“Of course we can have a little chat first, my darling.”
She is sitting on the bed – “Name’s Cherri, by the way. With an i,” – leaning on one hand, her other playing with the clasp on her mysterious little suitcase as one crossed leg swings her foot back and fore, toying with its shoe. “Now will that be of the clothed or the unclothed variety?”
She sees him eyeing the case.
“My accoutrements?” she says, with a slight elevation of an eyebrow. “Would you like to see?” She begins to open the clasp. He raises a palm.
“That won’t be necessary.”
“They’ve all been safety tested, if that’s what you’re worried about? Got little stickers and everything.” Curiously, if true, that may be the most interesting thing she’s said so far. But he shakes his head.
She exhales heavily. “Fuck.”
“What?”
“I owe Trixie a drink. She said you’d be enforcement. No, I said. Look at his face! Too young and cute. Not enough mileage.”
“I only want to ask a few questions.”
She shrugs. “Go ahead. But I must warn you: my general knowledge is for shit. Though I may surprise you on my art and literature.”
He gets out his tablet and shows her the reconstruction of the girl’s face.
“Have you ever seen this girl?”
She pauses slightly too long, then shakes her head too casually. “Nope. Sorry.”
[Eye movement and reaction time suggest evasion,] his AI’s interrogation module chips in, but he’s already worked that out.
“Are you sure?” he asks her.
“110 percent.”
“I can get a warrant, you know.”
“Well, well,” – she shakes her head again slowly – “that escalated quickly. A warrant for my thoughts. Not very romantic, is it?”
“I…” He’s gone too hard too early. The warrant is a bluff, anyway – his jurisdiction doesn’t extend beyond the Arcs, not without municipal cooperation, but he has correctly guessed that she doesn’t know that. “I’m sorry. This …”
[Try to engage the subject at an emotional level,] the module suggests. [You could use the deceased’s fate to garner sympathy?]
“I think this case is getting to me.” He rubs his forehead with thumb and forefinger. “I mean …” He flicks through to another picture on the tablet and turns it again to show her the face before the reconstruction. She flinches and looks down and away.
[Now try to bring her into your confidence, make her feel that only she can help.]
“On the surface, it seems straight forward – that she jumped from somewhere inside the Arc. And I suppose it could just be a suicide, you know? But even so, there are some weird—I mean, I shouldn’t really be telling you any of this, but my gut is, I think someone else might have been involved.”
“You think she was pushed?”
[Pupil dilation, skin capillary response and breathing rate all indicate emotional arousal. Suggestion: introduce possibility of personal jeopardy.]
“I … I don’t know. But say she was. What if someone is targeting girls – girls like you. Like …” Think back – where was it?
[The Neal Street Murders in Covent Garden. The Salford Dolls. The—]
“… like in … in the Salford Dolls case?”
She looks down again, swallows. Accent suggests she’s from somewhere in the North, too – might even be Manchester. She toys with a ring on her right hand, a red stone set into a band of gold, twisting it around her finger.
[Subject is displaying increased anxiety.]
You don’t say.
After she’s gone, he feels guilty, almost dirty – more so, perhaps, than if he’d actually engaged in what she thought she was there to do.
Though that’s not something he’s ever done.
With anyone.
Cherri with an i had eventually admitted that the girl’s face “looks sort of familiar”; she would ask around. “But I’ll need a patch – for my pimp.”
She’s done this before – or knows someone who has; knows anyway that there’s some gizmo that he can give her that will interface with her implant to disguise her memories, should anyone go snooping – and not only the questions he’s asked her, but also her responses, patching them over with things more innocuous and mundane. A patch that she can also use to protect other girls when she shows them the picture. It’s an extraordinary thing, like most of its ilk, trickled down from its beginnings in military and spook stuff, deployed eventually in law enforcement and witness protection, private security, and by now finally making its way into the under-the-counter catalogues of your local back-street dealers. It’s basically a surveillance umbrella, all parties involved standing “under” its aegis, linked in a digitally shared lie about what was done and said. Like what the Freudians used to call a “screen memory” (back when there were still Freudians).
And so somewhere, strange to think, she is now walking around with a graphic recollection of their encounter – not of acts committed with him, naturally, but with some non-existent john, dreamed up by the AI itself, as in fact will be the whole meeting. He’s half tempted to pull up the memory, curious as to what AIs think is standard erotic fare in these situations – nothing transgressive, of course, apart from (strictly speaking, given the local laws on prostitution) the act itself. But he resists – he’s good at that.
He sends the follow-up questions to Caulden, along with the facial reconstruction (in case it jogs any Directorial memories), and begins the arrangements to acquire the surveillance footage from Outside. This will require some deft and delicate footwork. Though semi-autonomous, each Arc is essentially a franchised outlet of the Company, subject to the same overarching rules and regulations. Within his remit, as investigator of unusual fatalities within the arcologies, his powers are therefore quite broad. But Outside is a different matter. Since the devolution of the municipalities and the defunding of the forces, each municipality is responsible for hiring its own private security, and dealings with local law enforcement have become even more fraught. And over all of which he has no authority at all.
So if he wants footage from Outside, he will have to play nice with the Mayor.
Percy puts in the request for a mayoral “audience” and waits, feeling like a peasant petitioner come cap in hand humbly to press his suit before some medieval baron. Which is apt, because if previous dealings with municipal authorities are anything to go by, the man will turn out to be nothing more than some puffed up local hoodlum, his veneer of legitimacy concealing shady connections and shadier dealings. The municipalities really have become a law unto themselves.
