Six names, and six causes of death. That’s all I had to work with. There’d been some preliminary investigation done when they’d first come to light, but it mostly boiled down to a mention of time and place for each individual. Since I wouldn't get much work done here at the Les Deux Magots, I retreated to my office and started going over the files.

Some folks think that we Avatars live in a fantasy world, and I suppose that’s true to some extent. Where the reality differs from their expectations is more a manner of degree than anything else, and my workspace is no exception. I could have something half a hectare wide, with a view of Saturn’s rings and plush carpeting a meter thick, featuring a wet bar plus hot and cold running secretaries, but the idea behind having an office is to actually get work done, not live the life of a billionaire playboy.

Instead, it’s something a bit more austere, patterned after many Noir detective films of the early to mid-twentieth century. A small window overlooking an alley, a functional desk and swivel chair, a chalkboard for notes, and my name on the door’s glass partition. An old-style telephone and battered typewriter sit front and center, there’s the obligatory bottle of whiskey in the bottom drawer, and if I really want to set the mood a smoky jazz soundtrack will play in the background. The only thing missing is a beautiful Femme Fatale sitting opposite, dabbing at her eyes and begging me to off her husband. I spread out the files across my desk and looked them over, searching for a place to start. Since one victim was a fellow Avatar, I started there.

Mallus had been an Information Retrieval Specialist like me, with an impressive career. Other than the Katabasis mission, nothing really stood out in his dossier, except of course the way he died. Being an Avatar doesn’t automatically make one immortal, and our gestalt can be damaged in several ways, though we’re aware of those and do our best to avoid them. Being in the presence of a strong enough magnetic or radiation field will do it, as will a complete power drain of our current memory storage unit. If someone could isolate the physical location of our program and destroy it while preventing our escape, that would work too. Attenuation will do us in as well, but the only problem was I couldn’t find any of those contributing factors that might explain his demise. Because his death was so unusual, there were those that believed someone had hacked his program.

That, unfortunately, was possible, though exceedingly rare. The code that defines our existence isn’t like what runs your computers, but there are points of commonality. Disrupt that code badly enough, and the gestalt mind behind it will cease to exist. As theories went it wasn’t bad, and played right to Chris’s concerns, but I wasn’t sure I bought it. We have a vested interest in avoiding being tampered with and we spend a great deal of time and effort maintaining our defenses and watching for malicious viruses. One could have gotten through anyway, but it was unusual enough for me to look at other possibilities first.

Something tickled the back of my digital mind as I pored over the data, though it took me a while to realize what was bothering me. An Avatar perishing like this was unusual enough to warrant a more thorough examination of the facts, instead of the rather cursory review I was now reading. It was almost as if someone had prevented a more serious probe from being conducted or had white-washed the pertinent files after the fact.

I leaned back in my chair, before pulling open the bottom drawer and pouring myself two fingers. Could this have been an inside job? Now that was a truly scary thought. Until now I’d assumed some outside agent had been responsible, probably the Troika, but if it were a fellow Terran…

I mean, it wasn’t unheard of. One only needed to look as far as the Proteans, who were still reeling from the havoc Samara had wrecked. Alien masters manipulating human puppets to further their interests, with Terrans going along with it despite the consequences to their own race. Or if one of the Tu’udh’hizh’ak had got a hold of them, they could easily be under their telepathic control, doing their bidding as an agent provocateur. Though it could simply be the age-old motives of greed and revenge at play. Whatever it was, I’d need to play things close to the vest, limiting my contact to as few others as possible, reporting only to Chris herself.

All right, so where to next? Where could I go to find more information?

Luckily, he hadn’t been on a mission at the time of his death, otherwise he’d likely be listed as “Missing, Presumed Lost”. An Information Retrieval Specialist spends a lot of time riding the electronic highways and stowing away aboard alien ships, all of which carry with it a certain amount of risk. They didn’t make the galaxy with electronic personalities in mind. Instead we’re an afterthought, a tribe of mice surrounded by elephants. We survive the same way all small fry do, by hiding in the nooks and crannies where no one thinks to look.

Of course, it also doesn’t hurt that we know your secrets, and the ones we don’t know we’ll soon ferret out. Knowledge is power, and it’s our stock in trade. Keep that in mind if you’re ever tempted to do us dirty.

One problem I faced with Mallus was there was no physical evidence. We don’t have a physical body, no corpus delicti to search for clues. When he derezzed, his program devolved into random electronic noise, an incoherent jumble of random 1’s and 0’s that dissipated in nanoseconds. Perhaps the physical memory storage unit might tell me something, if I knew where it was now, eighteen years after the fact, and if it hadn’t been destroyed or recycled since then. It was worse than a needle in a haystack, and a complete dead end.

Witnesses? There were a few listed, but after a quick read-through of their testimony, I had little hope I’d find anything useful there. For one thing, none of them were Avatars, so what little they could tell me would be secondhand. Worse, a corporeal would only see what Mallus wanted them to see. What we choose to project onto a screen rarely has any bearing on what we’re actually doing, and even if he had been showing them a feed that was one hundred percent accurate, there are still things we do that simply don’t translate.

But let’s game it out, shall we? Say Mallus realized something was wrong, that he was under attack, and immediately began broadcasting that information to anyone within range. What kind of attack was he under? DDOS? Polymorphic Botnet? Logic Bomb? Would the flesh and blood witnesses be able to understand the differences between them? Probably not. Really, all I had to work with was the transcripts of his last conversations, which told me nothing, plus his session and workflow logs. I’d already gone over those with a fine-toothed comb and found nothing there as well. His program simply… shut down.

