Headspace Read online

  We walk up the sloping ramp to the screened-in bridge, and I have to push through the crowd to get near enough to see anything.

  I spot Agent Wiser, my former partner who’s now at the head of the investigation into everything I supposedly did last time I was restored, but he’s not paying attention to the audience. He’s in deep conference with another agent, a pitbull of a man in a three-day beard and dark overcoat. Wiser’s talking, the other man is listening. The forensic tech is bent over his sniffer, his orange-gloved hands fiddling with one of the bot’s sensors. Constables walk up and down the scene, lights scanning back and forth to avoid the red-spattered patches of snow. A bulging yellow sheet lies perpendicular to the tracks, spread over something the size of a rhino. Likely what’s left of Dub’s skyn.

  Why is Standards investigating Dub’s death? Dead Reszos are Service jurisdiction. This should be a simple lost time call.

  If Agent Wiser is investigating Dub’s death, there’s more to this than suicide.

  At first, I didn’t know why I needed to come down here. Whether I really thought I’d be able to learn something about why Dub attacked me or if it was because I didn’t want to stay in that apartment with Dora, her presence a living reminder of every mistake I made with my last life.

  Probably a bit of both.

  But now that I’m here I’m glad I came. If Standards is interested, then so am I.

  Might as well get a closer look.

  A paved path runs under the trestle and swings back up along a boardwalk to the beach side of the berm. It’s lower than the bridge but quite a bit closer to the scene than where we are now.

  “I’m going to see if they need help.” I say to Dora, but she isn’t beside me. I push clear of the people and find her back at the fringe of the crowd, crouched around her bag, turned away from the crime scene, privacy hood up.

  “I didn’t stay off SecNet for six months by showing my face for every camera in the sky,” she says as I approach. Her eyes dart around in her skull and her jaw pulses. The Bliss must have worn off. “Did you see? Can we go?”

  “Dub was your friend too, aren’t you concerned about what happened to him?”

  “Whoever was inside that skyn wasn’t Dub,” she says, her voice flat.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “I was here when all this started. You weren’t. I’ve seen this happen. With Tala and Miranda.” Her hand darts out, grabs mine. “Let’s go. We still have time.”

  “I’ll just be a minute.” I say, and gently extract myself from her grip.

  She takes a deep breath but lets me go. Lowers her eyes and hugs her bag close.

  I can only imagine what it’s been like for her this past year. I have to keep reminding myself that even though her body looks twenty-five, on the inside, she’s more than eighty. She’s lost her husband. She’s watched people she became close to disappear or go crazy or die.

  Then I came back, someone who’s supposed to care about her, and I’ve never met her. She’s putting up a tough front, but if I’d been hiding for six months, dwelling on all the things I’d lost, I’m not sure I’d be doing any better.

  But I’m not ready to run. Not yet.

  I kneel down beside her, put my hand on her thin shoulder. “I’ll be right back.”

  She doesn’t say anything, just nods. Resigned.

  I push cross the pedestrian bridge and up a snowy incline to the winding path, follow it down, and duck under the tape. As I do, one of the Standards drones catches me in a spotlight, sounds a klaxon and activates its warning lights.

  By the time I make it under the bridge to the boardwalk, Agent Pitbull is picking his way down the snow-covered slope from the raised tracks, angling to intercept me.

  I guess he hasn’t noticed the two metre high chainlink fence between us.

  “Hey, fucknuts,” he barks from halfway up the incline. “What the fuck you think you’re doing here?”

  “Just out for a stroll,” I answer, hands at my sides.

  “The fuck you are,” he says and as he does his feet shoot out from under him and he rides his ass down the slope until he crashes sideways into the fence.

  “Fucking fuck,” he grumbles, struggling to haul himself upright, gloved fingers wrapped in the chainlink. “You’re not in enough trouble, you want to add obstructing justice to your collection of charges.”

