Two Truths and a Lie

by Cory O'Brien

Genres: General Fiction; LGBT & Pride; LGBT Gay; Science Fiction; Crime & Mystery; Cyberpunk

Synopsis

From the beloved internet humorist, a debut novel that introduces an unforgettable investigator to the drowned streets of L.A. in a hugely imaginative and heartfelt blend of noir and cyberpunk.

In a mostly underwater near-future Los Angeles, aging combat-drone veteran Orr Vue now lives a simple and small life, trading snippets of what's become the most valuable currency: information. So when the cops show up at his door looking for data on a murder he’s not even aware has happened, things get interesting for the first time in 25 years.

At first, Orr is happy to exchange whatever he knows about the demise of InfoDrip’s top exec to buy booze and pay rent on his memory storage, but that plan goes to hell when Orr’s old boyfriend, Auggie Wolf, shows up as the number one suspect. Forced to stretch his atrophied spy skills and take his illegal horde of drones out of retirement alongside his busted knees, Orr finds himself in the crosshairs of the militarized police, a family of megarich corporate heirs, a clan of emancipated AIs, and a cult. Barely avoiding getting killed with every clue he collects, Orr realizes he's uncovered not just a murder, but a conspiracy that threatens Auggie’s very existence. Ahh, the things we do for love... 

But in a world where memories can be bought and sold, how can you truly know who anyone is—or what you yourself are capable of? Fast paced, funny, and shockingly romantic, Two Truths and a Lie is Raymond Chandler reinvented for the 22nd century.

Release date: March 4, 2025

Publisher: Pantheon

Print pages: 304

Sample

Submission1

The L.A. sun squeezed in through my building’s cracked roof and poured itself onto the sheet-metal ceiling of my compartment, cooking me awake almost an hour before my kortiko would’ve zapped me conscious otherwise. Mornings are worthless. Nobody wants to buy a memory of bloodshot eyeballs and nostalgia for last night’s liquor, so my archives are loaded with identical copies of the same seven minutes of suffering, stretching all the way back to when I took the fact-checking gig at InfoDrip a decade and a half ago. Still better than your job, though.

I have some sympathy for you, since we’re in the same business. Difference for me was, I corrected a higher class of information than you kids on the municipal blockchain. More work to verify, but worth more. I’m sure most of the stuff you get on commission is nothing but conspiracy theories—“No, the mole men are not invading your teeth,” “Yes, gravity is a universal force, unaffected by how much raw beef you eat.” This, I assure you, is not that. Listen till the end, and I promise to make this submission worth your while. And, just for you, I’ve included plenty of irrelevant detail to line your pockets with. So where was I?

Right. A perfectly awful Wednesday morning in July. I peeled off sheets that would’ve been drier if I’d pissed in them and began the forty-five-minute process of convincing my atrophied muscles to crawl out of bed and carry me to work. My commute was five steps long, bed to table. At my age, that’s five steps too long, but I find that if I stay in bed to work my spine’s a solid rod by the end of the day, and not the kind of solid rod I like. At the table, I poured myself a bowl of Grape-Nuts drowning in caffeinated milk and slapped a handful of knockoff Think tablets into my mouth. Gotta keep the brain slippery, as the kids say. I stuck a lunch pack to my arm, strapped the Frosty to my face, and—with nothing else to do—made the fateful decision to clock in forty-five minutes early.

The InfoDrip buffer slid over my brain from back to front, giving my eyeballs the feeling of being goosed from behind. It’s the worst feeling in the world. Well, okay, no, not technically the worst (I’m not giving you such an easy excuse to invalidate and collect this submission, checker), but I’m sure you’ll agree it’s a bad one. You sit there all day, in the back of your mind, fully aware that your brain is doing something, but unable to observe the smallest sliver of it. Can’t have us actually knowing any of the data we interact with, can they? That’d be financial suicide. Anyway, if you know how the buffer works—and I know you do—you’ll understand why I didn’t hear the cops come in. What you might not understand is why I screamed at them anyway.

See, back in the drone corps, we didn’t have the bandwidth to monitor our meat and our metal at the same time, so we had to get creative. You could tab back and forth, but mess up the timing and your gently twitching body could be target practice for a Union scout, Russian “aid worker,” rogue AI dogbot, actual wild dog…The list goes on. We needed a fail-safe, Commonwealth funds were tight, and that’s when some sadist invented the Frosty.

A Frosty—named for the type of blowjob you do with ice cubes in your mouth—is just a can of compressed air inside a welding mask, with a little fishing line around the trigger. You wear the mask, point the air can at the roof of your mouth, and tie the fishing line to whatever door you’re trying to monitor. Door opens, air can goes off, and 150 psi of brain freeze wakes you up out of whatever immersive routine you’re running. What worked in the war works just as

well in peacetime. Over the years, I’ve caught one or two of my neighbors trying to sneak in and tap my trode while I worked—though they mostly stopped trying to hack my kortiko after I bit one of them and gave him a staph infection. Still, I rigged the thing faithfully every morning before work, because if I stopped doing it and got killed for my carelessness I’d feel like a real asshole. Anyway, I don’t know what the two cops expected to find when they cut the lock and walked into my crate, but I’ll wager a scandal it wasn’t a sixty-eight-year-old ghoul shrieking his guts out as he somersaulted backward over his threadbare office chair, clawing an air can away from his face, and inventing a new language just to curse in.

