True tries again. “Did you talk with her?”
“Yes.”
“Was she a regular around here?”
“No. Of that I am sure. I hadn’t seen her around this club before. She did so at perilous risk to herself. This area is protected.”
“Protected?”
“She was interfering with legitimate beggars who pay to work this territory.”
“Like you?”
“Like I.”
“Do you think she was killed because of this?”
She walks on, past the crumbling shell of the church. “No.” She lowers her voice when an in-line skater, grappled to an electric limo, rolls by. “But I warned her about bizzing here.”
“What else did you talk about?”
“I said if she continued to vex these beggars she’d soon be dead. But she wouldn’t listen. I heard later she died begging from a filthy Muslim. I would not wish to die in that manner.”
“She mention her name?”
“No.”
“Where she came from?”
“No.”
“Who she was waiting for?”
She shakes her head.
“Where she was staying?”
“No. It didn’t come up.”
“You don’t have any idea how I could reach her family, do you?”
She slips into an open doorway and part way up a set of steps, many of them broken or missing, the wood decayed and decaying, names and curses carved, painted, and penned in myriad tongues, no space untouched.
“No. And if you search the shanties, you may not get out alive.” The Rajput stoops to brush away crumbs, mud, dirt, packets of disposable air syringes and empty vials, then sits. True joins her on the stairs.
“Now, it’s your turn.” She hands True a program card to insert into his wrist-top.
She types in initial commands. In response to the computer’s query, Is this game program in English? She taps y, yes. The computer analyzes the card, and then the screen carries another question: This program takes up a great amount of memory. Shall I compress your other files to make room? She pecks another y. When the computer requests a password to prevent illicit copying, the woman shields True’s eyes with her free hand and punches it in. Five taps.
“I will tell you the code after you buy it.” She unblocks True’s sight.
“I’m not going to buy it.”
“What is your name?”
“True.”
“What kind of name is that?”
“The name I was given.”
She types it in. “Only someone who could live up to such a name would possess it, or someone who flaunts his dishonesty.”
“What’s your name?”
“I do not have one anymore.”
“What was it before?”
“It does not matter.”
“Well, where in India did you come from? Rajasthan?”
“Yes. I was born in Rajasthan and am directly related to Rajput kings. We were known for our courage. If my ancestors lost a battle and all the men were killed, the women and children would march into a funeral pyre to their death. That is called jauhar.”
True notices cancer acne on her forehead masked with mud. She’ll need money for treatment, a simple technique, but probably prohibitively expensive for her. Without treatment, she has five months to live, seven tops.
“Why did you come to this country, baba? It’s laden with miscreants.”
“Why did you?”
“I was here on business when the war with Pakistan started.” She flicks at one of her sandals with a toe. “Where else could I go? And anyway, this capital city—Nerula—reminds me of a great leader, Nehru. This offers some comfort.”
With a flourish she taps a key and moves aside. Immediately, tie-dye mists—orange, purple, turquoise, pink, gold—swirl. Then the opening credits, a list of software researchers, writers, producers, composers, the caterer, copyright date, and a warning that unauthorized copying of the enclosed program is expressly forbidden. Even the pirates are trying to cut down on piracy. A menu appears in front of True under the program name Building Love. The first options have to do with historical settings. The categories are Primitive Womyn/Man, Romyn, Greek, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, 17th c., 18th c., 19th c., 20th c., 21st c., and the Future. True points a finger, locks onto the 21st c. Then new listings appear: Ethnicity (choose 1 or more of the following, it says). Subheadings are European extraction, Asian extraction, African extraction. True chooses Asian and European. Further listings narrow his choices to the relatively simple mix of Japanese and English.
He navigates through the program easily, knowing what he’s looking for. For height (in both metric and American measurements), he chooses 5’6”, for weight (in kilograms, pounds, or stones), 125 lbs. The waist size he opts for is 26”, the chest size 38”, probably a little on the big side; but this is, he tells himself, virtual reality.
Hair color? Dark brown bordering on black, hair length medium, ending at the shoulders. Eyes more green than brown. Skin tone: Sticky Olive Oil Fashion, which he loved in contrast to his own whole wheat toast hue.
A woman’s naked figure appears, slowly rotating so he’s able to get a full circular view. Slightly slanted eyes of green and brown, shoulder-length brown hair, rounded breasts, a taut abdomen. True checks the further options catalog, widens the space between the breasts two, three, four percent, shrinks the nipples, lightens them from brown to brick red. He further tightens the figure’s abs, darkens its skin tone. Also widens the shoulders, rounds the rear. The hair is wrong—too shiny and straight—so he adds flaws, some split ends, a matte finish, an almost invisible streak of red in each strand.
Satisfied thus, True goes to work on the face, first adding some strategically placed freckles and choosing a nice aristocratic nose with the touch of a flare. Next come eyebrows, ears, the strong hands and slender fingers, wide feet, angular toes.
He stops to rest. It’s her. Or just about. Goes back and waves his finger at the pubic hair category, chooses to make it fuller; and for the naval he digs an innie. Admires his handiwork, realizes what he’s created isn’t just as beautiful as what he remembers. It’s more beautiful.
