(Fiction) Rule of Salts

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The technician at her feet looked up. “Is that too tight?”

Nio examined the heavy bracelet around her left ankle: woven Kevlar attached to a hardened plastic box with a single recessed infrared lens.

“It’s fine.”

The tech ratcheted the specially-shaped sprockets one click tighter and stood up. “Done,” he told the officers behind him.

The man in charge was Special Agent Roger Erving, who had flown in from New York after several days of negotiations. His office handled high profile cases and had originally investigated Sol’s death. He was neatly suited with a violet tie that complemented his dark skin. He was an inch or two shorter than average, but his piercing eyes and confident grip more than compensated. He wore a wedding band and a ruby-tipped class ring to a school Nio didn’t recognize. He spoke in a rich baritone, like a sports announcer or radio DJ.

“I’m not sure what Dr. Chang told you,” he said as the tech stepped away, “but your purview will be limited to assisting the Bureau in its investigation into the disappearance of Albumin Sol Einstein. You are authorized to conduct no other business or activities while under remand, is that understood?”

Nio nodded.

“Under the US Constitution and the laws of South Dakota, you are not obliged to admit guilt, and this agreement doesn’t infringe that right. However, it is an ‘at-will’ arrangement. It can be terminated by either party at any time. If we’re not satisfied with your progress, or if you’re not satisfied with how you’re being treated, just say the word and you will be taken into custody and returned to the Brown County Sheriff at the first available opportunity. Do you understand all of that as I’ve explained it to you?”

“What about Mr. Misery?”

“Any alleged crimes peripheral to this case are not your concern.” He glanced down to her socks like he just noticed she had no shoes. “You should’ve reported him to us.”

“Check your records, chief.” Nio crossed her arms. “I tried.”

Erving’s mouth turned down slightly. He turned and raised a hand to second agent, an enormous man, both tall and broad-shouldered, with a dark complexion that didn’t seem to belong to any ethnicity in particular.

“This is Agent Arlo Quinn from the Bureau’s Minneapolis office.”

His expensive Italian silk tie didn’t match the rest of his stiff-fabric suit, nor did his suit match his longish hair. He looked more like a surfer than an FBI man, but his bioelectrics were strong. Nio could feel him modulating between standard and heightened arousal, a pattern she had noticed was common with athletes, soldiers, and performers—anyone in the habit of reacting quickly.

“Unfortunately, Agent Quinn drew the short straw and got the arson case. He’s going to be looking after you, reporting to me, for the duration.”

“A babysitter,” Nio said, sizing him up.

“What did you expect?”

Agent Quinn’s dark brown, wiry hair was well tousled. His narrow eyes were constantly smiling even when, as then, his mouth wasn’t. He was recently clean shaven, judging from the razor burn on his neck, and noticeably handsome—in a very conventional sort of way. His face was extraordinarily symmetrical. He looked to be in his 30s, which was plenty of time for an equally conventionally attractive woman to scoop him up, but there was no ring on his finger.

“Do you have any questions for me?” Special Agent Erving asked.

“When do we talk about my side of this bargain?”

“After you demonstrate your willingness to cooperate and produce results. I respect Dr. Chang’s position on this and understand where he’s coming from. But we’re the ones taking the risk here. You’ve been granted a tremendous opportunity. Make the most of it.”

“When do I get my personal effects?”

“That’s up to the sheriff. Anything else?”

Nio shook her head.

“Then my advice is to take the evening. Relax. Get used to being out of your cell. Agent Quinn will buy you dinner. Nothing too fancy,” he added as an aside. “You start first thing in the morning. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a plane to catch.”

With that, he nodded to Agent Quinn and walked out the front.

“You have some ID?” Nio asked the big man. He had arrived late and she hadn’t had a chance to ask before.

Quinn looked incredulous, but he complied. He reached into the breast pocket of his coat and removed his credentials.

Nio studied them. “Arlo Miguel Quinn.” She looked up. “Miguel?”

“After my grandfather,” he said flatly.

Standing next to him, Nio thought he seemed even bigger. He had to be at least six-foot-six. He struck Nio as someone who used to lead an active life but didn’t since joining the FBI and was paying the price on his waistline. If he’d been married, Nio would’ve expected kids had entered the picture. If so, he didn’t have any pictures in his wallet. Maybe he was divorced.

He took the wallet back.

“How you gonna play it?” she asked.

“How am I going to play what?”

“Dirty Harry or Columbo?”

