by Pat Cadigan
More images came up in bursts, scenes from the area of the Downs where I’d been doing characterization research. She knew them all as if she had seen them with my own eyes … or as if I had seen them with her own eyes …
Onionheads, rooster-boys, street-corner neurosis peddlers, sidewalk holos meant to jump-and-jive you into the dreamlands for a cheap dose of REM-pix, and the featureless one-roomer where I’d been staying on a short-term lease. Hustlers passing off cheap fixations and compulsions and calling them real neuroses, dreamlands fronting for chop shops that sold stolen memories and the last scrapings from sucked-out minds to hungry junkies (like me?). Anwar, who had suddenly had an attack of something like decency. Bateau sending (me) on another out-call, saying, come back with something good, come back with something I can use, that’s what I keep you for, come back and I’ll fill your head with all the things you can’t get enough of and can’t have for real, but most of all, come back. Come back.
Yah, I’ll come back, if I have to walk through a hail of fire, if I have to kill them instead of just taking them to the edge and letting them go over themselves. And whatever I find in the lives they leave behind is mine to take with me, at least until Bateau takes it from me, and sometimes I call him a pimp instead of an agent, but I ain’t no uptown day-wage priv. I got less than nothing but other people’s memories make it like there’s something. And in here, who knows the difference?
The vertigo of being in two places at once was almost overwhelming. I wanted to stop and reach for the Method instead, but something held me back until I got used to what I was doing. It felt so strange. How did those old-time actors do it, how did they become other people and still know that they weren’t?
My eye sockets hurt, so I know I’m not in the system anymore, but where I really am I want to find out without anyone knowing. I’ve got this crazy memory of being at Bateau’s and getting away, but I was delirious or something …
Shit, the damned memory lane Anwar took me to. That skuvand-bones bitch must have shot me with a bad load. She used me for a dump, scraped out the bottom of the barrel of whatever chop shop she was fronting for, and while all the junk she shot into me went playtime, I fugued out. Christ knows who or what I’ve been claiming I was. My memory’s all jumbled up, I remember things about a theatre and someone named Sovay and some other guy with white hair—
And her. The client. No, fuck Bateau’s fancy talk: the trick. Much better word for her, trick. She was a trick, all right, they’re all tricks in the end. Especially in the end, where they always try to drag you along with them. They can’t help it, drowning people will do the same. But that’s not my problem, my problem is getting out of the thrill-and-chill alive and in one piece. That’s the real trick.
Well, I’m alive, but I don’t know how many pieces I got now. Worst thing I could have done was take that job. I tried to get Bateau to let me out of it, but he was all excited. Go on, go ahead and kill that personality for her and while you’re in, grab for all the goodies you can, let’s see what we come up with while the client’s still alive and maybe of some use.
And what do you know: she didn’t have much, not the one who hired me. It was the one she wanted to kill who had all the goodies, because she was the one in charge after all. Surprise good-bye, followed by a surprise hello. I got a little more than anyone figured I’d get, and all I have to do now is unload it without getting chilled myself. If Bateau knew she was a cop—
Jee habba cop.
Shit, did I say that? Does he believe it?
And the cop’s still here.
He doesn’t know that yet, but if he gets his hands on me again, he’ll find out, and I’ll get the chill with no thrill.
Unless I can make him think it was all just runaway memory after the fact. Then give him some cop stuff. She must have had plenty when she sank her hooks into me and reeled herself in off that cliff, and it must all still be there—
“Are you awake?”
I was still too drugged to startle. The trick leaned over me looking all you-poor-baby and I was supposed to buy it. “You can sleep a little longer if you like,” she went on, too friendly. “The operation was a success, the patient died, and all’s right with the world.”
I get it. I’m supposed to think it just happened, what we did last week, I’m supposed to think we’re just finishing up. The game is, I pick up and go home, walk right into Bateau a week or more out-of-date. He takes a can opener to my head and that’s my problem. And their problems are all solved, because when I go, the cop goes with me and no one’s left to tell the tale.
