Strange Flesh (44 page)

I can also better piece together his state of mind. When Gina dies, he knows enough to have theories about her reasons. And he knows who to blame. He tries to bury with her a figure not of her main av, but rather the one she used to store her Dancer mock-ups. He asks Olya, “Are you happy now?”

Thinking about how I started to unravel this story brings to mind the other party whose grief over Gina seemed as keen as Billy’s: her mother. I feel like she deserves to know what I’ve discovered.

I’m relieved when she picks up the phone, and after thanking her for the figurine and memory stick, I say, “I just wanted to tell you that I acquired the video your daughter recorded of her death. I don’t think you’ll want to see it.”

“No, I guess not.” She pauses for a long time, fighting to control her voice. Finally, in a high, plaintive tone, she asks, “But why did she record it? Does she say anything?”

“She says, ‘I guess you thought I’d play the daughter of Lot, but I will not.’ “I wait to see what she makes of that, but only silence follows. “I could tell you what I believe she meant, to see if it accords with your—”

“No, Mr. Pryce.” Hearing her daughter’s last words is too much for Ruth Delaney. Her voice breaks as she says, “I’ve heard enough.”

Then she hangs up.

So I’m left to interpret Gina’s death for myself. What exactly did she mean by that laconic rhyme? She obviously shared an interest with Billy in Genesis 19: the chronicle of the Lord spending his utmost wrath upon sexual deviants. Lot’s virgin daughters were to be sacrifices to a throng of Sodomites. So perhaps Gina identified with them in that she felt she was being forced into serving, through her invention, the lusts of the mob.

But I’m puzzled by her close identification with the Dancers. Why would she have equated Olya’s commercialization of them with
her
being savaged by the masses? One hears self-aggrandizing artists talk about the sales process as a form of rape. But that’s not a perspective native to engineers. Also, if she truly abhorred pandering to the global umma of perverts, why didn’t she just destroy the things? Instead she damaged them superficially and focused on destroying herself.

She knew from previous attempts she didn’t have the force of will to drive the blade home. So, like she’d done all her life, she built a mechanism to solve the problem. She looked around for the right materials, and her eyes lit on Billy’s garrote. Maybe she recalled the video they made together. Might release from her strangling desperation feel akin to that burst of ecstasy her character achieved when the jack popped into her neck?

Yet the record of her last moments shows the opposite happened.

I doubt I’ll ever know all the reasons behind Gina’s sad demise, but clearly Billy feels like he understands them well enough. He holds his brother and Olya responsible for her death, and now he wants to put them under the same level of mental strain they placed on her. By making himself the Genghis Khan of cyberbullies with his game.

A game that will be rolling through embarrassing family revelations just as public scrutiny heats up on Blythe’s deal. Billy surely knows that
in attacking Blake now, the blow will really fall most heavily on Blythe. He would hope the damage then multiplies even further in the pain-reflecting echo chamber of the twins’ relationship.

But to complete his oeuvre, he needs the record of his heroine’s swan song, something only I can give him. So if Billy wants to play games with it, he’s going to have to come to the table.

T
he final words Billy spoke through the slats of my crate were, “I’ll be in touch.” Thirty-six hours later, I’m driving myself nuts with the worry that I’ve completely mistaken his need for Gina’s death video.

Just as I’m starting to brainstorm new “operational concepts” for a surely unpleasant meeting with Blake, his brother finally deigns to make contact. But he’s not reaching out to me; his message comes to Jacques.

In NOD, I find orders for the next
Savant
Degree sent from Madame Martaine. As tired as I am of this nonsense, which has yet to produce any concrete lead, I still open it greedily. The virtual parchment says:

Searching for service to the Duc de Blangis?
Please look at my
pictures
, and soon you will see
Just what you can do to be helpful to me.

The word “pictures” links to a server hosting a huge library of images.

I zip up all 14,400 and forward them to Red Rook’s code quarry. Then I dig in myself.

The unifying theme: women doing violence to other women. Of course, most are lesbian bondage shots, and I’m distressed to see such lovely anatomy so thoroughly abused. Intercalated among all the pinching and probing, I find other categories. Stills from the recent YouTube craze for brawl videos of teenage girls, mothers slapping daughters, soccer harpies dragging opponents to the ground by their hair, and morgue
photos of the rare woman murdered by another female. They’re Billy’s bitter comment on Olya and Gina’s relationship I guess.

My cypher-punks return disappointing results: none of the files hold encoded information. So cracking this puzzle won’t be as easy as the last one. They’re seeking other avenues, but the inquiries will take time. Which leaves me to stew over the images.

I know they carry some kind of message, and Billy probably designed this kind of challenge to frustrate automated analysis. Maybe he wants to force his players to really immerse themselves in his assemblage of gynolence.

They click by for hours as I make detailed notes. But not only do I fail to determine a pattern beyond the obvious, I can’t even see a method by which I’d ever find one. How can one be expected to trace all the possible connections among such a mass of complex photographs?

I return to my starting assumption: these files must be telling me something. But what if the individual pictures are relatively meaningless, and their secret resides only in the
collection
? How do you view a series of images collectively? You place them on the table and then stand back.