“Who’s Columbo? You wanna start with the vic’s house or where he died?”

“Neither. I don’t need to retrace your steps. We already know that doesn’t go anywhere. Are those the case files?”

A cardboard file holder stood like an altar on a bare desk.

Agent Quinn nodded. “Most of them.”

“Most?” Nio took the lid off and started looking.

“Everything that could be transferred electronically from New York and printed. The physical evidence is in a locker somewhere.”

“Do me a favor?” she asked.

“What’s that?”

“Get some coffee?”

He snorted once. “Pot’s over there.” He nodded toward the corner. “I’ll see about your personal effects. Don’t get comfortable. We’re not staying.”

Nio scowled but didn’t look up from the files. When Agent Quinn, stepped away, Nio tried to reach Ziggy again, but there was no answer. She hung up and was about to look for Mutiny’s number online when she noticed a picture. Sol’s face peeked sideways from a manila folder. She hadn’t seen him in years. He looked different. Like an adult. Mature. Respectable. He was a spitting image of his alter but had elected to forgo the iconic brush mustache and wild hair. He kept his neat. He had the same oval eyes she remembered, at once curious and maudlin. She sat down and turned the page.

More than any of them, Sol had followed in his alter’s footsteps. Mutiny had become a professional fighter, it was true, but in an entirely different sport. Sol became a physicist, and not just any physicist. He had picked up exactly where the other man had left off. He was trying to reconcile gravity with quantum mechanics. After completing his education at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, he became a fellow-in-residence at the Institute for Advanced Study, located at 1 Einstein Drive, Princeton, New Jersey. It was, as the organization’s president said at his welcoming speech, a homecoming. The institute, which was funded by grant and charged no tuition to those accepted, was a place for big minds to ponder even bigger problems. Freed from the necessity of earning a salary, he taught only when he wanted to, which was rarely. His publications were rarer still and covered everything from virtual particles to the variety of quantum phenomena in nature. Evolution, it seemed, had hit upon a number of clever uses. He was unmarried and had no children. Since he was ethnically Jewish, he had made a few token attempts to get involved with the local synagogue, but nothing seemed to come of it. He had friends at the institute, where he was quite popular, but none of them were close.

Unlike her, Sol had kept in touch with the others, but contact was sporadic. The FBI had collected every call, email, or text sent or received from any of his devices in the weeks leading up to his disappearance. One name immediately stood out. There was a reference code next to it, indicating the FBI had followed up. It took Nio several minutes to find the agent’s notes in the files. It had been a single, short call, so there was no reason for anyone to disbelieve the woman on the other end, who said that she and Sol had had a brief, pleasant conversation during which they made plans to see each other in the coming weeks. An entry in his daily planner confirmed that. Nio turned to a nearby PC and searched for Chancery.

“Chaz,” as the others had called her, had dreams since adolescence of running the world’s largest company. She was then settling for the 256th, a quantum computing upstart headquartered near Fermilab, just outside Chicago, where she was CEO. If Nio called and requested a meeting as herself, she knew Chaz would say she was busy. Instead, Nio called the company switchboard and asked for the CEO’s secretary, who explained that his boss was unavailable. Nio pretended to be disappointed and said she was a reporter with Vogue, whose name she found online while talking on the phone. She said she was going to be in town in two days and wondered if she could have a few minutes of the boss’s time for an article she was running on women in power. The secretary did his job and neither confirmed nor denied availability, but in so doing, did let it be known that the meeting was at least possible, which meant Chancery was scheduled to be in town that day.

“Thank you so much,” Nio said and hung up.

“Where’d you learn to do that?”

Nio turned. The enormous Agent Quinn was leaning against the neighboring desk, sipping coffee from a paper cup. It looked like a kiddie cup in his hand. The other held a bundle of sealed plastic evidence bags. One of them was large and contained her puffy coat.

“For the record,” he said, “you’re not supposed to do that.”

“Lie? I promise I’ll never do it again.”

“Use the phone. Or access the internet. Not without permission. It was in the terms and conditions you signed.”

He tossed the bags on the desk. The smallest fell to the floor.

Nio picked it up. Inside was her opened letter, folded in half, and a small local flyer she hadn’t purchased. Religious paraphernalia, she figured. The ladies in the Sheriff’s office had been not-so-subtly trying to bring her to Jesus. But otherwise all of them had been nice.

“Pack all this up,” Quinn said. “If we hurry, we can get back before midnight.”

