MY BODY IS back at the hotel, my mind in the MoJ server space, this time in Milsom’s virtual office. I don’t want to be in either place. Milsom’s arms are folded and she’s giving me that look, the one that makes sweat gather on the small of my back. The look that says, “Give me one good reason not to put a black mark in your file.” One good reason stands between me and another year added to my contract.
I need to change tack. “I’m not saying anything except that Theo’s suicide doesn’t ring true for me. Whether the case stays open or not . . .” I hate the words falling from my mouth. Every goddamn particle of me wants the case to stay open. It is far from resolved. “. . . is entirely up to you, boss. All I’m doing here is voicing my concerns. I’m not going to be another splinter in your arse about this.”
She leans back in her chair, an old-fashioned leather one with brass studs running round the edges where the leather meets the wood. A perfect reproduction of the real chair in her real office in London. One she shares with ten other people at her pay grade, reserved solely for the rare occasions when they want to chew someone’s ear off in person.
The rest of the room isn’t an exact replica though. Here, in her own virtual space, she can have things on the walls, personal effects on the large wooden desk. Not that she does, of course. That would be unprofessional. I don’t even know if she has a partner, where she lives, what she does in her spare time. She has ruled my life for almost twenty years and I know as much about her personal life as I did the day I met her.
There is only one picture on the wall behind her chair. A block of red three meters high and two across, with a band of dark brown at the bottom and a tiny black square on the far left-hand side, sitting on top of the brown. Its lack of detail infuriates me. Fuck modern art. Fuck this office. I want to bang my fist on the desk like in some cheesy mersive, yell that the case needs to stay open if she’s interested in knowing the truth. I want to shout that I need to be left to do my job, dammit, and that all the pen pushers and bean counters—and whatever else those lone DCIs say in these situations—need to butt out and let me get the job done. But I stand here, feet exactly half a meter apart, hands clasped behind my back, standing straight, waiting for her decision in silence.
“Finding the prime suspect dead is a critical milestone,” she says, her voice less confrontational. I don’t allow myself to relax. “There’s no way we can stop the meeting and we can’t keep the details out of the file, obviously.” She steeples her fingers. “Off the record, I acknowledge your concerns. But it doesn’t change the fact that we’re under immense pressure to close this case as soon as possible. It’s just a matter of time before the press blow it open, and while we can gag the Noropean press, we can’t do the same for Europe and the States.”
“But couldn’t their lawyers—”
“No. They’ve made it clear they’re not prepared to do that. It costs too much money, for one thing.”
This stinks. The press is just a collection of subsidiary companies owned by other subsidiary companies, all answering to their respective CEOs at the top of the respective gov-corp branches. If all three groups can collaborate enough to cause all the hell they have already, a mutual agreement to gag the press should be a piece of piss. Yes, it costs money, but money that’s just being moved around from one part of the beast to the other. At the end of the day, gov-corps always balance their books.
“They’ll want a verbal summary from you, being the lead investigator,” she continues. “Stick to the facts but downplay the parts that concern you.”
I press my lips together, look down at the edge of the desk and the oak-leaf detail carved into the edging. The original is old enough to be real wood that was actually carved by a human hand. Someone who would have taken pride in his work.
“I’ll handle any difficult questions,” she says, and stands up. “I know you’re not happy, Carlos, but for what it’s worth, you’ve done a great job on this case.”
Have I? I’ve only just started and she’s talking as if it’s the end. There are more questions than answers, and the thought of leaving these loose ends to be buried in a digital footnote at the end of Alejandro’s life makes my stomach churn.
I realize she’s looking at me expectantly. “Thanks, boss,” I say, and she gives a slight smile of satisfaction. Yes, your dog is lying down and rolling over.
“It can’t have been easy. I’ll send a note to your psych supervisor to recommend a session or two to make sure nothing lingers from this.”
A memory of Dee returning to the communal break room after a session with her psych supervisor flashes through my mind. We were in the final stage of highly specialized hot-housing, one that few people reached. Our future owners had put down a deposit on us and detailed how our skills were to be tailored to their requirements. They weren’t just buying people with the exact skill sets required; they were buying people who could never resign early, who would never qualify for a pay raise and never use their training to jump ship to another gov-corp for a higher pay grade and better conditions. With extraordinarily limited rights of our own, we could be worked harder, for longer hours, in whatever conditions they chose.
