Wil McCarthy - The Collapsium

It took a whopping forty-five seconds to secure the suspect spaceship.

“One occupant,” the human SWAT commander stated flatly as he materialized to usher the royal committee from their berths. “A modified human, male, deceased.”

“Modified?” Bruno asked, curious and a little afraid. “Deceased?”

“You’ll see.”

“Hmm.”

The inside of the ship was remarkably cramped and colorless, like a half dozen prison cells strung end to end. The ship was much smaller on the inside than the outside, since after all it was mostly engine, fuel tank, and superconducting battery. But it was so dim , so ugly . There were no windows of any kind, and no effort had been made to smooth or pad the many corners, nor to hide the various plumbing and wiring that connected the ship’s systems. It looked like a utility closet, and would have been an inhospitable place even without the twenty black-shelled SWAT robots crowding it.

The “one occupant” lay on a kind of acceleration couch near the ship’s bow, from which all manner of hoses and cables radiated. The couch appeared to be the ship’s only actual furnishing. The “deceased” status of said occupant was obvious; Bruno’s external air pressure gauge read a flat 0.00, and the figure was naked, somewhat shriveled looking, and was both covered and surrounded by odd pools and knobs and jagged crystals of red-colored ice. “Male” was there for anyone to see, and as for “modified human,” well, that was unequivocal as well; there were wires and tubes feeding into every part of the dead man’s body. The ones running into his head looked blackened and scorched and melted, as if they’d carried a brief but enormous electrical surge.

The fact that he had six arms—each gripping its own joystick on the wide, gray shoulders of the couch—was actually one of the least disturbing things about him. People hadn’t done this much in Bruno’s day, wholesale modifications of their body forms, but even then, the absence had been recognized as a matter of fashion. The idea itself was hardly a shocking one, given that the capability was there in any fax machine.

What did shock Bruno was that the face, shriveled and bloody and burned as it was, looked painfully familiar. “I know this man,” he said, and his voice sounded unnerved even to him. “I’ve seen him. On my last visit to the Queendom, I think. On Maxwell Monies, on Venus.”

“It’s Wenders Rodenbeck,” Tamra agreed, and her voice sounded unnerved as well. “The playwright.”

“Activist against collapsium,” Deliah added. “Yes, we hear from him frequently at the ministry. I’ve never known him to wear six-armed body forms, though, nor to travel in space. He’s the typical hypocrite: faxing himself daily through the collapsiter grid he claims to despise. He’s pleasant about it, though—a natural charmer. I actually like him. Can this be the same person?”

“Where are his injunctions and restraining orders now?” Marlon murmured, as if to the body itself. “Is this his final settlement, a head full of burnt wires? I’ll wager I know Wenders better than any of you. A happy prankster, yes. Now a killer? Now lying here with six arms, and blood all over his face? Is this a trick? God, excuse me, I think I’m going to vomit.”

And so he did, inside the bowl of his helmet. Familiar with the hazard, the SWAT robots slapped his purge valve, then whisked him away to the fax machine before he could move wrong or breathe wrong and suck down a choking glob. Crystals of purged, rapidly freezing vomit spun after him, as if terrified of being abandoned here without him.

“Cause of death,” Cheng Shiao said gently, looking down at a wellstone pad, “probable suicide. He left a note. An entire log, actually, detailing his activities for the past seven years. Assuming it’s accurate, this would appear to be our man.”

Vivian regained her maturity and summoned Wenders Rodenbeck right there to De Towaji’s Bane for questioning. Did he know anything about this ship or its business? Did he wish any harm to the Queendom, or bear a grudge against any of its officials or luminaries?

Rodenbeck, bleary eyed, hanging there in zero atmosphere in a spacesuit he’d never been trained to use, could only stammer his replies: No, no, not at all. Never!

The Queendom recognized no right to remain silent under questioning; every response was compulsory, and subject to analysis by the finest lie detectors, stress analyzers, and personality emulators of the Royal Constabulary. If he was innocent of the crime being investigated, all records of this conversation would be purged from the interrogators’ minds, leaving them to speculate about any other infelicities or malfeasances he might have revealed under questioning. And any distress he suffered would be measured with exacting precision, and a proper compensation calculated and dispensed. But in the meantime, the twin priorities of public safety and swift justice held sway, and his brain was theirs to pick.

Bruno had never imagined himself in such a position before; it troubled and embarrassed him, dirtied him in some ill-defined way. Perhaps the experience would be erased, though; Rodenbeck did appear both innocent and distressed. “I’m an artist,” he protested repeatedly. “I love the Queendom—I’ve gone to considerable pains to protect it against its own excesses. And always within the framework of the law! Well, nearly always…”

“Ah,” Vivian said then, with a knowing look. “Yes. Indeed.”

Bruno figured that would have been an unnerving thing under any circumstances, to be addressed that way by a Commandant-Inspector of the Royal Constabulary. Hearing it from an eleven-year-old girl, though, seemed to tip Rodenbeck into hysteria. “Hey, I watch the news!” he shouted. “I’m not stupid. I know why I’m here! You think this Ring Collapsiter thing has anything to do with me? Do you really?”

“You have spoken out against it on lots of occasions,” Vivian pointed out. “And against its creators.”

“Of course! Its creators are guilty of the grossest irresponsibility and negligence, as demonstrated by their current difficulties. I protest the use of collapsium because it’s dangerous, because it poses a huge safety risk. I’m on the side of the angels, here, little girl. Why would I, why would I possibly do anything to enlarge that risk?”

Vivian, examining readings of some sort on her little well-stone pad, frowned at that. “ Have you done anything to enhance the threat?”

“No.”

“Have you harmed anyone?”

“No.”

“Do you plan to?”

“No!”

She sighed then, and clunked her hand against the dome of her helmet in a manner all too familiar to Bruno—she’d been trying to touch her face. “Come look at a body with me, sir. You may find the experience disturbing.”

“Why? Whose body is it?”

“Yours.”

They strode the length of the ship, slipping past SWAT robots and royal bodyguards until they’d reached the strange acceleration couch. It had been fitted with a crinkly black plastic cover, but at Vivian’s nod the attendant Shiao unhooked its fasteners and peeled it away, revealing the body beneath.

Rodenbeck recoiled. “Eew. Is that real? Is that supposed to be we?‘”

“It is you, sir,” Vivian said. “Bioassay confirms it’s an accurate copy whose pattern began divergence from yours approximately seven years ago. It shows several fax markers in that first year, each with body modifications associated, and nothing at all after that. Reconstruction shows it’s been physically grafted to that chair for sixty-two months, nine days. Unfortunately, the brain suffered extensive damage in the surge that killed it, so its memories are not available to us. Do you have any idea what this… individual… might have been up to?”