“Where we going?”

“Minneapolis, to start. We can’t stay in the sheriff’s hair. He’s got real police work to do. My office will be home base for now.”

“What about shoes?” She lifted her socks.

Agent Quinn scowled. “There’s a Wal-mart near the freeway.”

“Wal-mart? You can’t be serious.”

Quinn dropped his coffee in a trash can and dug out his keys. “This is gonna be fun,” he said sarcastically as he walked to the door.

The car was a rental, a squat sedan with minimal features. Nio tossed her coat and the box in the back and Agent Quinn started the car and headed toward the highway, which ran adjacent to the store. It took Nio over 30 minutes to settle on a pair of men’s hiking boots. They were cheap and uncomfortable, but the store had a size small enough to fit her. Agent Quinn waited in the aisle and made a few calls, but he never took his eyes off her for more than a few seconds. He tested the ankle bracelet while they waited for the stock boy to check the back. He made it beep in warning from the app on his phone. Nio turned and gave him a look.

They walked out with a bag of potato chips, which the giant Agent Quinn ate from like a snack pack. Nio sat in the back of the car and opened the case files. They pulled away, and after two hours of silent driving, during which time Agent Quinn had tried more than once to make conversation, he finally got a response.

“You’ve had the same look on your face since Ortley.” He could see her in the rear view mirror.

“What’s oatley?”

“Town we passed about ten minutes back. Find something?”

“Pictures,” she said absentmindedly.

“I can see that. Of?”

She turned one around. It was a photo of a handheld electronic device, black with yellow trim. An FBI numerical label card was next to it.

“You know what this is?” she asked.

“Looks like an infrared thermometer. I used to work HVAC in high school. Summer job, mostly. Fixing air conditioners.”

“In Minneapolis?”

“I grew up in LA.”

“Ah. That explains the surfer-do.”

“So why are you scowling?” he asked again.

“Do you know what these are used for?”

“Taking temperatures?”

Nio turned another photo. “What about this?”

It was another black handheld electronic device, albeit rectangular this time. A V-shaped antenna poked from the top. A string of colored lights stretched across the rim.

“Radon detector?” Agent Quinn guessed.

“Why would a radon detector have an antenna?”

“I don’t know,” Quinn said.

“EMF,” she explained.

“Huh. Well, the guy was a scientist right?”

“Last one.” She turned another. “Call it a tie-breaker.”

“That’s a receiver for a wide-band radio. Long distance around-the-world kind of thing.”

“There’s a digital voice recorder also,” she said. “Here’s today’s pop quiz, Agent Quinn. What do all of these things have in common?”

“They were found in our vic’s garage.”

“I’m serious.”

“I dunno. You can buy them at a home improvement store.”

“It’s ghost hunting equipment.”

Quinn scowled. “What do you mean ghost hunting? Like on TV?”

“Yes. This is a bog-standard paranormal research kit.”

“What do they use the infrared thermometer for?”

“Test for cold spots.”

“Cold spots?”

“And this.” Nio turned another photo. “What about this?”

“That’s easy. That’s a motion sensor. I have the same model on my house.”

“Are you sensing a trend?”

“Har, har.”

“Your people photographed everything, right?”

“I doubt they got the lint in his dryer, but yeah. Basically.”

The interior of the car was quiet.

“Weekend hobby?” Agent Quinn suggested. “Blow off steam. Impress the pretty undergrads.”

“He wasn’t like that.”

“When was the last time you saw the guy?”

“He wasn’t like that, Quinn. Read the damn case notes if you don’t believe me.”

Agent Quinn grit his teeth. “I have, lady. I’m trying to make an alternative suggestion that fits the facts and make more sense than what you’re suggesting. It’s called detective work. Wasn’t this guy supposed to be one of the smartest people in the world?”

“Something like that . . .” Nio breathed, scowling at the glossy pictures in her hand.

“Are you hungry?” Quinn asked. “If we grab something quick, we can still make it back tonight.”

“You said that already. You got a hot date or something?”

“Some of us like our own beds.”

“No offense, Arlo, but I’ve been in a cage for ten days. I’d like some real food and a good night’s sleep. We can be A-students tomorrow.”

“Well . . .” Agent Quinn examined a road sign as it passed. A grid of logos announced the meal options at the next town. “I hate to say it, but it looks like our options are fast food or pizza.”

“No.” Nio pointed to the yellow sign at the horizon.

