Broken Mirror (22 page)

A sick man looking at minerals and herbs, holed up in a hospital, playing with lab equipment. Why?

Victor snapped to attention. “He was looking for a cure.”

“Didn’t he shut down the project?”

“Not a cure for me,” Victor said. “For him. I looked through his medical records. He must have known he was being poisoned. But he kept it quiet and tried to find a cure all by himself.”

Tosh swung his gaze over the room, nodding. “He was crafty.”

Victor was glad he finally met someone who didn’t greet everything he said with skepticism. “You don’t think I’m crazy?”

Tosh gestured to the work bench. “Jeff always played a long game. I knew something was wrong, and I suspected . . . Well, poison makes a lot of sense to me.”

Victor looked around the room. “Are you sure there’s nothing left of his data stores?”

“Not a thing.”

A lump formed in Victor throat. “Then we’ve got nothing.” His eyes felt warm and moist.

Tosh rubbed his jawline. “There’s one thing.”

Victor looked up. Could Tosh help him after all? “What is it?”

“I mean, I’m sure it’s nothing. He told me to save one thing for you.”

“
What
? Why didn’t you say so?”

Tosh smiled, a hard cruel twist of his lips. “I was Jeff’s friend, not yours. It doesn’t look like much, a kind of photograph, just black and white blotches. I thought it looked . . . artful. I had it framed.”

“Artful,” Victor repeated. Tosh seemed as cultured as a bag of bricks.

Tosh glowered. “You’re the last person who should be making assumptions about people.”

“I want to see it,” Victor said.

“Then we’ll go to my place.”

They retraced their steps down the stairs and through the dark basement. With each step, Victor felt more wary. He didn’t know anything about Tosh, not really. Why should he trust him?

He believed Granfa Jeff was murdered, that’s why, and that should be enough. But Victor’s uneasiness didn’t fade.

When they were back outside, Victor tripped over a tree branch and cursed.

Tosh shushed him and then froze. “We’re not alone,” Tosh whispered.

Victor looked around. The wind lifted the moist air from the bay and brushed it against the hills, cold enough to give Victor chills. The light was fading by the minute.

“Keep quiet and follow me.” Tosh crept toward the gap in the fence, and Victor followed on legs wobbly from the sleeping gas.

Their cars were parked outside the hospital grounds. Tosh scanned the hillside, grumbling. “You’re being followed, two people, a man and a woman. We’ll lose them on the way to my place. Come on.”

Victor looked around, but only saw trees, bushes, and shadows. He’d run into a man and a woman in Little Asia. Had they been following him since then?

No, that was paranoid thinking, Victor told himself. Tosh was jumping at shadows, trying to scare Victor into trusting him. As soon as he saw what Tosh had to show him, they would part ways, and Victor would watch his back the whole time.

They drove separately, Victor following Tosh and looking in his rearview mirror for headlights, but he didn’t spot any. Twenty minutes later they arrived at a spray-and-set fabricated duplex in South Bayshore, where new cheap neighborhoods had chewed up marshland and orchards to accommodate vacation homes for European elites.

Inside Tosh’s house the walls curved seamlessly into the ceiling
—
contours of sprayed carbon nano-fiber that could withstand and dissipate seismic waves stronger than any previously recorded earthquake had produced.

Tosh wasn’t much of a homemaker. The same sand-colored paint covered every visible wall, and a few scattered chairs and couches were the only furniture. The man popped into a small room and returned with a framed square of photographic film.

“We’re looking for the same thing, Victor. Together we’ll find it.” He squeezed Victor’s shoulder and looked at him with a kind smile. Victor’s skin tingled
—
from either fear, arousal, or both. Then Tosh handed him the film.

It looked like an old, blurry photonegative of a nebula. A roughly circular black haze was centered on the milky white film with another smaller black blob extending below it. If Victor narrowed his eyes the image almost looked like a face. Of course, it could be anything. People were likely to see faces anywhere: in rocks, in toast, in any unfamiliar pattern. It was how the human mind worked.

Victor took the plastic film out of the frame and held it up to a lightstrip that hung from the ceiling. He noticed a square dark patch in one corner. He turned the film over and saw a small label: “J.E. alpha exposure, 1990-Aug-25.”

The hair on his arms rose. Alpha exposure. Signs of radiation, again.