Dee—who read up on these things in far more detail than I ever did—explained to me that my future employer was the best I could ever hope for. As an SDCI, I would be exposed to sensitive information, so my contract would be nontransferable. All I needed to do was keep the Noropean MoJ happy and I would serve out my contract for the next fifty years and then be free.
It was an intensely stressful time. I was reciting Noropean law in my sleep, going through conditioning to ensure good behavior around superiors and being trained in data-mining techniques. Dee, with her sharp eye for human behavior and social structures, had been bought by a media company that combined entertainment with “social education and behavior refinement.” As she put it, “They make people laugh while programming them to be good citizens.” She’d laughed at the horror on my face, that moment I realized that all the shit Alejandro had been preaching at me was true. I asked her how the psych session was.
“I just pretend I’m in a shitty RPG,” she said, stabbing the buttons on one of the food printers. “If you choose the right responses, they leave you alone.” She turned to me then, shot that smile that always made me feel better, like I wasn’t the only real person in the world. “I’ll help you if you like. Then they won’t put you in the machine again, and you’ll qualify sooner too.”
“How do you know all this?” I asked, and she shrugged.
“Obvious, innit? We’re resources now. Resources that got mined and sold and are being made into something else. Just like a game. I don’t wanna grind at this level for any longer than I got to. Fuck that shit. If we gonna have to do what we’re told for the next fifty years, I want more interesting orders. Know what I’m sayin’?”
I didn’t, back then. I was still reeling, still fumbling my way back into the world after the hell of getting out of America, of escaping from one exploitative asshole only to find myself in the clutches of another. If it wasn’t for Dee putting her faith in me and keeping me sane, I would have been stuck in hot-housing for another year, maybe more.
I don’t even know if I could have survived that last phase.
It wasn’t the performance- and memory-enhancing drugs; the hot-housers managed the side effects well enough. It wasn’t even the occasional beating from another inmate, which happened when they flipped out and I was the nearest viable target. It was the constant cognitive dissonance of being so desperate to get out yet too scared to leave. Of being so afraid to fail yet wishing I did so it would all stop. Of being told I was lucky when I was being abused. Of hearing I was a valuable asset when I was being treated like a fucking object. I had no idea what my future was going to be like; I’d forgotten what life outside hot-housing was really like. What if I didn’t meet the expectations of the Noropean MoJ? How would the money they’d spent on buying me be reclaimed?
“The thing to remember, above all else,” Dee said as she plucked some artificial shit out of the delivery hatch in a little paper tray, “is that no one gives a fuck about you. There are a million of you, of me, all ready to take our place if we bomb out. And it could be a lot worse.”
“Am I supposed to feel lucky? I never wanted this,” I said, and she smirked.
“Neither did I. But I want the alternative less. This is the best we got right now. If we play this game right, in fifty years we’ll have real choices. And if we play this game well, those fifty years won’t be so bad, neither.”
“They’ll still own us,” I said, gripping the edge of the table I sat on.
“Dump that anger, sunshine. Someone always owns you,” she said. “No matter who you are. Deal with it.”
I miss her. I was too harsh. She has the same pressures as everyone else. That one slip with the journo shouldn’t cancel out everything she did for me. I’m a fuck sometimes. I need to call her after I’ve dealt with this.
Now, looking at my boss, I take a breath to say a session with the pysch supervisor won’t be necessary, but Milsom wouldn’t have said that unless she’d already made the decision. She must have seen the entries in my MyPhys file detailing the vomiting incident, the mild shock and the stress at various points.
I consider the sparse branches of the decision tree ahead of me and put on my best grateful smile. “Thanks, boss. I’m sure that will be helpful.”
—
“WELL, this is a relief to everyone involved,” says an American man whose pay grade is so far above mine and privacy dialed so high that Tia has nothing to display about him. “A crime of passion—very tragic. Obviously Theodore Buckingham had issues with the relationship between Casales and Klein. We’ll arrange for both of the bodies to be transported back to the Circle.” He gives a nod to the lawyer representing them, her face pinched with worries that she doesn’t express. “And, of course, we’ll compensate Norope for the use of—”
“I’m sorry to interrupt”—the man’s opposite in Europe, a petite blond-haired woman with a French accent, holds up her hand—“but you’re talking as if this is over.”
