The Unincorporated Man (19 page)

“Let’s say that this will help all of us, and make any past rough spots all forgiven.” Smiling in spite of herself, Irma waved for him to continue.

“Have you been hearing anything out of Boulder lately?” he asked.

Irma’s eyes took on that piercing look they got when on the scent of news.

“Maybe.”

Hektor laughed out loud, and said, “Damsah’s balls, woman, just how much do you know already?” Going on instinct she decided not to tell what she had, and only said that they’d heard that there’d been an unusual reanimation.

“Want a picture?”

“You know I do, but isn’t the Boulder revival clinic a GCI operation? Whatever happened to guarding the family secrets?”

“Let’s just say I’ve been reassigned since you last heard from me. Here’s the pict.”

Irma took a look at the full-body holo-image that appeared in the corner of her DijAssist and zoomed in on the face.
Handsome. Where have I seen him before?
“You in trouble, Hektor?”

“You care?”

“Well, if you need a job, give me another call.”

Hektor chuckled. “Irma, I may call, but given our… ahem… history, it won’t be for a job.”

Irma laughed at his crudeness. She saw that Saundra and Michael were also having a good time at her expense.
No regrets
, she figured.
Better they hear it all and catch an angle than me keep my pride
. Another thought came to mind.

“Alright, Hek. Am I the first you’re calling?”

“Absolutely.”

Irma chose to believe him. “How long?”

“I can only give you an hour,” he said, “then I’ve got to go public.”

“How about a half-hour, only you mean it?”

Hektor paused, considering the request. “Very well, for old time’s sake. A half-hour. Starting…” Hektor checked the time. “. . . now.”

The line went dead.

Irma was already up and heading out the door before Saundra or Michael could ask her any questions. “Move, people, we go now. Bring it or buy it there.”

Her team followed her out of the office and onto the roof, where they loaded into the
Terran Daily News
van for a ride to the New York orport. Once they were settled into the van, Michael spoke. “I ran the holo for any ID, and I found our man.”

“Who is he?”

“He’s supposedly a DeGen who works as a maintenance engineer for the clinic.”

“Right,” snorted Saundra. “A three-hundred-year-old DeGen. That makes perfect sense since… well… um, there was no such thing as a DeGen until a hundred and twenty-five years ago! Maybe Hektor’s screwing with us, Irma, to get back at you somehow.”

“I don’t think so,” Irma said. “Push the cover, and I think it’ll crack.”

“If it’s a cover it’s a good one,” answered Enrique. “DeGens have almost no records that can be traced conventionally. They pay all their bills through a holding company, and usually the holding company is a front for an embarrassed family that doesn’t want the connection traced.”

“It’s a fake, crack it,” commanded Irma. She went quiet as the team arrived at the orport. The New York orport, being the largest of its kind on Earth, was built with hard emplacement tubes rather than the gravity-assisted ones common to smaller orports such as the one in Boulder. It was actually more economical and suited better, given the tremendous volume of daily traffic.

Irma’s team made their way directly to the gate and entered their private t.o.p. At no point during the trip to the orport did any of them stop working. When they were settled in they allowed themselves to continue the conversation they’d started less than an hour before.

“It’s a sham,” confirmed Enrique. He pointed at his DijAssist for anyone interested in viewing it. “Look at the pattern of expenses over the years. It seems random, but it’s not. See how the pattern repeats if you look at it mathematically.” Enrique pointed at various parts of the scrolling data. Of course, none of the team knew what he was talking about but trusted his abilities implicitly, so they just smiled, nodded, and incorporated the new facts into their calculations.

“This is interesting,” said Saundra, coiling the strands of her hair around her forefinger. “The staff revivalist is someone named Neela Harper. She’s just been given a top-flight expense account and booked a passage for two to Florence, Italy.”

“Any data on who she went with?” asked Irma, without looking up from her DijAssist.

“Just paid for two passengers and left.”

“Conjecture?” asked Irma.

“In all likelihood,” answered Michael, “she’s been bought off. Think about it. You’re the no-talent revivalist stuck in Boulder. Not a stellar beginning to any career. The rich and famous have their own specialists brought in to cover them. So all you get is miners and the occasional broke tourist. Then, if we’re to believe what Hektor is saying, some guy from three hundred years ago pops up. You think they’d let someone like this Harper woman get near the guy? No way. They’ll call in Gillette, or someone of that caliber. Then pay her off to shut up and go away.”