I heard my spine pop and felt my hip crunch before finally completing my somersault and colliding with the mess of domestic machinery along the back wall of my crate. I tried to land in a battle crouch, but the best I managed was a menacing sprawl.

“Monastery graymatter hotswap!” I said, before I could get my language centers fully under my control. Then I collected myself and said something very cool and intelligent. It came out as a bundle of exotic vowels. The cops waited to see if I was going to try any other linguistic experiments. Then the shorter of the two spoke.

“LAPD,” she said, unnecessarily. Who else in this city wore black riot gear in July?

“So?” I managed.

“We traced a drone to this address,” said the taller one. He held out an early-model Dragonfly painted baby blue with a matte finish. One of mine, all right. But, of course, I couldn’t remember what I’d just been doing with it.

“I have a license for that one. Fact-check only, through my employer,” I slurred, my tongue still numb from the compressed air. I had managed to get the welding mask off my face.

“Maybe you do,” said the shorter one. The two of them seemed to have a deal about alternating who was talking.

“Am I under arrest?” I asked.

“Not necessarily,” said the tall one, sticking to the deal. Now that my eyes were starting

 to focus, I noticed how thoroughly he failed to fill his uniform. The way it bunched and wrinkled around his torso made it look like there might just be a spine and a rib cage under that shirt. The short one filled hers too well. Between the two of them, they had exactly the right amount of fabric, just poorly distributed. They each wore sleek black police-issue kortikos—carbon-fiber commas over their left eyes. Removable, unlike my ancient model. A green LED blinked on the short one’s kortiko as she spoke. Recording.

“We just want to ask you a couple questions down at the station, Mr. Vue.”

“How much data are we talking?” I asked, knowing I’d hate the answer.

“Not much,” said the tall one.

“Following up on a couple Rumors that’ll maybe roll up into a minor Scandal,” said the short one.

I did the math. Two Rumors and a Scandal was a month and a half’s rent in this place. And that’s only if the Scandal really was minor. A major Scandal could easily get me through October. I couldn’t afford to be questioned right now, not this close to the end of the month.

“Suppose I don’t feel up to answering questions right now?” I asked hopefully.

“We’re authorized to compel your obedience,” said the tall one, his unofficial smirk belying his official-sounding words. The two cops took a step forward. I would have scooted back, only there was nowhere to go. My back was already pressed against an ugly chunk of metal and plastic tubing, which was itself pressed against the rear door of the shipping crate I live in, which was suspended by steel cables thirty feet above the warehouse floor. Even though that floor was covered with a thick cushion of seawater and salty garbage, going out the back way didn’t seem like a very clever option.

While I was considering whether I had any clever options, I noticed that the two cops had stopped advancing after that first step. I followed their uneasy gaze over my right shoulder to the peeling plastic label that identified the machine I was leaning against: “Hoy Fong Foods At-Home Dialysis System” and, below it, beneath a wonderfully intimidating yellow-and-black icon, “Caution: Contains Organic Blood.” The idea that occurred to me then wasn’t clever, but it had a certain appeal.

“Okay, so I get that you’re authorized to compel my obedience,” I said, “but you’re not…compelled to compel me, right? You could choose not to?” As I spoke, I felt around on top of the machine for one of the plastic pouches of used blood I’d been too lazy or sentimental to send out for recycling.

“Mr. Vue,” said the short one; then, her eyes twitching up and to the left as she checked some unseen kortiko overlay, “Orr, don’t make this difficult.” She tried to take another step forward, but I coughed theatrically, and she froze. Belatedly, the two cops twitched their eyebrows, raising breathing masks from their collars.

“You know what’s difficult?” I said, emphasizing the rich undertone of phlegm in

 my voice. “Hepatitis. Your piss turns the color of maple syrup, you’re tired all the time, nobody wants to share needles with you anymore…” As I spoke, I brought the corner of the plastic blood pouch to my mouth, and ripped the corner with my teeth. “But that’s just the sort of bug that breeds in organic blood. Wish I could switch to synthetic like you two, but, well…” I spat on the ground between my legs, and the two cops took an involuntary step back. “My kortiko’s the invasive type, it only runs on organic blood, and it’s drilled too far into my brain to remove now.”

The cops’ eyes flicked to the dull silver contact plate cooking the flesh above my left eye, then to each other, then reluctantly back to me. “Though I hear synthetic blood’s not all it’s cracked up to be, in terms of immunity,” I said, idly gesturing with the blood bag. Their eyes couldn’t help following it. I squeezed a little too hard, and a few drops trickled out of the torn corner. “The nanobots in the synthetic blood fight infection, but a life without disease means no antibodies. In the time before the ’bots get there, an organic virus can do some real damage, no?” I raised the plastic bag above my head, and the cops’ hands went for their guns. Always going for their guns, cop hands are.

“Put down the—”

“Drop the bag, Orr,” interrupted the short one, forgetting their deal about taking turns. “Assaulting an officer is—”

“Relax,” I said, not moving, “I’m not gonna throw it at you.” Instead, I clenched my fist around the bag, squirting its contents onto my bald head. The blood oozed down my scalp, onto my shoulders, and down my bare arms. The tall cop looked like he was considering hiding all that blood under a thick layer of whatever he’d had for lunch. I took the opportunity to get my feet under me and push ever so painfully upright, the dialysis machine carving its name into my spine as I did. I tried (and failed) to keep the pain out of my voice, but, honestly, it only added to the effect.

