Dervish Is Digital Part 17

Stop, she told herself. Stop thinking. Vitals are up. Stop thinking.

Ogada smiled a little. "You look kinda scared, Konstantin, you know that?"

He couldn't have put it over on her forever. Maybe not even for very much longer. But how long had he expected to? And, even more important, why?

Dervish is digital. How many different ways do I have to say it? Susannah Ell's voice in her mind.

Why does a person stalk somebody? Particularly, why in AR? Dervish could cost Ell money, ruin her deadlines, destroy her peace of mind but h.e.l.l, it wasn't like he could kill her, so what was the big deal?

She never even saw him in person. People went into AR for precisely these kinds of thrills. It wasn't Dervish's fault she was delusional, saying he was somehow converted into a digital being. Pure AR fantasy! If Susannah Ell couldn't take the heat, she should stay out of the frying pan. Konstantin could practically hear Dervish's lawyer making the case in court.

And herself? Right, the junkie cop with the penchant for s.e.x clubs. Drugged on the job, couldn't tell the difference between AR and Ground Zero. A software program meant to defraud AR service providers by falsifying online records? If it please the court, let's call it by its real name -- the fruit of the poisoned tree.

Which would mean that Dervish, digital or not, would be free to continue playing his strange, terrible games in AR with anyone he chose, whether they liked it or not. I can do whatever I like with you. And I will.

This had all gone through her mind in one zap of gestalt. Her thoughts would not stop racing; if anything, they seemed to be working faster. She felt as if she were trembling. Dervish looked down at her with his Ogada face, enjoying himself. Now that she knew, she couldn't imagine how she had not perceived Dervish's essence leering out at her through the Ogada mask.

Or the arms dealer's, she realized.

She could crown herself genius of the year later, she thought. Understanding everything was great, but it didn't help her figure out how to get away from the son of a b.i.t.c.h. He thought he was digital, which, to answer Susannah Ell's all-but-forgotten question from some eternity ago, probably made him psychotic. But he also seemed to command practically unlimited amounts of processing power, almost as if he really were digital. How did you fight against something that strong? Dervish rose slowly from his crouch to stand over her. He looked a hundred feet tall from this angle. She made herself go as limp as she could.

The element of surprise was crude, but still effective. She waited for him to look toward the door again before she sprang up and shoved him as hard as she could through the open doorway. Instead of the squad room, there was nothing but a black void beyond the threshold and she had managed to surprise him so well that he dropped like a stone immediately, disappearing before she even slammed the door and locked it.

"I thought you'd never get up."

She whirled. Goku was standing by the chair, holding her headmount. He lunged at her and slammed it down onto her head.

"I know, you don't have to say it," said Konstantin as they sat in the stern of the junk. "We don't have much time." The junk certainly seemed to know it. Instead of bobbing up and down, it was cutting through the water as smoothly as a powerboat, heading back to Hong Kong from Kowloon.

Goku laughed. "We don't have any time. We're making our own. Or rather, uncovering it." He reached into his still-elegant black tuxedo jacket and came up with his silver cigarette case.

Konstantin sighed. "This is no time for affectations."

Now he stared at her. "Well, thank you so much for that helpful tip." He flipped the case open and helped himself to a pure white cigarette. As usual, it lit itself and he blew the smoke in her face. She started to say something and he shook his head. "I know, you didn't feel that, but it's disrespectful." He took another drag and this time blew the smoke directly at her chest.

Konstantin's white-hot flash of rage was replaced almost immediately by an odd buzz that was spreading upward from her neck to the top of her head. She raised her hand to where she thought her cheek would be and felt her face -- or a face, anyway -- under her fingers. Immediately, she rested her elbows on her knees and put her chin in her hands, deciding not to burden him with the knowledge of how long she had been wanting to do that in AR. It didn't feel quite like the real thing, but it was close enough to be comfortable.

I've got that unreal feeling again, she thought. Time to log out.

Taliaferro, are you there yet?

"I'll reconnect you to your partner shortly," Goku said, blowing a cloud of smoke around them.

Not exactly a cloud -- it seemed to be more like a curtain or a veil with a visible lattice weave in it.

Instead of dissipating as it grew, it became thicker, or so it seemed to Konstantin. "As soon as you're capable of communicating at a more normal speed. It all sounds normal to you but it would be unintelligible to your long-suffering partner."

Those weren't lattice patterns in the smoke, she saw; they were fractals. She looked at Goku.

"East/West Precinct is a bit less... fussed, you might say, about its operatives keeping up the appropriate pace."

She winced. "You're Phase 3 Interpol."

