MINDFRACK Page 8

  No one was coming to help her.

  Then she did something unexpected. Pic sat up and watched intently.

  She managed to pull something off the bedside table.

  He zoomed in and froze the image in a separate window. It was the detective’s business card. Pic had blocked her iSense from the Cloud and the local hospital cloud, but she could still use her iSense to flash a text message to the card.

  She stared at it with wide, terrified eyes before letting it slip from her fingers. It tumbled like a leaf, sliding under the bed.

  The card would forward her message on to the detective. Clever girl. But it wouldn’t do her any good, so he ignored it. Wouldn’t tell Turkey either.

  He waited until she stopped struggling. No more shudders or heaving for air. He zoomed in to her face and then her eyes. They were open and there was no sign of movement other than a solitary tear that streaked down her cheek and onto the pillow, staining it.

  This was the point at which he released his hold on the hospital systems.

  Inside trauma room “18”, the health monitors returned to life, registering that the patient was no longer breathing or pumping blood. Alarms had gone off on the duty nurse’s desk while the medibot emergency team were alerted via the hospital cloud.

  Pic switched his view from one cam to another, catching the initial reactions of medical staff, as though he were watching a reality show.

  The policewoman let the emergency team through and stood watching from the doorway. She was clearly shocked.

  In a matter of seconds frantic activity had engulfed the bed. This was in stark contrast to the patient, who appeared oddly serene.

  Exactly twelve minutes later, the medibot emergency team stood back simultaneously, leaving the single human overseer at the body. The senior physician pronounced Dexy Please dead, recorded the time and checked other personal details on his tablet before moving on to the medical part of the form. He took the feeds from the medibots and tapped in the probable cause of death.

  Pic looked over the physician’s shoulder as he typed, using his selfie-cam, and read out the concluding paragraph in an overly officious voice: “… post-traumatic temporal lobe trauma – i.e. the previous recorded head injury – leading to spontaneous ‘grand mal’ seizure and related novel spontaneous cardiac arrest. Blah blah blah …”

  The physician examined the health monitors while scratching his head, looking puzzled. Finally, he instructed the medibots to clear up and vacate the room. He took one last look at the young woman and closed the door behind him.

  Pic looked upon the dead body from the room cam, his head cocked, his ticks and grimaces settled in a rare moment of stillness.

  Death was a fascinating thing.

  13

  “Diaz …?” It was four ten a.m. and Luna had woken Logan, recognizing that the call was urgent. “What’s going on – what are you doing in the lab …?”

  His selfie-cam flew off the wall.

  “Mac, sorry to wake you, but I thought you should hear this from me.”

  The tone of her voice made him sit up. His selfie-cam backed away to accommodate. “Okay, no problem, I’m listening.”

  “It’s Dexy Please. She’s dead.”

  “Dexy’s dead?” Logan repeated, blankly.

  “The hospital informed the Department an hour ago; I just found out.”

  “How did she die?”

  “Apparently, she had a seizure and died of heart failure – around two twenty.”

  Images of the enigmatic beauty flooded his mind. He recalled too clearly the intimate moment when Dexy held his hands, her vulnerability, and her fear that she was in mortal danger. And now those fears had been paid up in full. A shadow descended upon him.

  “Mac?”

  “Yeah, just give me a moment – it’s bit of a shock.”

  “All right – but we need to talk.” There was something unfamiliar about the way that Diaz looked at him. He’d gotten to know her well over the brief period that he’d worked with her; she’d become an open book to him, her youth untainted by too much cynicism or hard knocks – but not today. Today, Gloria Diaz was wary of him.

  “Talk …?”

  “Mac – did you come in last night?” she said, blurting out the question.

  “What? Why would you ask that? You know I’ve been home all night.”

  “Well, Carrie’s gone.” She stood back and let her selfie-cam pan across the lab.

  Logan zoned out. Why was his heart racing? He’d never had a panic attack in his life, yet he felt as though he had a foot dangling over a cliff. He dug his fingers into the tops of his legs, to bring himself back.

  “Mac?”

  “Did Archive take her? They shouldn’t have done …” He faltered. “There’s something else, isn’t there? Spill it, Diaz, just tell me.”

  “I checked our security cam. Then I double-checked with roving. And, well …”

  “What? Come on, Diaz, you’re freaking me out here.”

  She worked her mouth, like she was pushing bubble gum around. In a small and doubtful voice, she said, “You took her, Mac.”

  Logan made himself smile and huffed at her, not understanding the joke. Her expression hadn’t changed. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. Security shows it was you. I – I don’t know what to do … Mac?”

  Logan blinked, unable to respond. Sweat broke out across his brow. Diaz wouldn’t have been mistaken over something as serious as this. Light-headed, he batted away his selfie-cam and yanked a bedside drawer open. He clawed around until he found his nano-popper. Thumbing the top to blue, he poured the contents onto the bedsheets. He scooped a few up and threw them into his mouth; he gagged as he dry-swallowed them.

