“Alright,” Quinn said, settling into a chair in front of a curved screen. “What am I doing?”
“You control it with your keyboard,” Clo explained from the identical station next to him.
“There’s nothing on the screen.”
“We have to wait for them to connect. You’ve really never used a telepresence bot before?”
“They’re not ideal for law enforcement. Too easy for people to ignore you. Or lie.”
“Yeah, well, all the freeways on the eastern seaboard are parking lots.”
“I’m just explaining why I’ve never used one before.”
“I get it. It’s easier to intimidate people in person.”
The curved screen stood on adjustable stilts on the desk such that it was eye height. It stretched nearly 180 degrees around his head.
“One of my friends just had a really bad experience with one of these,” he said, fiddling with his arrow keys.
“With a telepresence bot?” Clo scoffed. “Seriously? They’re like the Nerf toys of the robot world.”
The screens clicked on.
“Here we go.”
Quinn saw a staid business lobby decked completely in grays with gold trim.
“Is someone supposed to meet us?”
Clo fought back a laugh and hit the mute on her machine. “Your robot just said that aloud.”
It was true. People passing in the lobby turned. But unlike the glances he got in Texas, these were more worried than amused.
Quinn hit the mute button and the sound icon on his screen turned red.
“Why is everyone looking at us like that?”
“Maybe because of our avatars,” Clo explained.
“What about them?”
Clo tapped a few buttons and one of the main displays in the center of the lab changed: a stark white Crimes Division logo on an all-black background.
“That’s what they see on this thing’s face? Well, no wonder. We look like Nazis.”
“We look like police officers.”
“We look like Nazis. Change it back.”
“I can’t.”
“What do you mean you can’t?”
“I’d have to disconnect and create new accounts and start again. It’s supposed to encourage people to use their real identities.”
“That’s stupid.”
“I didn’t pick the agency software,” Clo said.
“No, but you put the frickin’ badges where our faces are supposed to be. We’re not vice officers interviewing pimps and druggies. This is a major corporate research park.”
“Fine,” she said curtly. “I’ll change it next time.”
“Agent Quinn?” a woman asked from behind his robot. “I’m sorry I’m late.”
Quinn turned his robot somewhat laboriously and saw a middle-aged Indian woman with dark, wavy hair and a white lab coat. She looked between the robots. Seeing no faces, just the Crimes Division logo, she wasn’t sure who to talk to.
“I take it you’re Dr. Sagar,” Quinn said.
“Agent Quinn?”
He extended his robot’s hand. “Guilty. Please forgive the lack of personalization. We’re still working out some kinks on our end.”
“I understand.” She took the robot’s hand gently in greeting. Her fingers were long and slim. “You should’ve seen this place after we moved in. Nothing worked. And please, call me Priya.”
“Thank you for meeting with us.”
“Don’t thank me. Thank our lawyers. Have you seen the agreement they drafted authorizing this visit?”
“Unfortunately, yes.” He motioned to Clo. “This is my colleague, Officer Galois of the French National Police.”
“French?”
“It’s kind of like an exchange program,” Quinn said. “We agree to take her, and in exchange, we get all the croissants we can eat.”
Dr. Sagar seemed confused at first. Then she laughed. “Oh, I see. Like they wanted to get rid of her. Well, we have a bit of a walk, if you want to get started. We have to go the long way round. Apparently, the agreement states you’re not to see any of the main campus.”
She led them toward the back of the chic but spartan foyer to a pair of doors that sat under an enormous banner hanging from the ceiling. On it, the bearded face of a middle-aged man looked confidently to the future.
Quinn stopped to look up at the over-sized advertisement. “The beard is new.”
“You’re familiar with our illustrious founder?” Dr. Sagar asked as she held open the doors.
“You could say that.”
She smiled knowingly. “Giving you guys trouble, was he?”
“He’s still giving us trouble,” Clo corrected.
“Now that I think about it,” she said, leading them down a long, curved hall, “all of this is sort of your fault.”
The same gray-with-gold-trim seemed to run through the whole compound.
“Whose?”
“The Agency’s. We had to let Bob go because he refused to get licensed. Dr. Q held you guys off for as long as he could, but once it became clear that compliance was the only real option, he sent out a memo to that effect. Bob was furious. Demanded to see him. Said he was giving in to fascists.”
