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ninety6tears[See Master Post]
Right after I showed up to the office the next day I got a comm from Pike telling me where the meeting would be held. Even though most of the people present would be from Murder, he'd convinced them all to come over to the Undercover office, which was a huge relief for me; I didn't feel like confronting too much deja vu.
"Have you talked to Leonard since yesterday?"
"No," I replied, then realized why he was probably asking. "He finish the examination?"
"Yeah. He'll be telling me more than that right before the meeting, but he's pretty tied up before then."
Bones hates having to repeat himself, and while this was an instance where he was probably willing to make an exception, I'd already planned not to harp on him about anything he'd found until the actual meeting. There wasn't a peep from my on-duty communicator for all of my Saturday, and that morning was split between paperwork and the distracted contemplation of all the rustling activity I knew that Chris and a couple others would be taking care of already. They'd be questioning the hell out of Will's housemates about everything conceivably related to an assault investigation, and for those who got comfortable enough to not really notice, everything that wasn't even related at all. The house was going to be stampeded, probably every foot of Will's room analyzed and imaged. I usually had a lot of sympathy for people who had to deal with our overwhelming brigade, but in this case I didn't really know what to think.
Bones and I met up on Sunday morning when he came to give me a ride. I had to give him directions to Undercover, and when we got there Bones let out a whistle, unable to help commenting on how much spiffier the place was compared to the Murder Squad's office. Murder had always been a little more in touch with the small-trade technology that was "retro" to the tourists but eventually customary to New Dubliners, and undercovers loved to take any chance to remind them of that. But considering that homicide records were pretty safely kept to paper systems and half of UCD's personnel were currently on suspension for suspicion that one of them may have sold data passwords to a skinjob lab, I was thinking it was going to be a while before they could brag to us again.
Them, I bit at myself. Not "us."
"What's with the most discrete subdivision of the NDPD getting the biggest headquarters?"
"It's not all UCD," I said. "Illegal Sciences uses over half of this building, actually."
"Ah," Bones said. "The good old Black Math Squad."
Bones and I were almost done dancing through security later when he said, "Ah, there she is," noticing the early arrival of a tall blond figure all the way down the narrow hall standing waiting for the elevator.
"Who's that?"
"That," Bones said, "is our robopathologist."
"Robo-what-now?" I demanded, "That's a field?"
"Anything can be a field if somebody puts enough work into it. In this case, it was her husband, this guy Korby who invented the word 'robopathology' for basically anything that's a combination of medical and technical diagnostics. Cute, right?"
"You're telling me there are specialists for this type of shit we're dealing with?"
"I'm saying she's the one. And today's her lucky day." In response to the look I had on now, Bones smiled a bit sheepishly. "She's a nurse most days. We used to work on the same floor."
"Leonard." We were within a range that she'd turned to notice us. "Morning."
"Hey. This is—"
"Jim Kirk, I presume." She flashed me a great smile just after a flinch got into her features at the sight of me. She'd seen the body. "It's Chapel. Christine if you like."
I reached out to shake her hand, blinking. "Pleasure."
When we were in the elevator, the shimmying around some people who were already in there placed us far enough away from Chapel that I could intentionally irk Bones by whispering, "My, my, who would divorce her?"
"Nobody yet, and thank God you didn't try that on her as a line. Why the hell would you assume that?"
"If they were still much of a team wouldn't her husband be here?"
"He's not here because he's dead."
"...When did he die?" After a second my mouth dropped open. "Holy shit: Roger Korby? That one doctor who—"
"Shut the hell up now."
"Oh, man, from what I heard that case was fucking screwy."
"The guy was fucking screwy, now shut up, and don't you dare mention that to anyone else."
"Of course I won't." I sighed. Just when Bones maybe thought I would actually shut it: "He was also, like wickedly ingenious, is the thing..."
Bones went more dramatically back into rolling his eyes, but I was interrupted by the elevator tapping to a stop at one of the underground levels. The air was noticeably cooler when the doors opened and most of the rush exited into an already partly occupied hall. Apparently there was more than one meeting on this floor.
"And on Sunday," I mumbled.
Chapel heard it and shrugged. "They have to organize a hell of an inquisition if they're hoping to get a lead on whoever might have helped the harvester."
"Yeah, I'm not envying that job," I said with a scoff.
The meeting room was a long-tabled high-tech affair where you felt an immediate sterility when you entered that made you want to keep your voice down. Bones and I stuck to the same side of the table, and as other people entered, the unofficial rule of sequestering Murder to one side and everyone else on the other unconsciously started to stick.
I wanted to groan in annoyance with the first couple people from homicide who were apparently on task for external investigations: So far it was Joey Kelly, who I've always known only pretends to dislike me out of social rules that smack of purely teenage politics, and Rock—I've never bothered to figure out whether that's his first or last name—who I have often labeled the stupidest good detective in New Dublin. We honestly have a lot in common, including our reputations for getting by purely on looks and luck, but the problem is he's never given me the same benefit of the doubt I've given him and I've never given enough of a shit to prove him wrong.
Then there were the officers from IS, none of whom I knew. I was saved from a polite and boring spell of small talk with one of them when somebody came in and tapped me at the elbow; I turned and saw Detective Rand cocking her eyebrow at me.
"So I hear your somebody's evil twin."
"Apparently." I grinned, realizing with some surprise that I was extremely happy to see her. "Damn, Janice, it's been a while."
"It has, boy, you don't comm, you don't write. Though I assume you can't have done anything disastrous in the last few months. How's Spock doing?"
I parried, "How's Junior? Apparently he's finally had the sense to promote you."
My old superintendent, who I was thankful wasn't needed here because of Pike's staggering rank, was called "Junior" everywhere but to his face at the homicide offices; it was for the fact that his intelligence made us all deduce it was only because of his father's founding role in starting up the NDPD that he ever got a job as a police officer in the first place. Annoyance with him was a safer topic than the weather, and Janice's eyes went rolling right away.
"It's hard not to think it was just because you left the job open. Thanks for that, by the way. I swear, sometimes he still makes me feel like a glorified legal secretary."
I was going to try for a reassuring joke when we were interrupted by Kelly bumping her elbow with his so she'd take the coffee he grabbed for her off of his hands. After that she went to claim a seat at the table next to him and Rock, and I felt the thin but undeniable wall between the different sides of the room.
The last time I would have seen all of them, it had been uncomfortable common knowledge around the precinct that Joey Kelly was helplessly in love with Janice and possibly always would be, but in only a couple minutes' time I figured out that wasn't there anymore; he laughed a tiny bit more at her than with her when Rock made a crack about the extra packets of sugar she was dumping into her drink, and only looked at her for a second or two at a time. Rock was stretching his arm behind Joey's back to show off some pictures of his newborn goddaughter, his grin making his eyes seem to glow a brighter green. Janice was now getting more mileage out of the 'F' word than I was used to hearing and was now too busy to do much more with her hair than let it hang in a short bob. I had been gone for just four or five months, and they all were like continents that had jumped perceptible miles while I'd been looking away for only a moment. It bothered me more than it should have.
Chris finally came in, towing with him a bunch of data displays he was hooking up to the huge overhead monitor when Bones got out his notes and went up to ask him a couple things. Soon enough the last straggler from IS came in and sat, and Chris cleared his throat.
"Okay, first thing: You all need to pay close attention, but understand that the operation isn't a go just yet. I wanted all divisions to be able to compare notes, so we'll start with medical forensics, I think. Doctor McCoy, if you could at least start with the basics..."
Bones was valiantly professional about it, as I had to be, even when the others reacted with some morbid fascination at the photos of the body as he went through the preliminary fundamentals: Cause of death was nothing odd; he died within minutes from the stabbing. There were the nutrition facts, the lack of hard drug use, lack of recent sexual intercourse, etc. He went over the cuts and contusions on various parts of the body, but none seemed unusual for a physical struggle leading up to getting stabbed.
"You all know from the report that he placed an emergency call but was unable to verbally respond to the dispatcher, and by the time police arrived, he was dead..." Bones said, "From my observation, he was possibly unable to say something because of the onset of shock or brain death, but it's also likely he was incapable of vocalizing clearly because of internal bleeding.
"As for...other diagnostics." Bones paused. "The body is genetically identical to James T. Kirk, with some, uh, 'mechanical' variation, but possibly not as much as you'd expect. For one, we obviously know that he's younger, but I have an estimate that he was created about three years ago, which is just about as old as he can be if he was made to match the alias. Whether there was an actual fetal or infant stage or if the genetic development was somehow grafted onto some base form of artificial life at an older life state is impossible to tell. However, analysis of the bone development indicated that the body was forced through some kind of hormonally stimulated hyper-growth. Uh, Ms. Blake, you said earlier..."
An IS officer said, "I wanted to point out that there are known drugs formerly discovered by us that could induce that kind of abnormal growth; we don't think they were invented for that use, and we haven't seen it used to such an extreme, but..." She shrugged. I suddenly wished I had friends from Black Math; I'd never heard of anything like that before.
"We know it's out there." Bones nodded. "The growing pains could give anybody a less than sunny personality, that's all I'll say about that. Aside from the irregular cell growth, the body would otherwise appear to be somewhere between 26 and 28—possibly younger than Kirk, but only by a year or so, definitely not too perceptively."
"Hang on." Kelly had his hand raised. "How were genetic samples attained in the first place? There's no data in the systems you can use to map somebody's DNA..."
Chris shrugged, looked grim. "It's pretty much the proof we've got that the harvester obviously has a link to the real identities and was able to track them down. All they would have had to do is pretend to be a custodian and poke around Jim's desk..."
"Lovely," I remarked, wanting to cut off the talkative exclamations at the other end of the table, when a member of IS asked something.
"So are we assuming that there's some motive related to the fact that the sources are involved with law enforcement? I ask because it just seems unbelievable that an organization that's capable of doing all this wouldn't be able to find some other way..."
"They wouldn't go to the trouble matching them up with aliases, you mean?" I asked, shrugging. "We can't rule out the possibility that the type of people who do this stuff are attracted to the cleanliness of it. Not just how intellectually tantalizing it might be to, ooh, make covers into real people, but they may have even thought about the advantages of it if they ever had any of their clones discovered. For example, if I'd made a lot more enemies as Will Kenley, there might be some hesitation to do a case that would draw public attention to the fact that Will was an informant, because it could get me into some trouble."