“You two are free to do what you like,” I said. “You can take me in, by reaching out and touching my body with your hands, or you can let me walk out of here. The choice is yours.”

And with that I walked between them, out the door. Their hands came up to stop me, but their brains seemed to veto the idea. I had already lurched the remaining five steps to the door before the tall one thought to say, “Hey…stop.”

But, rebel that I was, I kept going. Leaning heavily on any surface within arm’s reach, I shuffled out of my crate and onto the chain-and-polymer rope bridge that connected the rooms on my level. All around me, the other shipping crates that contained those rooms swayed gently, suspended in a web of ropes, wires, and steel cable that would have been illegal if all the saner real estate in the

 neighborhood wasn’t underwater. Hell, even the bottom floor of my building was underwater, with the crates of the lucky bottom-dwellers floating on the oily seawater. You’d think I’d be used to the swaying after twenty-plus years in the building, but I stumbled and lurched my way along the walkways as if I’d moved in yesterday. Nice thing about getting older: it keeps you young.

The blood gag wouldn’t hold the cops long—I could already hear them digging in their belts for latex gloves to apprehend me with—and I wasn’t getting any quicker, so I entered phase two of what I was now calling my “plan.” With the remnants of what was once a pretty impressive lung capacity, I yelled: “Hey, everybody, Orr Vue is covered in blood, and the cops are here!”

The response was about as relaxed as the one you get when you kick an anthill. My voice echoed through the jungle gym of chains, epoxy, crates, and girders, summoning scarred and wrinkled faces from every cranny and crevice. The lucky ones had crates of their own, and they scurried out onto the walkways laden with telephoto lenses and boom mics. The unlucky ones lived in webs of nylon rope that would have made a shibari master blush, strung between the crates of their richer neighbors, and they crawled along the girders and scaled the scaffolding to get a better view. Their cameras were cheaper, but their angles were better. Behind me, my fellow tenants were already crowding the walkway, dragging nano-nets through the air to capture my stray pheromones, and scraping skin samples off the cops as they struggled to push through. It was near the end of the month, and nothing interesting had happened in the building since at least May. For a lot of these folks, a juicy Rumor here was the difference between paying rent and finding another home. I was doing a little better, but only if I managed to avoid any tricky questions from the police.

While the cops attempted to fight through the sudden crowd, I limped ahead and ducked into the communal toilet. Inside, I threw the bolt behind me and squeezed past the toilet. The bathroom’s got doors on both sides, so it can service more tenants. JB Splunge, my beneficent landlord, sifts through all the waste and sells whatever data he can scrape from it as demographics. You can pull a good five or six hundred demos from a full septic tank—enough to buy a handjob and a hot meal if you’re not picky about the meal or the hands.

What Splunge did to the tanks, I now needed to do for my mind. I didn’t need to stay ahead of the cops forever. (Which was good, because I wasn’t going to—the tall one was already doubling back to find another way over to me, while the short one put her shoulder into the door I’d bolted.) All I needed was to buy enough time to figure

out what they wanted to learn from me, then sell off the memories for demographics before they could ask me about them. Demos spend easier than fat facts—they’re the closest to the old fiat currency we’ve got left—and on top of that a head full of Bangladeshi soft-drink preferences isn’t so incriminating during a police interrogation. The only problem was, I had no idea why the cops wanted to talk to me. In the old days, it wouldn’t have been a question, but I’d been disappointingly well behaved for the last couple of decades. Whatever they were curious about, it was probably something I’d learned under the buffer, a fact I’d corrected and therefore been allowed to keep on commission. Hence the sifting I was gonna have to do.

“Get back here!” the tall cop called out. The last word was garbled by the sound of one of my neighbors sticking a cotton swab into his mouth. I ignored him, and faced my greatest nemesis: the stairs.

My average daily step count, according to my medical monitor, is twenty-seven. Six days out of the week, I only get about ten. The average is only so high because once a week, on Sunday, I walk the sixty-two steps down to street level, buy some street produce, breathe some air with a little extra oxygen in it, and hobble back up. Today was not Sunday, but the cops after me didn’t seem to care. I gripped the railing and started down the first flight.

I stumbled on a slippery metal step, narrowly ducking under a kid who was hanging from a girder, trying to snip a lock of hair off my rat-tail. The crowd was thinner around me—even the old and the poor can afford synthetic blood these days—but a few brave souls still shot their shots. On the second-floor landing, I accessed my memories. My left eye—the worse one—went blind, and then hallucinated a messy desk with a pile of old memory cartridges on it, content summaries scrawled on their surfaces in black marker. I know I could just see a list as an overlay, but I got my niece to show me how to implement the custom interface. I find it comforting.

“Local,” I muttered, too focused on getting down a creaking ladder to make it subvocal. The cartridges sorted themselves into two piles on the table. Only three files in the local pile. Still probably too many to read while one of my neighbors swabbed bloody sweat off my scalp with a mechanical appendage. “Value greater than ten k demos,” I muttered. The three local facts split into two high-value facts and one low-value. I grabbed the first juicy one and mimed stuffing it into my mouth. The headline exploded across the 

 backs of my eyes.

