Free Please Do Not Taunt the Octopus by Mira Grant Page A

and compression. We always sound strange to ourselves when heard in playback. This was especially strange. I might not have recognized myself, if not for the mystery woman’s voice speaking a second later, answering me, confirming the provenance of the file. Tessa began shaking her head. “No,” she said. “Nyet. No.”
    “What?” I tapped on my computer screen, hoping the noise and motion together would be enough to catch her attention. “Tessa, what ? You can’t freak out without inviting me to your ‘everything is ruined forever’ party. It’s not nice, and it’s not productive. What’s wrong? Why are you trying to refute reality? Refuting reality never works out in the long run, trust me.”
    “This woman…I may know who she is.” Tessa looked up, shaking her head again. “I think she used to work with the competition. A man from Seattle, who did the kind of work I do, but I will be honest: he was better than I will ever be. I have more patience for legwork, I am happier to look for missing people and use the skills I have, but this man? He could wipe you from the world if you told him where to start. He could build an identity out of nothing, put a person in cracks that no one even realized were there until they might as well have existed all along. He was an artist.”
    “What happened to him?”
    “What happens to all the artists in this world? He died.” She kept typing, her eyes fixed at a point below the level of her webcam. I could see the roots of her hair, dark brown showing through her carefully cultivated blonde. “The community was in an uproar for months. Some people even said it was a hoax, that he was doing the ultimate ID scrub and scrubbing himself right out of reality. Nobody knows for sure. I’ve seen the autopsy reports. They look legit to me, but what do I know? I’m no doctor.”
    “Besides, they could have autopsied a clone.” Tessa’s head snapped up, eyes even wider this time. I shrugged. “What? I did physiological examinations of the second Georgia Mason, remember? Clone tech is more advanced than we like to think it is, especially when you don’t need your clone to do anything but die. Let me tell you, that doesn’t take any special skills.” Anybody could die. It was almost the only thing that every person on Earth had been designed to do with equal proficiency.
    “I didn’t even think of that.” She bowed her head as she resumed typing. “They called him ‘the Monkey.’ If he had a real name, he scrubbed it years ago—maybe before he did anything else. The best always experiment on themselves, you know? Means you have time to be sure that whatever it is you’re doing really works , that it’s not just chance. He had the resources to get himself a clone, if he really wanted one. If he needed to disappear.”
    “This is all fascinating, but what does it have to do with my mystery woman?” I asked.
    “He always lived with at least two women. They were…let’s call them his ‘public relations team.’ That’s what you call your lovers who sometimes kill people for you, right?” Tessa’s scowl was visible only in the way her cheeks distorted, tightening and pulling at the sides of her face. “A friend of mine worked for him for a while. He deleted her whole original identity, just wrote her out of the world and wrote her back in as part of his private menagerie. He called her ‘the Wolf,’ and when she fell out of favor, he deleted that identity, too. We’ve never found her body. I don’t think we ever will.” She was still typing, more fiercely now, like she thought she could bring her friend back from the dead through sheer force of anger.
    “So what? You think our guest was one of the Monkey’s girls?”
    “The last two recorded members of his little zoo were ‘the Cat’ and ‘the Fox.’ A hacker and a killer, according to all reports.” Tessa glanced up. “The Cat’s body was recovered at the same time as the Monkey’s. The