It seemed convincing enough for Irma. “OK. Find out where Gillette is now. Also, see if anyone else at the hospital took a sudden leave of absence… and to where.”

Michael nodded, absorbing and inputting notes at a furious pace.

“Not bad,” said Saundra, purposely tempering her praise, “but this guy’s
already
been revived. In all likelihood Harper’s taking a quick trip to Florence to bring Gillette or whoever’s replacing her up to speed over dinner. A high muckety-muck would expect that kind of treatment.”

Irma considered Saundra’s take. “OK, follow through on it. Get a mediabot to Florence and check out the better restaurants. Start with the ones Dr. Harper has already been to. If it’s a big-time Vegas revivalist, I want to know about it.”

Irma switched gears. “Any luck on IDing our ‘Justin’?”

A chorus of nos.

“Come on, people,” she chastised, “they had records three hundred years ago, just find the face.”

Michael took it personally. “Irma, it’s not that easy. A lot of data got wiped out in the computer plague unleashed during the Grand Collapse. And most of whatever’s left still hasn’t been reconstructed. But even if the data does exist, I suspect it’ll be hard to come by. And not because it’s corrupted.” He paused a moment to let the next part sink in. “I suspect we’re talking about a massive government or government/corporate project. Those were always classified. It’s therefore likely that, whoever this guy is, he had his ID purposely erased.”

“Why do you assume it’s a government project?”

“Did you see that thing he was encased in? We’re talking a major investment of turn-of-the-millennium resources. Few if any pre-GCs had that kind of cash lying around.”

“OK,” agreed Saundra. “It makes sense. But I wouldn’t rule out eccentrics, either.”

Michael put down his DijAssist and looked up, eyebrows slightly raised. “Why not? Like I said, this is pre-GC, and most of the lemmings back then thought cryonics was a fraud. The whole meme was, for lack of a better description, prodeath and, conversely, rabidly antisuspension. I don’t see anyone, much less a rich guy, doing something like this with his hard-earned money.”

“Exactly my point, Michael,” continued Irma. “And don’t get me wrong. I agree that in all likelihood it’s probably a pre-GC government thing. However, it
could
just as easily have been done by an eccentric billionaire. Remember, eccentrics by their very nature don’t follow societal memes. So all I’m really saying is, given the magic number of ‘three hundred years ago’ as a starting point, it should be quick work to find a group of individuals with the resources to pull this off.”

“And someone with that kind of money,” continued Saundra, “would garner press, which means…”

“. . . which means there might possibly be enough leftover data to find our mystery man,” finished Enrique.

Michael shrugged and went back to his work. He reminded himself that it was the story that counted, and better one of them be right than none of them. However, that didn’t mean he had to give his boss the gratification of acknowledgment.

Irma made a few notes in her DijAssist and looked at the team. “OK, we touch down in another twenty. Use this time to dig, folks. And please dig deep.”

“And what’s our queen on high going to be doing while we do all the dirty work?” asked Saundra.

“I’m going to be checking on our source,” answered Irma. “Hektor hinted he might be in trouble. I want to see how much, and if it has anything to do with this.”

The interior of the t.o.p., now gently arching about 270,000 feet over Michigan, went quiet as the team dived into the Neuro in search of a nowhere man.

The somewhat bedraggled
Daily Terran
news team disembarked from the Boulder orport in much the same way as they entered—chatting, checking data, and arguing. In the midst of the din, and just as they were about to exit the building, Enrique’s DijAssist made a loud, horrible sound.

“What was that?” asked Saundra, shooting Enrique a disapproving look.

“Yeah,” added Michael. “You think maybe you can control that little thing of yours?”

Enrique ignored them all as he stood in place, viewing the information his DijAssist had so effectively made him aware of. “It only does that when it feels it’s an emergency,” he half mumbled to the group. He proceeded to check the information, ignoring the orport’s loud din as well as his peers’ sarcastic comments. He looked up from the screen, confused.

“Saundra?”