Someone in IS cocked an eyebrow at that and bluntly underlined something in his notes. I swerved the inquiries back to Bones.
"What about the mental development?"
"Pitch perfect, actually, though it's harder to tack an age on that," Bones said. While some whispering went around the room, he exchanged a look with Chapel who was already coming up to the front so he could mutter some question to her before she nodded at him, shrugged and took over.
Chapel was confident and brisk, hardly giving off that this wasn't the type of thing she did every day. "I was asked to examine the only non-organic components that were to be found anywhere in Kenley's organs. His brain appeared to be very delicately wired to an artificial memory system; his procedural learning and memory is at least partly natural, but it's possible that from a certain point in his history, all of his episodic memory is installed and completely fabricated."
Joey asked, "Can I get that dumbed down a bit?"
My mind was still reeling with too much new information but I tried to fill in: "You're saying that it's possible his memories were entirely rebooted and rewritten at one point, but that his, um, skill memory...how to walk and talk and read, could have naturally carried over? But the, um, autobiographical info is corruptible because of the mechanism..."
"Jesus," Rand exclaimed at a whisper.
"And we're presuming," Rock slowly asked, "this is used to market them. That you can, say, program somebody to think they've been your spouse for five years?"
You could feel the skin starting to crawl all over the room; I kept my nose in my notes. I'd dealt with the worst I could have imagined about the situation already.
"We're presuming," Chapel confirmed. "And Pike will have more to say about this, but that would mean that someone could still be exercising some kind of control over the, uh, residents." She cleared her throat.
Chris took the cue. "Thanks, Chapel," he said without looking up from the notes he was currently going through.
Next to me Bones sank back with the confirmation that his part in this meeting was mostly done, and finally let into the mood his entire weekend had been cooking up to. I heard him grumble something about "I should go back to being a damn surgeon," and covered an affectionate smirk with my hand.
"Okay," Chris said, now leaning into his hands and standing at the front of the table. "Let's detail what we had on the actual body real quick: Our Will was not carrying any kind of weapon except for an army knife. He had a personal comm with a very limited social life: only seven comm numbers that weren't restaurants. He was carrying in one side of his jacket a notepad with nothing much besides doodles and grocery lists in it; and on the other, our goldmine..."
He was looking at me as he set it on the table. It was a multi-use PADD, the types students often had but obviously a pretty nice one.
I was cocking my eyebrow expectantly before he proclaimed, "It's got all the notes you could possibly need to bullshit your way through History 301, an efficiently kept personal calendar, and...nine plus hours of recorded home footage."
My mouth fell into what I suppose was a pleased 'O' of surprise. That last bit was the jackpot I'd felt like Chris was probably waiting to spring on me if I was still wishy-washy about committing to the investigation. It could make all the difference in whether I felt I could pull off the operation at all. I didn't know whether the PADD sitting there a few feet away from me felt heavy and ominous or like something I couldn't wait to get my hands on the second this meeting was over.
"Another thing: While there were signs of struggling, there was no traceable evidence anywhere on Will that would lead us to an identity. The only thing we've got was that some blood was found on the wall a couple yards from the body; it could have been related to the fight, or it could have somehow gotten there at any point that day or even earlier, it's difficult to tell. The blood gave us no solid genetic match, but it was copper-based, which typically belongs to Vulcanoids or, more likely, an Orion. And yes, it should be noted that the location of the crime is smack-dab in the middle of a gang turf; most people around there would be nervous to be out there alone at night, but at the same time, we don't know this particular group to trouble themselves with small-time killing unless there's a personal motivation."
"Which group are we looking at?" Janice asked; the external parts of the homicide operation were where she'd be more involved. "The Saiphon? They're pretty exclusively Orion, right?"
Joey said, "Yeah, that's their territory. There's a rumor the big boss has a claim to the museum, even. Sorry," he added to Chris, for fraying the conversation.
"I'll probably go over more about that with you guys later, but we need to get to the residents," Chris continued. "I'm going to start off by saying that out of the four people Will was living with, there's one we haven't been able to link to a known genetic source. The rest are pulled from police handles just like Will.
"Other possibly relevant details: All identified genetic sources are aged between 25 and 31; all of the aliases are no longer in active undercover use, and all were initially created for that purpose as part of our own UCD, with the exception of Uhura's, whose information was submitted to us at some point from the TIA. We noted no genetic predispositions to any severe medical complications when we attained information from the sources, so they've got pretty healthy codes. Another notable similarity is that all of the sources are pretty young for undercover officers, which might be related to the fact that they're all individuals of above average intelligence."
A snort at the other side of the table: "Yeah, except for Kirk."
"Don't be a shitbird, Rock," Chris lightly warned. "Kirk's aptitudes place him as a genius."
I wasn't in the mood to be insulted by the blatant cynicism held by a couple people in the room, and just sat there smirking instead of entertaining the immediate hubbub of the other side of the table placing bets on my actual numbers. I didn't even specifically remember them; Chris was in an appeasing mood, rolled his eyes and looked it up for them. Rand won dinner.
While the talking had been dying off Chris had got up the specific IDs on the residents: At one point he glanced over at me, and he had this look, like he was gloating over knowing something I didn't know. It made Bones cock an eyebrow at me, and I just shrugged and nudged him with my elbow.
The first ID that went up was Toni's driver's license: I squinted as if I was actually looking for a notable difference, but of course I wasn't going to find one in the perfectly familiar pretty angles of her face. She hadn't bothered smiling for the picture and her black hair was in a laid-back braid down the side of her neck, grown very long.
"Source name is Nyota Uhura; alias is Antonia Doyo. She claims she's Dominican Terran and that her parents are long deceased. She is a double major focusing on history and," Chris paused and, for my sake, added in a sort of dry ta-da!, "linguistics."
"Shocker," I sang back in sarcasm.
"Next we have Ken Toshiro. Source name is Hikaru Sulu."
The record was a student ID this time. Toshiro had a kind of intentionally-overdoing-it smirk in the photo, thick brows, a smooth boyish cut and a slight slice of bright white teeth. Something made me want to like him; I felt like I'd heard of Sulu, but I'd definitely never met the guy.
Chris read off, "History with a specific interest in exploration and colonization. Claims to have been born in Japan and then moved with his family to the sector when he was still a toddler; neglected to answer any questions about his relationship with his parents but said that they are still alive."
In response to this, a few styluses were moving fiercely. Mine was not: Chris had gone to the next card.
"A few of you will recognize Detective Spock. Our copy goes by the name Danek, son of I-can't-pronounce-it-but-he-doesn't-exist-either-way, is majoring in history and minoring in astronomy. He neglected to tell me anything about his family, but implied that he's lived here a good amount of time."
Regardless of whether he had much of any knowledge of the implicit complications, I felt like it was kind of a dick move for Chris to spring this on me without any kind of warning, but the thing is, I could have seen it coming. I hadn't, because my mind just hadn't ever put Spock into that category: I had for a time completely forgotten that he'd ever done any undercover.
But I remembered, it was a very brief assignment he'd been recruited to do only a few months after I'd started on the murder squad—something they'd apparently needed a Vulcan for badly enough to tap the only one in the entire department, regardless of his inexperience. My memory of the time only served me vague impressions of wandering around making coffee runs, third-wheeling on cases and being generally bored out of my mind on top of more than a little worried by the nagging thought that he was going to end up getting shot before I even had the chance to get to know him much better.
I of course had a half-dazed awareness that Bones was looking over at my reaction and that Chris had probably already checked a surreptitious glance in the middle of speaking, but my attention was glued to the photo of Danek up on the monitor. The identical Vulcan possessed all of Spock's severe and soft features, the rich dark eyes peering at me from the ID, and it was impossible to believe it was anyone other than my former partner. He had a dark red scarf over something equally basic and generally looked like someone you'd presume to be approachable but might still hesitate to talk to. He wasn't wearing any particular facial expression; what was there was neutral rather than frigid. I noted that his hair was even similar to how Spock's had been after I'd persuaded him that interviewees might find him less intense if he at least grew his bangs out some, which he'd kept relenting over even after he figured out it was part of my ongoing plot to get one of the techs to ask him out.
"And last, we have our wild card." Chris was already moving to the next resident, and the screen now showed what looked like a pretty young Orion woman with a wavy explosion of red hair, a true grin on her face, features that all popped so that you didn't know whether to look at her eyes or her mouth or somewhere else. "First name is Gaila; at some point she picked up the last name Vro, but seemed to be implying she picked the name herself as lots of Orions do. Her story's about as vague as you'd expect: She hasn't seen her family since she was seventeen and skedaddled out of Orion looking for honest work. She's majoring in history with a special interest in politics. And the point I have to make is that she may or may not even be a clone. We can't trace her to a fake, but we can't assume she is who she says she is either."
I'd been expecting Chris to get to this point sooner or later, but chose to ask about it now. "So they're all history majors, right? Did you ask them how they met?"
Chris nodded quickly. "Yeah, see, despite the supposed age differences they're all in the middle of their second year, with the weird exception being Will, who was a junior, though obviously a 'transfer student.' Which meshes pretty well with them all claiming they met at orientation where he was volunteering to help with some lecture thing."
"Well, that's bollocks," Joey muttered eloquently.
"The thing is," Chris interrupted, and his next bit was marked with a tone of disbelief and frustration, "I've already talked to half the kids who go to the college who are acquainted with the group. So far I've asked nine of them how they all met, and they've all said it, 'They've been hanging out since history orientation.' And they can't all be taking their word for it, because this girl Kara West who seems to be an actual friend of theirs was there."
"Does Kara check out as human?" I asked.
"Am I a detective?"
"Just checking."
"So we're either looking at some very elaborately staged way of meeting each other just on the off chance that they would some day need an alibi..."
"How could it be anything else?" one of the IS officers demanded. "I'm not about to believe they all just met by accident, even if they were somehow...programmed with a predisposition to communicate with each other. The only thing they'd seem to have in common besides their majors is being a couple years older than the average first-year."
I spoke up with a clearing of my throat. "Stop me if I get this wrong, Chris, but we've basically got two possibilities going?"
He gave me a small smile and a gesture to take it from there.
