city blues 01 - dome city blues (7 page)

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said.  “Turing Scions are
supposed
to be plugged in.  That’s what they’re designed for.”

“True,” Jackal said, “but they’re only intended to be active for short periods of time.  If you leave one plugged in too long, it goes crazy.”

“I still don’t understand,” I said.

“Look,” the kid said.  “The entire point behind the Turing Scion is to preserve the knowledge base of our so-called civilization.  In the past, if a brilliant engineer died, his knowledge and his creativity died with him.  His thought patterns, his ideas, his personal methods of problem solving …
everything
.  All gone forever.  That’s the way things worked for most of human history.  Then, along comes the Turing Scion and changes all the rules.  Now, if our hypothetical engineer has a Turing Scion, his knowledge doesn’t disappear when he dies.  If we have a problem that only Mr. Hypothetical Engineer can solve, we just plug his Scion into a computer node and start asking questions.”

“But you can’t
leave
it plugged in,” Jackal said.

“Why not?”

The kid stared at me like I was an idiot.  “Scions are sort of like software,” he said.  “They’re only active when you plug them into a computer node.  Unplug one, and it’s just an anodized box full of dense-pack memory chips.  It can’t talk.  It can’t think.  It can’t do
anything
.  It’s inert.  Asleep, if you prefer.”

“But when they
are
plugged in,” Jackal said, “they have dynamic memory, just like AI’s.  They continue to think, and learn, and grow.”

“How does that make them go crazy?” I asked.

“Think about it,” the kid said.  “Even a low-end computer can process information three or four hundred times faster than a human brain can.  For every hour of real-time that passes, an active Scion would experience four hundred hours.  That’s about sixteen days.  Not sixteen days for some piece of artificially intelligent machine code that only
thinks
it’s alive.  Sixteen days for a human mind who has memories, wants, aspirations.”

I nodded.

The kid looked back toward the performance artist’s Turing Scion.  “Asshole over there has kept his Scion plugged in for over a year.  Try to imagine that.  Four hundred years trapped inside a machine.”

“It’s not like it’s a real person,” Jackal said.

“It
thinks
it’s a real person,” the kid said.

I looked across the bar at the anguished face of the Scion, and suddenly I couldn’t bear the thought of being in the same room with it.  I cleared my throat.  “This is all very interesting,” I said, “but I have business to attend to.”  I looked at Jackal.

“Sorry,” she said.  “I got a little sidetracked.”  She pulled a data chip out of her pocket and slid it across the transparent table top.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out an envelope.  “Cash,” I said.  “As agreed.”

We traded.

I wouldn’t be able to verify the contents of the chip until I got home.  Jackal knew this; out of courtesy, she didn’t open the envelope until I was gone.

Outside the bar, I waited for a cab on Santa Monica Boulevard, and tried not to think about Turing Scions.  I’d seen one years before, and I hadn’t liked it anymore than I’d liked the one inside Nexus Dreams.

John had talked Maggie into letting him make the recording.  She’d been excited by the idea: her mind, her
personality
stored in a digital module.  All you had to do was plug the Scion into a computer and presto, Maggie in a can.  Sort of the electronic version of immortality.

She was in there, all right, or at least an incredibly accurate computer approximation of her personality was.  Her memories were in there too, current up to the instant when John had slipped the sensor network over her head.

Maggie had tried to talk me into making one.  She and John both had.  I’d refused, a decision I had never regretted for a second.  Man is not meant to be factored into logic algorithms.

The Scion had just been a novelty to John and Maggie, an interesting trinket.  Every once in a while, they would drag the module out and plug it into John’s computer.  They’d talk to it for hours, giggling over it, like children playing with an amusing gadget.  Then they’d unplug it, and it would go back on the shelf.

It might still be there somewhere, gathering dust at the back of one of John’s closets.  I made a mental note to ask him about it.  If the damned thing was still around, I wanted it erased.

The past was dead, and nothing that was recorded on a stack of memory chips could change that.

CHAPTER 4

The computer in the den was concealed in the mahogany surface of my desktop.  I plugged Jackal’s data chip into a hidden slot in the right edge of the desk and thumbed the power switch.  A holographic display field unfolded in the air above the desk, the translucent blue rectangle empty except for a slowly flashing cursor.  The keyboard was a hologram as well, projected over a grid of infrared sensors that read the position of my fingers in relation to the imaginary keys.

I called up a file menu.

I would put off the actual crime-scene recordings until last.  I’m not usually squeamish, but the fact that the victims were all children, or practically so, added an unpleasant dimension.  I wanted to work myself up to them slowly.

I started with the text files.  Most of them I just skimmed.  It takes a while to read every report generated during a single murder investigation.  I had files from fourteen murder cases.  Fifteen, if you counted Winter’s suicide.

The first murder had occurred in 2061 on the thirteenth of August.  The victim: a fourteen-year-old girl named Kathy Lynn Armstrong.

Twenty-four days later came Miko Otosaki, thirteen years old.

Sometime after the death of Felicia Stevens, the third victim, an over-educated desk sergeant had started calling the killer
Huitzilopochtli
, in honor of an Aztec God whose thirst for human sacrifices demanded a regular diet of hearts.