“I knew that word would come up eventually,” Quinn said, shooting a mean look at Clo.
“I tried to convince him it was no use. I even offered to help him with his application. But after a couple of months, when he still refused, Dr. Q let him go.”
People passed giving the telepresence bots confused or frightened glances.
“What was Dr. Pilchhorn working on when he was here?” Clo asked.
“His last project worked with exotic matter. He was introduced to it here and got a little bewitched, I think.”
“Exotic matter?” Quinn asked.
“It’s like regular matter, but it’s composed of non-standard quark combinations, ones that don’t occur naturally in our universe.”
“Meaning?”
“Our universe has a set of laws. Other universes might have different laws, but ours necessitate that certain kinds of quarks pairs are unstable, which makes exotic matter very short-lived. Special steps have to be taken to keep it from decaying.”
“Decaying? You mean it’s radioactive?” Quinn asked.
“Yes. As the quark combinations decay to normal matter, they release energy. The difference between the energy of the unstable combination and the next stable ground state exits as some form of radiation.”
They moved through a long, covered walkway that connected two dark glass buildings. It curved slightly over the road below and was lined on the inside by narrow, regularly spaced cedar trees which looked completely identical.
“What would you use something like that for?” Quinn asked.
She stopped. There was a smirk on her face. “How much do you know about what we do here?”
Quinn shook his head like he wasn’t sure how to answer, only to realize she hadn’t seen it since she couldn’t see his face.
“Just what I see on TV.”
“And what’s in your licensing applications,” Clo added.
It was a point of contention between Quest and the SCA that the company had only submitted some of its work for licensure. The rest, Quest claimed, was not actually science, despite that it was marketed that way, and therefore was exempt from the law. Suits were pending.
“Everything is supposed to fall under the heading ‘holistic biohacking,’” Dr. Sagar said, “but really we’ll make anything we think our customers might buy. To be fair to Der Fuhrer”—she nodded to yet another image of the man hanging in the hall at the end of the walkway—“I think he really would give everyone a healthy new body if he could. But that’s because he’s a narcissist who relishes the praise. Still, as much as he loves that, I suspect he loves money more.”
“You’re being very candid,” Clo suggested.
“Am I? Versus what the lawyers want me to say, you mean? Yes, well, with all due respect to Der Fuhrer, I’m not going to obstruct a murder investigation. I’d rather get fired than get stricken from the rolls and lose my license. At least with a license I can get another job.”
“Eminently reasonable,” Quinn suggested.
After turning down the next hall, Dr. Sagar glanced around casually to make sure no one was in easy earshot.
“If you want to understand this feud, and why Bob left, you have to understand how this business works. Our ads say everything is independently tested for validity. And that’s true. But that’s not the whole story. Let’s say for example that I’ve discovered a compound that gives you perfect eidetic memory for some period of time.”
“Have you?” Quinn asked.
“I have, actually. A nasal spray. Let’s say I give both the spray and my notes to an independent lab and ask them to confirm my results and nothing more, which they do. I can now say on the bottle that my compound ‘gives photographic memory, as independently verified by such-and-such respectable lab.’ But what does that mean, really? Do you really remember everything, or just a lot more than usual? And for how long? Twenty minutes? An hour? And simply by calling it ‘memory,’ I’m not lying, but at the same time, I’m not distinguishing between working memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory, two of which are completely unaffected by my compound. Heck, it might even make them worse.”
“Worse how?”
“Maybe you remember more right away but less long term. So, for the students using it to ace their chemistry midterm, they might remember less about chemistry in a year than someone who struggled to get a C in the class. But I don’t know any of that because I deliberately didn’t look. Understand? I barely even looked to see if the compound was toxic. If I deliberately don’t try to understand my discovery, does what I do really count as ‘science?’”
“This is what the lawyers are gearing up to fight over in court.”
“Exactly. Quest wants to keep the fight as quiet as possible, if he can. He has to be careful about arguing too loudly that what we do isn’t science. I think the word they’re settling on is ‘scientific,’ which they will argue is close but different.”
“Jesus . . .” Clo shook her head.
“Lawyers.”
