The 88th Floor (3 page)

Rees looked at the body again.

“
Why is it strapped down?”
he asked.

“
Because I am not
convinced the victim is dead.”

“
What?”

“
The initial nano-scan
detected no cellular activity, which normally indicates death, but
upon further examination, its cells have gone into an extreme state
of hibernation.”

“
So you mean that this
thing could wake up at any time?”

“
That is possible,” Morgan
said.

“
Have you told anyone else
about this?”

“
No.”

“
Well, a lawyer from
Sircotin just made off with our shooter so you might be getting a
message from upstairs to destroy the evidence from this
case.”

“
It appears I already
have. I received a message before I contacted you that I was far
too preoccupied to open until just now. Detective Rees, I am afraid
I will have to ask you to leave and to forget everything you have
seen here as it is no longer admissible as evidence.”

“
Right,” Rees said. He
wanted to thank Morgan, but the doctor was already going to be in
enough trouble with the department for ignoring a priority message
for so long. Still, given the particulars of the case, Morgan could
probably claim that what was left of his human curiosity got in the
way of regulations.

As he walked out of the examining room, Rees
noticed a small plastic chip on the table by the door and he picked
it up.

Case #4563367-6638, Addendum. Dr. L. S.
Morgan.

Rees glanced back at Morgan, who was still
busy tending to the corpse and ignoring him.

He put the chip in his pocket.

“
Hey, I don’t suppose the
identity scans for this stiff ever came up with anything, did they?
Vandum put a name to him; Aran Kurush, he said. But I
don’t–”

Morgan stopped what he was doing and looked
up at Rees.

“
I am sorry, Detective,
but I really must insist that you discontinue this line of
questioning as any information obtained through my analysis or your
invalidated questioning of Mr. Vandum is no longer considered
admissible evidence in the investigation.”

Rees put his hands up and nodded. He should
have known better than to try to squeeze another drop of info out
of Morgan.

“
Right,” he said.
“Sorry.”

Morgan turned to go back to his work, but he
stopped short as if some thought had just occurred to him.

“
However,” he said, “from
a purely procedural standpoint, it would be a simple matter to
cross reference the victim’s autopsy data with any suspected
aliases to produce a more complete picture of the victim’s
identity, provided one had access to and could thereby
cross-reference municipal, state, federal, and corporate records.
Such multi-faceted data analysis carries substantial liability
risks, however, which is why several cyberanalysts were dismissed
from the police force in recent years.”

He looked at Rees again. His mouth twisted
oddly and it took Rees a moment to realize that he was trying to
form a smile.

“
Again, this is only a
hypothetical estimation of how one might procedurally continue with
such a unique case under the circumstances.”

“
Hypothetical,” Rees said.
“Sure.”

***

Once the Sircatin lawyers got involved, the
entire case fell apart. First Vandum was off limits, then some
obscure legal code nobody at the department had ever heard of
before rendered Morgan’s examinations inadmissible as evidence.
Sircotin even wanted the body returned so their security personnel
could conduct an internal investigation, but Morgan managed to head
that off by citing a few of the city’s health regulations. If they
were cagey enough about it, they could keep the body in custody for
at least another week or two before Sircotin could bribe a judge to
rule in their favor.

Rees hoped it would be long enough to get
some answers.

When he left the precinct an hour before
noon, he took the el-train over to Sizzle Street, which was on the
west end of downtown. At one point, the place had been a hot
nightspot, home to some of the best clubs and bars in the city.
Like most of downtown, though, it had gone to shit once the
arcologies went up a few decades back. As more and more citizens
moved into self-contained living spaces, the street started
catering to a different kind of customer. The street still
“sizzled,” but that had little to do with the nightlife.

The train dumped Rees a few blocks away from
his destination. It took a few minutes to push through the crowded
loading platform to get down to the street, but once he was there,
it was easier to get around without bumping into someone. The busy
sidewalks gradually cleared out as he moved farther away from the
station. By the time he’d gone a block, the number of pedestrians
had dropped to a trickle

Heavy, chemical laden clouds generally
covered the city like a cotton-lined roof, but today there were
more gaps in the shroud than normal. The harsh sunlight punched
through and baked everything it touched. Rees pulled his jacket’s
hood over his head to keep the harmful rays off his skin. Most of
the people he passed wore a wide-brimmed hat or held an umbrella
aloft. Those going without protection already had the telltale
patches of discolored skin or were losing clumps of hair. Either
they couldn’t afford treatment or they’d simply resigned themselves
to the slow death of skin cancer.

Sizzle Street was quieter during the day,
but it was hardly dead. Most of the shops there were open around
the clock, and there were always street dealers set up in the
mouths of alleyways or roaming up and down the sidewalks. The place
really lit up at night, though. That was when the street filled up
with folks from the surrounding blocks looking to get all sorts of
business done. Some of it was legal, but most of it wasn’t.

The sheer number of people there made it a
good choice for face-to-face meetings and there were so many signal
scramblers set up that it was almost impossible for either city or
corporate authorities to listen in unless they knew exactly when
and where to focus their efforts. Bribes and moles proved more
effective means of keeping tabs on what was going down at any given
time.

Rees entered an old apartment building and
took the stairs up to the fourth floor. Most of the rooms there
were empty, or had been the last time he’d visited. He stopped
outside apartment #483 and knocked.

The tiny cameras positioned at the corners
of the doorframe whirred to life and scanned him from head to
toe.

“
Open up, Squibby,” he
said. “It’s Rees.”

No answer. The cameras went silent.

Rees knocked again.

“
I’m not here to arrest
you, asshole. Will you just open the fucking door?”