Since none of the rest of the cops in the station house could pronounce Huitzilopochtli, they’d quickly shortened the killer’s nickname to Aztec.  The media had picked up on the title immediately.

The last of the killings attributed to Aztec was a thirteen-year-old named Tracy Lee.  Tracy had died on the twenty-ninth of March in 2063: a little over two weeks before Michael had put a bullet through his own brain.

Fourteen victims stretched out over nineteen months.  The shortest interval between killings had been four days.  The longest had been ninety-eight days.  That made the average about forty-five days.

I checked my watch.  Aztec hadn’t killed in 133 days, not since Winter’s suicide.

None of the murdered girls had been penetrated orally, vaginally or anally.  The police had never found a trace of semen or foreign saliva on or near any of the victim’s bodies.

Christine Clark’s file I examined in detail.  Sonja was right about the date; Christine had been murdered on the eighth of February.  The coroner’s best guess was 3 p.m., plus or minus a half-hour.  LAPD’s AI estimated time of death at 3:07:21 p.m., plus or minus two minutes.

So if Sonja was telling the truth—if Michael really had been with her that day—then he couldn’t have killed Christine.

But a check of the physical evidence files put another nail in Winter’s coffin.  The LA coroner had positively identified the knife found on Winter’s corpse as the weapon used in all fourteen Aztec slayings.

I backed out of the LAPD files and logged onto the other file.

The second data pull consisted of one file: twenty-four hours of data recorded by a household AI.

Ten minutes of random sampling told me what I wanted to know.  Still, the data could have been edited.  I had the desktop computer run the entire file at a compression ratio of 3600 to 1, verifying each DataNet time code recorded.  In twenty-four seconds I had my answer: there were exactly 86,400 seconds worth of sequential time codes.  None were missing and there were no extras.  That didn’t totally eliminate the possibility that the file had been edited, but it made it damned unlikely.

One thing was clear: on the eighth of February, 2063, an adult male answering to the name of Mike had spent the better part of nine hours in Sonja Winter’s apartment.

Until I could prove that he was Michael Winter, I decided to call him Mr. X.

Since Sonja Winter’s apartment wasn’t equipped with video cameras, there was no identifiable footage of Mr. X.

The man appearing in the security system’s IR imagers could have been anyone of the proper height and weight.  A person’s heat patterns are as individual as fingerprints, but Michael Winter had probably never been thermally mapped.  Since thermal mapping only works on warm living tissue, it was too late to map Michael now.  Without a reference map on file, there was no basis for comparison.  Those heat patterns might have belonged to Michael Winter.  Then again, they might not have.

So, scratch visual, and scratch infrared.  What did that leave?  Audio.

There were three voices in the recording, two female and one male.  One of the female voices I recognized as Sonja’s.  The other female voice was easily attributed to Harmony, Sonja’s AI.  The male voice belonged to Mr. X.

I captured three random samples of Mr. X’s voice and compared them to the police file copy of Michael Winter’s suicide recording.  The voiceprints matched.  The voice in Sonja’s apartment on the day of Christine Clark’s murder belonged to Michael Winter.

The court wouldn’t buy it, of course.  The District Attorney would rationalize it away.

No two voiceprints are ever perfectly identical.  The DA would call in a half dozen voiceprint experts, all prepared to testify that the minuscule variations between two samples made absolute positive identification impossible.  The voice in Ms. Winter’s apartment
might
belong to Michael Winter.  Then again, maybe not.

Or, the DA might be willing to concede the possibility that Michael had an alibi for the murder of Christine Clark.  Which didn’t alter the fact that Michael had confessed to the other thirteen killings.

LAPD and the District Attorney’s Office had a solution that made them happy.  Fourteen murders were solved and the killer was dealt with.  They certainly weren’t going to call a press conference to announce that fourteen murder cases were being reopened and a killer was still running rampant.

According to the case files, before his suicide, Michael hadn’t been a suspect.  In fact, the police hadn’t even been aware of his existence.  His confession had taken them by surprise.  Coming—as it had—complete with the murder weapon and a suspect who knew intimate details of the crime, the whole package must have seemed a Godsend to the police.  All of which felt just a little too convenient.

I was a long way from being convinced that Michael Winter hadn’t killed Christine Clark, but—for the sake of argument—what if he hadn’t?  What would it mean?

By Sonja’s extension of logic, if he was innocent of one murder, then he hadn’t killed any of them.

I wasn’t ready to make a leap that large.  He might very well have killed one or more of the others.  I didn’t know yet.

Damn.  So much for the easy way out.  I wanted the bastard to be
obviously
guilty.  Then I could walk away from this whole mess with a clean conscience.

But there was a glimmer of a possibility that Michael Winter was innocent.  If so, he had paid the price for someone else’s crimes.  And his sister would go on paying for years.

I stood up and reached for a cigarette.  My pack was empty.  I crumpled it up and tossed it into the recycling bin on my way to the kitchen.

I rummaged through the kitchen drawers.  No smokes.

“House, where are my cigarettes?”

“There are two packs of cigarettes in the top drawer of the nightstand in your bedroom.  There is a partial pack in the right pocket of your tan jacket in the hall closet.  There are three full cases and one partial case in the storeroom.  There are...”

“Okay, okay.  I’ve got it.”  I walked into the bedroom and grabbed one of the packs from the nightstand.