Forever Magazine - December 2016 Page 4

  Koos nodded, as if Deshin’s praise embarrassed him. Then he left the office.

  Deshin watched him go. As soon as he was gone, Deshin contacted Gerda on their private links.

  Koos might have increased security, but Deshin wanted to make sure everything was all right.

  He used to say that families were a weakness, and he never wanted one. Then he met Gerda, and they brought Paavo into their lives.

  He realized that families were a weakness, but they were strength as well.

  And he was going to make sure his was safe, no matter what it took.

  It had taken more work than Broduer expected to get the body back to the coroner’s office. Just to get the stupid crate out of the warehouse, he’d had to sign documentation swearing he wouldn’t use it to make money at the expense of Ansel Management.

  “Company policy,” Najib Ansel had said with an insincere smile.

  If Broduer hadn’t known better, he would have thought that Ansel was just trying to make things difficult for him.

  But things had become difficult for Broduer when DeRicci’s partner, Rayvon Lake, arrived. Lake had been as angry as Broduer had ever seen him, claiming that DeRicci—who was apparently a junior officer to Lake—had been giving him orders.

  Lake had shouted at everyone, except Broduer. Broduer had fended a shouting match off by holding up his hands and saying, “I’m not sure what killed this girl, but I don’t like it. It might contaminate everything. We have to get her out of here, now.”

  Lake, who was a notorious germophobe (which Broduer found strange in a detective), had gulped and stepped back. Broduer had gotten the crate to the warehouse door before Ansel had come after him with all the documentation crap.

  Maybe Ansel had done it just so that he wouldn’t have to talk with Lake. Broduer would have done anything to avoid Lake—and apparently just had.

  Broduer smiled to himself, relieved to be back at the coroner’s office. The office was a misnomer—the coroners had their own building, divided into sections to deal with the various kinds of death that happened in Armstrong.

  Broduer had tested out of the alien section after two years of trying. He hated working in an environmental suit, like he so often had to. Weirdly (he always thought) humans started in the alien section and had to get a promotion to work on human cadavers. Probably because no one really wanted to see the interior of a Sequev more than once. No human did, anyway.

  There were more than a dozen alien coroners, most of whom worked with human supervisors since many alien cultures did not investigate cause of death. Armstrong was a human-run society on a human-run Moon, so human laws applied here, and human laws always needed a cause of death.

  Broduer had placed Sonja Mycenae on the autopsy table, carefully positioning her before beginning work, and he’d been startled at how well proportioned she was. Most people had obvious flaws, at least when a coroner was looking at them. One arm a little too long, a roll of fat under the chin, a misshapen ankle.

  He hadn’t removed her clothing yet, but as far as he could tell from the work he’d done with her already, nothing was unusual.

  Which made her unusual all by herself.

  He also couldn’t see any obvious cause of death. He had noted, however, that full rigor mortis had already set in. Which was odd, since the decomposition, according to the exam his nanobots had already started, seemed to have progressed at a rate that put her death at least five hours earlier. By now, under the conditions she’d been stored in, she should have still been pliable—at least her limbs. Rigor began in the eyes, jaw, and neck then spread to the face and through the chest before getting to the limbs. The fingers and toes were always the last to stiffen up.

  That made him suspicious, particularly since liver mortis also seemed off.

  He would have thought, given how long she had been curled inside that crate, that the blood would have pooled in the side of her body resting on top of the compost heap. But no blood had pooled at all.

  He had bots move the autopsy table into one of the more advanced autopsy theaters. He wanted every single device he could find to do the work.

  He suspected she’d been killed with some kind of hardening poison. They had become truly popular with assassins in the last two decades, and had just recently been banned from the Moon. Hardening poisons killed quickly by absorbing all the liquid in the body and/or by baking it into place. It was a quick death, but a painful one, and usually the victim’s muscles frozen in place, so she couldn’t even express that pain as it occurred.

  He put on a high-grade environmental suit in an excess of caution. Some of the hardening poisons leaked out of the pores and then infected anyone who touched them.

  What he had to determine was if Sonja Mycenae had died of one of those, and if her body had been placed in a waste crate not just to hide the corpse, but to infect the food supply in Armstrong. Because the Growing Pits inspections looked at the growing materials—the soil, the water, the light, the atmosphere, and the seeds. The inspectors would also look at the fertilizer, but if it came from a certified organization like Ansel Management, then there would only be a cursory search of materials.

  Hardening poisons could thread their way into the DNA of a plant—just a little bit, so that, say, an apple wouldn’t be quite as juicy. A little hardening poison wouldn’t really hurt the fruit of a tree (although that tree might eventually die of what a botanist would consider a wasting disease), but a trace of hardening poison in the human system would have an impact over time. And if the human continued to eat things with hardening poisons in them, the poisons would build up, until the body couldn’t take it any more.

  A person poisoned in that way wouldn’t die like Sonja Mycenae had; instead, the poison would overwhelm the standard nanohealers that everyone had installed, that person would get sick, and organs would slowly fail. Armstrong would have a plague but not necessarily know what caused it.