Pop Idol Shiva Stallion Denies Eating Own Clones

I spat out the cartridge. That wasn’t it. Just a continuation of a battle I’d been having with an entertainment reporter for the past three days. “Shiva” (formerly Mars Trampoline, formerly Alabaster Wankhome, formerly DROP TABLE Starlets) had been changing her name on an almost hourly basis in an attempt to evade the rumors going around about her. The reporter who submitted the story had called her Mars this time, and in a few minutes “Shiva” probably wouldn’t be right, either. If I’d had the time, I would have cashed the fact in for demos before another name change made it worthless, but I could hear the cops starting to throw their weight around on the walkway above me. I stuffed the other fat fact in my mouth.

Texan Ambassador Pleads Guilty to Arms Smuggling Charges

The writer of this one had misidentified the make and model of the assault weapons the diplomat had been importing. I got a lot of corrections like these—civilians are clueless about guns, and nearly everyone’s a civilian these days. But I wouldn’t have needed a drone to check that fact, and the cops don’t tend to meddle in international business anyway. Another dud. I spat out the cartridge. A stick-thin woman hanging spiderlike from a web of rope above me caught the spittle in a plastic grocery bag. My lungs ached, and my throat was dry. The blood on my arms and head was starting to turn crunchy and brown. I dragged myself onto the final staircase, leading with my “good” leg. The cops were only a floor behind. I needed more time. I brought up my chat interface and flashed Ty. After a couple pings, his avatar bloomed inside my head, more smell than visual, a stink like coffee grounds and fish.

TydeeTy: What you want? Doing my route.

me: Good. I need a pickup. Cops after me.

TydeeTy: Wow, blast from the past.

me: Is that a yes?

TydeeTy: 50k demos.

me: I could always let them catch me.

me: Tell them who dumped that load of rotten pumpkins in front of City Hall during the sanitation strike.

TydeeTy: Ok how about you owe me a drink.

me: Deal, trashman

I was down at sea level now, on the rotting wooden pier that rings the outer edge of the bottom level. I could practically hear my kneecaps grinding against bone as I forced myself to keep walking. The curious crowd thinned out down here—tenants who can afford a bottom crate aren’t nearly so hungry for data—which meant the cops would be catching up any second. I could hear their boots clanging on the staircase. I barely made it to the back door before the short one hit the bottom of the stairs and put a boot through the rotten wood. I shut the door on her curses.

The midday sun insisted on sautéing my eyeballs the moment I was outside. Didn’t matter where I looked—up at the gray-blue sky, across at the bleached concrete buildings of the warehouse district, down at the gently stinking seawater in the canal—the sun used every available surface to make sure my corneas stayed molested. My medical monitor congratulated me rather sarcastically on venturing outside twice in one week.

“Shut up,” I muttered, and it did.

The off-white plastic sidewalk bobbed beneath my exhausted feet, just out of sync with the building’s dumpster on its heavy steel chain. One last feat of acrobatics. I hauled over the dumpster by its handle, shoved the lid open, braced one foot against the disintegrating concrete wall, and (against the muffled complaints of my medical monitor) half jumped, half fell in. More than half fell, actually. I hit a disappointingly thin layer of moist garbage near the bottom of the bin. Damn dust eaters get nearly everything these days. Even I have one. You can’t beat the convenience, until one day you’re trying to hide in a dumpster and there’s nothing soft to break your fall.

I heard the door bang open next to me, and two pairs of boots stomped out onto the sidewalk. They’d check the dumpster eventually, but not before they’d exhausted every less disgusting option. That gave me, unfortunately, a little more time to think. Neither of the high-value facts I’d corrected that day seemed to be the reason they were after me, and anything nonlocal I’d checked would be out of their jurisdiction. That left the one I’d skipped for being low-interest. My hopes weren’t high, but I was out of options. I shoved the cartridge into my mind’s mouth.

You Won’t Believe How These Six Rich Assholes Spend Their Data

A gossip column. Pure clickbait. I stifled a groan. InfoDrip doesn’t usually vet low-rent gossip. That’s more of a job for someone like you, no offense. ID does make an exception, though, for gossip about

 its top execs. Keeping corrections of that stuff in house means the execs aren’t getting snooped by municipal checkers, which helps keep their data private. And, sure enough, one of the Six Rich Assholes on the list was InfoDrip’s toppest exec of all, Thomas Quentin Mahoney, CEO. My corrections were all in his section, and they all seemed to be fairly minor line edits. I skimmed them:

The CEO of InfoDrip, Thomas Mahoney, spends 14 trillion demos every…=>…Mahoney, spent 14 trillion demos every…

Mahoney eats genuine beef, drinks unlimited water…=> Mahoney ate genuine beef, drank unlimited water…

Mahoney lives in a repurposed missile silo…=> Mahoney lived in a repurposed missile silo…

And so on, changing every present tense to the past tense. What, had Mahoney lost his fortune overnight? A quick scan of the public feeds didn’t turn up anything with his name. And a rich guy getting poor all of a sudden probably wouldn’t have the cops poking around my building. I had a feeling that Mahoney’s past tense was a lot more permanent. I checked the supporting files I’d attached to verify my corrections, hoping for more context. There was only one file attached: “Live drone footage captured 8:47:22.” I tried to open the file, but got the missing-tooth feeling of a file-not-found error instead. Red text blinked before my eyes, filling my HUD:

Data Missing

Removed for Reasons of Organizational Security

Authorized by A.M.