  The snow covering the lower half of his body and the fence separating us undercuts his tough guy attitude, but he’s not wrong. Coming here wasn’t smart. But I didn’t have any other choice. If I want to figure out that’s going on, I have to follow the leads I’m given. I refuse to let fear make me a bystander in my own life.

  “You know who I am?” I ask.

  He gives me a ‘what do you think’ look.

  “Tell Agent Wiser I’d like to talk to him,” I say.

  “You can talk to my fist.”

  More posturing. Probably joined Standards so he could play a professional hard-ass 24/7. The worst kind of cop. “There’s a level crossing a few hundred metres up the tracks,” I say, pointing back to the top of the path. “I’ll wait.”

  He looks back over his shoulder. I can see him considering the effort it’ll take to crawl back up the slope through the thigh-high snow, the whole time clawing at the fence for support, then trudge down the tracks and swing back down the path, then have to fight me. It doesn’t take long for him to give the idea up.

  “Get out of here,” he says, the threat gone from his voice. “You’re not police anymore.”

  “You’re Wiser’s new partner?”

  “You don’t remember me?”

  “Small blessings.”

  “Detective Brewer. We both traded up after you left.”

  “That really Ari Dubecki up there?”

  “What’s it got to do with you?”

  “You know what it’s got to do with me,” I answer. Brewer doesn’t acknowledge anything, but he has to. He’d know Dub had come after me. “What about his Cortex?”

  He sneers. “A bloody smudge. Laid his head on the tracks and let the eight forty-five eastbound give him a full-frontal robotomy.”

  Shit. Why would Dub attack me and then immediately off himself? He wanted something from me but didn’t get it. Did he give up? Or did someone give up for him?

  “Sounds like a lost time call. How come Standards is interested?”

  He flinches but turns the posturing back up. “I’m not telling you shit. Now beat it and let the real police deal with this.” He turns, puts his hands on his hips but doesn’t go anywhere, just stands and glares up at the snow-covered hill.

  I move further along the boardwalk, angling to get a better view of the scene. Before I’ve walked five paces, Detective Brewer yells out for help.

  Wiser, the FIS tech, and two constables race to the edge of the tracks and peer down the slope. Wiser and the uniforms have their weapons drawn.

  I raise my hands up to my chest. “Agent Brewer is in need of a rope.”

  “Fuck you,” Brewer sneers over his shoulder. “Next time there won’t be a fence to save your ass.”

  “Hopefully at least a small hill,” I say.

  The FIS tech says something to Wiser but I can’t make it out. Wiser just shakes his head and re-holsters his weapon, instructs the two constables to help Agent Brewer.

  “Special Agent Wiser,” I yell up. “Let me have a look. I can help.”

  Wiser looks down at me for a beat, his face unreadable, then walks away. The tech looks like he’s about to say something, but Wiser calls him and he moves out of sight as well.

  I take a couple more steps up the boardwalk until I’m almost level with the scene. Brewer is watching me while the constables assigned to help him confer at the top of the hill.

  I can see Dub’s shrouded corpse from here, his footsteps in the snow leading from the edge of the thin strip of trees to the track. The newly fallen snow has filed them smooth but it’s clear he walked himself to the t
racks and lay down. Newer footprints mark the periphery of the crime scene but the immediate area, from here at least, still looks intact. Meaning the second set of snow-filled footprints leading from the woods to Dub’s body and back into the woods had to be left near the time of Dub’s death.

  Someone was with him when he died.

  Someone still out here.

  I think of Dora, alone on the bridge and I hurry back down the boardwalk, past Brewer with the two constables shoving him up the slope, and make my way back to where I left her.

  She hasn’t moved.

  “Dora,” I say. “Let’s get out of here.”

  She looks up at me. Her eyes are sunken. I’ve never seen anyone look as tired as she does right now.

  “Can we go back to your place now?” she asks.

  I’ve got one more lead to run down. Dub wasn’t acting on his own. Either he was coerced, or he was intimidated into attacking me and then coerced or intimidated into killing himself. The question is why.

