Tea From an Empty Cup (9 page)

‘Body Sativa,’ said the first customer interviewee. He was an aging child with green hair and claimed his name was Earl O’Jelly. ‘Nobody knows more. Nobody and
no body
. If you get what I say here.’

Konstantin didn’t bury her face in her hands. The aging child volunteered the information that he had been in the crowd by the Hudson that Shantih Love had staggered through, but claimed he hadn’t seen anything like what she described to him.

Neither had the next one, a grandmother whose AR alter ego was a twelve-year-old boy-assassin named Nick the Schick. ‘That means I technically have to have the “the” as my middle name, but there’s worse and stupider, both,’ she told Konstantin genially. ‘Nick knows Body, of course.
Everybody
knows Body. And vice versa, probably. Actually,
I
think Body Sativa’s really just a database that got crossed with a traffic-switcher and jumped the rails.’

‘Pardon?’ Konstantin shook her head, uncomprehending.

The grandmother was patient. ‘You know how files can get cross-monkeyed? Well, like that. It coulda been that the traffic-switcher was referencing the database in a thunderstorm, or maybe sunspots, and they got the virtual equivalent of arc-welded. Then the traffic-switcher interface mutated from the acquired characteristics in all the database entries. That’s what
I
say, anyhow, and
nobody’s
proved yet that
that
couldn’t happen. Or that it
didn’t
.’ She nodded once, looking wise.

Konstantin opened her mouth to tell the woman that if she understood her correctly, what she was describing was akin to putting a dirty shirt and a pile of straw in a wooden box for the purpose of spontaneously generating mice and then decided against it. For one thing, she wasn’t sure that she
had
understood correctly and for another, the shirt-and-straw method of creating mice was probably routine in AR.

There was no third interviewee. Instead, an ACLU lawyer came in and explained that since the crime had occurred in the real world, and all the so-called witnesses had been in AR, they weren’t actually witnesses at all, and could not be detained any longer. However, all of their names would be available on the video parlor’s customer list, which Konstantin could see as soon as she produced the proper court order.

‘In the meantime, everyone agrees you ought to try talking to this, uh’ – the lawyer consulted a palm-top – ‘Body Sativa, whatever she is. Assuming she’ll give you so much as the time of day without legal representation.’

‘I suppose I need a court order for that, too,’ Konstantin grumbled.

‘Not hardly. AR is open to anyone who wants to access it. Even you, Lieutenant Konstantin.’ The lawyer grinned, showing diamond teeth. ‘Just remember the rules of admissibility. Everything everyone tells you in AR –’

‘– is a lie, right. I got the short course tonight already.’ Konstantin’s gaze strayed to the monitor, now blank. ‘I think I’ll track this Body Sativa down in person and question her in realtime.’

‘Only if she voluntarily tells you who she is,’ the lawyer reminded her a bit smugly. ‘Otherwise, her privacy is protected.’

‘Maybe she’ll turn out to be a good citizen,’ Konstantin mused. ‘Maybe she’ll care that some seventeen-year-old kid got his throat cut.’

The lawyer’s smug expression became a sad smile. ‘Maybe.
I
care.
You
care. But there’s no law that says anyone else has to.’

‘I know. I’d be afraid if there was. Even so –’ Konstantin winced. ‘I do wish I didn’t have to depend so much on volunteers.’

She sent DiPietro and Celestine over to the dead kid’s apartment building, though she wasn’t expecting much. If he really was typical, his neighbors would have barely been aware of him. Most likely, they would find that he had been yet another gypsy worker of standard skills, taking temporary assignments via a city-run agency to support his various habits. Not the least of which would have been his AR habit.

Just to be thorough, she waited in Guilfoyle Pleshette’s office for the call letting her know that the other two detectives had found a generic one-room apartment in the city. Except for the carefully organized card library of past AR experience in the dustless, static-free, moisture- and fireproof nonmagnetic light-shielded container. Every heavy AR user kept a library, so that no treasured moment could be lost to time.

The library would go to headquarters to be stored for the required ten-day waiting period while a caseworker tried to track down next-of-kin. If none turned up, the card library would then be accessed by an automated program designed to analyze the sequences recorded on each card and construct a profile of the person, which would then be added to the on-line obituaries. Usually this would cause someone who had known the deceased to come forward; other times, it simply confirmed that there was no one to care.

