For a moment, my hardwired reflexes had kicked in. For a moment, I had been considering whether or not this man had blown my cover, whether or not I should kill him. I carefully manufactured a smile, and said that I hadn’t realized that I seemed so odd.
“Most of us have secrets,” Willy said. “That’s why we’re out here, my brother. We’re just as much prisoners as anyone in our sticks. They don’t know it, but those dumbasses blundering about in the files are trying to find a way of escaping what they are.”
“And there’s no way you can escape what you are,” I said.
The moment had passed. My smile was a real smile now, not a mask I’d put on to hide what I really was.
Willy toasted me with his bulb of tea. “Anyone with any sense learns that eventually.”
“You still haven’t told me how you would catch the assassin.”
“I don’t intend to catch him.”
“But speaking hypothetically…”
“For all we know, it’s the warden. He can go anywhere and everywhere, and he has access to all the security systems too.”
“The warden? Really?”
Willy grinned. “I’m pulling your chain. But seriously, I’ve done a little research about these things. They’re not only stone killers: they’re also real good at disguising themselves. The assassin could be any one of us. The warden, you, me, anyone. Unless this thing makes a mistake, we haven’t got a hope of catching it. All we can do is what we’re already doing—deploy more security drones, keep the prisoners locked down when they aren’t working, and pray that that’ll keep a lid on any unrest until that team arrives.”
“I guess you’re right,” I said.
“Don’t try to be a hero, my brother. Not even hypothetically.”
“Absolutely not,” I said.
But one of Willy’s remarks had given me an idea about how to reach out to the assassin, and my mind was already racing, grappling with what I had to do.
I decided that if the assassin really was keeping an eye on the people who were hacking into the files, then he (or at least, his demon), must be lurking in the root directory of the data system. That was where I left an encrypted message explaining what I was and why I wanted to talk, attached to a demon that would attempt to trace anyone who looked at it. The demon phoned me six hours later, in the middle of the night. Someone had spotted my sign and wanted to talk.
The demon had failed to identify the person who wanted to talk, and it was infected with something, too: a simple communication program. I checked it out, excised a few lines of code that would have revealed my location, and fired it up. It connected me to a blank, two-dimensional space in which words began to appear, emerging letter by letter, traveling from right to left and fading away.
>>you got rid of the trace function. pretty good for an old guy—if that’s what you really are.
>they trained us well, I typed.
>>you think you know what i am. you think that i am like you.
Whoever was at the other end of the program wanted to get straight down to business. That suited me, but I knew that I couldn’t let him take the lead.
>we are both children of the vat, I typed. that’s why I reached out to you. that’s why i want to help you.
There was a pause as my correspondent thought this over.
>>you could be a trap.
>the message got your attention because it is hardwired into your visual cortex, just as it is hardwired into mine.
>>that kind of thing is no longer the secret it once was, but let’s say that i believe you…
A black disc spun in the blank space for less than a second, its strobing black light flashing a string of letters and numbers, gone.
>>do you know where that is?
I realized that the letters and numbers burnt into my brain were a grid reference.
>i can find it.
>>meet me in four hours. i have a little business to take care of first.
It was the middle of the night; the time when the assassin did his work.
>please don’t kill anyone else until we have talked.
My words faded. There was no reply.
The grid reference was at the precise centre of a small eroded crater sixty klicks south of the facility, an unreconstructed area in the shadow of the graben’s eastern rimwall. Before I headed out, I equipped myself from the armoury and downloaded a hack into the security system so that I could move freely and unremarked. I was oddly happy, foolishly confident. It felt good to be in action again. My head was filled with a fat, contented hum as I drove a tricycle cart along an old construction road. The rendezvous point was about an hour away: I would have plenty of time to familiarize myself with the terrain and make my preparations before the assassin, if that was who I had been talking to, turned up.
I want to make it clear that my actions were in no way altruistic. The only life I wanted to save was my own. Yes, I knew that I was dying, but no one loves life more than those who have only a little of it left; no one else experiences each and every moment with such vivid immediacy. I didn’t intend to throw away my life in a grand gesture. I wanted to unmask the assassin and escape the special team’s inquisition.
The road ran across a flat terrain blanketed in vacuum-cemented grey-brown dust and littered with big blocks which over the eons had been eroded into soft shapes by impact cratering.
The graben’s wall reared up to my left, its intricate folds and bulges like a frozen curtain. Steep cones and rounded hills of mass-wasted talus fringed its base. To my right, the land sloped away toward a glittering ribbon of fences and dykes more than a kilometer away, the boundary of the huge patchwork of fields. It was two in the morning by the clock, but the suspensor lamps were burning as brightly as they always did, and above the western horizon the sun’s dim spark was almost lost in their hazy glow.
I was a couple of klicks from the rendezvous, and the road was cutting through a steep ridge that buttressed a great bulge in the wall, when the assassin struck. I glimpsed a hitch of movement high in a corner of my vision, but before I could react, a taser dart struck my cart and shorted its motor. A second later, a net slammed into me, slithering over my torso as muscular threads of myoelectric plastic tightened in constricting folds around my arms and chest. I struggled to free myself as the cart piddled to a halt, but my arms were pinned to my sides by the net and I couldn’t even unfasten the safety harness. I could only sit and watch as a figure in a black pressure suit descended the steep side of the ridge in two huge bounds, reached me in two more.
It ripped out my phone, stripped away my utility belt, the gun in the pocket on the right thigh of my pressure suit and the knife in the pocket on the left thigh, then uncoupled my main air supply, punched the release of my harness and dragged me out of the low-slung seat and hauled me off the road. I was dumped on my back near a cart parked in the shadow of a house-sized block and the assassin stepped back, aiming a rail-gun at me.
The neutron camera I’d fitted inside my helmet revealed scant details of the face behind the gold-filmed mirror of my captor’s visor. Its demon made an extrapolation, searched the database I’d loaded, found a match. Debra Thorn, employed as a paramedic in the facility’s infirmary for the past two years, 22, unmarried, no children… I realized then that I’d made a serious mistake. The assassin was a doppelganger, all right, but because she was the double of someone who hadn’t been an adult when the war had ended she must have been manufactured and decanted much more recently than me. She wasn’t insane, and she hadn’t spent years under cover. She was killing people because that was what she’d been sent here to do. Because it was her mission.