"Since it is practically a given that the three at least have to be copies, I'm coming up on two theories: Because the possibility of an assortment of them just happening to find each other is pretty much nil, they would have to either be currently still actively engaged in some purpose they were created or purchased for, or all be currently exercising independence after somehow escaping some manner of control. If we're pointing at Vro as a suspect in the cloning mess, she may well be somehow in control of their situation, but she could also just be a student who has no idea whatsoever that there is anything unusual about her housemates. And with the ability to program them, as theoretical as all that is, we can't rule out the possibility that anyone else who regularly has access to them, even if they aren't one of the residents, is involved in their exploitation."
A couple people around the table were putting up hands so that Chris would give them a second to jot down a couple things. Finally he said, "Chapel here told me she finds it really unlikely that any kind of programming could ensure that a group of people would talk to each other, much less become roommates simply because of personality subroutines, which..."
"Personality subroutines don't seem credible, is what I want to say," Chapel said. "Of course it's theoretical when we're only working with what we've seen, but I've researched every single record to be found on legal and illegal harvesting of artificial intelligence, and every A.I. specialist has told me that the more advanced the ability to learn becomes, the more you run into a paradox: a mind that is advanced enough to grow and change cannot be programmed to have a certain personality, or it's just too likely to crash. That can only be picked up through experience, and in this case, organic predispositions. If you need me to dumb that down? I really don't think two of the residents could have been deliberately built to 'like' each other. It just doesn't work that way."
"Which is why I think the only possibilities are that they faked a first meeting, or..." From his tone, I knew this was the theory Chris liked: "Maybe more than one but not all of the residents are more than aware of what they are, and they're just very instrumental with people. All it would take is having some certainty they would all be in the same room at some point, and one or more of them working some magic..."
Janice mumbled, "This is making my head hurt."
Shaking his head, Chris said, "If you don't all understand by now why I want to put somebody on the inside, I don't know what to tell you."
"I have a pretty important question for Illegal Sciences," I piped up. This took even Chris by surprise as I turned with a smart polite smile and asked that section of the table, "Am I a suspect?"
After a blinking moment, one IS member said, "What?" which seemed to annoy the person sitting next to her.
"It's just, it would seem like the first person to try to look at would be the genetic source, since I might have felt like growing myself an organ donor and there's enough of a relationship there that offers a sort of panic motive."
Despite Rock's opinion of me, he was grinning and enjoying this. Most people on Murder don't exactly dislike IS, but for some reason it's a tradition to kick them in their shiny jewels whenever possible. The same would go for Undercover if anyone was actually willing to mess with them.
The woman who'd shared about the hormone medicine seemed to be rolling her eyes at the rest of her team. "You're saying we need to clear you of suspected status before you're involved in the operation. Do you have an alibi?"
"Why, yes, I do," I said brightly, thinking dryly that my nosy gym buddy might come in handy after all and that I owed him a cigarette next time I saw him.
"How can he have an alibi for the DNA sourcing, though?"
"Doesn't matter," Chris said. "He just needs to be clear of possible murder because on the page, we only have to pick between this being a murder investigation and an IS investigation. Handing over evidence to Sciences at a later time suspends reliability policies; it won't be very clean, it will give you some pain-in-the-ass delays, but it's doable. It's my favorite loophole in the entire handbook."
"You've already thought about this?" I asked Chris, laughing.
"And you're thinking very bureaucratically for a case you may not even be doing," he replied, taking the opportunity to raise me a questioning eyebrow.
The room instantly became much more trained in my direction and I realized we were at the moment of truth, if not already past it. The air tightened in on me, but I felt it like an exhilarating kick. The half of my mind that had been anxiously jumping over this entire idea and petulantly waiting for the rest of it to get with the picture might as well have been doing a little victory dance.
I gave it an aloof stretch of a few seconds, my face almost spreading into a nervous grin, then sighed. "When is Will waking up?"
Bones was blinking closely at the photo, nervously fingering at his instrument table with the other hand. He gave me a close look, then another at the photo, then back at me again, then set it down in an abrupt slap. "This is way too damn weird."
"Bones, come on," I was whining. "I drank all this tequila thinking we were going to be doing this tonight."
Chris was looking between the two of us. "Doctor, I thought you were alright with this."
"I said it could be done, sure, I didn't say that I would do it."
The three of us were at Leonard's place, in the big office that functioned as a perfectly good creepy little lab area when he had any reason to work from home. I was sitting on the shiny steel operation table and restlessly kicking my legs around off the side. "The sooner we do it, the more it can start healing and look convincing by the time I'm in there. What's the big deal, anyway, it's only the second time you'll have cut me up this week..."
"It wasn't you, smartass, and excuse me for not thinking it's really inside the duties of my profession to maim you," Bones said back, shaking his head at how cute I thought I was being. Chris could only look a little perversely satisfied, obviously enjoying that I was showing the kind of dedication that most people in his position could only say his officers would have.
"You're not maiming me, good God, you said it wouldn't have to be that deep to look like I'd had surgery. Hell, you even said you wanted to go back to being a surgeon, so..." I gave a shrug and wobbled back when my jeans slipped against the table, laughing.
"Don't even. And I told you, it could leave a scar."
I dismissed that with a little wave of apathy. Somehow sensing that Bones was coming around, I went conversational: "Why'd you become an M.E., anyway?"
"Because it was fate that you and I would meet and that you would drive me slowly but surely from sanity," Bones said flatly, and he was getting out the sanitizers. "Shirt off and bite a belt or something, before I change my mind."
"So..." Chris looked maybe a little uneasy for the first time. It was a weird look on him. "Don't you have any anesthetics?"
"For what, Chief? The corpses?"
We were back at my apartment and I was on the couch trying to assure Bones it hadn't been that bad, unable to stop occasionally looking or prodding at the new wound under my shirt. Considering that the surveillance kit would mean I'd be clothed as much as possible, the chance of somebody catching me shirtless was pretty obscure, but Chris had confirmed that the bathroom door didn't lock and I'd decided that if I was going to screw up this cover, I really didn't want it to happen while I was wearing a towel.
Chris got a comm and took it out on the veranda; when it was left just me and Bones, he started saying something chatty about how rich Christine Chapel was probably going to find the whole surgery scar thing.
"Hey, Bones," I said at a slight pause, my voice quieter than when Chris had been in the room. "I want to say thanks."
He knew I wasn't talking about the graze, and he gave me a narrow look. "What for?"
"Just...You haven't been as hard on me about doing the op as I thought you'd be. I know you didn't want me signed on."
"Actually." Bones sat up a little; he didn't want to admit it, but he said, "I'm glad you took the job."
"Oh." I cleared my throat, and then had kind of a delayed reaction while I scraped my finger along a tear on my beer label. "I guess I'm confused here, because that pretty much contradicts everything you've been saying to Chris. Or the way you've been acting about it for the last few days. And, I don't know, your personality in general?"
He let out a sigh. "I just got to realizing that it's only going to mean the difference between worrying about you all the time and worrying about you all the time, so what's the point in stopping you."
I scoffed. "Um, I think there's a difference between worrying about this and worrying that some drunk abuser might throw a frying pan at my head."
"You know that's not what I meant." I thought Bones wasn't going to say anything else, but then he seemed to be checking if Chris was about to come back in. "It's just, how you've been since this whole thing came up. The day of the meeting, and even on the night we found the body...It's like something about it makes you nervous as hell, but at the same time, you're totally high on it. You're reminding me of you. I haven't seen you like that since..."
The turn of the conversation had surprised me so much that I hadn't gotten up my defenses, but Bones seemed to have realized that wasn't a thought he should follow up on. Chris' footsteps were padding back into the living room, and when he appeared around the doorway he was holding Will's PADD.
"Are you ready for this?"
"I'm drunk and diced. There isn't gonna be a better time." I elbowed Bones. "You wanna be around for this, right?"
"I'm pretty sure I'll die of curiosity if I don't bother," he'd already decided.
While Chris was hooking up the media chip to my big screen, I got up my notes and asked, "Do we have a number yet?"
"Op 17," Chris told me without looking up.
As I entered it in and flitted through a couple of my files I remarked, "I almost get nostalgic for the old operation names. The numbers are so boring."
"Black Math still does it old-fashioned, like it's to prove they actually have a sense of humor," Chris remarked, then let out a sudden laugh. "You guys remember 'Operation Annihilate'?"
"Yes," I hissed, grinning as I recalled, "Don't forget the exclamation point on the end."
Chris backed up from the screen. "Cue it up to about ninety minutes."
"You've already watched some of it?"
"Course I have."
I did as told with the remote piece, then sat there tapping it on my cheek until Chris gave me a look of "Ready when you are."
I was still seriously drunk, but if I'd been any more present the tension in the room might have snapped. The alcohol glazed over the whole bemusing reality of it a bit, but once I clicked the recording on and heard a clip of my own voice mid-word, the air still seemed to jolt into a tingle. "Ohfuck," I whispered, my hand going up in the air to do nothing in particular before it landed back on my knee.
"—he wanted to see it," Will was saying from where he stood mostly turned away from the camera, indicating something on a wall. It was a dark room, a little echoey like an old basement. There was something simultaneously patient and bored in his demeanor; he held a sweater over his shoulder by a couple hooked fingers.
"He didn't want to." A man's voice from behind the camera, had to be Ken. "We just—"
"He won't believe how bad it looked when he gets back, and by then..." That was Toni off-screen. In response to it, Will looked over just behind the camera, and I felt like something was breathing across the hairs all over my skin. For only half a second the camera light made the blue of his eyes blaze, and then the focus lilted off to the left again.
Without even realizing it, I had leaned slowly and intently forward on the couch, unblinkingly focused on Will so much that I lost all track of what the conversation in the recording was about: the mannerisms and threads between his movements were somehow so much louder, embedding into some gradual confirmation that this man had been entirely real. I think up until we'd switched on that recording, I'd still been entertaining all the spook and superstition about the situation and been halfway expecting Will and Toni and the others to truly be our packages of lies staggering into life just to come out and haunt us.
But my clone, I quickly guessed, was possibly even less like my previous version of Will Kenley than I was. His movements were more careful and discrete, his presence almost pensive and distant. These things pulsed him into being to me more than the things he was saying. I had had to work on physicality in undercover before, but this was going to be in a different league entirely.
Bones probably would have been making a lot of noise if Chris and I hadn't technically been working at the moment. I found myself unable to even look away long enough to guess what he was thinking about any of it.
