Flashback

attention then. He remembered now that he’d had to drive up to Boulder to interview the Buddhist-robed jerkwad at the Naropa Institute there six years ago. Derek Somebody was a total flash addict whose goal was to relive every second of his forty-six years of life in a total-immersion flashback tank. The goal was satori via flashback.

“The murder floor is like this, too?” Nick asked while trying to remember the name of one of the more spaced-out men here standing in the small kitchen area and holding a glass filled with amber liquid that obviously had just come from a solid, real-world bottle of expensive-looking Scotch.

“Yes.”

“Jesus,” said Nick, remembering the crime-scene and autopsy photos. “Wait, has Mr. Nakamura seen all this?”

“Of course,” Sato said in tones that couldn’t get any flatter. “Many times.”

“You did this for your private investigation,” said Nick. He realized how dull-witted he sounded… no, was… but didn’t feel apologetic about that. He had damned good reason to feel a little slow this morning.

Sato nodded ever so slightly. The big security chief was following Nick around the large living area and smaller kitchen space. He showed no hesitation at walking through people.

“In that suit,” said Nick, talking just to shake the cobwebs out of his head, “you remind me of Goldfinger’s guy… Oddjob.”

Sato showed no sign of recognition and Nick mentally kicked himself for trying to make conversation. The rule of cop life—hell, of life—was that you don’t try to converse with your own armpit or asshole, so don’t try with ambulatory surrogates of same.

Nick sighed and said mostly to himself—Still, if Mr. Nakamura keeps seeing all this and visiting his son’s freshly murdered corpse upstairs, it must be…”

Nick froze. He turned slowly to stare at Sato and said, “Why, you miserable motherfucker.”

One of Sato’s dark eyebrows rose a few millimeters in query. Otherwise, the big man showed no expression.

“You sure in hell didn’t get all this detail from witness statements or memory,” said Nick.

“Perhaps some witnesses volunteered to submit to flashback before describing details?” suggested Sato. Detairs.

“My ass,” said Nick.

Sato folded his hands over his crotch in the ancient posture of funeral directors, military men at ease during a dressing-down, and security men trying to disappear into the wallpaper or drapes behind them.

“My ass,” repeated Nick for no other reason than he liked the sound of it. “You were here. You were on all three floors that night. You know how to observe better than any so-called witness there that night. You went under flashback—probably for weeks of sessions—to see and record all this incredible detail so you could give it to the VR programmers. You did.”

Sato said nothing.

“It is illegal for all Japanese nationals to own, sell, possess, or use flashback, either in Japan or when traveling abroad,” said Nick. “And, if convicted of the offense, the only punishment a judge may impose under Japanese law is death by lethal injection.”

Sato stood there calmly.

“You motherfucker,” repeated Nick, also just because he liked the sound of it. And because it was overdue. But he also hesitated in his newfound advantage. Why on earth would Sato give Nick such life-and-death leverage over him?

The answer was—he wouldn’t.

Nick walked quickly from room to room, passing through frozen forms without hesitating. This is simultaneous. In all three rooms and the kitchen, what one could see of the other rooms was occurring at the same instant. Even if Sato had gone under the flash, he couldn’t have recalled what was occurring simultaneously in different rooms here on the first floor, much less what might have been happening on the second and third floors.

Not for the first time this miserable morning, Nick Bottom felt like throwing up.

Sato nodded as if reading Nick’s thoughts (again) and handed Nick two blue-glowing earbuds.

Nick set them in place with a sick dread at what would come next. And it did.

Sato pressed an icon on his phone’s diskey and all the digitally re-created three-dimensional people around him and in the adjoining room came to life. Just the ambient roar of party noise made Nick reflexively throw his hands over his ears. With the tiny earbuds set deep, that obviously didn’t help much.

Nick stood there motionless for a moment and watched the totally natural movement of people and endured the roar. Then he crossed quickly to the couch and leaned down between a far-too-handsome-to-be-natural young blond man who was, in turn, leaning forward to talk intimately with a far-too-beautiful-to-be-real young blond woman.

“I find the cocaine-three, brandy, flash, and fucking go really, really well together when you’re, like, there doing it all,” the male was whispering, “but you don’t, like, get the buzz when you go back to it under the flash again.”

“My experience also, like, you know, I mean, totally,” said the female blonde while leaning literally into and through Nick to afford her blond interlocutor a better view of her breasts.

“Shit,” whispered Nick as he stood upright, walked from room to room while watching and listening to more than two hundred people partying, and then stopped and stared at Sato. “It was all recorded at the time. Hidden cameras upstairs, too?”

The security chief gestured to the stairway and Nick led the way. A fourth Japanese security man in tac- glasses stood in front of a locked door on the landing. Nick stepped aside as Sato reached through the seemingly solid man to unlock the locked-in-the-real-world door with a real-world key.

The second-floor door was also locked and when Sato opened it, the door swung through a fifth young security man. Nick was taking off his glasses from time to time to make sure that none of these new security guards was real.

The second floor was just as Nick remembered it from his visits to the crime scene, except that it had been empty and totally trashed then. Now it was merely messy and very, very crowded.

Eight bedrooms ran off the central waiting area on this floor and all of the bedrooms were occupied. None of the doors here was locked. Nick chose a room at random and walked in.

A short, skinny felon whom Nick instantly recognized as Delroy Nigger Brown was in bed having sex with three white girls. None of the girls, Nick knew from his memory of the files at the time, was older than fifteen, and two of them had died of natural causes—if one considers being knifed by one’s pimp or overdosing on heroin-plus- flash “natural causes”—within four months of Keigo’s murder. Nick also knew that the pimp and drug supplier, Delroy N., should still be serving time at Coors Field… but not for the death of either of these particular girls. With another surge of nausea, Nick realized that if he was forced to go ahead with this investigation, he’d have to visit Delroy N. as one of the witnesses who were the last to see Keigo alive.

The felon had been Keigo’s prime supplier of flashback and other drugs while the rich boy had been in Denver.

Nick confirmed that all the bedrooms were occupied and that many of the men in the other rooms were not as punctilious about not having sex with other males around as Delroy N. was. The energetic combinations in the eight rooms combined accounted for another forty or so party guests and with the twenty-some hookers and guests waiting in the center area, the total number of invited partiers, party crashers, caterers, prostitutes, and security guards seemed about right.

Not yet counting the two bodies upstairs.

By the time he’d looked in on all eight bedrooms—and wished he’d skipped at least three of them—Nick realized that the noise and motion had continued for more than ten minutes.

This had taken an astounding amount of supercomputer time to generate. These ten minutes alone created for the tac-glasses must have equaled the cost of a comparable amount of time in a high-budget Hollywood all- digital movie.

“How long is the play loop?” Nick asked.