Free Virtually True by Adam L. Penenberg Page B

they’ll get away with it?”
    Sputtering, de Bris accidently spits on his screen. “Sorry.” He rubs away the spittle with his sleeve. “I’m sure these corporate gods will get off. Hell, they’ll probably fine the victims. Already affiliated companies are threatening to relocate their operations abroad and take their technology with them, if there’s a guilty verdict. The government is divided on whether to prosecute.”
    “Corps rule. I can imagine the electronic town hall is overloading its circuits with constituents’ calls to Congress.”
    “Mostly in favor of dropping the charges. I mean, fuck! Unemployment is at twenty-five percent. No one wants to see corps pack up and leave. America doesn’t need the vote anymore, now that we live in a corpocracy .”
    De Bris falls silent, as if everything that needs to be said has been said.
    True says, “Let’s get back to the plastic. Have you come across anything like it before?”
    “In a murder victim?”
    “Anytime. Read anything about it? See it? Experience it?”
    “No, not unless—wait—yeah. There’s a new microcamera used for diagnostic medical tests. Shoot it into a patient and you get clear pictures of arteries, veins, organs. Kind of like Fantastic Voyage .”
    “And these cameras are made from plastic?”
    “Yes. They disintegrate after 24 hours or so.”
    “Do a lot of companies manufacture this camera?”
    “Only one, far as I know. A Japanese firm. I can’t recall the name.”
    True starts. “Can you find out?”
    “Hold on a sec.”
    True watches de Bris type in commands on his console. The taxi slows, squeezing into traffic, then is cut off by a city bus spewing grapplers. The taxi rams into a bicycle rickshaw, running it onto the sidewalk. But then they’re stuck in traffic. The driver punches the horn, yelling along with it. Like a sing-along, True thinks. As the car idles, True watches an auto-sprayer painting road lines. Another UN development project: more traffic symbols to be ignored. A dead body lies on the road and the robotic sprayer engulfs it, then flattens it into a pancake with a yellow line bisecting it. No other cars are coming on that side of the street to mush it down, although True doesn’t know why.
    “Hmmm. I was wrong,” de Bris says. “It’s an American company: MedTekton. Based here in New York.”
    True snaps back to attention. “Not one of the corps on trial?”
    “No. Nice try.”
    “Anything else I should know?”
    De Bris reflects a moment. “No, except that by the look of it, this missile could have been fired by any number of hostile groups in—what’s that capital city again?”
    “Nerula.”
    “Nerula. There are so many damn countries I can’t keep track. Fifty years ago, there were 180. Today, more than 250. Where is Luzonia anyway?”
    “Next to Malayanalaya.”
    “And where the hell is that?”
    “Next to Luzonia. They’re both young Southeast Asian republics.” True’s trying to be helpful.
    “Well, be careful. I don’t relish analyzing your skin cells, DNA, and blood with my lab’s computerscope.”
    The taxi yodels through the tunnel hugging the shanty’s edge. True sees his building. “Thanks for the help, de Bris. I’m home now.”
    “But not home free.”
    The sky bursts with ash-colored droplets falling hard as pigeon shit, staining windows. True pays the driver and steps out. His intuition is telling him something is up. Even though MedTekton isn’t a Japanese company, Edo is still emerging as a major theme. Is there some connection he’s missing? Blinking from the falling gobs, he watches the taxi soak into the distance, sees it stop at a long line of vehicles cramped this side of the tunnel. A traffic jam, maybe an accident. Since the tunnels are the only safe vehicular route through the shanties, odds are most of the drivers will wait.
    True doesn’t feel like home yet. He’s frustrated by his slow thought process, feels like sponging up the city through the