He calls up the facial reconstruction of the girl via his interface. He has taken to poring over it, as if by power of scrutiny alone he can gain some insight into who or what she was. But the more he examines it, the more he finds in it a kind of solace, a reassurance that he was right in his initial assessment – that there was an innocence, a purity about her, something almost talismanic.
What will Rachel make of that, when the time comes? Of the fact that this particular dead stranger’s face – supplanting, in terms of mind-time, even that of his own fiancée – should come to hold such fascination for him?
[Perhaps she is an embodiment of your anima?] his AI chips in. [The female face of your unconscious?]
The impending happy event casts a retrospective shadow over everything he does, everything he thinks and feels, as he inches toward that terrible accounting of all that he is. Not that he doesn’t want it – Transparency; or at least, want what it represents: not just physical union, but spiritual, emotional, their minds conjoined. He just fears that at the very point of consummation – the unfiltered deluge of his memories, the declassified records of each ungoverned whim and yearning – Rachel will recoil, rebuff him, repel him like an invading virus or a spreading infection, aghast at his impurity.
He catches himself toying with the promise ring on his left hand – just like the girl had done with her own – rotating the celtic band around the ring finger with his thumb, its knotwork overlapping, intertwining like limbs.
[Fear of psychic contagion suggests a repressed and depersonalised libido.]
Rachel has sensed this, of course, in her inimitable way, has tried to reassure him: “Percy, darling, we’re all human. Some days, my mind is an absolute sewer!” And just to belie that very statement, she had laughed, like a peal of church bells, clear and pure and high. It’s all a game to her, a giddy adventure, one where none of it really matters, to her or to anyone else. She’d even offered to send him pictures, videos. (“I know waiting is hard – you can send me pictures too, if you’d like? There’s nothing wrong in that, is there? They’re our bodies. We already belong to each other.”). But he’s told her he’d rather wait. For in truth, he is also afraid; at what his mind will do with that mental foretaste; of how it will mix and commingle images of her beautiful, pure body with that of others. Bodies he passes in the street. Bodies more readily to hand. Bodies with hands that knock on doors, looking for someone, but where anyone will do.
“She is still just a girl – you know that?”
Rachel’s father, knowing in advance the purpose of his visit, had made him wait, fielding business call after business call on his interface while Percy had sat sweaty-palmed in the big leather armchair opposite the palatial desk affording another peerless view – even more impressive than Caulden’s.
“Silly, flighty,” he’d continued, “fully of childish enthusiasms.” He had turned and looked at Percy: was he weighing up his candidacy for such a passing fad? A phase she would outgrow? He’d met Rachel through the church, not a faith that her father genuinely shares, he suspects, but useful for vetting potential in-laws, and Transparency would be a precondition of the engagement and a clause in the parentally-enforced prenup. “Your prospects” – he had waved a hand – “they’re not an issue. I can see to all that. But she needs someone stable, you understand? Serious. Someone with maturity. She needs ballast.” His look again had searched Percy for those qualities too. “Could you provide her with that?”
And he could – can. He is nothing if not serious. And Transparency is a sign of that seriousness. Of his commitment to her and to himself.
[Conflict with male figures of authority may involve projections of the Shadow.]
This had been Rachel’s idea too. The therapy module.
“I’ve heard they help a lot. With, you know … anxieties.” She’d suppressed a smirk. Is she really incapable of taking any of this seriously?
But the one she’d encouraged him to install has ceased to have any beneficial effect, and now serves chiefly as an ongoing reminder of his unresolved issues. It had been a relief at first, liberating, to have something non-human he could share his unvoiced qualms with. And its lack of personality ideally suited it to such a role; something that wasn’t secretly judging him – or at least, whose judgements he wouldn’t care about.
And it’s not like there isn’t material there. For him to work through.
His mother, obviously.
[Did her death perhaps make you feel abandoned?] the AI continues, sensing another opening. [Something you perhaps took personally?]
His father, too – whom he has to thank for his career. Not in any positive, supportive sense – just the opposite. As motivation: to not be that man. Now there was shadow, there was shadiness, and aplenty. The criminality, the sleazy connections; the endless parade of casual hook-ups, no attempt even to conceal them, from him, from his mother; the drink-fuelled heavy-handedness that passed for paternal love. No, he will be better than that, a better man, whatever that takes.
Hence Transparency. And hence the therapy module.
But maybe its lack of core personality is also the problem. It is too obliging. No pushback, no hard truths, just the daily dose of trite homilies, buzzwords and psychobabble. And if one approach doesn’t work, then let’s try another, shall we? – behaviourist, person-centred, Adlerian, Freudian, the latest being Jungian. As if mindlessly working through a list, any one as good as the other, hoping by exhaustive iteration to eventually chance upon the cure.
But – and here’s the thing – perhaps there isn’t one.
For perhaps – heresy as this thought is to all he now professes to believe – the human mind is meant to stay private.
Tidelands is a weekly sci-fi/fantasy serial that publishes every Friday, emailed straight to your inbox. All instalments are free, but you can support my writing by taking out a paid subscription, or buying ebook or paperback editions of the collected instalments.
Great world building and great characterisation throughout. Thanks for sharing this 👏