Strange Flesh (58 page)

What about the Dancers? They’re not mentioned, so she must have hidden them as well. Not hard to pull off in a warehouse full of sex toys.

And why would Xan do this anyway?

I think back to that picture Billy took of her shaking hands with Blythe at Gina’s funeral. Xan had said she was just offering condolences, but what if it was more than that? What if they struck up an acquaintance? That led to a business arrangement. Could Blythe have asked Xan to “keep her informed” like she did with me?

So when things blow up at the warehouse, Xan calls Blythe, and she sends McClaren to perform triage. They concoct a tale for the police, and the responding officers buy it.

The sickening second insight follows on impatiently: for Xan to have felt free to deliver such a fabrication, there must be no other surviving witnesses. And that means that Blake Randall is dead. I glance cautiously at Blythe, once again wondering if I’m next in line.

She looks at me steadily. “My brother’s been laid to rest, James.”

I clear my throat. “You seem—”

Her eyes flash. “I am
shattered
with grief for him.” She takes a long breath and calms. “But I saw more clearly than anyone how dedicated he was to reliving my father’s life. And that couldn’t have ended well, could it? I mean, consorting with a psychopath like Mondano?” A hint of bitterness creeps into her voice. “The way Blake would rail about our ‘crazy half brother.’ When all the time, he was the one losing touch with reality. The Randall family curse.” She brushes the corner of her eye with the back of her hand.

“I’m sorry.”

“I had hoped you might be able to protect him. Though I’m not sure if anyone could have by that point. He was so bent on . . . Well, anyway, Xan tells me he shot first. And I’m inclined to believe her.”

“I’d thought it was over. I don’t really remember pulling the trigger.”

“I think you’d better forget it. He was a big believer in destiny, and he reached for his fate with both hands. You had the bad fortune to be present at the reckoning.”

“And your other brother?”

“After the police found him”—she shudders slightly—“it didn’t take them long to piece together what they’d done to him and why.”

“Are Xan and Garriott okay?”

“They are. Garriott’s here. Recovering nicely. Maybe you two will find yourselves on the shuffleboard court soon. Xan is fine. You are indebted to that woman.”

She adds a sharp glance at the papers I’m holding, commanding me to endorse this fantasy for the police. That feels dangerous. There are dead bodies here, and lying about what happened, if it unravels, would be a good way to get a murder jacket rather than a shot at justifiable homicide.

But the tale has already been told
.

I’m holding the official version in my hands. If mine should deviate, I not only lash myself to all four corpses, I also make Xan a perjurer. She may not be completely innocent in this affair, but she must have made her statement for my sake.

Easy choice.

“I know. She saved my life.”

We sit in silence. Blythe gives me another drag off her cigarette. I watch her smoke for a moment. She French-inhales, which makes me think of someone else.

“And Olya?” I ask.

Blythe’s nostrils flare at the name. “That one remains an outstanding issue. She found the strength to check herself out of the hospital well before anyone would have thought her able. Head injuries can be like that, I’m told. We have people looking for her, but she seems adept at covering her tracks. Our best information is that ‘Olya Zhavinskaya’ isn’t even her real name. McClaren tells me there are some unsavory Russian gentlemen trying to locate her as well. Something to do with a previous enterprise. Even so, there’s no telling where she went, though I understand statuesque blondes can find all sorts of diverting work in Kuwait. But with the burn scars . . .”

I close my eyes, remembering her.

“No doubt men all over New York are tearing their hair that she’s gone. But you’ll heal. I’m sure next year’s model will be even better.”

“So what happens now?”

Blythe waves toward the window framing a priceless view of white
sand and sparkling water. “For you? You’ll understand that your relationship with IMP can’t continue, but I’m prepared to offer generous severance.”

I shoot her twin brother, and she’s offering me
severance?

My surprise lessens as she continues. “After such a tragedy, I’m sure I don’t need to say the word ‘
plomo
’? With all these nasty perforations, I suspect you’ve had your fill of the heavy metals.”

Disconcerting for Blythe to pose a question immortalized by the hall-of-fame kingpin Pablo Escobar:
Plata o plomo?
Silver or lead? A joke, but an edgy one.

She glides a finger just above my chest wound. “What happened was awful, but one day I’m sure you’ll treasure these scars. There’s something so attractive about a man with the power to stop bullets.”

A
fter my release from the hospital, I’m tempted to slink back to Red Rook, but that doesn’t feel quite right. Blythe bore the cost of patching me up, so I figure the least I can do is spend some of my separation pay to fix the two parties who helped save my life. Ginger’s neck is broken in several places, and of course Fred needs to be remasculated.

I try to recruit Garriott and Xan to help, but they seem fairly traumatized by what happened and want no further part of the roborotica business. And they aren’t going to have Blythe Randall pulling strings for them forever. We agree that they’ll keep their shares of any new company, but otherwise I get free rein.