Quinn brought them back to the matter at hand. “You’re saying the exotic matter didn’t necessarily have to have a purpose. It just had to seem like it had a purpose.”
“To put it crudely, yes.”
“And Bob had a problem with that?”
“Not at all.” She laughed. “Bob wanted to be rich. The problem is, there’s not a large market for what we make. Most of it is produced in small batches and is only one step above novelty.”
“Then how do you stay in business?” Clo asked.
“People like to try new things. But you’re right that that only takes us so far. What we’re really looking for is the rare product that takes off, like our mood organs, which we produce continuously. But that’s uncommon. And unfortunately, we don’t know in advance which product will be a hit, so we basically keep trying things at random.
“But as far as Bob was concerned, all of that was academic. Even if he or I invented a hit, we wouldn’t see a dime. All the profits for our inventions go to Dr. Q. That’s what we agreed to when we started working here. We get a steady paycheck, and in return, all patents are his.”
“That’s standard, isn’t it?”
“Edison did it. So did Bell Labs. But Bob thought he had something brilliant to offer—so brilliant, that it often caused problems. Here we are.”
Dr. Sagar held another set of doors open for the lumbering robots. On the other side, the floor turned to concrete and industrial piping ran along the walls.
“How so?”
“Bob was sure no one was as smart as Bob was. As time went on and people didn’t realize his brilliance, he got bitter. It was a slow downward spiral from there. Painful to watch. At some point, he started to believe there was a conspiracy against him, which was why he wasn’t wealthy. People were after him. Powerful people. Getting let go was only proof that Der Fuhrer was in on it.”
“You don’t think it’s strange that he wound up violently murdered?”
Dr. Sagar stopped again and unlocked a heavy red door.
“I think Bob Pilchhorn had an undiagnosed mental illness for which he refused to seek treatment. I think after he lost his job, he was losing touch with reality and that probably drove him into the arms of some very dangerous people. What was he living on in Texas? How was he funding his experiments? Do you know what it takes to keep exotic matter stable? Even with a maker, it’s crazy expensive. It’s no secret that scientists like Bob and I are in demand on the black market. People are constantly looking for new experiences, new designer drugs, new body modifications. It’s big business and our skill sets make us valuable. The difference is, if you tell Dr. Q to go fuck himself, you just get fired. Tell a gangster the same thing . . . You see where I’m going? Bob didn’t know when to shut up. Hence, all the nonsense about getting licensed. So, no. I’m not surprised that you found him working in a bathtub in a derelict house, but I don’t think that’s evidence he was being persecuted by a secret government cabal.”
She opened the door to a long, concrete-walled storage warehouse.
“Speaking of the bathtub,” Quinn said, “I wonder if you’ve had a chance to look at the samples we found.”
“I did. Is that what caused the mess in Texas?”
“I’m afraid we can’t comment on an ongoing investigation.”
She stopped again and gave them a strange look. “I think there’s something you need to see.”
Dr. Sagar led them through an organized maze of mothballed equipment that seemed to go on forever. The smaller objects were packed in plastic boxes and stacked on high rafters. Anything bigger stood by itself, wrapped in translucent plastic like a burial shroud. To add to the funeral effect, the overhead lighting followed them as they walked, only illuminating what was immediately ahead or behind, like a funeral procession, and leaving the rest in darkness.
“What is this place?” Clo asked.
“A cemetery, where everything goes to die.” She pointed to a half-full rack on her left. “That’s a theta-wave inducer. That’s a home garden for growing edible medicines.”
“Edible medicines?”
“It’s like programmable yeast. You use a genetic editing tool to alter the seed and grow a plant that naturally contains whatever medicine you need to take. The vector choices were mint or cacao.”
“Didn’t work?”
“No, it did. We thought the organic, natural element would appeal, and we did have a few buyers, but no one wants to farm medicine. You have to wait weeks for it to grow, and dosing is hard. And what happens when you go on vacation or forget to water it? And then there were the kids growing things other than medicine, if you know what I mean.”
“Right.”
“Wasn’t worth the liability, so we killed it.”
Dr. Sagar stopped a corner nook where she tore a tarp off a glass sphere that stood on a metal stand four feet off the ground. Hovering inside the glass as if it were repelled by it was an undulating black glob.
“That looks familiar,” Quinn said flatly.
