Balot slept for nearly twenty hours solid, cocooned by the white bubbles, her lungs pushed onward by the respirator.
She didn’t dream. The time simply disappeared.
She remembered pulling the trigger on the gun, then found herself inside a pod.
When she awoke, Balot found that she felt absolutely fine. Indeed, the whole world seemed clearer to her than it had ever been.
It was a peaceful existence inside the Humpty—the very definition of tranquility, if you ignored the Doctor’s constant clatter as he processed the data and sent and received emails to and from the DA’s office.
It was in these serene surroundings that the pieces to the puzzle all started to fall into place for Balot.
She got a glimpse of the yolk of one man, rotten to the core.
≡
Balot stared up at the ceiling from her easy chair.
She felt as calm and composed as she had when she first woke up back at the original hideaway.
Her body was covered in a figure-hugging black outfit. Made by Oeufcoque. Virtually identical to the one she had worn for target practice. The only difference was that there were now a number of electronic terminals attached to her body, connected by a multitude of cords that spread out from the center of her body in all directions, winding their way back to machinery shoved into a cramped corner of the dining room.
“It’s not enough for us just to analyze Shell’s memories to prove what he did when,” the Doctor said over the clutter on the table. “In order for it to stand up in court as proof, we need to also replay his thoughts and emotions—we need to establish the process as much as the actual results of his actions. This is a mammoth undertaking, really, and would normally take the best part of half a year, but I’m sure you and Oeufcoque will be able to work it out in less than a day.”
At this point the Doctor took his eyes off the screen and looked at Balot. “Now, are you really all right with this?”
Balot slowly lifted her head up from its relaxed position on the easy chair and looked straight at the Doctor.
–I want to know the answer. Why me? As long as I can get just a little bit closer to the answer, I’ll be satisfied.
She snarced the electronic voice box built into her suit. The Doctor’s eyes turned to it—to him.
“Make sure you filter out any material that’s too inappropriate, right, Oeufcoque? Anything too shocking and we’ll end up in violation of the protection of minors law ourselves.”
“Balot’s plenty sensible and mature about this, Doc. She’s the one who got the chips, after all. If she wants to see what’s inside them, we shouldn’t keep it from her.”
The Doctor scratched his head when confronted with Oeufcoque’s intractable bluntness. “It’s just that we had a warning from the DA. He told us to make sure we take into consideration the reactions from the Women’s Institute and other educational charities…”
Still in her prone state, Balot shrugged her shoulders. Why should the WI or the children’s charities care now if she was exposed, secondhand, to sex and violence? They couldn’t have cared less when they were the ones exposing her to it firsthand.
“It’s precisely because the laws of the land designed to protect minors didn’t protect her that Balot’s here with us today, Doc.” Oeufcoque seemed as unconcerned as Balot by the wrath of the do-gooders. “Besides, this is what Mardock Scramble 09 was made for. Balot wants to know why she was killed. It’s what she needs to do in order to move on and live again. No one trying to obstruct that has any claim on us—this is firmly outside their jurisdiction.”
The Doctor shrugged. It wasn’t as though he actually cared about the DA’s request, anyway.
–Don’t worry. I’ll be all right, ’cause Oeufcoque will be with me the whole time.
Balot smiled, and the Doctor couldn’t help but smile back. “So, even little half-baked Oeufcoque ends up getting cooked in an instant under the spell of the girl.”
“I’m just trying to do the right thing, based on what we know about her abilities and her feelings.”
“No need to go all red—I’m only teasing you! Are you blushing, my wishy-washy little friend?” the Doctor interrupted Oeufcoque, who was about to come to a spluttering halt anyway, and then turned toward the monitor. “Now, let’s break some eggs. All set?”
A piece of machinery in the dining room that looked like a large refrigerator started grinding away.
It was a machine that the Doctor and Oeufcoque had built together, designed specifically for the purpose of extracting Shell’s memories from the four chips. The idea was that Oeufcoque digested the raw data, processed it, and fed it to Balot, who physicalized the data into a form that could be recorded by the machine.
Balot snuggled deep into her easy chair and closed her eyes.
She experienced a different feeling from the time when she’d fixed her fake ID at the café with Oeufcoque, and one also distinct from her swim through the pool of information back at Paradise.
Her task now was to relive, as much as was possible, the life of another human being, selecting only the most pertinent pieces of information.
The first thing she heard was a voice. A low speaking voice. The sound swelled, dissonant and echoing all around her head, until it finally burst deep inside her, leaving only silence in its wake.
Balot’s ears pricked up, and she realized that she was somewhere she had never seen before.
A second later, she realized that she was standing there.
She was walking toward someplace. She seemed to be in the pleasure quarter of Mardock City. She came across a girl she had never seen before. A blonde, fourteen or fifteen.
The girl said something. Balot said something back to the girl.
For a moment a Blue Diamond sparkled inside the girl’s breast. An image of the rings on the right hand. The index finger on the right hand swelled up, and Balot saw playing cards and cars and drinks.
What number was this girl? Was she Shell’s first? Memories flooded her head, and Balot realized that the girl in front of her was indeed one that Shell had bought. At that same moment the girl started speaking. Balot couldn’t make out what the girl was saying; there was too much noise, too many other voices. Eventually the distractions subsided, and Balot could discern a number of phrases, snatches of conversation.
“I don’t want to go back to my father’s house,” the blonde girl said. Her voice was urgent. Balot felt overwhelmed by empathy.
“Please, don’t make me go back to my father.”
“Of course not. I’ll protect you, my little one. I’ll take you to a safe place. You’re beautiful. And you’re about to become even more beautiful.” A surge of empathy welled up inside him. Suppressed, over and over, many times. A crystal. The luster of a Blue Diamond. Then a great loss befalls both, all turns to dust. The processing commences.
The memory faded, and the jewel replaced it. The inevitable ritual that accompanied the death of memory.
The urge always appeared after a similar event—it was triggered by something. The death of a girl, murder dressed as suicide. Why me? The answer was sinking into the depths. A flashback that was doomed to wander through eternity, unknown and unknowable by anybody.