Continuance (2 page)

But who
are
they?

Jason thought about what he knew,
trying to puzzle it out. “The first hit on a Viceroy continuance came, what,
maybe a year ago? And if they’re using the same technique Chrysalis does, count
on at least a year before that to finish the cloning and neural vectoring.”

“Your point?”

“That’s a lot of time and effort
to burn. Why not work with Chrysalis? They’re already set up for continuance.
Why set up shop independently?” He took a swallow of his coffee, burning his
tongue, and started his third muffin.

“Who knows? Maybe the same reason
you don’t trust Chrysalis to handle your searches.” Alex raised an eyebrow.
“Maybe these new guys don’t trust them to execute on the data they must have hacked
from Arkive. Chrysalis has had more than one run-in with the spiders.”

“Don’t remind me,” Jason said. “One
was more than enough.” With an arsenal of intricate traps and tools dedicated
to capturing retreads, the Digital Interment Authority and its agents were a
constant threat, and Alex knew firsthand just how dangerous they were. As did
Jason. “Anyway, there’s still the duplication worry. I can’t imagine Viceroy
would risk it, but who knows when they’re out there operating on their own?”

“So cynical for a kid your age.”
Alex looked at him in mock disappointment. “Would you prefer they weren’t
operating at all? Without them, you wouldn’t have a prayer of finding your girl.
You already know her stasis was too early to be in the Chrysalis data set.”

That was the crux of it. Whoever
this parallel group was – this Viceroy – the results of their work were like
Halloween candy left on the porch. Like a kid in costume, Jason couldn’t resist
the chance to fill his bag. No matter how much he distrusted their mysterious
appearance, no matter how wrong the whole arrangement felt, Alex had made the
only point that mattered. They were his best option for finding Michelle. For
the moment, at least.

Matching Records
Found: 0.
Jason took a breath, letting the coffee’s aroma fill his nose. “With any luck,
maybe we won’t have to depend on them much longer.”

Alex paused, taking off his
glasses. Idly, he stared at them, turning them over in his fingers. “So you’re
still going through with this plan of yours?”

“Already in motion. Waiting for
other people to get things done isn’t one of my strengths.”

Alex gave a rueful laugh.
“Neither is being careful, I guess.” He kept his gaze on his glasses. “Remember
what happened the last time someone went up against the DIA.” He looked up at
Jason with a questioning stare.

Jason shook his head, giving Alex
a faint smile. He glanced at the time on his AP and slid the plate aside. The
muffins were gone; Alex hadn’t taken a bite. “I have to get going. I’m meeting Stuart
before class. Thanks for the data.”

Alex hoisted his coffee cup with
a nod.

Jason paused. “Don’t worry, old
man. I’ll be working from the inside this time. No hacking required.”

“Inside or outside, if you get
caught, it doesn’t matter.” Alex upended his coffee, setting the empty cup down
with a hollow thump. “And I’d hate to lose a good customer.”

Matching Records
Found: 273

Lindsay Grieves scanned through the
report from his latest cloud sweep, dismissing most of it as false positives
and noise. Halfway down the list, though, his eyes locked on an entry, and his
pulse quickened.
Hello, hello. Now that’s more like it.

He watched the net address
cascade down the photoscreen as its relevance to the search algorithm
decreased. Then it rose again. The cycle repeated several times before he froze
the display and drilled into the node, plotting all traffic to and from. The
data flow seemed to pulse – first strong, then weak – as the stream rotated
through other nodes he hadn’t yet identified.

Already halfway out of his chair,
he felt a tingle from the photoscreen’s haptic feedback as he touched the entry
for the address, dragging it to the rotating icon of his personal drive. Then
he grabbed his jacket and hurried through the door, squeezing into the hallway
between two startled agents. The augmented reality of his smartglasses
superimposed captions on his vision – a thumbnail profile hovering above each
man in translucent amber text. Lindsay paid the information little mind. He
hadn’t been with the Authority long, but he recognized these two agents on his
own.

