There are some definite advantages to having a significant other who happens to be a detective. For example, only one of us is technically allowed to have a gun. Then there are those times when your partner is pissed off and you remember that only one of you is allowed to have a gun.
“So instead of getting the hell out of there, you…brilliant you, decided to take a closer look at the maniacal machine-man, and then you WONDER why I’m mad?”
I was not really in a position to disagree. On the way over to Myke’s place I realized only too late that I had reopened a wound from my tangle with Chuckles and bled all over Myke’s carpet. I needed stitches, and at that moment she had a needle in my arm. “I don’t want to be ungrateful Myke, but could we have the overly dramatic portion of this conversation after you’re done with the sharp objects?”
It’s bad enough when someone angry with you has a needle in your arm. I hadn’t given any thought to an angry person working with a needle in your arm just leaving it there, and staring at you in awkward silence. “Bad timing?” I asked.
“Ya think?”, she closed the wound and moved to the kitchen, and took two glasses from the cabinet. “The only reason we’re not going to continue this argument is because you got my attention with what happened to your friend.” She poured two glasses of red wine, returned to the couch, and handed me one. “He was talking to you and swearing he wasn’t in control before he power-cycled, and then—?
“Then he went even more nuts,” I said. “But it’s weird. It wasn’t him when he came back online. Pointer said his personality was wiped or something.”
“Yeah, that’s why it got my attention. I can’t say a whole lot, but there’s an open investigation.” Myke sipped her wine. “However, I’ve heard enough of your story to tell you that it has some similarities to some other incidents.”
I was about to ask what those similarities were, but Myke cut me off at the pass “No K, can’t go there. Not sure I was supposed to say even that much.” I wanted to plead my case, but Myke gave me that one look that I knew was the final word in any argument. Myke crossed her legs on the sofa, took another sip of her wine, and then cocked her head to one side. “Hey, I have the wine. What’s for dinner?” I blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“So you didn’t bring dinner?”
“Technically, no. I ordered some takeout?”
“Oh, ok. Will it be here soon?”
“Let me check with Pointer.”
“I translate that as “Let me get Pointer to order the dinner I forgot to order.”
I shot her a surprised look and excused myself to go to the bathroom. Closing the door, I tapped the silent trigger on my wrist that signaled Pointer. “Boss!”
“Pointer, are you aware that I tapped the silent button to get you?”
“Yup. Which means you don’t want Myke to know you’re talking to me.”
“What part of silence were you not getting?”
Just then there was a knock on the bathroom door. “Hi, Pointer. Would you make sure I get beef fried rice and not shrimp?”
“Sure, Myke,” Pointer said. I opened the door to the bathroom to see Myke’s face smiling sweetly back at me. “Do the two of you just plot against me all the time or is this—“
“No,” Myke said. “Every day.” Pointer said.
“Great.” I threw up my hands.
—-
Dinner was a welcome respite. I said my goodbyes to Myke and headed for the elevator. One of the advantages of having a girlfriend who lives in the same building is that you don’t have far to stumble. Plus, there’s always a neutral corner if a retreat is in order. That’s probably why we’ve managed to keep it going for as long as we have because even I know I’m best taken in small doses. I don’t know if this is a related point, but an advantage I thought I had living in an apartment building was the code they gave me when I signed the lease. I thought that code meant that they wouldn’t let just any old case of meat in the door, but when I entered my apartment I was introduced to a huge pair of arms that latched onto my head and urged me towards the couch. The arms pushed me down and left. I looked up and was about to tell someone I was headed to the couch anyway when I realized that there was a second pair of arms in that room, and those were attached to the last person I ever needed to see.
“Pockets, what the hell?” I yelled.
“Rollins, the general idea of leaving The Dregs is to not go BACK there.” Pockets moved over to the other side of the couch. “Especially when you get the welcoming committee you received.”
“Because your welcoming committee was so much better up here,” I said. “Tell your buddy his deodorant isn’t cutting it. Why are you here?”
Pockets shot me a look that was as serious as I’ve ever seen him. “I’m here to tell you that what you ran up against is a little deeper than you think. It’s not a glitch.”
