Tears in Rain (16 page)

And now where am I going?
she asked herself. At that very moment, an incoming call sounded on her mobile. It was Inspector Paul Lizard. Oddly enough, thought Bruna, she could still remember the Caiman’s name.

“We have a date in twenty minutes, Husky.”

“Uh-huh. I haven’t forgotten,” she lied. “I’m on my way over there.”

“So why are you on a travelator going in the opposite direction?”

The rep became irritated.

“You’re not allowed to locate anyone by satellite without their permission to do so.”

“Indeed, Husky, you’re quite right, unless you’re a judicial inspector like me. I can locate anyone I please. Incidentally, you’re going to arrive late. And if you keep going in the opposite direction, you’ll be even later.”

Bruna cut off her mobile with a smack of her hand. She’d have to go and see Lizard, although she wasn’t at all happy about it: maintaining her private detective’s license was inevitably linked to how well she got on with the police. She jumped over the handrail of the travelator onto the sidewalk and started to hunt for a cab. It was Saturday and a beautiful day, and Reina Victoria Avenue, with its central, tree-lined little park, was full of children. They were rich children, who were taking their plush, animal-shaped robots for a walk: tigers, wolves, small dinosaurs. One little girl was even flying a few handspans above the ground with a toy reactor strapped to her back, despite the prohibitive price with which the waste of fuel and resultant excess pollution were penalized. For what it cost the child to fly for an hour, a human adult could cover the cost of two years of clean air. Bruna was used to putting up with life’s inequities, especially when they didn’t impact on her personally, but today she felt particularly irascible, and the sight of the child made her even more bad-tempered. She sat back in the cab and closed her eyes, trying to relax. Her head was still aching and she hadn’t had breakfast. When she arrived at the headquarters of the Judicial Police half an hour later, she was beginning to feel really hungry.

“Hi, Husky. Twenty minutes late.”

Paul Lizard was wearing a pink tracksuit.
A pink tracksuit! It must be his idea of casual weekend attire.

“I’m hungry,” said the rep by way of a greeting.

“You are? Me too. Hold on.”

He connected with the canteen in the building and ordered pizzas, chicken-flavored sausages, fried eggs, hot rolls, fruit, cheese with toasted sunflower seeds, and lots of coffee.

“They’ll bring it to the evidence room. Come with me.”

They went into the room, which was empty, and sat down at the large holograph table. Paul ordered the lights to dim. Across the table, lit solely by the milky brightness coming from its top, the man’s face looked like stone.

“Listen, Husky, let’s play a game. A game of collaboration and exchange. You tell me something and I tell you something. Turn and turn about. And no tricks.”

Even
you
don’t believe that
, thought Bruna, and then she also recognized that she didn’t have much to tell. Not many cards to play.

“Oh yes, Lizard? Well, then, I want you to explain to me why nobody’s talking about the adulterated memories. And what’s on those memories.”

The man smiled. A nice smile. A surprisingly charming smile that, just for a moment, seemed to change him into a different person. Younger. Less dangerous.

“You go first, of course. Tell me, how do you think your client died?”

Bruna frowned.

“Clearly, she was murdered. I mean, they implanted the adulterated memory against her will.”

“How can you be so sure that she didn’t do it voluntarily?”

“She didn’t strike me as a woman who would take drugs. Moreover, she knew about the lethal mems; she wouldn’t have risked it. Especially after being threatened.”

“Ah, yes. The famous ball that appeared in her office. What was on the ball?”

“You don’t know?” Bruna asked, surprised. “Haven’t the RRM made it available to you?”

“Habib says he hasn’t got it, that you have it.”

“I returned it to him by courier yesterday.”

“Well, I’ve just spoken to him and he hasn’t received it. The robot must have disappeared mysteriously along the way. But you analyzed the message.”

Bruna thought for a moment. The ball had been lost? It was all a bit strange.

“Hmmm, one second, Lizard. Hold on a bit. It’s your turn to give me information, now.”

Paul agreed.

“Fine. Have a look at these people.”