"Ohmygod," Toni exclaimed almost at the same time as something falling, and started laughing kind of huskily. Then the camera was on her, Ken chuckling at her reaction to some old wine bottle that she'd knocked over. It was still hard for me to tell myself it wasn't Uhura, much like it had been when I'd seen her picture, but over the minutes she began to edge out of my expectations. Even with how little I knew about the person she'd indirectly come from, there was something immediately different about Toni. "Shut up. This place is giving me the creeps. We could—"
The recording went black, then the screen showed a green pair of crossed legs—It was one of those ubiquitous testing-the-button shots, over as soon as it had skipped, and then it was Gaila and Toni at what looked like a costume store, the background a long rainbow of feather boas and some other sequined surface. Gaila's eyes dazzled over a grin; she and Toni were sort of posing with these headbands with furry animal ears. Toni was in the middle of some chatty suggestion while Gaila was rocking into her and clasping her arm around her, making as if to lick Toni's face and making her go into a cringing laugh. Will, apparently holding the camera: "Um, the guy's giving us looks. Di—"
Skipping again: Some fireworks were going off in the sky and someone was holding the camera, walking behind Ken and Will with their hands in their pockets and up too far ahead for any of their conversation to be heard.
None of the recordings were quite the stereotypical use of a home camera, but at the same time, we watched almost an hour of it and I couldn't help but be struck by the unmistakable normalcy. Chris hadn't been betting on the bunch of them staging the way that they met, and while I could have believed that, I couldn't find it likely at all that they'd gone so far as to record all this as some fake history to back up that they were ordinary. Chris commented at one point that there were a couple comments close to the very beginning of the recordings that implied they were started fairly early in their shared relationship, that I should watch them later but that it was more important to observe them at the points that they'd gotten more used to each other.
I'd been expecting to hit the sack as soon as Bones and Chris left, but I found myself unable to turn the screen off. I started to impatiently fast-forward through some segments like I was looking for something, laughing when I had to back up one part to the beginning: There was a short but dedicated stop-motion film made out of clay figures that were little ice skaters swarming around a rink made out of craft paper; at the end a title card wished Ken a happy birthday. It wasn't until I finally resigned to my exhaustion and was about to fall asleep later that I realized what was a little pitiful about that, the fact that they would celebrate their "birthdays."
From the jumbled perspective of not knowing much more than how they were made, they had been these cryptic figures in the freak house, and I'd been expecting clues and hints and breaks in whatever show they were putting on. But there was no show at all. There was something all too real in the mere couple hours of what I'd seen so far. It put me on edge more than anything else we'd discovered, and I couldn't put my finger on why.
The next day I got a comm from Chris to say he was coming over to pick me up only minutes before he arrived, announcing that he needed to go test some things with his gadget guy. About as soon as I had my jacket on I was flopping into his passenger seat, sneering at his music choice and reaching for the controls while he bitched about traffic. It was a short drive and it was only when we were both getting out and heading up to an apartment complex that I asked, "Why aren't we headed to tech aid?"
"Oh, I use this private inventor now. He's only been making the goods for about a year, but Barnett swears by him. Apparently he's the same guy who engineered the energy conservation system for our weather control. Picks up a new hobby every year, apparently."
I made an impressed whistle.
"You still do the geek thing and read about that stuff?" Chris asked; he was squinting at me almost affectionately and he'd unexpectedly already turned to tap the bell comm at our next door.
I shrugged. "Only twice as much as I used to."
"The police folk already?" A voice pepped out of the comm sounding thick with grogginess; he pronounced "police" with what I thought was a Glasgow dialect, and something about the voice made me feel like it wouldn't be a problem if I came in with my cigarette.
"Morning, Scott," Chris grunted, and after a buzz he went right for the door and we let ourselves in.
Mr. Scott's house was extremely cluttered in one room—a colorful assortment ranging from remote control toys to tricorders to something that looked like a sewing machine attached to a hamster wheel—and very clean in the next one. The man himself appeared to us in the type of outfit I'd typically throw on just to run to the store, complete with some woolly arm warmers that made me agree that the place was pretty drafty. He had a loud, straightforward presence but a decidedly handsome cheer to his eyes once he was bothering to shake my hand.
"Montgomery Scott, this is Jim Kirk," Chris said. "He's worked with me before, but not for a while."
"Sounds familiar. I think I've heard a couple stories?" He gave an encouraging pat over the tight handshake and then swiftly turned to swerve around until he snapped his fingers in recognition of a box he was looking for.
"You may have," Chris replied in a way that made me wonder if they were both understating.
One box hissed across the table when Scott knocked it in our direction, and then another. It turned out Scott helped with straight old concealment techniques as well as surveillance technology and I could have pored over the assortment with some interest, but Chris and I had already agreed that having me carry even a miniature weapon wasn't going to be doable except for when it was absolutely necessary. People who are likely to get into more violent places need the more secret agenty stuff, but the most I was going to be doing was concealing a phaser in a jacket whenever I left the house or had an excuse to keep it on. Holsters can get you far if you can swing wearing stuffier clothes, but aside from a somewhat classier variety of outerwear, Will had my preference for basic thin t-shirts and the bulk would show right through.
We got down to the recording hook-up, and what got handed to me was this slim tablet that was only half the size of anything I'd used before. Chris had to explain that I'd been out of the job for years, and Scott went right off.
"Well, then it'll work better than any you've had on you. If you invest in one of the Pills, here..." He picked up one that was a different color. "You're looking at a bigger price, but all of the sound splicing mechanics is in this little box that you've got off-site. So if your guy has any need to flush his gear down the jacks, as they say, you're looking at a replacement that's just basic mic functions rather than the fancier stuff."
I met eyes with Chris. "Nifty, but I don't think this is gonna be that kind of operation."
"Well, it's always good to know when the babies get to live long. You've got plenty of other pros to this one, though. It's got a sensitive range that automatically amplifies voices that are across the room up to thirty feet away. The data stream automatically voice-ID's every person who speaks, and creates a singled recording, so that if Jane and John are talking at the same time, you can splice the recording and listen to only one of 'em. What else, uh, it also picks up some limited life signs? So if you wanted Pike here to pick up on it when your heart rate or anyone else's picks up, it has a range of only about six feet on that, but..."
"Holy woah," I mildly exclaimed, then grinned at Chris. "You've been holding out on me, boss."
"Speak for yourself, DV. Scott, I think we'll take the pretty one."
Chris wanted to test-drive the voice recognition, so I was sent out with a mock-up of the gear strapped under my buttons and carrying my mobile comm next to my ear so that passersby wouldn't think I was bumbling to myself while I tried to nudge by anyone else whose conversation could get picked up. I went three blocks around pretending to have an explosive break-up with someone named Cherise; once that got old I tried to recite poetry, and I had almost made it through a monotone stanza of "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" before Chris finally nagged me to come walking back. By the time I returned to the garage-like work room the two were done discussing the tech details, I got another handshake from Scott, and we were on our way.
On the ride back Chris got a comm call that sent him into a rant about how impossible it was getting to find someone he trusted to run his back-up surveillance while most of his usual team were on the hook until somebody could determine none of them had helped anyone break into the data systems. "At this rate I'll just have to recruit some Terran scout," he grunted with typical zealous NDPD pride.
"Hey, now. I almost was one of those."
Chris just laughed at that, undoubtedly trying to imagine how bored I'd be if that had worked out. Then we got to talking, finally, about some of the interviews he'd had with the residents so far. It was crazy to think I hadn't even watched any of them but we both knew that I would probably get way more out of the home footage and just having him relay anything particularly important to me. He wanted me under in less than a week and there was very little time for me to review everything.
"Um." I was squinting at a few of Pike's notes when I finally pressed, "Will isn't seeing anyone, right?"
It had suddenly dawned on me that I'd taken for granted he would have already checked that out, and was thankful that the look Chris gave me was knowingly assuring. Relationships can be part of covers, sometimes, within reason. This situation was so unprecedented that on the page I could totally get away with it, but no way in hell was I going to consider it. It was one of the many ways in which I had to respect that I was in even less control than I would usually be, that Will Kenley had gone out of my reach some time ago and was no longer mine.
"There were some pretty differing answers, but they all pretty much arrived at no," Chris said, and actually remembered it off his head: "Ken just said no; Gaila said, 'Oh, from time to time?'...Toni seemed to find something funny about the question and said, 'I'm sure he tries.' Danek: 'I don't see how it is relevant to the investigation and can I have a glass of water.'"
I scoffed, as if in some kind of affection.
"That was the same answer he gave to eight or nine other questions, too." Chris shrugged in annoyance. "If Will was getting some it was nothing worth mentioning. Unless of course they're lying."
"Unless," I repeated, the tone conveying the unspoken That goes for almost everything they say.
Later that morning when we went through more of the recordings, I finally found Danek. He was obviously in less of them than any of the others as he didn't show up until three or so hours in. It turned out he wasn't so much camera-shy as camera-boring, and possibly didn't go out as often as the others.
Gaila was walking the PADD through the house. The group's was a pretty weird idea of a student home—one of those two-to-three-story flats sandwiched up tall between a couple other apartments, and there was something that made it so theirs I tended to believe it wasn't a temporary choice.
The camera turned into their bright blue scheme kitchen and Danek was there, sitting still. I had to abruptly set my drink down.
Gaila was asking, "Whatcha dooin'?" in a curious sing-song and my mind was ticking up the expectations, the paragraph-long response and steady tone.
Danek replied in a flat mutter, "Reeaading" and the flicker into him being unfamiliar was immediate. I looked harder. His clothes were boring and utilitarian but altogether very locally fashioned. Under the red scarf I recognized from his driver's license, he had his top button undone. He slouched forward a bit onto his elbow. When Gaila asked him something about coming out later for dinner, seemingly having the idea he would be more persuaded if he were on camera, he spoke a bit faster than Spock would, in some indecisive group of thoughts instead of a definite response. There wasn't a whole lot of expression in his voice, but the conversation was too dull for me to feel like I could gauge much.
Except, when Gaila turned to go and insisted to someone in the next room that Danek had submitted to the invitation, I couldn't hear him but wanted to picture him sitting up in a sigh of annoyance:
"Gaila—" The scene was clicked off. Most of the parts with Danek seemed to be cut off like that, a little too short. I was having a hard time sinking my teeth into him.
Right after I showed up to the office the next day I got a comm from Pike telling me where the meeting would be held. Even though most of the people present would be from Murder, he'd convinced them all to come over to the Undercover office, which was a huge relief for me; I didn't feel like confronting too much deja vu.
