“We found your next yard sale buyer,” Dolniak said, indicating the body sprawled on the floor by the bed.
“How do you know?”
“Couple of reasons. One, look at the back of his head.”
“Can I, uh …” She gestured to the sheet covering the body.
“Go ahead. We’ve already got what we need.”
She lifted the sheet. The body had fallen facedown and the first thing she noticed was that the head was intact. “No forced download?”
“No. That’s the thing that doesn’t fit here. This victim wasn’t wired at all.”
Li felt a shiver of apprehension. “Can I get a look at the face?” she asked.
Dolniak turned the corpse over, lifting it as easily as if it were a rag doll.
Korchow’s face looked different in death. Smoother, less cynical. More like the Syndicate construct he was and less like the human he’d passed for in life.
“You know him,” Dolniak said.
“Yeah.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. We weren’t exactly friends. He was a Syndicate spy.”
Dolniak started. “You mean he’s not human?”
“No.”
“He looks human enough.”
“He’s KnowlesSyndicate. They’re diplomats and spies. They need to be able to talk to humans to do their work. And sometimes they need to be able to pass as human.”
Dolniak appeared to consider this for a moment. “But if he’s a construct, then you might not know him after all. Isn’t that right? This could just be another construct from the same geneline.”
“I doubt it.”
“You can’t be sure, though.”
But she could be sure, Li realized, as the memory of a sunny spring morning during wartime welled up in her mind. The memory wasn’t pristine, unlike that long-ago morning. It had been washed and spun and redacted so many times that it was impossible to tell now what was real and what was just UNSec ass-covering. But she’d seen the scar twice in the years since—years during which UNSec hadn’t had access to her hard memory. And Korchow had told her things about that morning that no one who wasn’t there could possibly have known.
She bent down and pulled aside the collar of his shirt. And there it was. A long, jagged scar, healed badly, that snaked down the side of his neck and over his collarbone.
“It’s him,” she said.
“You know the scar? You’re sure about that?”
“Sure as death.” She laughed, sharp and bitter. “I gave it to him.”
Dolniak looked at her across the dead body, and his expression managed to convey more contradictory feelings than Li would have thought such a quiet face could contain.
“I’m going to need your NavComp logs for the relevant time frame,” he told her. “Not that they mean anything. I’m sure you know how to fake them in ways a simple country mouse like me wouldn’t even imagine.”
“Guess that still leaves you stuck with good old-fashioned country mouse detective work.”
“Yeah. I’m good at it, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“I’m glad. Plenty of guys would already have locked me up and thrown away the key.”
Before she could answer him, there was a bustle in the hallway and the coroner arrived. He greeted Dolniak with easy familiarity, spared a brief, incurious glance for Li, and began laying out his tools on the floor next to the body. He was wired—of course he would be—and as
he bent over, Li got a glimpse of an angry rash around his input/output socket. It startled her. Other than listening to Router/Decomposer’s complaints about throttling and slow load times, she hadn’t been paying nearly enough attention to the progress of the wild AI outbreak on New Allegheny itself. Partly, she now realized, because the only organic on New Allegheny she’d had much contact with was Dolniak. And being wired was so normal in her world that it was always an effort to realize that he was unwired, and thus far more resistant to the outbreak than most people.
She suppressed an instinctive urge to step back from the coroner—and instead forced herself to consider the outbreak from his perspective. To ALEF and the privileged AIs of the inner worlds, wild AI was a threat that undermined their attempts to prove that organic and artificial citizens could coexist without conflict—or at least without more conflict than usually accompanied the rise toward full civil rights of any ordinary minority. To Helen Nguyen and UNSec, wild AI meant a potentially fatal loss of control over a double-edged technology. In the war zone DNA-platformed AI was their only hope of triumphing over the Syndicates. But back home in the inner worlds it was a dark cancer eating away at the foundations of a status quo designed for and by humans. And for the people of New Allegheny? A once-free people who were now wards of a newly claimed UN Trusteeship, locked out of any hope of controlling their own lives precisely because they lacked access to the high-speed virtual worlds in which every decision in UN space that mattered was debated and decided? What did wild AI mean to them?
