The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25 (Mammoth Books) (128 page)

Amber thinks about it for seven microseconds and says, “Okay – I’ve got that superimposition in place and I think I can do it but I’m not sure about the tone. Is it aggressive or seductive or hurt or confused or neutral or venomous . . . ?”

Rachel interrupts her. “I don’t want a list. Just update Alice and we’ll try it. Tarquin, come back.”

Tarquin’s state machine receives the notification message and breaks out of its loop. His immobile features begin to move. He appears to breathe. He blinks. His lips are clean and moist.

“Take it from the top,” Rachel says.

Tarquin takes Amber in his arms and moves his mouth towards hers. She turns away enough to evade his kiss and says, “Don’t kiss me. You can fuck me, but you can’t kiss me. I’m not ready for kissing – yet.”

Rachel smiles and says, “Not bad, darlings. Not at all bad. Quite effective and affecting. Just one thing, Amber . . .”

“Yes?”

“Lose the smile.”

Amber’s smile bends and curls into a snarl. Snot runs from her nose. Her eyes squeeze shut in pain. She falls to the floor, inert.

Seconds later, Tarquin goes catatonic, and his image fades to noise.

A siren begins to wail. Red emergency lights flash outside the control room.

Rachel, Jack, and other directors run down the long gloomy aisle from their capsules towards the control room. Jack leads the pack and punches the digits on the security keypad, and he’s first through the heavy door.

“What the fuck’s going on?” Jack shouts. senior Operations Manager Sunil Gupta is leaning over the shoulders of two console operators. Their touch-panels are Christmas trees of flashing red icons.

It’s a very warm summer night in Kiev. Crowds sit outside cafes and bars. The moon reflects off the rippling surface of the Dnepr River. A dark shape bobs gently downstream, turning slowly in the current. Tarquin Beloff, aka Alexandr Bondarenko, is physically untouched. He has no wounds, no appearance of damage. His handsome features surface and turn down again into the moonlit flow. His only problem is that his lungs are full of water and he’s dead.

The corporeal remains of Julia Simpson, aka Amber Holiday, have been bagged and sent to the mortuary in Corfu Town. Spiros and Alexandros are driving back to Corfu Town along dark, dangerous, twisty roads which weave between cypress trees and olive groves. Spiros’s mobile rings. He listens for a few seconds and gestures to Alexandros, who performs a risky three-point turn and accelerates.

Agios Stefanos is not the teenage shot-glass hell of Kavos to the south. It’s not the fish-and-chip zone of Sidari to the north. Once the tiny fishing port for the village of Avliotes which perches high on the surrounding hills, it’s a modern cluster of apartment blocks, tavernas, and bars. It has no disco. Self-respecting, numb-your-mind, under-twenties would hate it. The beach is a long crescent of golden sand and gently lapping Ionian Sea. Tourists know it as San Stefanos – allegedly renamed by package-holiday company Thomson so that reps at the airport wouldn’t keep sending clients to either of the other two Agios Stefanos on the island.

Alexandros drives into the centre of the village and parks outside The Little Prince apartments and taverna. The terrace restaurant area is busy. Cameras flash as Michalis (Mike) delivers Sizzling Steak to tables near the road. The platter steams and spits, and he wears a plastic bib. Michalis hates serving Sizzling Steak, but it’s tonight’s special.

As Spiros and Alexandros leave the car and walk towards the restaurant the lights dim a little, and another Spiros, who is a waiter, and yet another Spiros, who is also a waiter, begin to dance a sirtaki in the aisle between the tables. Corfu is awash with men called Spiros after the island’s patron saint, Agios Spyridon. Their legs swing back and forward and around. They touch their heels and then their toes. They jump down to a crouch and then spin and rise, their arms spread wide.

Dimitris, the owner, sprays barbecue lighter fuel from a bottle onto the floor and ignites it. Blue and orange flames flicker as Spiros and Spiros dance through fire and camera flashes.

