The Resurrected Man (14 page)

He wanted to look away, but her eyes followed him, locked onto his through the relay VTC. And suddenly he was in the past again, confronting her on the day she quit—wanting to talk her out of it but knowing that, whatever he said, it would be wrong. Her eyes were as piercing then as now, an intense green that cut into him like a laser. There was no point lying; she could see through him better than anyone. But she didn't seem to realise that. She kept asking for
the truth
, for
honesty
, when all he had to offer was himself. And she had already rejected that as a lie.

“Fuck you, Jonah McEwen,” she had spat, her eyes never leaving his as she crossed the room, gathering her things as she went. “You
and
your fucking father.”

He willed himself to move, to act, to do something before it was too late. But he was pinned by her stare. It took all his will just to speak.

“Marylin, I…” He stopped. He doubted that anything he could say would make a difference. He had never heard her swear before.

“‘You' what?” She shook her head when he failed to reply. “Exactly. Just ‘you.' That's enough for you, isn't it? You, you, you and fucking you. What about me? I need more than this. I can
be
more than this. If you want to sit in this box and play mind-games with the rest of the world, then go ahead and feel free. But count me out. I'm leaving you to it. It's all yours. Have fun. Fuck you.”

The door slammed, and suddenly he could move again. Her eyes were gone.
She
was gone.

And he was free—free to watch his father die in the explosion he had been supposed to prevent. Then to spend three years of his life floating in jelly while his brain rotted.

Free to die on the inside when she looked at him that way again. And once more, he froze for as long as the moment lasted—which could only have been seconds, but felt like hours.

She broke the spell by turning away and staring out the car window. Only then did he realise that she had not been looking at him at all, but into the mirror, at her own face.

Before he could think of anything to say, the car slid smoothly to a halt outside the EJC office building and the VTC was over.

Marylin opened the car door and stepped onto the sidewalk, swinging the briefcase ahead of her like a battering ram. Fassini lagged a second or two behind as he programmed the car to return to the garage. Then he was hurrying up the stairs and through the sliding glass doors, between the motionless sentries and to her side.

“Wow,” he said.

She didn't look at him. “What?”

“He really gets under your skin, doesn't he?”

“It's not that hard,” she said, stepping up the pace.

He only lengthened his stride. “When you're comfortable with someone, no, it's not. You and Odi, for example. But this is different. You were defensive before he even said anything.”

Christ, was it that obvious?
“Can you blame me?”

“I've read your report in the Twinmaker file; I know what happened between you two.”

“Well, then…”

“I just can't believe it's that simple.”

She ground her teeth and reopened communications with MIUACOC—normal channels only this time, not VTC. She didn't want Jonah back in just yet. Whitesmith instantly appeared in a window, his image frozen.

“Hold a second, Marylin,” he said.

She did so and concentrated on walking back to the basement where the interjurisdiction d-mat booths were. Fassini didn't pursue the conversation, much to her relief. She didn't really blame him for digging. It was his job, just as it was hers. But she wasn't used to being the one interrogated.

They passed through a hall filled with people. Law Enforcement Officers and the general public mingled in a multicoloured tangle. The babble of voices was incessant and loud, despite acoustic dampeners. She tried to shut it out, but it only increased her annoyance.

A scuffle nearby sent a young girl spread-eagled to the floor in front of her, and she stepped carefully out of the way, ignoring a LEO who nodded apologetically in her direction.

When she reached the stairwell the racket dropped to an echoing low-frequency mutter.

“Sorry, Marylin.” Whitesmith's face assumed a more natural animation, although she still wasn't sure it was real. “Just finishing a conversation.”

“With
him?
”

“Yes.”

“About what?”

“I can replay it for you, if you want.”

“Not yet. We're ready to leave. Do you still want us to go to
Faux
Sydney?”

“Not much point without McEwen, is there?” Whitesmith shook his head. “We'll give that a miss for a while, I think.”

She felt bad, then, for acting impulsively, for letting Jonah get a rise out of her. She should have known better than to allow him to drag her down to his level.

