Strange Flesh (42 page)

Where does Billy find these people?

Of course he’d never make things easy by just meeting me at the bar. Though if I had Blake for a sibling, I would handle one of his agents with a snare pole as well.

I sit down in front of him, and he looks into my eyes with sugary solicitude. “
What
shall it be?”

His delivery makes me want to punch him, but I stick to the script. “I’d like a Rabbit Hole.”

I can tell he wants to ad-lib theatrical flourishes but has been warned
against improvisation. So much so that he places a beaker in front of me and pours a stream of muddy brown liquid into it from a cocktail shaker. The pre-mixed beverage seems obviously wrong under the circumstances. And Billy is exactly the kind of guy who has a Kool-Aid recipe several lines longer than it should be.

I lean over to smell it. “I don’t suppose there’s anything unusual in here?”

“Like what?” He makes a visible effort to suppress the phrase “pray tell.”

“A sedative would be traditional.”

He grins like I’ve just nailed a Daily Double. “No sedative in there.” He reaches into a pocket of his dirty apron, pulls out a large light-blue capsule, and places it on the napkin beside my drink. “There is in this though.”

“You want me to take a pill?”

This is too much for him to resist breaking character. He bugs his eyes and smiles. “Just like
The
Matrix,
man.”

“What if I don’t?”

He frowns. “Then I guess we can have a nice talk. May—” He wants to say “mayhap” but stumbles over it. “Mayha-be . . . I can regale you—”

The prospect of being regaled depresses me enough that I pop the pill and wash it down with the suspicious drink. It tastes like a black rum and cider fusion with some odd herbal tones. Delicious really.

The guy tilts his head toward a green velvet couch in the back. “You might want to lie down, sir.”

A
s was only to be expected, I wake up in a cage.

A cage packed into a reinforced crate. I’m curled up in a ball, but the space is tall enough for me to sit Indian style in relative comfort. Feeling around in the darkness, I learn I’m surrounded by a grid of iron bars covered over with planks that smell of new lumber. I sense the quiet vibration of motorized transport.

Taking me somewhere.

Also, I’m completely naked. Not that I fear for my safety, though I am concerned about splinters; my nudity just highlights how bizarre my job has become now that I find myself so frequently disrobed in the line of duty.

Those concerns are interrupted as the truck stops and my crate rolls down a steep ramp. I’m wheeled around with teamster brusqueness until I bang gently into a wall. Then I wait for what feels like several hours.

Someone prying off the front side of my crate yanks me back to alertness. I’m in an abandoned construction site well lit by the cool blue glow of an almost full moon. Billy Randall squats before my cage. He’s holding the same crowbar with which he attacked Blythe. He raps it against the bars.

I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but Billy looks worse than when he was electrocuting himself. His hair has grown longer and now sticks up in greasy dinosaur spikes. The bags under his eyes stand out like
makeup, but the eyes themselves reveal a manic fire that makes me start to worry a little. He’s sweating profusely.

“I can’t believe you actually took the pill. Seems foolish for you to assume I’ll be gentle.”

“I’m foolish? Your game will have you exchanging your glass house for a concrete cell. When your lunatic horde really hurts someone, it’ll be your fault.”

“Amazing that my brother’s rent boy has the gall to lecture me about morality.”

“Rent boy? You’ve got our relationship all wrong. Think of it more like the one between your marquis and his valet Latour.”

Billy coughs out a chuckle. “Really? How’s that?”

“It’s true I do errands for him. But under the right circumstances, I’m also willing to fuck him.”

“And what happens the morning after?”

“He won’t know what happened. He’s unaware I’ve got your friend Gina’s farewell address. I know you need it. Though I have to ask, would she really want to star in your sophomoric melodrama? Seems like the last project you cast her in had some unfortunate—”

“You better watch your fucking mouth.”

“Fine. But if you ever want to see the sequel she made, you’ll stop patronizing her demented daddy and deal with me.”

“What do you want?”

“A hundred thousand in cash. Delivered by you. In person. No one else and no more games.”

Billy considers this for a moment. His lips twist into something resembling a smile. Then he slams the tapered end of his crowbar down into the juncture at the hinges to the door of my cage. Splinters graze my forehead.

“I’ll be . . .
in touch
.”

He leaves the crowbar, allowing me to begin the long, blistering process of prying my way out.

B
illy showed unexpected courtesy in also leaving my clothes, so I’m able to ooze home without making an undue spectacle. I arrive at my door exhausted, but assuming that Blake doesn’t look kindly upon well-rested employees, I again choose my coffeemaker over my bed.

