DOROTHY: 2.0
The day passes in a blur. First off, you’re late for work. Not your fault, but figuring out how to get from Liz’s bijou flat to the Gyle involves a not-terribly-magical mystery tour around Edinburgh’s spatchcock public-transport infrastructure. Your hotel’s on the tram network, twelve minutes out—but Liz might as well live in Newcastle given the frequency of the bus service, and after most of an hour, you end up paging a taxi.
Then, when you’re on-site, your attention is shot. You just can’t focus properly. By late morning, you’re working up your nerve to go talk it out with Human Resources—write off the day’s work so far against goodwill in return for an unscheduled early exit—when you get an IM from the police. It’s not wholly unexpected, but still you find your hands clammy with sweat. You call HR anyway and find them surprisingly receptive: “I have to go and give the police a statement about a crime I witnessed,” you tell the man on the screen. “I don’t know how long it’s going to take, so I’m clocking off for the day.” He nods and says something diplomatically non-committaclass="underline" There, you did it. Relieved, you leave.
The afternoon passes in a blur, most of it spent in a drab waiting room, some of it in front of a discreet webcam and a sympathetic detective constable. She takes you through the night before, not prompting but clearly already aware of most of what you’re saying: She seems to mostly want to know about Christie, everything you can remember about him that you weren’t paying attention to. Sex, even bad sex, does strange things to your memory. You are, you think, discreet about your precise relationship with Liz. “A friend,” you describe her, “one of your colleagues.”
Finally, you’re free to go. Free, empty, drained of memories. You go outside, under the sky that is cold and blue, streaked with thin clouds high overhead. Your phone, emerging from the station’s shielding, gibbers to itself for a few seconds as a bunch of messages come in. You read them with increasing disbelief and disgust. Most of them are work-related, but only Liz’s message makes any sense, and she’s just asking if you have any dinner plans.
You text her back: CAN I STAY TONIGHT? You don’t examine your motives too closely; whether you’re tacitly offering to play by her rules, or just looking for any port in a storm, you don’t want to spend another night in that hotel. Minutes later, as you walk towards Stockbridge, you get a reply: SURE. Which tells you what to do next—bid for a microbus back to the hotel to pack your bags and clear your room.
LIZ: Debrief
By the time you get back to HQ, a log-jam has broken.
The first sign you get, sitting in the back of an ambulance as a paramedic checks your pupils, is an excitable voice call from Moxie. “Skipper, you’re going to love this! It’s crazy! There’s been a revolution in someplace I can’t pronounce in Asia, and it turns out the government’s been running a scheme to use AI tools to go after spammers? Only, see, they screwed up the training they gave their cognitive toolkit, and it began arranging accidents—”
You tune him out as irrelevant background noise, devoid of content. Your head hurts, your back aches, and you’re increasingly pissed-off with yourself. I’m getting too old for this crap. The honorary consul for Issyk-Kulistan, indeed. And some random psycho who’s arranging staged suicides when he’s not peeling the skin off his victim’s hands? It’s too damn much, that’s what it is. The fire-hose of seemingly disconnected data is drowning you. At times like this you can see where Tricky Dickie is coming from, with his hankering for a simpler time—even if it’s not your simpler time, even if it’s a time when you and yours were not welcome and not legal.
They make you sit on your arse for half an hour while they confirm there’s no concussion. A couple of messages come in on your phone’s private personality: YES, you tell Dorothy, YOU CAN STAY OVER. A few seconds later she responds: I’LL GET MY BAGS. Unresolved fragments of your untidy life are sliding towards an uncertain resolution. Eventually, you get yourself signed off and go back inside the madhouse, where a couple of car-loads of uniforms are busy poking around in search of traces. There’s no sign of Anwar, but Dickie is waiting for you in the over-furnished living room, pacing back and forth beneath a kitsch gilt-framed hologram of the Ka’bah. “Why?” he demands. “Why here?”
This is promising. “Social-network analysis, intelligence driven. ICIU has a mandate to track the international side of this investigation. After interviewing Dr. MacDonald, Inspector Aslan and I concurred that he wasn’t telling us everything we needed to know. I authorized a search of his public friends lists, and came up with a close personal connection to Mr. Hussein, via a particular social site. As Mr. Hussein was already noted in proximity to one of the ATHENA victims, once I’d confirmed that Dr. MacDonald was indeed the victim at Appleton Towers, I decided to visit Mr. Hussein and see what I could shake loose.”
You can see Dickie winding up again, but he bottles it up for once. “Why did you not see fit to file a report with BABYLON?” he asks, his voice uncharacteristically soft.
“Ah, well, I did. But there’s so much intel going into the funnel on this one that, on reviewing the situation with Inspector Aslan, we agreed that there was a high risk of its not being prioritized. And as you can see, even with blues and twos, we only just got here in time…”
“Aye.” Dickie’s glower fades to a calculating frown: He’s probably spinning the PR angle, considering how it’ll look in the newsfeeds. Detective saves victim from psycho killer in the nickof time always plays well. “But you lost this Christie character.”
You rub the back of your head, ruefully. “Not for want of trying.”
“Just so. Tell me, Inspector, what motivational factors do you think we’re looking at here? And where do you think he’ll go?”
You blink, surprised. “We haven’t already… ?”
The frown is back. “Nae fear, it’s a matter of time.”
“Shit.” The drones must have arrived overhead too late to catch his trail. It’s daylight, and the sun’s out, so the heat signature from his footsteps will be washed out, and if he was smart, Christie will have disabled all his personal electronics. “Ahem. Motivation. I’m flailing in the dark here, but even leaving aside the sock-puppet ID, Christie doesn’t sound right to me. He’s from out of town, he’s got diplomatic connections with Issyk-Kulistan, hence the connection to Mr. Hussein.”
“He’s got more than that,” Dickie mutters. “Mr. Hussein has some questions to answer about what we found in his bathroom.”
“What? Drugs? Kiddie-porn?”
“Neither: But we found a bucketful of bootleg replicator feedstock he was busy trying to flush down the toilet.” Dickie looks smug. “Almost certainly the same stuff that’s been turning up in your Saturday night specials down in Leith. I trust we will shake loose where he got it from in due course.”
It’s the feedstock channel you’ve been chasing for months, under-resourced and overworked. Typical of Dickie to roll it up for you as a side-show. Asshole. “Huh. That’s not like Anwar; he’s always been one for the white-collar scams. But you asked about Christie?”
“Aye. What do you think?”
Well, at last. “I think he’s working for some organized crime syndicate or other. I don’t know what he’s doing in Edinburgh, but the ATHENA killings rattled his cage, and he or his took it as a personal attack. Maybe it was a personal attack; what if he turned up on our door-step because he was looking to do business with the victims? Or kill them as rivals, or something.”