And a tiny little voice in my head says, Sovay. For a moment I get him confused with Anwar and I can’t remember which of us had who, or, for that matter, how. Was he there, too? Was he there, watching from a safe distance while we balanced on the edge of the cliff?
No. I know that one for sure, he couldn’t have hidden from me. But he’d been there. He’d left traces. And he could claim all he wanted that he didn’t know, but when Bateau took that can opener to my head, Bateau would see where he’d been and what he knew, and even if he didn’t know it anymore, Bateau would make sure he couldn’t know it again. Just in case.
I got to get out of here now. Maybe I can tell this Sovay he’s got trouble, maybe not. He should know he does, just because he knows her, but he probably doesn’t. If he were really smart, he’d have gotten himself a pump like Anwar’s.
I sit up, ready to go, and then freeze. I’m back in my old rags from last night. If my fancy clothes are gone, that means my wads are gone. Son of a bitch, how cheap can they get?
“If you’re all done with me,” I say, “you can call me a cab. Right after you pay me.”
Ha, and ha—who says I can’t think up stuff? She wasn’t expecting that one. She looks off to her right and this white-haired guy comes over, and I almost choke, because it’s Coney Loe in uptown drag.
So now I get it. We are talking bootleggers and body-snatchers and who knows what else, if Coney Loe’s involved. Anybody fooling with bootlegging and body snatching has got to have a Downs connection and there’s none better than an information junkie like Coney Loe. He lives to find out everything and then spills his guts. Got to say he looks good in uptown drag. Hell, he almost looks natural, except I think the last natural thing he ever did was breathe in for the first time.
She makes Coney come across with a fistful of currency—not as much as I was holding when I came to in Davy Jones’ Locker. After having that much, I’m ruined, I want it all back, but what can I do?
“There,” he says, pressing a pile of bills down on my hand and closing my fingers around it. “Your fee, and a tip you can hype out on.”
She gives him a look. “Maybe we’ll beat that errand boy’s vocabulary out of you.”
“Call her a cab,” he says, jerking his head at her. They have a glare contest for a few seconds and then she stalks out of the room.
“Temperament,” he says to me. “You know how these actors can be. Even after they get everything they want.”
I swing my legs over the side of the bed, barely missing him as he steps back. Just as my feet hit the floor, I get the oddest damned sensation, this damned feeling that I’m not moving. More like I’m being steered. Used.
Sometimes, you eat a bad memory somewhere that gives you the being-used creeps. You find yourself taking a little daytrip to the scene of somebody else’s crime all because you’ve got the memory of what happened and where. Like the memory knows somehow it’s in the wrong head and it wants to get back to where it started.
I want to shut down, take a breather, and figure out what I could be remembering now, but whatever’s making me move isn’t in the mood to stop.
“Something wrong?” Coney’s giving me a wary look.
“Hangover,” I growl at him. What does he know about it?
She steps back in with this big, bad old smile. “I took the liberty of calling your agent instead of a cab. He’s sending a van for
you. A free ride’s better than fare-and-a-half, isn’t it?”
The adrenaline rush is like a punch in the gut.
“You sure you’re all right?” Coney says, and for a minute there I can almost believe he wants to know.
“Hangover”, I growl again. “Just show me the way outta here, I’ll wait outside.” If I can hit the sidewalk before Bateau’s van shows, I can sprint for it.
“This way,” she says, crooking her finger at me. I follow her through this big old empty room with a lavabo in the middle of it, to a lift that isn’t much more than a cage on a pulley and a chain. Moving around still feels funny to me, like my body is an exoskeleton and it’s a bad fit.
The lift is so slow it’s painful. I’m slouching in the far corner and she’s at the control panel like she thinks I might jump her, which reminds me of being at Bateau’s in delirium. I can remember how I got out of there now. Poor Anwar, I hit him with everything I had and it must have hurt. Not likely I’ll get a chance like that again.