The policemen wait on the side of the road, watching, until the dance finishes, and then skirt the tables and walk into the interior of the taverna. Dimitris gestures for them to follow, and leads the way through to the apartment block and up the stairs to the swimming-pool level and the rooms.

Room 101 is at the end of the corridor. A slippery-floor sign bars the way. Joe, the barman, keeps guard on the end of the corridor. He’s looking pale.

Dimitris hands the master key to Spiros, and they go in.

Angel Argent, aka Audrey Turner, lies on the floor face-down. She’s wearing a black bikini. An empty bottle of sleeping pills and a half-empty bottle of Metaxa are side by side on the work surface. Her dark brown hair is spread out around her head like a deep shadow.

Spiros says, “Skata!” – which roughly translates to “Oh shit!” – and turns to Dimitris. “How did you find her?”

“It’s a change-over day. People on night flights can get an extension to the late afternoon. One of the maids came in to prepare this room by mistake. By the way, her friend hasn’t turned up yet tonight. They had a bit of a row this morning.”

“What’s his name?”

“Not him – her. Julia Simpson.”

Alexandros and Spiros exchange one of those looks between policemen which contain the unspoken words “night” and “long”.

“Alexi,” Spiros says, “radio in and get a science team here as fast as possible. And bring some security tape from the car. Dimitri – be so kind as to keep this area sterile and put two Sizzling Steaks on to cook!”

Sunil Gupta is ending his presentation to an assembly of directors, producers, executive producers, and most importantly, Lynne Songbird, who owns the studio, the actors, the staff, FlashWorks, an executive jet or two, and houses in LA, Glasgow, London, Paris, and Bangalore. Sunil is scared. Lynne is volatile. Lynne kicks punch-bags with bare toes for exercise. She wants some good news, but there isn’t any.

“So basically,” Sunil says nervously, “we’ve lost quantum entanglement to five key actor brains – all within minutes of each other.”

“Keep the heid!” Lynne says, reverting to the Scottish idiom for stay calm. “How can that happen?”

Sunil points to a diagram on his electronic whiteboard. “We can only come to two conclusions: either the laws of physics have changed today, or these people are dead.”

Jack’s been in the corner talking on his smart phone. He comes over into the light of the whiteboard projector. “I phoned Angel’s mobile again,” he says. “A policeman on Corfu answered it. Amber drove off a cliff Angel took an overdose.”

“And?” Lynne asks.

“This many brains gone within minutes of each other? Looks to me like we’re under attack.”

There’s a long pause as Lynne’s blue eyes track across the room. “Jack, Sunil, Rachel, Jason – stay here. Everybody else goes home, but keep your phones on and be ready to go anywhere at very short notice. Thank you.”

When the room empties Lynne points to some seats and pours herself coffee from the flask near the whiteboard. Nobody says a word. Eventually Lynne sits down and says, “Okay. We need to be clear about this. Jack – you’re senior director on this movie. How much have we got?”

Jack is in his mid-thirties. He has unfashionably long hair and a patrician English private-school accent, despite the fact that he went to a crummy comprehensive in Bolton. “If we include some marginal takes,” he says, “I’d say we’ve got about eighty percent of it. Just a guess. We’ll have to do a slash edit.”

Lynne turns to Rachel, who is the second ranking director. “Rachel, do you agree with that?”

Rachel nods.

“So,” Lynne asks, “my first question is, can we finish it? We’ve got vast information from the actors on the computers. Haven’t we, Sunil?”

Sunil hates this. He avoids eye contact with the others. “Yes, we have,” he says quietly.

Lynne walks over and stands in his eye line. “You don’t sound very sure,” she says. “Why can’t we finish the movie using the personalities we have?”

“We probably can,” Sunil says.

“How big or small is ‘probably’?”

Sunil puts his forefinger and thumb into a sign for small.