Victor stumbled backward and fell onto Tosh’s black synthleather couch. His granfa had tried to find a cure for radiation poisoning, and he’d failed. He handed the film back to Tosh, saying, “Ionizing radiation from polonium would do this. Enough of that, and there’d be internal scarring. DNA damage. His organs, maybe his heart. His skin, his hair. The blotches.”

Tosh held up the film and squinted at it. “This could be anything. I want to believe this means something, but . . .”

“I agree,” Victor said. “We need better evidence.”

“Such as?” Tosh asked.

“A radioactive corpse.”

Tosh and Victor waited for full dark to descend so they could take the radiation detector they’d purloined from the university to the graveyard. Tosh made jokes about sex among the burial mounds. Victor told him to stop, but the man seemed too amused by Victor’s discomfort to let up.

The sun had only neared the horizon when Victor’s MeshBit chimed. The message from Ozie read, “Dark grid blowing up w/ rumored BM crackdown. Check on plant lady. Urgent. Seconds ticking.”

“We need to get to Little Asia,” Victor told Tosh, who was staring through the window at the sun glinting off the bay.

“The view is so nice from here.” Tosh wrapped his arm around Victor’s shoulders.

“Did you hear me?” Victor asked. He tried to squirm away, but Tosh held him tight. “Get off!”

Tosh said, “Slumming isn’t my idea of a good date night.” Tosh squeezed Victor close. Warmth radiated from his body. It made Victor’s stomach queasy.

“Would you stop with those jokes?” Victor said. “They’re creepy.”

Tosh released him and nudged his side with his elbow. “Don’t worry, sourpuss, you’re not my type.”

Victor brushed his clothes where the man had touched him. “Good. I’m not interested.”

“What?” Tosh turned and gaped at him, wearing a shocked expression. “Not interested in men at all? You’re a puzzle, aren’t you?”

“I’m not a puzzle. I’m not interested in
you
. I’m a duophile. I like both genders equally. Like most people.”

“How egalitarian of you. I’m an androphile myself.”

“Good for you. Can we just go?” Victor strode to the front door and opened it.

“Suit yourself.” Tosh stepped toward the door, stopping at the threshold. “Why Little Asia?”

“I need to check on Pearl, the woman I get my herbs from
—
my medicine, I mean. She knew my granfa, and I think she’s in trouble. And I need to stock up.”

“And if you don’t get your medicine?” Tosh mimed his head exploding with hands launching sideways from his ears.

“Let’s not find out,” Victor said.

“Why do you think she’s in trouble?”

“My friend Ozie is a brainhacker. He says something is wrong with Pearl. I don’t know why I’m telling you all of this.”

“Because I’ve charmed you.” Tosh held up a warning finger. “This is your one freebie. We check on your Asian lady, and then we go to the graveyard. No other detours.”

Victor nodded.

At the Trans-Bayshore Rail Depot’s westbound platform, a clattering, old-timey, condensed-ethanol-fueled train pulled into the station, and a real human voice announced the boarding. Tosh and Victor rode over the bridge just as the sun dipped behind a fog bank. The other passengers sat staring blankly at each other across the central aisle. No one consulted a MeshBit. There were no juice bulbs, no glossy magazines. Even books were likely too expensive for the poor who lived on the other side of the bay. But several guarded gray synthsilk bags of produce at their feet, and Victor smelled something live, maybe a chicken or a small mammal destined for an outdoor cooking fire in the slums of Little Asia.

Victor’s foot tapped a beat on the bioceramic tiles covering the floor. “I think we’ll be fine,” he said, hoping he sounded more confident than he felt. At least he wouldn’t be alone in Little Asia, and Tosh was as muscled as they came.

The train descended from the bridge to the peninsula coastline. They disembarked and hustled through the teeming and soot-covered corridors of the transit center, exited to the street, and stayed close to the waterfront promenade, where everyone was pushing to reach their destinations before the twilight faded completely. Heading west and then south, they rounded the base of a steep hill and entered the slums of the flats. The night was full of dogs barking, men’s coarse laughter, and night women’s shrill calls.

They arrived at the herbalist’s shop without incident. Finding the door unlocked, Tosh entered first.

Lightstrips illuminated a complete mess.