“We are not going to Denny’s.” Agent Quinn gave her a look.

“We’re going to Denny’s,” she said.

They were shown to a booth at the front window by an overweight waitress with iridescent eyelashes and a motion tattoo of a small child, a son perhaps. Agent Quinn stepped around the table and groaned in anticipation of getting off his feet and stretching out, but Nio stopped him.

“No, not there.”

He looked blankly at the bulging red cushions of the booth.

She motioned to a nearby table. “We’ll sit here,” she told the waitress.

The woman shrugged as she moved the laminated menus.

Agent Quinn was incredulous.

“Don’t ever sit at a table with two salt shakers,” Nio explained. “Did something happen to him?” Nio asked the waittress, nodding to the motion tattoo on her arm.

A small child sat awkwardly on the floor near some presents—a birthday or Christmas. As the woman’s arm moved, the boy’s face brightened into a smile. The work was mediocre, which made the image seem that much cornier—almost demonic.

Quinn was looking at the cluster of condiments at the back of the booth. The sweeteners were arranged by color and guarded jealously by a bottle of ketchup. The pepper shaker hid behind a triangular desert menu. Standing in front of the lot were a pair of salt shakers—identical except for a dent in one cap.

The waitress looked down at the image under her skin. It was slightly crisper than the tattoos of old, but it was considerably less defined than the photograph from which it had surely been taken.

“How did you know?” she asked, suddenly quite emotional.

“Not recently, I hope.”

“Two years ago.” She frowned.

Nio frowned in return and took the woman’s hand. She shook it in support. “I’m so sorry.”

“Thank you.” The woman smiled weakly before returning to the kitchen.

Nio pulled out a chair and took a seat, but Agent Quinn hadn’t moved. He turned back to Nio, who was reading her menu. He pulled out a chair and looked at the half-inch of speckled padding. He took a seat. It creaked.

“That some kind of superstition?” he asked.

“It’s not superstition. It’s science.”

“Science? So how does it work? Does it apply to pepper too?”

“Have you ever seen a table with two pepper shakers?”

Agent Quinn opened his mouth to answer but stopped. Although he could imagine the scenario easily, strangely enough, he couldn’t recall ever actually seeing it. He studied the table in front of him the way an audience studies a magician after a trick. Then he turned his head to the rest of the room.

“What do you think has the most meat?” Nio asked, staring at the menu.

“What can I get you both to drink?” the waitress asked. She seemed out of breath.

“Coffee,” they said at the same time.

“Jinx,” she mumbled before walking off.

Quinn picked up his menu and glanced back to the pair of salts on the booth table.

“I don’t suppose you’re a certified Ally.” Nio pointed to a small logo at the bottom of the menu. “We can get 10% off.”

“I downloaded that app,” he said. “Right after it came out. I could never keep up. To keep your certification, you have to answer questions that pop up from time to time. I kept answering wrong. Every week it seemed there was some new person we were supposed to be mad at.”

Nio slapped her menu down and started pulling napkins from the container. “Get me the Denver omelette. I gotta pee.”

Quinn looked down at the ankle bracelet and turned back to the table. “Don’t take too long. We got a long way to go today.”

The waitress returned after a short gap and he ordered for the both of them. After a few minutes, he turned to the back, but saw nothing. He studied the floor tiles and wondered if he’d already screwed up. He gripped the table and was about to push himself up when Nio appeared in the hall, rubbing her hands together. She sat down and poured four creams into her coffee. The pair drank in silence.

The food came, and Agent Quinn watched Nio shove the stuffed omelette into her mouth like a hyena.

“What’s in that?” he asked, staring.

“Meat,” she mumbled with her mouth full. She took another bite before she had fully swallowed the first.

“I can see that. What kinds?”

“Zau-zage,” she said with her mouth full. “Ham. I dunno.” She chewed and swallowed and took another bite. “Meat.”

Agent Quinn stabbed his fork into his salad.

“I didn’t eat meat for fourteen years,” she explained after she’d finished.

“So now you’re making up for lost time?”

Except for the smears of grease, her plate was completely bare. Agent Quinn had half his salad left. He forced one more bite.

“No offense, Arlo, but you wouldn’t understand.”

“Try me.”

Nio held her coffee close to her mouth. It was cold. “I got involved in something.” She took a sip. “I wanted to do something good. Then some people died and I got out.”

“I didn’t see anything like that in your file.”

“I have a file?”

“Everyone has a file.”

