Dervish Is Digital Part 19

"And?"

Taliaferro sighed again. "I'm going to have Mura call you and give you the whole story. It's just easier that way."

"Oh." She paused. "When I was talking in my sleep, did I happen to thank you for voluntarily entering not only a building but a little tiny room to give me CPR? Even if you did crack my ribs."

"If you're thanking people, thank Goku Mura for contacting me and telling me your vitals were flatline." He smiled, a little sadly she thought. "And it was only one rib. A tap wasn't enough. I had to pound you a few times."

"Thank G.o.d you tell lame jokes. It hurts to laugh."

Mura didn't call. He came to see her in person instead.

At first, she thought it was her eyesight. After a few minutes, she realized why Goku Mura looked blurry to her in person -- real life just didn't have as high a resolution as AR. Perhaps that was her eyesight after all, but suffering only in comparison to a standard that had crept up on her without her noticing.

Besides looking a little blurry, he was also paler and gawkier. The easy physicality of his movements and posture had been, apparently, all software. Not that Konstantin felt especially critical. If anything, it was more of a relief to find out the James Bond suave had been left behind in AR. If he'd borne too much of a resemblance to the gambler she'd first seen in the lowdown Hong Kong casino, her resulting inferiority complex might have killed her.

"When your partner called me," he began in his soft voice, "I knew that I would have to come here and talk to you in person."

Konstantin nodded. "Under the circ.u.mstances, I think I'd have done the same."

"But perhaps it's not what you were expecting."

"I'm not sure what you mean," Konstantin said after a moment of hesitation. "What am I expecting? I wasn't expecting you to come in person--"

"I mean what you're expecting to hear," he said.

"Well, the parts I don't know, I don't know what to expect," Konstantin said, apprehension starting to build in the pit of her stomach. "You can tell me those and I'll tell you how little I expected."

Goku Mura looked pained and Konstantin's apprehension turned to nausea.

"OK," she said. "Just tell me. Get it over with. We're not going to make a case against Hastings Dervish, are we."

He shook his head.

"Because it's just too--" she floundered, trying to find a word. "Preposterous?"

"Dervish is not digital," he said, gently. "Dervish is dead."

The words fell to the floor of her mind with a thud and lay there. Dead. Dervish. Dervish is dead.

He sat silently in the chair next to her bed and didn't try to hurry a response out of her, which she appreciated.

"Someone's seen the body, then?" she said after a bit.

He nodded. "There is most definitely a corpse, and it has been positively identified as Hastings Dervish."

"Well, there you go," she said. "The first thing I'm going to do when I get out of here is visit a few narcs and inform them that it is, in fact, possible to get yourself more than slightly dead in AR. I almost bought it, and Dervish went all the way."

Goku shook his head. "Dervish died while he was logged in to AR, but not because he simply stopped breathing, as you did."

"No? What happened?"

"He was murdered."

Konstantin couldn't speak. "The story from Key West is that a trespa.s.ser, an alien looking to enter the United States illegally, happened to fetch up on Hastings Dervish's beachfront. After breaking in and helping herself to some food, she was exploring the rest of the house, looking for valuables when she came upon Hastings Dervish all done up in his hotsuit and headmount. The sight scared her so much she pulled a gun and shot him."

"Lone gunwoman, huh?" Konstantin said.

Goku smiled slightly. "Exactly. There has been no suggestion that any formally or even informally organized crime group were financing various developments in software and mind-control techniques and decided the stooge they were using as a front was becoming far too high profile such that he might have managed to get himself directly connected to a felony crime committed while resident in Key West, thus making him and all his a.s.sociates vulnerable to an investigation."

Konstantin blinked. "Really. No one's even tossed that out as a theory?"

"Hard to believe, I know."

"Well." She took a breath and let it out, automatically putting a hand on her chest to feel it. "I realize prosecuting a dead man is one of those... difficult cases, but wouldn't your anti-jamming software justify at least confiscating Dervish's set-up, including his software?"

There was a short pause. "The anti-jamming software didn't work."

"What do you mean, it didn't work? You got out."

"You got me out. You and whoever was helping you. Was that Celestine or DiPietro?"

Konstantin stared past him, unsure what to think. "Neither."

"Oh." Goku looked troubled. "I suggested to your Ogada that he put you and the one helping you in for a commendation."