I had no idea what that meant, which I guess was the point. That was fine, though. I knew enough: Thomas Mahoney, CEO of InfoDrip, was dead. Recently dead, probably, and—judging by the cops—murdered, to boot. Given all of that, the fact that I knew so little was actually a blessing. I just needed to find a broker willing to buy the Rumor of Mahoney’s death off me, and I could pay my rent with the proceeds. If that sounds ghoulish to you, spend a couple decades sharing a communal toilet with a diaper fetishist, and then we’ll talk.

I heard the dogged burbling of Ty’s trash barge coming down the canal. There was a mechanical grinding and a sharp jerk, and then I was tumbling

out of the underfilled dumpster and into a proper heap of everybody’s leftovers. My face landed in something wet that smelled like sharp cheddar and urinal cakes, my chest landed in a forest of springs that used to be a mattress, and my legs landed in what felt like a nest of cockroaches. I had a couple guesses what my feet had landed in, but then it started slithering and I stopped trying to guess. From up in the cab, Ty’s sweet stink messaged me.

TydeeTy: Where to, geezer?

me: Just finish your route while I handle this, then Villains for that drink.

Ty responded to that with something I’m sure was incisive and clever, but another chat request grabbed my attention before I could read it. The name on the chat request made me forget the pain in my knees and back and hips, the layer of slime and seawater coating my skin, even the unidentified trash creature now shyly slithering up my pants leg. It was a name from the old days, the Braining Wheels days, when this sort of thing was a daily affair and I was busy racking up the maladies I was now paying off. It was the name of a man whose kortikode I’d tried to block, more than once, but never quite managed to. The name, for all I wished it wasn’t, was Auggie Wolf.

I accepted the request. Auggie’s avatar bloomed in my brain, sharpened teeth and flayed ears unchanged after twenty-five long years. But there was something in the simulated eyes I’d never seen before: he was nervous.

Auggie: Hey, Orr.

Auggie: Long time no see.

me: Not long. Only two and a half decades.

Auggie: Listen…

Auggie: You know I’d never…kill anyone, right?

me: …

me: Where are you?

Auggie: The police station, dummy. How about bailing me out? I’ve only got the one call.

I told Ty to stop the barge. I pushed myself upright in my nest of wet trash, and waved to the furious cops on the sidewalk below.

“Hey,” I said as the barge drifted to a reluctant stop, “I’ve decided I’d like to go with you after all. No hard feelings?”

 

Submission2

Welcome back. Forgive the multiple chapters, but I just don’t have the stamina to give you the whole story in one take. I know it’s you, though. Fact checking’s so dull, any one of you would jump at the chance to flag a story like mine. At least, I like to think so. Either way, I’m gonna act like you’re the same person. So.

It was a tense ride from the trash truck to police headquarters, where they were keeping Auggie. The cops didn’t bother putting me in the cage at the back of their boat, but the short one did take it upon herself to repeatedly hold my head underwater as we sped along the canals—“to sanitize you,” she said. The way the water tasted, I’m not sure it was any cleaner than the garbage, but the high-pressure wash did get the rest of the blood off.

We motored through J-Town, passing the half-sunken Little Tokyo Market Place, with its red-plastic plaza floating amid what were once the second floors of all its shops and restaurants. The bottom floors were still there, I knew, their doors sealed with boat glue and their windows looking out at a curated selection of tropical fish. The boat didn’t slow down, and I watched our wake swamp more than a few pedestrians navigating the bobbing plastic sidewalks behind us. Between the Commonwealth, C-SEC, and the Strategic Core, cops have to get by with whatever petty authority they can cling to.

LAPD HQ looked like an enormous steel housefly on dozens of plastic stilts. The place was built before the levees broke, and the plastic legs were added to keep the exciting concrete architecture from crumbling into the sea. The bulk of the building was a cube of windows that someone once told me was meant to symbolize transparency in policing, but if those windows had ever been transparent, they had been obscured by half a century of acid rain and salt accumulation on top of their mirrored glass. The building bristled with antennae, scrutinizing the sunken neighborhood around it from every angle. My captors docked among the building’s many legs and lugged me inside.

They left me in what was either a waiting room or a holding room, depending on which side of the badge you were on. I felt something I hadn’t felt in at least fifteen years, though I thought about it daily: air conditioning. The air was cool, the furniture was modern, and as I stepped through the door, my kortiko autoconnected to the building’s guest AR layer, which attempted to soothe my unsoothable nerves with pleasant lobby music. Commonwealth or no, Investigation pays well in a city like Los Angeles.

A shortish, stocky Black cop with a cheap suit and a sharp fade seemed to be waiting for me when I came in. They reminded me of an artist’s rendering I’d seen once of a spacecraft designed for stealth. It’d been blocky and angular, not the kind of aerodynamic you’d expect, but, then, in space it didn’t need to be. The cop had the same silent blockiness, the same unexpected efficiency of build. The guest layer gave me the cop’s name and pronouns on an overlay: Detective Mar Coldwin, they/them.

“You the one he messaged?” they said without preamble. They had eyes that sucked in light and gave back nothing, and their mouth was a jail of teeth that only let out questions. They were not the sort of cop I’d been hoping to deal with.

“Orr Vue,” I said, extending a hand, “Fact Checker for InfoDrip. Pleased to meet you, Mx.”

Instead of taking 

 my hand, they summoned an LAPD breathing mask from the collar of their dress shirt, further inhibiting my ability to read them.

