The Unincorporated Man (18 page)

Michael and Saundra stared at Enrique.

“Well?” asked Michael.

“I couldn’t get into the hospital’s individual accounts either, but what I was able to find, since it was in the public domain, was the account balance for the hospital itself on a minute-by-minute basis from the past week.”

“And that helps us how?” asked Saundra.

“Well,” continued Enrique, “right before the fourth reanimation the accounts were changed due to a credit transfer.”

“And?” asked Irma.

“It was not a scheduled transfer.”

“How much, then?” she asked.

“Ten mill.”

“Ten million credits for a reanimation?” Michael exclaimed.

“I very much doubt that, Mike. But certainly some of it could have gone toward the reanimation. Nothing else makes sense.”

“Are you sure you didn’t move the decimal over a couple of times?” asked Saundra.

“I can assure you all that I checked it and rechecked it,” answered Enrique, looking insulted. “It may be that the hospital in Boulder chose to pay for an entirely new computer system at just that moment, but I doubt it.”

“I doubt that too, Enrique,” agreed Saundra. “It doesn’t make sense. If they were paying for a new system they’d have paid the way everyone else does—credit card.”

Irma remained silent, content to let Enrique go at his own pace.

“Anyhow,” continued Enrique, “an amount of money that large usually leaves fingerprints, records… something one can work with. This transfer did not. It was a cash amount put in directly and stealthily. Whoever did it wanted to remain anonymous, and has so far succeeded brilliantly.”

“Well, well,” Irma said, suffused in triumph, “think there’s a story now?”

“Forgive us our doubts, O great one,” Michael said, half bowing. “How can we be restored to your grace?”

“Get me that story, guys. Get me the story.”

The second round of research took more hours than the first, because now there were some very real leads to pursue. The team chose to meet in the conference room. It was bigger, and besides having a few very comfortable couches, it had an ample amount of what the group had affectionately called “brain planes.” They were simple floating devices that allowed the user to configure a chair style, lean back, and go. Not that there was a lot of room to maneuver, but for some reason thinking was made easier by the simple act of floating in patterns. Irma likened the patterned floating to the simple act of pacing back and forth to stimulate thinking. Which is how the little squares acquired their moniker. It seemed as though the best ideas the group produced had come via a few short trips around the conference room. Irma set her brain plane to “cushy bar stool/no back,” and settled in.

“Wow me, people.”

“Me first,” blurted Saundra, waving her hand, “me first.” After looking around and seeing that, as usual, no one objected, Irma nodded. Saundra always went into great detail not about what she’d discovered but about how she’d managed to discover “it.” And she always saved the “it” for last. A less patient mentor would’ve robbed her of the joy of the telling. Irma not only humored her in this area, she encouraged it.

“OK,” Saundra continued, “I tried getting a mediabot into the hospital to check out what was going on, and it lasted all of four seconds.”

“Suppression field,” Michael stated, as fact more than a question.

“Yes,” answered Saundra, “and a darned good one, too.”

“Looks like more marines at the candy store,” Enrique offered.

Saundra nodded in agreement. “Yup. So I got one of my boardroom specials.”

Everyone smiled. Saundra was well known for having specialty mediabots modified for all occasions. Her “boardroom specials” were made specifically to infiltrate the toughest electronic disruption nets and suppression fields, as well as take on a whole array of devices designed to keep the media out.

Saundra frowned. “Worked for twenty-eight seconds.”

“A lot can happen in less,” said Irma.

“Funny you should mention that,” Saundra said, drawing everyone’s attention to the room’s screening area. “Anyhow, I’ll get to that. The unit got zapped, of course, and I mean actual physical termination, including its accompanying security floater.” On the center screen the team could see the last few seconds of the mediabot’s life as recorded by the security floater. A moment later the security floater’s screen went blank.

Enrique scratched his chin as he stared at the images. “They knew to take out the meat before the potatoes,” he said, referring to the order of the kills. “So much for diversionary tactics.”

“Like I said, Enrique, this ain’t your momma’s security system.”

“You’ve never met my momma,” Enrique fired back, grinning.

“Not sure I’d survive,” Saundra agreed. “Anyhow, the zapper that got mine was very high end—a Brinks model 471. Top-of-the-line unit.”