“Not a glitch? Damn sure looked like a glitch to me.”
“I know,” Pockets sighed. “This is as close to an epidemic as I’ve ever seen in the Dregs, and yet it’s only affecting a portion of the augmented population. It’s a sizable chunk, though. The common link appears to be MEMBRAIN. Every one of them has it.”
“Hang on,” I said, a little confused. “Every one of them? Every one of whom?”
“Everyone dead, Rollins.” Pockets said. “A cubic assload of dead augments.”
“They all have MEMBRAIN?” That gave me some pause for a couple of reasons. MEMBRAIN is a port that is installed behind the right ear that connects to hardware memory inside your brain case. It’s connected to the part of the brain that visualizes things like memories, and it self-manages. The port is for memory extraction so they can be analyzed. Useful in some lines of work, like mine. You never know when you have to prove where you were, and that was the second reason it worried me: I had MEMBRAIN installed a little more than a decade ago. It’s an older version, but I never felt like I needed to upgrade as long as it did the job. Always seemed like way too much fuss, and while I’ve never regretted getting MEMBRAIN, I don’t want anyone messing around with my brain bucket any more than necessary.
“So let’s start at the center and work our way out. I have a MEMBRAIN. Should I be worried?”
Pockets rolled his eyes. “No, center of your universe, as long as you don’t move back to the Dregs and take candy from strangers, you should be—“
I interrupted him, “Candy from strangers? What the hell does that mean?” Pockets smiled, lifted his hands to my eye level, and pulled out a small vischip from an unseen pocket in his wrist. He did come by his name honestly. Pockets was a courier of highly sought-after items. We work together quite often, as I find things and employ his services on occasion to get them somewhere. Sometimes those clients—and those items—demand a certain amount of privacy. We’re a good team. We don’t necessarily like each other, but business is business. “I’m just gonna leave this here,” he said. Turning to leave, he stopped at the door. “I’m not the type to be sentimental, Rollins. This could be very bad. You’ll see. Please try not to get yourself bricked.”
I waited for Pockets to leave, and then went into my little office area. “Pointer, put up a screen right here.” A flat holographic screen image popped into view in front of me. I looked at the vischip for a moment and having determined everything appeared normal, I touched the chip to the screen.
The screen flashed to life. It showed a large man strapped to a gurney in some sort of stark medical environment. The camera was being held by hand, and the shooter walked up to the subject and centered on their face. A metal hand came into view from the other side of the subject’s face and yanked it to the side to reveal the MEMBRAIN port. Another hand, slender with painted nails, inserted a device into the port and waited 15 seconds before removing it. The metal hand restraining the face released, allowing the face to re-center to the camera. It didn’t take long before the subject started trembling, which increased to shaking and then convulsing. After what I figured was about a minute, the subject stopped and went limp. The camera pulled back to a full-body view, the subject still strapped to the gurney. After another minute, the subject jerked back into life, and in one violent movement all but shredded their arm restraints. Sitting up on the gurney, the subject was attempting to remove the restraints from their legs before the owner of the large metal hand came back into view. Placing a hand on the subject’s forehead, he screamed in pain before going limp again and tipping over the gurney, his head hitting the floor with the kind of sickening thud that told you that he was no longer metabolizing. The video flicked off.
I sat there in silence, trying to process what I had seen. “Pointer?”
“I don’t know what to say, Rollins.”
I walked over to my fridge and pulled another Neo-Coke out. “Yeah.” I took a long swig and thought for a second. “I thought MEMBRAIN was for extraction only. Can you find anything that says it’s ever been used for input?”
“I’ve never known it to be, but I’ll go digging.”
I looked out the window to the neon-colored panorama below. “That’s disturbing on several levels, P.”
“I can think of a couple, yeah,” Pointer replied, and yet I don’t think he knew what I was thinking. The sheer number of people that could be a victim of this could be massive, almost incalculable. Even a fraction of that number could be devastating. But how did it work, and more importantly, what exactly was it?
To find that answer, I might have to go home again.