by Huw Lyan Thomas
www.zendyne.comThe new client was right on time. Stranger appreciated that. The day had turned hot and humid, and he hated hanging around, waiting for the right person to come along for him to kill.
Stranger pretended to be distracted and looking elsewhere as his target bustled through the apartment building’s revolving doors. The rentacop came within a couple of meters, close enough for Stranger to see he was smiling, as if this was the end of a good day.
A lot of Stranger’s clients looked that way, up to the point where he introduced himself.
According to Back Office, this guy had been on duty when his employer was gravely inconvenienced by a Zendyne love doll. In Stranger’s world, allowing such a thing to happen would have counted as an inexcusable breach of professional propriety, but the rentacop was mainstream and completely unembarrassed. On the contrary, he seemed pleased and proud, which made sense once you knew that Zendyne had bought his discretion with a place on the gravy train -- right up there in the first class section, with all the trimmings.
Stranger had risen from the mainstream long ago, and his human memories were mostly faded and burnt out. A few raw scraps remained, though. Enough to tell him how golden a deal like this would be: a slice of real luck, and an end to crawling between faux-glitzy lottery booths and squalid drug dens, scrabbling for a dream ticket or a hit of shard.
Shame the dream is only temporary, Stranger thought. Tough. Shit happens.
Tonight, his job was to interview the rentacop about some lost property and a remarkable doll, and then to make sure that the rest of the man’s day turned out to be very unlucky indeed.
He watched the client enter the elevator and then zoomed in for a closer, horribly pixelated view of the floor indicator. The elevator ascended smoothly and stopped at thirteen.
The client lived in apartment 134.
Stranger waited for thirty precisely judged seconds before entering the lobby.
He’d already scoped out the defenses. There was a security scanner blocking access to the elevators, and two female guards with Slavic features and helmet-linked autoguns. If things went smoothly, he wouldn’t have to deal with these ladies, but it was all in the day’s work to Stranger. A client could hide inside as many Russian Doll security layers as he liked; none of it would help. Nothing ever helped, not against Stranger, not once you were on his list.
He slid an artfully scuffed Zendyne ID across the front desk. "Personal document delivery for Mr. Kelly. Could you tell him I’m here, please?"
The lobbybobby glanced at the card, taking in the fake name that was printed alongside the authentic barcode. "Certainly, Mr. Mottram." He turned away and spoke softly into his headvox before turning back to Stranger. "Could you let him know what’s it’s concerning?"
"He was supposed to sign some papers before he left work." Stranger patted the courier bag that was slung from his shoulder. "Today’s the deadline for this quarter’s stock allocation. The company likes everyone to participate. I need to get it filled and back to the office ASAP."
"Just a moment." The flunky whispered into the headvox again, then looked up at Stranger. "Apartment 134." He nodded towards the guards. "You’ll need to go through security clearance first, if you don’t mind."
"Not at all."
The scanner stayed politely silent as he walked between its sensors, but one of the Russian Dolls decided to frisk him anyway. Stranger often had that effect on her kind. His bulk and his buzzed hair probably didn’t help. The sightfold made him look odd, too, but he had no choice about that: the artificial eyes it concealed were too distinctive -- and too costly -- to plausibly belong to a company messenger.
In the meantime, the low-res prosthetic did a good enough job, and even the most flinty-hearted security guard would think twice before asking a visually impaired visitor to remove his ‘fold.
"Sorry to have troubled you," the woman said.
Stranger nodded courteously as he walked past her to the elevator.
Once safely inside, he took off the ‘fold and initiated the other changes, watching himself in the mirror as the elevator ascended. By the time he reached the thirteenth floor, his body had transformed itself: he’d lost several kilos of body fat, which made him feel good, because being overweight always took the spring out of his step. In return, he’d gained a form-following layer of concealed body armor and a long, black blade, which made him feel even better.
For the moment, the knife was inactive, gripped in his right palm and concealed behind his forearm.
