Alita

by Pat Cadigan

  “There’s a lot you don’t know about your future,” the woman said.

  “I know where I’ll be and what I’ll be doing,” Chiren said evenly. “Do you?”

  The woman nodded. “You’ve got a point…”

  “But?” Chiren prompted. The woman frowned at her, puzzled. “It sounded like there was a ‘but’ coming.”

  The woman smiled briefly. “There’s a ‘but’ coming for all of us. The conditions in the fine print, the catch in the deal, or in the throat; the string attached that’s really a tripwire. You’ll know yours when you see it. In the meantime, have a good game tonight.”

  Chiren stared after her as she strolled out of the pit with an air that was practically jaunty. Maybe it was the hat. Or just that she was walking away from all her previous responsibilities. Running away was always so much easier than facing whatever you had to face.

  When she left she wouldn’t be running away from anything, Chiren thought; she would be going to something. She’d be going home.

  Until that time, however, she had a lot to do. There were Paladins to upgrade, maintain, repair, and rebuild when necessary so they could win games and take championships. She had to get back to work, make sure inventory had everything they could possibly need. She had to do everything, and she had to do it right.

  * * *

  Vector showed up just as she finished with Claymore. Claymore gave him a big smile and a warm, friendly hello. Vector greeted him just as heartily, grinning from ear to ear as if he had every reason to expect this would be the best game ever, the best night of all their lives.

  Once Claymore had rolled out of the pit, however, Vector’s eyes went dead and his face went stony. “We set for tonight?”

  “I’ve been here all afternoon making sure,” she told him. “We’re ready for anything.”

  “We better be.”

  The pit crew began coming in then, laughing and joking around. Vector had a big smile for all of them. He patted a few backs, bumped a few fists, and gave everyone two thumbs-up before he swaggered off to watch the game from his box. He only did that when he had special guests or when he was pissed off about something, and Chiren knew there were no special guests tonight. She wasn’t sure what he was more pissed off about—losing Chase or the chip. Or the fact that she hadn’t been able to build another chip from memory. As if that was her fault.

  If he’d made more of an effort to find the cyborg—if he’d told that bunch he called his street rats to make finding the cyborg a priority—things would have turned out differently. She’d have been able to yank the chip and try it out in the more sophisticated cyborg body. But it had all gone wrong, and now he was up in his box sulking like a five-year-old.

  Vector wouldn’t be able to stay up there for the whole game—he never could. Before the Paladins had gone once around the track, he’d be back down in the pit, breathing down her neck, barking orders, demanding results. Which was pretty much what he did all the time, no matter what kind of mood he started the evening in.

  She simply had to show him it wasn’t all about chips. It was all about what she could do. She could build him Champions. Then he’d understand he didn’t have to have his nose out of joint over some piece of hardware that hadn’t worked right to begin with. He’d see she was living up to her part of the bargain, and when the time came, he’d live up to his and send her back to Zalem.

  It wasn’t ideal, but if this was the only way to get home, she could stand it. She could stand it. She could stand it.

  She could. She could.

  CHAPTER 20

  “I can’t stand it,” Gerhad said. “If this is gonna be the norm with you, I quit.”

  “Okay,” Ido replied.

  “Okay, what?” Gerhad fixed him with a glare worthy of an interrogator. “Okay: you’re gonna stop trying to get killed. Or, okay: it was nice working with me and you’ll give me a recommendation?”

  They were sitting at the kitchen table together while Ido nibbled at some quesadillas from the taqueria across the street, his first solid food since that night in the cathedral. Gerhad had been staying in the spare bedroom to look after him. She had also taken it upon herself to close the clinic to all but emergency patients. Ido might have argued that all his patients were emergencies of one kind or another. They were all urgent, certainly—they had jobs, families to take care of, promises to keep. He’d been too incapacitated to argue. But God help him, he was glad Gerhad had closed the clinic, because he’d had nothing to give.

