Lost Time: Part 1 [Second Skyn] Read online

  Great, random orgasms. Another one of those little things no one tells you about when you sign your humanity away.

  She plops down beside me. “This guy I re-qualled last month—Constable Stevens, you know him?” I shake my head. “Really? There’s only a handful of you restored, you’d think you would.” She shrugs to herself and continues. “Anyway, I’m doing the interview and I’m sitting across from him. I lean over to take my tab back and accidentally brushed his thigh. Barely touched him. He tensed up like I’ve only ever seen naked people do. Tongue fell out of his mouth and his eyes rolled back into his head. His wife was sitting beside him, had to be in her eighties, she got up and never came back. I'll bet a month's salary, she hadn’t seen him make that face since the last time a Republican was President.” She lowers her voice, leans in close and breathes on my cheek, “It’s why they say the first few months in a new skyn are the best sex you'll ever have.”

  She jerks up and slaps my knee like a punch line. I flinch but nothing comes.

  “You’re in HR now?” I ask.

  “Only temporarily.” She says, taking in the room while she talks. I see through her eyes the empty Ibo bottle on the floor, the discarded package of Memoraze, the groceries still half in the bag on the counter. “I’m on line-of-duty leave, six weeks to go. I got loaned to the civvies while I recuperate.”

  That explains it. The civilians in administration were constantly complaining about being overworked. Better odd help than no help at all.

  “Was it bad?” I ask.

  She grins, pulls her shirt up, runs her fingers over a cross-hatching of pink seams along the right side of her abdomen. “Was chasing down three guys fleeing a robbery. Caught a slicer round. Came in here and went out all through my back. Lost three litres of blood. Had to replace my liver and regrow a bunch of muscle and intestine. Can't hardly tell though, can you?”

  “Slicers?” I have to fight to contain myself. She’s complaining about a few slicers? A bit of regrown skin and muscle? Anger that had been quiet for the past few hours suddenly flares.

  “I caught a whole 'van,” I seethe, “spread me across most of a highway.” I jab at my temple. “Everything in here is factory fresh. I’ve still got that new body smell…” I want to hit her like I’ve never wanted to hit anyone in my life, hit her over and over…and then the anger’s gone, deleted from my head like it was never there. I take a slow breath, put my hand up, rub my eyes.

  What is wrong with me?

  She’s quiet for a second, watching. “I’m sorry about your wife,” she offers. “Have you slept?”

  I haven’t. Every so often yesterday gravity’d level up a notch. My limbs got weak, my eyelids droopy, my thoughts heavy, but it went away when I ignored it. Happened a couple times, each time stronger and harder to resist than the last, but then it quit and hasn’t happened again. That was sometime early this morning.

  I shrug. “Yeah.”

  She pulls off her cap, rakes her fingers through her short hair, considering my answer. With her hat off her face looks like a teacup, a strong jaw that slants up around her cheekbones to a wide hairline. She nods, replaces her hat and flips her tab open. The official business has begun. “Are you ready to start back to duty?”

  “Isn’t that up to you?”

  “Somewhat,” she says with a wobble of her head. “Your COPA's cleared, and medically you’re off the charts—says here you have the body of a man half your age. One who has spent a great deal of time in the gym.” I take her word for it. I’ve been ignoring my new body as much as possible. I don’t tell her I’ve covered the mirrors in the bathroom. Or urinating feels like a homosexual act. ”The only thing left to determine is your mental state.”

  “I woke up yesterday a widower and a cyborg,” I offer. “My mental state is in line with that.”

  “Noted.” She thumbs something into her screen. “Have you picked out a meeting yet?”

  “A what?”

  “Restoration Counselling.”

  Counselling? She wants me to sit in a room with a bunch of smiling bit-heads and interface our outputs? What am I going to get out of talking to people as fucked up as I am? I don’t need a weekly session to remind me I’m not me anymore. The less I think about it, the better.

