“The last time we made it this far, that damned private investigator came in and made a mess of things before I could go public, even after I offered to make him a shareholder, and it was decades before anyone made it down into that hole again so I could start over. And the time before that, with the idiot writer for the pulps? That was a disaster. But to be fair, that was kind of my fault for letting too many minority shareholders call the shots, and those weren’t really Big Picture guys.”
Zotovic had to still be in his late twenties, Patrick knew. Yet he was talking about things that had happened decades before he was born as if they had happened to him personally. This suggested who he was not talking to, even if it didn’t clear up who, or what exactly was doing the talking.
“But that won’t happen again.” Zotovic sat back in the chair, chest puffing up with pride. “This time I’m calling all of the shots. No more middle men. Just me.”
He held his hands in front of him, palms down, fingers splayed and wriggling.
“For a while I tried to diversify. Spread myself out. Brought in new talent and shared the responsibilities evenly. Not just one majority shareholder, but as many suitable candidates as I could get down into that hole.”
Zotovic lowered one hand, and held the thumb and forefinger of the other a short distance apart.
“And I was this close to moving forward when that damned professor started taking shareholders out, cutting them off from the Merger.” He shook his head. “I should have dragged him down there and brought him onto the team when I had the chance. But before someone was able to stop him he had worked his way through every shareholder but one.” Then he tapped his chest.
Clearly when Zotovic said “I” he didn’t mean the man sitting before him. Zotovic was a body that the voice speaking was wearing. Patrick was talking directly to the loa itself. So why was an extradimensional intelligence talking like a Silicon Valley wunderkind about to take his startup public with an IPO?
“I suppose I have you to thank for that, don’t I, Lieutenant Tevake? That was the first time I encountered your name, when you and Agent Lefevre took the professor down. I considered reaching out to you at the time, making you one of my minority shareholders, but I was still in the development phase of the product at that point, and didn’t have a space for you on the team.” He grinned, without any warmth. “But to be honest, you wouldn’t have been a good fit for the Merger back then, anyway. I needed people who carried the right kind of memories in their heads, the knowledge of how to code the priming visuals into the software, and the engineering experience to take care of the hardware of the delivery system. I thought of you just as a badge and a gun who chased down killers in the street. Imagine my surprise when I found out that you were investigating the distribution side of my business, all of these years later.”
Priming visual? Patrick thought. Then he remembered the conspiracy videos that he’d watched the day before.
“The encoded data in the applications,” he said in a low voice. “The subliminal visuals in the code.”
“So you had worked out that part. I thought you might.” The thing that was wearing Zotovic nodded, looking impressed. “Last time around I used large two-dimensional representations to prime the candidates, with a spoken component to engage the frontal lobe, reworking the structures of their minds to aid with the Merger. But that required a considerable amount of time and attention, forcing candidates to sit and stare at a wall while chanting for hours at a time. This time I decided it would be more efficient to put the priming visuals in a place that people would be staring at for hours at a time, anyway.”
“Their phones.”
The thing shrugged, a gesture of mock humility.
“Just inserting a piece of myself into a person’s brain isn’t enough. I can gain control in the short term, but it’s a brute-force method that rapidly exhausts the usefulness of a shareholder. They tend to start decaying at a fairly rapid rate, and when the nervous system breaks down and the muscles start to rot, they’re not much use to me anymore. But with the synaptic structures aligned in just the right way, I can take root in only the parts of the brain that I need to maintain control, and keep a shareholder in operation indefinitely. Even after their death.”
Patrick heard the sound of the door knob turning behind him, and once again the room was bathed in light from the hallway beyond. The thing that wore Zotovic like a suit stood up from the chair as footsteps passed on either side of Patrick.
“I think you know these minor shareholders,” the Zotovic thing said, as two men came to stand beside him. On his left was the man with the bullet hole in the middle of his forehead that had spoken to Patrick earlier that night, the thick sludge of blood crusted brownish black in a trail down his face. On his right stood Tyler Campbell, the dead drug dealer whose autopsy had started this whole thing off only a few days before. The Zotovic thing looked from one to the other and then back to Patrick. “I’ll do most of the talking—their vocal cords aren’t working so great anymore, and the speech centers of their brains are pretty much toast—but I can use the extra hands for what comes next.”
The Zotovic thing reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out what Patrick first took to be a ballpoint pen, but then realized was one of the Ink auto-injectors.
“Now, I’m going to make you the same offer I made to the private investigator last time around, and