  Gerhad was staring at him. Still waiting for an answer, Ido realised. He grinned sheepishly and held up his cup for a refill. “Are you kidding? Your coffee’s a hundred times better than mine. If you think I’d jeopardise that, you’re crazy.”

  “No, you’re crazy,” she said, pouring for him.

  “You’re probably right,” he said good-naturedly.

  “Don’t humour me.” Gerhad wasn’t smiling. “I’m gonna take a moment to point out that I have shown great consideration in not raising these issues with you until now, so as not to stress you too early in your recovery.”

  “I noticed,” Ido said truthfully. “My body and I thank you. I also thank you for understanding my fondness for quesadillas for breakfast.”

  “That I don’t understand,” Gerhad replied. “I’m just going along with it. I can make a list of things I’ll just go along with. Be warned—it’s not a long one.”

  Ido grimaced apologetically. “I told you I’m a licensed Hunter-Warrior. The bounties keep the clinic open and pay your salary. If you can’t go along with that, I’m sorry for both of us.”

  “I didn’t say I wouldn’t go along with that,” Gerhad said, still not smiling. “What I won’t stand for is your hunting when you haven’t healed from the previous beating. What the hell were you thinking?”

  “That if I didn’t put a stop to him, he’d kill someone,” Ido said.

  “And that someone was almost you,” Gerhad snapped. “And for what? There was no bounty to collect.”

  Ido nibbled some more of the quesadilla. It wasn’t as spicy as he would have liked. No doubt Gerhad had ordered them mild for the invalid. “It was a special case.”

  “I guess so, seeing as how this was all you came home with.” Gerhad dug in her pocket and put the chip on the table between them.

  Ido sighed with relief. “Thank God. I couldn’t remember what I’d done with it.”

  “You didn’t do anything. I had to pry it out of your hand. Is this the super-chip you’ve been making noises about?”

  “What did I say?” Ido asked, slightly alarmed.

  “A lot.” Gerhad chuckled. “Someone got in and stole it, and you don’t know how or who, but you’re sure Vector and your ex-wife Chiren were behind it. They put it in one of their players to make him fast and it didn’t work right. The player went crazy and it’s all your fault.” Pause. “I pieced that together from several delirious rants, so I might not have it right.”

  “No, that’s pretty much it,” Ido said. “I was working on a way to make the physical experience of Total Replacement cyborgs seamless and natural at all levels. I figured if I could do that, it would also improve things for people with only one or two replacements.”

  Gerhad put her left elbow on the table and raised her forearm, turning it one way and then the other. She was wearing the hand rather than any of the surgical instruments. “I’ve got no complaints.”

  “Does it feel exactly like your organic arm?” Ido asked.

  “No, but I didn’t expect it to. You told me it wouldn’t and I’d have to get used to it. News flash, Doc—it’s easier to get used to having an arm that feels kinda funny than it is to get used to not having an arm at all.”

  Ido took a sip of coffee, holding the cup with both hands to keep it steady. “Any phantom limb sensations?”

  “None that I’ve noticed,” Gerhad said. “Does that happen much?”

  “More often with traumatic amputations like yours than w
ith elective replacements,” Ido told her. “Sometimes the homunculus in the brain will fight a prosthesis as an intruder or a usurper.”

  “‘Prosthesis.’” Gerhad gave a small laugh. “I never thought of it as a prosthesis, just an arm. My arm.”

  “We put it in pretty quickly. Your brain didn’t have much time to register the absence of your organic arm.”

  Gerhad chuckled. “Maybe I’m just that adaptable. I’ve never felt any drop-out or loss of sensation.”

  “You don’t put any extraordinary demands on your arm, do you?”

  Gerhad frowned at him. “What would you call ‘extraordinary’?”

  “I’m really not sure.” Ido shrugged and regretted it. His upper body still objected to even small movements. “I built in a capability for extremely rapid suturing. Maybe if you had to use that several times a day, every day, you might start getting some hesitation.”