“Yes?”

“You were saying that this guy might be a creative, incredibly wealthy…”

“I never said creative.”

“Right. I’ll throw that into the ‘eccentric’ mix. Anyway, we’re talking about a person who would have disappeared about three hundred years ago, and who was not associated with any of the nation-state infrastructures.”

“That’s our guy,” confirmed Saundra.

Enrique shook his head as if he almost didn’t believe what he was about to say.

“I think… I think I found him.”

“Spill it, Enrique,” snapped Irma.

“You’re not going to believe it.”

“Either way,” groused Michael, “you’ll be antimatter in a few seconds if you don’t tell us the name!”

“I will, but you’ve got to let me drag it out just a little… .”

Now Irma was starting to get miffed. “No, we…”

“Who,” Enrique asked, ignoring everyone, including his now fuming boss, “is one of the better known pre-GC personalities of his time? And he’s not government—I’ve for sure ruled that out.”

Silence.

“Who disappeared mysteriously around… well… three hundred years ago? And who is
very well known to us
, and rich enough to have pulled this off, based on what I just told you?”

Michael’s eyes lit up. “No way. Tell me you’ve got pictures to confirm.”

Enrique cast a small hologram image of the man they’d all taken a more than keen interest in. As he did this the group instinctively encircled the image, protecting it from outside view.

“Are you insane?” Irma whispered, face taut. “Shut that thing down!”

They all stood there, staring at nothing, still taking in what they’d just seen.

“Enrique,” demanded Irma, “put that image next to the one Hektor sent us, and then
hand
me your DijAssist.”

Enrique did as he was told.

“Certainly a bit younger now,” Irma noticed. “Plus, no beard.”

Saundra was peering over her shoulder. “That would be the nano at work. But the bone structure’s the same…”

“And the eyes… ,” Irma added, “those eyes.”

“Almost like a hawk,” Michael agreed, squeezing between Irma and Saundra.

Irma was locked onto the figure like a cat on its prey. “I studied him in school, you know. I remember it was pre-GC history class, and of all the personalities we studied, he was one of the few I would have wanted to meet. He seemed too modern, like he was in the wrong age. And you’re right, Enrique. He did just up and disappear.”

“This is friggin’ crazy,” Michael said. “Unfriggin’ believably crazy.”

But there was no mistaking it. The man who had woken up just a day ago was not only pre–Grand Collapse; he was one of the few men of that era who had helped define that era.
Only Damsah would have topped this
, thought Irma.

“Well, that’s just great,” Enrique said, folding his arms in anger. “The biggest story of our careers is locked up tighter than a V.P. at GCI headquarters in a hospital in Boulder.”

Saundra was distracted by a message light from her DijAssist. It was feeding her live footage from the mediabot she’d launched less than an hour before. Her eyes bugged out when she saw it.

“No, the biggest story of our career is having pizza in Florence, Italy.”

Justin put the napkin he’d earlier placed on his lap onto the table, took a sip of wine, and uttered the name he’d yet to pronounce in the century in which he currently resided.

“My name is Justin Cord.”

That name
, she thought.
Where have I heard that name?
She desperately wanted to talk to her avatar, and cursed the virtual-reality edicts that made subcutaneous communication taboo. But then a light went on. She started to remember her course work in turn-of-the-millennium culture, specifically, a class about famous missing persons. Amelia Earhart, Glenn Miller, and the billionaire industrialist who disappeared… into thin air… on New Year’s… in two thousand…

“Damsah’s ghost, you’re Justin Cord!”

“Um,” he said, smiling. “I believe I just said that.” Justin almost hated to admit it, but there was a part of him that was secretly glad he hadn’t been forgotten.

Neela was shaking her head.
He could be lying. But why would he? It certainly makes sense, given where and how we found him. But
. . . She decided on a simple test.

“You grew up in true poverty and mastered business and corporate finance. You graduated from Yale.”

“Harvard, actually,” he interrupted.

“Harvard,” she answered in the affirmative, “when it was a respected university.”
Not much of a test
, she figured,
but… it must be him
. What the facts couldn’t verify, her gut could. This was Mr. Cord, alright. And she’d be willing to bet her paltry month’s dividend statement on that.