Wright, the taller, thick-set
one, flashed an annoyed look as Lindsay brushed past, while Costilla called out
from behind. “What’s your hurry, rook? Crack open a big one already?”

Maybe. If this
is what I think it is.
But Lindsay kept the answer to himself. He rounded
a corner in the corridor, cutting off Costilla’s snicker behind him.

Stuffed into a remote wing of a
vintage federal building, the Digital Interment Authority’s Everton field
office felt like an old suit jacket – drab, threadbare, and a size too small.
Plain doors lined the cramped labyrinth of halls, with the glossy black
hemisphere of a SLIDe mounted in the transom space above each. Along with the
photoscreens that lined the walls, the SLIDes were the latest tech, but in a
place built back in the 2030s, they seemed to belong about as well as
electricity inside a pyramid.

Young as he was, Lindsay remembered
a time before the SLIDes – before Subdermal Laser Identification Devices had
sprouted up everywhere like digital fungus, from airports to banks to Disneyland,
their invisible beams reading statistical samples of DNA from everyone in view.
For his part, Lindsay was happy to have them. The bioprints they collected were
the best tool the DIA had for tracking down retreads.
And those creating
them. This has to be Chrysalis.
But it was too soon to know for sure.

As he made his way down the
corridors, white lights – spaced a little too far apart – created long islands
of overexposed hues perforated by shorter segments in solemn grays. Some of the
agents and staff he passed gave tiny nods. Others ignored him altogether. A few
more turns brought him to a set of metal-plated double-doors, with red letters
scrolling across the photoscreen overhead.

Recovery
Control: Authorized Personnel Only

The SLIDe beneath the photoscreen
verified his bioprint, and the doors separated with a low rumble. Lindsay
passed down a dim hallway until he came to a door at the far end. On its face,
six equilateral triangles – three yellow, three black – fit together like pie
slices to form a hexagon. Beneath it, bold letters read:

Gamma
Ray Laser Encephalograph

Caution: Harmful
Radiation

The GRaLE.
When he’d first
learned about it, Lindsay hadn’t been sure what to make of the allusion to a
fabled holy relic. But the more he thought about it, the more apt it seemed. In
a sense, the GRaLE represented the endpoint in the DIA’s mandate to track down
and recover retreads – each recovery the culmination of a quest.

Inside, workstations and the 3D
projections of a dozen photoscreens littered a control and monitoring area. On
the opposite side, a wall curved down and inward to form a sealed chamber in
the shape of a cylinder laid on its side and jammed sideways through the room.
The center section was transparent, while the ends were made of dark metal. A
tech in a blue protective suit and mask gave him a disinterested look before
stepping through a door at one end of the chamber.

Lindsay paid him no mind, more
interested in the man the tech had been speaking with. Dressed in a dark
business suit with no tie, Isaac Neal stood a few feet from the chamber’s
curved window. He was compact, with a quiet intensity that gave him a kind of
predatory cast. The angular lenses of his smartglasses hid his gaze, but his
attention was fixed on the figure of a man laid out on a table inside.

As Lindsay approached from
behind, Neal spoke as if to himself. “For the memory of Martin Shepherd.” As
always, his voice carried a rasp, like sandpaper on stone. A dull metallic
glint caught Lindsay’s eye as Neal tucked something away inside his jacket.

“Is there a problem?” Neal asked
without turning.

Suddenly, Lindsay felt foolish
for rushing in on his boss in the middle of a recovery. The news was important,
but it could have waited a few minutes. He glanced at the man on the table in
the chamber.
Martin?
The name didn’t matter. The man was young – maybe
twenty, but the appearance was a lie.
He’s a retread. Who knows how old he
really is?
But that didn’t matter either. Scrapbook details of his life
were irrelevant. This was a recovery, not a memorial service.