“Why did he message you?” they asked, as if they were continuing a conversation we’d been having for hours.

“I…I don’t know,” I said. “All he told me was that you all had him here, and it had something to do with a murder he didn’t commit.” I’d expected questions, but not two steps inside the front door. They hadn’t even invited me to sit, and I could already feel the cramps creeping up the sides of my legs. I was uncomfortable, and they could tell.

“What murder?” they asked. “If you had to guess?”

“If I had to guess?” I stalled. I knew they weren’t just looking at me with their eyes. A cop HUD is one of the most powerful lie-detecting interfaces data can buy. From Detective Coldwin’s perspective, my face probably looked less like a face and more like a weather map—microexpressions, temperature fluctuations, subvocalizations, all lit up with shiny green labels. I got to look through one once, back when I used to fuck a cop, and it felt like seeing people naked. Once a cop knows you’re lying, they can apply for a warrant, and once they have a warrant, there are much more effective methods of data extraction than asking questions. That’s leaving aside the minimum ten-year sentence for counterfeiting info. Basically, lying to a cop at my age is suicidal, and I promised I’d only off myself by autoerotic asphyxiation, so I gave my best guess: “The murder of Thomas Mahoney.”

“How do you know about the Mahoney murder?” I could see what was happening now. They were rushing me, hoping I’d give something away. But you don’t survive on a fact checker’s commission by just giving data away.

“I’m a fact checker.” I shrugged. “We end up with all kinds of info and no clue why.”

“I didn’t ask why,” they said. “I asked how you knew, and that sounded suspiciously like an evasion.”

“All right, all right, I checked a fact about him during my shift today,” I said. “Something written before he died, so the whole article was in the wrong tense. That’s how I know, okay?” I wasn’t trying to evade the question, but acting like I might be had broken their rhythm and given me a chance to stabilize. For the first time, I glanced down at their stub-fingered hands, and noticed that the right one—the one that had very deliberately not shaken mine—was deftly spinning an expensive-looking pen. It seemed more like a nervous tic than a conscious affectation. If I couldn’t get any information out of their mouth, maybe I could get some from their hands.

“When did you learn that information?” they pressed on. As much as I would have

 liked to give a vague answer for frugality’s sake, the memory was timestamped.

“Eight thirty-one a.m.,” I said. My forthrightness was rewarded by a little twitch in Coldwin’s right hand. The pen faltered mid-spin before resuming its hypnotic motion. The time was important. They looked down, caught me staring at their hand, and stuffed it into their pocket. Along one wall, a tasteful gray couch beckoned, begging me to rest my weary joints on its soft cushions, if only I were invited to do so.

“Who is Auggie Wolf to you?” they asked. A rapid change of direction, designed to retake the initiative. It worked.

“No one anymore,” I said, dropping my eyes. “I haven’t heard from him in twenty-five years.” When I looked up, Coldwin was staring at me, prompting me not so subtly to continue.

“He was a friend,” I said, unsure whether I used the past tense because he wasn’t a friend anymore, or because in my mind he had already died.

“Where did you and Auggie meet?” Coldwin’s words cut a gash through my reminiscence. I grimaced, which is the closest I come to a smile when I’m sober.

“Braining Wheels. Old mindracing club in WeHo. Still open, last I checked, but I haven’t checked in a long time.”

“Before I take you in to see him,” they said, “I’d appreciate it if you shared any potentially relevant information about your relationship with Auggie—the last time you saw him, any aspirations he shared with you, people he fought with, that sort of thing.”

Would you believe I almost answered? I was that out of practice, and they were that smooth. But instead I shook my head, made my grimace as grinlike as it would go, and said, “Sorry, Officer, but by my count that was a who, a what, a where, a when, a why, a how, and a yes-no. By law, you’ve run through all the questions you’re allowed to ask a civilian in a routine conversation. Now, can I see my friend?”

Detective Coldwin narrowed their eyes, but didn’t press. I shudder to think how much data the cops would’ve pumped out of me over the years without the Seven Questions Legislation.

They weren’t done yet, though. Without breaking eye contact, they gestured over my shoulder at the short cop who’d power-washed me on the way in. Officer Menendez, the overlay told me, she/her. Menendez pressed the powder-blue Dragonfly drone into Coldwin’s palm. Coldwin didn’t even bother looking at it.

“You don’t have a permit for this,” they said. They were out of questions, but this I had to answer.

“Not personally,” I replied. “It’s licensed through InfoDrip, my employer. Strictly for use under the buffer.”

“Mahoney’s company,” Coldwin said. Not a question, a threat. “Okay, come with me.”

Coldwin made no allowance for my decrepit shamble, so I was breathing heavy before we were halfway down the corridor. I knew, though, that aching limbs and shortness of breath were the least of my problems. I hadn’t given away much in their little question game, but only because I didn’t have much to give. The fact that the cops were so interested in what I knew made me mighty nervous about how much I didn’t. What had my drone seen that tipped me off about the murder? Why did Coldwin seem surprised at the timing? And what did Auggie Wolf, the mindracing wizard who walked out of my life twenty-five years ago, have to do with any of it? I was rich with questions, but you know what they say: If questions were answers, then children would be richer than popes, and who wants that? Children are assholes.