"I am, yes. Not all of East/West is, however. Yos.h.i.+da isn't, for example. In any case--"

She tried to interrupt.

"In any case," he repeated, talking over her, "it was me talking to you before, not Taliaferro."

"How did you know what to say to me?"

"You were muttering a mile a minute on Taliaferro's frequency. I could hear you just fine."

Fractals parted before Konstantin's eyes, slid through her peripheral vision and disappeared just as more appeared. "That was a pretty neat trick with the cards at the casino. How did you manage to get past Dervish's blockade?"

"Trade secret." He shrugged. "Any tech-head at East/West can give you chapter and verse. What I need to know right now is what you want to do." Konstantin frowned at him, confused. What was he asking her for -- a date?

"Are you going to log out?" he said patiently.

"I didn't get that son of a b.i.t.c.h," Konstantin said. "If I can't prove he's got software capable of defrauding AR service providers, everything he put me through was for nothing."

"Very gung-ho," said Goku, freshening the fractal veil.

"Gung your own ho," Konstantin said irritably, not caring if she made sense. "I've been through it today and I'm not in the mood. That's the only charge anybody's gonna take seriously against this guy.

He's got his ex so crazy she thinks he changed into a conscious digital creature that never leaves AR and has unlimited power to make her life miserable. You know what he did with me. G.o.d knows what he can do to anyone else on a whim. I think he's just getting started. The fact that he can't physically touch anybody, let alone kill someone, could have him going in and out of court on a conveyor belt -- mostly out, I'd bet. But let it out that someone's developed the AR provider's worst nightmare, the decoy time-sink, and everyone'll be paying attention."

Goku didn't say anything.

"What?" she said finally.

"Dervish gives every sign of being digital," he said. "Or of being so adapted to the digital environment he might as well be."

Konstantin stared at him. "How long have you been in? I know a cyborg who's convinced he's set his body free and he's going to spend the rest of his life in AR. Of course, that's easy to check with him -- he's local. We've got his name and address because he filed an official complaint and we can send someone around to check on him." Konstantin thought about it. Maybe she'd go herself just for a change in routine. Besides, she wanted to see what someone who would choose to look like a cyborg looked like in real life. Someone other than Celestine, anyway.

"If you think Hastings Dervish is digital," she said after a bit, "maybe lowdown Hong Kong's put some weird s.h.i.+t in your head."

"Or maybe if you go fast enough long enough, you learn how to outrun your own shadow."

"The stuff of urban legends," Konstantin jeered.

"Prove it."

"Why am I arguing with you about this?" she yelled. "You told me you were looking into complaints that lowdown Hong Kong mound was raping people's minds -- your term for it. I think Dervish is behind it, with or without Hong Kong mound's complicity. Spend half an hour at high speed with him jerking you in every direction, pus.h.i.+ng you onto those carnivals rides, you'll believe anything."

She paused. "Is that what happened to you when you were the kid?"

He looked at her. "When did you see the kid?"

"I wasn't sure if it was you, you didn't recognize me. You stole an olive out of a martini, ate it and spit out the pit. I thought you were showing off."

"I was being jammed," he said. "I'd been chasing down some lowlife tourist in an expensive pre-fab kiddy-wh.o.r.e get-up. Stupid tourists go get that s.h.i.+t and they don't know what they're asking for.

They're sure not ready for what happens to them, and the f.u.c.k-a.s.s company that supplies them don't care. They're making too much money. Anyway, this one got away from me."

"Really," said Konstantin, keeping her voice neutral. "What were you going to do to her, or him?

Or him/her?"

Goku gave a short laugh. "Just scare the jerk to death. At the time, I was really looking forward to it, too, so maybe it's just as well. You don't want to enjoy that kind of work too much, it makes you into something you'd never want to be. But I was all puffed up with self-righteous anger and I got careless. I got jammed. I don't know how long it lasted -- there's something about the white noise they use that scrambles your sense of time pa.s.sing. But when I came to, or woke up, my suit had logged me out. But the kid had been busy running errands for someone. Dervish, apparently. He went and got all the information he needed on Ross."

Konstantin blinked. "Ross?"

"The arms dealer," Goku said patiently. "Didn't you know her name?" "Right, yes, I did, yes. I just always thought of her as 'the arms dealer.'"

"That's another hazard in AR. You start thinking of people as what instead of who. And they start behaving that way. But that's a tirade for a more convenient time." He blew out another fractal crowd and looked at the cigarette. "I've got maybe two more clouds and then that's it, we're out in the open again. You want to get Dervish for defrauding his AR provider?"

Unbidden, Ogada's story about Al Capone rose up in her mind and in spite of herself, she smiled.