  When I doxxed Dub, the IMP said he’d gone into business with a partner, Shelt, another member of our former counselling group. Shelt’s been ignoring my messages. Maybe because he knows something about why Dub would come after me.

  Or maybe he sent Dub himself.

  “Soon,”

  I say.

  Dora sighs but doesn’t argue. “Where are we going now?”

  I hold out my hand and she takes it, pulls herself up.

  “To see another friend of yours.”

  StatUS-ID

  [a646:d17e:8670:511f::Finsbury/D//GAGE]

  SysDate

  [20:56:51. Sunday, April 14, 2058]

  I’m dragged awake by the Service signal chiming from my tab. I don’t know how long it’s been ringing. The room’s dark and I’m stretched out on the couch, still in my clothes. The taste of asphalt lingers on my tongue.

  “What?” I call into the murk.

  “Good morning, Detective Gage.” It’s the AMP. “Sorry to wake you, but we have a priority-one lost time call.”

  I swing my legs off the couch, dig my fingers into the corners of my eyes and rub, blink them clear. Lost time. Low man on the pole.

  Lost time calls are a big reason why Rithm Crime postings are so despised—they’re often hate crimes that, in the eyes of the law anyway, are closer to property damage. Murder scenes where the victim’s last moments of terror and agony, however real, are discounted because the victim isn’t really dead. All that’s lost are a couple million dollars worth of scafed cells, a lump of smart plastic and a few hours of someone’s privileged life that they likely wouldn’t want to remember anyway, so why spend so much time and effort and taxpayer money trying to figure out who’s responsible for causing it?

  Lost time has all the trappings of a serious offence, but none of the weight. Which is probably why conviction rates hover in the thirty-five percent range. And even if the perpetrator is found and convicted, the punishments are minor. It’s an inconvenience for everyone involved.

  Still, it’s my job.

  “We have an ID on the vic?” I ask.

  “Not as of yet. Unknown restored male with forced hardlock.”

  “No ID? How do you know there’s lost time?”

  “There’s always lost time with a hardlock, Finsbury.”

  No arguing with an AI. “Fine. Where?”

  “The Ashbridge’s Treatment Plant. I’ll have a Sküte waiting at your building’s door.”

  “Don’t bother, I’ll find my own way there.” No more vehicles with autopilots, not unless I have to.

  I stand, stretch and notice the cuff lying on the table beside the couch and leave it where it is. I may have meen tempting myself with it last night, but I won’t need it.

  I pull my jacket on over my rumpled shirt and head down to the garage where I parked the Triumph when I first came here. I turn the hazard lights on and off, cycle through the drive modes, press the start button three times and hold it for two seconds on the third press—the secret starting sequence Dad and I had build into the bike when we’d restored it—and the bike whines to life. It was a neat trick to never need to worry about losing the key when I was a teenager.

  I gun the throttle and scream up and out of the parking garage. This early in the morning on a Sunday, the city feels deserted. Even the downtown towers, behind me on the horizon, are dim. Faded monuments to another way of life.

  With the streets clear, I take the chance to open the bike up. I need to get a helmet. I have to squint against the wind, but a moment later I’ve crossed the bridge over the exit from the Gardiner Tunnel and crossed into Reszlieville, going way too fast. The heart of the neighbourhood is just to the north-east and glows like an artificial dawn. One hundred and fifty thousand people live there, tens of thousands more visit every day, and most of them barely need to sleep. With nothing but time and the money to indulge their whims, the neighbourhood burns twenty-four/seven.

  Clouds of private hoppers flit through the air like phototaxic insects, ferrying the ultra-rich from one never-ending party to the next. Arterial Sküte lanes pulse with bobbling vehicles, while lifter drones and AVs haul supplies and goods in on the round-the-clock schedule required to keep unquenchable desires satiated.

  It’s hard to believe a place like this could exist. Like out of mythology. Immortals, partying in the sky.