It wasn’t the same as the anomaly in Texas. The blob floating under the glass seemed more fluid. It was also darker and didn’t have the same iridescence.
“What is it?” Clo asked. Her voice echoed faintly in the long, dark room.
“It’s a biofeedback tool, fundamentally no different than what they do with electrodes.”
“What do they do with electrodes?”
“I take it you guys aren’t big into biohacking? Metabolic enhancement? Osteogenic loading? Dream learning?”
Both Quinn and Clo were silent.
Dr. Sagar turned back to the blob with a knowing look. “You should try it. I read a small library in my sleep last year.”
“Is that what it says on the bottle?” Clo jibed.
Quinn shoved her arm.
“Biofeedback is just a fancy name for a measurement of some internal state.” She stepped closer to the sphere. “If we put electrodes on your head, you can not only see your brain waves on a screen, you can influence them. Change them. And you can get better with practice.
“Rather than electrodes, which look scary, and a screen with a bunch of meaningless waveforms, we wanted something our clients could hold onto. This design was based on the Tesla coil, which has remained popular with people for, what? 170 years? It’s always the first thing the kids run to at the science museum. Hence the glass sphere. Unlike a Tesla coil, you don’t have to touch it to make it work, but we found people liked having something physical to touch, and touching does insure you’re close enough for it to register your brain waves.
“You control the interference with this knob in the base. More interference means you have to work harder, concentrate more, to induce the material to take a stable shape. Analogous to the resistance on a treadmill.”
“Shape?”
“Like this.”
Dr. Sagar approached the machine and put her hands on both side of the glass. Immediately, the floating, fluid blob inside began to change. Gradually, it morphed into a very irregular pyramid. It held the shape for barely a moment.
“I used to be better at this,” she said, letting go.
“That’s actually pretty cool,” Clo admitted.
“Oh, totally. Kids love it. Hence our initial interest. It’s the kind of novelty that people would pay money to play with. The idea was, as you crank up the resistance, you’re able to overcome more interference, which is supposed to be ‘proof’ that your brain is getting ‘stronger.’”
“Is it?” Clo asked.
“No. It just means you’re getting more skilled at manipulating your own brain waves.”
“Is that why you didn’t market it?”
“Ha. Hardly. Quest would re-market thalidomide if he thought he could make money. We didn’t market it because we couldn’t get approval from the FDA. Can’t say I blame them. The glass sphere is shielded, but if it ever cracked for some reason, low levels of radiation would leak into the home. If there were children or someone was pregnant . . .” She shrugged. “But Bob was convinced it was an untapped gold mine.”
“How so?”
“He thought exotic matter might be the key to finally realizing programmable matter, which is sort of the Holy Grail of materials science. Programmable matter is matter you can change on a whim. You want your table to be higher. You tell your home computer, or in this case, simply think it in the right way, and your table gets higher. Programmable matter turns the real world into the digital. Everything becomes malleable.”
Quinn was scowling. “So, he thought there was a way to turn this biofeedback tool into that.”
“Imagine what the patent would be worth. Imagine how different our wold would be.”
“You didn’t want in?”
“HA!” She laughed. “Exotic matter is unstable in our space-time, even in a vacuum.” She pointed to the blob. “This is suspended by magnetic field in an airless vacuum, but it’s already considerably more viscous than it was just a few months ago. It constantly emits low levels of radiation as it slowly reverts, particle by particle, to normal matter. As it reverts, it becomes rigid. Less and less manipulable. Like a shoddy cell phone battery, it winds down gradually until finally it’s worthless.”
“Is that why he was working with slime molds?” Quinn asked.
“Probably. Bob’s background is in memory, same as me. That’s how we met, actually. One of the key problems with programmable matter is that it has to be able to learn and adapt, to respond to its environment, to take new shapes, to return to old shapes. That requires some kind of memory. But unlike a computer, which keeps all its memory in one place, programmable matter needs to be able to morph. To split. To merge back together again. At each stage, retaining the full set of configurations.