  “Mac? I’ve lost you – no, wait, there you are. You okay? You don’t look so good …”

  His selfie-cam had picked itself up from the floor and had re-established its default position in front of his face. “What? Yeah. I’m fine,” he said, struggling to keep it together. “Just had one too many beers last night.” Dammit, he’d been overwhelmed by the feeling that he was somehow responsible for everything. He focused on slowing his breathing, working with the blues. “Diaz, you need to listen to me. I didn’t come in last night.”

  “We need to verify that … What about your PD tracker?”

  “Switched it off – always do out of hours.” Being civi, he could never see a valid reason why he had to be on radar twenty-four seven; now he wished he was.

  “iSense?” She meant his social trackers.

  “No – same thing.”

  “Doesn’t help. What about an alibi?”

  “Nope, there wasn’t anyone. I came straight back to my apartment, had a few beers and went to bed.”

  It was Diaz’s turn to be at a loss for words. Her young eyes flickered. He knew she was in a quandary and that she should report this immediately.

  “There’s got to be a logical explanation,” said Logan, shaking his head. “Look, I’m coming in. Just hold off reporting this until we can have another look at everything. Can you do that for me?”

  “Of course, Mac.” She didn’t seem convinced. “But this is very, very fucked up ...”

  “I’ll be there in thirty. Hey, Diaz, before you go, did you get those results back on my blood works?”

  “Uh, yes. Hang on. Here they are – you were right. You were drugged, but only with a form of benzodiazepine, nothing else.”

  “That’s just a tranquillizer, isn’t it? No zombie tree drug?” So why did he cooperate so easily with Shala?

  “I guess not,” said Diaz, and she dropped the call.

  Logan dressed while scrolling through his social media in his head-up, discarding the bulk of it but stopping in his tracks when he came across a text message from Dexy Please. He opened it with trepidation. Instead of a protracted goodbye, which would have been strange since there had been nothing more between them than a fleeting connection, there was a pictur
e of Carrie, a couple of words and an email address:

  [Carrie’s picture] protect

  [Fifi Okupska’s email address] trust

  He closed the message and made his way out of his apartment and down through the condo.

  Outside, a cab whooshed down and sidled over to the kerb, the door swinging up as it stopped. He hopped over the narrow wing-board and got in. As the cab threaded itself efficiently and with speed through an invisible but well-defined corridor, he reopened the message and stared at it.

  Fifi Okupska …?

  14

  Logan spotted Diaz through the lab wall-window, hunched as usual, her back to the corridor, working on her tablet. Above and in front of her was the lab’s big 3V display. Her hands flew up and she deftly manipulated the floating icons; he’d once told Diaz that she had the hands of a musician.

  The door was ajar.

  “Diaz?”

  Diaz flapped a hand at Logan, beckoning him in, but didn’t turn. “Just a sec ...”

  He waited patiently at the door for another half a minute, his eyes browsing the room and noting the gap on the work-surface that Carrie had previously occupied. Diaz swept the 3V away and it zipped down to a pulsing corner icon above the pen projector. She stood up and turned around. Her cheeks were flushed with stress and her eyes were bloodshot.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  She reached up and worked her fingers through a tangle of hair, only to abort any attempt at styling it. “Yeah, I’m fine. I was on the circuit before I came in.”

  By “circuit”, she meant that she was doing one of her Friday-nighters on the World-Wide Gaming Circuit. Logan knew she harboured a fantasy to go pro on the WWGC. She had the complete kit including one of those immersion metasuits, which must have cost a fortune. There was glory, fame and lots of money for those who got seeded. Even had a team; he remembered it was called “USA Orion”. She’d come in today wearing her reactive steam-punk gear, a discordant mix of leathers, canvas, belts and zips, with an intelligent metal-lattice bodice that rearranged itself according to her posture. Logan wondered why she had bothered to go to the effort.

  “You slept at all?” Logan asked.

  “No.”

  “How did you find out about Carrie?”

  “I’m on call for the weekend, so I had the usual alerts pinged to me. One of them mentioned Dexy Please – but that’s not why I came in. I had another from our lab PA. It asked me whether I wanted to raise a retro-request regarding removal of evidence.”

  “I’m afraid to ask, but – anything …?” Logan held his hands open.

  “Nothing, Mac. This is fucking surreal – I mean, if what you say is true – and I do believe you, but …”

  He knew she was having a bad time as she rarely used profanities. “But …?”

  “All I have to work with is what I can see. You … walking out of here … with the box.”

  “Show me.”

  She brought the 3V up again.

  Logan sat motionless, his eyes riveted to an image of himself doing things that he had no memory of. He could have been looking through a portal into a parallel universe. Disturbingly, everything about “him” looked correct, down to his clothes, the way he wore them, even the way he went about collecting Carrie’s pieces from the worktop, placing them in the box and then removing it from the lab by kicking the automatic door back beyond its normal reach. He briefly entertained the idea that he had somehow been sleepwalking, but discarded such a notion as absurd: when he’d asked Luna what he had been doing for the last few hours since he’d got back to his apartment, his PA confirmed that he had slept like a baby.

  “You’re right, Diaz – that’s me. There’s no way roving security would be fooled by a mask.” Security would not only check on his iTatt and facial biometrics, but every aspect of what made him Mark Logan, including voice, body metrics, eccentricities and so on. It did a better job than a seasoned security guard that had manned the entrance desk for years. And roving security continued to check on all staff after they entered the building, twenty-four seven.