The door to apartment 134 was already open. The client stood just inside the threshold, his face lit with a welcoming smile that faded into embarrassment as he failed to ignore the strangeness of his visitor’s eyes. "Mottram?"
Stranger nodded, once.
"It’s so nice of you to come all this way just for this stock option thing. Makes me really appreciate starting at Zendyne." The client reached forward, offering his hand.
Stranger held the other man’s gaze as he stroked the blade across the proffered fingers, tracing a line along the knuckles. The artificial eyes -- with their extraordinary peripheral vision -- let him observe the severed digits as they fell like a handful of plump sausages that had been splashed with red ketchup and dropped on the carpet. There was a barely perceptible patter as they arranged themselves among the woven rose petals.
The blade was exquisitely sharp: the man didn’t even notice what had happened until Stranger was inside the apartment with the door securely closed. Then he looked down with a puzzled expression on his face.
"You need to take care of that, and you need to stay quiet," Stranger said.
The client’s face showed incomprehension, followed by shock and then by panicky understanding. "Please. My wife."
"And where would Mrs. Kelly be?"
"In the bathroom."
"You’d better lock her in. You really wouldn’t want her to meet a man like me."
This client caught on more quickly than most: he nodded and fetched a dining chair with his uninjured hand. He propped it under a door handle that led off the cramped hallway.
"Good," Stranger said. "A tourniquet, perhaps?"
The words brought a flicker of hope -- gratitude, even -- to the client’s eyes, as if being allowed a tourniquet was the same as being allowed to live. This piece of illogic was endlessly perplexing to Stranger, though that didn’t stop him from exploiting it: he had learned long ago that hope and co-operation were two sides of the same coin, and he liked his interviews to go as smoothly as possible.
He waited politely while his client dug a dishtowel out of a kitchen drawer and did his best to staunch the flow of blood.
"Now," Stranger said, watching as pristine cotton succumbed to a bright arterial tide mark. "Tell me all about your previous employer. In fact, tell me everything that happened today."
Halfway through the meeting, Mrs. Kelly called to her husband. Shortly after that, she started pounding on the bathroom door.
"Calm her down, would you?" Stranger asked.
"Just stay in there and keep quiet, sweetheart," called the client. "Some urgent business has come up."
"Why is your voice shaking, honey? What’s wrong?"
"Please, sweetheart, just trust me. Stay put and be quiet. Everything’s going to be okay."
The shouting and banging didn’t stop.
Stranger walked over to the bathroom and pitched his voice so that only Mrs. Kelly would hear. "Each time you squeak, from now on, I will remove another of your husband’s fingers. One squeak, one finger. Do you understand me?"
Peace descended, disturbed by nothing more irritating than the woman’s muffled sobbing. That was acceptable to Stranger, so he returned to his interview.
"Please don’t hurt her," said the client.
"That’s not why I’m here." Stranger did his best to look encouraging. "Now, you were telling me about the man who came to deal with the android. Mr. Lee from Zendyne, wasn’t it?"
***
At the end of the session, when he realized that the tourniquet didn’t mean anything after all, tears started to escape from the client’s eyes.
"Why?" he asked. "Why me?"
"It’s nothing personal," Stranger said. "I’m just deleting some inconvenient memories. You won’t remember any of this when you come back."
The man’s voice became desperate. "You don’t understand. I’ve just changed jobs, switched insurance plans. I’m not covered. I haven’t even arranged for my memory archive to be transferred."
Stranger shrugged. "Then we won’t be meeting again."
The client’s remaining fingers twisted the tourniquet even more tightly, as if that would stop his final moments from leaking away. "Whatever this is about, it has nothing to do with Cara. Please don’t hurt her. I swear I’ve told you everything I know."
"I promise you that she won’t feel a thing," said Stranger, and ended the interview, very gently.
Then he went back into the hallway and removed the chair from where the client had wedged it, underneath the bathroom door handle.