But that raises the problem of how to arrange them. A linear layout seems unlikely. So how, then? What’s the best way to organize 14,400 files? How could one determine the right structure a priori?

I look back at Martaine’s message, but there’s no hidden verbiage there. Just these thousands of shots mocking me with their intractable quantity.

But that’s just it: their
quantity
. The
number
of photos describes the only correct form: a square. 14,400 is the square of a particularly relevant number. Once again, Billy’s riddle provides a self-validating solution. The number that multiplied by itself equals 14,400?

120.

A couple minutes using a photomosaic program to make a square of files 120 to a side leaves me with a picture composed of Billy’s photos, each one representing a single pixel. Together they reveal the sublime visage of Olya Zhavinskaya.

My new target.

The crypto department comes back a bit later having determined that if you source Billy’s images from the web, you find that the first letters of the file names for each one combine to form an acrostic text.

The message is 165 characters followed by meaningless garbage. It reads:

Our prey resides at 290 Grand second floor
So this evening be sure to keep your eyes on her door
Report when she leaves and observe where she goes
And the Divinest of torments will be mine to impose

Billy’s demanding that Jacques assist in his attempt to spoil Olya’s evening stroll.

Getting this order right now sets off internal warning bells, but a quick scan of the
Savant
box reassures me that Jacques was probably chosen for his skills, not because Billy’s identified me as his player. Assuming he’d select someone from GAME to surveil Olya, he’s got forty players to choose from. Only ten of us enjoy Innoculyte status, and six have completed RL missions. Of those, two seem to have quit the game shortly after, and one deleted his NOD profile entirely. With Red Rook’s help, I tend to solve puzzles the fastest among the remaining four, so it’s no surprise that Billy might call on Jacques if he needed someone to tail Olya.

I’m sorely tempted to ignore the directive, but the last line of the poem implies Billy’s going to take a very personal interest in this exploit. Might he even show up himself for the most severe humiliation yet of his favorite target? I can’t risk losing a chance at him.

Thinking it through, I realize there’s another risk I can’t afford:

Telling Olya what’s about to happen to her.

I had expected Billy’s maniacal minions to do their worst on the way over to GAME. But Olya arrived for her evening work session without incident. Luckily it’s cold out, so with sunglasses, a scarf, and my parka hood, I can obscure my face enough to avoid recognition should Billy actually
show up. I monitor the exits from the bodega on the opposite corner, sending periodic status updates back to Madame Martaine.

Since my first real break came from following Olya back to her apartment, wouldn’t it be just perfect if I finally caught up with Billy after trying it again?

At midnight, she emerges from the rear alley and takes a right. I follow well behind her. Every pedestrian out this evening looks sinister, each glance broadcasting malice until they move past. Twice over the seven-block route I break into a run as some kind of van pulls up next to her.

But nothing happens.

I watch the door to Olya’s building shut behind her. What went wrong? While Billy’s assets are certainly amateurs, his gross little productions so far have come off quite well for him.

You’re missing something
.

I pull up her number on my phone but can’t quite think of what to say.

A light comes to life in her second-floor apartment. The tall windows are obscured by a translucent shade, but they allow me a view of her silhouette stepping forward to draw together the heavy inner curtains. Only . . .

Only it’s not her silhouette.

The contours of Olya’s shadow would easily merit an R rating, and I just saw the mundane lines and angles of a skinny man.

I run across the street, dismissing the idea of the police right away. I can’t be sure she’s in any real danger, and she’ll kill me if in trying to help her, I end up getting her deported. I hurtle down the alley on the short side of her L-shaped building and see a rusty fire escape dangling from its back. I have to climb a chain-link fence and carefully navigate a slack coil of razor wire, but from the top of the fence, I can just leap to catch the bottom of the steel walkway.

My first view of her apartment shows a cavernous industrial space held up by exposed brick pylons. The room is layered with luxurious fabrics and filled with low, bed-like furniture.

A motion catches my eye through the window at the far end of the fire escape. I creep over for a better look and see four men in Olya’s sitting room arrayed as though on the set of some gonzo porn production.

Two of them are pressing a gagged Olya face-first into a column. A
heavyset South Asian with a wolfman beard is trying to handcuff her to a chain thrown over a high wall sconce, but he’s only secured one hand. His partner is a grizzled biker wearing a sleeveless leather vest to display his welter of violent Nordic prison tats. He slices at the back of Olya’s shirt with a large butterfly knife. Naturally, Olya is
resisting
.

The other men are setting up the gear. A skinny geek with an atrocious grin and Manson bug-eyes has trouble suppressing his excitement as he rigs a hi-def video camera. To his left, a tall guy in a black trench coat with waist-length brown hair done up in a topknot types into a laptop resting on Olya’s coffee table. At his studded belt dangles a cat-o’-nine-tails with thick leather straps knotted at the ends. Not the modern prop of safe-and-sane naughtiness but a tool designed to rend flesh.

On the laptop’s screen I can see a video feed of a man’s face. The window’s too small to tell for sure, but I’m distraught to think Billy’s decided to witness this via teleconference. Topknot takes out his whip and turns to observe his comrades’ struggle with Olya.