"Have you talked to Leonard since yesterday?"
"No," I replied, then realized why he was probably asking. "He finish the examination?"
"Yeah. He'll be telling me more than that right before the meeting, but he's pretty tied up before then."
Bones hates having to repeat himself, and while this was an instance where he was probably willing to make an exception, I'd already planned not to harp on him about anything he'd found until the actual meeting. There wasn't a peep from my on-duty communicator for all of my Saturday, and that morning was split between paperwork and the distracted contemplation of all the rustling activity I knew that Chris and a couple others would be taking care of already. They'd be questioning the hell out of Will's housemates about everything conceivably related to an assault investigation, and for those who got comfortable enough to not really notice, everything that wasn't even related at all. The house was going to be stampeded, probably every foot of Will's room analyzed and imaged. I usually had a lot of sympathy for people who had to deal with our overwhelming brigade, but in this case I didn't really know what to think.
Bones and I met up on Sunday morning when he came to give me a ride. I had to give him directions to Undercover, and when we got there Bones let out a whistle, unable to help commenting on how much spiffier the place was compared to the Murder Squad's office. Murder had always been a little more in touch with the small-trade technology that was "retro" to the tourists but eventually customary to New Dubliners, and undercovers loved to take any chance to remind them of that. But considering that homicide records were pretty safely kept to paper systems and half of UCD's personnel were currently on suspension for suspicion that one of them may have sold data passwords to a skinjob lab, I was thinking it was going to be a while before they could brag to us again.
Them, I bit at myself. Not "us."
"What's with the most discrete subdivision of the NDPD getting the biggest headquarters?"
"It's not all UCD," I said. "Illegal Sciences uses over half of this building, actually."
"Ah," Bones said. "The good old Black Math Squad."
Bones and I were almost done dancing through security later when he said, "Ah, there she is," noticing the early arrival of a tall blond figure all the way down the narrow hall standing waiting for the elevator.
"Who's that?"
"That," Bones said, "is our robopathologist."
"Robo-what-now?" I demanded, "That's a field?"
"Anything can be a field if somebody puts enough work into it. In this case, it was her husband, this guy Korby who invented the word 'robopathology' for basically anything that's a combination of medical and technical diagnostics. Cute, right?"
"You're telling me there are specialists for this type of shit we're dealing with?"
"I'm saying she's the one. And today's her lucky day." In response to the look I had on now, Bones smiled a bit sheepishly. "She's a nurse most days. We used to work on the same floor."
"Leonard." We were within a range that she'd turned to notice us. "Morning."
"Hey. This is—"
"Jim Kirk, I presume." She flashed me a great smile just after a flinch got into her features at the sight of me. She'd seen the body. "It's Chapel. Christine if you like."
I reached out to shake her hand, blinking. "Pleasure."
When we were in the elevator, the shimmying around some people who were already in there placed us far enough away from Chapel that I could intentionally irk Bones by whispering, "My, my, who would divorce her?"
"Nobody yet, and thank God you didn't try that on her as a line. Why the hell would you assume that?"
"If they were still much of a team wouldn't her husband be here?"
"He's not here because he's dead."
"...When did he die?" After a second my mouth dropped open. "Holy shit: Roger Korby? That one doctor who—"
"Shut the hell up now."
"Oh, man, from what I heard that case was fucking screwy."
"The guy was fucking screwy, now shut up, and don't you dare mention that to anyone else."
"Of course I won't." I sighed. Just when Bones maybe thought I would actually shut it: "He was also, like wickedly ingenious, is the thing..."
Bones went more dramatically back into rolling his eyes, but I was interrupted by the elevator tapping to a stop at one of the underground levels. The air was noticeably cooler when the doors opened and most of the rush exited into an already partly occupied hall. Apparently there was more than one meeting on this floor.
"And on Sunday," I mumbled.
Chapel heard it and shrugged. "They have to organize a hell of an inquisition if they're hoping to get a lead on whoever might have helped the harvester."
"Yeah, I'm not envying that job," I said with a scoff.
The meeting room was a long-tabled high-tech affair where you felt an immediate sterility when you entered that made you want to keep your voice down. Bones and I stuck to the same side of the table, and as other people entered, the unofficial rule of sequestering Murder to one side and everyone else on the other unconsciously started to stick.
I wanted to groan in annoyance with the first couple people from homicide who were apparently on task for external investigations: So far it was Joey Kelly, who I've always known only pretends to dislike me out of social rules that smack of purely teenage politics, and Rock—I've never bothered to figure out whether that's his first or last name—who I have often labeled the stupidest good detective in New Dublin. We honestly have a lot in common, including our reputations for getting by purely on looks and luck, but the problem is he's never given me the same benefit of the doubt I've given him and I've never given enough of a shit to prove him wrong.
Then there were the officers from IS, none of whom I knew. I was saved from a polite and boring spell of small talk with one of them when somebody came in and tapped me at the elbow; I turned and saw Detective Rand cocking her eyebrow at me.
"So I hear your somebody's evil twin."
"Apparently." I grinned, realizing with some surprise that I was extremely happy to see her. "Damn, Janice, it's been a while."
"It has, boy, you don't comm, you don't write. Though I assume you can't have done anything disastrous in the last few months. How's Spock doing?"
I parried, "How's Junior? Apparently he's finally had the sense to promote you."
My old superintendent, who I was thankful wasn't needed here because of Pike's staggering rank, was called "Junior" everywhere but to his face at the homicide offices; it was for the fact that his intelligence made us all deduce it was only because of his father's founding role in starting up the NDPD that he ever got a job as a police officer in the first place. Annoyance with him was a safer topic than the weather, and Janice's eyes went rolling right away.
"It's hard not to think it was just because you left the job open. Thanks for that, by the way. I swear, sometimes he still makes me feel like a glorified legal secretary."
I was going to try for a reassuring joke when we were interrupted by Kelly bumping her elbow with his so she'd take the coffee he grabbed for her off of his hands. After that she went to claim a seat at the table next to him and Rock, and I felt the thin but undeniable wall between the different sides of the room.
The last time I would have seen all of them, it had been uncomfortable common knowledge around the precinct that Joey Kelly was helplessly in love with Janice and possibly always would be, but in only a couple minutes' time I figured out that wasn't there anymore; he laughed a tiny bit more at her than with her when Rock made a crack about the extra packets of sugar she was dumping into her drink, and only looked at her for a second or two at a time. Rock was stretching his arm behind Joey's back to show off some pictures of his newborn goddaughter, his grin making his eyes seem to glow a brighter green. Janice was now getting more mileage out of the 'F' word than I was used to hearing and was now too busy to do much more with her hair than let it hang in a short bob. I had been gone for just four or five months, and they all were like continents that had jumped perceptible miles while I'd been looking away for only a moment. It bothered me more than it should have.
Chris finally came in, towing with him a bunch of data displays he was hooking up to the huge overhead monitor when Bones got out his notes and went up to ask him a couple things. Soon enough the last straggler from IS came in and sat, and Chris cleared his throat.
"Okay, first thing: You all need to pay close attention, but understand that the operation isn't a go just yet. I wanted all divisions to be able to compare notes, so we'll start with medical forensics, I think. Doctor McCoy, if you could at least start with the basics..."
Bones was valiantly professional about it, as I had to be, even when the others reacted with some morbid fascination at the photos of the body as he went through the preliminary fundamentals: Cause of death was nothing odd; he died within minutes from the stabbing. There were the nutrition facts, the lack of hard drug use, lack of recent sexual intercourse, etc. He went over the cuts and contusions on various parts of the body, but none seemed unusual for a physical struggle leading up to getting stabbed.
"You all know from the report that he placed an emergency call but was unable to verbally respond to the dispatcher, and by the time police arrived, he was dead..." Bones said, "From my observation, he was possibly unable to say something because of the onset of shock or brain death, but it's also likely he was incapable of vocalizing clearly because of internal bleeding.
"As for...other diagnostics." Bones paused. "The body is genetically identical to James T. Kirk, with some, uh, 'mechanical' variation, but possibly not as much as you'd expect. For one, we obviously know that he's younger, but I have an estimate that he was created about three years ago, which is just about as old as he can be if he was made to match the alias. Whether there was an actual fetal or infant stage or if the genetic development was somehow grafted onto some base form of artificial life at an older life state is impossible to tell. However, analysis of the bone development indicated that the body was forced through some kind of hormonally stimulated hyper-growth. Uh, Ms. Blake, you said earlier..."
An IS officer said, "I wanted to point out that there are known drugs formerly discovered by us that could induce that kind of abnormal growth; we don't think they were invented for that use, and we haven't seen it used to such an extreme, but..." She shrugged. I suddenly wished I had friends from Black Math; I'd never heard of anything like that before.
"We know it's out there." Bones nodded. "The growing pains could give anybody a less than sunny personality, that's all I'll say about that. Aside from the irregular cell growth, the body would otherwise appear to be somewhere between 26 and 28—possibly younger than Kirk, but only by a year or so, definitely not too perceptively."
"Hang on." Kelly had his hand raised. "How were genetic samples attained in the first place? There's no data in the systems you can use to map somebody's DNA..."
Chris shrugged, looked grim. "It's pretty much the proof we've got that the harvester obviously has a link to the real identities and was able to track them down. All they would have had to do is pretend to be a custodian and poke around Jim's desk..."
"Lovely," I remarked, wanting to cut off the talkative exclamations at the other end of the table, when a member of IS asked something.
"So are we assuming that there's some motive related to the fact that the sources are involved with law enforcement? I ask because it just seems unbelievable that an organization that's capable of doing all this wouldn't be able to find some other way..."
"They wouldn't go to the trouble matching them up with aliases, you mean?" I asked, shrugging. "We can't rule out the possibility that the type of people who do this stuff are attracted to the cleanliness of it. Not just how intellectually tantalizing it might be to, ooh, make covers into real people, but they may have even thought about the advantages of it if they ever had any of their clones discovered. For example, if I'd made a lot more enemies as Will Kenley, there might be some hesitation to do a case that would draw public attention to the fact that Will was an informant, because it could get me into some trouble."
Someone in IS cocked an eyebrow at that and bluntly underlined something in his notes. I swerved the inquiries back to Bones.
"What about the mental development?"
"Pitch perfect, actually, though it's harder to tack an age on that," Bones said. While some whispering went around the room, he exchanged a look with Chapel who was already coming up to the front so he could mutter some question to her before she nodded at him, shrugged and took over.
