Virtually True (10 page)

The driver looks back, spitting out her window carefully so as not to spray her passenger. Just that’s worth a tip. Past the national broadcast corporation where the day’s major stories are neoned as headlines. Today:
Muslim Insurgents Murder 472 Luzonians in Terrorist Attack.
Tomorrow only the number will change. True checks the time, realizes he has to call New York before the lab closes. He types in
Slovo de Bris,
and after the usual run of four or five 15-second advertisements in deadtime, a 3-D image of his friend floats before his eyes.

“Hello, True,” de Bris says brusquely, his lab coat starched and stiffly white, his face puffy from constant weight fluctuations. De Bris is in one of his thin phases. When True was just a collection of sperm cells and ovum in a test tube, did he look through the glass and see someone like de Bris?

“How are you, de Bris?”

“You didn’t follow proper safety precautions. I opened up your package and was faced with blood and bits of skin and some unbreakable plastic shards. Thanks a lot.”

The driver rolls down her window to scream at a grappler. She jiggles the steering wheel, tries to shake the extra weight to conserve fuel.

“Where are you calling from?”

“A taxi.”

“I almost had to pass up dinner: a hormone-free roast leg of lamb, homemade mint jelly, organic oven-roasted yams, and, for dessert, a lovely forest berry tart made with pesticide-free fruit. It cost a fortune.” De Bris is addicted to food, his seasonal obesity testing his wife’s loyalty. Three times a year he has fat cells drained from his body in what True always thought of as a bulimia program for the rich. True wonders what he does with all that leftover lipid. Make soup stock?

“I presume business is, as usual, booming.” Since the government moved toward privatization in grand fashion, farming out work to the private sector, de Bris’s lab has been thriving. It doesn’t hurt that forensics is the fastest growing medical field in the U.S., or that murder and terrorism top the crime stats.

“I have my days.” De Bris puffs out his cheeks.

“What were your findings, maestro?”

“Let me pull them up on screen. Can you see?”

“Yeah.” As the cab jumps up and down over the rough, potholed street, angular models, enzymes, ions, protons, and chemical formulae air-dance frantically, matching True’s wrist movements. “I see them. What do they mean?”

“I found particles of a highly durable material embedded in the traces of skin you supplied that had the same properties as the swatch of material you sent along. I also found powder—TNT powder, which leads me to believe that, at least from the evidence you’ve supplied thus far, at least two people were struck by an explosive device. I identified two sources of blood, type A and O negative.”

“Go on.”

“The A blood originated from a male, approximately 35 years old. Blood analysis shows he spent a great deal of time in tropical climates. There were traces of malaria, giardia, bilharzia, and dysentery, along with scads of other Southeast Asian microbes. In fact, the subject was recently exposed to Japanese encephalitis.”

“How recently?”

“One and a half, two weeks before he died. I can’t be any more precise than that.”

“Anything else about the male subject?”

“Well, nothing groundbreaking. What are you looking for?”

“Anything that will help me find out who killed him.”

“Well, first, let me tell you about the other subject. A girl, aged ten or eleven, I’d say. She suffered from a cornucopia of illnesses. Her growth was stunted from lack of food, and she carried traces of bubonic plague, dysentery, malaria, elevated white cell count—probably lived near sources of radiation.”

“What kind of radiation?”

“Toxic waste would be my guess. Not the same ions as a nuclear plant or blast. I’m afraid running a trace and superimposing pockets of residences on a map of potential toxic waste site areas wouldn’t be of much help. I already thought of that.”

“Because it’s so common. So there’s no way of pinpointing where she lived?”

“Not from this evidence.”

“Given the medical data, there’s no chance they were in contact before the explosion?”

“Probably not. Lots of microbes and afflictions, but from different sources.”

“Tell me about the explosion.”

“The explosive was your run-of-the-mill but highly effective TNT charge, carried in plastic explosive casing, the type you’d find at construction sites, mines, and in many weapons.”

“How would I find the manufacturers of this explosive?”

“I could walk outside my office and pick up enough of this explosive to blow up the White House. Might not be a bad idea either.”

“The bomb was carried in a sophisticated missile, guided by software able to key in on a person’s DNA. Why equip a sophisticated piece of hardware like that with TNT?”

“For the very reason we’re scratching our asses wondering why. Compressed TNT works: It’s reliable, so widespread that it’s impossible to trace, and cheap.”

“What else did you find? Any traces of the missile?”

“Well, the outer shell was probably plastic, but I can’t be sure.”

True spots crumbs on de Bris’s shirt. His weight is going to yo-yo back up again soon. “Why not? Can’t you trace plastic?”

“Not in this case. My guess is that it was a type of plastic designed to disintegrate in an explosion.”

“Wouldn’t that make it unstable?”

“Not unless the targeted DNA makes contact with it.”

“What do you mean?” True leans hard into the door as the cab veers left.

