Asimov's SF, January 2012 (23 page)

Indrapramit's avatar checked a beacon—a glowing green needle floating just above his nonexistent wrist. The directional signal led them through a space meant to evoke an antediluvian ice cave, in which about two dozen people all dressed as different incarnations of the late-twentieth-century pop star David Bowie were working themselves into a martial frenzy as they prepared to go forth and do virtual battle with some rival clade of Emulators. Ferron eyed a Diamond Dog who was being dressed in glittering armor by a pair of Thin White Dukes and was glad of the expressionless surface of her uniform avatar.

She knew what they were supposed to be because she pattern-matched from the web. The music was quaint, but pretty good. The costumes . . . she winced.

Well, it was probably a better way to deal with antisocial aggression than taking it out on your spouse.

Indrapramit walked on, eyes front—not that you needed eyes to see what was going on in here.

At the far end of the ice cave, four seventh-century Norse dwarves delved a staircase out of stone, leading endlessly down. Heat rolled up from the depths. The virtual workmanship was astounding. Ferron and Indrapramit moved past, hiding their admiring glances. Just as much skill went into creating AR beauty as if it were stone.

The ice cave gave way to a forest glade floored in mossy, irregular slates. Set about on those were curved, transparent tables set for chess, go, mancala, cribbage, and similar strategy games. Most of the tables were occupied by pairs of players, and some had drawn observers as well.

Indrapramit followed his needle—and Ferron followed Indrapramit—to a table where a unicorn and a sasquatch were playing a game involving rows of transparent red and yellow stones laid out on a grid according to rules that Ferron did not comprehend. The sasquatch looked up as they stopped beside the table. The unicorn—glossy black, with a pearly, shimmering horn and a glowing amber stone pinched between the halves of her cloven hoof—was focused on her next move.

The arrow pointed squarely between her enormous, lambent golden eyes.

Ferron cleared her throat.

"Yes, officers?” the sasquatch said. He scratched the top of his head. The hair was particularly silky, and flowed around his long hooked fingernails.

"I'm afraid we need to speak to your friend,” Indrapramit said.

"She's skinning you out,” the sasquatch said. “Unless you have a warrant—"

"We have an override,” Ferron said, and used it as soon as she felt Indrapramit's assent.

The unicorn's head came up, a shudder running the length of her body and setting her silvery mane to swaying. In a brittle voice, she said, “I'd like to report a glitch."

"It's not a glitch,” Indrapramit said. He identified himself and Ferron and said, “Are you Skooter0?"

"Yeah,” she said. The horn glittered dangerously. “I haven't broken any laws in India."

The sasquatch stood up discreetly and backed away.

"It is my unfortunate duty,” Indrapramit continued, “to inform you of the murder of your mother, Dr. Jessica Fang, a.k.a. Dr. Dexter Coffin."

The unicorn blinked iridescent lashes. “I'm sorry,” she said. “You're talking about something I have killfiled. I won't be able to hear you until you stop."

Indrapramit's avatar didn't look at Ferron, but she felt his request for help. She stepped forward and keyed a top-level override. “You will hear us,” she said to the unicorn. “I am sorry for the intrusion, but we are legally bound to inform you that your mother, Dr. Jessica Fang, a.k.a. Dr. Dexter Coffin, has been murdered."

The unicorn's lip curled in a snarl. “Good. I'm glad."

Ferron stepped back. It was about the response she had expected.

"She made me,” the unicorn said. “That doesn't make her my
mother
. Is there anything else you're legally bound to inform me of ?"

"No,” Indrapramit said.

"Then get the hell out.” The unicorn set her amber gaming stone down on the grid. A golden glow encompassed it and its neighbors. “I win."

"Warehoused,” Indrapramit said with distaste, back in his own body and nibbling a slice of quiche. “And happy about it."

Ferron had a pressed sandwich of vegetables, tapenade, cheeses, and some elaborate and incomprehensible European charcuterie made of smoked vatted protein. It was delicious, in a totally exotic sort of way. “Would it be better if she were miserable and unfulfilled?"

He made a noise of discontentment and speared a bite of spinach and egg.

Ferron knew her combativeness was really all about her mother, not Fang/Coffin's adult and avoidant daughter. Maybe it was the last remnants of Upping, but she couldn't stop herself from saying, “What she's doing is not so different from what our brains do naturally, except now it's by tech/filters rather than prejudice and neurology."

