“Investigator,” Floramel said when he was sipping a drink and sitting up unaided. “Sir, why did you choose this moment to recycle yourself?”
He looked at her seriously. “Because I knew you were coming. I heard of Etta’s death—and of the things you two did back at Central. Oddly, your name was omitted from the criminal records, McGill. Was this an oversight?”
The Investigator was kind of a planetary governor. It made sense that when some kind of big crime went down, he was on the feed to hear about it. Moreover, he was linked into the community of other planetary leaders. He could pass on any information he wanted to—and he wasn’t a forgiving man. The fact I was his granddaughter’s daddy wouldn’t necessarily stop him from turning me in.
“Hell no,” I said. “Floramel here just up and went crazy. She hacked into some database—I don’t even know which one—and stole files and such-like. I just found out about her crimes when she confessed a few minutes ago.”
“Thanks, James,” Floramel said quietly.
The Investigator gave me a hard look, but he nodded. “It didn’t take much deductive logic to realize you would come here next. Recently, you came here to revive a friend—why would you not attempt the same with your daughter?”
“Uh… yeah. Guilty as charged. What do you think about that idea? Reviving Etta, I mean.”
He smiled faintly. “That’s why I chose to recycle myself at this point. I wanted to be fully fit for the job. My previous body… well, it was at least a decade past its prime.”
We helped him into some clothes, and he looked a lot more like the Investigator I’d known for decades. He was, in fact, almost ageless. It was kind of weird now that I thought about it, that he’d never grown old and died out here on Dust World. Maybe that’s why he’d never wanted to leave here. If he stayed in his hot, humid little valleys he could live forever with no records to detect the illegal revives going on down here in the shadowy catacombs.
The next day, we got started on the Etta project. The Investigator was vigorous again. What’s more, he seemed quite interested in our goals.
That made me smile. These old spiders on Dust World prided themselves on not giving much of a shit about each other or the universe at large, but here the old guy was, offing himself just so he could do a better job of bringing back his granddaughter. It was enough to warm my heart toward him. He really did care—he just wasn’t too good at showing it.
The two geniuses built a first-class setup for Etta. They used a freshly-flushed tank, lots of goo that was almost sweet-smelling in comparison to the used stuff, and a dozen new hoses that still had tags on them. They’d shipped gear out from Earth to get the best.
All this made me feel overconfident, I’m sure. If Floramel and the Investigator couldn’t do a job—well sir, it was probably impossible to begin with. Etta’s existence was therefore in the best hands I could hope for.
On the third day, they got into the files, and their faces fell.
“What’s wrong?” I asked the two of them, but they didn’t meet my eye.
“The files… they’re incomplete,” the Investigator said.
“What?”
“The checksum is wrong,” Floramel added. “That means even what we’ve got is flawed.”
“That might not be true. If part of the file is missing, the checksum could be correct for the entire body of data—we just don’t have all of it.”
Floramel put her face into her hands.
“Uh…” I said, feeling a sinking, sickening sensation grow in my guts. “Guys? What do we have to do to fix this?”
Floramel turned to me slowly. She could barely meet my eyes. “I must have rushed off that elevator too fast. I should have stopped on the Intel floors and waited until the download was finished. It said it was finished, I swear that it did, but sometimes files aren’t fully synchronized when—”
“Hey! Hey, girl? Are you telling me that Etta is permed, or what?”
She shook her head helplessly. “I don’t know, James. Maybe we could go back. Maybe we could get a full scan this time.”
“No. That won’t work. They’ll have changed all the codes by this time. They might have flushed old Juan Pujol’s brain by now, too. Just to be sure.”
Floramel nodded. She looked miserable, and I felt sick.
The Investigator, however, was still poking at the files on his tapper.
“There may be another course of action open to us,” he said. “It is, after all, only the body-scan that’s damaged. Her mind is intact.”
“Oh no,” Floramel said. She looked at each of us in turn with red-rimmed eyes. “Gentlemen—Raash is so unhappy with his makeshift body. You can’t mean—”
I put out a hand, touching her lips.
“Just do it,” I said, and everyone fell quiet after that.
-58-
The next few weeks were rough on me. Using a full body-scan to print out a human using a Shadowlander revival machine—that was first class. Those fine pieces of equipment could work quickly, printing out trillions of cells in half an hour or so.
The process the Investigator had dreamed up was something different. It took weeks, it was messy, and we didn’t even have complete data to start with.
The first phase consisted of Floramel and the Investigator messing with Etta’s body-scan files. They dug out lots of other files, looking for compatible genetics. Most of every human’s DNA is identical, after all. That made the first part of the job easy. Once they’d identified which genes were missing from the file, they could simply take standardized genes and plug them into place.
The
