Chapter Three
Dex awoke to the familiar throb of a headache and he tasted a gummy film in his mouth. He reached over to the small shelf next to the bed for the large bottle of Flying Fish Tonix. He drank a large gulp and fought the brief flash of nausea that followed. In a moment the headache was dulled and he got up. After stepping into the lavatory cubicle, he turned on the spray and showered quickly. When he was done, the bathroom’s ceiling nozzle began to dry him and the room and he brushed his teeth and used the toilet.
He pulled his uniform out of the autoclave and put it on, stuffing a nutrient bar into the pocket. He was out the door and on his way to work in less than ten minutes after the alarm went off. The sky was its usual grey and there were only patches of it visible between the tops of the building. Dex wasn’t looking at the sky, though. He had already logged into the Cubicle Men’s system and was paging through the overnight news. There were the usual attacks on streeters that the goon squad busted up, a few domestic cases among the “differently employed” and what looked like a very interesting case in Asia of a missing piece of artwork. Obviously, the client had acquired it though less than honest means originally. Dex thought he would have liked that one.
Dex scanned over the list of ongoing cases for his squad as he boarded the train, one eye on the scrolling text and the other on a local news board. He stood on the train, sardined in with the other commuters, while he got a sense of what was going on with the other Cubicle Men in the city. As a lieutenant, Dex had a part time responsibility as a mentor for the other members. Lieutenant was really the highest rank anyone achieved and still was on active duty. After lieutenant it was all administration and recruiting, something in which Dex had less than zero interest.
When he really thought about it, Dex knew that he wasn’t an ambitious man, so it didn’t bother him that he was never going to rise any further. The organization, although technically hierarchical in structure, didn’t really place a lot of status on the various ranks. It was more focussed on finding the right niche for each member. Consider Buster Takahashi. He’d been a goon before Dex started and he was still there, cracking heads, busting ribs and putting the fear of death into people with the best of them. He’d never get off the street and he’d never get past constable, either. But he was one of the most respected guys in the squad, he was so damn good at what he did.
Dex knew he wasn’t in Buster’s league, but he also knew that he was good at his job. He had one of the higher solve rates in the squad and he truly liked his work. Although most of the other Ds in the squad wouldn’t have pegged him as an introspective guy, Dex had thought a lot about what made him good at this kind of work. He had never been great at school, in fact he’d always been pretty average at everything he had tried. He was stubborn, though, and once he sunk his teeth into something he had a hell of a time letting go. But, the only real aptitude he’d ever shown was for talking to people, making friends — although that was all in the past now.
Dex shook his head slightly, as though shaking the thoughts loose. There was no point in dwelling on that; he had real work to do. The train slowed and Dex’s onboard system showed a reminder superimposed over his vision that this was his stop. He pushed through the crowd to the door and stepped out. He walked the block to the B&B offices, still reading over the local Cubicle Men cases. He logged out just before passing through the doors to the Customer Service Reps’ room. He knew that B&B’s system would scan him as he entered, logging his time in and ensuring that we wasn’t using company time for non-work-related lollygagging.
However, once he was at his workstation, waving his hands over the B&B interface to check his messages and log in to the call system, he ran a program from his own system that allowed him to access the external parts of everywherenet without the B&B system noticing the additional traffic. This way, Dex could work on his real work while doing the job that paid the bills and kept him housed. As he answered the first complaint of the day, Dex saw that he had a text message from Ivy waiting for him. He paged over to it and while going through the motions with the B&B customer, he read through her message.
She claimed that she hadn’t been able to come up with a lot of information about the Reuben identity, since most of it was housed in his own memory cells, which had been destroyed. She did give a timeline from her own memory, though. She said she’d created Reuben about five years previously, first as a purely textual identity for some boards she posted at and for an online journal. The journal had been automatically deleted when Reuben had been killed, but Ivy said it was just a collection of essays about user interface issues. After she’d been using the Reuben identity for a year or so, she set about creating an avatar for him in the visual interface to everywherenet.
“It was harder than I thought it would be,” she wrote. “M City piggybacks on the identity system for the everywherenet itself, rather than having its own user management system like the boards do. I had to create a complete identity within a shell inside my own system. It was tough, but after a few months of solid work, I had it working.
“Reuben was, in a very real sense, a complete individual. He had access to the everywherenet as if he were entirely separate from Ivy — it got to the point where I could switch back and forth between the two identities very easily. Technically speaking, that is. It’s funny — the easier it became to master the technology, the harder it was to actually switch personalities myself.”