Lynne steps away and takes a breath. “I’m very stupid,” she says. “We spend two billion Euros to get the most advanced movie-making system ever devised. We collect Oscars the way people get loyalty points in supermarkets. We hire some beautiful people with zero acting talent, hijack their brains, and then I forget that they’re human. They can die. We didn’t protect them. We’re gobshite.”

The blue eyes are unexpectedly wet. Jack’s smartphone buzzes and he swipes the screen with his finger. “Two more,” he says. “They’re taking out everybody.”

Lynne spins around and kicks a chair across the room. “Well fuck them!” she shouts. “This is fucking war! Jack and Rachel, see if we can rescue the movie. Sunil, get the whole of your technical team on it.”

Sunil has his head in his hands, gazing at the grey carpet. “Fine,” he says. “But we may have another problem.”

Lynne picks up the broken chair, sets it down very carefully, and says, “This is absolutely the time I need to know everything. What is it I don’t know?”

A white Learjet 85 is lined up on the apron at the west end of the runway next to the white terminator markers, trembling in the wash of a Whizz Air 737 bound for Prague winding its engines up to take-off thrust. The 737 rolls away down the runway, its wingtip lights flashing brightly; it rotates and lifts off.

The cabin lights are dim in the Learjet, but we can still see Lynne and her PA Jason sipping coffee. There’s busy radio chatter from the control tower, and then the Learjet begins to move, turning into the long reach of black tarmac, accelerates, lifts into the air, and flies southwards across Germany and the Alps, down the Italian coast past Venice and Brindisi towards Corfu.

Lynne is sleeping as the plane descends from thirty-seven thousand feet to five thousand and follows the track down the Adriatic towards the islands that mark the north westerly points of Greece. To their left the flight crew can see the rocky coast of Albania. Jason wakes Lynne with coffee and fruit juice. Orange dawn light is flaring over the mountains to the east.

Danny Edwards, the head of security, doesn’t sleep much. He’s sitting in his seat just behind the pilots, patched into the studio’s hi-tech and probably illegal network of satellite systems. He’s drinking herbal tea, which he hates, and the nicotine patch on his arm itches. He has his headset on and he’s calling in the return of a few favours, plus a liberal sprinkling of Euros. Sunil is sitting beside him, monitoring the exotic equipment in the hold.

The Learjet pilots have a few words with the tower at Ioannis Kapodistrias airport, lower their landing gear, extend the flaps, and descend to fifteen hundred feet. It’s a bumpy ride as the wind that brought the heroes of the Odyssey home to Greece takes them down the west coast of Corfu. The dark green mountains of the island are to the left. The Ionian Sea, plunging to a depth of sixteen thousand feet, is to the right. They fly past the villages of Agios Stefanos, where Angel died, then Arillas, Agios Giorgios, and Paleokastritsa, where Amber died. The beaches are all in shadow. The gods are asleep, even Korkyra, the beautiful nymph whom Poseidon abducted and married, and who gives her name to the island: Kerkyra.

They turn left and make their approach over the hills to the runway, which is a spit reaching out into the sea. They pass over a white-painted church on a small island. They touch down and savage the dawn peace with reverse thrust.

Spiros has seen a great deal of sudden death in his career as a policeman, but he still hates postmortems. He hates the bitter charring smell of bone-saws. He hates the calm evisceration, the digital scales, the organs, the dissection of somebody who laughed and loved into a scrap heap of components. He’s sweating.

The mortuary in the new blue-and-white-painted hospital in Kontokali, just north of the town centre, is state of the art. Amber’s mangled body lies naked on one stainless-steel slab and Angel’s perfect dark-haired beauty lies on the next, although she’s not so good-looking with her scalp peeled back. Spiros is pleased to be behind glass in the observation area and not up close and intimate with the body fluids. He’s even more pleased when his mobile phone rings and the head of the prefecture orders him to halt the postmortem. His pleasure doesn’t last long.