Tears in Rain by Rosa Montero, Lilit Zekulin Thwaites Page B

police used, a powerful tool that immediately deconstructed the original fragment of Myriam and showed the image’s ID properties, which, understandably, corresponded to those of the RRM. As for the additional footage, the program couldn’t find the original sequence on the web, so it performed a hypothetical reconstruction. It was the gutting of a pig and might have originated in a legitimate slaughterhouse, because the animal seemed to have been killed first in the regulation manner, using anesthesia and a stun gun. The image’s ID properties had been carefully erased, together with all its electronic tags, making it almost impossible to track down. Although there were now fewer and fewer slaughterhouses—in part due to a growing sensitivity toward animals, and in part because in order to reduce CO 2 emissions, the government required meat eaters to acquire an expensive license—hundreds of them were still in operation across the planet. Moreover, the recording could have been made at any stage during the last three years, this being the software’s maximum life span, according to the program. As to the chip itself and theholograph ball, they were basic, everyday products, the sort any kid could buy in the local corner store to make a hologram to take to school. It would be very difficult to extract useful data from them. Nevertheless, Bruna started an exhaustive analysis of the sequence with the pig and left it running in the background. The analysis program would take hours to complete its task.
    She decided to take a break and eat something. She put an individual serving of compressed fish cakes into the Chef Express, and in one minute it was ready. She removed the lid, poured herself another glass of wine, and returned to sit in front of the main screen, eating straight from the container.
    “Find Pablo Nopal,” she said out loud.
    Various possibilities came up, and Bruna touched one, leaving a faint, greasy food stain on the screen. The man’s image came up instantly, a life-size 3-D head shot on the right-hand side of the screen, with various film clips on the left. Dark hair, slim, with a long, narrow nose, thin lips, big black eyes. An attractive guy. He was thirty-five: TTT age, had he been a rep. But he wasn’t. According to the records, Nopal was a playwright and novelist, as well as a memorist. And he did indeed enjoy a certain celebrity—not just for his books, which were well received, but also for a couple of scandals in his past. Seven years earlier, he had been accused of the murder of his elderly uncle, a patrician millionaire. Nopal just happened to be the sole beneficiary. He even spent a few months in custody, but in the end, there was some murky business about contaminated evidence, and Nopal was cleared due to lack of evidence.
    His reputation was tarnished, however, and many people continued to believe that he was guilty; in fact, the government stopped commissioning memories from him because of it all, so he hadn’t gone back to being a practicing memorist.
At least not officially
, Bruna thought to herself, because black market memories also needed memorists to write them. Three years after his acquittal, Nopal was implicated in another violent death—thistime, of his private secretary. He had been the last to see the victim alive, and for a time he was targeted by the police, although in the end he was never even accused. Naturally, both incidents increased the sales of his books. There was nothing like a really bad reputation to make you famous in this world.
    Bruna studied Nopal’s face. Yes, it was attractive, but it was also disturbing. An easygoing smile but too sardonic, too tough. An indecipherable expression in his eyes. He had published three novels, the first a few months after his uncle’s death. The title was
The Violent Ones
, and the book’s publication had been celebrated with a small cultural event. Bruna typed in her password and credit account number, paid five