“Aren’t those babies like thirty-five grand apiece?” asked Irma.

“For the Terran-made ones. The space-based models go for around fifty.” One always paid a premium for sophisticated devices assembled without gravity’s interference.

“Anyhow,” continued Saundra, “it gets better. Before my baby got zapped she was able to pick up the info patterns on twenty-six more.”

“Twenty-six 471s for a hospital in Boulder?” Now it was Michael’s turn to be perplexed. “What is it, GCI system headquarters?”

“Actually,” answered Saundra, “GCI HQ probably has thousands, but I do agree, it is a bit heavy-handed.”

As Saundra seemed to finish, Irma slowed her floater to a halt. “Thanks for the information, Saundra; the 471s are the smoking gun we needed. Enrique, did you find out anything else on the money trai…”

“I’m not done,” Saundra said, bursting with excitement.

Irma gave Enrique an apologetic look and motioned for Saundra to continue.

“It just so happens that I, too, have a Brinks model 471 in my collection—Terran-based, but just as good, believe me. Anyway, I had it specially modified at great expense in both time and credits for just such an occasion. I was saving it for a proxy fight at GCI, but my gut told me to send it in. The nice thing about the 471 is that, besides being built tough, they can often fake out their well-armed brethren… .”

Irma scrunched her eyebrows. “Fake out?”

“Yup. A 471 will recognize another 471 and often won’t destroy it immediately.”

“Right,” continued Michael. “It’ll question it first.”

“Correct. Any other unit it would have shot to kill on sight; a similar unit confuses it. In the time it took to interrogate its ‘cousin,’ I managed to get off a bunch of pictures.”

Now Saundra had everyone’s attention. She called up an image on the main view screen. The screen came to life in a vivid holograph engulfing the room and its occupants with the selected imagery. The holograph showed various scenes of the hospital corridors and personnel.

“Now you have to understand,” Saundra continued, “that the jamming was cutting-edge. So I sent the floater in with simple instructions. ‘Go to the place with the highest concentration of 471s and send back whatever images you can.’ In all I have thirty-seven seconds of images spread out intermittently over a four-and-a-half-minute period.” More images flew by in bits and pieces. It was, as Saundra had stated, a hodgepodge.

“Most of these images,” continued Saundra, “are probably useless. I’ll try a detailed analysis of every person shown and see if I can contact the useful ones. But I saved the best two images for last.”

A three-dimensional image of an enormous black and crimson box appeared before the team.

“That thing’s huge,” Enrique whispered, almost to himself.

Michael’s eyes remained fixed. “What on earth is it?”

“Jeez. Patience, guys. I’m getting there,” snarled Saundra. “Besides looking for where the 471s were concentrated, I also programmed the mediabot to seek out anything in the hospital space that it had no records of. So, basically, it knew every accounted-for item within the structure. That I got from open databases. This,” she said, pointing to the large black structure now filling their conference room, “was not on
any
database.”

“What part of the hospital is this thing in?” asked Enrique, circling the holographic suspension unit.

Michael walked around one side of the holograph. “If you ask me, I’d say it looks like a loading bay.”

Saundra touched her nose. “Bingo!”

Michael smiled at his lover and winked.

Enrique frowned. “Fix.”

“Anyway,” answered Saundra, ignoring the slight, “after this shot they destroyed my baby.”

Though it was only a piece of machinery, Saundra’s expression of grief could have led one to believe her defunct Brinks 471 was an actual living, breathing being. She didn’t mourn long.

“As you can see, I captured enough visual data to reconstruct the image on all sides except the one facing the floor.”

Saundra looked around the room. She was done.

“I did good?”

“Saundra,” answered Irma, “you did very good. We’re talking the ‘will you marry me?’ kind of good. Now,” she said, looking around the room, “does anybody have any idea what that thing is?”

“Oh, right,” answered Saundra. “I forgot to mention that. It’s a suspension unit.”

“You sound pretty sure of yourself,” challenged Michael.