“Even Searan?”

“Who’s Sharon?”

“Searan. Our waitress. You didn’t see the name tag?”

Agent Quinn stabbed his salad with his fork but did nothing with it. “No,” he answered her. “Searan probably doesn’t have a file. But you do. And I didn’t see anything about people dying. Just the prior. Two years in. What was that about?”

She set her coffee down. “Are you done?”

Agent Quinn looked at his salad. He pushed himself up from the table with a grunt and walked the way very large men do to the cashier.

“Nobody calls me Arlo,” he said on the way to the car. “My grandma calls me Miguel. Everybody else calls me Quinn.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, Arlo.”

Quinn leaned on the roof of the sedan and looked across to Nio. “What is your problem? You’ve been—” He stopped. He looked back at the restaurant as if he just realized he’d left his wallet.

“Stay here.” Quinn shut his door and walked into the diner. He found the restrooms at the back and knocked on the women’s. When no one answered, he pushed open the door. “Hello?”

Inside, he found a very thin cell phone resting obliquely on top of the hand dryer, as if someone had left it there by accident. He took it and found the waitress, Searan, who was amazed. She had been running around the restaurant looking for it. She was confused by Agent Quinn’s request to see if any calls had been made, but she complied.

There was one, but it hadn’t been answered. Quinn took a photo of the screen.

“Thank you so much,” he said with a smile.

He walked outside, where Nio was leaning against the sedan. They both got in and Agent Quinn started the car. He sat in silence for a moment with the engine running.

“So the salt thing was a con?”

“No,” she objected. “It was a distraction.”

Quinn wanted to argue, to challenge, but he couldn’t escape that it had worked.

Nio saw the look on his face. “It’s a biohack. Sort of. We like to think we’re passive observers of the world, but we’re not. Our brains actively scan the environment, focusing on some things and ignoring others. If you give the brain a particular kind of problem in a particular context, it runs with it. It doesn’t mean you fell for something. You’re not stupid.”

“How so?”

“You snapped out of it pretty quick.”

“Are you suggesting I should be grateful that you gave me an opportunity to demonstrate how smart I am?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You wanna tell me who you called?”

She didn’t answer.

“Suit yourself.”

They drove down the street to a block, two-story motel. Doors opened onto the pocked parking lot. One of the lightbulbs in the sign was out.

“Wow, the FBI goes all out,” Nio said sarcastically.

“Budgets. Wait here.”

After checking them in at the automated kiosk, Agent Quinn led Nio to the second floor. He opened a door and walked in as if it was his. “This is you,” he said, looking under the bed.

“Are you checking for monsters, dad?”

Quinn turned on the bathroom light on and peered inside. Then he walked to the phone and unplugged it.

“You’re seriously taking the phone?”

“It’s not complicated. You act like a child, I’ll treat you like one.”

“What if there’s an emergency?”

“I’ll be right next door. And just to remind you, if you get more than a hundred yards from me”—he held up his phone—“an alarm sounds on the bracelet and on here, which also has a map linked to a positioning system that tells me exactly where you are. I call local PD, they pick you up, and we take you back to jail, game over.”

“They explained this to me already. I’m here voluntarily, dickwad.”

“Don’t act like I’m overreacting. I’ve known you for five hours—barely—and you’ve already tried to trick me. Twice.”

“What was the other time?”

“Good night.” Agent Quinn walked out and closed the door, taking her room key with him.

Nio kicked off her boots and sat cross-legged on the bed, which creaked under her. The TV was at least 15 years old—only 4k—but at least it was wired. There was a browser, but it wouldn’t work with VPN. She could connect to a server but the connection repeatedly timed out. Nio signed up for a new encrypted email account instead. If anyone checked, they could see what she was doing but not the contents of the message or to whom it was sent. She wrote to Samizdat first and explained the situation as best she could in a few sentences. Typing meant tabbing through the on-screen keyboard with the arrows on the remote, which was excruciatingly slow. Nio tried to find Mutiny’s contact info but could only get her manager in Las Vegas, to whom she also sent an email, asking that her friend get in touch with Agent Quinn of the FBI’s Minneapolis office. She thought briefly about checking the forums to see if Mr. Misery had posted again but decided against it. If he had, there was nothing she could do about it anyway.

After an hour of flipping through channels, Nio turned off the TV, got up from the bed, and cracked open her door softly. Agent Quinn was standing in the walkway, leaning against the railing that overlooked the car. She opened the door fully.