"Well, we sure can't get him on a.s.sault, rape, or aggravated mopery and dopery--"

"Yet," put in Goku.

Konstantin hesitated. She wasn't so sure about what disadvantages there would be in a system where they could, but there wasn't time to meditate on it now. "Maybe we can add tax evasion, just to make sure he's tied up for awhile."

Goku looked impressed. "When all else fails, call the taxman. I wish I'd thought of that."

"Don't worry, you will."

He gave her a confused look.

"Nothing, nothing, old joke. You had to be there. Did you have a plan for putting Dervish in the money shot, so to speak?"

"It's a tough one," he said.

"One of us gets jammed. Or both of us."

"Both of us only if we're very unlucky."

"How does the one who picks the short straw get un-jammed?"

Goku shot his cuffs, looking smug. "I've got some software."

"You do?" Konstantin gave him a look. "Then why didn't you use it when you got jammed?"

"It didn't work then."

"But it works now."

"It had better."

Konstantin let out a long breath. "You Phase 3 Interpol people are, as they say in post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty, crazy motherf.u.c.kers."

Goku nodded. "Good thing we're on your side, eh?" He blew out a very thin cloud of smoke and tossed the cigarette over the side into the water. "OK, we're about to be really busy." He stood up and pulled Konstantin to her feet. They were approaching a floating dock several yards from the harbor itself.

"The junk won't stop completely, so we'll have to jump for it. Be ready to move fast as soon as we hit."

He frowned. "I mean, really fast. You're going to have to turbo-charge the boost. The software should help, but a good part of it is sheer will."

Konstantin remembered her climb out of the elevator. "Spirit is willing," she said. She felt something funny spreading upward from the bottom of her jaw and thought that another dose of numbing filler was kicking in. Then she realized that she was actually feeling wind on her face.

"Software," said Goku, watching her expression. "Better transcutaneous stimulation, more thorough. It a.s.sociates more nerves so eventually your face gets tuned in. There's a lag sometimes between what you perceive and what you feel, but for the most part, it's a lot better than nothing."

Before she could respond, he put his arm around her waist and they were vaulting from the edge of the stern onto the dock. The landing was stiff enough to give her knee a twinge. She rolled over, stood up, and found herself standing outside Room 606 with the key in her hand.

To Konstantin's surprise, Room 606 was a regular hotel room of the utilitarian sort meant for business travelers who didn't stay anywhere for very long. Instead of a window, however, it had a smaller version of the multi-screen wall in her virtual office. Goku perched on the edge of the king-sized bed that took up most of the s.p.a.ce and picked up a remote. All of the screens went on at once; he scanned them quickly and then pointed the remote at the lower right-hand corner.

Konstantin watched herself entering room 909 from the hallway. The arms dealer crowded up behind her as she remembered, but when she was suddenly yanked into the room, the arms dealer flew backwards, hit the opposite wall, and then fell through it and disappeared. "The old switch-ola," Konstantin said, more to herself. "The real one. Where Dervish switched himself for the original."

The screen split into upper and lower halves, the latter containing a long, complicated read-out of figures Konstantin didn't understand. She looked questioningly at Goku.

"East/West's a.n.a.lysis says that program is neither fully human nor fully AI," he said.

"What program?"

"The one running the arms dealer. It would seem to be part Dervish and part AI."

"That's--" Konstantin bit down on the word impossible.

Goku gave her a half-smile. "That's... interesting, right?"

"Among other things. Where is she now, really?"

"Data says she's offline. Since she's in police custody, that's probably true." He aimed the remote at a screen in the left-hand corner. "Not the case with your friend Darwin. Data says he's offline now, and he's been offline for about twelve hours. The truth is, he hasn't been out of AR since I started watching him."

The image on the screen was a fetus about a month away from full-term. "Are you sure that isn't a decoy?" Konstantin asked, repelled.

"As sure as you can be about anything in here. He doesn't know he's a fetus. He doesn't know anything at the moment because he's completely jammed. Every so often, Dervish unjams him and lets him frolic in his cyborg drag in AR, but he mostly keeps him in limbo. Whoever he is, he's not especially strong-willed and he's highly suggestible, so it didn't take long for Dervish to brainwash him."

"Jesus," Konstantin whispered.

"You were next," Goku told her.

"Me? Why me?"

"Because his ex-wife sicced you on him." Goku shrugged. "Probably. Also, the idea of doing a cop appealed to him as much as anything. Hastings Dervish really hasn't been out of AR for -- well, I don't know how long. He's got some kind of intensive-care style set-up in Key West, mostly automated.

Intravenous feeding, catheters."