Chapel was confident and brisk, hardly giving off that this wasn't the type of thing she did every day. "I was asked to examine the only non-organic components that were to be found anywhere in Kenley's organs. His brain appeared to be very delicately wired to an artificial memory system; his procedural learning and memory is at least partly natural, but it's possible that from a certain point in his history, all of his episodic memory is installed and completely fabricated."
Joey asked, "Can I get that dumbed down a bit?"
My mind was still reeling with too much new information but I tried to fill in: "You're saying that it's possible his memories were entirely rebooted and rewritten at one point, but that his, um, skill memory...how to walk and talk and read, could have naturally carried over? But the, um, autobiographical info is corruptible because of the mechanism..."
"Jesus," Rand exclaimed at a whisper.
"And we're presuming," Rock slowly asked, "this is used to market them. That you can, say, program somebody to think they've been your spouse for five years?"
You could feel the skin starting to crawl all over the room; I kept my nose in my notes. I'd dealt with the worst I could have imagined about the situation already.
"We're presuming," Chapel confirmed. "And Pike will have more to say about this, but that would mean that someone could still be exercising some kind of control over the, uh, residents." She cleared her throat.
Chris took the cue. "Thanks, Chapel," he said without looking up from the notes he was currently going through.
Next to me Bones sank back with the confirmation that his part in this meeting was mostly done, and finally let into the mood his entire weekend had been cooking up to. I heard him grumble something about "I should go back to being a damn surgeon," and covered an affectionate smirk with my hand.
"Okay," Chris said, now leaning into his hands and standing at the front of the table. "Let's detail what we had on the actual body real quick: Our Will was not carrying any kind of weapon except for an army knife. He had a personal comm with a very limited social life: only seven comm numbers that weren't restaurants. He was carrying in one side of his jacket a notepad with nothing much besides doodles and grocery lists in it; and on the other, our goldmine..."
He was looking at me as he set it on the table. It was a multi-use PADD, the types students often had but obviously a pretty nice one.
I was cocking my eyebrow expectantly before he proclaimed, "It's got all the notes you could possibly need to bullshit your way through History 301, an efficiently kept personal calendar, and...nine plus hours of recorded home footage."
My mouth fell into what I suppose was a pleased 'O' of surprise. That last bit was the jackpot I'd felt like Chris was probably waiting to spring on me if I was still wishy-washy about committing to the investigation. It could make all the difference in whether I felt I could pull off the operation at all. I didn't know whether the PADD sitting there a few feet away from me felt heavy and ominous or like something I couldn't wait to get my hands on the second this meeting was over.
"Another thing: While there were signs of struggling, there was no traceable evidence anywhere on Will that would lead us to an identity. The only thing we've got was that some blood was found on the wall a couple yards from the body; it could have been related to the fight, or it could have somehow gotten there at any point that day or even earlier, it's difficult to tell. The blood gave us no solid genetic match, but it was copper-based, which typically belongs to Vulcanoids or, more likely, an Orion. And yes, it should be noted that the location of the crime is smack-dab in the middle of a gang turf; most people around there would be nervous to be out there alone at night, but at the same time, we don't know this particular group to trouble themselves with small-time killing unless there's a personal motivation."
"Which group are we looking at?" Janice asked; the external parts of the homicide operation were where she'd be more involved. "The Saiphon? They're pretty exclusively Orion, right?"
Joey said, "Yeah, that's their territory. There's a rumor the big boss has a claim to the museum, even. Sorry," he added to Chris, for fraying the conversation.
"I'll probably go over more about that with you guys later, but we need to get to the residents," Chris continued. "I'm going to start off by saying that out of the four people Will was living with, there's one we haven't been able to link to a known genetic source. The rest are pulled from police handles just like Will.
"Other possibly relevant details: All identified genetic sources are aged between 25 and 31; all of the aliases are no longer in active undercover use, and all were initially created for that purpose as part of our own UCD, with the exception of Uhura's, whose information was submitted to us at some point from the TIA. We noted no genetic predispositions to any severe medical complications when we attained information from the sources, so they've got pretty healthy codes. Another notable similarity is that all of the sources are pretty young for undercover officers, which might be related to the fact that they're all individuals of above average intelligence."
A snort at the other side of the table: "Yeah, except for Kirk."
"Don't be a shitbird, Rock," Chris lightly warned. "Kirk's aptitudes place him as a genius."
I wasn't in the mood to be insulted by the blatant cynicism held by a couple people in the room, and just sat there smirking instead of entertaining the immediate hubbub of the other side of the table placing bets on my actual numbers. I didn't even specifically remember them; Chris was in an appeasing mood, rolled his eyes and looked it up for them. Rand won dinner.
While the talking had been dying off Chris had got up the specific IDs on the residents: At one point he glanced over at me, and he had this look, like he was gloating over knowing something I didn't know. It made Bones cock an eyebrow at me, and I just shrugged and nudged him with my elbow.
The first ID that went up was Toni's driver's license: I squinted as if I was actually looking for a notable difference, but of course I wasn't going to find one in the perfectly familiar pretty angles of her face. She hadn't bothered smiling for the picture and her black hair was in a laid-back braid down the side of her neck, grown very long.
"Source name is Nyota Uhura; alias is Antonia Doyo. She claims she's Dominican Terran and that her parents are long deceased. She is a double major focusing on history and," Chris paused and, for my sake, added in a sort of dry ta-da!, "linguistics."
"Shocker," I sang back in sarcasm.
"Next we have Ken Toshiro. Source name is Hikaru Sulu."
The record was a student ID this time. Toshiro had a kind of intentionally-overdoing-it smirk in the photo, thick brows, a smooth boyish cut and a slight slice of bright white teeth. Something made me want to like him; I felt like I'd heard of Sulu, but I'd definitely never met the guy.
Chris read off, "History with a specific interest in exploration and colonization. Claims to have been born in Japan and then moved with his family to the sector when he was still a toddler; neglected to answer any questions about his relationship with his parents but said that they are still alive."
In response to this, a few styluses were moving fiercely. Mine was not: Chris had gone to the next card.
"A few of you will recognize Detective Spock. Our copy goes by the name Danek, son of I-can't-pronounce-it-but-he-doesn't-exist-either-way, is majoring in history and minoring in astronomy. He neglected to tell me anything about his family, but implied that he's lived here a good amount of time."
Regardless of whether he had much of any knowledge of the implicit complications, I felt like it was kind of a dick move for Chris to spring this on me without any kind of warning, but the thing is, I could have seen it coming. I hadn't, because my mind just hadn't ever put Spock into that category: I had for a time completely forgotten that he'd ever done any undercover.
But I remembered, it was a very brief assignment he'd been recruited to do only a few months after I'd started on the murder squad—something they'd apparently needed a Vulcan for badly enough to tap the only one in the entire department, regardless of his inexperience. My memory of the time only served me vague impressions of wandering around making coffee runs, third-wheeling on cases and being generally bored out of my mind on top of more than a little worried by the nagging thought that he was going to end up getting shot before I even had the chance to get to know him much better.
I of course had a half-dazed awareness that Bones was looking over at my reaction and that Chris had probably already checked a surreptitious glance in the middle of speaking, but my attention was glued to the photo of Danek up on the monitor. The identical Vulcan possessed all of Spock's severe and soft features, the rich dark eyes peering at me from the ID, and it was impossible to believe it was anyone other than my former partner. He had a dark red scarf over something equally basic and generally looked like someone you'd presume to be approachable but might still hesitate to talk to. He wasn't wearing any particular facial expression; what was there was neutral rather than frigid. I noted that his hair was even similar to how Spock's had been after I'd persuaded him that interviewees might find him less intense if he at least grew his bangs out some, which he'd kept relenting over even after he figured out it was part of my ongoing plot to get one of the techs to ask him out.
"And last, we have our wild card." Chris was already moving to the next resident, and the screen now showed what looked like a pretty young Orion woman with a wavy explosion of red hair, a true grin on her face, features that all popped so that you didn't know whether to look at her eyes or her mouth or somewhere else. "First name is Gaila; at some point she picked up the last name Vro, but seemed to be implying she picked the name herself as lots of Orions do. Her story's about as vague as you'd expect: She hasn't seen her family since she was seventeen and skedaddled out of Orion looking for honest work. She's majoring in history with a special interest in politics. And the point I have to make is that she may or may not even be a clone. We can't trace her to a fake, but we can't assume she is who she says she is either."
I'd been expecting Chris to get to this point sooner or later, but chose to ask about it now. "So they're all history majors, right? Did you ask them how they met?"
Chris nodded quickly. "Yeah, see, despite the supposed age differences they're all in the middle of their second year, with the weird exception being Will, who was a junior, though obviously a 'transfer student.' Which meshes pretty well with them all claiming they met at orientation where he was volunteering to help with some lecture thing."
"Well, that's bollocks," Joey muttered eloquently.
"The thing is," Chris interrupted, and his next bit was marked with a tone of disbelief and frustration, "I've already talked to half the kids who go to the college who are acquainted with the group. So far I've asked nine of them how they all met, and they've all said it, 'They've been hanging out since history orientation.' And they can't all be taking their word for it, because this girl Kara West who seems to be an actual friend of theirs was there."
"Does Kara check out as human?" I asked.
"Am I a detective?"
"Just checking."
"So we're either looking at some very elaborately staged way of meeting each other just on the off chance that they would some day need an alibi..."
"How could it be anything else?" one of the IS officers demanded. "I'm not about to believe they all just met by accident, even if they were somehow...programmed with a predisposition to communicate with each other. The only thing they'd seem to have in common besides their majors is being a couple years older than the average first-year."
I spoke up with a clearing of my throat. "Stop me if I get this wrong, Chris, but we've basically got two possibilities going?"
He gave me a small smile and a gesture to take it from there.
"Since it is practically a given that the three at least have to be copies, I'm coming up on two theories: Because the possibility of an assortment of them just happening to find each other is pretty much nil, they would have to either be currently still actively engaged in some purpose they were created or purchased for, or all be currently exercising independence after somehow escaping some manner of control. If we're pointing at Vro as a suspect in the cloning mess, she may well be somehow in control of their situation, but she could also just be a student who has no idea whatsoever that there is anything unusual about her housemates. And with the ability to program them, as theoretical as all that is, we can't rule out the possibility that anyone else who regularly has access to them, even if they aren't one of the residents, is involved in their exploitation."