“Okay, show me the recording.”

His image nodded. A moment later, a smaller window opened in her workspace containing two faces: Whitesmith and Jonah from moments earlier.

“Well, that wasn't completely dysfunctional
,” the recorded Whitesmith said.

“
I don't know
,” Jonah replied. “
She did pull the plug on me.
”

“
Temporarily. I'll talk to her, give her a couple of hours to think it over. You too. There's a chance this could develop into something more productive.
”

Marylin grunted: the comment could once have summed up their entire relationship.

“
Old habits die hard, Whitesmith
.” Jonah's voice was tired, possibly even regretful. “
It'd be easier if we had some privacy.
”

“
That can be arranged, assuming Marylin agrees, as long as the sessions are recorded. I'll be available should a problem arise.
” After a slight pause, in which Jonah's eyes drifted half-shut, Whitesmith went on:
“There's just one thing I want to ask
.”

“
Go on, then.
”

“
You did seem put off by the thought of looking more closely at your apartment. Why was that?
”

“
She took me by surprise,
” Jonah admitted.
“I'll do it, of course. I just hadn't considered it prior to then.
”

“
Good. We need you to access the records in your housekeeper. Our technicians have been trying to see what's in there, but haven't had any luck so far.
”

A half-smile touched Jonah's lips.
“No worries. How about we deal with that when the time comes?
”

“
Understood.
” The recorded Whitesmith lingered, as though he was about to say something else. But in the end he simply nodded and disconnected.

“That's it,” said the other Whitesmith, real-time, ending the playback. “All he's done since then is ask QUALIA to retrieve the files for him and to follow up the Schumacher inquiry. It's my bet he won't last long; QUALIA says he's exhausted.”

Marylin chewed her lower lip, thinking. Jonah had asked for privacy during the VTC. Why? Because he was feeling exposed? Vulnerable? He certainly looked it. Whatever else she had hoped to learn from watching the playback, that was something.

“So what happens next?” she asked.

“Come back to ACOC and meet me in the lab. Bring Jason with you. There's plenty to do up here.”

She nodded. “Look, Odi, I'm sorry—”

“No worries. Completely understandable. I really thought it went quite well, considering.”

Considering what?
But she knew the answer to that question, and didn't want to hear it.

Marylin didn't have an office as such in Artsutanov Station. The rent on such a volume of habitat space would be orders of magnitude higher than her salary. Instead she had a site in the MIU workspace.
Appearing as a grid of black and grey windows superimposed upon patches of relative emptiness in her visual field, it reminded her of a morgue. Behind the windows—which did indeed bear a passing resemblance to the stainless steel drawers described in twentieth-century crime fiction—lurked grisly secrets better left undisturbed by the public; it was the job of experts like her to probe their depths, irrespective of personal cost. Sometimes she was tempted to add a splash of colour to the view, to mark it with something that spoke uniquely of her. Most of the time, however, she preferred to keep any aspect of herself as far as possible from the taint of murder.

Travel within the station was mainly by transit cabs, pressurised and silent, propelled by linear induction motors through tubes connecting diverse sections of the vast structure. The MIU-ACOC portion was small relative to the rest and decidedly cramped. Within ten minutes of arriving by d-mat, she and Fassini had reached the MIU laboratories and were fully appraised of the current status of what was becoming known as “the McEwen situation.”

Indira Geyten's assistant, Mereki Graaff, looked up as they entered, her dark hair tied back in a short ponytail. “Back again, Marylin.”

“We're meeting Odi. Sorry to get in the way.”

“No, it's no trouble.” The woman turned back to her work, a sly smile creasing her rounded features. “Don't often see
you
up here, Jason. Dirtside too dull for you these days?”

Fassini smiled and put his hands in his pockets. “Moonlighting.”

“Well, we could use the help.”

Two fragments of the away team were actively pursuing the investigation in
Faux
Sydney. A full forensic team was in the process of taking Jonah's unit apart and putting it back together, bit by bit. The other, consisting of just one technician and a large amount of diagnostic backup, was probing the mysteries of the unit's study, looking for any evidence of remote-operation technology. Neither team was making much progress.