And what did it mean to this man? His parents had probably sold his birthright to buy him a wire job that was decades out of date before he went into the viral tanks for his implant surgery. His options in life were defined and circumscribed by the fact that he could only creep along in the back roads of streamspace, clocking at speeds so slow that the only job he’d ever qualify for was in a backwater police station. And now he had acquired—for free and by accident—a massive parallel processing infrastructure that was built into his very cells and that no
one could take away by any act short of outright murder. UNSec might call it a disease … but what did
he
call it?
Nothing in the man’s face gave Li any hint of the answer to that question. In fact, he seemed to be going about his business as usual, neither disturbed nor ecstatic about the profound changes being wrought in the genetic information that he encoded and embodied. He was trying to tell Dolniak something about the body. And Li peered over his shoulder, too, curious to see what he’d find.
But Dolniak had other ideas. “Would it surprise you to hear that your Mr. Korchow—if that really is his name—seems to have left you a little courtesy message?”
“Seems to have?”
“We can’t open it. That’s why you’re here instead of back in the lockup waiting until I feel charitable enough to get around to bailing you out.”
He turned and walked into the bedroom, leaving her to follow. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the gloom. Then she saw that Dolniak was standing by the room’s cheap flat-screen monitor with a handheld remote in his outstretched palm.
Li took it doubtfully. She’d used them occasionally in her half-remembered childhood, but she wasn’t sure she could even remember how.
“Go ahead,” Dolniak said, misinterpreting her hesitation. “It’s coded to your DNA. I sure as hell can’t open it.”
Except it wasn’t coded to Catherine Li’s DNA. It was coded to Caitlyn Perkins’s DNA. Korchow had always known that Li’s Peacekeeper files were faked. The first time they’d met he’d used the knowledge to blackmail her. But how had he gotten the original geneset? Had Cohen given it to him? And if so, did that mean that Cohen had predicted she would arrive on New Allegheny as Caitlyn and not Catherine? Li wasn’t sure how she felt about that. In fact, she was getting increasingly fuzzy about the real distinction between the two women even as she felt their identities spiraling uncomfortably in opposite directions.
She fumbled with the remote. The message began to play.
It was Korchow, but not Korchow as she’d ever seen him. He was bruised, bloody, battered. The corpse in the next room didn’t look much worse than this.
“They must have locked him in here at some point,” Dolniak guessed, “and not realized he could use this to record something.”
Li could understand the lapse. She wouldn’t have imagined it, either. The thing was a dinosaur.
“They know about you,” Korchow rasped through cracked lips.
His voice was hoarse, his breath short and wheezing. Li knew that sound; the knowledge welled up from the murky depths of interrogation memories that she was pathetically glad UNSec had spliced and doctored into press-release-ready official war stories. Korchow’s jailers had broken his ribs, and his lungs were starting to fill with fluid. If he’d lived, he would have been mere days away from fatal pneumonia and in desperate need of the most basic medical care. Not that it mattered now.
“I didn’t tell them,” Korchow continued, each word coming harder than the last. “They knew when they got here. They know things only Cohen could have known. They have a fragment. It’s the only thing that makes sense. And that means they might know everything.”
He broke off to wheeze and wipe his bloody mouth. Then he glanced toward the door. Had he heard a noise outside? Were they out there? Were they coming for him?
“Run!” he whispered. “Run and don’t look back. There’s nothing you can do now except save yourself!”
Korchow lifted a hand to the screen. The message cut out and lapsed into static.
Li stood in front of the screen for a moment, getting her breathing back under control. She turned to Dolniak, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to meet his eyes.
“Can I go?” she asked.
“You want me to let you walk out of here alone? After seeing that?”
“I can take care of myself.”
“Better than Korchow?”
She bit her lip.
“I’ll walk you home. And I’ll post a guard outside your door.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me. It’s not a favor.” He smiled, but the smile died before it reached his eyes. And truth be told, it hadn’t started out too healthy, either. “You’re the only suspect I’ve got, darlin’—I have to make the most of you.”
Dolniak was as good as his word. He walked her back to the hotel. He checked her room. He called the station and waited until the patrolman arrived. But all the while he radiated a fury that Li didn’t understand. Or maybe she just didn’t want to understand it.
