Tomorrow’s World (6 page)

And then at last the medics came in—a doctor and a nurse.

The nurse was called Carol Connor. We'd had a fling once, not long after Jen died, but it was obvious to us both that it was a case of coinciding needs rather than anything remotely resembling love.

The doctor was a brown-haired, brown-eyed Number.

While there was pity on Carol's face as she summed up the situation, the doctor's expression was one of contempt. He ignored me altogether and said to Paula, “Any indication of how much they took?”

Paula shook her head.

“No need to wait,” he told her. “There's nothing you can do.” He looked at me and said with more than a hint of a sneer, “Unless you want to watch.”

All that stopped me from coming out with a scathing put-down was the knowledge my life might be in his hands one day. And the fact I couldn't think of a scathing put-down.

Since there was nothing more for Paula and I to do in apartment 826 we headed back to the station house. It's nothing more than an office with two desks and an adjoining holding pen. It's not really called the station house, but that's what they used to call the place where police officers went to play at being police officers back in the Old Days, so it's what I call the place I go when I'm not waving my knockdown around and trying to look heroic.

I sat down and went through my daily routine of fussily adjusting the framed photo of Bernard Russell that has pride of place on my desk. I ‘accidentally' knocked it over to draw attention to it, like I do every morning, and Paula ‘tutted' and rolled her eyes like she does every time I knock it over. I'm willing to bet there's a photo like it on the desk of Names everywhere. A balding, bespectacled man with a beaky nose, a soup-stained paisley-pattern tie, and a moth-eaten tweed jacket, Bernard Russell is an unlikely looking hero, but he's become an iconic figure to us. Back in 2012 he beat the most advanced computer on the planet in a game of chess. His victory passed largely un-noticed at the time—there was too much serious stuff happening, because the world was in the process of going down the toilet—but, with the benefit of hindsight, it was a seminal moment. It was the last time the mind of man outwitted the pure logic of a computer.

As I adjusted the photo I glimpsed Paula's reflection in the plexiglass that covered it. She was shaking her head in a mixture of disapproval and disbelief at my pettiness, and no doubt thinking how pathetic I was by scoring the same point every day. Still, getting her to shake her head and exhibit emotion was a triumph in itself.

By then it was time for our mid-morning coffee break. We're allowed two cups a day—like everything else, coffee and water are rationed. I always share my morning coffee with the small plant I keep in the corner of the room. I love watching Paula's face when I pour the last of my precious coffee into the plant pot. She looks at me like I've gone a little loco.

Maybe she's right.

While I waited for my coffee to cool I stared at the plant, thinking about the man who'd sold it to me. Actually, Doug gave it to me for nothing when he found out it was for the station house. In my mind I replayed my last few visits to The Plant Place, looking for some sign Doug MacDougall had a drug problem, or any other kind of problem. I couldn't remember anything to suggest he was wrestling with inner demons, let alone any indication he was on the brink of taking his own life.

All the while there was a monotonous BEEP … BEEP … BEEP … going on in the background. Finally it got on my nerves so much I turned from the plant to Paula and said, “Do you never get tired of those things?”

By ‘those things' I meant logic puzzles. Numbers are obsessed with them. Theory time, again, folks. I think Numbers quickly get bored when they don't have a practical task to accomplish or a problem to solve. And, since they can't fill empty moments with daydreams and imagination, they fill them with logic puzzles—and Name-baiting.

“Why does my doing puzzles bother you so much?” Paula said without looking up from the screen, eliciting those infuriating BEEPs as she tapped various parts of it with the tip of an elegant forefinger that appeared increasingly sensual the longer I looked at it. “Is it because you can't do them?” she asked.

“I wouldn't swap,” I told her.

“Swap what?”

“Daydreaming for being able to do a logic puzzle.”

For once, Paula didn't have a put-down.

Winning our little exchange should have given me a warm glow of satisfaction. Instead it left me feeling ashamed, and like I should apologize.