To follow up on the figurine Ruth Delaney gave me, I check to see if Gina’s Ines_Idoru account is still alive. I pull up NOD’s sign-in page and enter her NODName, hitting the link for the password hint, which comes back as: d@d.

That seems obvious enough that I should be able to finesse it quickly. I have a program called [p]ass_crack that will spit out intelligent variations on a given string of characters. For example, when I give it “Charles Delaney,” it tries “CH@r135 D3!@n3Y,” among many other combinations. But none of them are right, so I open up the parameters to include leading and trailing numbers and feed it his birth date, her birth date, and both social security numbers. Still nothing.

Knowing her father’s personal deficiencies, I suppose it’s unlikely that she’d have wanted to bring him to mind each time she logged in. So let’s take the avatar itself: Ines_Idoru.
Idoru
is the title of a William Gibson novel, about a holographic person that a Japanese progressive rocker is planning to marry. Acting out fan fiction is a favorite NOD activity, though most of the energy flows to space opera and X-rated anime. But it makes sense that an intellectual like Gina would name-check a character
from one of the classier sci-fi authors. So maybe her hint meant the
idoru
’s father.

The web has only poor plot summaries, so I torrent a copy and start skimming. I gather that Rei Toei, the virtual woman in question, was created by a media conglomerate, not a specific person. I try jamming the corporation name and a number of characters and places from the book into [p]ass_crack. It chugs for a while, but again I get nada.

Frustration warring against fatigue, I check her av name to see if she turns up on any NOD blogs that might give me a clue. Nothing comes back but hits from some Cyrillic language I don’t recognize. I’m about to pack it in for the evening when I notice Google asking if, by chance, I might have meant “anesidora” rather than “Ines Idoru.”

I didn’t, but mindful of NODlings’ penchant for wordplay, I click through.

The name, I’m informed, is an alternate spelling for the woman whom Eve displaced as the most significant female ever: Pandora. She of the fabled box that when opened brought everything evil into the world. I pick up Gina’s figurine and realize that what I’d blithely assumed was a kimono is actually a stylized ceremonial toga. The jewel-like container’s placement over her pelvis refers to a common feminist interpretation of the myth: Pandora’s box represents the womb, and the tale is a crude expression of male sexual anxiety.

So who was Pandora’s dad? A little reading tells me that while the creation of Pandora was a joint venture, with several deities bestowing various gifts, Hephaestus, that ugly god of fire, blacksmiths, and of course technology, gets the primary credit.

Seconds later, a NOD scene graph is rezzing, and I’m entering the world in Gina’s skin.

But Ines_Idoru is a big disappointment. Like a newborn, she’s almost completely blank. No inventory, no friends, no favorite places. No evidence of the woman who made her.

Did Gina scrub Ines before she died? But then why would she leave the account alive? Or if this was just a random alt that Gina never really used, why would Billy pick this av to place in her coffin for all eternity?

I’m about to give up in disgust when I notice the box that the av is holding. It doesn’t show up in Ines’s NObject inventory because she’s
actually wearing it as an accessory. I select it and bring up the thing’s property page. That’s where I hit pay dirt. Contained by this box is a list of scripted NObjects. The first lines read:

20140203_F0001.215

20140206_M0000.9.3

20140207_F0002.215

20140209_M0000.9.4

20140211_F0003.0

20140213_M0001.0.0

They look like successive entries for two objects in an ad hoc version archive, which could be this alt’s only purpose. While Gina wanted to obliterate even online traces of
herself,
perhaps she liked the idea of a little bit of her
work
surviving in a forgotten corner of NOD. Maybe this was her last project and held some kind of significance for her, so that she couldn’t bear to drag it with her into the void.

I teleport to my private dev sandbox and block-rez a bunch of the NObjects out into the world. When they all finally appear, I’m reminded of that spurious diagram called “The Ascent of Man” that tries to explain how we changed from chimpanzees to Homo sapiens. They’re a series of 3D sketches that show a clear evolution from the barest glimmer of a design to two fairly polished mechanisms.

The experience is like seeing baby pictures of your fiancée for the first time. I’m looking at snapshots from the childhood of the Dancers. The last examples show Fred and Ginger very nearly in their current form.

The create dates on all the objects start in early February of last year, and they end four weeks before Gina killed herself.

Five weeks before Olya called the first iTeam meeting.