I finally caught up with Coldwin at the door of the interview room, and they opened it for me—more, I suspect, to keep my dirty hands off the handle than out of any kind of courtesy. They closed it behind me, too, but didn’t lock it. The inside was like any other interrogation box in the city: gray-blue acoustic pads bolted onto lead-shielded walls, a scar of fluorescent lighting blaring from the equally shielded ceiling. Gummy gray floor that’d probably eaten more than its fair share of blood. The only unusual thing in the room, just like in any room he inhabited, was Auggie.

Auggie Fucking Wolf. Literally, had his middle name changed so he could introduce himself that way without irony. Five foot five, a hundred pounds soaking wet, a build that might have looked frail if it wasn’t constantly animated with such frenetic energy. His vicious leanness made the tendons stand out on the backs of his hands, the sinews dance in his ever-active forearms; made his neck look like the roots of a tree digging curiously into his lithe body. His eyes were green, his chin was knife-sharp, and his ears were cut into a wicked fringe that ran from lobe to helix. At least, that’s what he’d looked like when I’d last seen him, twenty-five years ago.

Now, in the interview room, most of the parts were still in the same places, but they seemed to fit together differently. His elbows, which rested on the dull gray interview table, had become as sharp as his chin, and the olive skin that once clung so tightly to his muscles had grown looser and taken on an ashy tinge. His always-too-long nails had yellowed and thickened, his green eyes had sunk,

 and he’d lost one of his front teeth. All the hair on the front left quadrant of his skull had been burned away by the heat of his invasive kortiko, same model as mine, its position marked by a four-centimeter aluminum square ringed with puckered flesh five centimeters above his left eye. Even now, fifty years old, he looked too young to be wearing one of those.

Then there was the invasive itself. I stared at the dull metal plate a little too long—maybe because I never keep mirrors around, so I forget what mine looks like. There was a millimeter-long spur of bone poking out from the ridge of flesh around the edge of the contact plate. Our heads don’t want these things inside them. The machine’s incompatible with synthetic blood, the weight gives you neck pain, and the outdated hardware saves all your memories in a format that looks like plain text to anyone with newer-model headgear. If we’d waited just a few years, we could have gotten all the same benefits without drilling a hole in our own brains, but the military wasn’t willing to wait that long. Neither was Auggie, though no one forced him to get the operation. Seeing that little spur of bone trying desperately to push away that invading hunk of metal made me especially sorry for him. Imagine the things he could have done if he hadn’t been limited by our crummy hardware.

He caught me staring and smiled at me, and I noticed one of his canines was missing, too. Somehow, all his flaws only added to the appearance of dangerous solidity he’d always had, like the years of grease accumulated on an ancient monkey wrench.

“Orr,” he said. “Good to see you.”

“Better than good,” I said, pulling out a chair for myself and gratefully slumping into it. “Assumed you’d died.”

“Working on it,” he said.

“You always were,” I replied.

He chuckled and leaned back in his chair. That’s when I noticed the thing that was most different about him: the stillness. His fingers rested flat against the tabletop. His eyes held mine steadily. His jaw was relaxed, no sign of the grinding that we always joked would turn his teeth to powder. His constant activity had always made him fascinating to watch, but this inaction was somehow even more fascinating, if only because it was new. Also, he was wearing a dark-gray monastic robe. That was new, too.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he said. “These guys think I killed Thomas Mahoney.” He nodded at the two-way glass behind me, beyond which Detective Coldwin surely loomed.

“Why do they think that?” I asked. He blew a breath through pursed lips and put a bare foot against the edge of the table, tipping his chair back

“Probably because I was in the area when he died, and I don’t have an alibi, and I was the only one around who knew him personally.”

He said it in the same tone he used to use when describing the latest challenge the admins at Braining Wheels had cooked up for him. Like, “Oh, they just want me to sword-fight five guys while riding a unicycle, and also solve a Rubik’s Cube with my tongue.” He’d had reason to be cocky then. I couldn’t see the reason now.

“Why are you so calm about this?” I asked him.

“Side effect of the monastic life, I guess,” he said, gesturing at his robe.

“The monastic life?” I said. Then, finally putting it together, “Auggie, don’t tell me you joined…”

“Yup.” He smiled. “I’m a blockhead now. I live in the Barnsdall Monastery. So did Mahoney, until, uh, I guess this morning. They’re not done wiping my memories yet, but I’m already seeing the benefits.” He paused, chewed his lip, and gestured at the interrogation room. “And, I guess, the drawbacks.”

The blockheads. Formally known as the Brotherhood of the Uncarved Block. If you’re fortunate enough to be unaware of these crackpots, I’m sorry to burden you with the info. You know how some monks in olden times used to take a vow of poverty? Well, with information being currency nowadays and all, ten or so years ago some wackos got the bright idea to invent a Vow of Ignorance. An anonymous code monkey going by the moniker “Brother Null” wrote some kortiko firmware that pulls out all your memories and wipes your short-term cache every so often to keep you ignorant. They set up a couple locations around L.A. where you can live and work for free, as long as you agree to strap on one of those special kortikos. What they do with all the data they suck out of their members’ heads, no one’s quite sure, but let’s just say there’s a reason they never need to pass a collection plate. People call them “blockheads” because of the blocky kortikos they wear to wipe their memories, and because it’s a play on their name, and because they’re idiots. I’d never thought I’d hear Auggie describe himself that way.

“How…how long do you have?” I asked.