“As it happens, life has already solved just about every engineering problem there is. Slime molds are some of the oldest forms of life on our planet. They’re not even truly multicellular. And what I just described is exactly how they work. If you make it so that a slime mold has to cross a salt bridge, which would normally be toxic, in order to feed, eventually, through a kind of directed randomized trial and error, it’ll figure it out. The thing about slime molds is that they have no body plan, no determined size or shape. Two slime molds that meet in the wild will merge. If you split one into five parts, or ten, you’ll have ten slime molds.
“If you split the slime mold from your experiment, all ten child molds will retain the ability to cross the salt bridge, meaning they all contain the learned skill of the parent. When two slime molds merge into one, the child retains the skills of both parents. That’s a true distributed memory, where updates cascade through the entire system. My guess is Bob was trying to create something similar. What I don’t get is, the samples you sent suggest he was nowhere close to solving the radioactivity problem, let alone matter reversion—which, frankly, is impossible. Bob may as well have been chasing perpetual motion. It was junk. Completely not worth killing over. Anybody who tried to make money on this would lose a fortune.”
“What about enemies?” Quinn asked. “People with a vested interest in seeing him fail. Competitors? Rivals?”
“Competitors? Not that I’m aware of. Almost no one is working with exotic matter because it’s so notoriously impossible to maintain. There was an explosion of interest a few years back after CERN figured out how to keep certain variations stable for more than a few seconds. People thought it might lead to a bunch of radical new materials, stuff with amazing properties like something out of science fiction. Since then, everyone’s pretty much moved on. Except Bob.”
“What about rivals then? People he pissed off?”
“Well . . .” She sighed. “There’s no shortage of those. I couldn’t even try to name them all. Sooner or later, Bob rubbed everyone the wrong way. But honestly, nobody stands out. It was all the kind of thing that didn’t get you invited back to the next dinner party. Seems like if someone was going to kill him, they would’ve at least raised their voice first. Or thrown a punch or something.”
“You don’t know,” Quinn suggested. “People have killed over the keeping of score in a beer pong match.”
“Then you would know better than me,” she said, clearly skeptical.
The three of them were quiet a moment.
“I don’t have to see your faces,” Dr. Sagar said, “to know that’s not what you all wanted to hear. And I’m sorry. But I have no idea who would want to kill Bob Pilchhorn. Or why. Believe me, I wish I did. He could be a real sonuvabitch sometimes, but no one deserves to die like that. Fossilized from the inside out . . .” She shuddered. “And I get no joy out of knowing whoever did it is still out there.”
It was the middle of the night and the Crimes Division lab was dark and silent. Thalia pushed open the doors with coffee in one hand and her bag slung over one shoulder. She couldn’t reach the light switch without losing one of them, but thankfully, someone had left their screen on, and the pale blue-white glow gave her enough light to reach her desk.
Then she saw the head in front of the screen.
“Oh, Jesus! You scared me.” Thalia recovered almost immediately. “Wait, who are you?” she demanded.
Nio held up her Special Visitor badge which hung from the lanyard around her neck. It announced by color that she had RED: Secure clearance. “I’m with Quinn.”
“Is he here? Already?”
She seemed worried.
“No. I came by military transport. I didn’t have a lot of say in when we arrived. What’s your excuse?”
The question seemed to fluster her.
“We have a huge amount of data coming in today. I just wanted to double check everything was ready.”
“Oh, right. From the autopsy.”
“You know about that?”
“Quinn sent me the case files.”
Thalia scowled. “Who are you exactly?”
“I’m Nio. I’m sort of a consultant, I guess.”
“Nye-oh,” Thalia said in that way everyone does at first, as if no such name should exist.
Then her face changed in recognition.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, right.” She started unpacking her bag. “So, you’re um . . .”
Nio waited patiently. “I’m?”
“Well, just . . . The da Vinci Project and all that.”
Nio smiled and turned back to her screen in the dark room. “Yup. And all that.”
Some people didn’t like to use the word clone, as if it were offensive.
“You can say it,” Nio told the woman.
“I did a paper on the project in college.”
“Oh?” Nio nodded as if that were interesting. “And what was your conclusion?”
“Oh, no conclusion really. Just the tricky ethics of it, you know.”
Nio guessed there had been a conclusion. Most people conclude the project never should’ve happened, but as that would mean telling her she shouldn’t exist, everyone deferred when speaking in person.
“Do I get to know your name?” Nio asked.
“Oh, right. Sorry. I’m Thalia.”