The program compliments him on his taste, asks if he’d like to save the figure he’s created, store it in the database for convenience. When he indicates yes, it asks for his secret code.
“As I said, unless you purchase the program I cannot tell you the code.” The Rajput’s voice from outside True’s world and inside his head at the same time. “But keep going, there is more of interest, I think, to you.”
It’s uncanny how perfect it is, how memories of love can be relived with just the sight of her. True moves to attribute a personality to the blank expression (choose one or more of the following: soft, angelic, happy, perky, flirtatious, masochistic, sultry, nymphomanic, intellectual, bimbo, distant, cold, tough, angry, sadistic, evil—press this space for more options).
But before he can choose, a whirring noise emanates from his wrist-top; the program locks, lightning bolts of pastel colors frozen vertically in space.
Turning his head, True sees the Rajput through the jagged beams. “What did you do? You broke it.”
True hits the escape option. Is returned to the damp hallway.
She steps toward him. “Now you must buy it.”
“It’s software. It can’t break. There must be a program glitch.”
Sighing, she yanks the card out of the computer. “Yes. You are correct. I have worked on this many times, but I cannot seem to overcome certain one-offs.”
A one-off: that one in a million chance combination that can cause a system to stall, break, crash—like hitting a lottery jackpot, True thinks, or ending up a serial killer’s victim.
True rises, produces the stash of dollars he uses to get things done in a country that doesn’t have sufficient numbers of automatic debit machines. He hands her a crumpled handful of notes.
She ho
lds out the program card, but he waves it away.
“You’re from America?” She tucks away the money and card.
True cocks his head, eyes her thoughtfully, says nothing.
She insists. “You are. I know because American tourists believe in charity.”
“You’re wrong about one thing.”
“You are not an American?”
“I’m not a tourist.”
The Rajput’s laughs slip into parched coughs that fade as True skips out the door.
CHAPTER 6
True’s tired and the weather’s all sideways, ocean wind pinning rain clouds against Nerula’s surrounding hills. He flags down the first taxi he sees—an old diesel job, more rust than paint. There’s a bullet-proof partition separating the driver from the passenger. The taxi looks like True feels. He gets in.
After telling the driver his address, True leans back, rubs bits of foam padding from his pant leg, and watches the city stream by through the window. The driver, a squat woman squeezing a pistol between pudgy thighs, takes the expressway along the river, and True sees the crispy shells of buildings painted with pictures of cartoon-like windows with drawn shades, families sitting around dinner tables, flower pots and plants, ivy winding up the sides, a lone man reclining in an easy chair, reading a book. Swedish foreign aid, a plan to raise commercial property values, accomplished by literally painting over Luzonia’s problems.
Packs of shanty children, skin spray-painted over skeletons, are wilding; police chase them with tasers, clubs, and water cannons. The war left a generation of street orphans to fend for themselves, and this they do by forming gangs, stealing and murdering together. Wolf packs, except wolves never prey on their own.
The driver looks back, spitting out her window carefully so as not to spray her passenger. Just that’s worth a tip. Past the national broadcast corporation where the day’s major stories are neoned as headlines. Today: Muslim Insurgents Murder 472 Luzonians in Terrorist Attack. Tomorrow only the number will change. True checks the time, realizes he has to call New York before the lab closes. He types in Slovo de Bris, and after the usual run of four or five 15-second advertisements in deadtime, a 3-D image of his friend floats before his eyes.
“Hello, True,” de Bris says brusquely, his lab coat starched and stiffly white, his face puffy from constant weight fluctuations. De Bris is in one of his thin phases. When True was just a collection of sperm cells and ovum in a test tube, did he look through the glass and see someone like de Bris?
“How are you, de Bris?”
“You didn’t follow proper safety precautions. I opened up your package and was faced with blood and bits of skin and some unbreakable plastic shards. Thanks a lot.”
The driver rolls down her window to scream at a grappler. She jiggles the steering wheel, tries to shake the extra weight to conserve fuel.
“Where are you calling from?”
“A taxi.”
“I almost had to pass up dinner: a hormone-free roast leg of lamb, homemade mint jelly, organic oven-roasted yams, and, for dessert, a lovely forest berry tart made with pesticide-free fruit. It cost a fortune.” De Bris is addicted to food, his seasonal obesity testing his wife’s loyalty. Three times a year he has fat cells drained from his body in what True always thought of as a bulimia program for the rich. True wonders what he does with all that leftover lipid. Make soup stock?
“I presume business is, as usual, booming.” Since the government moved toward privatization in grand fashion, farming out work to the private sector, de Bris’s lab has been thriving. It doesn’t hurt that forensics is the fastest growing medical field in the U.S., or that murder and terrorism top the crime stats.
“I have my days.” De Bris puffs out his cheeks.
“What were your findings, maestro?”
“Let me pull them up on screen. Can you see?”