The woman had locked herself in. Stranger eased his blade through the panels, which offered no perceptible resistance, and cut out a wide semicircle around the lock. The weeping sounded louder through the hole, and became more urgent as he pushed the door open.
"Why are you doing this?" she managed to ask.
"Risk management," was his honest reply.
Cara Kelly was nicer looking than he’d have expected, going by her husband. Stranger remembered enough of mainstream culture to realize that a guy usually had to have something special about him to end up with a desirable female like this one.
He also knew that most men would have thought it a waste, killing such a woman so simply and so quickly. Some of Stranger’s competitors might have extended her life for the short time it would have taken to rape her. Others would have regretted the need to damage her at all, as if they believed that female loveliness was a finite resource and that removing Cara Kelly from the gene pool would somehow diminish their own share.
On a purely rational level, Stranger believed he understood the philosophies behind such viewpoints, but he didn’t really get them.
He washed the blood from his fingers in his clients’ sink, and carefully rinsed away the rose-colored droplets that clung to the ivory porcelain -- because he’d have hated it, if anyone came to his place and messed the bathroom up. He borrowed one of their fluffy white towels to dry his hands before hanging it carefully back on its gold-effect hook.
By the time he got back to the lobby, he’d put the sightfold on once more, and his armor and blade had transformed themselves back into moist-smelling flab. He was already too hot and too heavy. He smiled sadly at the Russian Doll who’d frisked him earlier and gave a resigned nod to the flunky as he passed the front desk.
***
In the darkened cocoon that was his limousine, Stranger plugged himself into the network and called up Back Office.
"Authorizing connection to ... Stranger. Awaiting input. Please forward your query parameters."
"Send whatever data you have on a Mr. Lee," Stranger said. "Works for Zendyne. He was the first on site. Apparently he does something for their android division."
There was a pause while Back Office scanned its databases.
"Confirmed. Li Jia Wei, lead designer of civilian recreation dolls. Commonly known as Lee. As of today, he’s no longer with the corporation."
"Did he jump, or was he pushed?"
"His personnel file has yet to be updated. One moment, please. Li Jia Wei’s access privileges have been revoked and his payroll record is set for truncation. His Zendyne stock positions have been liquidated. No further information is available at this time."
"It sounds as if we should arrange a meeting with Mr. Lee. Where does he live?"
"Bayswater. He has a company apartment there. The place has been reallocated as of noon tomorrow."
"Then we must move quickly. Rearrange my schedule so I can fit him in before he leaves."
"Acknowledged."
"I’m told he was the first person to attend the incident today. I need to understand what his role was."
Another pause. "Transmitting his dossier now. He headed the design phase for the Aphrodite 9400 series. The most likely reason for his presence was to deal with any technical problems the containment team couldn’t handle."
"And I presume that is exactly the sort of problem he found. Given that he quit his employment almost immediately after contact, we must assume that our missing property has taken him. What news is there from his erstwhile employers?"
"Very sketchy, so far. A few incident reports, some preliminary test results. They have no idea that the doll was subverted; they are still analyzing their AI design, searching for a flaw. Based on their resources and task prioritization, projected time to discovery is seventy hours, plus or minus four. Then they will wish to speak to Lee again."
"They must not discover the truth."
"That will not be permitted. The other Partners agree that we must secure our property at all costs. They have expressed their confidence in you, and promised their full support for your actions."
"Imagine what a comfort that is to me."
"Back Office is not capable of empathic imagination."
"Yes, I do remember what it’s like," Stranger said. "It was a figure of speech. Now, start working to establish a management relationship with Zendyne. I wish to lead them to the discovery that they need specialist help, and that we are the only choice. Seed their databases with the appropriate hints."
"That is already in hand," said Back Office.
Stranger pulled the jack plug from his eye, breaking the connection, and then settled back to consider the dossier that had been downloaded to his mind.
It seemed that Mr. Lee was an unusually talented android designer, but, as always, Stranger found it simpler and more professional to consider him a client.
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