[SF] [HM] Case in Point

**Case in Point was written as a short story, and is also now the prologue for the SF novel I'm writing, of the same name. So feedback very much appreciated, good or bad, to help me shape & develop the novel!**

Frank Kincaid was not a happy man. He wasn’t even Frank Kincaid. At least, not the original.

It started like this: you want something done right, do it yourself. Don’t have the time? Copy yourself into a new body and send them instead. Expensive, certainly, but if the job was important enough, the payoff sufficiently high, you’d be crazy to send some other schlub. But what if the job was unpleasant? What if it was something you didn’t want to do? Well, that was easy too: you adjust the copy, tweak it a little so it won’t mind getting its hands dirty or, if it does, it’ll be stubborn enough to do it anyway. And then, assuming you’re a decent human being, you meet up afterwards, buy yourself a few beers, pat yourself on the back, and reintegrate.

Assuming. Of course, if you’re not a decent human being, then you just take the money and run. Saves having to fill your head with all those unsettling memories. And then your copy would find itself stranded somewhere – say, a sleazy bar in the cheap side of a half-finished habitat dome on Mars – with no money, some newly-acquired enemies, a head full of edited memories and personality algorithms, and one solitary certainty to cling to: that the real Them, whoever They were, whatever Their actual name might be, was an absolute, first-class, no-holds-barred, unrelenting bastard.

As small comforts go, that one was pretty tiny, but Kincaid clung to it with a tenacity that had probably cost his old self a small fortune in psychosurgery bills to acquire.

He glared up at the barman defiantly, and ordered a whisky. The barman glared back and laughed.

“Nice try. Orange juice or lemonade?”

Kincaid sighed, gesturing his meagre bank account into life in the space between them, and proffered a ¥2,000 note. “How about a coffee, and maybe you could Irish it up for me?”

The barman shook his head in disgust but took the bribe anyway. Kincaid snatched up the drink and retreated to a table in the corner where he could brood in peace.

“For the love of God, kid, read the sign. No smoking.”

Kincaid glanced guiltily at the cigar poised halfway to his mouth, and returned it unlit to his top pocket.

That was another thing. Would it have been too much to ask to give himself a fresh set of habits to go with the new body? Say, a keen interest in football, sucking his thumb, and fizzy drinks from around the solar system. As opposed to booze, tobacco, gambling and womanising – the last being particularly problematic. There was an old joke: “I wouldn’t touch any woman who’d be interested in the likes of me.” Ha. Welcome to Self Loathing, Population: 1.

He glowered into his coffee.

“Jen: Any interesting contracts available?”

Genevieve burst into glorious life in the corner of his retinal HUD and pursed ruby lips thoughtfully. “Some old lady’s offering fifty thou’ for the safe return of her missing cat?”

“Hysterical laughter. For the last time, I’m not a PI anymore, I don’t find pets. Next?”

“Halcyon have-”

“Hang on. Fifty grand? For a cat? Mark that one down as a definite maybe.”

“Sure thing. Halcyon Interplanetary Industries have a ¥150,000 bounty on one Tricia Altmann, wanted for embezzlement. Civil case, so bring her in alive. I’m flashing up her corporate ID, address, known contacts and immediate family.”

Kincaid scanned the data sourly. “A hundred and fifty. Well, aren’t they generosity incarnate. What did she do, make off with the petty cash? Don’t you have anything with a little punch? I’m not getting off this rock on cats and suits.”

That earned him a stern look from eyes the colour of molten bronze. “Cats and suits pay the bills, Frank. “Punch” gets you killed.”

“What are you, my Mum? Come on, something in seven figures, at least. Make it worth my while.”

She raised an eyebrow but let it pass. “You know I hate the ‘armed and dangerous’ file.”

“We’re not having this discussion again. I’m going back to Earth. I’m going to find the real me. I’m going to punch him for a while, and then I’m going to bodynap the bugger. Okay, maybe reverse the order on that one and switch bodies first. The important thing is, I’m getting my body back, and my life, and the real me can have this one, see how he likes it. That’s going to take money and plenty of it. And that means spraying bullets – no two ways about it.”

She gave him a Look. “It’s only because I care, Frank.”

“You’re programmed to care, don’t make it sound noble.” He regretted it instantly, but the damage was done. Synthetic hurt feelings washed over technicolour features, sculpted brows drawing together in artificial fury. “Listen, Jen-”

“Fine. You want seven figures? How about eight. The Raminov Brothers, Lev and Vadim, wanted for extortion, armed robbery and five counts of murder. Seven mil’ for Vadim, eleven for Lev, dead or alive. There’s your big score – might even cover the hospital fees. You can catch them now if you hurry, they’re all over the news, shooting up a housing fab three blocks away. Two badges dead at the scene, so – your lucky day – the reward should be going up any time now.”

