The Escapist | Page 3

directly to Vanessa Carmichael, COSI's director of digital investigations. She was an incredibly tough and resourceful woman.
Carmichael had landed the top job after her predecessor was removed in a wave of adverse publicity. It was a typically British scandal. Apparently he'd been using his position of power to extort sexual favours from up-and-coming hopefuls, male and female. In exchange for bizarre acts of perversion, he offered a healthy career path. He'd tried this with one very promising young lady and she'd threatened to expose him. Similar situations had happened to him countless times, but he was such a pro at the espionage and enforcement business that he either knew something about his accusers to shut them up, or he had them quietly killed. But this particular lady had been too smart for him. She was totally clean, beyond blackmail, and had efficiently dealt with every assassination agent sent. She knew when each one was coming and somehow headed them off with blackmail of her own. Eventually COSI's director of digital investigations had to step down in a hail of controversy. The woman did well after the incident. She was none other than Vanessa Carmichael herself, his successor.
I didn't want to cross someone with that kind of reputation. Nevertheless, I was surprised that a law-enforcement professional so respected and feared among the criminal community should fail to notice my shady identity. I didn't have any convictions and I'd never been explicitly implicated in any of the collapsed illegalities with which I'd been involved. But I expected that such a paragon of investigation would have some information about me which even I didn't know existed. If she did, it hadn't stopped her signing me up. Maybe it even improved my job prospects -- it takes a thief to catch a thief and all that.
I entered Carmichael's office for the first time to report on my initial trip into von Kühnert's cerebrum.
"Sit down", she ordered before I'd even finished walking through the door. She looked only slightly older than me, but her voice had an imperative quality mine could only partially make up for in charm and seduction. I sat down in a comfortable cloned-leather chair - still an expensive item, despite the new cloning expansion slots for the latest pocket computers. Carmichael looked at me with a thoroughly undecipherable expression. She was strangely attractive, for a slightly plump woman perilously closing in on middle age. After a time, during which I felt like I was being given a full-body X-ray and sonogram, she spoke:
"Well, Mr Dean, what have you got for me today?" was all she said. And then the first sign of any emotion: her lips curled upwards slightly at the edges, in what must have been a vain attempt at a smile. It looked more like a symmetrical facial tic in slow motion.
"He's totally wiped, Vanessa," I began. "I don't know why they didn't just kill the poor vegetable off."
Carmichael nodded. She looked a little bemused by my use of her first name. "Memory is just biological disk space. Data is never fully wiped for someone who knows how it has been shredded," she proposed.
"And that's the big problem," I continued. "We have to find the specific way his mind has been erased after they got what they wanted out of him. What exactly was he working on when he was abducted?"
"I'll get Industrial Intelligence to put something together for you. It'll be on your home system when you get there this evening. You can study it tonight." I nodded sagely, and then there was a silence of a good many seconds.
"Any chance of a drink?" I ventured, in an attempt to loosen up the atmosphere. There was a further pause in the proceedings as Carmichael had her secretary, an extremely effeminate dwarf of a man, fetch me a coffee-flavoured mineral water. When this had arrived and I'd taken a few sips I outlined my plan of action. "Look, Vanessa, I need to make a study. I know what it's like inside a dead person's mind, but I want to compare this scientist's blank brain with the insides of naturally intellectually-challenged minds. I think the differences between the two could give me a clue as to exactly where amongst his empty passages the ghost of von Kühnert's consciousness lives. I want to go to the Nexus-7 Neurological Institute with clearance to venture inside a few of their permanent holidaymakers."
Nexus-7 was the leading hospital for chronic mental illness, situated on the Moon. All the most incurable psychopaths and prematurely senile people were sent there, either by their loved ones or private police forces like COSI. I didn't really want to go to Nexus-7, but it would be a good excuse to enjoy the Moon's famously debauched nightlife. It would also give