Indrapramit changed the subject. “Let's make a virtual tour of the scene.” As an icon blinked in Ferron's attention space, he added, “Oh, hey. Final autopsy report."

"Something from Damini, too,” Ferron said. It had a priority code on it. She stepped into an artificial reality simulation of Coffin's apartment as she opened the contact. The thrill of the chase rose through the fog of her fading hypomania. Upping didn't seem to stick as well as it had when she was younger, and the crashes came harder now—but real, old-fashioned adrenaline was the cure for everything.

"Ferron,” Ferron said, frowning down at the browned patches on Coffin's virtual rug. Indrapramit rezzed into the conference a heartbeat later. “Damini, what do the depths of the net reveal?"

"Jackpot,” Damini said. “Did you get a chance to look at the autopsy report yet?"

"We just got done with the next of kin,” Ferron said. “You're fast—I just saw the icon."

"Short form,” Damini said, “is that's not Dexter Coffin."

Ferron's avatar made a slow circuit around the perimeter of the virtual murder scene. “There was a
DNA match
. Damini, we just told his daughter he was murdered."

Indrapramit, more practical, put down his fork in meatspace. His AR avatar mimicked the motion with an empty hand. “So who is it?"

"Nobody,” Damini said. She leaned back, satisfied. “The medical examiner says it's topologically impossible to turn somebody inside out like that. It's vatted, whatever it is. A grown object, nominally alive, cloned from Dexter Coffin's tissue. But it's not Dexter Coffin. I mean, think about it—what organ would that
be
, exactly?"

"Cloned.” In meatspace, Ferron picked a puff of hyacinth-blue fur off her uniform sleeve. She held it up where Indrapramit could see it.

His eyes widened. “Yes,” he said. “What about the patterns, though?"

"Do I look like a bioengineer to you? Indrapramit,” Ferron said thoughtfully. “Does this crime scene look staged to you?"

He frowned. “Maybe."

"Damini,” Ferron asked, “how'd you do with Dr. Coffin's files? And Dr. Nnebuogar's files?"

"There's nothing useful in Coffin's email except some terse exchanges with Dr. Nnebuogor very similar in tone to the Jessica Fang papers. Nnebuogor was warning Coffin off her research. But there were no death threats, no love letters, no child support demands."

"Anything he was interested in?"

"That star,” Damini said. “The one that's going nova or whatever. He's been following it for a couple of weeks now, before the press release hit the mainstream feeds. Nnebuogor's logins support the idea that she's behind the utility virus, by the way."

"Logins can be spoofed."

"So they can,” Damini agreed.

Ferron peeled her sandwich open and frowned down at the vatted charcuterie. It all looked a lot less appealing now. “Nobody came to Coffin's flat. And it turns out the stiff wasn't a stiff after all. So Coffin went somewhere else, after making preparations to flee and then abandoning them."

"And the crime scene was staged,” Indrapramit said.

"This is interesting,” Damini said. “Coffin hadn't been to the office in a week."

"Since about when Morganti started investigating him. Or when he might have become aware that she was on his trail."

Ferron said something sharp and self-critical and radically unprofessional. And then she said, “I'm an idiot. Leakage."

"Leakage?” Damini asked. “You mean like when people can't stop talking about the crime they actually committed, or the person you're not supposed to know they're having an affair with?"

An
urgent
icon from Ferron's mausi Sandhya—the responsible auntie, not the fussy auntie—blinked insistently at the edge of her awareness.
Oh Gods, what now?

"Exactly like that,” Ferron said. “Look, check on any hits for Coffin outside his flat in the past ten days. And I need confidential warrants for DNA analysis of the composters at the BioShell laboratory facility and also at Dr. Rao's apartment."

"You think
Rao
killed him?” Damini didn't even try to hide her shock.

Blink, blink
went the icon. Emergency. Code red. Your mother has gone beyond the pale, my dear. “Just pull the warrants. I want to see what we get before I commit to my theory."

"Why?” Indrapramit asked.

Ferron sighed. “Because it's crazy. That's why. And see if you can get confidential access to Rao's calendar files and email. I don't want him to know you're looking."

