by Rosa Montero
She shot off so fast in the direction of the park that she quickly ran out of breath. She reduced her pace and tried to find a well-balanced rhythm, breathing easily, accommodating her body. Little by little she got into the relaxed and hypnotic rhythm of a good run, her feet almost weightless, hitting the sidewalk in time to her heartbeat. Above her head, the public screens spilled out the usual stupid messages, juvenile little quips, music clips, personal images from someone’s last holiday, or news items covered by amateur journalists. In one news item, she saw an Instant Terrorist blowing himself up on Gran Vía, fortunately causing only his own death. Just as well that at this stage, Ins were so incompetent and clumsy that they rarely managed to do much damage, thought the android; but once those antisystem crazies learned to organize themselves and make good homemade bombs, the Ins would turn into a nightmare. Every week, someone in Madrid set themselves on fire, for who knew what reason.
Bruna entered the park through the corner gate and crossed it on the diagonal. It was a lung park rather than a park with vegetation. The rep liked running between the rows of artificial trees because it was easier for her to breathe: they absorbed much more carbon dioxide than genuine trees and you could really notice the higher concentration of oxygen. Yiannis had told her that decades earlier artificial trees were built so that they more or less simulated real ones, but those absurdly mimetic creations had long been abandoned in the search for a more efficient design. The android was aware of at least half a dozen tree models, but the ones in this lung park, which belonged to Texaco-Repsol, were like enormous banners made from an almost transparent, and extremely fine, red metallic thread, floating strips three feet wide and about thirty-three feet long that swayed with the wind and produced small, chirruping, cricketlike noises. Crossing the park was like passing through the baleen filter of an enormous whale.
When she came out on the other side of the park, Bruna caught herself turning right rather than taking a left and heading for home along Reina Victoria Avenue, as she had intended. She jogged for a minute without really knowing where she was going, until she realized that she was heading for Nuevos Ministerios, one of the city’s deprived neighborhoods, a prostitution and drug-dealing district. Maybe she could find a memory trafficker there. It was not the ideal spot to be walking around unarmed at night, but on the other hand, a combat rep out exercising was unlikely to be the most desirable target for criminals.
Despite its name, Nuevos Ministerios was very old. It had been built two centuries earlier as a government hub, and it consisted of a collection of interconnected buildings that formed a gigantic, zigzagging mass. It must have been an ugly and inhospitable cement monstrosity from its inception. During the Robot Wars, Nuevos Ministerios was used to house displaced people, and afterward there was no way of getting them out of there. The original refugees sublet rooms to other tenants illegally, and the area rapidly deteriorated. The windows were broken, the doors burned, and the former gardens had become filthy, empty esplanades. But there were also noisy bars, squalid Dalamina-smoking dens, wretched cabarets. An entire world of illegal pleasures overseen by the local gangs, who paid the clean air fees. Bruna reached the outer perimeter of Nuevos Ministerios and walked past Comet, the area’s bestknown hangout, a dive on the outer boundary frequented by some well-to-do customers keen to dip their toes into the dark side of life. The music was deafening, and there were quite a few people hanging around the door. The majority of them were bodies for hire, figured the detective after giving them a quick glance. Just then, an adolescent-looking boy caught up with her and started to jog along beside her.
“Hi, tough girl. I see you enjoy sport. How about doing some exercise inside with me? I work wonders...”
Bruna looked him over; he had the typical, telltale eyes with the vertical pupils, but he was too young to be an android. True, he could have had plastic surgery, but most likely he was wearing contact lenses that made him look like a rep. Many humans had a morbid sexual curiosity about androids, and the male prostitutes took advantage of it.
“Are you a human or a techno?”
The boy looked at her, uncertain, weighing up which answer would better suit his purpose.
“Which do you prefer?”
“Frankly, I don’t give a damn. It was a matter of curiosity, not business.”
“Come on, cheer up. I’ve got candy. Top quality.”
Candy. Meaning oxytocin, the love drug. As a legal substance, it was bought in drugstores by couples in a stable relationship to improve or reawaken their relationship. The candy he was referring to, however, was an explosive cocktail of a massive dose of oxytocin combined with other synthetic neuropeptides. A veritable bomb—banned, of course—that Bruna had taken on occasion with sizzling effect. But this was neither the time nor the place.
“Don’t waste your time. I’m serious. I don’t want anything you have to offer.”
The young man frowned briefly, somewhat upset, but was sufficiently professional to continue being charming. As he was always telling himself, an out-and-out no today might be a sure—give me a hit tomorrow.
“Okay, stripy-face, some other time. But if I were you, gorgeous, I wouldn’t keep running in that direction. It’s a bad area, even for tough girls.”
They had reached the first building, the point where the dark esplanades of the Inner Zone began. The youth turned around and began to jog back toward the distant lights of Comet. Then Bruna had an idea.
“Hang on!”
The kid returned, smiling and hopeful.
“No, it’s not that,” the rep said quickly. “It’s just a question. You must buy the candy from someone, right?”
“Do you want me to turn someone in to you?”
“No, it’s not that either. But I am interested in the people who sell drugs. Do you know the local traffickers?”
