Stuart MacBride - Halfhead

Maybe six years was long enough to mourn.

Sighing, he pulled the keyboard out from under the coffee table and powered the screen up again. He’d not had any joy finding Ken Peitai yesterday, so it was time for a different approach. Will opened up the old bonus payment he’d found.

The digital signatures were all stored with the docket. Received by Ken Peitai. Approved by Julius Grond-PayFund Manager. Requested by Tokumu Kikan. That would make him Ken’s boss, and he obviously thought highly of him, given the number of zeroes on the deposit.

Will leaned forward in his seat. Tokumu Kikan. He’d never heard of him, but any friend of Ken’s was a friend of his.

He sent a cluster of stealth engines off to look for anything relating to Ken’s boss.

Ten minutes later he was still no further forward: there was no sign of Ken or his boss in any of the government systems, other than that one bonus payment. PayFund was one of the few services every ministry shared, so that was Will’s next target.

He called up the Network’s payment system and slipped in though a back door he wasn’t supposed to know about. From there it was a struggle to work his way back to the main PayFund servers without leaving a footprint. PayFund was a high-security system for a reason: it handled every single penny the government collected and spent. Screw around in here and you could bankrupt the whole country. They had every type of guardian software known to man in operation, all of it monitored around the clock for intruders. Which was why Will had to take it slow and careful, covering his tracks as he went.

He slipped into the budget allocations and went looking for any mention of Ken Peitai, Tokumu Kikan or Sherman House.

Half an hour passed and all he had to show for it was a blinding headache. He was having to work harder and harder to keep the software from finding him in its daughter’s bedroom with his pants round his ankles. If he stayed in here much longer someone was going to notice.

Ken Peitai: one-William Hunter: nil.

He worked his way back out of the system, making sure he’d left nothing incriminating behind, then slumped back on the sofa, massaging his eyes.

OK. Time to try something else.

He couldn’t find anything on the people running the Sherman House project, but what about the people they were experimenting on. The two bodies they’d dragged back from the place: Allan Brown and Kevin McEwen. Two men living two doors away from each other. One a serial killer, the other a family man who decided one morning to murder his wife and kids.

They’d only managed to ID Allan Brown because his DNA was on file with PsychTech, but maybe there’d be something in there about Kevin McEwen as well.

There wasn’t.

Will swore. Then tried a couple of the other systems. As far as he could tell Kevin McEwan had been a perfectly normal citizen. Until Ken Peitai infected him with VR syndrome. So Will went back to PsychTech and called up Allan Brown’s case notes.

There were a lot of them, just like Colin Mitchell’s, describing his development, step by step, into the monster they’d finally caught. But there were other chunks of data in the PsychTech files. Data that wasn’t meant for public consumption. Data he’d never have found without root access to the archived records. Data logged against Dr Fiona West-field’s username.

Damn. Every time her name came up, Will felt that familiar tightening in his stomach. And the more he read, the worse the feeling got.

‘Jesus…’

Her notes detailed every session with Allan Brown’s parents: how she encouraged beatings, sexual fantasies, feelings of resentment, drug and alcohol dependence…Allan Brown was doomed from the start. Parents hate him, abuse him, leave him. Boy drifts into a violent fantasy world. Boy starts burning things. Boy starts hurting things. Boy starts killing things.

‘Boy ends up torn to pieces in a public toilet.’

Will called up Colin Mitchell’s records. He found a similar set of notes, all logged by Dr Fiona Westfield as she methodically ruined Mitchell’s life.

Everyone thought Alastair Middleton was the only monster she’d made, but now it looked as if she’d been a lot more productive. Taking vulnerable children and twisting them into carbon copies of herself.

First thing Monday morning he’d get a team to slog through everything-see if they could spot anyone else Westfield had manipulated.

‘How many more of you are there? How many more of you did she make?’

She stands outside the incubation room, pretending to clean the window, but really staring at what’s growing inside.

It’s beautiful. Most of her new head is covered with skin: soft and pale and lovely. It hangs, suspended in its pouch of growth medium, surrounded by a nimbus of thick, golden hair. The face looks like she did when she was eighteen. Back when she was just beginning to experiment with dismemberment. Ah, to be young and innocent again…

The nose is slightly too big, the chin slightly too wide-the way it was before Daddy paid for that little round of cosmetic surgery. Helping nature on the way to perfection.

Her heart tingles as she watches her new face floating there. Tonight Dr Stephen Bexley will make sure she can speak, and eat, and look just like a real person.

Tonight she gets her human mask back.

She finishes wiping the glass and drops the rag back into the wheely’s cleanbox.

Time to make sure everything is arranged.

She pushes into the good doctor’s office, pulling her mop and bucket behind her. When he sees her he flinches. He’s lost weight over the last two days; dark circles shroud his bloodshot, grey eyes. He has always had beautiful eyes. It seems to take him a minute to figure out whether this is really her or just some brain-dead, menial slave. She sees the sweat prickling on his face. He knows who she is.

Dr Westfield pulls the datapad from her pocket and presses a button. ‘ WELL? ‘ it says in its flat, artificial voice.

‘Theatre Six: half past eleven.’ Stephen fumbles with the pens on his desk. ‘It’s the earliest I could get without anyone seeing.’

‘ ACCEPTABLE. ‘

He rubs a hand across his face. ‘I…I’m not sure that I can do the whole procedure on my own.’

He wants someone to hold his hand. Share the honour.

‘I mean…I mean who’s going to assist? Who’s going to handle the anaesthetics? I can’t do everything! What if something goes wrong?’ There are tears dribbling down his cheeks and she wonders if she’s pushing him too hard. Perhaps she should have sprung the operation on him at the last minute, instead of giving him time to worry. He’s obviously terrified for his family, not been sleeping. Panicking. Imagining his pregnant wife being skinned alive.

Hmm…Dr Westfield frowns. A miscalculation on her part: she needs him at his best, not exhausted. But it’s too late to worry about that now.

Her fingers dance over the keypad.

‘ IF ANYTHING GOES WRONG YOUR WIFE DIES. ‘

‘But I-’

She punches the ‘speak’ button again:

‘ IF ANYTHING GOES WRONG YOUR WIFE DIES. ‘

He buries his head in his hands and cries.

‘ MAKE SURE EVERYTHING IS READY. WE START AT ELEVEN THIRTY PROMPT. ‘

She steps back from the desk and stares at him. Snivelling like a frightened child. Disgusting. Weak.

When she kills him-after he’s fixed her face-she’ll be doing him a favour. A long, slow, painful favour.

‘ DO NOT DISAPPOINT ME, STEPHEN ,’ says the datapad in her hands. ‘ YOU WILL NOT LIVE TO REGRET IT IF YOU DO. ‘

He won’t live anyway, but sometimes a little hope can go a long way.