  “I’m good,” I say and jerk my thumb at the livewall just as a tropical bird in plumes of red and blue explodes from the trees and glides out of sight. “The IMP can tell me how I work if I need tech support.”

  “This stuff isn’t in the manual. These are other people, people who have transitioned, people going through what you are. It’s supposed to help, you know, sharing and whatnot. Think of it as AA for the undead.”

  “I don’t recall the Service’s health care plan covering voodoo therapy,” I play along, “but I’ll look into it.”

  “Don’t trouble yourself—I’ve already sent a list of times and locations to your IMP. You can choose one that works best for you.”

  “And if skipping it works best for me?”

  She looks at me as if to say 'what do you think?' “It’s for the Service’s ass-covering as much as it is for you—you’re on probation until we get three months of smiley faces from a counsellor.”

  “And if the news isn’t good?”

  “Then you keep at it until it is. They need to see you’re stable, that you’re not going to snap and take a bunch of your co-workers out.”

  She's studying me, waiting for my response. It doesn't seem like I have many options. I wipe the expression from my face and intone. “My name is Finsbury Gage, and I’m a bit-head.”

  “Is that what you think you are, a bit-head?” She seems serious, playing psychologist, like she wants to hear my answer. So I give it to her.

  “Digital Human. Reszo. Bit-head. Xero. Fucking abomination. All the same.”

  “Then why bother with the insurance?”

  “Wasn’t my idea.”

  “I see,” she says. Pauses. “So you'd rather be dead?”

  I bite back a reply—I’ve already said too much. The Service doesn’t need to know I'd have preferred to bleed out on the asphalt. I’ve been back less than a day, and I'm already exhausted from guilt and grief and wrestling with the basic nature of just being alive—but knowing that whoever took Connie is still out there gives me something to hang on to. Gives me a reason to justify being here. Besides, there's nothing to gain in confessing I'm having an existential crisis to the person responsible for deciding whether I'm fit to carry a weapon.

  “I’d rather get back on the street.”

  “Good answer. Work will make things easier—routine, distraction. It helps with the adjustment.”

  “Where am I being posted?” The Service's COPA regulations are clear in that the newly restored shouldn't return to their previous assignments. Some shrink concluded it's easier to fit into a new team than try to reassert your identity with the old one. That’s the official line at least, which means I’ll be out of Homicide.

  “Fifty-Seven,” she says.

  “Reszo Squad.” I knew it. Throw me in with the rest of my kind.

  Most of the original Canadian provinces had lead the Union in recognizing the Continuance of Personality Act that permitted the Restoration process—after the Scandinavian countries but before United Korea. While the majority of the former U.S. states had fought about it—the term 'mark of the beast' had not been under-used on the Union Senate floor—Toronto had become a global Reszo destination, and most had stayed even after President Ruiz was elected on the promise of immortality for everyone and expanded COPA Union-wide.

  At the time, most of Reszos active in the emerging lifestyle lived in or near Studio Alley, which a decade before had been a walled-off urban ruin, but in the intervening years had transformed into Reszlieville, one of the most exclusive postal codes in the hemisphere.

  Toronto Police Service’s Fifty-Seven Division was created to serve the massive concentration of restored, and the Psychorithm Crime Unit—Reszo
Squad—tasked with policing the list of never-before-considered activities that jamming computers into people’s heads made possible. Activities that, everywhere else in the Union, are enforced by the Ministry of Human Standards. The Reszo community doesn’t want heavily armed Feds patrolling their streets, so the Reszo community makes sure Fifty-Seven stays funded.

  I’m not trained for Psychorithm Crime. This posting is a political move, a bone to wealthy activists, and a way to keep me away from the cases that matter. I won’t go.

  I shake my head. “No way.”

  “It’s been decided,” she says.

  “Give me Major Crime or Guns and Gangs. Hell, bump me down to constable and put me on traffic.”

  “We need you in Psychorithm Crime.”

  “They want another token bit-head in their Reszo Squad to show off to the press. The Service’s commitment to diversity in action. I won’t do it.”