  “There’s a little of that when I first wake up in the morning,” Gerhad said. “But the rest of me isn’t hitting on all cylinders either.”

  “Keep track of that,” Ido said. “I mean, log every occurrence and let me know if it increases or decreases.”

  “Okay, just because you asked me to,” Gerhad said. “But I’m not sure it’s really all that important.”

  “Why not?” Ido asked, surprised.

  “It’s an artificial limb interfacing with an organic brain. But even organic limbs don’t work exactly the way they’re supposed to all the time.” Gerhad nodded at the chip on the table. “I think you’re chasing perfection with that, Doc, and that’s futile.” She put her hand gently on his arm. “We are all of us imperfect vessels, Dyson. We don’t need perfection; we need something that works.”

  Ido shifted slightly in his seat, ignoring the pain in his ribs. He had spent his whole life striving for perfection, knowing even as he did that he would always fall short somehow. Nonetheless, perfection always had to be the goal.

  But then, perfection was much more clearly defined in Zalem; it was easier to conceive of. It was more obvious, because in Zalem, it was closer—or so he’d thought. When Nova had exiled him and his family because of his daughter’s so-called imperfection, he’d learned just how far from perfect Zalem was.

  Iron City wasn’t really any further—it was just at ground level.

  Gerhad got up from the table. “I’m gonna check for emergency messages,” she told him. “You finish that quesadilla. You need it.”

  “It’s kind of bland,” Ido said, half-joking.

  “You don’t get anything spicier till you finish what you’ve got.”

  Ido stared after her. He wanted to follow her into the clinic, but he just couldn’t get up from the chair.

  * * *

  Later in the afternoon Gerhad decided Ido was rested enough to spend some time at his workbench.

  “But only puttering,” she told him firmly. “Read notes, make more notes, think complicated thoughts, stare into space.”

  “I left an arm here—” Ido said, looking around as Gerhad helped him lower himself into the chair.

  “I finished that for you,” Gerhad said. “Patient wore it home, says everything’s fine.”

  Ido looked up at her wide-eyed. “You finished Gladys-Jean’s elbow?”

  “Actually, you did,” Gerhad chuckled. “I just closed the housing and re-attached the arm. She’s the only non-emergency I took, and only because her arm was pretty much ready so there was no need to make her wait.”

  “That was a good thing,” Ido said. “Thank you.”

  “De nada. You sure you don’t want to take a nap instead?”

  “No, I’ll putter,” he said, flipping on one of the two monitors.

  What he wanted to do was read through the notes on the super-chip, which was now sitting in a small receptacle on the workbench. But he could read only marginally better than he did anything else. He couldn’t seem to retain anything. That would be the pain meds, of course. He should look into developing pain relief that didn’t make a person too high to function, he thought.

  On the other hand, said a small voice in his mind, if you need that much pain medication, maybe you shouldn’t function. You might forget how injured you are.

  Ido frowned. That didn’t sound like him… but it was a good point. Concentrating his practice on cyborgs had given him a tendency to think of recovery from illness or injury more in terms of the physical. Cyber-medicine was making him into a raving dualist, treating body and mind as separate and distinct. Perhaps that was where humanity was going now—brains in boxes, ghosts in machines.

  And brains in boxes would still like getting high.

  Even so, if there was some way to remove the euphoric effects of the drugs Paladins had to take to help align their brain function with their bodies, it would solve the problem of addicted ex-players selling off their parts, doing anything for a fix—like, say, breaking into clinics and killing innocent bystanders. Ex-players could gradually downshift the dosage to a level adequate for life without the extraordinary physical demands of Motorball. They’d have a chance at a normal existence.

  The problem was, a normal existence wasn’t really what they wanted. They wanted to not have been cut from the team, to not be an ex-player. The high that came from the screaming stadium crowds was as addictive as anything else, and no one had ever developed a detox for that.