The smile disappeared from the boy’s face.
“Hey, don’t make trouble for me. I’m off.”
Bruna grabbed him by the arm.
“Cool it. I’m not the police, I’m not a dealer, so don’t be scared. I’ll give you a hundred Gs if you answer a few simple questions.”
The prostitute thought about it.
“First give me the money and then I’ll give you the answers.”
“Fine. I don’t have any cash, so put yourself in receiver mode.”
They activated their mobiles, and Bruna keyed in one hundred gaias on hers and sent through the transaction. A beep signaled the successful transfer of funds.
“Okay. Go ahead.”
“I’m interested in artificial memories. Do you know of anyone around here who sells them?”
“Mems? No idea. I don’t use them. But way over on the other side of that half-ruined stall where that red light is, there’s a smoke den. And I’ve heard that on the other side of the smoke den, in among the arches, is where the traffickers hang out.”
“You’ve heard? Come off it. Then where do you get your candy from?”
“Listen, I’m a professional. I have a personal supplier who brings it to my place; a real gentleman, nothing to do with this—he only sells oxytocin. Over there’s the hard stuff, like strawberry and other flavored cocaine, mems, ice...But I know nothing about that. I don’t do drugs. Just candy, which goes with my line of work. I’m sorry, but that’s all I know. Head for the red light and look under the arches on the left.”
The android sighed. “That information isn’t worth the money I gave you.”
“What do you expect? I’m a good boy!” he replied, with a charming smile.
And, giving a half-turn, he started to run toward the bar.
Bruna began to cross the filthy esplanade. Half the lights were broken, and the shadows formed irregular pools and dark patches in the shadows. Luckily, she could see quite well in the dark, thanks to the improved eyesight of reps. It was assumed that vertical pupils were good for that, although Myriam Chi and other extremists would say that feline eyes were nothing more than a se
gregationist’s trick to make reps more easily recognizable. Either way, night vision enabled Bruna to distinguish several dozen people wandering around the place, alone or in groups. She passed three or four of them, elusive beings who moved out of her way. There were also some characters sleeping on the ground, or perhaps they’d passed out, or maybe they were even dead—junkies with their brains fried by drugs. They were mere dark shapes, barely distinguishable from the rubble and other waste that littered the zone. Near the entry to the smoking den, Bruna saw a couple of combat replicants, no doubt hired gorillas. They watched her go by with furious expressions on their faces, like guard dogs in a frenzy because they couldn’t leave their posts to go and bite the intruder. Bruna walked under the arches, leaving the smoking den behind her. The red street light bathed the shadows with a ghostly, bloodlike sheen. She walked slowly through the arcade; in front of her the darkness was thickening. A few columns farther along she thought she detected the outline of a person. She was focusing on making out what it was when someone suddenly landed hard on top of her. With an automatic defensive reflex, the rep grabbed the aggressor’s arms, and was already on the point of smashing his head against the wall when she registered that he wasn’t an assailant but a poor idiot who had unintentionally bumped into her. Worse still, he was a child. A genuine child. The boy was looking at her, terrified. Bruna realized that she had almost lifted him off the ground, and gently let him go. For heaven’s sake, he didn’t even seem to have reached the legal age!
“How old are you?”
“Four...fourteen,” jabbered the child, rubbing his forearms painfully.
Fourteen! What the heck was he doing on the street? He was breaking the adolescent curfew.
“What are you doing here?”
“I...I’d arranged to meet a friend.”
The android noticed the shake in his hands, the splotches on his face, his grayish teeth. They were the effects of strawberry, and of Dalamina, the synthetic drug in vogue. So young, and he was already a wreck. The shadow Bruna had seen a few arches farther down was walking quietly toward them now. As the woman reached them, she smiled in a soothing manner. She was about fifty, with one ear much higher than the other. She had to be a mutant deformed by teleportation. The misplaced ear, located almost on top of her head, poked out from her sparse hair, like the ear on a dog.
“Hi. What are you looking for, techno friend?”
Her voice was surprisingly beautiful, modulated, and as smooth as silk.
“I want some strawberry...I want strawberry...” interrupted the boy, agitated by his need.
“Shut up, kid. Who do you take me for?”
“Sarabi, give me a fix, please,” he moaned.
The mutant looked Bruna up and down, trying to work out if the rep posed any kind of risk.
“Give the boy the damn drug. It’s all the same to me,” said the detective.
And it was true, because the boy was already an addict and needed the fix not just to relieve his withdrawal symptoms but also because the puny-bodied creature had undoubtedly stolen and bashed and maybe even killed someone in order to put together the money for his fix. Gangs of feral kids were terrorizing the city, and not even the curfew was able to curb them effectively. Whenever Bruna thought about those wild adolescents, she felt less saddened by her inability to have children.
“But I don’t know you,” grunted the woman.
“And I don’t know you either,” Bruna replied.
“Can I use a lie detector?”
“That ridiculous gadget? Sure, why not?”
The woman took out something like a small magnifying glass and held it in front of one of Bruna’s eyes.
“Do you have any intention of causing me harm?” she asked emphatically.