“I-” The apology got no further than his throat, or its digital equivalent in his private VR, where it twisted into a grunt of annoyance. “Huh. Right then. Was that so hard? Flash me the address and let’s get going.”

She sulked all the way there. Well, he was an arsehole, right? Case in point: young Frank, two years out of New Scotland Yard Crime Academy, working traffic in South London. That’s London, Earth. As in, real air, real whisky, real coffee. There he was, admiring the congestion, when a black roadster came screaming out of a side street hotly pursued by a ’29 Ford Classique. They both swerved to avoid the gridlock, the Classique mistimed it, mounted the curb, and ran over a ten-year-old kid.

Messy. Kincaid still remembered the shock of staring down into the ruined face as he dialled the emergency services, hoping against hope the boy’s parents were among the privileged few who could afford personality backup, because it didn’t take a medical degree to see that nothing was going to be salvaged from what was left of that poor skull. The driver was stood beside Kincaid, sobbing that he was a copper in pursuit of a suspect, that he hadn’t seen the kid, oh Christ, he just came out of nowhere.

No sympathy. The man’s career was over, of course, and he didn’t try to fight it, but the higher-ups wanted to paint it as a freak accident. No Reckless Endangerment, just a blameless copper in the wrong place at the wrong time, resigning out of guilt and nothing more. Kincaid wouldn’t have it. That much speed in a built-up area, someone was going to get killed, and he testified accordingly. Two more ruined lives to add to those of the family – the kid wasn’t backed up, so it was jail for the officer, and Kincaid was drummed out of the force on a trumped-up disciplinary a few months later. Or maybe it wasn’t so trumped up; he’d had a few issues since the accident, hadn’t exactly been cooperative with the mandatory trauma counselling. So some punches were thrown, big deal.

The point was, he’d had it easy, threw it all away on a point of principle. And for what? To hammer another nail into the coffin of a man already riddled with guilt? Arsehole.

He checked the action on his Glock Needlegun, made sure the concealed armslide was unobstructed, and swung himself out of the beat-up VW that currently served his transportation needs. There were a couple of camerabots jockeying for position outside the fab’s characteristically Martian red brick frontage, but no immediate sign of trouble. He pushed past them, drawing angry electronic squawks as their live feeds filled with the back of his head.

A shot rang out from inside the building as he reached the entrance, followed by a burst of automatic fire. He flattened himself against the wall. The distant wailing of sirens gave him about a two minute lead on the police – couldn’t claim a bounty for men who were already dead or in custody. He unclasped his satchel, pushed open the door and stepped inside.

The foyer was gloomy and had the look of a rundown hotel, shoddily converted into housing after the colonial bubble burst: grubby carpet that might once have been beige, cracked plaster, and a cheap plastic reception desk made up to look like wood. Kincaid decided against using the lift and was halfway up the first flight of stairs when more automatic fire rang out, answered by a couple of single shots. Sounded like the next floor, somewhere off to the right. The bloody forms of two private police decorated the landing. No pulse.

He pushed through the door to his right and followed the gunfire down a dim corridor. Half the lighting strips were out and one in every two of the doorways had been crudely sealed up as part of the conversion, the brickwork left exposed. No one had even bothered to paint over. He peered around the corner and then ducked back hastily. Two men were taking cover beside a kicked-in door, automatic shotguns in hand, the kind of faces that betrayed a lifetime of violence – broken noses, cauliflower ears, more scar tissue than unmarred flesh. Lev and Vadim, without a doubt. There were bullet holes in the plaster behind them; someone was firing back?

The shotguns sounded out once, twice, three times. Kincaid risked a glance in time to see the pair pile through the doorway, firing as they went. He followed as stealthily as he could, pausing outside to take stock. The Russians were advancing down a short hall, weapons trained on the far door, through the tattered splinters of which could be seen the remains of a hand basin, a cramped bathtub, and fallen across it, bleeding heavily, a middle-aged woman. A handgun slipped from her grasp as Genevieve flashed up a photo ID: Tricia Altmann, formerly of Halcyon Interplanetary Industries.

Kincaid considered the Glock, but the odds of putting both men down cleanly without either twitching off a shot into Altmann’s face weren’t promising. No time to think. Shit.

“Mummy!” He broke cover and ran towards them, satchel bouncing around at his side. “Don’t hurt my mummy!”