  I cut south and less than a minute later turn at the dark Streetcar Maintenance Facility. Its tracks are packed with row after row of dusty public transit vehicles made obsolete in favour of the door-to-door convenience of an ad-fuelled Sküte.

  The Treatment Plant sits just past, its squared-off concrete buildings, holding tanks and massive smokestacks all relics of a time when the city relied on large processing stations for clean water.

  A lone cruiser sits under the streetlights at the entrance to the dis-used facility, duty lights slowly crawling back and forth. A massive sign stretches across both sides of the gate, trumpeting the hundred-acre condo, shopping and water-park facility that will soon be breaking ground.

  I slow the bike as I approach the cruiser. The constable doesn’t bother to look up from whatever he’s reading and clears me with an absent wave.

  I ride through the narrow parking lot, past an ambulance and a fire truck on their way out, stop at the guard house next to a blocky Forensic Services van and another constable in an unmarked unit, shut the bike down and get off.

  I take a deep breath, hold it for a second, feel the chill in my lungs. Even though the plant has been inactive for years, there’s still the faint tang of sewage in the air. Or it could be the proximity to the lake. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.

  Light glows off to the south-east, near the central quad of cylindrical digesters. I check my tab to make sure that’s where I’m headed and start on foot.

  On the way, I pass a downed late-model secbot. It still looks brand new, except for its external sensors, which someone has bashed in. There’s no other signs of damage, so either the bot just let someone walk up and smack it—someone the bot had authorized, meaning the assailant could be known to the victim—or it was disabled with a shot from a bot gun. The Forensic tech will need to find out.

  Showtape cordons off an alley between two of the curved holding tanks, ’Toronto Police Service — Crime Scene’ scrolling over the yellow background in blue caps. Floatlamps illuminate a charred lump that must be the victim. A sniffer meticulously scans the area, modelling the scuffed footprints in the dirt, examining the discarded can of accelerant lying nearby, discovering DNA, hair, fibres and whatever else it can find.

  Just outside the showtape a portable lab analyses the sniffer’s findings, sequencing bio/kin profiles as the evidence builds, cross-referencing with past crime scenes, enhancing DNA and running it through the global databases, sending it all to the AMP to develop theories of the crime.

  A Forensic Investigation Technician I haven’t met sits beside it, his back against the curved wall of th
e digester, long legs splayed out. A dimmed tab rests on his thigh under an orange-gloved hand. His head is bowed, his eyes closed. A cigarette that’s half ash dangles from his lips. ’S. Omondi’ flickers in red from a Service ID hanging around his neck.

  Galvan’s here already, talking to the plant’s security guard while a constable stands nearby, poking at her tab. I nod to the uni and she acknowledges me with a slight raise of her eyebrows.

  “This is Stephen Morris,” Galvan says, indicating the security guard in a too-tight yellow and grey-uniform underneath a yellow windbreaker. He’s got a squat, square head, and a close-cropped receding hairline. In the time it took to walk over to them, the guard’s reached up and smoothed his thin moustache with a forefinger and thumb three times, as though he needs to keep reminding himself what’s tickling his upper lip. Or he’s nervous. “He discovered the body,” Galvan continues. “Mr. Morris, this is Detective Gage.”

  “You see anything?” I ask Morris, not expecting much.

  “Not a thing,” he says, shrugging. “Other than the flaming Reszo. Like I said to Detective Wiser, I did my usual rounds at two and it was all clear, then around oh-three hundred I got a call from one of the rovers, hopped in the buggy and came out and found the fire. I pulled the extinguisher, put it out, and when I realised it was a body I called it in. The Homicide detectives thought it was an actual murder at first, you know, like a real person, and when they figured out it wasn’t they called you guys and took off.”

  A real person? That should probably piss me off more than it does. I look at Galvan and he’s got a face like Morris just farted. Or used a racial slur. He’s angrier than I am. I don’t think Morris meant anything by what he said. He just doesn’t believe I’m a person.

  And the thing is, I’m not sure I disagree with him. But I can’t just let it slide.