The holograph images of three individuals began to form on the tabletop—three corpses: a man with a perfectly round and neat hole in his forehead, definitely a laser shot; another man with his throat cut, covered in blood; and a woman with half her face blown off, maybe by a conventional explosive bullet or by a plasma shot. Bruna gave a slight start; the half-face of the victim that remained was vaguely familiar. Yes, that misplaced ear was unmistakable.

“Do you recognize them?” asked the policeman.

“Only the last one. I think she’s a drug trafficker from Nuevos Ministerios. I bought a mem from her three days ago.”

“And what did you do with it? Have you used it?”

“Who are the others?”

“They’re all illicit traffickers. Known dealers. Someone has started to murder them. Could it be to take revenge for the lethal memories?”

“Or to get rid of the competition and be able to sell the adulterated merchandise? I sent the mem off for analysis. It was normal. Pirated, but harmless.”

Paul nodded in agreement again. Just then the canteen robot arrived with their lunch. The quality of the dishes probably wasn’t all that good, but they were hot and turned out to be reasonably tasty. They placed the trays on the table and, for several minutes, dedicated themselves to eating with silent relish, while the images of the three corpses continued to float around in the air. It seemed like a lot of food, but after a few minutes Bruna confirmed with some astonishment that, between the two of them, they had managed to eat all of it. The rep poured herself
another coffee and looked at Lizard with a benevolence produced by her full stomach. Sharing a meal with someone when you’re hungry predisposes you to complicity and coexistence.

“Okay. I think you were going to talk to me about the content of the holograph ball Chi received,” said Lizard, pushing aside the plates.

Bruna sighed. Her hangover was much improved.

“No, no. It’s your turn. I’ve told you about the illegal mem.”

Lizard smiled and manipulated the table again. Two new corpses appeared in front of them, floating like ghosts. Two reps. Strangers.

“I don’t know who they are,” said Bruna.

“Well, as you’ll see, they’re two odd corpses. They worked for the RRM. That’s to say, they worked for an outside maintenance company whose sole client was the RRM. Does this sound familiar to you?”

The private detective maintained an impassive expression on her face.

“How did they die?” she asked, stalling for time.

“Two shots to the back of the head. Executed.”

Should she tell him or not? But she didn’t want to reveal any details Habib had given her without the android’s permission. After all, he was her client. She decided to give Lizard a different piece of information instead of that one.

“No idea. I don’t know anything about that. As far as the holograph ball is concerned, you could see Chi giving a speech at—”

“No, don’t worry about that bit; I know what the message was about. Habib told me. What I want to know is the outcome of your analysis.”

“The disembowelment images are of a pig, and there’s a fifty-one percent probability that they’re not from a legal slaughterhouse but produced domestically. And I couldn’t find a single trace, fact, clue, or ID. Just...”

“Just...?”

“Can I use your holograph table?”

“Of course.”

Bruna used her mobile computer to request access and Lizard approved it. Within seconds the menacing message took shape in front of them. The table provided magnificent resolution and the image was life size; it was quite unpleasant. When the film had finished, the detective touched her wrist screen and transferred the original video of the pig, cleaned up and reconstructed. She focused on the knife, blowing up and sharpening the image until they could see the eye of the rep.

“Hmmm. So the sequence was recorded by a technohuman,” murmured Lizard thoughtfully. “Interesting.”

“You can keep a copy of the analysis.”

“Thanks. So the two androids who worked for the RRM don’t ring a bell?”

“I’d never seen them before in my life,” Bruna replied with the calm aplomb of someone telling the truth. “But it occurs to me that you could run them through an anatomical recognition program to check if the eye you can see on the knife belongs to either of them. Speaking of which, where did you find the bodies?”

Lizard gathered up the last bits of the soft cheese on the plate with his fingers and ate them with delight. A look of concern preceded the rest of his words.

“That’s the strangest part. We found all the bodies in the same place, in Biocompost C.”

In other words, in one of Madrid’s four main garbage recycling centers.

“In the garbage dump?”