And then I remember what Bateau said before that, in his office. Bring the actor in alive. And fast.
Oh, boy. Bateau must have wet his pants laughing when she called him to come pick me up. Do I tell her she’s taking this ride with me, or do I just let it be a surprise?
“What?” she says suddenly, and I realize I’ve been staring at her. “Nobody can prove a thing,” she adds. “She’s gone, and her memories are gone. All I have to do now is purge my own memory of the knowledge that she was ever there, and I’m home free, warm, and dry.”
Now, I know, I just know that she’s talking about that cop, the one she had in her head, or thought she had in her head. Well, fuck her. Let Bateau have at her with everything he’s got. What choice did I get in any of this anyway? It’s not like we voted. Let her get the box and I’ll be home free, warm, and dry for a change. Bateau will find out how things really are, and take her apart instead of me.
“You’d better purge the memories when you’re through with them,” she says then. “You don’t want to risk getting caught with them if they actually get a search warrant. And they will come looking when she doesn’t report in. But if they can’t find a trace of her, they’ll just have to give up and leave us all alone, and I’ll be free to live my life the way I want to. I just hope for your sake that your pimp knows how to hide the database.”
The database. That’s it. That’s what Bateau will want, when he knows it exists. All the Brain Police have one locked up in their minds, all the things they have to know, but that they can’t get at until they really need it. The only problem is, I don’t have it anymore. I used to. I can even almost remember what was in it, but I put it somewhere, and I’m goddamned if I can remember where—
From nowhere: chewing.
Oh, Jesus, her? Did I give it to that skinny bitch in the memory lane? Or did she just help herself to it like it was a platter of fucking deli sandwiches?
Like that matters. What matters is that I get it back again. It’s the only thing I can offer Bateau to make him believe I’m still with the program.
“Tell me,” she says, “is it hard for memory junkies to forget, or are you used to your memories coming and going?”
She’s got that look, belligerent and knowing, one-up-on-the-world. The urge to gloat was going to be the death of her. “Yeah, sure,” I say, “they come and go and one’s as good as another if you want to get a rise.”
The elevator thumps to a stop and the outer door rattles open. We’re at the far end of a large, airy, glassed-in lobby and it’s a mob scene, people all over the place. She starts to get off but I hang back. This tall guy in a silvery uniform strolls by and gives me a wink.
“It’s all right,” she says, and she looks like she doesn’t know whether she wants to laugh at me or swing on me. “It’s just the catalog. They’re all holos.”
Now I can see that. The tall guy is looking about six inches too far to my left, about the usual margin of error for guidance software. But it’s still pretty great holo; no static, even though it’s indoors, and real solid, you can’t see through them unless you get right up close or unless there’s a bright light right behind them.
“Doesn’t this scare off the trade?” I say.
She’s trying to pull me out of the elevator. “Don’t be ridiculous. This is what everyone comes here for.” I hold on to the door, trying to see if there’s a van parked at the curb outside. But who says Bateau would send the same van, or any van? Maybe he wouldn’t even send Anwar; maybe he figured out what Anwar did and Anwar’s treading time in a box now.
“You got another way out of here?” I say. “Back door, trapdoor?”
She blows out a heavy, put-upon breath. “Look, why don’t you just go back to your life? You’re not me, and you’ll never be me. If I’d known you were such a quick study, I wouldn’t have—”
Boom—like that, I’ve got both hands around her throat before I even know it. Someone is yelling—
“I know what happened, you incredible bitch!” I yelled into that face, my stolen face. The feel of Marceline broke apart like wet tissue; so much for the masquerade. “This is my life and you stole it!” I slammed her against the wall. “You’re the one going back to that pimp, not me! You’re the Escort—”
She was making choking noises and pulling on my wrists. I could squeeze the life right out of her, I realized. I was bigger and heavier now, I could literally kill her in the old-fashioned, down-and-dirty way and suddenly I really wanted to do that. Let her find out what it was like to go all the way to the brink of death and be forced over it—
She’s not going to go willingly.