An extra loud BEEP! signaled completion of the logic puzzle. There was no sign of satisfaction on Paula's face. I think her triumph over the puzzle was as hollow as my victory over her. While I watched over the top of my screen she cocked her head to one side, the way you do when a message is coming through on your hear-ring. After a few seconds she raised her i-band to her mouth and said, “Okay, I'll close the case.”

“Let me guess, Doug MacDougall's toxicology shows he died of an OD,” I said.

Paula nodded. “Pure R8XL. Death would be instantaneous.”

Rush—or, as Numbers call it, R8XL—is the opposite of Slo-Mo. It's another drug that's recently appeared out of nowhere and is gaining a worryingly widespread following among Names. It speeds up the metabolism and amplifies adrenaline production to the extent that those who've taken it become a danger to themselves and anyone in striking distance. It's as if the drug generates more energy than the user can contain—and compels them to release it with total disregard for their own safety and everyone else's. Apparently it was developed to treat people who've taken Slo-Mo, but somehow it got out of the lab and found its way onto the dance floors. In the last month we've had reports of broken limbs resulting from frenzied disco moves, and people collapsing from dehydration and exhaustion after dances that would have made the whirling dervishes of old look like they were doing a slow waltz. There was even word of a couple of young lovers being found with their hearts stopped and faces frozen in expressions of awesome ecstasy, legs entwined and arms wrapped around each other like they were holding on for dear life. The man's back was apparently torn to shreds by the woman's nails, and her spine had been snapped in two by a spasm of pleasure-pain that was too much for her body to bear. I don't know if the thing with the lovers is apocryphal, but it's helped Rush achieve cult status in a couple of months, becoming the drug of choice among people who want to push back the boundaries and don't mind how much they abuse themselves and others in the process.

“Doug MacDougall doesn't come anywhere close to fitting the user profile for Rush,” I said, thinking aloud.

“He wasn't taking it for recreation. He was taking it to kill himself. Which would explain why he took it undiluted and intravenously rather than orally.”

“He'd no reason to kill himself,” I said, giving voice to the thought that had been going through my head all morning.

“We've worked together for two years and four days, yet there are lots of things you don't know about me,” Paula said. “I think it's safe to assume there's a great deal you didn't know about someone you only had occasional contact with.”

I would have dearly loved to find out some of those things I didn't know about Perfect Paula, but now wasn't the time to ask. So, instead, I said, “Don't you feel the least bit curious about why Doug MacDougall would have taken his own life?”

“No,” Paula said. “His reason was probably pathetic. It's certainly academic. The case is closed, Travis.”

T
HE CASE MIGHT BE CLOSED FOR
P
AULA, BUT NOT FOR
me. For the rest of the afternoon we had the usual mix of minor incidents and dramas to deal with, each demanding my complete attention. But, when I got back to my apartment at the end of the shift, my thoughts soon turned back to Doug MacDougall.

I tried reading one of Calum Tait's travel articles but the words didn't register, and when I looked at the photos they dissolved into Doug MacDougall's face or Paula's.

I put on a Meg Ryan film, but for once she didn't win my heart or make me laugh, and my mind kept straying to the scene I'd walked into in apartment 331 that morning. I switched the movie off halfway through and sat there staring at the blank wallscreen, projecting my own thoughts onto it. The result was a mystery that seemed insoluble. Doug MacDougall simply wasn't the sort of guy to mess with drugs. He got his rush from looking for plants and sharing his love of them with other people. To me, that made an accidental overdose a non-starter. If it wasn't an accident, then it had to be on purpose. Which meant suicide or murder. Suicide didn't make sense, either. The autopsy failed to reveal any life-threatening physical ailments that might have led him to end it all. His body had far more toxins in it than was good for him, as you'd expect in someone who spent so long Outside. But, although those toxins would have taken twenty or thirty years off his life, he'd still had a good ten years left before it was an issue. Meantime, he wouldn't have felt anything worse than a shortness of breath and recurring sore throat.

