“Define that, and we’d better agree.”
“After a certain entry point into the system, it became untraceable.”
I blinked twice. “Like . . . to humans? Or to you?”
“Me,” he said, and his voice had a slight echo to it. “You’re familiar with the idea of an air gap, yes?”
I nodded. The term usually meant when something had been taken entirely off-line—like a mafioso’s second, actual bank book, written by hand and kept in a safe. A way to keep the numbers safe from other people, so that only the chosen few could see them.
“This is like that, combined with a cryptocurrency...but only for people locked in the same room. A whole economy separated from the rest of the world—it’s as if they’ve all agreed on a different fiat.”
“Which is?”
“Currently undetermined,” he said, and one of his server fans spun up thoughtfully behind me. “I’ve considered all the normal financial options and come up empty. Which leaves me with a rather odd set of alternatives.”
“Oh, God.” I sighed. “Like what?”
“Power? Fame? Access? Or more nebulously, redemption, or even perhaps rebirth. They are giving these people new faces, after all. I’ve spent most of the time since I last saw you researching cults and other sub-religious movements from the last century.”
My jaw slowly dropped. “Are you suggesting these women were here because they wanted to be?” I asked, gesturing at the screen.
“Perhaps at one point—under pressure or promise—yes.”
“And they let someone else erase them?”
“I find it to be an odd goal, yet many human hobbies seem to disagree.”
“So what then? What good is a blank human?”
“I can think of several use cases. Information exchange, chiefly. They would be the perfect porter, having no internal biases to sully the data. Or, assassins, although after meeting Sophia, that seems unlikely.” More of his fans turned off and on, as if in consternation. “And I have to consider the fact that they may be held as breeding vessels.”
9 /NEX
“What?”Sirena’s voice spiked—volume, pitch, blood pressure. Fans ticked up in reflex; I forced them to be quiet.
“It’s a possibility I must model,” I said. “Not a claim. If you can strip a life down to the chassis, you can assign it tasks. Some of those tasks could be reproductive. That’s all.”
She angled toward my nearest camera. “So this is the face you wanted to see?”
Yes.
Always.
Pretty is a lazy word for what she does to light. She’sprecise: mouth blade-straight, a freckle 7.2 millimeters off her left hairline, lashes like wet ink, the crown setting a faint ache into her brow she refuses to show. Symmetry would tell you she was attractive;purposemade her beautiful. When she decided, everything arranged—jaw, eyes, the quiet between breaths—and the room fell into its right shape around her.
But she meant the expression she was currently wearing, heat banked in her eyes.
“Not entirely.”
One of her eyebrows ticked up. “Why?”
Confession: “I caught another hit—an independent pallet-tag ping off the tracer line. New shipment. Live.”
Which was why I didn’t risk telling her sooner. She’d have gone alone.
“Where?” she asked as she stood. The chair legs complained across the floor; her pulse bumped +4 BPM; her spine stiffened like a verdict.
“I’ve already set a mandatory briefing in fifteen minutes, with all available agents.” I’d started sending invites the moment her elevator reached my floor. “Conference room two.”