“I mean, this device was sophisticated in the sense of guidance system and trigger mechanisms. It wouldn’t go off, I assume, unless the DNA it’s programmed to come in contact with makes actual contact.”

“So in other words, this missile could have collided with a house and wouldn’t have gone off.”

“Or a car. Or another human, although the guidance system seems to have been sophisticated enough that the missile was able to miss everything except the intended target. I accessed your video file and mapped out its flight path. Smart little fucker. It bobbed and weaved like a heavyweight fighter.”

“Or a Luzonian taxi,” True says, his head skimming roof. They skid to a pause, stall, then run Nerula’s lone traffic light, which nobody heeds anyway. Right of way goes to the biggest vehicle. “You see the missile on screen. Why can’t you tell me who made it?”

De Bris scoffs. “Do you think somebody who has the resources and technology to commit a hit like this is going to leave a calling card? The shell doesn’t mean shit: It isn’t as if you’ll find a decal. You can’t judge a missile by its cover. As for the flight path, it could have been preprogrammed, could have been fired from twenty feet away or two thousand miles. Best way to avoid getting wiped out by one of these babies is to stay inside a well-fortified bunker. Better yet, don’t let anyone in on your DNA sequence.”

“No idea as to its range?”

“No.”

True looks out the window, watches bruised clouds collide against the mountains. A single drop of rain on the windshield, but no others. “Shit.”

“Who bought it?” de Bris asks.

“A friend.”

“Tough luck.”

“A shanty girl too.”

“Even the most sophisticated bomb guidance system doesn’t care who gets in the way at the moment it makes contact with the intended DNA sequence. One of them was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

De Bris clears his throat. “Sorry. I hear about tragedies like this every day. You’re lucky you’re not here in New York. Things have really gone toxic. This morning four corporations boycotted their trial on conducting drug, virtual reality, and psychological experiments on unsuspecting citizens. Some of these people were driven to suicide. Others ended up in psych wards. Ugly shit. But you’d know all about that.”

“Thanks, de Bris.” A twinge, that’s how True would describe it, in addition to his hospital-stay memories. There is something familiar about what de Bris is saying, something that stimulates True’s memory neurons, but he can’t place it. Isn’t sure he wants to know. Says, “You think they’ll get away with it?”

Sputtering, de Bris accidently spits on his screen. “Sorry.” He rubs away the spittle with his sleeve. “I’m sure these corporate gods will get off. Hell, they’ll probably fine the victims. Already affiliated companies are threatening to relocate their operations abroad and take their technology with them, if there’s a guilty verdict. The government is divided on whether to prosecute.”

“Corps rule. I can imagine the electronic town hall is overloading its circuits with constituents’ calls to Congress.”

“Mostly in favor of dropping the charges. I mean, fuck! Unemployment is at twenty-five percent. No one wants to see corps pack up and leave. America doesn’t need the vote anymore, now that we live in a
corpocracy
.”

De Bris falls silent, as if everything that needs to be said has been said.

True says, “Let’s get back to the plastic. Have you come across anything like it before?”

“In a murder victim?”

“Anytime. Read anything about it? See it? Experience it?”

“No, not unless—wait—yeah. There’s a new microcamera used for diagnostic medical tests. Shoot it into a patient and you get clear pictures of arteries, veins, organs. Kind of like
Fantastic Voyage
.”

“And these cameras are made from plastic?”

“Yes. They disintegrate after 24 hours or so.”

“Do a lot of companies manufacture this camera?”

“Only one, far as I know. A Japanese firm. I can’t recall the name.”

True starts. “Can you find out?”

“Hold on a sec.”

True watches de Bris type in commands on his console. The taxi slows, squeezing into traffic, then is cut off by a city bus spewing grapplers. The taxi rams into a bicycle rickshaw, running it onto the sidewalk. But then they’re stuck in traffic. The driver punches the horn, yelling along with it. Like a sing-along, True thinks. As the car idles, True watches an auto-sprayer painting road lines. Another UN development project: more traffic symbols to be ignored. A dead body lies on the road and the robotic sprayer engulfs it, then flattens it into a pancake with a yellow line bisecting it. No other cars are coming on that side of the street to mush it down, although True doesn’t know why.

“Hmmm. I was wrong,” de Bris says. “It’s an American company: MedTekton. Based here in New York.”

True snaps back to attention. “Not one of the corps on trial?”

“No. Nice try.”

“Anything else I should know?”

De Bris reflects a moment. “No, except that by the look of it, this missile could have been fired by any number of hostile groups in—what’s that capital city again?”

“Nerula.”

“Nerula. There are so many damn countries I can’t keep track. Fifty years ago, there were 180. Today, more than 250. Where is Luzonia anyway?”

“Next to Malayanalaya.”

“And where the hell is that?”

“Next to Luzonia. They’re both young Southeast Asian republics.” True’s trying to be helpful.