James Knapp - State of Decay

“ Yes.”

She stared at me as I paused the footage again. She looked at me exactly the way she had looked at the suspect. The nervousness, the shyness—they were gone, replaced by a confidence that seemed absolute. Was the awkwardness an act?

The JZI pinged. Wachalowski, it’s Noakes.

Yeah.

There was nothing left. The blast destroyed everything. Serial numbers, lot codes—it’s all slag.

What about organics?

A team is trying to track down a piece we can tie to the revivor, but the site is a mess.

I understand.

No radiation was detected, and no biological agents, but see Sean anyway and let him check you out.

I’m on my way down now. Sir, that bomb was strapped to a revivor, another combat model. It was fitted with a standard communications array. It was definitely military.

Did you make contact with it?

I had extended the connection roughly a minute before the bomb went off. It didn’t think it was going to accept it, but with less than five seconds on the timer, it had. I wasn’t facing it at that point; Faye had come out of the restaurant and I was moving her away when the revivor had suddenly picked up.

Time to wake up, Agent Wachalowski.

That was all it said. Before I could respond, it was gone.

Briefly. It knew who I was. It had to have come from Tai’s unknown contacts. They know we’re on to them.

What about the detective?

She gave me a name one of the revivors from the fire gave her. Also, she saw something I think might have been the attacker underneath an LW suit.

There was a pause before I got a response to that one.

Light-warping technology is top secret. Only a few countries even have access to it. Do you have any idea how expensive that would be?

Someone has money to burn.

What about the name?

A last name only: Zhang. No leads on it yet.

Could it be the name of one of Tai’s customers?

Maybe. I’m following up on the dock revivor now. I’ll let you know what I find.

I switched off the images and made my way to the subbasement, then into the dingy corridor that led to the morgue. The morgue was usually Judy’s domain, and she wasn’t used to sharing it. When the door opened, Sean was leaning over a body that was facedown on the tray while she hovered nearby, her arms crossed in front of her. She glanced at me when I came in. As I approached them, I caught a faint, bitter-tar smell.

“How’s it going?” I asked. The room was brightly lit, and Sean was still bent over the body, squinting into a magnifying lens that was strapped to his head.

“Getting there,” he said. He was peering into a square hole he had cut in the back of the revivor’s skull, teasing at something with his instruments. His white latex gloves were smeared with blackish blood.

“Find anything?”

“Your news jockey’s eyes were mostly intact,” he said, nodding toward a fluid- filled jar on the counter where they now stared out through the glass at me.

“They’re slightly different colors,” I observed.

“Only one is a fake; the other one’s natural. I was able to pull a little bit out of the buffer of the camera eye. I flagged it for you.”

I connected to the server and checked it out. The first clip was little more than a few frames strung together; it looked like the SWAT team escorting one of the revivors out of the building after the raid. The next was actually a shot of me, from when he had approached me in the lobby.

“They go backward,” Sean said, “from the end of the buffer back toward the beginning. The last clip was actually recorded first.”

The last clip was a little over four seconds long. From the looks of it, the kid was standing in someone’s private office. Even though the quality wasn’t good, everything in his field of vision still managed to scream wealth. The desk looked like real wood, and on top of it I could see a polished stone clock with what might have been a diamond at the twelve o’clock mark. A small figure sat behind the desk.

“Is that a kid?” I asked. It almost looked like a little boy at first, except the clothes were those of an adult and the earrings were definitely feminine.

“It’s a woman,” Sean said.

Once I got a better look, I could see it was definitely a female, maybe full-blooded Asian, maybe Chinese. She was definitely adult, but very small except for her head, which looked a little too big for her body. She wore a navy suit jacket and white blouse with a gold neck clasp. I could make out rings on both hands, gold earrings, a slim gold watch on her wrist, and cuff links with what might have been real diamonds on them. Her face was made up heavily but carefully, and she might have been pretty except her lips and eyes were vaguely fishlike.

“…exclusivity?” the kid’s voice asked.

“I don’t care what you do with it after you bring it to me—” the woman said, then was cut off as the clip ended.

“Someone hired him,” I said.

“Someone with money.”

Someone with money, and someone, based on the little bit of footage there was, who seemed uninterested in the monetary value of the footage itself. Whoever it was knew what she was after and must have known where to send him, since there was very little time between their exchange and the images of the revivors. She didn’t want to use or sell the footage if she was turning down exclusivity; she wanted information. She was using him for recon.

I looked back at the eyes floating in the jar. Someone had gotten the kid killed. Someone looking for information on Tai. Someone who wasn’t us.

“Apparently, we aren’t the only ones interested in what was going on over there,” I said. “What about the unit we recovered at the dock?”

“Deanimation was straightforward,” Sean said. “A bullet to the head. You say the other models you picked up there were sex models?”

“Pretty much.”

“Not this one,” he said. “Check out the caboose.”

I took a look between the exposed, flat buttocks and saw that the vaginal opening had been sealed, along with the anus. They did that with legitimate revivors after bring-back in most countries; revivors didn’t have sex urges, couldn’t give birth, and didn’t eat. Any unnecessary cavities were just places to invite infection; packing them with biogel and sealing the whole thing over with a skin graft eliminated the problem.

“Any other bullets hit it?” I asked him.

“No, why?”

“I’m wondering if that bullet was meant for it or for me.”

“Was it destroyed intentionally? No way to know for sure, but if it was, your shooter didn’t exactly succeed. Have a look.”

I leaned in close as he reached into the hole with a pair of slim forceps and carefully began to pull something out. When the end of the tongs came out of the hole, I saw they were clamped around a small, rubbery object about four inches long. It made me think of a translucent, eyeless squid with tentacles coming out of both ends. Sean slowly eased the thing out until the last little tentacle dangled free, then placed it into a large beaker filled with clear liquid.

“That’s the main node,” he said. “If a revivor had a soul, that would be it.”

I took a closer look. I was familiar with revivor technology, but I’d never actually seen one of those things outside the body. I’d imagined it looking metallic, but it almost looked organic. Millions of barely visible little threads ran through it.

“You can see the connections,” I said. Up close it looked like some giant microbe.

“You guys are going to clean this up afterward, right?” Judy asked.