Which isn’t supposed to happen.

I stood up and paced, trying to spot some clue that I’d missed. It helps me think.

… Sigh… I knew this was going to come up, eventually. Look, I get it. Why am I, an Avatar, an uploaded electronic personality, constantly creating illusory spaces for me to inhabit? Do I need them in order to survive?

Well, the answer is no, no; I don’t. Not really. I can survive just fine in an unfiltered environment if I have to, I mean it’s not like it’ll kill me or anything, but we find it uncomfortable. We were born flesh and blood humans, spent our formative years walking and talking and breathing and eating and everything else, so when we make the leap and leave our old bodies behind, creating our own space is the first trick we learn. It’s simply more comfortable for us to mimic the way we used to live, a way for our minds to feel more at home. That’s all. So when I’m guzzling down champagne or pacing in my office, I’m simply gravitating towards the familiar. It’s what we know, so we recreate that life on the other side of the electronic divide. Our minds aren’t well suited for an existence without those illusions to help keep us sane.

I stopped pacing and sat back down, no closer to solving the puzzle than when I’d started, when I took another look at the list. Six deaths, spaced out over a five-year period, but Mallus had died first. Interesting. Why start with him? If our unknown adversary had eliminated the remaining crew, there were others that were more easily accessible. Did they decide to tackle the tougher assignment first?

Another glance at the list seemed to eliminate that possibility. If they’d chosen to remove the more dangerous survivors first, then the Protean Chikere would be the obvious next target, except that out of the group she’d died fourth. Back to square one.

Was there something he knew? Some bit of information he’d gleaned from the mission but hadn’t shared with the others? Or was it our unknown assassins had somehow gained access to him before the others? The prospect of an inside man raised its ugly head yet again, but all I had were questions, and no answers.

A thought occurred to me, and I reached out and pulled down a copy of the Katabasis’ mission report… the revised version, not the fiction Maggie and the others had maintained prior to the second mission. The reason they’d kept the truth suppressed was because they’d feared whoever had reprogrammed Master Schnoebelen into murdering the crew might come after them as well.

Judging by what happened after, it seemed they might have been onto something.

The problem I was having was that while the ship had sustained damage because of Maggie’s efforts, that occurred after Schnoebelen started his killing spree. Unless the captain had locked him out of the computer’s memory core, Mallus should have had full access to the ship’s monitoring and security systems. He should have been able to report who was responsible, their whereabouts, and perhaps even prevent him from murdering others. So why hadn’t he?

A sick feeling settled deep inside me. Had Mallus been the inside man, surreptitiously aiding the reprogrammed Tinker as he’d wandered the ship, gunning down anyone within reach? But if that was the case, why wait over twenty years before eliminating him? What changed? Did he decide to blackmail his handlers, only for them to conclude he was now a liability? Had there been some new discovery that reframed the circumstances of the mission? A political revolt behind the scenes that altered the landscape? For that matter, how had they gotten to him in the first place? What could the Troika… or whoever… offer an Avatar that might tempt him into betraying his own kind? As uploaded personalities, luxuries mean nothing to us since we can conjure up anything we want or need up at will. While they may not be the genuine article in the physical sense, they are completely real to us.

Some sort of leverage then? Had someone he cared about been threatened, forcing him to betray his crew? Possible, but difficult to track down at this late date. I suppose it’s possible he was just an asshole, except that the psychological testing we do before accepting someone into the clan weeds those sorts out. Still, it could happen. People can slip through the cracks, though it’s rare.

Questions, questions, questions. Theories I had in abundance, but not a shred of evidence to back any of them up. I was beginning to wonder if this was a wild goose chase, or some practical joke Chris had come up with to amuse herself. Leaning back in my chair, I considered my options. I suppose I could whistle up an ersatz copy of Sherlock Holmes and dump it all in his lap, but the problem there was that simulacrums lacked any genuine spark of spontaneous thought. They were good enough to populate a party with if you were so inclined or warm your bed as long as you weren’t expecting any sort of connection, but there was a reason machine intelligence had never taken hold. Well, that and the Yīqún. Nothing like a genocidal race of self-replicating monsters to take the bloom off the rose.

Nope, it was just me. But I needed something, some actual piece of evidence to work with, some clue I could use to kick-start my investigation. Without that, I’d just end up chasing my tail. I needed an anchor. A big one. Something like…

I bolted upright as the answer came to me.

In a flash, I started chasing it down. It took a while, digging through the records of rival clans and alien databases, until I finally found what I had been searching for… the current location of the Corsair ship Katabasis.

It was a longshot, in fact even calling it that was being massively optimistic. The odds of finding anything there after all these years were astronomical; any system I might be interested in had likely long since been replaced, but it was all I had. After the mission to Earth, the ship had been refurbished, though no one wanted to fly her. A fresh coat of paint and a name change had taken care of that when they rechristened her, the ship now known as the CCS Longjump. According to the Corsair records I’d managed to... ahem... “locate”, she was now out plying her trade somewhere near Epsilon Cassiopeia.

Getting there could prove… tricky.

For something that far out, I needed transportation. I couldn’t ask the Corsairs for help, not on this one, which meant I needed to find my own way there. I started a database search of any known vessels headed in that direction and got a few hits, but nothing fast enough or soon enough. That was a problem. I’d promised Chris I’d sort this all out as soon as possible, which meant playing a little fast and loose in order to meet her deadline. I didn’t have a problem with that, but it’s always smarter to break the rules with your eyes wide open.

So… time to hijack a ship.