The sight of the American’s teeth, just as even and white as those of Collindale, who sits beside him, doesn’t make his smile any more convincing. “It is. Buckingham admitted to the crime. His suicide is tragic, but it’s the end of the road. Sometimes these things are just as straightforward as they appear to be. Crimes of passion are often committed by someone known to the victim and—”
“Don’t insult my intelligence,” the French woman says. “Have you read Buckingham’s background? He came from an extremist sect that has codified misogyny to the extent that an unmarried woman having a sexual relationship is practically a manifestation of Satan on Earth. Do you really think that a man who grew up in that environment would take out his jealous rage on the male participant in the extramarital relations? The man he all but worshipped? No, he would have killed Klein.”
She focuses her pale blue eyes on me. I’ve barely spoken since I gave my brief, horribly edited summary of the case to date. “Don’t you agree?”
I feel Milsom’s glare like a sunlamp, making my cheeks burn. “In my experience, women do bear the brunt of the anger in crimes involving sexual jealousy, but we can’t be sure that was Buckingham’s motivation. It could have been a matter of attention without a sexual element.”
“Did you hear that?” the French woman says with arched eyebrows. “He said, ‘We can’t be sure,’ and that is my concern exactly. We do not know enough about Theo Buckingham to understand the motive here.”
“Listen,” the American says. “I don’t need to know what he felt when he hacked that poor bastard to pieces. I’m not interested in what he was thinking when he fled the hotel and went and killed himself. The facts are all that matters here, and the facts—”
“Are woefully incomplete,” the woman, whom I’m starting to see as my savior here, interrupts. “Perhaps you haven’t had the opportunity to read the entire case file”—she flicks a disparaging look at the American, whose jaw clenches—“but anyone who has can see several avenues of inquiry that our investigator hasn’t had the opportunity to pursue yet.”
“Our investigator,” the man from Norope says with unsubtle emphasis, “was tasked with finding the murderer of Alejandro Casales, which he has done, in less than twenty-four hours.”
The French woman redirects her attention to the Circle’s representative. “Are you satisfied with what you have to take back to your client? Would you be able to answer all of their questions honestly? If Buckingham’s family disputes this result, do you think a judicial review would conclude that all avenues of investigation leading to the inference that he is guilty have been adequately completed?”
The Circle’s lawyer clears her throat and gives a nervous glance toward Collindale. Interesting. “I would anticipate dissatisfaction from both the Buckingham family and members of the Circle.”
The lawyer next to the Norope representative, one I recognize from the first night at the hotel, has been typing at her v-keyboard throughout. A message arrives from her, sent to both Milsom and me. This investigation is costing Norope approximately £10,000 per hour. Shut this down now.
“In terms of a path to prosecution there is nowhere else to go,” Milsom says. “Buckingham is dead. No one else is under suspicion. I can’t see what would be achieved by continuing the investigation at this point.”
The French woman looks up and to the right as she holds up her hand. The lawyer who represented Europe at the first meeting is also seated beside her, staring into the middle distance, attending to something else. “I understand this is a costly process,” the French woman says after a few seconds, as if the private message has been intercepted and she doesn’t care that we know. “But it will be even more costly if a civil case is brought against the Ministry of Justice with claims of negligence.”
“The Circle will not bring that charge against the Brits,” says the US gov-corp rep far too confidently, and the Circle’s lawyer’s eyes flash with anger. “It wouldn’t be in their best interests to do so.”
“But the Buckingham family comes from a very wealthy sect,” the Circle’s lawyer says. “Litigation would be a concern.”
I have the feeling she would suggest it to them herself, just to get at her countryman for treading on her toes.
“And Europe is willing to share the costs of extending the investigation, as per the original agreement.”
Milsom and the Noropean reps look at one another. This is my chance. Alejandro deserves better than this shoddy, half-baked investigation.
“I wouldn’t need much more time to follow up on a couple of things,” I say, trying my best to weather Milsom’s glare. “I work fast. You’ve all already seen that.”
“I suggest we consult within our respective groups and reconvene in ten minutes,” the Noropean lawyer says, and all agree.
Milsom looks at me like her favorite dog has shat on the rug in front of houseguests. “You’ll be informed of the decision,” she says, and with a flick of her finger I’m booted out of the simulated room and back into my aching, sweating body on a hotel bed in Devon.