Alice is trembling. In a way, this is worse than seeing any of the corpses she has witnessed of late, because bodies only show the aftermath. It is almost as bad as watching Omega’s grab, but for its sick-joke killer twist.
Alice and Nikki look to each other and then to the protective frame around DeLonge’s shattered limb.
“They got a machine that can make me do that to myself,” DeLonge says. “Imagine what else it could make someone do.”
“We don’t have to,” Alice tells him. “We’ve already seen.”
DeLonge opens the cupboard again and pours himself another shot of whisky, knocking it back in a gulp. Alice notices Nikki’s eyes on the bottle, like a dog spotting a hare.
“A little later, I got another message from Yash,” he says. “You should take a look at that too.”
He forwards the data. Alice sees an image of her doppelganger: a shot lifted from Yash’s own recording of a picture on a screen. No blonde hair this time, so the face looks even more like Alice upon a cursory viewing. It shows her in military fatigues, water twinkling in the background. There is accompanying text.
This is who butchered Omega. You’ve probably heard otherwise but that’s because Julio is too dumb to understand the real threat. He’s convinced himself it’s all about Yoram, but I was inside Neurosophy. I saw what she is. She is coming for what we took. She is coming for all of us because we need to be silenced.
Your instinct will be to delete this grab. Do not. I want you to keep it, and I want you to watch it again any time you are even thinking of telling anybody about what we did. Because if she finds you, what happened to your leg will be a treasured memory by comparison.
If she tracks you down, I recommend taking whatever course is available to end yourself, because she won’t make it so quick. Believe me, it’s what I will be doing.
“And you really have no memory of inflicting this injury upon yourself?” Alice asks. “Only the grab?”
“Nothing. It’s like it happened to somebody else, or my memory was on pause while I was under someone else’s control.”
Alice is on the verge of thinking she could use a drink herself.
“The implications of this technology are terrifying,” she says. “And I’m inclined to believe that Slovitz thought so too. He wanted to blow the whistle on it by smuggling out the device and bringing its existence to light. Unfortunately for everybody it ended up in the hands of a criminal.”
“I think the phrase you’re looking for is fucking asshole moron gangster shitbird,” says Nikki. “And I’m starting to see a timeline. I figure Omega goes back and tells his boss they’ve got this amazing weapon that’s gonna change everything for them—just as soon as Yash works out how to operate the damn thing. That’s why they get pumped up all of a sudden, pulling shit like jacking Yoram’s shipment. They could have done something like that before but they never dared risk the reprisals.
“Yash must have tried to warn Julio that they were playing with fire, given whatever she saw inside Neurosophy and what she was learning about the device—especially once Omega got sliced and diced.”
“But Julio wouldn’t listen,” Alice suggests.
“Because he was a fucking asshole moron gangster shitbird. He assumed Omega’s death was down to me and Yoram because he could only see things in terms of his own little world. And in that world, he was in touching distance of having a mind-control device that would let him rule the roost.”
“We have to assume that after the raid, my doppelganger suspected Slovitz was the insider. Then presumably she tracked him down and he gave her Omega’s name before she killed him. She then repeats the drill with Omega. I wonder why she made sure his body was found when she managed to conceal what happened to Slovitz?”
“I don’t know how much Omega told her before he passed out, but it wouldn’t have been difficult for her to suss he was mobbed up. That’s a nightmare scenario for her: instead of a small trio of robbers to silence, she’s got a whole crew. Making a macabre show of Omega gave her a phony gang war to pin everything on.”
“I don’t know how much he gave her either,” Alice confesses. “I haven’t been able to force myself to watch the whole grab. I’ll have another look.”
“Okay, you do that. Maybe while we wait Mr. DeLonge can fix us all a coffee. Or something stronger,” Nikki hints, to no satisfactory response.
Alice scans the grab, skipping the blackouts, homing in on vocal audio signatures to save time. Her doppelganger doesn’t say much, just keeps asking for names. Omega fades in and out of consciousness, but the end doesn’t come quick enough, and he does eventually submit. He may have been a thug and a criminal, but Alice marvels at his loyalty: he withstood remarkable torment before he was prepared to give up his own people.
“He named Slovitz, Julio and Yash,” she reports. “But not Mr. DeLonge. She didn’t ask anything about transport, so maybe she assumed they got in at ground level using access codes.”
DeLonge slumps a few inches as some of the tension is slackened.
“This shouldn’t come as a surprise,” Nikki tells him. “Because if Omega named you, you’d be long dead.”
Understandably, this doesn’t appear to bring him any comfort.
“It was Yash who had possession of the device itself,” Alice points out. “Which must have made her the primary target. If she was afraid of being tracked down, why risk drawing attention by experimenting with the thing, making random strangers do weird things in public?”
“For one, she probably had Julio on her back, demanding results. But maybe she reckoned if she could figure out how to operate this thing, she could use it against the assassin. Looks like she didn’t figure it out soon enough, though. And given that the killer never showed up at this here door, I’m now thinking she did commit suicide when she knew your evil twin was about to show up at hers.”
“Before she could be tortured to reveal any more names connected to the raid,” Alice confirms.
Nikki swallows, a look of concern descending upon her.
“None of this is sounding promising for Amber,” she admits.
“Who’s Amber?” DeLonge asks.
“The girl you helped smuggle out. Who had no official identity and who was presumably being held against her will. At least we know where they most likely took her. This all goes back to Neurosophy. And not to some rogue tech-developer there either.”
“No,” Alice agrees. “Those men at the dock were able to chase off the Seguridad with just their clearance, which was also high enough to suppress their identities from appearing on even my lens. Who can confer that kind of status?”
“The same level of people who have the resources to cover up a murder by paying for an empty shuttle to Heinlein and an empty elevator capsule to Earth.”
Alice feels something shudder through her. It is vertiginous, the sudden perception of a chasm that threatens to suck her down. This device, whatever it is, wherever it is, can remotely connect to people’s meshes, overriding even their instincts for self-preservation. And if it can override their conscious will, she is sure it could upload memories without their knowledge also.
People are reassured against this possibility by the existence of the watermark effect, but they have also been told that the requirement for a physical connection to the machine is a safeguard too. If one has been overcome, why not the other? And if memories could be remotely inserted, what if they could be remotely deleted?
“Not people,” Alice corrects Nikki. “Person.”
For there is only one individual on CdC capable of creating such a device: the one who only a few days ago she heard joke about building a robot army. In this moment, Alice understands that if she is indeed an android, then there is no restraining protocol to prevent her making the deduction that has revealed the identity of her designer.
Her creator.
Her true mother.