The brothers turned in confusion, and one reached out a hand and grabbed him by the front of his school uniform, hauling him into the air. Pitiless eyes stared into his.

“Your mummy’s going to die, son. You can watch if you like.”

Kincaid reached into his top pocket. “Cigar?” he offered civilly, by way of a distraction, as his other hand found what it was looking for in the satchel and brought it out. “I’d run if I were you.”

He brought his little legs up against the Russian’s chest and kicked as the grenade hit the ground, clattering away across the tiles. He landed awkwardly, rolled into the tub next to Altmann, and covered her eyes as the flashbang detonated.

The Glock slid smoothly into his hand and he was firing blindly into the room before the flare died away. Huh. The Raminovs weren’t as stupid as they looked – there was no sign of them, which meant they’d either fled back down the hallway or else ducked into one of the side rooms. His ears were ringing too loudly to be much help on that front, but Genevieve reported the sound of running footsteps in the corridor outside.

“You okay?”

He realised the futility of the question when his own words were drowned out by the ringing, so he settled for checking her over by hand. Her shoulder was a mess and blood was seeping from a wound in her side, but she was strong enough to pull him off when he tried to lift the blouse.

“Listen-” He shook his head, and switched to virtual audio courtesy of Genevieve. “Listen, you need medical attention. Here-” He fumbled in the satchel and brought out a medical kit. He started to pantomime patching her wounds, but it seemed she’d had the same idea about virtual audio.

“Who the hell are you?”

“Kincaid. Hi. How are you? Now help me get that blouse off before you bleed to death.”

It wasn’t pretty. Buckshot might not be the most sophisticated of technologies, but the shotguns were state of the art, military-grade kit. Powerful, lethal, highly illegal, and still relatively safe to use within the confines of a hab dome. Not as safe as his needle rounds, mind, but not everyone could be the upstanding citizen he was.

He tutted and sprayed on idiot mix – a combination antiseptic, anaesthetic and fast-acting clotting agent that was usually enough to get the drunk and accident-prone to hospital before they bled out. The pock-marked flesh scabbed over and he added a layer of synthskin for good measure. It looked a god awful lumpy mess, but then it would all have to be redone when the shot was removed anyway.

She glanced at him questioningly and he shrugged. “You’ll live. Probably. Here-” He offered his hand and half-helped, half-dragged her out of the tub. “If I’m not mistaken, that’s the sound of a dozen pairs of flat feet piling out of a rapid response unit. Fancy sticking around and explaining all this? Didn’t think so. Rear exit?”

She led the way. They came out in the car park, and she unlocked a corporate dronemobile and ushered him in. There’d be some explaining to do when the police traced his VW out front, but he’d have to figure that out later.

“So what’s your story?”

The car glided out of the lot and into the Martian twilight, and Altmann eased the seat back and sprawled. Her hair was more dust than brunette, her face a patchwork of worry lines, pale with shock, but there was enough of a hint that she might be bookishly handsome underneath it all for him to want to like her. She quirked a tired grin at him. “You first, ‘son’.”

He grimaced. “You don’t want to hear all that.”

She laughed, then clutched at her shoulder. “Ow. Sure, no one ever wants to hear that story, I bet.”

“Hardly anyone at all,” he agreed dryly. “Okay, fair enough. My name may or may not be Frank Kincaid, and I’m not me. I’m a copy. If I can trust my own memories, which honestly I don’t, I was created to collect on a particularly difficult bounty here in New Beijing.”

To be fair, she was probably too tired to look especially shocked, but she still took it pretty well. “Bounty hunter, huh? That mean we’re about to take a detour to Halcyon corporate HQ?”

“The thought had crossed my mind. But I’m happy to cruise on auto while we talk things through. I was after the Russians.”

“Isn’t it against some kind of code to take out the competition?”

He snorted. “Those two, bounty hunters? Do me a favour. The pittance on your head wasn’t even enough to get my attention, never mind the Raminov Brothers.”

“Pittance? I’m positively insulted. I thought they’d at least stretch to a trifle. So if they aren’t bounty hunters, who are they?”

“Thugs. Killers. Any idea why they’d want to spray paint your home in buckshot grey?”

“Not if they weren’t after the money. That wasn’t my home, by the way. That was temporary. Trying to lie low...” Her voice tailed off and she looked for a moment like she might be sick, then she drew in a long breath and sighed it out. “So, you were telling me about this person you’re not. If I’ve got this right, you’re some kind of edited copy, sent to kill a big shot here in New Beijing. Anyone I know?”

“Wu Lao Hui.”

He smirked. No hiding her reaction to that little name drop.

