The Resurrected Man (26 page)

“Are you going to point the finger at Herold Verstegen next?”

He looked up. “Why do you ask?”

“Because you hinted at something to do with him before.”

“No other reason?”

“Like I might wonder about him myself? No. He's a spook and no one likes him much, but that doesn't make him a murderer.”

“He and Trevaskis make a nice couple,” he said.

“Their disagreements are common knowledge. Verstegen regards the MIU as a subordinate branch of his security force. Trevaskis wants the unit to become a fully fledged subsidiary of the EJC. Neither aim is compatible, so there's constant friction. Your appearance seems to have brought it to some kind of head.”

“Not me,” he said. “The Twinmaker.”

“Games again?” She half-smiled. “I keep coming back to that too.”

“It is a theory,” he acknowledged. “I'm not sure I agree with it, but it's definitely suggestive.”

She moved around the room to a straight-backed chair nearby and sat down with a creak of armour. Her expression was wooden, as though she was hiding something more than just impatience at waiting for the latest body to turn up. In her hand was a folded piece of paper.

“What else is there you haven't told me?” he asked.

“Plenty, no doubt,” she said, too casually. “As you say, it's hard to bring you up to date immediately—”

“Anything specific?”

She looked at him for a long moment, then reached across to hand him the note.

Marylin watched him read with a feeling not unlike apprehension. Why, she didn't know, but the feeling was there. His eyes scanned the page once, then again, just as hers had the previous day. After the second time, he turned the page over and looked at the back. It was blank.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“I didn't write it,” he said, looking up at her. “Where did it come from?”

“I left it in the JRM office six months ago for you to find if you showed up there. When I checked it yesterday, that line had been added.”

“It's been analysed?”

“Of course. It's clean.
Very
clean. The envelope it was in, the one I put it in myself, hadn't been opened. The note was somehow written onto the page while it was still inside.”

“That's—” He stopped.
Impossible
, he'd obviously been about to say.

“It can be done,” she said. “I can think of one way.”

“Nanos?”

“No. Even they would leave a slight trace. Also, the paper hasn't been scorched or stained by ink. It's changed colour on a molecular level.”

“How?”

“By d-med.”

He leaned back onto the bed. “Ah.”

“You get it, don't you? If it was put there by d-med, then that means someone from KTI really is involved. So if you've got any information I should know, please tell me.”

He looked at her as though she had helped him reach some sort of internal decision. “It doesn't seem to be anything to do with the Twinmaker case. After all, you've just demonstrated that he wasn't anywhere near any of the victims during the times they were killed. But it may connect with Lindsay. I remember someone being here after Lindsay died—”

“Here?”

“In the lounge. He was threatening me, or implying some sort of threat. I can't remember what it was all about, or what he looked like, but Herold Verstegen's name keeps circling through my head—as though the two are connected somehow.”

“You think it might have
been
him?”

“I don't know for certain; I could even be imagining things—you know, plugging new data into old problems regardless whether they fit or not.”

“Spurious associations?”

“Yes. You see, when I first met Verstegen, I thought he looked familiar, although I couldn't, and still can't, remember where from. Maybe I'm trying to answer that question by connecting it to the flashback.”

She nodded, understanding why he had been reluctant to admit to it. It was tantalising yet frustratingly vague. Almost worthless, in fact, except as a sign that perhaps Jonah's memory was returning.

“What about QUALIA? Any flashbacks there?”

His expression changed to one of bemusement. “Why would there be? QUALIA wasn't around when I took the plunge.”

She explained about the memory spikes. He listened, but she could tell the answer before she had finished.

“No. I can't explain how I could've heard QUALIA's voice,” he said. “There must be another reason for the spikes. You interpreted the data wrong, perhaps.”

“There isn't another explanation. Not even QUALIA can find one.”

He leaned forward to wave the note at her. “Then it's probably irrelevant—whereas this note
is
important. It's
proof
that someone from KTI is involved.”

“I know,” she said, taking the note back from him. “That's what worries me.”

He sagged back onto the bed. “Why?”

“Because the Twinmaker left it there for me to find. He
wanted
me to find it. He doesn't care if we know about him, or his contacts—or you, for that matter. That's the scariest thing; he thinks it won't make any difference.”

“Then we'll just have to prove him wrong.”

“Yes, but—what if he's
right?
”

He met her eyes and didn't look away for what felt like an eternity. “He can't be. The only way to be sure he'd never be caught would be to stop now and lay low while the investigation peters out—which he might have done, had he been me.
This
me. The whole hibernation thing could've been nothing more than a ruse: I wiped my memory, went into the goop, made it look like I'd been in there a lot longer than I really had been, then led you right to me.”

She remembered Trevaskis' theory along the same lines. “That's not an option any more. There's been another murder.”

“Exactly. So he's still out there. We can still find him.”

“And he could still be a copy of you.”

He nodded. “Yes, he could. Or I could be a copy of him. Is there any way to tell if I'm the original?”

“I doubt it.” She floundered for a second; this was something else she'd never considered. “The markers in your spine would tell when you took your last few jumps. The only one before the last couple of days would have been on the nineteenth of April, when you returned here. Presumably you would've been copied by then.”

“Is that information on file? It must've been checked during d-med.”

“I'll ask. Hang on.” She e-mailed a text query for Indira Geyten to check the files. It didn't seem terribly important. It smacked of an exercise in existential semantics.

“Speaking of d-mat reminds me,” she said when she was finished. “Why would Lindsay have taken a jump?”

“He wouldn't.”

“Not even in an emergency?”

“No, never.”

“But according to the housekeeper records he did.”

That flustered
him.
“Are you sure?”

“Check for yourself.”