"My Ogada is not even a concept. I don't know what he'll put me in for. Competency tests, maybe." She rubbed her forehead. There was something rea.s.suring about being able to touch your own face, your own head, that you couldn't appreciate until you'd spent too many hours headless in AR.

"What are we left with?"

"Nothing."

"That much?"

"Dervish being digital was a flop as an idea."

"But..."

"And I'm afraid that the only log anyone has of your activities from the time Dervish cut you off from Taliaferro and any other communication outside lowdown Hong Kong would be suitable only for the kinkiest of adult networks."

Konstantin felt the blood draining out of her face.

"So I've been told," he added quickly. "I didn't see it."

"Even if you did, lie to me and tell me you didn't," Konstantin said darkly.

"It is generally acknowledged by all concerned as a clever fake."

"Has it been destroyed?" Konstantin asked skeptically.

Goku didn't answer.

"All right, I can look into that myself when I get sprung from here." She gave a short laugh. "What about your log? Are you a p.o.r.n star too?"

He shook his head. "My log is one long blank. Mechanical failure or something."

"Never mind. I still have a report to make, I can raise some questions--"

"They're going to claim that you stopped breathing because of an allergic reaction to one of the fillers in the boost you ingested."

Konstantin groaned and looked at the ceiling. There were no answers up there. "I'll kill those narcs." She paused. "Maybe they really were trying to kill me."

"Why would they do that?" Goku asked, looking sincerely confused.

"Never mind. It's too preposterous, even for AR." She wiped her hands over her face. "I can't believe this. I'm sitting here in a hospital bed after having nearly died in an investigation, and I've come away with nothing." "Your Ogada -- I mean, your boss Ogada seems to antic.i.p.ate a fight from you about that."

"At least he's right about that. I wasn't the only one involved besides you. There's a cyborg named Darwin who got brainwashed and a fashion designer named Susannah Ell who would swear to anyone that Dervish was digital, she was the one who told me in the first place." She looked at Goku.

"They aren't... dead or something, are they?"

"No," said Goku. "But you seem to have forgotten that everything people say in AR is a lie."

Konstantin looked at the ceiling again, but the answers still weren't up there. "Why?"

"Because anything unexplainable is unacceptable? Because the only thing that really happened in the real world was someone shooting Hastings Dervish? Because too much depends on the testimony of a cop who was under the influence of an illegal drug at the time? Because the faked p.o.r.n footage of said cop would be too devastating to the department's image and credibility even if it were proved to be fake? And how fake is it really, since she already admits to being on drugs?" Goku shrugged. "Or because AR service providers and certain parties with addresses on Key West pooled their resources to pay to have the whole investigation paved over, each for their own excellent reasons."

Konstantin shook her head. "Which?" she said.

"Take your pick," Goku said. "Whatever the reasons might be, they all come down to one thing -- four out of five, or five out of six, or eighteen out of nineteen people directly affected by this investigation believe justice is best served by explaining everything away and closing the file."

"Eighteen out of nineteen?" Konstantin said. "Or eighteen out of twenty?"

"That's nine out of ten, actually."

"Yeah. I know."

After another long and very awkward silence, Goku stood up. "I shall come and see you again tomorrow. It's no trouble." He frowned thoughtfully. "I want to thank you for being able to un-jam me when the software failed."

Konstantin shrugged.

"I would not have stopped breathing as you did," he went on. "But it was a very unpleasant experience. It has triggered a depression in me that will take some time to..." His voice trailed off and he spread his hands.

"Come back tomorrow morning," Konstantin said. "Taliaferro can send us over some blueberry pancakes for breakfast. I've been told it helps."

Goku nodded. "I accept." He started to leave and then paused at the door. "P3I is hiring."

"I'll keep that in mind," said Konstantin.

Some weeks later, Konstantin paid a visit to the maintenance facility where the j.a.panese woman slept on. She was sorry to see that the woman's body had started a slight but definite curl toward the fetal position. Perhaps it was only inevitable that everything should look explainable... kayfabe.

She considered whispering something in the woman's ear, but in light of everything that had happened, she found herself at a loss for words.

All for the best, she reflected. A lifetime ago, Featherstonehaugh had warned her against admitting to anything outside of AR and, all things considered, it was probably the best advice she was going to get, in this life, or any other.