Tails You Lose (28 page)
It was clear that Gray Squirrel was talking about the alpha-test model of the REM inducer, which had been tested overseas. The reference to "Yomi" told Alma where that testing had been carried out: Yomi was the island in the Philippines that Japan had exiled its ork and troll populations to. It was an odd place for PCI to choose as the site of a testing program. The memo seemed to be indicating that only orks and trolls had been accepted as volunteers to test the device—and yet the REM inducer was intended to benefit all races.
According to what Alma had just read, a horrifyingly large number of those volunteers had died, despite Gray Squirrel's best efforts. No wonder Gray Squirrel had been so happy to have a subject with Alma's stamina volunteer for the beta-test unit. She glanced at her left hand, wondering how much worse the tremors caused by the REM inducer were going to get. If only Gray Squirrel were still alive . . .
With grim determination, Alma read on through the report, lingering over the next highlighted section of text.
Suggest
you
continue
to
stall
Salish-Shidhe
Council
members
.
Alpha-test
version
is
clearly
not
ready
for
testing
in
soldiers
.
Battlefield
applications
at
this
point
seem
limited
,
unless
you
can
persuade
Council
to
up
acceptable
"
friendly
fire
"
casualty
rate
from
ten
percent
to
twenty
.
Alma paused. What was Gray Squirrel talking about? The soldiers who would be receiving the REM inducer were already casualties. Their brains had been injured by magic wielded by the enemy, not by "friendly fire."
Suddenly, another interpretation occurred to Alma. What if the REM inducers were intended not for wounded soldiers but for healthy ones? The cyberware would turn them into the perfect fighting machines: men and women who needed only a fifteen-minute catnap between battles to be fresh and ready to fight again. Alma shouldn't have been surprised by this proposed application, and she understood now why Gray Squirrel had done the first round of testing so far afield: if PCI was going to sell it to the Salish-Shidhe military, they certainly didn't want the Tsimshians finding out about the project. She marveled at the fact that Gray Squirrel had found so many test subjects—fifty in all. according to the numbers cited in this report. What would have motivated people who probably couldn't even find Salish-Shidhe on a map to volunteer for such dangerous testing? Certainly not patriotism.
The answer was in the final section of highlighted text.
Problems
with
alpha-test
model
are
in
process
of
being
rectified
,
but
imperative
that
you
authorize
either
transfer
of
credit
or
move
to
new
test
area
as
soon
as
possible
.
Director
of
detainment
camp
is
unwilling
to
risk
exposure
of
project
,
in
light
of
high
mortality
rate
,
and
is
proving
uncooperative
.
He
is
refusing
to
provide
more
test
subjects
until
further
credits
are
transferred
.
There was a little bit more—the usual salutations—but Alma didn't read it. She stared at the flatscreen, unwilling to believe what she had just read. If it was true, there was a darker motivation for testing the REM inducer on Yomi Island. The people who'd had the alpha-test units implanted in their brains weren't volunteers. They were lab rats. And Gray Squirrel had killed them.
It all made sense now. Gray Squirrel's unwillingness to provide detailed destinations to PCI security when he went on his business trips to the Philippines, the low-level tension that Alma had thought was caused by Gray Squirrel's quarrels with his wife, and his reluctance to talk about the alpha-test models. When he refused to provide her with details of the alpha tests, she thought that he'd been trying to avoid biasing Alma's assessment of the beta-test version. In reality, he hadn't told her about those tests because he knew she'd find them abhorrent.
What did you do when you suddenly discovered that one of your best friends—a man you looked up to as a benefactor of humanity—was really a murderer? Alma's lips set in a grim line as she answered the question she'd posed. You either try to deny the evidence and forget you ever saw it, or you confront that friend with what you know and demand an explanation.
She scrolled back to the image of Gray Squirrel that had the crosshairs superimposed over it. Thanks to Abby, Alma would never have that chance. Even though her sinking heart told her that Gray Squirrel was guilty of the crime he'd inadvertently confessed to in the memo, Alma would have liked the chance to hear an explanation of why he'd done it from his own lips.
Part of her already accepted the fact, however, that it would have made little difference. Hu's words echoed in her mind: There are no excuses, only reasons. Even so, Alma still groped for excuses—and rejected them, one by one.
Maybe Gray Squirrel had been forced into carrying out the experimentation on unwilling subjects—but the tone of the memo didn't suggest this. Even scanning between the lines, Alma couldn't find a hint of regret or sympathy for his victims.
Maybe the memo was a forgery, designed to accuse Gray Squirrel of something he hadn't done—but if it was, why had Abby murdered him, instead of exposing him?
Wanting to see where the file had been copied from, and when, Aima called up the summary information on GRIM REAPER. She wasn't surprised to see that it had been pirated directly from a private grid access host that was separate from the main PCI system. What did shock her was the routing code on the file itself. Abby hadn't just accessed a secret system that Alma herself didn't even know about—she'd done it from Alma's workstation. And the date and time at which the file had been copied—11:03 p.m. on November 10—was disturbingly familiar . . .