The memory came up with such force and feeling that I thought I’d been instantly transported to some other place, that other place, the cliff where it had all happened—
That’s what you’re here for, that’s why I called you. She’s just a character, just a useless character who put down too many roots and believed she was real. I can’t use her anymore but she keeps trying to take over.
I remembered; I remembered saying it. But if I said it … who was I choking?
Her face was a deep red. I let go, shocked at the sight and at myself. Coughing, she staggered away from me just as the front door slid open. I stepped into the crowd of holos as the green guy came striding in, a graft bandage on his head marring the green. Anwar was right behind him. The pump on his belt was bigger.
I slipped behind a holo of a woman in a billowy outfit of scarfs; she was swaying back and forth with her arms spread, dancing in place to whatever music she’d been hearing when they’d scanned her. With only a wall behind, it was all but opaque. Still coughing and clutching her throat, the bodysnatcher staggered through the image of some man in a glittery quasi-military costume cracking a soundless whip and directly into the tint.
“Where is she?” the tint demanded, digging a hand into her hair and pulling her head back. A sad-faced clown in a hobo outfit broke into silent laughter, holding his stomach and pointing. All the woman could do was cough and try to shake her head.
“Where?” yelled the tint and jerked his head at the holos. “Look around!” he barked at Anwar. “Keep your eyes open!”
The dancing woman made a sudden small leap to the left; I leaped with her, spreading my arms behind hers and matching her movements as best I could. The projection was so high-res, I could just barely see through her head as Anwar walked toward the center of the lobby, letting various characters pass through him as he scanned the display.
The woman leaped to the opposite side and I managed to go with her again. The long, filmy scarf around her neck flew back and ripped through my head. I felt nothing—having a holo go through you is less than having a shadow fall on you—but I was afraid of interference breaking up the image. But nothing happened, not so much as mild static, even when she took an unexpected step back and I found myself wearing the image like an exoskeleton. That was all right; I had her choreography pretty well figured out. Al
l I could do was keep moving and hope it didn’t make any sudden and dramatic changes. If she did anything even mildly acrobatic, I was finished.
Anwar continued his slow walk through the room. I was swaying in place when he stopped five feet away and turned to look directly at the holo. I forced myself to keep swaying instead of jumping out of my holo skin and bolting for the door. At that distance, he had to see me. At least, he had to see something moving inside the image like a double exposure that didn’t quite match up.
Maddeningly, he just stood there and kept watching, and now his eyes seemed to be looking directly into mine. I kept moving with the image, waiting for him to reach forward and pull me out.
Instead, he reached down and shut his pump off in mid-beep. I dropped my arms and stood there as the holo woman jumped to the left, but at the same moment, he turned away.
“She must have run out just before we got here.”
The tint was dragging the bodysnatcher toward the front door. “Come on, we’ll see if we can catch her out on the street,” he said. She was struggling, trying to pull out of that bruising grip. I actually felt sorry for her. The tint swung her around in a casual way and gave her a solid punch in the face. She went down with her mouth bloody and I heard her head hit the floor with a nasty cracking sound.
“Jesus!” yelled Anwar. “Couldn’t you wait for me to patch her?” He flicked a glance in my general direction. I caught up with the holo and started dancing again.
The tint picked her up and slung her over his shoulder. “No. I couldn’t. Head injury won’t bother Bateau.”
Anwar followed him out, glancing over his shoulder in my direction again. I danced with the holo for a full count of thirty after I saw the van pull away from the curb and then took off in the opposite direction.
It wasn’t until I’d gone three blocks that I realized there hadn’t been so much as a squeak out of the guy upstairs. Coney Whoever, I could remember having known the name, but it was obscured now. There wasn’t any time to wonder about him anyway.