The idea came unbidden to Konstantin, derailing the semi-doze she had slipped into at whatever indecent a.m. the night had become. She plugged the archiver into the phone and sent the retriever to fetch data on the other seven AR DOAs.

Delivery was all but immediate – at this time of night, there wasn’t much data traffic. Konstantin felt mildly annoyed that DiPietro and Celestine couldn’t report in just as quickly. Perhaps they had taken the stringer with them and were even now playing to the cam in an inspection of the dead kid’s apartment.

A bit of heartburn simmered in her chest; she imagined it was her blood pressure going up a notch. According to
The Law Enforcement Officers’ Guide To A HEALTHY & HAPPY
Life (
ON & OFF The Job!
), sex was the number-one stress reliever. Konstantin was sure that the
Guide
had most likely meant the sort that involved at least one other person. Sighing, she surveyed the data arranging itself on the archive’s small but hi-res screen.

The first to suffer a suspicious death while in post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty had been a thirty-four-year-old woman named Sally Lefkow. Her picture showed a woman so pale as to seem faded. She had passed most of her realtime hours as a third-rank senior on a Minneapolis janitorial team whose contract had included both the building where she had lived and the building where she had died. Konstantin wasn’t sure whether to be amused, amazed, or alarmed that her on-line persona had been an evolved dragon. Eight feet tall and the color of polished antique copper, it had been bisexual, able to switch at will. Sally Lefkow had died of suffocation; the evolved dragon had been in flight when it had gone into a steep dive over the East River, entering the water at a high speed and never coming up again.

Konstantin put the dead woman’s realtime background next to the information on the dragon to compare them but found she was having trouble retaining anything. ‘In one eye and out the other,’ she muttered, then winced.
Lover, come back – you forgot to take the in-jokes along with the rest of the emotional baggage
.

She marked the Lefkow-dragon combo and went on to the next victim, a twenty-eight-year-old gypsy office worker named Emilio Torres. Konstantin thought he looked more like an athlete. Or maybe an ex-athlete. He had died alone in his Portland apartment during an on-line session as – Konstantin blinked – Marilyn Presley. The hybrid had been an on-line flash-fad, hot for a day, passé forever after. But not, apparently, for Torres. He had persisted as Marilyn for six weeks, long after the rest of the flash followers had lost interest, and he had died – Konstantin blinked again – of an overdose of several drugs. During the OD, the Marilyn Presley persona had been – Konstantin blinked again – abducted by a UFO while attending some sort of gathering that wasn’t quite a street brawl but not really an open air party, either. There was no follow-up on the persona, nothing to tell Konstantin if Torres’s license had been inherited, sold, or simply terminated.

Torres had died a month after Lefkow and half a continent away. The next death had occurred two months later, in a cheesy beach-side parlor in New Hampshire. March Kuykendall had been unembarrassed by his status as an AR junkie, supporting his habit with odd and mostly menial jobs.
Acquaintances of the victim have all heard him say, at one time or another, that realtime was the disposable reality because it could not be preserved or replayed in AR
, Konstantin read.
AR
is humanity’s true destiny. In AR, everyone is immortal.

If you don’t mind existing solely in reruns
, Konstantin thought. Kuykendall had owned half a dozen personas, all creations original to him. Mortality had caught up with him while he had been acting out a panther-man fantasy. The panther-man had been beaten to death in the Gang Wars module by some vaguely monstrous assailant that everyone claimed not to have seen clearly. In realtime, Kuykendall had been found crumpled in a corner of the parlor cubicle, having taken blows hard enough to shatter both his head-mounted helmet and his head. No one in the parlor had seen or heard anything.

Victim number four had been in rehab for a year after a bad accident had left her paralyzed. Lydia Stang’s damaged nerves had been regenerated, but she had had to relearn movement from the bottom up. AR had been part of her therapy; her AR persona had been a cat burglar who was an idealized gymnastic version of herself. She had died of a broken neck. On-line witnesses stated she had been drawn into a street duel with a lizard-person, and lost. Even better, the lizard-person had come forward voluntarily and admitted to AR contact with the deceased. Stang had been on-line in Denver, while the lizard-person had been cavorting in a parlor not three blocks from where Konstantin was sitting. She double-checked to be sure she had that right, and then made a note to look up the lizard-person in realtime.