  “You have a unique perspective that will lend experience and garner sympathy in the community.”

  “I don’t even need this job,” I say, thinking of Connie’s money. “Maybe I’ll retire.”

  She tilts her head. “Even you don’t believe that.”

  “I’m not going to Fifty-Seven.”

  She leans forward, rests her elbows on her thighs. “Look, Detective Gage, things haven’t changed. The Service is understaffed—we’ve been leaning hard on the lawbots to fill in the gaps, but we both know they cause as many problems as they solve. Mayor Anders is pushing her zero-tolerance-on-crime broom again and every other day the feeds are pushing stories about problems in the Reszo Community—mindjacks, shyfts, scafes, dupes, Mark turf wars, COPA violations, Lost Time calls, you name it. Standards is chewing at their leash to get in here and start cracking skulls. That’s not to mention the rest of the complaints the Service deals with on a minute-by-minute basis. Reszo’s have got clout, Detective. They donated a shittonne for Fifty-Seven’s headquarters then pressured brass to scrape together a budget for a second shift of Detectives on Psychorithm Crime. And guess what?” She cuffs me again on the knee. I flash back to my dad doing the same thing—his one nod to affection. “You're one of them. The Brave. The Bold. The Lucky Few.” She gets serious again. “Reszo Squad or not, I’ve seen your record, seen your closure rate. They could use you. Hell, they need you. And you need them.”

  Goddamn those Service shrinks, they must have told her exactly what buttons to push. I want to argue, tell her I’m not that guy anymore and the world can go to hell as far as I’m concerned. But I can’t. And she knows I can’t. If I can help people…

  “Shit—” I mutter.

  She purses her lips, trying to hide a smile. She’s got me. “Dayshift tomorrow. Inspector Chaddah’s standing rundown starts at 7, and I hear she’s a stickler for punctuality. Nights start a week Monday.”

  “What about back-from-the-dead time?”

  “You already had six months, and I gave you today for bereavement.” I can’t tell if she's joking.

  Doesn’t seem like I have much of a choice. “In that case, I can’t wait.”

  “Good,” she hands me her tab. “You’re re-certified. Ack-it.”

  I scroll down through the document that takes twelve pages of legal jargon to say I'm allowed to return to work, but at the first sign of trouble I’ll be out on my reconstituted ass. I acknowledge it with my thumb and hand it back to her.

  “Now I'm official again, I want you to tell me something.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Who killed my wife?”

  She looks like she's been waiting for me to ask, takes a breath before responding. “We don’t know.”

  “Did anyone bother to look?”

  She clenches her jaw. “A cop was killed, Detective, one of our own. Not to mention six other people along the way. The investigating officers did everything they could and every time they hit a wall that old partner of yours wouldn’t let them give up. They canvassed the commuter lot for days without finding a single credible lead, tracked the van to the bottom of a quartz mine up north, tore it apart, had FITs run the sniffers over every millimetre, but nothing. It was registered to—”

  “Woodrow Quirk, some nomad coder. Tell me something the IMP can't.”

  “Every image of that van from the hundreds of cameras along the vehicle's path, private and public alike, were erased. All of them, do you understand? Clean strips sliced from the link. We couldn't recover a single frame or record or witness of the driver. Or of anyone coming to meet Quirk. Even Quirk's communication logs were wiped to six months before the accident. It was like someone had surgically removed every shred of digital evidence. The linktechs were stumped, said what they were seeing wasn't possible. We had nothing physical, nothing digital. The leads dried up and no more digging was going to help.”

  I almost tell her I saw him, to open my mouth and let the horror of the whole thing come pouring out, but something tells me to keep it to myself.

  She waits a beat, maybe for me follow through on why I popped my mouth open and closed. When I don't she scrinches her eyes at me for a second before leaping to her feet and saying, “Ok, I'm out. I've got a stack of dis-ab processing to work through.”

  She reaches her hand out and I take it, holding my breath. Nothing happens.

  “I spec I'll be seeing you around,” she says on her way out.

  “I spec you will,” I reply.