She gave him the date and time and waited while he looked it up.

“It can't be right.”

She shrugged. “Why would the housekeeper lie? Or who could have changed its records?”

“No one except Lindsay, to the last. And I can't think of a reason why he'd want to.”

“Unless he used his UGI to conceal someone else's.”

“But how did that person arrive? The jump is only one-way, remember.”

“I don't know.”

“Can we check with QUALIA?”

“No. KTI was running on mundane AIs back then. QUALIA had yet to reach ometeosis. In other words, e wasn't alive—”

“I know what it means. It's just a poor reason for not having access to the information we need.”

“Exactly. And now you know why KTI built QUALIA in the first place.”

“I guess.” He looked away. His expression hinted at annoyance, as though he had forgotten something. Which, she supposed, he had. Many things.

She went back into the hall to collect the remaining items of her uniform. He was quiet while she did so. On her return, she realised that this was because he was making or receiving a call via his overseer. She patched in to overhear.

“—of possibilities,” QUALIA was saying. “The Twinmaker may be diverting traffic elsewhere in order to cover the extra mass. If he knew the weight of his victim, a similar mass could be diverted, undelivered, to cover the discrepancy.”

“Have there been any complaints about late deliveries?”

“None that have not been accounted for.”

“He could be arranging the missing transfer himself, then. That way a complaint wouldn't be registered.” Jonah second-guessed the obvious next step with an ease that showed how much improved his reasoning faculties were. “There's only one problem. GLITCH doesn't give accurate information on weight, so he would have no way of knowing what sort of compensation he would need in advance. And to arrange something on the spur of the moment, while in the process of kidnapping someone—I don't believe he could do it quickly enough.”

“Perhaps you are right,” was QUALIA's reply.

“Perhaps.” Jonah sniffed. “Tell me, out of curiosity—what is the total mass/energy reserve at the moment.”

“Precisely 0.499 MLu.”

“One person's-worth short, in other words, of what it was yesterday, or a week ago?”

“Yes.”

“Is there any limit to how far back you can give me figures for the reserve?”

“Not in essence, although a certain level of secrecy does apply to information of this sort.”

“That's okay. I'm just curious to know if there have been any dips that haven't already been accounted for.”

“Other bodies?” Marylin intruded on the conversation.

“Or a copy that wasn't a body,” he replied. “Me.”

“Good point.”

“There have been other drops in the m/e reserve,” QUALIA said. “However I am not permitted to provide you with information regarding them all.”

Jonah sucked air in through his lips. “Is this something to do with Schumacher's secret archive?”

“Yes.”

“I thought it might be.”

Marylin suppressed an annoyed response, unwilling to go down that path again. “Are there any drops,” she asked, “that you cannot account for?”

“No,” QUALIA replied.

Jonah snorted and dropped out of the conversation.

“If that satisfies you,” he said aloud, “then you've gone even softer than I thought.”

“Not at all. I trust QUALIA, who has been programmed not to lie, and I trust Schumacher, who has the best interests of KTI at heart.”

“I don't trust anyone, and why should I? Schumacher's human, just like anyone. So's QUALIA, too, for that matter.”

“E's an AI, not human.”

“‘Not human' doesn't mean mechanical, Marylin. Any being complex enough to be considered intelligent must by definition be capable of lying.”

“Why?”

“Because—” He stopped, rethought what he was about to say. “Because that was the way Lindsay worked. His designs always included
a capacity for ‘negative information,' as he called it. He used to say that self-deception is one of the surest signs of true consciousness.”

Marylin almost shot back a comment about who Lindsay Carlaw might have learnt that from, given that Jonah had been adopted as a human guinea pig, but chose tact over old habits.

“Not QUALIA,” she said. “SciCon redesigned the QUIDDITY matrix when KTI commissioned a governing AI for the d-mat network.”

“How?”

“I don't know the specifics. They weren't after a human-analogue, so they took out the unconscious and some of the more esoteric features. The ability to lie must have been one of them. It had to be if QUALIA was to be trustworthy. Verstegen would never have allowed a loophole that large in his precious security net.”

“He had a say in this?”

“Schumacher brought him in specifically to oversee the installation. He was some sort of bigwig security specialist with heaps of experience in AIs. He ended up staying on permanently afterwards. I wasn't here then, and QUALIA was still being trained when I joined. There were bugs; people complained. People still resented Verstegen, even though he fixed the problem in the end. We haven't had a problem for a long time.”

“Apart from the Twinmaker.”

“That's hardly the same thing.”

“Isn't it? What sort of problems were they?”

“Record-keeping, mainly. Files going missing, transfers not recorded, IDs not registering. Minor glitches, but annoying. It was a matter of settling the database in, building up the world map, whatever. That takes time, just like with a person.”

“Exactly.” He leaned forward with one finger pointing. “And that's my point: QUALIA was once human enough to make mistakes, so why not, now, human enough to lie?”

She sighed and looked away. He was going in circles and dragging her along with him. “It's a moot point, I guess, without evidence.”

That made him smile. “At least I've got a hope of being proven right.”

“True.” She stood. “Are we done confessing secrets now? I'd like to get on with looking at the data”

“I thought that's what we
were
doing.”

“Hardly. There are still reams of housekeeper records to be double-checked with your recollections, plus details of the previous murders for you to familiarise yourself with. The more you know about the case, the more likely you're going to be any use to us, right?”

He shrugged. “If you say so. But I take your point. Best to keep busy. The wait must be killing you.”

She grimaced, uncomfortably aware how apt the comment was.

Before she could suggest a specific task, however, a red light began to flash in her visual field, indicating that an urgent call was waiting for her. It was, furthermore, a conference call with at least three participants.