“Caitlyn,” he asked finally, “what was he to you?”
“Korchow?”
He made an angry gesture. “Not Korchow! You know what I’m asking. Cohen.”
Li looked at him. At the powerful shoulders braced against potential disappointment and humiliation in a way that made her acutely aware of the vulnerable little boy he had once been. At the plain, honest face of a man who might play at being a flirt but would actually give all of himself to any woman he was halfway serious about—simply because he didn’t have it in him to do anything by halves.
She should have seen it coming. But of course she had seen it. And she’d let things slide because it got her his cooperation and information … and maybe just a little bit because it had made her feel better when she was miserable and lonely. She realized that she’d been lonely for a long time now. Because Cohen had left, in every meaningful way, a long time ago.
She looked across the room at Dolniak, knowing it would be safer—and probably smarter—to lie to him, but suddenly unable to do it. She was unnerved by his ability to compel her to honesty. She hadn’t expected that, any more than she’d expected what she was feeling now. She remembered something Cohen had said once about knowing himself less well the older he got. He’d been right, of course. That shouldn’t surprise her, even if everything else about this moment did.
“I told you, he was my husband.”
“Yeah, you said the word. But then you let me think it didn’t mean anything.”
“You say that like you think I took advantage of you.”
“Didn’t you? Not that I didn’t make it easy for you.”
He waited, his silence pulling at her more effectively than any question. She resisted, but not for long.
“He was my husband,” she said. “What does that usually mean?”
“You loved him.”
“Yes.”
“Do you still love him?”
There were tears in her eyes, but she willed herself not to blink or brush them away.
“Of course I do.”
She waited for the accusations she was sure were coming. But she’d underestimated him, as usual.
He looked intensely uncomfortable and embarrassed for a moment. Then he cleared his throat and looked away. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said with uncharacteristic formality.
He stood up and began moving around the room with all his usual calm and deliberation. He collected his gear, his coat, his files. Li watched him, feeling oppressed and breathless. The space suddenly seemed too small to contain both of them.
“Do you understand just how guilty you look right now—and how close you are to getting arrested for real?”
“Yes.”
He started to pace, then turned back on her, looking very large and very angry.
“I can’t produce a single piece of evidence that points at anything but you coming out here on some kind of insane suicide mission to single-handedly assassinate every son of a bitch who benefited from your husband’s murder. And all I have to put against that is a gut feeling that you’re not the killer. Sooner or later I’m going to start wondering if that feeling isn’t just my not wanting you to be the killer. Or worse, someone’s going to get impatient and yank the file upstairs, and then you really will be dealing with the kind of guys who’ll hang the crime
on you because you’re easy to catch—and with your history, damn easy to convict.”
“Didn’t you hear what I told you, Dolniak? It’s not just about me anymore. Korchow’s KnowlesSyndicate. You’re in over your head already. Don’t make me drag you in any deeper.”
But instead of answering her, he just rubbed at the faded tattoo, in an unconscious gesture whose meaning Li couldn’t decipher. Was he reminding himself of the words stamped there, or trying to rub them out?
And his reply, when it finally came, didn’t answer her questions.
“You have no idea how deep in I am.”
He walked to the window and stared out, biting his lip as if he was trying to decide whether to tell her something. But then he shook the mood off, visibly thrust aside whatever he might have been about to say, and walked to the door without looking at her.
“So where does this leave us?” she asked when it started to look like he was actually going to leave without saying another word to her.
“It leaves us just fine. I’m a little … overloaded, is all. I need to sleep on it. If I said anything now I’d just be talking off the top of my head and I’d probably say something stupid. Come into my office tomorrow morning first thing, and we’ll figure out where to go from here.” He must have read her doubts in her face then, because he smiled briefly. “Don’t worry. I don’t think you did it. I can’t come up with a single objective reason for why I don’t. But …” He shrugged. “I’ll still help you if I can. I just need to make sure that helping you isn’t endangering anyone else—including you. You’re not an objective professional anymore. You’re a victim. And when victims try to solve their own cases they hurt people. Usually themselves.”