  He double-checked his gloves, then let out a breath. Yes, he knew he was being paranoid. But he thought about these things a lot—the kinds of death that could happen with just a bit of carelessness, like sickness in a dome, poison through the food supply, the wrong mix in the air supply.

  He had moved from working with living humans to working with the dead primarily because his imagination was so vivid. Usually working with the dead calmed him. The regular march of unremarkable deaths reminded him that most people would die of natural causes after a hundred and fifty or more years, maybe longer if they took good care of themselves.

  Working with the dead usually gave him hope.

  But Sonja Mycenae was making him nervous.

  And he didn’t like that at all.

  Deshin had just finished talking with Gerda when Koos sent him an encoded message:

  Need to talk as soon as you can.

  Now’s fine, Deshin sent.

  He moved away from the windows, where he’d been standing as he made sure Gerda was okay. She actually sounded happy, which she hadn’t since Sonja moved in.

  She said she no longer felt like her every move was being judged.

  Paavo seemed happier too. He wasn’t crying as much, and he didn’t cling as hard to Gerda. Instead, he played with a mobile from his bouncy chair and watched her cook, cooing most of the time.

  Just that one report made Deshin feel like he had made the right choice with Sonja.

  Not that he had had a doubt—at least about her—after her reaction that morning. But apparently a tiny doubt had lingered about whether or not he and Gerda needed the help of a nanny. Gerda’s report on Paavo’s calmness eased that. Deshin knew they would have hard times ahead—he wasn’t deluding himself—but he also knew that they had made the right choice to go nanny-free.

  He hadn’t told Gerda what happened to Sonja, and he wouldn’t, until he knew more. He didn’t want to spoil Gerda’s day.

  The door to Deshin’s office opened, and Koos entered, looking upset. “Upset” was actually the wrong wor
d. Something about Koos made Deshin think the man was afraid. Then Deshin shook that thought off: he’d seen Koos in extremely dangerous circumstances and the man had never seemed afraid.

  “I did what you asked,” Koos said without preamble. “I started vetting her all over again.”

  Deshin leaned against the desk, just like he had done when he spoke to Sonja. “And?”

  “Her employers on Earth are still filing updates about her exemplary work for them.”

  Deshin felt a chill. “Tell me that they were just behind in their reports.”

  Koos shook his head. “She’s still working for them.”

  “How is that possible?” Deshin asked. “We vetted her. We even used a DNA sample to make sure her DNA was the same as the DNA on file with the service. And we collected it ourselves.”

  Koos swallowed. “We used the service’s matching program.”

  “Of course we did,” Deshin said. “They were the ones with the DNA on file.”

  “We could have requested that sample, and then run it ourselves.”

  That chill Deshin had felt became a full-fledged shiver. “What’s the difference?”

  “Depth,” Koos said. “They don’t go into the same kind of depth we would go into in our search. They just look at standard markers, which is really all most people would need to confirm identity.”

  His phrasing made Deshin uncomfortable. “She’s not who she said she was?”

  Koos let out a small sigh. “It’s more complicated than that.”

  More complicated. Deshin shifted. He could only think of one thing that would be more complicated.

  Sonja was a clone.

  And that created all kinds of other issues.

  But first, he had to confirm his suspicion.

  “You checked for clone marks, right?” Deshin asked. “I know you did. We always do.”

  The Earth Alliance required human clones to have a mark on the back of their neck or behind their ear that gave their number. If they were the second clone from an original, the number would be “2.”

  Clones also did not have birth certificates. They had day of creation documents. Deshin had a strict policy for Deshin Enterprises: every person he hired had to have a birth certificate or a document showing that they, as a clone, had been legally adopted by an original human and therefore could be considered human under the law.

  When it came to human clones, Earth Alliance and Armstrong laws were the same: clones were property. They were created and owned by their creator. They could be bought or sold, and they had no rights of their own. The law did not distinguish between slow-grow clones, which were raised like any naturally born human child, and fast-grow clones, which reached full adult size in days, but never had a full-grown human intelligence. The laws were an injustice, but only clones seemed to protest it, and they, as property, had no real standing.

  Koos’s lips thinned. He didn’t answer right away.

  Deshin cursed. He hated having clones in his business, and didn’t own any, even though he could take advantage of the loopholes in the law.

  Clones made identity theft too easy, and made an organization vulnerable.

  He always made certain his organization remained protected.

  Or he had, until now.

  “We did check like we do with all new hires.” Koos’s voice was strangled. “And we also checked her birth certificate. It was all in order.”

  “But now you’re telling me it’s not,” Deshin said.

  Koos’s eyes narrowed a little, not with anger, but with tension.

  “The first snag we hit,” he said, “was that we were not able to get Sonja Mycenae’s DNA from the service. According to them, she’s currently employed, and not available for hire, so the standard service-subsidized searches are inactive. She likes her job. I looked: the job is the old one, not the one with you.”

  Deshin crossed his arms. “If that’s the case, then how did we get the service comparison in the first place?”