“How long you been with the Agency?”
“A few weeks.”
“Like it? Quinn seems very excited.”
Thalia waggled her head. “It’s interesting, that’s for sure. More than what I was doing before.”
Nio noticed Thalia hadn’t logged in yet. She seemed like she was hesitating.
“Were you in law enforcement?”
“Is it that obvious? Don’t answer that,” Thalia joked. “Yeah, I spent 12 years with the LAPD. Almost. Eleven and a half.”
“Why’d you quit? Or is that private?”
“No, it’s fine. I got a divorce, actually.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Yeah, it wasn’t awesome. I thought the kids and I needed a fresh start. My ex is . . . Well, it wasn’t a very healthy relationship.”
“So, you needed some distance.”
“Exactly.” Thalia nodded. “Distance. As it happened, this opportunity opened up, so . . . Here I am.”
“Sucks you had to come in so early,” Nio said surreptitiously. “I’m supposed to be helping. Is there something I can do?”
“Oh, no.” Thalia waved her off. “It’s fine. Not a big deal. I’m probably worrying for no reason. What about you?” Thalia turned the question round. She stepped closer so she could see Nio’s screen. “Cayman Islands?” She read the words. “Taking a vacation?”
“No, there are some bad guys I’m trying to find.”
“Wait, how did you get into the—”
Thalia stopped when she saw the user name at the top of the screen. Nio had logged in as Quinn, who was using a variant of the same password he’d used at the Bureau.
“He won’t mind,” Nio assured her.
“The director might,” Thalia said.
Something about her face made Nio pause. She removed her hands from the keyboard. “Fair enough. I’ll take you up on that offer of help, then.” With a few clicks, Nio logged out. She stood. “Your desk?”
“Here is fine,” Thalia said, moving to take Nio’s place. “What are you looking for?”
“Court documents or cases or anything involving a man named Emilio Cortez.”
“Okay. We can do that. Nothing secret there. There’s an interagency register.”
“Ah,” Nio said. “Was I in the wrong system?”
“Something like that. So, is that Cortez with an S or a Z?”
“Can you do both? And restrict to the Caribbean?”
“It doesn’t work like that. You have to pick a jurisdiction.”
“Can we do it by country?”
“Yes.”
“Try the Cayman Islands.”
Thalia did as Nio requested and search results came up empty.
“What about the Virgin Islands?”
0 results.
“Bahamas?”
0 results.
Nio scowled. She really expected there would be something. Given the technical complexity of the game, it seemed likely that something would’ve touched some court or regulatory agency somewhere. Maybe it was under a different name?
“Can you do everything?” she asked.
“The whole database?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want a time range?”
“I want to see if there’s anything at all.”
“Okay. One sec.” Thalia typed and made a few selections.
The search results came up on the screen.
“3,512 entries with Emilio Cortes with an S or Z. But that’s anybody with that name. Is there something else we can restrict on?”
“What about just the past year?”
394 results.
“The last three months?”
101 results.
Nio sighed. She could go through all of them, but it would take too much time.
“Shit!” she blurted. She covered her mouth. “Sorry. Can you try Panama?”
“In the last three months?”
“In the last year.”
1 result.
She stood. “Gotcha . . . Can you send that to me?”
“I can’t send it. But I can let you look.”
Thalia clicked on the entry and the court filings filled the screen.
“That’s a lotta paper,” Nio said.
“Lawyers get paid by the hour,” Thalia explained.
“Looks like a wrongful death suit.”
Nio paged through it, but there wasn’t anything of interest, and after a few minutes, she felt guilty for keeping Thalia from her job.
“That’s it, I guess.”
“Find what you were looking for?” Thalia asked.
“Not at all. But what about you? Can I return the favor, help you with your thing?” Nio asked as innocently as she could.
“You know what?” Thalia said. “I think I’m gonna run a few errands and do it when I come back.”
She logged out and closed the screen.
“You sure? I didn’t scare you away, did I?”
“No, I just think it’ll be easier for me to do later. I’ll fall asleep working in the dark. I don’t know how you do it.” Thalia gathered a few things in her bag. “But it was nice to meet you. I’ll see you later, right?”
“I’ll be here,” Nio said.
She watched the woman leave.