Alma suddenly realized why. That was the evening she'd worked late at PCI. drilling the security staff on counterintrusion measures, and come home too exhausted even to flick on the lights before crawling into bed. When she'd awakened the next morning, she'd realized at once that her apartment had been broken into the day before. Nothing had been stolen, but there were subtle clues everywhere that an intruder had been through the place from top to bottom. A leaf on her orchid was broken, the window had been left depolarized, the holopic of the Superkids was crooked on the table, and the clothes in her closet weren't in the same order they had been. The intruder had even taken a container of soymilk out of the refrigerator, drunk it, and put the empty container into the trash.
Alma had promptly reported the break-in to Hu, and PCI had done a full investigation—with zero results. Alma had changed the coding of her apartment lock and tightened up security at work for the next few weeks, but there were no further incidents. She'd eventually classified the intrusion as a random event, unrelated to her work—a common break-in. The thief had found nothing of value in her home and had gone on his way.
Now she knew the truth. Abby had broken into her apartment, probably as a test of Alma's security systems. Then she'd gone the break-in one better by infiltrating PCI itself. She'd copied the file that Alma had just read and used it to whet the appetites of the executives at a rival corporation—Tan Tien Incorporated. Then she'd carried out the extraction of Gray Squirrel, framing Alma in the process.
No . . . not framing. Spitting on the camera was a clue, just as the taunting messages on Alma's cellphone had been. Abby had probably assumed that Alma, as PCI's counterextractions expert, would be in charge of investigating Gray Squirrel's kidnapping. She hadn't realized that Alma would miss the clue she'd so deliberately left behind—that it would be Alma's superior, Hu, who would spot it.
Abby hadn't been framing Alma. She'd been testing her. Just as the Superkids had once been tested.
This morning's I Ching reading had warned Alma to keep an eye on her immediate surroundings.
Observe
the
ups
and
downs
of
your
own
life
, it had advised her.
Observe
your
own
life
if
you
want
to
find
peace
of
mind
.
She could only think of one place left to observe that qualified as part of her "own life": her apartment. That was where she would find Abby. She was certain of it.
Easing out of Abby's apartment, she made her way down the hall.
* * *
Alma paced back and forth in her apartment, trying to decide what to do next. She'd found no signs of Abby—the apartment was empty, and everything was exactly as she'd left it that morning. She'd searched the apartment building top to bottom, including the roof, the electrical and utility rooms, the laundry and the storage lockers, just to make sure Abby wasn't hiding elsewhere in the building. She wasn't. As a final measure, Alma had mounted a miniature surveillance camera in the building's front lobby and placed another in the parkade where it would give a view of the motorcycle. She'd mounted a third in the hallway outside her apartment and a fourth in Abby's apartment, and then slaved all of them to a cyberterminal in her apartment.
For the past six hours and fifteen minutes she'd been sitting in front of the cyberterminal, staring at its monitor, watching other residents come and go. Although several people passed through the lobby and parkade, none of them resembled a Superkid. And none of them went anywhere near the motorcycle or came to the fourteenth floor.
Alma activated the clock in her cybereye and checked the time. It was 10:06 p.m. She still had to squeeze in a fifteen-minute catnap before she decided whether it was worth relocating her surveillance to Wazubee's. She placed the program she was using into record mode and then stood and stretched. She'd use the REM inducer to sleep from 10:10 to 10:25 p.m. and then do a quick-frame review of whatever the surveillance cameras picked up during that time.
Alma curled up on her bed in a fetal position with her back against the wall—her usual sleeping pose—and closed her eyes. To activate the REM inducer, she had to use a code; Gray Squirrel had designed the beta-test model to avoid the "glitches" he'd found in his first design—glitches that Alma now realized must have been bouts of narcolepsy triggered by accidental activation of the device. The trigger was to count backwards by prime numbers from nineteen—something that a person would be highly unlikely to do by accident. Alma began, subvocalizing to focus her concentration.
"Nineteen, seventeen, thirteen . . ."
She felt a hot tickle begin deep inside her brain, a centimeter or two above the spot where her move-by-wire system had been implanted.
"Eleven, seven, five . . ."
Dreamlike, hallucinatory images began to flicker against her closed eyelids as she began the slide into REM sleep: composites of her thoughts, her observations that day, her fears. She was straddling Abby's motorcycle with Akira Kageyama clinging behind her, riding the roaring metal monster through a night sky. Something monstrous followed in their wake, flapping wings that made a sound like grumbling surf. The bike's twin exhaust pipes puffed out clouds of thick black smoke that rained maglock keys, became storm crows and flew away. Up ahead, the moon was a gigantic silver coin with a winking square eye and a big grin on its face. Alma smiled back at it—the grin of a fool.
"Three, two, one . . ."
Consciousness fled, and sleep claimed her.
Night Owl opened her eyes, looked around, and saw that she was in Alma's apartment. Good. She hated it when Alma slept in a hotel, forcing her to figure out where the frag she was, or dossed down at the PCI office, which meant that Night Owl had to be extremely careful not to give herself away.