Though it turns out Blythe is pulling strings for me as well.

Something I find out after fielding a call from my old poker buddy William Coles. He begins by saying, “Dude, I’m totally into fucking robots.”

He’s taken a page from his father’s playbook and gone into currency trading, though his company, Philosopher’s Stone Financial, works with virtual currencies. Spinning gold out of silicon. Blythe tipped him off to my new enterprise, thinking he might be an ideal investor. We set up a meeting for a demo.

He closes the call by saying, “And at this meeting I want to fuck
Whitney Houston. Like pre-Bobby? No wait, an octopus! No . . . Uh! All three Olsen twins! Wait, can what I’m fucking change in the middle?”

I then call Adrian to convince him to work with me full-time on bringing Fred and Ginger back to life. He quickly agrees, saying, “The margins on manufacturing virtual snatchola are going to be obscene.”

A few weeks later, I pass a newsstand on my way home. The front page of the
Journal
shows a picture of a black-clad blonde emerging from a limo into a crowd of photographers: Blythe Randall returning triumphant from the closing of her TelAmerica deal. The article lauds her “iron resolve” in getting the transaction done after it was plunged into uncertainty in the “amazingly brief” period of chaos at IMP caused by the deaths of both her brothers. While Blythe has never addressed the press, the article quotes from the statement made by an old Randall family spokesperson:

Ms. Randall is deeply grieved by these developments and asks that the media respect her privacy in this difficult time.

Of course, the media is not in the business of respecting privacy. From my hospital bed, I’d read some of the coverage in the weeks after Blake’s death. You could hear the reporters gnashing their teeth as the police conducted their investigation with unusual dispatch and discipline. They quickly concluded that Billy had been murdered by Mondano’s two dead henchmen, and that the warehouse shootings stemmed from a fight that escalated to a lethal pitch. This determination relied on the testimony of two eyewitnesses whose identities had to remain confidential for fear of reprisals. All those suspected of violence were now deceased, so the case was closed without the glorious spectacle of a trial.

The verdict on Blake was, “Rich kid, under too much pressure from an early age, cracks. Tragic consequences ensue.”

Two weeks later, Israel reinvaded Lebanon, a photogenic toddler was kidnapped, and an earthquake re-destroyed Port Au Prince. The story dissipated.

Billy’s
Unmasking
stayed with us for a bit longer. There were trials to
cover, public disgrace to bestow, and tearful confessions to extract. But once the worm was contained and the source of new victims dried up, the sex scandals, being primarily virtual and involving mostly regular folks, lasted no longer than they usually do. Remarkable more for their simultaneous disclosure than anything else.

While there was a short and sharp drop-off in certain online activities, and perhaps a quicker uptake of browsing anonymizers, Lucifer quickly reasserted control over the world’s computer screens. I came to agree with Blue_Bella’s prediction that Billy’s trick would produce more eyes opened in wonder than it did heads hung in shame.

I had little doubt that the Dancers’ reception would be a warm one.

T
en months later, I’m starting to question whether they’ll be received at all. There’s a critical bug we can’t seem to stamp out.

The problem is that Ginger can have exactly eight orgasms in a session, and then she inexplicably dies. We want to have test units reviewed by a group of influential Sex 2.0 bloggers, and we can’t send them out until we squash the bug.

At ArrowTech, our “erotic technology” company, my team has been bickering about it nonstop. Since thirty hours have passed without a solution, I tell them I’ll take it over.

Eight hours in, all I can think is that I’m not even supposed to be doing this. Though I’m in charge of our tech efforts, I haven’t openly picked up a screwdriver or written a line of code in six months. The last time I tried, it caused a vitriolic argument with Adrian about my wasting time in the weeds. He said that whenever I’m tempted to do anything useful, I need to pick up the phone and tell our HR coordinator to hire someone to do it for me. With the lavish funding from Thrust Capital, Coles’s new venture fund, I’ve already conceded the “get erect fast” argument. But this whole time I’ve been secretly indulging an urgent need to get my hands dirty. Which is why I’m here at two in the morning hunting this pesky critter.

We started by establishing that the bug exists in the original version of
the Dancers’ code, in Fred’s orgasm-detection routines. So I’ve been poring over Garriott’s old files to see if we missed anything.

After a long time searching, I begin to feel another presence in the code. In a few places, generally the most complicated parts of the program, the ones you can’t quite understand upon first seeing them, I find some constructions that don’t seem like Garriott. Like someone is speaking with a different voice. A coder whose head is altogether closer to the machine: lots of complex class structures, fancy recursion, and elegant bit manipulation. Garriott is a very good engineer, but his code gives the impression of a rigorous proof. This stuff looks like poetry.