“You would be, too, if you could read.” She directed everyone’s eyes to the part of the structure where THIS IS A LIFE POD was engraved in scarlet letters. The group flocked to that part of the holograph and pored over every discernible detail, and read as much as could be gleaned from the captured image. When they were all satisfied with what they’d just read, they spent a moment considering what it meant.

“Is it real?” asked Irma, playing devil’s advocate. “For all we know this may be an elaborate hoax.”

“If it is a hoax,” answered Enrique, “someone spent ten million credits on it, and probably almost as much covering their trail. It may not be the record spent on a hoax, but it would be close.”

“Besides,” interjected Michael, “the hoax has a name.” This shut the group up.

“It’s Justin. I didn’t put it together until now. But it fits. One suspension unit. One mysterious reanimated guy. Anyway, Justin’s the name he supposedly gave.”

“What else do you have on him?” asked Irma.

“Not much beyond male, Caucasian, and English speaking.”

“And how’d you get it?” said Saundra, a little miffed to have been removed from the spotlight so quickly.

“The old-fashioned way,” he said, smiling, “charm. The only staffers who would talk to me were low level. I couldn’t even break into the high-level staff message service. Interesting for a hospital staff to not even have their message service on, though.”

“All right, people,” Irma said, shoring up the info. “Let’s go down the list. Michael, you start.”

“A rumor stating that an unusual reanimation took place in Boulder.”

“Check.”

“Pictures of a large box claiming to be a suspension unit, but one we have never seen before,” chimed in Saundra.

“Check.”

“A very suspicious and untraceable money trail that leaves a lot of open questions,” added Enrique.

“And, finally,” Irma finished, “a man who has activated none, and I mean none, of the usual procedures concerning revival. No insurance, stock reactivation, or portfolio reclamation claims and unfrozen accounts. If this guy were a corporate spy they would at least have provided a cover. But our friend, hoax or not, literally dropped in from nowhere.”

“Maybe not from nowhere,” Michael offered, rubbing a finger over his chin.

“Yes?” This time Irma was impatient.

“Maybe from a few hundred years ago. If I had to guess, I’d say over three.”

“Where’d you come up with that?” asked Saundra.

He turned around, staring hard at the holograph of the suspension unit. “I think it’s obvious that this is someone who was worried about not being woken up or, worse, being expunged and stuck in some sort of museum. Witness the clarity of his instructions—almost paranoid. This unit is a testament to fear that the near future would not know about suspension or reanimation. By the late twenty-first century it was common knowledge that cryonic suspension was viable, so this box had to be from before then. I don’t know that it’s exactly three hundred years, but if this isn’t a hoax—if it is real—then that would be my guess.”

The team waited patiently for Irma to finish absorbing all the information and come up with the best course of action.

“It’s real,” she finally said. “Too many angles waiting to be explored for it not to be, but there’s more here, maybe much more. We go full bore, people. I want us on the next t.o.p. to Boulder, and some office space rented. Enrique, you’ll see to that.”

“Right away.” Enrique made a dash for the door.

“Before you go,” continued Irma, “make sure it’s a long-term lease, use the actors’ account; we don’t need to let the competition know what we’re up to.”

Enrique nodded and disappeared out the door.

Irma continued. “OK, you two,” she said, looking toward Michael and Saundra. “When we get there, hit the ground running, spend what you have to, but break that hospital. Saundra, could you …” Irma was interrupted by a call on her private line, priority contacts only. When she looked down her eyes lit up.

Saundra leaned closer. “Business or pleasure?”

“Both,” answered Irma.

“Whatever happened,” Michael intoned, “to never mixing your contacts with your personal life? You pound that into us all the time.”

“You should talk,” answered Irma, eyeing both of them. “Now, shush.” She then directed the call so only her head and shoulders would be visible to the caller and patched it through.

“Hello, Hektor.”

“Irma, it’s indeed a pleasure to see you again.”

“What do you need, Hektor?”

“Irma, I’m hurt. Here I am, wishing only to do you a favor, and this is how I’m greeted?”

“Hektor, you’re the only man I never got any information out of…”

“Irma, I gave you lots of information.”

“Not the info I wanted, and the amazing thing is, I still don’t mind that much. So whatever it is you do have for me, I can be assured of one thing: It will be almost entirely for your benefit.”