“Wait, you-”

“Yep. Wu, AKA Ahmad Ben Shah, AKA The Butcher of Benghazi, AKA Theodore Valentinas. That last name you probably won't have heard before, but it’s the one he was born with. The man swapped identities like you’d swap shoes. Anyway, that was me. Unnamed government operative, my arse.”

She frowned sceptically. “The Libyans couldn’t reach him, and you took him out in that piece of shit body?”

“Appearances can be deceptive. Which was the whole point. Valentinas had a brother, lived with him in the bunker, and the brother had a family. Specifically, a wife, Lara, and their ten-year-old son, Raph. This body was custom ordered by the original me to be a perfect duplicate of Raph. I was created to occupy that body, and psychosurgically altered to suit the needs of the operation. I strolled in past security, shot Valentinas twice in the chest and once in the head, and strolled right back out again.”

She whistled. “So why-”

“-doesn’t anyone know it was me?”

“And why-”

“-am I still here? Because, firstly, killing the head of the most powerful crime family in New Beijing is one thing, living to tell the tale is another (hello, Frank Kincaid, blabbermouth, pleased to meet you), and secondly, I can’t afford transport off this rock. Frank 1.0 welched on the deal. Collected the money and disappeared. That’s assuming, of course, there ever was a version of me working as a bounty hunter on Earth, and I wasn’t cooked up in a lab by Libyan Intelligence to take care of business. Plausible deniability, all that jazz.”

“Wow. That’s a lot of uncertainty to live with, and any way you look at it-”

“-I’m buggered. Yep. Speaking of which, your career prospects aren’t looking too rosy right now either. Care to fill me in? Maybe we can work out why two hired killers with military issue hardware have taken such a dislike to you.”

She took another deep breath. “It doesn’t make any sense. Look, I work in Accounts. The pay stinks, the hours are lousy, and my boss has bad breath and wandering hands. So, I siphoned a little out of the slush fund. A couple of mil’. Just enough to tide me over till I found a new job – I didn’t think they’d even notice.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Okay, several mil’. Nine, actually. Still, petty cash to a hypercorp.” She leaned into him, one hand on his chest, and big brown eyes bore into his. “Please help me, Frank.”

Kincaid sighed and shook his head sadly. “Just when I was starting to like you. You’re a poor helpless pencil pusher who got greedy, and now the big nasty hypercorp is trying to kill you. Good thing there’s a strong, dashing man for you to snuggle up to.” His lip curled in disgust. “You’re not a pervert, Ms Altmann, and neither am I, so drop the act. You wouldn’t be trying to manipulate me this hard unless you knew a lot more than you’re letting on.”

She recoiled as if she’d been struck, and sat watching him for a moment. “Halcyon are trying to kill me, Mr Kincaid.”

“Doesn’t wash. Why set the bounty so low if they give a damn about finding you? Try again.”

“Because licenced bounty hunters won’t kill over simple theft – it’s illegal. And Halcyon don’t want me alive, they want me dead. I took ¥100,000,000, and it’s still not about the money.”

Kincaid whistled softly. “Go on.”

“It’s about our Russian friends, in a way. And corporate espionage, corruption, false accounting, insider trading; all the happy things. A lot of big players went bust when the bubble burst, and Halcyon owns most of them now. There’s reasons for that. Dirty, shameful reasons. The kind of reasons politicians need an incentive to overlook. I was supposed to deposit the money in Governor Chou’s Swiss bank account, like I do every month. I opened one of my own instead.”

The pieces rotated in Kincaid’s mind, and clicked into place. The best way to serve a lie was with a liberal garnishing of the truth. “So they accused you of petty theft to cover up a larger one. Posted a bounty so low they hoped you’d never be found. Sent in a team of their own to make sure.”

“That’s about the size of it. What do you plan on doing, now that you know? I’ll cut you in for half if you take me someplace safe. You could get back to Earth on that kind of money, set yourself up with a whole new life.”

He would’ve taken her offer – of course he would. He didn’t get the chance, because at that moment a black van T-boned the saloon, crumpling the left rear corner like so much tin foil and sending the vehicle spinning into a wall.

It could’ve been worse. If the autodrive hadn’t swerved at the last moment, Altmann would have been crushed to a pulp and Kincaid would have found himself pinned between the van and the wall. As it was, the car’s automatic restraints protected him from the brunt of it, and he was left with a nasty case of whiplash and a stupid look on his face.