Towers of bins and boxes had crashed to the floor, spilling their dried herbal contents. Victor and Tosh pushed past the debris and found that Pearl’s desk had been cleared of its papers, ledgers, and knickknacks, and the mess lay scattered on the floor.

“I assume it doesn’t always look like this?” Tosh asked, holding a stunstick in one hand as he advanced deeper into the shop.

“It’s usually tidier,” Victor said, stepping carefully over the shattered remains of glass jars. His heartbeat thudded from his chest down to his fingertips.

Victor took fumewort and bitter grass from their cubby holes, stuffed the herbs in paper envelopes, and stowed them in his pockets.

They moved further in, but the herbalist was nowhere to be found. A few metal measuring cups lay scattered on the floor.

“This is her work area. I think she lives upstairs.” Victor pointed toward a door.

Tosh opened it and began advancing up a narrow stairway that barely accommodated the man’s shoulders. Victor followed, growing more concerned. Was Pearl’s lifeless body lying somewhere upstairs? He felt the walls pressing against him.

Victor’s MeshBit vibrated. He teetered on the edge of a step. One foot slipped, and as he pitched backward, yelling, time seemed to slow down. Almost as if he were out of his body, he watched himself twist and land on one foot, tweaking his ankle. His butt and elbows slammed down on the wooden steps.

Tosh turned at the sound of Victor’s yelp and hauled him to the top of the stairs.

“Thanks,” Victor said, shrugging him off. He limped through Pearl’s apartment, which consisted of a living room with floral-patterned, synthsilk-covered furniture, a tiny kitchen that smelled like jasmine rice, and a small bedroom and bathroom crowded with bottles of ointments and oils. No herbalist.

Back in the living room, Victor perched on a chair and checked his MeshBit. Noises came from the bedroom, where Tosh was shifting furniture.

There were three messages from Elena in Victor’s feed, each asking, “Where are you? Call me!” He deleted them, blaming her for his sprained ankle.

He brought his MeshBit to his lips and recited the MeshID that Ozie had given him. The feed connected. Ozie said, “Did you find Pearl?”

Victor heard urgency and fear in Ozie’s question. His heart thudded faster. “No. I’m at the shop. There are some overturned boxes and broken glass downstairs.”

“No, no, no,” Ozie moaned.

Tosh walked into the room, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. “I found a bunch of electronics back there.” He pointed at Victor’s MeshBit. “Who is that?” he mouthed.

“Is someone with you?” Ozie asked, panic running through his voice.

Tosh heard the question and shook his head at Victor.

“No,” Victor said, looking at Tosh, who nodded his approval. “I said, ‘I found some electronics here.’”

“If Pearl’s gone . . . Shocks! We need a change of plans. Victor, could you identify the MRS gene if you had full access to BioScan’s data?”

“What? Why?”

“Could you do it?”

Victor’s eyes unfocused as he pictured complete genome records stored in BioScan’s data vaults, each containing billions of bits encoding DNA base pair sequences. Victor would need to perform advanced analytics to identify the Broken Mirror gene, essentially reverse engineering the black-boxed reference sequence. He would have to create a data crawler that could filter out known genes, examine what remained, and then find the sequence shared by all Broken Mirrors. It was worse than finding a needle in a haystack. It was finding a specific grain of sand in a desert using a microscope to search through it.

He told Ozie, “Not possible.”

“Why?”

“The reference sequence is encrypted. I’d have to compare a thousand genomes to identify the gene and sequence it. That’s beyond what any computer can do in a reasonable time,” Victor said. “Maybe if we had eternity.”

“Imagine you had all of BioScan’s data and a computer with enough processing to do it. What else would you need?”

“A copy of the Human Genome Initiative’s gene libraries. And permission, of course.”

“Forget permission, we’re doing this. Bring me BioScan’s data.”

“It’s a crazy idea.” It was also illegal and not something Victor should be doing while his reclassification was pending.

“While you’re at it, I need you to plant a back door on their network.”

“No! Look, I said I would help you if it helped me figure out what happened to my granfa. This has nothing to do with him.”

“It does, trust me. He wanted to reform the Classification Commission, or barring that, destroy it. Now Pearl is gone . . . Vic, here’s the truth: you can’t stay in SeCa. Your time there is almost up.”

Cold gripped Victor’s body. “What do you mean? Do you know something about my reclassification? My auntie was going to try to take care of it.”