Free Virtually True by Adam L. Penenberg

closes. He types in Slovo de Bris, and after the usual run of four or five 15-second advertisements in deadtime, a 3-D image of his friend floats before his eyes.
    “Hello, True,” de Bris says brusquely, his lab coat starched and stiffly white, his face puffy from constant weight fluctuations. De Bris is in one of his thin phases. When True was just a collection of sperm cells and ovum in a test tube, did he look through the glass and see someone like de Bris?
    “How are you, de Bris?”
    “You didn’t follow proper safety precautions. I opened up your package and was faced with blood and bits of skin and some unbreakable plastic shards. Thanks a lot.”
    The driver rolls down her window to scream at a grappler. She jiggles the steering wheel, tries to shake the extra weight to conserve fuel.
    “Where are you calling from?”
    “A taxi.”
    “I almost had to pass up dinner: a hormone-free roast leg of lamb, homemade mint jelly, organic oven-roasted yams, and, for dessert, a lovely forest berry tart made with pesticide-free fruit. It cost a fortune.” De Bris is addicted to food, his seasonal obesity testing his wife’s loyalty. Three times a year he has fat cells drained from his body in what True always thought of as a bulimia program for the rich. True wonders what he does with all that leftover lipid. Make soup stock?
    “I presume business is, as usual, booming.” Since the government moved toward privatization in grand fashion, farming out work to the private sector, de Bris’s lab has been thriving. It doesn’t hurt that forensics is the fastest growing medical field in the U.S., or that murder and terrorism top the crime stats.
    “I have my days.” De Bris puffs out his cheeks.
    “What were your findings, maestro?”
    “Let me pull them up on screen. Can you see?”
    “Yeah.” As the cab jumps up and down over the rough, potholed street, angular models, enzymes, ions, protons, and chemical formulae air-dance frantically, matching True’s wrist movements. “I see them. What do they mean?”
    “I found particles of a highly durable material embedded in the traces of skin you supplied that had the same properties as the swatch of material you sent along. I also found powder—TNT powder, which leads me to believe that, at least from the evidence you’ve supplied thus far, at least two people were struck by an explosive device. I identified two sources of blood, type A and O negative.”
    “Go on.”
    “The A blood originated from a male, approximately 35 years old. Blood analysis shows he spent a great deal of time in tropical climates. There were traces of malaria, giardia, bilharzia, and dysentery, along with scads of other Southeast Asian microbes. In fact, the subject was recently exposed to Japanese encephalitis.”
    “How recently?”
    “One and a half, two weeks before he died. I can’t be any more precise than that.”
    “Anything else about the male subject?”
    “Well, nothing groundbreaking. What are you looking for?”
    “Anything that will help me find out who killed him.”
    “Well, first, let me tell you about the other subject. A girl, aged ten or eleven, I’d say. She suffered from a cornucopia of illnesses. Her growth was stunted from lack of food, and she carried traces of bubonic plague, dysentery, malaria, elevated white cell count—probably lived near sources of radiation.”
    “What kind of radiation?”
    “Toxic waste would be my guess. Not the same ions as a nuclear plant or blast. I’m afraid running a trace and superimposing pockets of residences on a map of potential toxic waste site areas wouldn’t be of much help. I already thought of that.”
    “Because it’s so common. So there’s no way of pinpointing where she lived?”
    “Not from this evidence.”
    “Given the medical data, there’s no chance they were in contact before the explosion?”
    “Probably not. Lots of microbes and afflictions, but from different sources.”
    “Tell me about the