A moment later, she was scratching the note out. The lizard-person was victim number five. Even more shocking, Konstantin thought, was the lack of information on the deceased, a former musician who had gone by the single name of Flo. After Lydia Stang’s death, Flo had given up music and taken up AR full-time, until someone had suffocated her. On-line, her reptilian alter ego had been swimming in the East River. Maybe that meant something, Konstantin thought, and maybe it didn’t. Why hadn’t anyone cross-referenced the two deaths?

Victims six and seven would seem to have killed each other in a gang fight. Konstantin found this extremely disheartening. In post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty, they had been a couple of nasty street kids, sixteen, just on the verge of adulthood. In realtime, they had been a pair of middle-aged gypsy office workers who had no doubt discovered that they had wandered into one of life’s cul-de-sacs and weren’t going to find their way out of it alive. They had both lived in urban hives only a few blocks apart in Houston, got assignments through the same agency, did the same kinds of no-brainer file and data upkeep jobs, and yet, they apparently hadn’t been acquainted off-line. Konstantin wondered if they had deliberately avoided ever meeting in realtime. On-line, however, they had mixed it up regularly. They had stabbed each other in a Gang Wars module; someone else had stabbed each of them in the privacy of their own homes. The times of death seemed to be in some dispute, but it didn’t look like anyone had followed up.

And now here was number eight, a weird Caucasian kid with a Japanese name.
Domo arigato
, Konstantin thought sourly, exhausting her entire Japanese vocabulary, and pressed for a summary of the common characteristics of each case.

There wasn’t much; each murder had occurred while the victim had been on-line in post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty. Two had been local; two others had been local to each other. And unless it turned out that the weird Caucasian kid had been a brain surgeon, all of them had been lower-level drones.

Konstantin sat back in the chair, thinking hard. Was serial murder back in style –
again?
Someone who had been enjoying pretend-murder in AR deciding to cross over? Or perhaps could no longer tell the difference?

She put in a follow-up request for a table of similarities among the AR characters and came up with a
Data Not Available
sign. The note on the next screen told her there had been no work done in this area, either due to lack of software, lack of time, or lack of personnel. Undoubtedly no one had thought it was particularly important to look into the AR personae. After all, it wasn’t as if
they
were the actual victims.

Were they?

For all anyone knew, Konstantin thought sadly, Sally Lefkow’s dragon would be more missed and mourned than Sally herself. Likewise for the rest of them.

Sad, and somehow predictable. She made a note to send out for more background on the victims. While she was reviewing what information she had, DiPietro and Celestine called to tell her mostly what she had already known, except for one very surprising difference: upon arrival at the kid’s apartment, they had found a nineteen-year-old woman in the process of ransacking the place. She would answer no questions except to say that she was the kid’s wife.

Konstantin checked quickly. Sure enough, the kid was the only – or the first – married victim. ‘Bring her down here,’ she told them. ‘Fast.’

‘He was looking for the out door,’ said Pine Havelock. ‘Anybody was gonna find it, it was gonna be him. And now look what’s gone and happened.’ Tomoyuki Iguchi’s self-proclaimed wife was sitting in a plastic bucket of a chair hugging her folded legs tightly and staring at Konstantin over the bony humps of her knees with a half-afraid, half-accusing expression. Dressed in what looked like surplus hospital pajamas, she seemed to be completely hairless, without even eyelashes. Her eyes weren’t really large enough to carry it off; she made Konstantin think of a hospital patient who had fallen into a giant vat of depilatory cream.

‘What out door would that be?’ Konstantin asked her after a long moment of silence. ‘Do you mean the one to the secret Japanese area?’

Havelock raised her head, staring at her oddly. ‘Get off.’

‘What out door?’ Konstantin said patiently.

‘Out.
Out
. Over the rainbow, Never-Never Land, where you go and you’ll stay. So you don’t come back to something like’ – she looked around Guilfoyle Pleshette’s office with distaste – ‘
this
.’