  He stopped his train of thought and turned to Diaz. “I have only one possible explanation – well, two, actually.”

  Diaz’s stance and expression remained non-committal.

  “Putting aside the possibility that I have an evil twin, the first is that he is really me, and I perpetrated this entire activity, which also involves hacking into my own PA’s memory and changing it.”

  “Or …?”

  “Someone has hacked the police systems and created these images.”

  “But that would mean that someone did get in here and take Carrie, which in itself is impossible.”

  “Not if it was someone on the inside with the right security credentials.”

  Diaz leaned her head to one side, grimacing. “Which would point to you again, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yeah, I get what you’re saying … Then someone from the outside, who somehow fooled security.” He held up his hand, halting Diaz’s objections. “Look, hypothetically, could it be done? Either way, could someone hack into the security systems and use old videos of me moving around and overwrite what we’re seeing here – hypothetically …?”

  “Well, yes, but –”

  “Okay – then we have a working theory.”

  Diaz smiled sardonically. “It would take a frickin’ off-the-scale super-genius, Mac. Make me look like an amoeba – and I’m not exactly an idiot. Hey, don’t look at me like that … And, in any case, why would someone like that be doing this? Why bother?”

  “We’ll come back to that.”

  She looked at him quizzically.

  “Just trust me for now. Let me think for a moment ...”

  Logan moved into the centre of the compact lab while sweeping his attention across the work-surfaces, then the door. It occurred to him that he could get wet forensics to check for prints, epithelials, DNA, the works, to find out who had been in there. But he dropped that line of reasoning just as quickly. Their lab wasn’t screened and controlled to eliminate what was called “biometric noise”. Hard-tech evidence was bio-scanned before it entered their lab so there was no real control from day to day. Colleagues came and went without clean-suits, so there would be hundreds of secondary bioprofiles. And, he reminded himself soberly, someone who could change video records with abandon could almost certainly eradicate their own bioprofile from the system. He would, however, get it checked out as a matter of routine. He snapped his fingers. “You’ve checked all the internal vids – but what about the external ones?”

  “Done that.”

  “What, so you saw me walk away and down the street with the box?”

  “Only as far as the building security cams reach, which isn’t that far. The approach, alleyways, parking and loading bay, etc. What are you thinking?”

  “You’re going to use that clever programming intellect of yours to set up a search query on the LDNP. We can’t farm it out to the public domain – security.”

  “But we need authority for any amount of time on the system – even a few minutes.”

  “Leave that to me – I, uh, know Jan quite well.”

  ***

  Logan counted himself lucky that Jan – the IT Assistant Data Manager – was on weekend duty. Although two weekends out of every three were good odds. After some hard but light-hearted negotiation, costing him a promised dinner, she reluctantly allocated twenty minutes’ usage of the department’s Large-Data Neural Processor or LDNP. It didn’t sound like a lot but that was the total core processing time they could use piecemeal for half a day or until lunch. One second of LDNP usage – as Jan had previously told him while attempting to describe the “beauty” of quantum processing – resulted in a data-crunching figure so big that it hurt his head when he thought about all the zeros.

  An hour later they were running the query that he had defined and Diaz had programmed. They were both drinking double shot coffees fetched from the machine in the corr
idor.

  There weren’t many high-priority requests running that morning, and it only took seventy seconds of core processing time. The results were fed back directly to their office via the department’s cloud.

  The principle of the search was simple. Use all the local road and private cams that the police had access to within half a mile of the building over a specified window of time, and look for human traffic carrying a box of the exact dimensions as one of their forensic storage boxes, i.e. the one that was missing.

  Considering the thousands of feeds from fixed and roaving cams, the results were better than expected. There was only one match.

  From the vantage point of a bank security cam they watched a hooded man emerging from a side street with a box that fitted their criteria. Another cam showed him loading it into a black SUV and driving away. The man looked too skinny to be Logan but there was insufficient street lighting to remove all doubt. It was enough for Diaz, however, and she visibly untensed, her reactive lattice bodice losing some of its rigidity to accommodate.

  “But we don’t have any third-party vids of him just beyond the Lab’s security limits,” said Logan. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Unless someone removed them.” Diaz glanced at him, her eyes raised and hopeful, before returning to the LDNP interface with gusto. “Wait – I have an idea.”

  She reverse-extrapolated using the perp’s unique form and kinesiological profile, and found some video of the perp entering the Forensics’ monitored perimeter earlier that morning. They glimpsed his face: it wasn’t Logan’s. But the exact moment the perp stepped over the boundary he became Logan. They moved the image back and forward, not quite believing what they were seeing.

  “Do you mind …?” Logan reached over Diaz to her tablet and moved his finger back and forward across the time-frame slider, watching the perp wink in and out of existence. He adjusted another control, one that zoomed in on the perp’s shadowy face. Logan gasped as he recognised his features. “Sonofabitch. He was in the hospital. It’s the physician. He walked into me, dropped his bag. That’s definitely not a coincidence. His name tag said Dr Banner.”