Of course there was always the other kind of ailment, the kind that afflicted mind rather than body. In my job you become a good judge of character. You notice things other people miss, tell-tale signs of stress and worry, guilt and shame, fear and doubt. I'd never seen any of those signs in Doug MacDougall's face or body language. I've been wrong about people enough times to know my intuition isn't perfect, but I'm right far more often than I'm wrong, and I'd back my judgment with my life. Those aren't empty words, because sometimes I've had to do exactly that. If I was wrong about Doug, then I could be wrong about anyone, and I'd never be able to trust my judgment with the same certainty again.

I'd lose faith in a whole lot of things if I was wrong about Doug MacDougall. I suppose he'd come to symbolize all that's best about people in my mind, and if he had a dark side of pathological proportions, then we all did. If he had a fatal weakness, a fundamental flaw, then all Names did, just as Perfect Paula believed. If she was right about that, I was wrong—and truly
human
beings had no future.

The trouble was that if Doug's death wasn't an accident or suicide, that only left murder, and the facts didn't fit a murder, either.

I used my computer screen to review the haven records one more time, checking the movements in and out of Doug's apartment. He was the only person to enter or leave it over the last few days. I tried to find ways around that, but there weren't any. Even if the apartment hadn't been on the third story, the windows don't open—they're sealed units to keep out the toxic atmosphere. As for the door, the only ID card used in it was Doug's. I've never heard of anyone getting into an apartment without a card, but there's a first time for everything. So, for the sake of argument, I imagined someone had found a way to sneak into Doug's flat. If they had, they would have left a trace of their presence behind somewhere. Without realizing it, people leave traces of everything they do in the Ecosystem database. We call them ghosts. Well, actually, I call them ghosts. Paula calls them EBTs, which stands for electronic bio traces, or something like that. Anyway, after all this time on the job, I have a good idea where to look for ghosts. I started the search by saying to my voice-activated computer, “Give me the thermal records for apartment 331.”

Almost instantly a histogram appeared on the screen. The processing power of the Ecosystem never fails to astonish me. It has to monitor half-a-billion citizens in communities around the world, and yet it can tell you the most intimate details of any one of those lives in the blink of an eye. What it was effectively telling me now was when Doug MacDougall's apartment was accessed, and by how many people. The histogram showed temperature on the vertical axis and time along the bottom. To save energy—we've learned our lesson from the past—apartments are kept at the ambient temperature when no one's in them. The temperature is raised by body heat when someone enters, which in turn tells the sensors to provide cool air until the room reaches 23C if you're a Name, or 22.5C if you're a Number;
they
really are colder than
us.
The resulting chart is made up of characteristic spikes and plateaus. The more people who enter, the more pronounced the spike and the longer it takes to cool the room to its optimum temperature. “Indicate occupant entries,” I said.

A series of red crosses appeared along the timeline. Each marked an insertion of Doug's card into the slot beside his door. Every cross corresponded to a spike, and each spike was the same height, indicating only one person entered. It confirmed only Doug MacDougall had been in the apartment.

I let out one of those long sighs that are punctuating my days with increasing frequency. Since I was getting nowhere, I decided to go somewhere. When things are getting the better of me I like to take out my frustration by beating up some prisoners in the station holding cell, so I headed there now.

Just kidding. I work out my frustration on an exercise bike, so I went down to the gym.

When I got there the first thing I did was look around for Paula, and my heart sank when there was no sign of her. I was surprised at that—not her absence, but how much it disappointed me. After all, I spend my working days with her, so her face is the last one I should want to see at night, especially since I don't even like her.

I headed for the only empty exercise bike. All the others were being ridden by Numbers, each pedaling faster than the next. It was as if they were being chased or were chasing someone. They're ridiculously competitive, and take as much pride in their physical condition as they do in their mental prowess. They also hate lying awake at night, because they get bored and restless, so they like to work-out to the point of exhaustion. That's one of the few things about them I can relate to—although I like to work to exhaustion because I think
too much
when I lie awake at night.