I have you.
I listened at the door but didn’t hear anyone inside. Sticking close to the wall, I reached out and tried the knob. It was locked.
Give me an override on the door.
Done.
I showed my badge to the scanner and the bolt clicked. No one inside moved or spoke. Using the backscatter, I looked through the door. No one was waiting on the other side.
I pushed open the door and slipped through. There were more cameras mounted in the ceiling but they were turned away, watching the bed.
We’re picking up some activity in there. How long, Wachalowski?
Not long.
The hotel room was lit by simulated candlelight. As soon as I was inside, I caught a blast of perfume and damp air. There was a water stain on the far wall where a strip of wallpaper had been torn away. The bed was made and the blankets turned down. The revivor signature was coming from the bathroom.
Moving into the room, I noticed something under the bed.
Hold on.
Across from the foot of the bed I saw the revivor through the open bathroom door. It was standing in the dark with its back to me, looking into the mirror over the sink. It was female, with stick-thin legs and a pair of sheer briefs hanging from a flat behind. It wore a wig the color of bubblegum.
I got down on one knee and looked under the bed. In the shadows, I saw a pair of bare feet, toes down.
“She put her there,” the revivor said from the bathroom. When I looked, it still had its back to me.
I grabbed the ankles, and the skin was cold. Keeping out of range of the cameras, I dragged a second female revivor out from under the bed. It didn’t have a signature.
“Who did?” I asked. In the bathroom, the revivor just kept staring in the mirror. I left the body and moved in behind it.
SWAT, get ready to move on my mark.
Roger.
I came within a foot of it, until I saw its eyes reflected back in the mirror. It had a pair of large, bare breasts thrust out in front of it with the characteristic dark gray nipples and black veins tracing the curves. Underneath them, ribs stood out, and down the middle of its back, I could see the knobs of its spine. When I leaned in, I caught a whiff of decomposition underneath heavy perfume. Wherever the thing was made, it was a botch job. The inhibitors were failing, and the body was beginning to rot.
“Who put the revivor under there?” I asked.
“She did.”
I blinked hard, deactivating the JZI. For a few seconds, I’d be completely offline. The revivor looked at me in the mirror, and met my eye.
“Am I for you?” it asked. I spun it around so it was facing me. I took a photograph from inside my jacket and held it in front of its face.
“Have you seen this woman?” I asked it.
“It’s a revivor.”
“I know that. Have you seen her?”
“No.”
“Do you know the name Faye Dasalia?”
The factory fire where I’d last seen her burned for three months straight. When it finally died down to the point where it could be scrubbed, there was nothing left. There was no way to know if Faye or any of the other revivors had come out of there intact, or where they’d gone if they had.
It looked up from the picture, focusing on me again.
“I don’t know that name.”
I blinked and the JZI reinitialized. Before it could say anything else, I touched the scanner to the back of its neck and squeezed the contact, firing a wire filament up into the spine. It made contact with the primary revivor’s node, and the body went rigid for a second before it went limp. I caught it as it started to fall.
Sean, Vesco, I have a connection.
You dropped. What happened?
That was Vesco. He’d been keeping an eye on me, a little too closely. Someone had their hooks in him.
Repeat: you dropped. What happened?
Cut the chatter and wait for my signal.
The revivor felt cold through my wet shirt. Hoisting it up, I eased it back into the bathtub.
The data miner started boring through the security they’d installed on it. A central command was being used to control them, which meant they needed an open connection to each revivor. A centralized hub like that, in the hands of an amateur, could allow access to all their systems if you made a direct connection with one of the revivor nodes. I was counting on that.
On the edge of my peripheral vision I could see audio waves piped in from the eye in the sky. The analyzer was pulling out three voices spiking over the haze of conversation. They were coming from the basement level, where a second group of revivors were located.
The miner drilled down and opened a channel. Using the JZI, I joined the revivor network.
Node count: eleven.
Five upstairs. The rest had moved to the basement. The link went green, and I tapped into the central node. They’d put plenty of security on all the typical channels, but sure enough, the revivor spokes were wide open.
I’m in.
Moving in now.
I started pulling the files. Less than ten seconds later, I heard a boom that vibrated through the floor. The audio being monitored spiked, and I heard shouting as footsteps tromped down the hallway. The last of the files came through, and I broke the connection to the revivor.
The door opened and a man came through, pointing an automatic pistol. I fired twice and he pitched back, his gun clattering across the floor.
“This way!” someone yelled from outside.
I picked up the pistol and handed it to a SWAT officer as I stepped back out into the hallway. Several more of them had men under armed guard.
“This is a raid! Get on the ground now!”
Down the hall, uniformed men were holding rifles on three guys. Two were in sports jackets and the last was in his underwear, holding a balled-up bedsheet to his chest. Mike Vesco waded through the mess, holding up his badge.
“Drop it and get down!”
“Step away from the—”
A high-pitched hiss blasted through the air back in what used to be the hotel lounge. Behind the bar a white light flared up as smoke blew through the seams of a computer chassis.
“Get an extinguisher over there, goddamn it!”
Watch those exits.
Down a side hall, hotel room doors were hanging open as SWAT cleared the rooms. Through one of the doorways I saw an overweight, middle-aged man standing naked with his hands up. A revivor was bound on the floor next to the bed, gagged and handcuffed.
Do we have a lock on the shipment?
Negative.
In the next room down was the only guy who hadn’t gotten caught with his pants down. He was an Asian man, dressed to the nines, with an expensive watch and long, thick hair. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, unconcerned. There was no revivor with him.
Who is this guy? I asked Sean.
He’s not involved.
How do you know that, Sean? Who is he?
No one. Come on, leave the pervs for Vesco.
When I scanned his face, I found him in the system. His name was Hiro Takanawa, and he was as rich as he looked. It looked like it wasn’t the first time he’d been caught paying for time with a revivor.
“Where’d the revivor go?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “I don’t see one here,” he said. “Do you?”
I didn’t. I shoved open the bathroom door and looked in, but it was empty.
SWAT, how many revivors are accounted for?
We got four, plus the two defunct in the room where you found them.
I checked the remaining signatures. There were six more beneath the floor somewhere, down on the basement level. Six up here, and six below. One was already defunct when I got there, so that put the node count at eleven. That was all of them.