“Of course not,” answered the detective.
Satisfied, the mutant put away the gadget. Lie detectors were supposed to capture certain movements of the iris if a person wasn’t telling the truth. They were sold in catalogs for ten gaias, and they were a real rip-off.
“Please, Sarabi, please give me the strawberry.”
“Calm down, kid. I may have something for you, but first you’ve got to give me something, too.”
“Yes, yes, of course. Here.”
The boy took various crumpled bills out of his pockets, which the mutant smoothed out and counted. Then she hunted in her brown, fake-leather backpack and took out a see-through blister pack with a small, fuchsia-colored tablet. The boy grabbed it from her hand and ran off. The mutant turned toward Bruna.
“You still haven’t told me what you’re after.”
Her beautiful voice seemed an anomaly in such a sinister character.
“I want a mem. Do you sell them?”
The woman looked annoyed.
“Hmmm, an artificial memory. Those are huge words. In the first place, mems are very expensive.”
“That’s not an issue.”
“And besides, I don’t traffic in that stuff.”
“You don’t say. So where can I find someone who does?”
The woman looked around as if she were searching for someone, and Bruna followed her eyes. It looked like there was no one in the arcade although, despite her sharp eyesight, even the detective couldn’t see clearly more than a few yards farther along, as the place was buried in shadows.
“Honestly, I couldn’t say. A few mem sellers used to come by here before, but I haven’t seen them for some weeks. It seems things are getting ugly in the memory market—you know, because of the dead reps. Sorry, technos.”
“Yes, those two recent victims,” said Bruna, testing the waters.
“Hmmm, more than two, more than two. There were others before them.”
“How do you know?”
“Well, I have ears, as you can no doubt see,” said the mutant with a burst of laughter.
Then she suddenly became serious.
“How much are you willing to pay for the mem? For one that’s top quality, written by a true memory artist.”
“How much would it cost?”
“Three thousand gaias.”
Bruna was shocked but tried to keep her expression impassive. Anyway, she hoped the RRM wouldn’t raise objections about her expenses.
“Fine.”
“Well then, you really are in luck. Because, while I don’t traffic in them, it just so happens I’ve got a really good mem right here that a colleague gave me to pay off a debt. Have you got the three thousand Gs?”
“Not in cash. I can transfer them to you.”
The woman waved her hands in front of her as if she were wiping steam from a mirror.
“I don’t like to use mobiles. They leave a trail.”
“Well, that’s all I’ve got. It’s that, or nothing.”
The mutant thought it over for half a minute, grumbling. Then she took a long narrow tube out of her bag and showed it to Bruna. She might just as well have been showing her a thermometer for animals, since the rep had never seen a memory applicator like this one. The woman manipulated her wrist computer.
“Okay. I’m ready. Put through the transaction.”
When she heard the beep, the mutant checked the information and then handed the tube over to the detective. It was less than a quarter of an inch wide and about eight inches long, and perhaps made of titanium, since it weighed nothing. Bruna turned it around in her fingers a few times.
“As you know, the mem’s inside. There. Have a look. And this is the insertion gun. Do you know how it works?”
“I guess so, though the applicators I know are different. Bigger, and more like a real gun.”
“Then it’s been a while since you saw a mem. You have to insert the thinner end into your nose, put it in as far as you can, and press these two buttons at the same time. Then the injector will take its measurements and set up the memory so that it’s on the right trajectory. And when it’s done that, it’ll emit a warning sound and then fire. It takes about a minute. You have to keep as stil
l as you can during the whole process. Rest your head against something. And be very careful which end you put in your nose, or you’ll end up firing the mem into your hand. Enjoy!”
She provided the instructions with a hint of mockery in her silky voice, as if she found Bruna’s ignorance amusing. Or maybe she was delighted that she’d charged her more than the going rate. Laugh while you can, Bruna thought vindictively, as she watched the woman disappear among the arches. If she found out that the mutant was in any way involved in the deaths, her fun times would be over. The android took a deep breath, trying to dispel a certain tightness in her chest, and headed back home. About halfway along the esplanade she started to run, and didn’t ease up until she reached home. When she walked into her apartment, she was clutching the metal tube so tightly that her nails had left their imprint on her palms.
She was drenched in sweat and her stomach was churning. She looked at the mem and thought, It’s like having a corpse in my hand. Even worse than that. Like having a living being shut away inside the mem. An entire existence anxiously waiting to be liberated, like the genie in the bottle in A Thousand and One Nights. She recalled a couple of combat reps whom she’d seen some time back, in the military, injecting memories. Watching them hadn’t been pleasant, at least initially—the guys threw up. But there must be something good about mems if so many people did them. Bruna inserted the tube into her nose. She was standing in the middle of the room with no support. She wasn’t going to fire the insertion gun; she just wanted to see how it felt. The tube’s metal was cold and she felt a bit suffocated having it in her nose. Would it hurt? Just by pressing two buttons she could have another life, be another person. She felt slightly nauseous. She removed the tube and threw it onto the table. She needed to find someone to analyze the mem. Maybe it was one of the adulterated implants.
CHAPTER EIGHT