  “At first, I worried that someone had spoofed our system,” Koos said. “It hadn’t. There was a redundancy in the service’s files that got repaired. I checked with a tech at the service. The tech said they’d been hit with an attack that replicated everything inside their system. It lasted for about two days.”

  “Let me guess,” Deshin said. “Two days around the point we’d hired Sonja.”

  Koos nodded.

  “I’m amazed the tech admitted it,” Deshin said.

  “It wasn’t their glitch,” Koos said. “It happened because of some government program.”

  “Government?” Deshin asked.

  “The Earth Alliance required some changes in their software,” Koos said. “They made the changes and the glitch appeared. The service caught it, removed the Earth Alliance changes, and petitioned to return to their old way of doing things. Their petition was granted.”

  Deshin couldn’t sit still with this. “Did Sonja know this glitch was going to happen?”

  Koos shrugged. “I don’t know what she knew.”

  Deshin let out a small breath. He felt a little off-balance. “I assume the birth certificate was stolen.”

  “It was real. We checked it. I double-checked it today,” Koos said.

  Deshin rubbed his forehead. “So, was the Sonja Mycenae I hired a clone or is the clone at the other job? Or does Sonja Mycenae have a biological twin?”

  Koos looked down, which was all the answer Deshin needed. She was a clone.

  “She left a lot of DNA this morning,” Koos said. “Tears, you name it. We checked it all.”

  Deshin waited, even though he knew. He knew, and he was getting furious.

  “She had no clone mark,” Koos said, “except in her DNA. The telomeres were marked.”

  “Designer Criminal Clone,” Deshin said. A number of criminal organizations, most operating outside the Alliance, made and trained Designer Criminal Clones for just the kind of thing that had happened to Deshin.

  The clone, who replicated someone the family or the target knew casually, would slide into a business or a household for months, maybe years, and steal information. Then the clone would leave with that information on a chip, bringing it to whoever had either hired that DCC or who had grown and trained the clone.

  “I don’t think she was a DCC,” Koos said. “The markers don’t fit anyone we know.”

  “A new player?” Deshin asked.

  Koos shrugged. Then he took one step forward. “I’m going to check everything she touched, everything she did, sir. But this is my error, and it’s a serious one. It put your business and more importantly your family in danger. I know you’re going to fire me, but before you do, let me track down her creator. Let me redeem myself.”

  Deshin didn’t move for a long moment. He had double-checked everything Koos had done. Everything. Because Sonja Mycenae—or whatever that clone was named—was going to work in his home, with his family.

  “Do you think she stole my son’s DNA?” Deshin asked quietly.

  “I don’t know. Clearly she didn’t have any with her today, but if she had handlers—”

  “She wouldn’t have had trouble meeting them, because Gerda and I didn’t want a live-in nanny.” Deshin cursed silently. There was more than enough blame to go around, and if he were honest with himself, most of it belonged to him. He had been so concerned with raising his son, that he hadn’t taken the usual precautions in protecting his family.

  “I would like to retrace all of her steps,” Koos said. “We might be able to find her handler.”

  “Or not,” Deshin said. The handler had killed her the moment she had ceased to be useful. The handler felt he could waste a slow-grow clone, expensive and well trained, placed in the household of a man everyone believed to be a criminal mastermind.

  Some mastermind. He had screwed up something this important.

  He bit back anger, not sure how he would tell Gerda. If he would tell Gerda.

  Something had been plan
ned here, something he hadn’t figured out yet, and that planning was not complete. Sonja (or whatever her name was) had confirmed that with her reaction to her dismissal. She was terrified, and she probably knew she was going to die.

  He sighed.

  “I will quit now if you’d like me to,” Koos said.

  Deshin wasn’t ready to fire Koos.

  “Find out who she answered to. Better yet, find out who made her,” Deshin said. “Find her handler. We’ll figure out what happens to you after you complete that assignment.”

  Koos nodded, but didn’t thank Deshin. Koos knew his employer well, knew that the thanks would only irritate him.

  Deshin hated to lose Koos, but Koos was no longer one hundred percent trustworthy. He should have caught this. He should have tested Sonja’s DNA himself.

  And that was why Deshin would put new security measures into place for his business and his family. Measures he designed.

  He’d also begin the search for the new head of security.

  It would take time.

  And, he was afraid, it would take time to find out what exactly Sonja (or whatever her name was) had been trying to do inside his home.

  That had just become his first priority.

  Because no one was going to hurt his family.

  No matter what he had to do to protect them.

  Broduer had six different nanoprobes digging into various places on the dead woman’s skin, when a holographic computer screen appeared in front of him, a red warning light flashing.

  He moaned slightly. He hated the lights. They got sent to his boss automatically, and often the damn lights reported something he had done wrong.

  Well, not wrong, exactly, but not according to protocol.

  The irony was, everything he had done in this autopsy so far had been exactly according to protocol. The body was on an isolated gurney, which was doing its own investigation; they were in one of the most protected autopsy chambers in the coroner’s office; and Broduer was using all the right equipment.

  He even had on the right environmental suit for the type of poison he suspected killed the woman.