The home team, on the other hand, had plenty of data to sift through, irrespective of whether it would lead anywhere or not. They had to eliminate the obvious.

“We have the results of the analysis conducted on particles found in the maintenance gel,” Geyten herself said from behind them.

Marylin turned. The head of the home team's attention was focussed only partly on the world around her. A large part of her personal workspace was taken up by the flood of information pouring through the lab. Walking carefully around a bank of processors, she took a seat and stared into space, pupils darting as she read.

“Dust, mainly,” she said. “Consistent with the environment of the unit and the regular cleaning it underwent. No sign of exotic substances; no genetic traces apart from those belonging to the subject.”
Jonah
, Marylin translated. “No sign of outside interference. The total particulate mass is consistent with exposure in the order of two to three years.”

She blinked, rubbed her forehead, then looked up at Marylin. Her eyes were red. “I think I've just closed the case against him. Sorry.”

“That's okay. We'd begun to assume he was in the clear anyway.”

“So I hear. Odi just called. He's been held up and would like you to proceed without him. He wants a complete rundown of the session you had with McEwen—stress analysis, cage profiling, the works. Can you help with that?”

“Yes.” Marylin swallowed a mild automatic protest. “I was there, and I know him. It makes sense.”

“You want me to sit in on it?” Fassini asked.

“Yes,” Geyten said. “You were there too, and you can be objective. Take the station over there.” Geyten pointed at an unoccupied cubicle. “Mereki will get you started.”

By the time they had each taken a seat the head of the home team was gone. Graaff organised virtual inputs, and a consensual screen appeared on the wall before them provided by the visual centres of their cerebral cortices.

“Audiovisual recordings here,” Graaff said, pointing at a window in which a compressed version of the VTC began. “Reactions here.” A series of smaller windows contained images of Jonah's face and multicoloured models of his brain. “Voice stress analysis in that panel there, by the shuttle controls.”

“I used an earlier version of this setup in Law Enforcement,” Fassini said.

“Good.” Graaff nodded. “That'll save time. I had a quick skim through the data while you were in transit. There are some features you might want to look at more closely.” The woman shuttled through the recording with the sound down. “Subconscious recall spikes here—and here. High stress readings in this passage. Some weird brain chemistry taking place toward the end, but I can't begin to guess what that means. Can I leave you to it?”

Fassini took over the virtual controls. “Thanks. We'll call if we need help.”

“I'll just be over here.” Graaff disconnected from the consensual view and went back to her own research.

Marylin let her lungs deflate. “Start at the beginning,” she suggested. Even to her own ears, her voice sounded weak.

“You don't have to do this,” Fassini said, studying her with a concerned expression.

“No, I do. So let's just do it, okay?”

Fassini operated the shuttle controls and the recording began, moving at normal speed.

“
Marylin, the link is established.
”

“
I know. Hello, Jonah.
”

“See?” said Fassini. “Listen to your tone of voice.
Más krank.
”

She ignored him. “Jonah took time-out in there. Go back. I want to see what's going on inside his head.”

He rewound, played the recording again at half-speed. The brain scans flowed less smoothly, moving from snapshot to snapshot without revealing anything obvious.

“You'd have to be a neuropsychologist to get anything from this,” Fassini muttered.

“Not really. Use cages often enough and you get to know the normal patterns. His hippocampus is way off-beam, and I'm sure those centres of his cortex aren't normally associated with speech and memory.”

“So what? His brain's a little dodgy.”

“So every little piece helps, Jason. Just help me do this by not giving in before we start.”

They watched the first minute through twice, until she conceded that she really hadn't learned anything definitive. Some of it
was
associated with memory, but it was mixed with other data she couldn't interpret at all. InSight had clearly damaged his brain more subtly than she had imagined—not causing lesions or anything so dramatic, but rewiring the usual pathways to follow more exotic routes. How the effects of that rewiring would emerge she had no way yet of telling; from the outside, he seemed reasonably normal.