  Ido’s gaze fell on the chip and he remembered he’d meant to look up his notes on it. He woke the screen and found them. The hard data—materials, circuits, the time it had taken for construction—was thorough, but he couldn’t make sense of it for longer than a minute, if that. And there was so much of it, including all the information he had recorded when he had still been working in the crew pit with Chiren: entries on all the various glitches—dropout, hesitation, stutter, blockage, rebound and resistance. There were copies of Chiren’s notes as well.

  Reading everything over now, Ido realised it said a lot about physical performance—how well the Paladins played, or how poorly—but very little about their state of mind unless it involved some kind of cognitive impairment or a change in consciousness. And nothing about their emotions.

  Because he’d been pursuing a goal of perfect performance. That was, after all, what Vector had paid him and Chiren to do. Make his Paladins perfect; make them winners.

  He punched Chiren’s number into his phone before he could think better of it.

  “What do you want, Ido?” Chiren asked impatiently. “I’m busy preparing for the game tomorrow.”

  “I know what you did,” he said. “I know you broke into the clinic and stole the chip.”

  “And I know you killed the man who was going to be our top player and stole it back,” Chiren replied evenly. “Anything else you want to get off your chest?”

  Ido felt the universe split in two. In one, he said: Come home now. We got lost and now each of us is living a life neither of us wants. Come home; we can find our way to something better together.

  In the other, he said: I’m done. I’ve actually been done for a while but now I know it. I’m not happy about it; it doesn’t feel good and I don’t like it. But I accept it now, and I’ll live.

  But apparently the universe had actually split into three, because what he heard himself say was, “No. You?”

  There was a long moment of silence. Finally: “I’m afraid not. We have nothing to say to each other that we both don’t already know.”

  “Why are you afraid?” Ido asked.

  “I don’t have time for your mind games, Dyson.” She broke the connection.

  “That’s not an answer,” he said. He felt slightly ashamed of the smug note in his voice even though Chiren hadn’t heard it.

  Ido looked down and saw the chip was now on the desk in front of him. At some point, he had taken it out of the receptacle and broken it in two. One piece for each universe he didn’t live in. Perhaps that was why he didn’t remember doing it.

  He became aware then t
hat his ankle and his ribs were throbbing. The sight of Gerhad coming towards him with a syringe made him want to weep with joy.

  * * *

  Hugo had come to enjoy riding his gyro through Iron City before dawn. That was why he did it, he told himself, not because he seldom got as much as four hours sleep every night and always woke before dawn, feeling too restless to stay in bed.

  Iron City was so quiet before dawn. Streets normally choked with traffic were empty, as if the entire population had suddenly vanished, spirited away unknowing and unaware by some incredibly powerful but silent force to a distant realm. Maybe those who woke up before they were returned could stay in that better place. But none of them ever did.

  And Hugo was the only one left out. The powerful force never took him, because he always woke before dawn.

  Lack of sleep was starting to make him weird, Hugo thought as he rode past Ido’s clinic. The sign saying it was closed except for emergencies was still up. But he wasn’t riding past to check on that; he was just taking the long way round to CAFÉ café.

  And he certainly wasn’t thinking about going back later to try talking to that nurse again. She had already told him that the doc had had an accident; he’d broken his ankle but he would be all right, and that was all she could tell him. Anything else he wanted to know he could ask Ido when the clinic re-opened.

  Hugo didn’t tell her he needed to know if the doc’s “accident” had anything to do with Vector. She’d probably want to know why he would think something like that, and he had no good lie to tell. So he had to wait and talk to Ido.

  When he finally did, though, what would he say? Ask him if Vector’s men had beaten him up? Confess he’d told Vector about the chip? Then what? Would Ido get really mad, say he never wanted to see Hugo again? Or would the doc forgive him? Hugo had no idea. Everything seemed equally likely and equally absurd.