“Yeah.” As the cab jumps up and down over the rough, potholed street, angular models, enzymes, ions, protons, and chemical formulae air-dance frantically, matching True’s wrist movements. “I see them. What do they mean?”
“I found particles of a highly durable material embedded in the traces of skin you supplied that had the same properties as the swatch of material you sent along. I also found powder—TNT powder, which leads me to believe that, at least from the evidence you’ve supplied thus far, at least two people were struck by an explosive device. I identified two sources of blood, type A and O negative.”
“Go on.”
“The A blood originated from a male, approximately 35 years old. Blood analysis shows he spent a great deal of time in tropical climates. There were traces of malaria, giardia, bilharzia, and dysentery, along with scads of other Southeast Asian microbes. In fact, the subject was recently exposed to Japanese encephalitis.”
“How recently?”
“One and a half, two weeks before he died. I can’t be any more precise than that.”
“Anything else about the male subject?”
“Well, nothing groundbreaking. What are you looking for?”
“Anything that will help me find out who killed him.”
“Well, first, let me tell you about the other subject. A girl, aged ten or eleven, I’d say. She suffered from a cornucopia of illnesses. Her growth was stunted from lack of food, and she carried traces of bubonic plague, dysentery, malaria, elevated white cell count—probably lived near sources of radiation.”
“What kind of radiation?”
“Toxic waste would be my guess. Not the same ions as a nuclear plant or blast. I’m afraid running a trace and superimposing pockets of residences on a map of potential toxic waste site areas wouldn’t be of much help. I already thought of that.”
“Because it’s so common. So there’s no way of pinpointing where she lived?”
“Not from this evidence.”
“Probably not. Lots of microbes and afflictions, but from different sources.”
“Tell me about the explosion.”
“The explosive was your run-of-the-mill but highly effective TNT charge, carried in plastic explosive casing, the type you’d find at construction sites, mines, and in many weapons.”
“How would I find the manufacturers of this explosive?”
“I could walk outside my office and pick up enough of this explosive to blow up the White House. Might not be a bad idea either.”
“The bomb was carried in a sophisticated missile, guided by software able to key in on a person’s DNA. Why equip a sophisticated piece of hardware like that with TNT?”
“For the very reason we’re scratching our asses wondering why. Compressed TNT works: It’s reliable, so widespread that it’s impossible to trace, and cheap.”
“What else did you find? Any traces of the missile?”
“Well, the outer shell was probably plastic, but I can’t be sure.”
True spots crumbs on de Bris’s shirt. His weight is going to yo-yo back up again soon. “Why not? Can’t you trace plastic?”
“Not in this case. My guess is that it was a type of plastic designed to disintegrate in an explosion.”
“Wouldn’t that make it unstable?”
“Not unless the targeted DNA makes contact with it.”
“What do you mean?” True leans hard into the door as the cab veers left.
“I mean, this device was sophisticated in the sense of guidance system and trigger mechanisms. It wouldn’t go off, I assume, unless the DNA it’s programmed to come in contact with makes actual contact.”
“So in other words, this missile could have collided with a house and wouldn’t have gone off.”
“Or a car. Or another human, although the guidance system seems to have been sophisticated enough that the missile was able to miss everything except the intended target. I accessed your video file and mapped out its flight path. Smart little fucker. It bobbed and weaved like a heavyw
eight fighter.”
“Or a Luzonian taxi,” True says, his head skimming roof. They skid to a pause, stall, then run Nerula’s lone traffic light, which nobody heeds anyway. Right of way goes to the biggest vehicle. “You see the missile on screen. Why can’t you tell me who made it?”
De Bris scoffs. “Do you think somebody who has the resources and technology to commit a hit like this is going to leave a calling card? The shell doesn’t mean shit: It isn’t as if you’ll find a decal. You can’t judge a missile by its cover. As for the flight path, it could have been preprogrammed, could have been fired from twenty feet away or two thousand miles. Best way to avoid getting wiped out by one of these babies is to stay inside a well-fortified bunker. Better yet, don’t let anyone in on your DNA sequence.”
“No idea as to its range?”
“No.”
True looks out the window, watches bruised clouds collide against the mountains. A single drop of rain on the windshield, but no others. “Shit.”
“Who bought it?” de Bris asks.
“A friend.”
“Tough luck.”
“A shanty girl too.”
“Even the most sophisticated bomb guidance system doesn’t care who gets in the way at the moment it makes contact with the intended DNA sequence. One of them was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
De Bris clears his throat. “Sorry. I hear about tragedies like this every day. You’re lucky you’re not here in New York. Things have really gone toxic. This morning four corporations boycotted their trial on conducting drug, virtual reality, and psychological experiments on unsuspecting citizens. Some of these people were driven to suicide. Others ended up in psych wards. Ugly shit. But you’d know all about that.”
“Thanks, de Bris.” A twinge, that’s how True would describe it, in addition to his hospital-stay memories. There is something familiar about what de Bris is saying, something that stimulates True’s memory neurons, but he can’t place it. Isn’t sure he wants to know. Says, “You think they’ll get away with it?”