In his dream, a man had talked to him about an escape route. But this room wasn’t guarded.
The world had an unreal tincture, like an old movie exposed too long to space’s background radiation.
He tried to speak again. This time, there weren’t any spasms. “What happened? Where am I?” he asked.
“What’s your name?” Kayoko asked, in that raspy voice of hers, barely rising above a whisper. She shone a tiny flashlight at his pupils, making him wince.
“My name…? Samuel Delagarza, Nanny. You think I’m in shock?”
She frowned. Whatever the nature of her examination, he was failing it.
Nanny Kayoko’s age had passed a hundred years old long before Delagarza arrived in town. She was a living example of what money and access to illegal life-extension technologies could do. Her wrinkle-free face had the texture of waxed paper, with a complexion to boot. Her hair was artificial, poly-plastic designed to her DNA signature. Same deal with her teeth. Her brand new eyes glinted with something that tried hard to be youthful liveliness, but came short enough to be uncanny.
With her standing over his bed, Delagarza almost deluded himself into thinking he’d died and she was a ghost. But ghosts didn’t drink tea, did they? She reached for a tray next to the bed and poured a brownish concoction into a ceramic mug.
“Drink,” she ordered him, still frowning. “It’ll calm your nerves.”
Delagarza didn’t want his nerves calm, he wanted to know what had happened. His memory was hazy, coming to him in pieces and without order. Taiga Town. Krieger’s naked breast under his palm. Major Nicholas Strauze. The Shota-M. The fractal inside the single non-encrypted file.
“What happened?” he repeated. It was the best question he could manage under his current state. Against the wall, a holographic monitor displayed his vitals next to a serum array. Delagarza traced the plastic tube to the vein of his forearm. He was naked under the white sheets.
“Do you know what a memetic virus is, Sam?” Kayoko asked while he sipped weakly at his tea. It tasted like grass and medicine.
“No.”
“Do you know what a Quail-class meditation is?”
“Sounds like pseudoscience.”
Again, that frown. She glanced at the door. Was it Delagarza’s imagination, or was Nanny Kayoko, underworld lady, scared?
“A memetic virus is a neural exciter delivered through sensory channels and designed to overwhelm your nervous system,” Kayoko said. She took one look at Delagarza’s confused face and changed her explanation. “It’s an image or sound that triggers a seizure. In some cases, it can induce an aneurysm and kill you. It’s rarely encountered by civilians. The SA guards its existence zealously, and for good reason. Knowledge of the existence of memetic virus helps them propagate.”
“Shit,” said Delagarza, “and I got bombed by one of those things?”
Talk about a shitty day at work.
“Cronos boy found you,” Kayoko said, “laying in a pool off your own secretions and screaming your throat hoarse. He brought you here, to one of my safe-houses, and we’ve been looking after you ever since. You’ve slept for three days.”
“What?”
“Most of that time we had you sedated—for your own good. Your brain activity was too high, and you’d have had more seizures otherwise.”
“Shit,” Delagarza said.
Seizures? What kind of fucking computer image caused seizures? He passed a hand across his face, like trying to wash invisible mud.
“What about Krieger and Cooke?”
“We sent your apprentice back to the surface, Delagarza. I’m sorry to say he’s not cut for your lifestyle. The woman left on her own before Cronos had a chance to reach you.”
That’s nice of her, thought Delagarza. He recalled how she’d stood over him, the expression of horror in her face, and the way she’d kicked the monitor away.
Kayoko took away his empty mug. “Enforcer Krieger only followed standard procedure. Upon encountering a threat, she was to secure the Shota-M and return to base,” she said.
The tea had calmed his nerves, now that Delagarza thought about it. He could think now. And something in Kayoko’s words caught his attention.
“How do you know that?” he asked.
Kayoko winked at him, a gesture out of place with her aura of ancient wisdom. “I’d be a lousy Taiga overseer if I didn’t know basic enforcers’ procedure. Here, have more tea.”
Delagarza accepted the new mug with an automatic gesture. His mind was working at overtime, like trying to fill the details of his blackout.
Whatever had been in that Shota-M was dangerous. And the enforcers wanted to find whatever hid inside the encryption so much that they’d risked hiring a planet-side contractor—him. And like many times when enforcers were involved, Delagarza had allowed himself to be blinded by the promise of money and forgotten that, many times, people that dealt with Tal-Kader didn’t live to enjoy the payout.
At least that’s it, he thought. I’m done with this shit. As soon as I can stand, I’ll return to my apartment and forget about this.
His bank account still had half the enforcer’s payment, right? He had a mind to keep it as compensation.
Nanny Kayoko regarded him with disapproval. “Are you out of questions, Sam? So many asked, yet none of them was the right one. Don’t you want to know what was inside the computer that almost got you killed?”
He almost asked her if she had gone insane, which would’ve been a stupid way to antagonize her. Instead, he took a deep breath, and said, “Sounds like enforcers want to keep that a secret. I’d prefer to keep them off my back, Nanny. The computer is none of my business.”
“On the contrary,” Kayoko said, “it has all to do with you.”
Before Delagarza could complain, she gestured at her wristband and transmitted a data file to Delagarza’s address. Then, she opened the file on her own screen, and showed it to him:
“This is what’s inside the Shota-M, once you get past the encryption and the virus.”
Delagarza almost jumped out of the bed, like the screen was a live grenade. If the enforcers figured out the information had leaked…
But he didn’t jump, nor did he avert his eyes. He stared at the flood of spreadsheets, travel logs, deep space coordinates, oryza expenditure, old camera feeds, and news reports. A familiar feeling of distortion overwhelmed him. It was the sense of doom that filled him after one of his nightmares.
But also yearning. He needed to know.
Kayoko didn’t keep him waiting. She examined his expression and flashed him the faintest nod of approval. “Fifty years ago, an SA battleship named Monsoon suffered a reactor overload while in deep space. Among the Monsoon’s casualties were President Reiner, his cabinet, and his family. During the chaos that followed, Tal-Kader rose to power and gained control over the Systems Alliance. Five years ago, a small team arrived at Dione and contacted a certain resistance group to whom I may or may not be related. They claimed that Reiner’s daughter and mother hadn’t been aboard the Monsoon at all, and that a remnant of Newgen had hidden them and smuggled them to the Backwater Systems. The team’s leader had followed Newgen’s trail to Dione and eventually put together the files you’re seeing here. Then, two years ago, Newgen’s data was leaked and fell in the hands of the enforcers. We lost contact with the team after they tried—and failed—to stop the enforcers from using the data to reach the same conclusions they did. I believe Major Strauze found that Shota-M only recently, but it’ll point them in the direction of Isabella Reiner before long.”