Naked to the waist, the man’s
eyes were closed, and black dots created a symmetrical pattern on his shaved
head. Small metallic projections extended from a headrest, disc-shaped feet at
the ends pushing against his temples and the base of his skull. The blue-suited
tech moved purposefully alongside the table, activating force restraints at the
man’s wrists and ankles.

“No, no problem.” Lindsay shook
his head. “I found something in the main cloud sweep. Traces of bioprints
funneled through some kind of anonymous array.” With a deliberate blink, he
eyeclicked a control in his smartglasses, sending a copy of the results to
Neal.

The other man’s eyebrows climbed
a hair as he received the transfer through his own glasses. “Are you sure about
this? That routine’s been running for months. I’ve never seen it spit out this
kind of result.”

“I tweaked the parameters. The new
version correlates SLIDe data with localized packet flow.” Lindsay scanned
Neal’s face, searching for some sign he might be pleased or impressed, but the
other man simply nodded as he stared at the unconscious retread.

A silence fell, and three rounded
arms unfolded from a metal disc at one end of the table – the GRaLE’s scanning
cluster. The disc itself extended until the arms bracketed the man’s head, like
a slender three-fingered claw poised to close around his skull. A tight beam of
laser light appeared from each, and the uppermost made a blue point on the
man’s forehead, aligned with the black calibration dot above his eyes. The
point expanded into a thin line along his nose and over the cleft in his chin,
dividing his face in half. The disc started to rotate, and the arms orbited the
man’s head in a slow circuit.

As if the motion had been a cue,
Neal spoke again. “Follow it up. Track down the source.” Then, as if they were
having coffee at the morning briefing, not standing here watching a live recovery,
he said, “But first, I need you to swing by the campus. They’re kicking things
off in the lab today.”

Lindsay nodded, too engrossed in
the scene in front of him to feel excited about what could be his first break
with the Authority. Or to be annoyed at having to babysit a few college geeks
along the way. “I’ll need to widen the cloud sweep to lock in. It’ll take
dedicated cycles from the central array.”

He heard the distracted note in
his own voice as he stared at a photoscreen hovering above a nearby console. A model
of the retread’s brain dominated the center, oriented on its side. Three
horizontal lines moved in time with the GRaLE arms, tracking the sub-cellular
scan as it skimmed into the outer layer of the cortex. Around the periphery of
the display, graphs and readouts tracked dozens of data points – breathing,
heart rate, sedation level, higher and lower brain functions. A green progress
bar labeled “Neuromap Capture” ticked upward from zero to one percent. A moment
later, an identical bar labeled “Cellular Necrosis” did the same.

Neal gave a quick nod. “I’ll
authorize the cycles you need with Cyber Division.”

Taking it for a dismissal,
Lindsay turned to leave.

Neal’s gravelly voice stopped
him. “This one was a musician.” He inclined his head toward the man in the
chamber. “Before.”

Lindsay turned back to look. The
GRaLE’s arms were rotating faster now, and a muted sound escaped the chamber,
like the far-distant whine of an animal. The blue lines on the monitoring
display tightened their circuit, slowly spiraling into the deeper tissues of
the man’s brain, peeling away layers like a lathe. The progress bars crept
upward, past the halfway mark, as the waves showing higher brain functions
calmed to tiny ripples, then went flat.

“Mugger attacked him after a gig
one night,” Neal said. “Two .38 slugs to the chest in some alley behind a bar.”
He shrugged. “He even remembered most of it when we questioned him.”

“Will he remember this?” With the
sedation field at maximum, Lindsay knew it wasn’t likely.

Neal shook his head, looking at
Lindsay for the first time since he’d come in. His eyes seemed to penetrate
from behind the opaque lenses of his smartglasses. “You seem disappointed.”

Lindsay lowered his eyes for half
a heartbeat. But he didn’t deny it.

“I don’t like them either, but…”
Neal hesitated, as if picking his words carefully. “But I try to remember what
they were, once. They went to work in the morning. They had friends and
families. This one left behind a wife and four kids. Fifty years later, he
wakes up, and they’re gone.”