The something inside the door clicked. Rees
turned the handle and slowly pushed the door open.

There were no windows inside the apartment.
Most of the light came courtesy of a small lamp resting on the desk
in the center of the room, but it wasn’t strong enough to reach the
walls or corners. Dozens of tiny lights in all sorts of colors
glowed and blinked in the darkness, each of them likely connected
to a larger piece of computer hardware. The room smelled of solder,
static, and old fast-food wrappers.

“
Squibby?”

She sat in a large, cushioned chair on the
opposite side of the desk. The chair was so big that she looked
like a child sitting in her father’s office. Her attention remained
fixed on the multiple monitors set up on the desk, but she waved
one of her hands up when Rees called out to her.

“
Mind the door, will
you?”

Rees shut the door and walked over to the
desk. Each monitor screen displayed lines and lines worth of
encrypted data. Additional information was being transmitted to
Squibby’s cyberoptic implants, but her workload was obviously much
too large for just one display feed. Her fingers danced across
three physical keyboards and occasionally reached up to tap on the
virtual interface that Rees couldn’t see. It looked overwhelming to
him, but Squibby juggled the tasks effortlessly.

But there was obviously a cost to such
efficiency. She looked like she hadn’t left the room in days, maybe
weeks. Her hair was greasy and tangled and Rees wondered when she
last washed her clothes. If it hadn’t been for the wisps of warm
air rising from her cup of tea, he might have wondered if she ever
left her chair. Even though the floor around her workstation was
covered with food wrappers and empty cups, she was frightfully
thin.

“
Been a while,
Squibby.”

She shrugged one shoulder, never taking her
eyes off the monitors.

“
Nice of you to notice,”
she said.

“
Come on, now, don’t be
like that. You told me to keep my distance.”

“
Keep your distance,” she
said. “Not disa-fucking-ppear.”

Rees wanted to argue, but deep down, he knew
she was right. More than a year had gone by since Squibby’s
dismissal from the force. He’d tried to keep in touch with her at
first, but her close association with an active detective was
making it hard for her to find work so she’d asked him to back off.
It didn’t take long for Rees to fall into a habit of forgetting to
contact her at all.

“
Look, I’m sorry,” he
said. “I should have called or something, just to check up with
you, see how you’re doing.”

She bobbed her head slightly. It might have
been intended as a nod.

“
Morgan says ‘Hi’,” Rees
said.

That got a smile out of her.

“
No, he doesn’t,” she
said. “Now you’re just being an asshole.”

She spun her chair around to face him rather
than the monitors.

“
So,” she said, “what do
you need? This have something to do with the murder over at the
Sircotin building?”

“
How do you know about
that already?”

Squibby sighed and pointed to her collection
of monitors as Rees fished Morgan’s report out of his pocket.

“
Morgan did an autopsy and
tracked the murder weapon to a guy named George Vandun. I got to
question him for a few minutes before a Sircotin lawyer hauled him
off and slammed the case shut. He gave me a name that I need
crosschecked in all the relevant databanks along with the results
of Morgan’s autopsy.”

“
What are you looking for,
exactly?”

“
Anything,” Rees said.
“According to Vandun, the stiff’s name was Aran Kurush. Vandun
seems to think he was up to something… strange.”

“
And you believe
him?”

Rees thought back to the look on Vandun’s
face when he spoke of his last meeting with Kurush.

“
Yeah,” he said. “I
do.”

Squibby held out her hand.

“
Give me the
file.”

It had been a long time since Rees watched
Squibby work.

He’d forgotten how good she was.

She started with the easy stuff, sorting
through the various national identity registries for hits on
Kurush. While the search was running on a few of the monitors, she
downloaded Morgan’s report and took it apart piece by piece,
feeding each bit into powerful compiler programs that would scan
trillions of datafiles for any similarities.

But that was just the groundwork. After the
automated programs started cranking out leads for her to follow,
she removed the synthskin plug covering her neural datajack and
plugged herself into her rig. Once she interfaced with the system,
she plunged into the datastream, slicing through any firewall or AI
countermeasure that got in her way. She worked quickly, almost in a
state of hyperactivity as her eyes darted from screen to screen and
her fingers keyed in hundreds of commands every minute.

Rees watched her closely for the first ten
or fifteen minutes of the search, but once it was clear she
wouldn’t be finishing any time soon, he found an empty chair and
sat down. He was still running through his conversation with Vandum
when he drifted off to sleep.

***

Rees didn’t sleep well.

He should have known better. Fifteen years
on the street had gone a long way to desensitizing him to the
nastier sort of crime scenes, but the human brain didn’t just
forget the things it saw. It tucked them away, to be sure, locked
them behind the iron doors of logic and covered them with veils of
denial. During the waking hours, the mind kept those barriers
strong, but during the night, when the tidal force of dreams
flooded in, it started springing leaks.

The process began slowly, an image here, a
conjecture there. But before long, the dreaming subconscious would
start connecting points that were better left disjointed, finding
patterns and ideas that eluded the more limited, systematic
reasoning of the waking mind.

Each dream brought Rees back to the
unfinished rooms of the eighty-eighth floor. But the place was
different somehow, or maybe he was the one that was different. He
noticed the seams in its construction, the architectural gaps that
offered a glimpse into something else, somewhere else. A queer sort
of light spilled out of unfinished corners, casting bizarre shadows
across the room.

Someone was there with him, always lingering
on the edge of his vision. A faint electrical hum filled the air,
like there was loose wiring connection in one of the exposed
conduits. When he listened closely, Rees thought it sounded almost
like whispering.