“Have you been waiting there this whole time just to see if I would run?”

He shrugged.

“I don’t have anything to do. Can I get the evidence box?”

He took out his key card and unlocked his room. The box was on the table. A fancy folding suitcase hung from the bathroom door.

“Are you using it?” she asked.

“Not necessarily. I just didn’t want to leave it in the car.”

Nio took it and walked in her socks back to her room.

“Thanks,” she said.

Quinn nodded politely back, and for a moment, it was awkward. Nio made a face and shut the door. She sat cross-legged on the bed and opened the box containing the remnants of a life, the last pieces of a man who had for all intents and purposes been a brother—or perhaps a cousin. Certainly, once upon a time, a friend.

Dr. Chang had said that Sol had been working on something secret—so secret he wouldn’t even mention it. The FBI had done their diligence, or so it seemed from the paper trail. They had talked to his colleagues. They had interviewed his students. They’d read all of his communications they could get their hands on. They even pulled his reading list from the Institute’s library, as well as from nearby Princeton University Library.

Nio read the title of a paper out loud. “Ion Qubit Exchange Anomalies Under Synchronous-2 and Asynchronous-7 Correspondence Models.”

There were papers on quantum field theory, graduate texts on gauge theory, even a transcript of symposium titled Eight Unanswerable Questions About Consciousness. There were numerous entries in the field of quantum biology, which Nio could guess had not been part of Sol’s primary training. She turned on the TV again and searched the internet for Sol’s most recently viewed papers.

“This is ridiculous,” she breathed, tabbing slowly with the arrow buttons.

All but one were behind a paywall, a 20-year-old monograph on quantum coherence in photosynthesis. It seemed every green plant in the world used the phenomena, whereby photons entering the reaction center took all available paths through the enzyme simultaneously and then retroactively “picked” the path that was most efficient. Given that photosynthesis was the basis for the entire food chain, nearly all life on earth relied on quantum mechanics, on the efficiency it provided, to survive.

“Why were you looking for ghosts?” Nio whispered to herself.

She sighed. There was nothing. She shut the files and fell back on the bed. She looked up at the ceiling. A brown stain traced an irregular rim around a patched tile.

“Video . . .”

She sat up. Dr. Chang said Sol was giving a public lecture when he died and that several of the guests had been recording it. There was no way at least one of them didn’t post footage of the death online. It was too salacious. Nio grabbed the remote. She found it almost immediately.

“Sick bastards . . .” she breathed.

The snippet started in the middle of Sol’s talk. He was explaining the Beckenstein bound, a principle of physics that described how information is stored. Nio paused it. He looked so mature. So . . .

She got up from the bed and washed her face in the sink. She blew her nose and wiped her eyes. She stared at the drain and remembered being 13 and hiding in the maintenance closet under the stairs. Sol found her. It wasn’t hard. Anyone could have found her. The point was that he noticed she was gone. The point was that he bothered to look. He sat with her in the dark while she cried.

“We’ll always be different,” he said.

Nio was about to watch him die.

She leaned on the edge of the bed and started the video again. Sol stood at a narrow podium flanked by tables on both sides. Various academics sat facing the audience, but none were less than two meters from him. Behind him was the back of the room. The hall itself was fairly small. Chairs were arranged in rows in the center. They were at most half full. She heard a sneeze as the audio began. Sol was describing the collapse of String Theory the early decades of this century and the vagaries left by several attempts to unify physics with geometry, including work with the AdS-CFT Correspondence. No one approached him in the moments before he fell. He didn’t touch the bottle of water that had been left for him on the podium, which was full and sealed. There was no gun shot, no knife strike, no spasm of poison. He paused as if searching for a word. There was some shuffling in the room, and then he began speaking again. He gripped the podium and in mid-sentence, his head wobbled, his words turned to gibberish, and he fell, his head knocking over the water bottle on its way to the floor. There were shouts and exclamations. And that was it.

The camera moved away, as if whoever held it was jumping to their feet, and then the snippet stopped.

Nio rewound and watched it again. And again. And again. The video stopped for the fifth time and she put her hand over her forehead, scowling. According to the case notes, four different people had recorded that part of the talk, and all four recordings matched. Logically, the case seemed simple. Given the video evidence, seven simultaneous brain hemorrhages, however unlikely to be natural, were still less unlikely than any apparent alternative.

And yet, Dr. Chang was right. Inexplicably, something was wrong.