A couple people around the table were putting up hands so that Chris would give them a second to jot down a couple things. Finally he said, "Chapel here told me she finds it really unlikely that any kind of programming could ensure that a group of people would talk to each other, much less become roommates simply because of personality subroutines, which..."
"Personality subroutines don't seem credible, is what I want to say," Chapel said. "Of course it's theoretical when we're only working with what we've seen, but I've researched every single record to be found on legal and illegal harvesting of artificial intelligence, and every A.I. specialist has told me that the more advanced the ability to learn becomes, the more you run into a paradox: a mind that is advanced enough to grow and change cannot be programmed to have a certain personality, or it's just too likely to crash. That can only be picked up through experience, and in this case, organic predispositions. If you need me to dumb that down? I really don't think two of the residents could have been deliberately built to 'like' each other. It just doesn't work that way."
"Which is why I think the only possibilities are that they faked a first meeting, or..." From his tone, I knew this was the theory Chris liked: "Maybe more than one but not all of the residents are more than aware of what they are, and they're just very instrumental with people. All it would take is having some certainty they would all be in the same room at some point, and one or more of them working some magic..."
Janice mumbled, "This is making my head hurt."
Shaking his head, Chris said, "If you don't all understand by now why I want to put somebody on the inside, I don't know what to tell you."
"I have a pretty important question for Illegal Sciences," I piped up. This took even Chris by surprise as I turned with a smart polite smile and asked that section of the table, "Am I a suspect?"
After a blinking moment, one IS member said, "What?" which seemed to annoy the person sitting next to her.
"It's just, it would seem like the first person to try to look at would be the genetic source, since I might have felt like growing myself an organ donor and there's enough of a relationship there that offers a sort of panic motive."
Despite Rock's opinion of me, he was grinning and enjoying this. Most people on Murder don't exactly dislike IS, but for some reason it's a tradition to kick them in their shiny jewels whenever possible. The same would go for Undercover if anyone was actually willing to mess with them.
The woman who'd shared about the hormone medicine seemed to be rolling her eyes at the rest of her team. "You're saying we need to clear you of suspected status before you're involved in the operation. Do you have an alibi?"
"Why, yes, I do," I said brightly, thinking dryly that my nosy gym buddy might come in handy after all and that I owed him a cigarette next time I saw him.
"How can he have an alibi for the DNA sourcing, though?"
"Doesn't matter," Chris said. "He just needs to be clear of possible murder because on the page, we only have to pick between this being a murder investigation and an IS investigation. Handing over evidence to Sciences at a later time suspends reliability policies; it won't be very clean, it will give you some pain-in-the-ass delays, but it's doable. It's my favorite loophole in the entire handbook."
"You've already thought about this?" I asked Chris, laughing.
"And you're thinking very bureaucratically for a case you may not even be doing," he replied, taking the opportunity to raise me a questioning eyebrow.
The room instantly became much more trained in my direction and I realized we were at the moment of truth, if not already past it. The air tightened in on me, but I felt it like an exhilarating kick. The half of my mind that had been anxiously jumping over this entire idea and petulantly waiting for the rest of it to get with the picture might as well have been doing a little victory dance.
I gave it an aloof stretch of a few seconds, my face almost spreading into a nervous grin, then sighed. "When is Will waking up?"
Bones was blinking closely at the photo, nervously fingering at his instrument table with the other hand. He gave me a close look, then another at the photo, then back at me again, then set it down in an abrupt slap. "This is way too damn weird."
"Bones, come on," I was whining. "I drank all this tequila thinking we were going to be doing this tonight."
Chris was looking between the two of us. "Doctor, I thought you were alright with this."
"I said it could be done, sure, I didn't say that I would do it."
The three of us were at Leonard's place, in the big office that functioned as a perfectly good creepy little lab area when he had any reason to work from home. I was sitting on the shiny steel operation table and restlessly kicking my legs around off the side. "The sooner we do it, the more it can start healing and look convincing by the time I'm in there. What's the big deal, anyway, it's only the second time you'll have cut me up this week..."
"It wasn't you, smartass, and excuse me for not thinking it's really inside the duties of my profession to maim you," Bones said back, shaking his head at how cute I thought I was being. Chris could only look a little perversely satisfied, obviously enjoying that I was showing the kind of dedication that most people in his position could only say his officers would have.
"You're not maiming me, good God, you said it wouldn't have to be that deep to look like I'd had surgery. Hell, you even said you wanted to go back to being a surgeon, so..." I gave a shrug and wobbled back when my jeans slipped against the table, laughing.
"Don't even. And I told you, it could leave a scar."
I dismissed that with a little wave of apathy. Somehow sensing that Bones was coming around, I went conversational: "Why'd you become an M.E., anyway?"
"Because it was fate that you and I would meet and that you would drive me slowly but surely from sanity," Bones said flatly, and he was getting out the sanitizers. "Shirt off and bite a belt or something, before I change my mind."
"So..." Chris looked maybe a little uneasy for the first time. It was a weird look on him. "Don't you have any anesthetics?"
"For what, Chief? The corpses?"
We were back at my apartment and I was on the couch trying to assure Bones it hadn't been that bad, unable to stop occasionally looking or prodding at the new wound under my shirt. Considering that the surveillance kit would mean I'd be clothed as much as possible, the chance of somebody catching me shirtless was pretty obscure, but Chris had confirmed that the bathroom door didn't lock and I'd decided that if I was going to screw up this cover, I really didn't want it to happen while I was wearing a towel.
Chris got a comm and took it out on the veranda; when it was left just me and Bones, he started saying something chatty about how rich Christine Chapel was probably going to find the whole surgery scar thing.
"Hey, Bones," I said at a slight pause, my voice quieter than when Chris had been in the room. "I want to say thanks."
He knew I wasn't talking about the graze, and he gave me a narrow look. "What for?"
"Just...You haven't been as hard on me about doing the op as I thought you'd be. I know you didn't want me signed on."
"Actually." Bones sat up a little; he didn't want to admit it, but he said, "I'm glad you took the job."
"Oh." I cleared my throat, and then had kind of a delayed reaction while I scraped my finger along a tear on my beer label. "I guess I'm confused here, because that pretty much contradicts everything you've been saying to Chris. Or the way you've been acting about it for the last few days. And, I don't know, your personality in general?"
He let out a sigh. "I just got to realizing that it's only going to mean the difference between worrying about you all the time and worrying about you all the time, so what's the point in stopping you."
I scoffed. "Um, I think there's a difference between worrying about this and worrying that some drunk abuser might throw a frying pan at my head."
"You know that's not what I meant." I thought Bones wasn't going to say anything else, but then he seemed to be checking if Chris was about to come back in. "It's just, how you've been since this whole thing came up. The day of the meeting, and even on the night we found the body...It's like something about it makes you nervous as hell, but at the same time, you're totally high on it. You're reminding me of you. I haven't seen you like that since..."
The turn of the conversation had surprised me so much that I hadn't gotten up my defenses, but Bones seemed to have realized that wasn't a thought he should follow up on. Chris' footsteps were padding back into the living room, and when he appeared around the doorway he was holding Will's PADD.
"Are you ready for this?"
"I'm drunk and diced. There isn't gonna be a better time." I elbowed Bones. "You wanna be around for this, right?"
"I'm pretty sure I'll die of curiosity if I don't bother," he'd already decided.
While Chris was hooking up the media chip to my big screen, I got up my notes and asked, "Do we have a number yet?"
"Op 17," Chris told me without looking up.
As I entered it in and flitted through a couple of my files I remarked, "I almost get nostalgic for the old operation names. The numbers are so boring."
"Black Math still does it old-fashioned, like it's to prove they actually have a sense of humor," Chris remarked, then let out a sudden laugh. "You guys remember 'Operation Annihilate'?"
"Yes," I hissed, grinning as I recalled, "Don't forget the exclamation point on the end."
Chris backed up from the screen. "Cue it up to about ninety minutes."
"You've already watched some of it?"
"Course I have."
I did as told with the remote piece, then sat there tapping it on my cheek until Chris gave me a look of "Ready when you are."
I was still seriously drunk, but if I'd been any more present the tension in the room might have snapped. The alcohol glazed over the whole bemusing reality of it a bit, but once I clicked the recording on and heard a clip of my own voice mid-word, the air still seemed to jolt into a tingle. "Ohfuck," I whispered, my hand going up in the air to do nothing in particular before it landed back on my knee.
"—he wanted to see it," Will was saying from where he stood mostly turned away from the camera, indicating something on a wall. It was a dark room, a little echoey like an old basement. There was something simultaneously patient and bored in his demeanor; he held a sweater over his shoulder by a couple hooked fingers.
"He didn't want to." A man's voice from behind the camera, had to be Ken. "We just—"
"He won't believe how bad it looked when he gets back, and by then..." That was Toni off-screen. In response to it, Will looked over just behind the camera, and I felt like something was breathing across the hairs all over my skin. For only half a second the camera light made the blue of his eyes blaze, and then the focus lilted off to the left again.
Without even realizing it, I had leaned slowly and intently forward on the couch, unblinkingly focused on Will so much that I lost all track of what the conversation in the recording was about: the mannerisms and threads between his movements were somehow so much louder, embedding into some gradual confirmation that this man had been entirely real. I think up until we'd switched on that recording, I'd still been entertaining all the spook and superstition about the situation and been halfway expecting Will and Toni and the others to truly be our packages of lies staggering into life just to come out and haunt us.
But my clone, I quickly guessed, was possibly even less like my previous version of Will Kenley than I was. His movements were more careful and discrete, his presence almost pensive and distant. These things pulsed him into being to me more than the things he was saying. I had had to work on physicality in undercover before, but this was going to be in a different league entirely.
Bones probably would have been making a lot of noise if Chris and I hadn't technically been working at the moment. I found myself unable to even look away long enough to guess what he was thinking about any of it.