“Until my memories are all gone?” he said. “A few days, likely. Assuming they give me back the kortiko. Which they should!” He addressed the last bit to the two-way glass. “They took it off so they could question me without me forgetting what they’d asked. Lot of good it did them.” He chuckled.

“Still doesn’t explain why you’re so calm,” I said. “You’re a murder suspect, with no

memory of the murder in question and no way to prove you didn’t do it. If it was me, I’d be pissing myself.”

“Really?” he said. “Has old age made you incontinent? I’m jealous, I’ve always wanted the excuse. Anyway, silly, I’m calm because you’re here.”

“Me? Why?”

“If anyone can clear my name,” he said, “it’s you. There’s a reason you became a fact checker and I became, like, a drug addict and then, you know, this. You are still a fact checker, right?”

“Yeah, for InfoDrip. But come on, Auggie, you’ve always been smarter, you—”

“That’s great!” he said. “InfoDrip was Mahoney’s company, right? Hey, maybe you even already know who killed him, huh?”

I clenched my teeth to keep from telling him the whole story in front of the cops. “If I ever knew, I don’t know now,” I said, trying to make it sound like a joke.

He didn’t take it like one, though. His green eyes, which, even sunken in his skull, had watched the whole conversation with a twinkling vigor, abruptly lost their twinkle. He laughed to cover it, but he seemed truly disappointed that I hadn’t just swung in on a golden rope to rescue him outright. The Auggie I knew would never hang his hopes on something so foolish. Then again, maybe this wasn’t the Auggie I knew.

“Hah, that’s fine,” he said. “You’ll figure it out. You’re tenacious. And you, uh…”

“What?” I said.

“Well…I’m fifty. I last saw you twenty-five years ago, and met you five years before that. The Brotherhood’s memory wipe goes from the front and the back and meets in the middle, so…”

“So I’m one of the last people you still remember,” I finished for him. If he was as far gone as he said, he wouldn’t remember his parents anymore. No recent friendships, either. Just me, and a few of the guys we used to run with at Braining Wheels back in the day. It was piss-poor company, but I was glad he still knew us at least. Still knew me.

“Yeah,” he sighed. “So…you’re gonna help me, right?”

I looked at the walls and ceiling, suffocated with acoustic padding. I looked over my shoulder at the two-way glass, felt cold cop eyes peering in from the other side. I looked at the door I’d entered through, heavy with shielding, and so far away. Then I looked back at him, at those familiar flayed ears, the dexterous hands, the green eyes watching me from within the sharpened skull with their look of

worried intelligence. I couldn’t remember Auggie ever asking for my help before. He was always too clever, too quick. By the time I got there to help, he would’ve moved on to an entirely different predicament. It brought me a sick kind of pride, there in the interrogation room, to know that now, in this brainwashed and weakened state, twenty-five years past his prime and uncountable decades past mine, he finally needed me for something. That was the reason I gave myself, when I chucked my better judgment in the trash and said, “I’ll try.”

“You’ll do better than try.” He smiled, exposing one of his three remaining canines. “I don’t know much, but somehow I know that.”

“We’ll see,” I said. Then we just sat there, studying each other across the table. I felt the tickling in my stomach I used to get before a match, or a fistfight, or a viciously good lay. It felt like he was waiting for me to say something, or maybe I was waiting for him to say something, or maybe we were both being very quiet so we could hear the thing that neither of us was saying. It felt too nice, so I pushed myself to my feet.

“I guess I better get to work, then,” I said.

“What are you gonna do?”

I supported myself against the back of my chair as I shuffled around it toward the door. “The most dangerous thing a guy can do these days: ask questions.”

Auggie chuckled. I put my hand on the door handle. A thought stopped me.

“Speaking of questions,” I said, “you mentioned you knew Mahoney personally. How did you know him?”

Auggie raised his eyebrows at me, his forehead deforming as it scrunched against the contact plate of his kortiko. “You don’t remember? You’ve been keeping too much of yourself in that storage unit of yours. I don’t know what we were to each other when he died, but, back when you and I met, I was his ‘live-in personal assistant.’ ” He winked at me. “There are worse arrangements.”

“Huh,” I said, suddenly angry for no clear reason. “Good to know.” I knocked on the door a little harder than I needed to, but the feeling passed as suddenly as it had arrived.

“Take it easy, Orr,” he said, as the cop outside opened the door for me. “And thanks.”

“Sure,” I said, and walked out the door directly into Detective Coldwin’s implacable stare.

“Well, that was a waste of time,” they said flatly.

“What,” I said, “you expected him to tell me something he hadn’t told you, in front of you? How dumb do you think he is?”

“You don’t get to ask me questions,” said Coldwin. “Officer Menendez will show you

out.”

“Hang on,” I said, as Menendez moved in to “escort” me. “You can’t keep Auggie in here like this.”

“Sure, we can,” said Coldwin. “He told you himself what a prime suspect he is.”

“You’ve got nothing on him,” I said, “no hard evidence. So he was in the monastery when the murder happened, and he happened to know the victim. That’s a paper-thin case. Toilet-paper thin.”

“You’re talking like you’ve got something to poke holes in it with.” Coldwin raised an eyebrow. “Some ‘hard evidence’ of your own. If that were the case…”

“No,” I admitted, “I don’t…”

Coldwin nodded, and Menendez resumed her approach. I held up a hand. ...