley saw them and rose from his chair.
“City enforcers!” Calvin shouted, panning the room with his gun. “Everyone down!”
There were a few predictable screams, but everyone complied. The dreadful music the band was playing mercifully died, leaving a nervous silence in its place. Calvin and his men converged on Kinsley. This club was notorious as a stomping ground for angry political demagogues, but surely none of them would attack an armed squad.
They stopped in front of Kinsley. The girl with him crouched behind her seat, eyes wide.
“Darin Kinsley,” said Calvin, “by the power vested in me by the Council of Justice and Criminal Affairs, you are under arrest.”
