Chapter Seventeen
“What do you mean, ‘vanished’?” Dex asked, incredulous. “People don’t just disappear. Hell, even Reuben didn’t disappear when he got killed. How can someone disappear?” His voice had risen about an octave from the beginning of the sentence to the end. With a great effort he tried to get himself together. “That’s the thing about everywherenet — you’re on all the time. It’s.... fucking... everywhere. That’s the point.”
“Dex, calm down,” Annabelle said. “People disappear off the ’nets all the time. They die, or they go offline. It’s not that unusual.”
“Then how come I’ve never heard of it before?”
“Well,” Annabelle said, “ever had a missing persons case?”
“No.”
“And have you ever looked for a dead person online.”
“Uh, no.”
“There you go then,” she said, matter of factly. “It’s perfectly normal, it just doesn’t come up that often.”
“Okay, fine.” Dex said, “So, you’re saying that Ljundberg is dead.”
“Or offline.”
“What do you mean, offline?”
“You know, offline,” she said, starting to sound a bit frustrated. “Not online. Unconnected to the ’nets. Not controlled by or directly connected to a computer or external network.”
“I know what the word means,” Dex said, with a slight petulant whine. “I just don’t see how a person would do that. How would you do anything? You can’t go anywhere, buy anything — could you even get into your apartment?’
“Yeah, you could do that,” Annabelle said. “Actually you’d be surprised at how much you can actually do offline. A lot more stuff is controlled by that chip in your hand than you’d think. The ’nets are really only for communication and banking and most rudimentary financial transactions, like paying train fare, are actually covered by the chip.”
“Huh,” Dex grunted. “So, Ljundberg could be offline and busy doing stuff out there in the physical world?”
“Could be,” she agreed, “and probably is.”
“Can you tell if he’s alive or not?”
“It’s not conclusive,” she said, “but when people are online when they die, there’s this really interesting data pattern they sort of expel into the network at the moment of death. It’s pretty cool and no one seems to know what it is. But there’s none of that recorded for Ljundberg.”
“So if he is dead,” Dex said, “he was already offline when it happened.” Dex thought for a moment. “Any way we can track him, now?”
“I was waiting for you to ask that,” she said, glee evident in her voice. “Deep in the everywherenet is the control program that monitors everyone’s ID chips. That’s what lets us use the same chip to get into work, home, the train, whatever. Now, it’s covered in a lot of layers of security, but I’ve been looking for an excuse to drill into that system for a while now. If I can get in there, I think I’ll be able to see where Ljundberg is. Or at least where he’s recently been, assuming he hasn’t chopped off his hand or gone off to the middle of the ocean on a rickety old raft or something.”
“Good,” Dex said. “Now, don’t let me keep you from this exciting break and enter job of yours.” He could almost hear her grin.
“I’ll keep you posted,” she said and ended the call.
• • •
Dex refocussed on the physical world, stood and stretched and shook his head. He visited the lav and checked the time. Even with the extra ninety minutes of sleep in the morning, it was getting late. He thought he ought to take a slug of SleepingJuice and call it a night. He was wired, though and even though the soporific tonic would knock him out no matter what, he just didn’t feel like sleeping yet.
He pulled up the recording he’d made of his conversation with Annabelle. He ran it back to the beginning, before the talk took its turn toward the intimate and disturbing. He listened as they talked about their work, sharing war tales and banter. Dex was surprised to hear his voice have that easy sound, like the conversation was comfortable, like it had been back with Maks.
But then he closed his eyes, listening to her voice tell some funny story about a doomed project at her day job and he tried to picture her. All he could see was her inhuman avatar, sickeningly morphing into different images in an attempt to please him. He opened his eyes and forced himself to picture something else. How could he explain how much that was the opposite of attractive to him, how he didn’t care what she looked like, so long as she was real?
He stopped the audio and poured another, though slightly smaller, glass of rum and ginger. He opened up his private files and searched for just the right video. The one from when he first started recoding. When he and Maks were out riding the trains with nowhere to go, high on youth and some drug Dex couldn’t even name now. Maks was making an ass of himself, making faces and trying to be funny, trying to get Dex to laugh and “ruin the shot.”
There it was — a couple of hours in — the part Dex wanted to see, to remember. On a train going through an outlying part of town, no one else aboard, the two of them wrestling over the last bite of a food brick. Laughing and grabbing at each other, falling over each other from the movement of the train and drug induced lack of coordination, their faces glowing with sweat and pure animal pleasure at movement of muscle. Dex felt his throat tighten and he closed his eyes. He wondered which would be worse, never knowing happiness, or this. The remembering. And he wondered if he ever would have the courage to erase the memories, to start a new life, a life without the burden of the past.