  ***

  SysDate

  [14:42:53. Thursday, April 11, 2058]

  After Yellowbird leaves, I use my newly refreshed credentials to log into the Service AMP and double check everything she told me. I don’t learn anything new, but I have something they don’t—a few milliseconds of the driver’s face nestled in my head. I get the AMP to load the facial imaging app and together we try to create a composite sketch.

  I close my eyes and immediately I'm back in the car, vivid red and orange leaves streaming past my window. Connie is beside me, radiant, beautiful. I can smell her. This is no fuzzy memory, it’s real, like I’m there again, and everything that’s happened since a horrifying daydream.

  She leans in and her fingers flex on my thigh. I want to stay here, forever in this moment, this perfect second with the warmth of her skin on mine and the future stretching out in front of us—before we knew it was all about to end. I want to stop and live in the crinkles around her eyes, breathe nothing but her scent. But no matter how hard I try, I can't stop it from happening, not even in my head.

  The van looms, the alert sounds, the restraints clutch. Again I see a blurry half-second of the man who caused this, the man who made me this way. I strain to see him, to make out any detail at all, but then comes the impact, the churning wheels, the sight of my wife ripped away from me.

  My glimpse was so brief, his face so shadowed, even remembering it over and over I can only manage a faint approximation. I can get his eyes, but the rest of his face is a vague guess. My first attempt at a reconstruction results in one hundred and eighty eight thousand bio/kin hits, Union-wide. Even with tweaking the features, adding as much detail as I can and cross-referencing for last known location, I’m still in the thirty thousand range.

  There's more detail in there, I can tell—I just can't see it. If I could slow it down, zoom in, up the contrast maybe—but memory alone won’t get me there.

  There’s something else though—the surgical precision with which the digital evidence was excised from the link. That’s no coincidence. You can’t go five meters without your image being captured by some form of surveillance or another. Someone cleaned up after themself. Removed all records of the van. Wiped Woodrow Quirk’s communication logs. Anyone who can do that, who has that kind of impossible power over the link, would have done it before. And no activity on the link goes unnoticed.

  I start tugging with general search terms about ‘link secrets’ and ‘unsolved link mysteries’ and go from there. The threads I find devolve into a convoluted web of conspiracy theories and general crac
k-pottery. Plenty of people have noticed strange things on the link. Files deleted without warning. Mysterious money transfers. Odd messages from no one and nowhere.

  Most dismissed the incidents as glitches in the trillions of lines of kludged code and interconnected systems underlying the link. But, as always, some aren’t willing to accept rationality as an answer.

  There’s a small and clearly insane group that insists the link has sparked sentience and the blanks in data represent it pruning its thoughts or excising unwanted memories, the messages a rudimentary form of communication. Some blame it on the Forgotten Synths, the first recovered personalities that escaped storage back before COPA granted them retroactive human rights. Others claim the anomalies as proof that the digital spirit of Klaxon Overdrive is haunting the virt mesh.

  Another community is convinced it’s ghosts.

  Either way, I can’t get far inside any of them. My StatUS-ID has too many official relationships to be granted an invitation. Being a Service employee has its perks, but access to underground link communities isn’t one of them.

  I could requisition one of the Service alt-IDs but then I’d have to make this investigation official, and I’m not ready for that. Yet.

  What I can piece together isn’t all that helpful anyway, except one handle: xYvYx. He or she—call it a ‘he'—pops up a good number of times, even through my rep restrictions. He’s a mid-rep, in the low point-sixes, but a low-rep celebrity, famous to those who don’t much count in the Social Faith scoring system: the criminals and the crackpots and the people who can't afford to buy a better rep. He’s been around for a long time, has a long history of contributing to sites and threads investigating and reporting on oddities in the link. He has a private feed of his own I can’t get anywhere near.

  Lately he’s expanded into touting himself a Rithmist, a coder who specializes in exploring and modifying the psychorithm, the digital extrapolation of the brain’s underlying neural code, and has been offering his services to the public.