After that the shot starting flying. The rear window vanished, along with both rear headrests, followed shortly after by Kincaid’s. Fortunately, he was already huddled in the footwell by that point, nursing his Glock and trying to kick the passenger door open. It wouldn’t budge. What did budge was the window, which exploded outwards, the roof support, which was neatly severed halfway down, and finally the windscreen, which shattered in several places before giving up the ghost entirely. Then the roof fell in.

It’s hard to describe the destructive force of a fully automatic shotgun if you haven’t witnessed one in action, but if you imagine a regular machine gun and scale up appropriately, you’ll get the general idea. Kincaid got the idea and hammered desperately at the door, wishing he had bigger legs. If the top half of the door had still been present, he probably wouldn’t have managed it, but as it was the composite cracked, split in the middle, and gave way. He wriggled out with all the grace of a beached turbot, leaving an ugly wash of red in his wake.

“Kincaid?”

The firing had stopped. He reached into the footwell and fumbled out his satchel.

“You in there, Kincaid?”

He slid out the compact Heckler and Koch he kept for special occasions, extended the shoulder rest, smacked in a clip and thumbed off the safety.

“We know who you are, Mr Kincaid. We know your reputation. We work for powerful people. Wealthy people. We can pay you a great deal of money to walk away now. We can give you a new body. An adult body, Mr Kincaid, custom grown to your specifications. Combat chassis, muscle aug, the works.”

Kincaid flipped open the access port behind the HK’s tactical display and pulled out the fibre optic viewer concealed there. Bellying forward across the debris, barely aware of the agony in his back, he slid the fibre round the corner of the car and monitored the display. There was the black van, doors open, Lev and Vadim sheltering behind them, weapons trained on the car. He synced the display with his retinal HUD and painted his targets. Then he fired twice into the air.

There was a brief flare as the micromissiles took flight, a streak of light across the tactical display, and both Russians dropped, headless, to the ground.

Kincaid laughed grimly and coughed up blood.

“Jen?” Technicolour curves filled his view. “What’s the damage?”

He didn’t really need to ask. Her playful expression was gone, replaced by a mask of concern. “Multiple buckshot wounds to the back. You have liver damage, kidney damage, intestinal perforations, massive internal bleeding. I – I’m sorry, Frank. I’ve already called an ambulance.”

“ETA?”

She shook her head. “Without medical insurance? Too long. Idiot mix isn’t going to cut it this time.”

He craned his neck, tried to move, then gave up and fed the fibre optic up over the remains of the side window and into the car. There was precious little left of the driver’s seat. Some of the frame, some cushioning, fragments of fabric imbedded in Altmann’s corpse.

He sighed. “You know, that wasn’t a bad offer they made.”

“You should’ve bid them up. They probably would’ve thrown in a fancy car and a house in France.”

“When you’re right, you’re right.”

He lay there for a moment, a cosy endorphin glow starting to replace the fiery throbbing in his back. Drowsily, he said, “Would’ve been nice to get back home. Teach that bastard a lesson.”

The mask cracked. Tears welled in amber eyes.

“It’s a lie, Frank. All of it.”

He frowned, half asleep. “Hm?”

“You’re not a copy. You never were. You’re not Kincaid, but you’re not a copy either. Your name is Webber, Frank Webber.”

The officer who ran the boy over, back in London. That made no sense. That’s not how it went.

“The Met wanted to go easy on you, Frank, but you wouldn’t have it. You talked to the press, told the family exactly what happened. Pled guilty to manslaughter. You served three years in hell when you could’ve walked away, but when you got out, it still wasn’t enough. You kept saying the punishment didn’t fit the crime. You hated yourself. So very much.” She wept, electronic tears streaming down flawless cheeks.

“So you decided to run away. From yourself, from what you’d done. That wasn’t easy in the centre of a media frenzy, you were going to need a new body and fake ID, and transport to someplace far away. You already owed a fortune – the kind of fortune it takes for a child-killing copper to survive behind bars. It took you a while, but you were desperate, and you came up with a plan. You went to the Libyans, offered to solve their problem for them. They trained you, carved away those awful memories, built you a new reality. A new Frank, in a new body, living a whole new life. The punishment fit the crime, I guess.”

Thoughts tumbled through his mind. Memories clashing with facts. None of it fitted anything he knew, it made no sense, and every word of it was hideously, unquestionably true.

“Jen?”

“Sh, Frank. Rest until the ambulance gets here. Just rest now.”

“I better bloody be dying, Jen.” He laughed wildly, coughed, red foam flecking his lips. “Otherwise this was one hell of a wasted effort.”

Submitted October 04, 2019 at 07:20PM by AdrianBagleyWriter https://ift.tt/2IrbIAW