• • •
The next morning, Dex found a message from Annabelle waiting for him when he was on the train. Judging from the time stamp, she’d been up almost all night cracking in to the ID chip tracker. The good news was that Ljundberg wasn’t dead, unless someone had hacked off his hand and was carrying it all over Guadalajara. The bad news was that he was still offline and there was no way to contact him, except physically tracking him down and going to talk to him embodied.
When Dex got to his station at B&B, he pinged Annabelle. He figured she’d be dodging morons at her day job, but he got back an automated reply. She’d set her system to send him a specific message if he called, which told him that she was on weekend and was sleeping in. She asked him to message her and said that she’d call him once she woke up. He sent the message and got to work dealing with B&B customers. While he was talking people into extended warranties they didn’t need and helping others find the power switch on their new toys, Dex pulled up the intercities train schedules.
The timing was reasonably good, since he’d be on weekend himself the next day. Usually Dex’s weekends were either lost in a bottle and a stack of videos on loop or he threw himself bodily into whatever case he was on. This weekend would be an extreme example of the latter. It was a long train trip to Guadalajara, but there was an overnight shuttle and he booked himself on the one leaving that night. He’d have up to three days to find Ljundberg and he didn’t know if it was enough time but there wasn’t really any other option.
He pinged Ivy. “Is it okay if we just text?” she asked. “I’m out with Renna at a club and I might need to talk there.”
“If this isn’t a good time to talk, you could just call me back.” Dex asked.
“No, it’s okay,” Ivy answered. “Renna’s dancing right now, so we’ve got a few minutes at least. Any news?”
“Maybe,” he answered. “I have to do some physical traveling to follow up a lead. I needed to let you know that there will be some additional expenses associated with the trip.”
“That’s fine,” she said. “Do you need me to add funds to the escrow account?” Dex quickly brought up the figures and saw that the account was still quite healthy.
“That won’t be necessary,” he answered. “I just needed your authorization to accrue the expenses.”
“Consider this a blanket authorization,” she s
aid, “to do whatever needs to be done. I’m not concerned about the cost, only about the result.”
“Very well,” Dex said. “I’ll contact you if I learn anything useful.”
“Thank you,” she said and signed out.
Dex booked his train fare and made a quick list of things he’d need to pack. He pinged Annabelle again, but just got the response she’d set for him again. He hoped he’d get to talk to her before he left. Dex had never gone looking for a missing person before and he wasn’t sure if he’d need some kind of special tools or something. He felt very much out of his element, but it was a surprisingly good feeling. This case had been strongly lacking in leads up until now and Dex could almost feel the answer coming to meet him.
This was it, the moment he had talked to Annabelle about. He had poked here and there, asking inane questions of people with no information long enough to finally get a tiny thread. A thread he could grab on to and pull until the whole fabric of this puzzle came apart in his hands. This was his favourite moment, the one that made all the rest of it worthwhile. It even made talking to moronic B&B customers seem less horrible than usual.
The rest of his workday passed by quickly, Dex spending the majority of his thought power on collecting information about Guadalajara — maps, names and contacts for inns and lodges, a schedule for the local transportation. By the time he clocked out of B&B, he was armed with enough travel information to spend a two week holiday there. He caught the train back to his apartment, knowing he had only about an hour to pack before he needed to catch the local train to the intercity station.
Just as Dex was getting off the train and starting to walk to his building, his system pinged. It was Annabelle, finally. “I’m so glad you called,” Dex said, “I’ve got a reservation on the train to Guadalajara in a couple of hours.”
“Whoa,” Annabelle said, “that was fast.”
“No time like the present,” Dex said, walking up the front stairs to his building. “Besides, I’m on weekend now, so it’s easy to take the time.”
“Makes sense,” she said, then explained that she had been monitoring Ljundberg and he seemed to be more or less stationary. “I’ve had very little activity for the past couple of days,” she said, “just a train trip here...” she sent a link to a map of the train routes with a stop and line highlighted, “and a purchase here.” Another map downloaded to Dex’s system, this time showing a small store just off the line about half a klick to the north. “He must be staying somewhere near there, but I don’t have anything more specific for you, I’m afraid.”
“No, that’s fantastic,” Dex said, now in his apartment, cramming a couple of changes of clothes into a small shoulder bag. “Can you keep me posted of any changes?”
“Of course,” Annabelle said. “I wouldn’t have it any other way. But you keep in touch, yourself, okay?”
“Will do,” Dex said and ended the call. He set his apartment for no occupancy for the next three days and as he walked past the box, grabbed a handful of food bricks to stick in his bag. He left the apartment, rode the lift down to the street and headed out to the train.