“The two technos were lying on top of the most recent mountain of waste. As if they’d been carefully placed there. The garbage robots are programmed to detect any sentient waste products and raise the alarm, so they stopped work and did so. And the other, earlier bodies were partially buried in that same
mountain of waste, in varying stages of decomposition. The two males must have been dead for at least a month, but the bodies were reconstructed in the holograms you’ve just seen.”

“In other words they were somewhere else and were brought to Biocompost C.”

“Exactly so. As if someone had wanted us to find all of them together so that we’d link the cases. Obvious criminal clues for idiot detectives.”

Bruna smiled. This big man with the lazy voice had a certain charm, though it wouldn’t do to trust him.

“Lizard, I know there’ve been other, earlier, similar cases of rep deaths. Earlier than the ones that came to light this week. Four others. That fascist Hericio said so on the news. And Chi was investigating them.”

Lizard raised his eyebrows, genuinely surprised for the first time.

“Chi knew about them too? Well, well...Then it was the region’s worst-kept secret. And what exactly was it that she knew?”

“That they were three men and one woman, all technohumans, all suicides, and none of them killed anyone else before killing themselves. They took their own lives in different ways, all of them quite ordinary: cutting their veins, drug overdose, throwing themselves off something. The last three—I mean, the last in time, the most recent ones—gouged out one of their eyes. And they all had adulterated mems.”

“Nothing else? She knew of no other detail that linked the dead people?”

“Chi hadn’t found anything that would link them. They seem to be victims chosen at random.”

“Could be, Bruna. But, in addition, they all had the word
revenge
tattooed on their bodies.”

“All of them?”

“All seven.”

“Chi as well?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t see it.”

“It was on her back.”

“Gándara didn’t say anything about it.”

“You left in a hurry last night. Look.”

The close-up of a back floated in the air. Long, undulating, white. But marked by the purple outline of some bruises. Near the smooth start of the buttocks was the word
revenge
, written in ink in very distinctive, cramped, and rounded letters. The word was just over an inch long and about half an inch tall. It had that purplish grape color of tattoos done with a cold laser gun, like the tattoo Bruna had. They healed themselves as they were being done.

“That’s Chi,” Lizard explained. “But all the tattoos are the same, and they’re in the same spot.”

He switched off the table and looked at Bruna with a slight smile.

“I think I’m telling you too much, Husky.”

And it was true. He was telling her too much.

“Tell me just one more thing, Lizard: what do the lethal mems contain?”

“Rather than mems, they’re induced-behavior programs, outstanding pieces of bioengineering. And the implants evolved from one victim to the next. That is, their programs were becoming more sophisticated.”

“As if the first deaths were prototypes.”

“Or test runs, yes. The implants have a very short memory load. Thirty or forty scenes instead of the usual thousands.”

“The normal number is five hundred.”

“So few? Well, in these mems there are only a few scenes that make the victims believe they’re human and have been the object of persecution by reps...or technos. And then there are other scenes that are like premonitions; compulsive acts that the
victims feel obliged to carry out. Something like psychotic delusions. The implants induce a kind of programmed and extremely violent psychosis. The impact is so strong that it destroys the brain in a couple of hours, though we don’t know if that subsequent organic degeneration is intentional or a secondary and unwanted consequence of the implant.”

“And the obsession with eyes?”

“Blinding themselves or blinding someone else is something that started with the second victim. It’s one of the delusional scenes. Something voluntarily induced, without a doubt.”

“The criminal’s signature. Like the tattoo.”

“Perhaps. Or a message.”

Someone really sick has to be behind all this
, thought Bruna.
A perverse mind that takes delight in the removal of an eyeball. Of a rep eye. Revenge and hatred, sadism and death.
The detective felt a vague discomfort in her stomach. She must have eaten too much.

“And why has nothing been said publicly about this? Why is the business of the implants being kept secret?”

Lizard stared at Bruna.

“It’s always useful to hold back some detail that only the criminal would know,” he said finally with his lethargic voice, after a somewhat overlong silence.

“You had the tattoos for that. Why keep something quiet that proves that the reps are victims as well, and not just frenzied killers?”