"Ohmygod," Toni exclaimed almost at the same time as something falling, and started laughing kind of huskily. Then the camera was on her, Ken chuckling at her reaction to some old wine bottle that she'd knocked over. It was still hard for me to tell myself it wasn't Uhura, much like it had been when I'd seen her picture, but over the minutes she began to edge out of my expectations. Even with how little I knew about the person she'd indirectly come from, there was something immediately different about Toni. "Shut up. This place is giving me the creeps. We could—"
The recording went black, then the screen showed a green pair of crossed legs—It was one of those ubiquitous testing-the-button shots, over as soon as it had skipped, and then it was Gaila and Toni at what looked like a costume store, the background a long rainbow of feather boas and some other sequined surface. Gaila's eyes dazzled over a grin; she and Toni were sort of posing with these headbands with furry animal ears. Toni was in the middle of some chatty suggestion while Gaila was rocking into her and clasping her arm around her, making as if to lick Toni's face and making her go into a cringing laugh. Will, apparently holding the camera: "Um, the guy's giving us looks. Di—"
Skipping again: Some fireworks were going off in the sky and someone was holding the camera, walking behind Ken and Will with their hands in their pockets and up too far ahead for any of their conversation to be heard.
None of the recordings were quite the stereotypical use of a home camera, but at the same time, we watched almost an hour of it and I couldn't help but be struck by the unmistakable normalcy. Chris hadn't been betting on the bunch of them staging the way that they met, and while I could have believed that, I couldn't find it likely at all that they'd gone so far as to record all this as some fake history to back up that they were ordinary. Chris commented at one point that there were a couple comments close to the very beginning of the recordings that implied they were started fairly early in their shared relationship, that I should watch them later but that it was more important to observe them at the points that they'd gotten more used to each other.
I'd been expecting to hit the sack as soon as Bones and Chris left, but I found myself unable to turn the screen off. I started to impatiently fast-forward through some segments like I was looking for something, laughing when I had to back up one part to the beginning: There was a short but dedicated stop-motion film made out of clay figures that were little ice skaters swarming around a rink made out of craft paper; at the end a title card wished Ken a happy birthday. It wasn't until I finally resigned to my exhaustion and was about to fall asleep later that I realized what was a little pitiful about that, the fact that they would celebrate their "birthdays."
From the jumbled perspective of not knowing much more than how they were made, they had been these cryptic figures in the freak house, and I'd been expecting clues and hints and breaks in whatever show they were putting on. But there was no show at all. There was something all too real in the mere couple hours of what I'd seen so far. It put me on edge more than anything else we'd discovered, and I couldn't put my finger on why.
The next day I got a comm from Chris to say he was coming over to pick me up only minutes before he arrived, announcing that he needed to go test some things with his gadget guy. About as soon as I had my jacket on I was flopping into his passenger seat, sneering at his music choice and reaching for the controls while he bitched about traffic. It was a short drive and it was only when we were both getting out and heading up to an apartment complex that I asked, "Why aren't we headed to tech aid?"
"Oh, I use this private inventor now. He's only been making the goods for about a year, but Barnett swears by him. Apparently he's the same guy who engineered the energy conservation system for our weather control. Picks up a new hobby every year, apparently."
I made an impressed whistle.
"You still do the geek thing and read about that stuff?" Chris asked; he was squinting at me almost affectionately and he'd unexpectedly already turned to tap the bell comm at our next door.
I shrugged. "Only twice as much as I used to."
"The police folk already?" A voice pepped out of the comm sounding thick with grogginess; he pronounced "police" with what I thought was a Glasgow dialect, and something about the voice made me feel like it wouldn't be a problem if I came in with my cigarette.
"Morning, Scott," Chris grunted, and after a buzz he went right for the door and we let ourselves in.
Mr. Scott's house was extremely cluttered in one room—a colorful assortment ranging from remote control toys to tricorders to something that looked like a sewing machine attached to a hamster wheel—and very clean in the next one. The man himself appeared to us in the type of outfit I'd typically throw on just to run to the store, complete with some woolly arm warmers that made me agree that the place was pretty drafty. He had a loud, straightforward presence but a decidedly handsome cheer to his eyes once he was bothering to shake my hand.
"Montgomery Scott, this is Jim Kirk," Chris said. "He's worked with me before, but not for a while."
"Sounds familiar. I think I've heard a couple stories?" He gave an encouraging pat over the tight handshake and then swiftly turned to swerve around until he snapped his fingers in recognition of a box he was looking for.
"You may have," Chris replied in a way that made me wonder if they were both understating.
One box hissed across the table when Scott knocked it in our direction, and then another. It turned out Scott helped with straight old concealment techniques as well as surveillance technology and I could have pored over the assortment with some interest, but Chris and I had already agreed that having me carry even a miniature weapon wasn't going to be doable except for when it was absolutely necessary. People who are likely to get into more violent places need the more secret agenty stuff, but the most I was going to be doing was concealing a phaser in a jacket whenever I left the house or had an excuse to keep it on. Holsters can get you far if you can swing wearing stuffier clothes, but aside from a somewhat classier variety of outerwear, Will had my preference for basic thin t-shirts and the bulk would show right through.
We got down to the recording hook-up, and what got handed to me was this slim tablet that was only half the size of anything I'd used before. Chris had to explain that I'd been out of the job for years, and Scott went right off.
"Well, then it'll work better than any you've had on you. If you invest in one of the Pills, here..." He picked up one that was a different color. "You're looking at a bigger price, but all of the sound splicing mechanics is in this little box that you've got off-site. So if your guy has any need to flush his gear down the jacks, as they say, you're looking at a replacement that's just basic mic functions rather than the fancier stuff."
I met eyes with Chris. "Nifty, but I don't think this is gonna be that kind of operation."
"Well, it's always good to know when the babies get to live long. You've got plenty of other pros to this one, though. It's got a sensitive range that automatically amplifies voices that are across the room up to thirty feet away. The data stream automatically voice-ID's every person who speaks, and creates a singled recording, so that if Jane and John are talking at the same time, you can splice the recording and listen to only one of 'em. What else, uh, it also picks up some limited life signs? So if you wanted Pike here to pick up on it when your heart rate or anyone else's picks up, it has a range of only about six feet on that, but..."
"Holy woah," I mildly exclaimed, then grinned at Chris. "You've been holding out on me, boss."
"Speak for yourself, DV. Scott, I think we'll take the pretty one."
Chris wanted to test-drive the voice recognition, so I was sent out with a mock-up of the gear strapped under my buttons and carrying my mobile comm next to my ear so that passersby wouldn't think I was bumbling to myself while I tried to nudge by anyone else whose conversation could get picked up. I went three blocks around pretending to have an explosive break-up with someone named Cherise; once that got old I tried to recite poetry, and I had almost made it through a monotone stanza of "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" before Chris finally nagged me to come walking back. By the time I returned to the garage-like work room the two were done discussing the tech details, I got another handshake from Scott, and we were on our way.
On the ride back Chris got a comm call that sent him into a rant about how impossible it was getting to find someone he trusted to run his back-up surveillance while most of his usual team were on the hook until somebody could determine none of them had helped anyone break into the data systems. "At this rate I'll just have to recruit some Terran scout," he grunted with typical zealous NDPD pride.
"Hey, now. I almost was one of those."
Chris just laughed at that, undoubtedly trying to imagine how bored I'd be if that had worked out. Then we got to talking, finally, about some of the interviews he'd had with the residents so far. It was crazy to think I hadn't even watched any of them but we both knew that I would probably get way more out of the home footage and just having him relay anything particularly important to me. He wanted me under in less than a week and there was very little time for me to review everything.
"Um." I was squinting at a few of Pike's notes when I finally pressed, "Will isn't seeing anyone, right?"
It had suddenly dawned on me that I'd taken for granted he would have already checked that out, and was thankful that the look Chris gave me was knowingly assuring. Relationships can be part of covers, sometimes, within reason. This situation was so unprecedented that on the page I could totally get away with it, but no way in hell was I going to consider it. It was one of the many ways in which I had to respect that I was in even less control than I would usually be, that Will Kenley had gone out of my reach some time ago and was no longer mine.
"There were some pretty differing answers, but they all pretty much arrived at no," Chris said, and actually remembered it off his head: "Ken just said no; Gaila said, 'Oh, from time to time?'...Toni seemed to find something funny about the question and said, 'I'm sure he tries.' Danek: 'I don't see how it is relevant to the investigation and can I have a glass of water.'"
I scoffed, as if in some kind of affection.
"That was the same answer he gave to eight or nine other questions, too." Chris shrugged in annoyance. "If Will was getting some it was nothing worth mentioning. Unless of course they're lying."
"Unless," I repeated, the tone conveying the unspoken That goes for almost everything they say.
Later that morning when we went through more of the recordings, I finally found Danek. He was obviously in less of them than any of the others as he didn't show up until three or so hours in. It turned out he wasn't so much camera-shy as camera-boring, and possibly didn't go out as often as the others.
Gaila was walking the PADD through the house. The group's was a pretty weird idea of a student home—one of those two-to-three-story flats sandwiched up tall between a couple other apartments, and there was something that made it so theirs I tended to believe it wasn't a temporary choice.
The camera turned into their bright blue scheme kitchen and Danek was there, sitting still. I had to abruptly set my drink down.
Gaila was asking, "Whatcha dooin'?" in a curious sing-song and my mind was ticking up the expectations, the paragraph-long response and steady tone.
Danek replied in a flat mutter, "Reeaading" and the flicker into him being unfamiliar was immediate. I looked harder. His clothes were boring and utilitarian but altogether very locally fashioned. Under the red scarf I recognized from his driver's license, he had his top button undone. He slouched forward a bit onto his elbow. When Gaila asked him something about coming out later for dinner, seemingly having the idea he would be more persuaded if he were on camera, he spoke a bit faster than Spock would, in some indecisive group of thoughts instead of a definite response. There wasn't a whole lot of expression in his voice, but the conversation was too dull for me to feel like I could gauge much.
Except, when Gaila turned to go and insisted to someone in the next room that Danek had submitted to the invitation, I couldn't hear him but wanted to picture him sitting up in a sigh of annoyance:
"Gaila—" The scene was clicked off. Most of the parts with Danek seemed to be cut off like that, a little too short. I was having a hard time sinking my teeth into him.
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no subject
Date: 2011-12-18 11:30 pm (UTC)Yay! I love Chapel! :-D
I love the background TOS stuff there ;).
"I turned and saw Detective Rand cocking her eyebrow at me."
Yay! Rand! i like her even more than Chapel! XD
"The body is genetically identical to James T. Kirk"
A clone! Wow, really interesting! :-D
Really wondering what's up with Will and why Danek's parts are cut short on the vid... i have some suspicious about that...
no subject
Date: 2011-12-21 06:55 pm (UTC)