"Wait right there,” Damini said. “Don't touch a thing. I'll be back before you know it."

"Mother,” Ferron said to her mother's lion-maned goddess of an avatar, “I'm sorry. Sandhya's sorry. We're all sorry. But we can't let you go on like this."

It was the hardest thing she'd ever said.

Her mother, wearing Sekhmet's golden eyes, looked at Ferron's avatar and curled a lip. Ferron had come in, not in a uniform avatar, but wearing the battle-scarred armor she used to play in when she was younger, when she and her mother would spend hours Atavistic. That was during her schooling, before she got interested in stopping—or at least avenging—
real
misery.

Was that fair? Her mother's misery was real. So was that of Jessica Fang's abandoned daughter. And this was a palliative—against being widowed, against being bedridden.

Madhuvanthi's lip-curl slowly blossomed into a snarl. “Of course. You can let them destroy this. Take away everything I am. It's not like it's murder."

"Mother,” Ferron said, “it's not
real."

"If it isn't,” her mother said, gesturing around the room, “what is, then? I
made
you. I gave you life. You owe me this. Sandhya said you came home with one of those new parrot-cats. Where'd the money for that come from?"

"Chairman Miaow,” Ferron said, “is evidence. And reproduction is an ultimately sociopathic act, no matter what I owe you."

Madhuvanthi sighed. “Daughter, come on one last run."

"You'll have your own memories of all this,” Ferron said. “What do you need the archive for?"

"Memory,” her mother scoffed. “What's memory, Tamanna? What do you actually remember? Scraps, conflations. How does it compare to being able to
relive?"

To relive it,
Ferron thought,
you'd have to have lived it in the first place.
But even teetering on the edge of fatigue and crash, she had the sense to keep
that
to herself.

"Have you heard about the star?” she asked. Anything to change the subject. “The one the aliens are using to talk to us?"

"The light's four million years old,” Madhuvanthi said. “They're all dead. Look, there's a new manifest synesthesia show. Roman and Egyptian. Something for both of us. If you won't come on an adventure with me, will you at least come to an art show? I promise I'll never ask you for archive money again. Just come to this one thing with me? And I promise I'll prune my archive starting tomorrow."

The lioness's brow was wrinkled. Madhuvanthi's voice was thin with defeat. There was no more money, and she knew it. But she couldn't stop bargaining. And the art show was a concession, something that evoked the time they used to spend together, in these imaginary worlds.

"Ferron,” she said. Pleading. “Just let me do it myself."

Ferron.
They weren't really communicating. Nothing was won. Her mother was doing what addicts always did when confronted—delaying, bargaining, buying time. But she'd call her daughter
Ferron
if it might buy her another twenty-four hours in her virtual paradise.

"I'll come,” Ferron said. “But not until tonight. I have some work to do."

"Boss. How did you know to look for that DNA?” Damini asked, when Ferron activated her icon.

"Tell me what you found,” Ferron countered.

"DNA in the BioShell composter that matches that of Chairman Miaow,” she said, “and therefore that of Dexter Coffin's cat. And the composter of Rao's building is just
full
of his DNA. Rao's. Much, much more than you'd expect. Also, some of his email and calendar data has been purged. I'm attempting to reconstruct—"

"Have it for the chargesheet,” Ferron said. “I bet it'll show he had a meeting with Coffin the night Coffin vanished."

Dr. Rao lived not in an aptblock, even an upscale one, but in the Vertical City. Once Damini returned with the results of the warrants, Ferron got her paperwork in order for the visit. It was well after nightfall by the time she and Indrapramit, accompanied by Detective Morganti and four patrol officers, went to confront him.

They entered past shops and the vertical farm in the enormous tower's atrium. The air smelled green and healthy, and even at this hour of the night, people moved in steady streams toward the dining areas, across lush green carpets.

A lift bore the police officers effortlessly upward, revealing the lights of Bengaluru spread out below through a transparent exterior wall. Ferron looked at Indrapramit and pursed her lips. He raised his eyebrows in reply.
Conspicuous consumption
. But they couldn't very well hold it against Rao now.

They left Morganti and the patrol officers covering the exit and presented themselves at Dr. Rao's door.

"Open,” Ferron said formally, presenting her warrant. “In the name of the law."