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Or:
Thoracic implants didn't necessarily equal an amphibious lifestyle. Maybe Let's-call-him-Colin wasn't even a rifter. He sure as shit wasn't an ordinary one, anyway. How many of those neurotic head cases would have been able to find Desjardins in the first place? How many could have broken into his home, laid him out, read his mind, threatened his very life without breaking a sweat?
Am I infected? Am I dying? Am I leaving traces for someone like me to sniff out?
Nearly a second had passed since the words had died in Desjardins's throat
I've got to say something. Jesus, what do I say?
"Actually—" he began.
He wants me to search Beebe's perso
"— I'm way—"
Whatever he wants he doesn't want me to knowhe wants it, oh no, he's being way too casual about this, just another possibility to follow up, right—
He won't push. He won't force it—
"— ahead of you on that," Desjardins finished easily. "I checked the rifters already. I checked everyone who had anything to do with Beebe. Nothing. Nobody's touched their bank accounts, no watch transactions, nothing at all since the quake."
He glanced up at Colin, kept his voice level. "But they were pretty much at Ground Zero when the Big One went off. Why would you think they'd survive?"
Colin looked back neutrally. "No reason. Just being systematic."
"Mmm." Desjardins drummed his fingers absently on the edge of the board. His inlays lit with visual confirmation: he'd opened a cha
"You know, I was thinking." Another idle tap on the panel; a luminous keypad sprang up in his head, invisible beyond his own flesh. "About why the primary vectors aren't dying as fast as the people on the Strip." His eyes darted subtly across the pad, focusing for the merest instant here, and here, and here on the characters. Letters brightened at his glance, began forming a command. "Maybe a nastier strain's developed out there." B—e—e— "Maybe the higher population density—all those extra dice rolls—maybe they just lead to a higher mutation rate."
Beebe Station.
Private menus bloomed around the edge of his vision. He focused on Perso
Let's-call-him-Colin grunted.
Four women, four men. Desjardins brought up the men; whoever was standing next to him probably hadn't changed that much.
"And if there's two separate strains, our propagation models are probably wrong," he said aloud.
Employee headshots. All faces unfamiliar. But the eyes…
He looked up. Let's-call-him-Colin looked back through a luminous palimpsest.
Those eyes…
The flesh had been reconstructed around them. The irises were darker. But for all that, the differences were cosmetic; a flaw in the iris left unchanged, a telltale capillary snaking across the sclera. And the overall aspect ratio of the face was identical. A casual change in appearance, more disguise than reconstruction. A new face, a new pair of socks, and—
"Something wrong?" asked Ke
Desjardins swallowed.
"Uh, the caffeine," he managed. "Sort of sneaks up on you. I'll be right back."
He barely saw the corridors scroll past. He missed the washroom entirely.
Oh God. He's been in my home he's breathed in my face he even stabbedme in the neck with something and he's probably rotten with ßehemoth, it's probably growing in menow it's probably—
Shut up. Focus. You can deal with this.
If Lubin were infected, he'd be dead already. He'd said as much himself. So he probably wasn't a carrier. That was something.
He could still be packing, of course: Joh
That was something, too.
Probably both of them were clean. Desjardins allowed himself a moment to feel sick with relief, then opened the door to Jovellanos's cubby.
It was empty; she'd taken the day to burn off some accumulated overtime. Achilles Desjardins thanked the Forces of Entropy for small mercies. He could use her board, at least for a few minutes. For however long one might reasonably be expected to spend on the toilet.
He hooked his account and considered:
Lubin wanted him to see Beebe's perso
Or maybe he had wanted Desjardins to see through his new identity. Maybe this was some twisted loyalty test courtesy of Patricia Rowan after all.
Still. It seemed more plausible that Col— that Lubin was interested in the other rifters. He either wanted to know something about them, or he wanted Achilles Desjardins to know something about them.
Desjardins fed names to the matchmaker and sent it hunting.
"Semen-sucking savior," he whispered two seconds later.
She was proliferating in plain sight. She'd been reported on half a dozen continents in a single day. Lenie Clarke was on the run in Australia. She was making friends in N'AmPac and pla
More ominously, Lenie Clarke was ending the world. And nobody—at least as far as Desjardins could tell—had actually noticed.
Nobody that mattered, anyway. The official news threads, jam-packed with the latest on this terrorist group or that arboviral outbreak, had nothing to say about her at all. The intel cha
Hell, none of the official outlets had even bothered to issue a denial on the subject.
It didn't make sense. Even the wildest rumors had to come out of the gate somewhere—how could all these people have started trumpeting the same thing at the same time? There'd been no media coverage, and there was way too much traffic for mere word-of-mouth to account for.
There was so much stuff on Lenie Clarke, in fact, that he almost didn't notice Ken Lubin and Mike Brander peeping over the lower edge of the scope. There wasn't much on them—a few hundred threads, all starting within the past couple of days. But they, too, seemed strangely susceptible to corrupted address headers and blocked-sender syndrome. And they, too, were proliferating.
What about the rifters? That whole scene seems to be fashionable these days…
Lubin's words. Achilles Desjardins was the one with the optimised wetware, and still Lubin had had to co
Okay. Now you know. Where does that get you?