After she described her technological achievement, Ivy explained that she had originally created the Reuben identity because she was involved in a community that was devoted to discussion issues of privacy and anonymity on the ’nets. She posted occasionally to their boards and developed an alternate identity, as most of the posters there did. Once she created an avatar for the Marionette City interface, though, the Reuben identity became more fully formed and she began to use it more often in the virtual world. She made reference to using Reuben for some freelance work and Dex made a note to find out more about that.
Dex had finished with his first call of the work day at B&B and was now helping another customer install a new disk node. He figured that he could take care of that call in his sleep, so he continued to mull over the information in Ivy’s note. It was a start, but there were several questions he’d asked her that were notable in the absence of answers.
He had asked her if anyone knew she had a multi and she’d completely ignored that rather important question. Since the avatar was attacked with code, Dex was starting with the premise that Reuben’s killer had known that Reuben was a multi, but was it a deliberate act against Reuben/Ivy, or was it simply a statement against multis in general? Without more information from Ivy, Dex wouldn’t even know where to start. He sent her a message asking her to meet him in the bar again later that day to address some questions. He had to focus on the unhappy B&B customers for much longer than he would have preferred before he got a reply agreeing to his time.
• • •
Dex arrived first. It was his habit to link in to the bar a good half hour before his client was due to meet him. He liked to be able to see the client arrive — you could tell a lot about the way the meeting was going to go from those first few moments. But Dex also happened to like this place; it was dark, with a blue and green light show over the main area. The tables at the sides, where Dex liked to sit, were in barely enough light to see across the table. No one would be peeking in on a conversation there. The bar streamed music and Dex enjoyed the stuff they played. It wasn’t the garbage that was currently popular and it set a nice atmosphere. Of course, you could always change to your own soundtrack or turn the sound off entirely, but Dex liked the effort they put in to the music and the ambience of the place. It felt comfortable. As comfortable as an online gin joint ever could feel to him.
Dex watched the other patrons while his avatar worked on a drink. If he had wanted to, he could have had his system replicate the effects on his physical body, but he’d rat
her taste his drugs as they went in. He just liked the look of his avatar with a drink in its hand. He changed his perspective to be able to look at his avatar from a cinematic view. He had designed it to look more or less like his physical body did, without all the metal nodes dotting his face. It wore a dark suit of an somewhat anachronistic style, which fit with the compact but wide body. The head was shaved almost bald, but a close observer could just make out the line of dark grey stubble at the base of his skull under his old fashioned hat. The avatar’s dark eyes closed briefly as it brought the drink to its thin lips and took a long swallow.
Dex knew he could have built an avatar that would have been more attractive or fanciful and many people’s avatars were of that ilk. But he never thought to embellish; it just seemed unnecessary. Secretly, he thought the suit and hat were a bit of an indulgence, but no one had ever commented. He reset his view back to first person and waited for Ivy to show up.
This time she linked directly in to the bar, her avatar materializing in an empty area of the open space in the middle of the room. The light show played on her rendering form, first cutting through her image, then bouncing off the dress and skin. She took a moment to get her bearings, then scanned the faces, looking for Dex. He sent her a private audio message indicating where he was and she walked over to the table. She sat without waiting for an invitation and this time ordered a drink from the bartender software.
Dex didn’t stand on ceremony. “I got your message,” he said. “And there’s some information missing. If you want me to find out what happened to him, I’m going to need to know everything about Reuben. Why you created him, who knew him, who knew about his connection with you, all of it.” He paused, but Ivy just sipped her drink and held his gaze. “I know this is difficult, but you have to help me before I can help you. And if you don’t want my help, there’s a hundred other people who do. So, don’t waste my fucking time.”
Ivy didn’t say anything for a moment and Dex wondered if she was just going to link out of the bar and that would be the end of the case. He hoped she would stay, because the case intrigued him, but he had nothing to go on unless she could give him more information. His avatar kept its stoic expression, but Dex’s physical face smiled when Ivy started to talk.
“No one knew about Reuben and me,” she said, quietly. “There was nothing to link us. I never told anyone about Reuben until yesterday, when I told you.” She looked at Dex defiantly, as if daring him to question her. He softened the look on his avatar’s face and she dropped her eyes. “This is very hard for me,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. “I got so used to keeping it a secret, that even saying my-“ she caught herself. “Even saying his name out loud seems, terrifying.”
“It’s okay,” Dex said, his avatar’s expression kindly while in the physical world he rolled his eyes and sighed. “But we need to talk about Reuben if you want me to help you. What were you dong when you were using that identity? Who were you talking to, what communities were you in and what were those freelance projects all about?” He swallowed the last of his drink and refilled the glass. Ivy lifted her own glass and followed suit.
“Fine,” she said, lifting her eyes to meet his gaze. “I hope you have some time.”