Finn's Golem

by Gregg Taylor

  It struck me that avarice dreamt of power and privilege pretty good, but I didn’t bother to bring that up. I said nothing.

  “So what do you expect me to do?” she said, her hand shaking hard now. “Share with you? Let you hold that power over me?”

  “Two minutes ago I was willing to walk away clean,” I said. “With nothing.”

  “That was two minutes ago,” she said. When she was right, she was right. “Besides, how could I live, always knowing that you were out there somewhere, hunting me?”

  It was a fair point. She didn’t know a thing about me except that I used to be stone-cold killer, that I’d had a more recent hero complex, and that with no profile to destroy, I would be one of the few people in the world she had no power over. I didn’t really see a profit in agreeing with her on this point though, so I said nothing.

  “Do you really imagine I’d think twice about shooting you? I just killed one of the most powerful men in the world,” she said, with the seeds of something new and hard growing in her voice. “And in an hour, I will have a glass of wine and put my feet up and remove any trace that he ever existed from history. People will find it odd, but it isn’t like that sort of thing hasn’t happened before. You’d do the same thing if you could.” There was a smirk in the voice now.

  “I would have liked to believe in Claire Marsland,” I admitted. “There was something about her that was just too damn good to be true. And I guess it was. When everything is said and done, it looks like the only person who’s been even half straight with me is a little Synthetic ex-whore. Maybe she was more real than either of us.”

  The gun stopped quaking quite as much and pressed a little harder into my neck. “Don’t you talk like that about me. You’re the one that isn’t real. You’re nothing but a filthy Shade.”

  “The minute you erased your profile and made yourself into Marsland’s heir, you became everything that I am.”

  She didn’t like that. “You’re nothing at all!” she wailed. “Nothing at all!”

  “Then why don’t you pull the damn trigger?” I shouted. “What the hell are you waiting for?”

  There was no sound at all for a moment. Then I could hear her breath come faster and I knew that she was crying. But the pistol never moved.

  “We can’t stay like this forever, angel. I’m willing to leave it to chance if you are.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Pull the trigger,” I said quietly. “If your charge was good for six shots you’ll be doing me a favor. You walk away clean with Marsland’s Golem Protocol and even if anyone ever finds me and Cyrus here, they won’t know who they’ve found.”

  She said nothing, but she was breathing hard.

  “If the charge only got you five shots, we’ll hear a click and I’ll know I can bat an eyelash again. I’ll take that pretty parcel off your hands, but I’ll give you a better deal than you’d have ever given me. You can carry on being Claire Marsland for as long as you like. Maybe someday you’ll actually be as real as she felt.”

  “I hate you,” she said through clenched teeth and tears.

  “So pull the trigger. I’d say the odds are 60-40 in your favor.”

  “Oh God,” she moaned.

  “I’m losing patience, Claire,” I said. “There’s been a hell of a lot of gunfire here already. If anybody heard it, the law could be on their way back from Freeville, which would land you in the clink, me on a firing range and the Protocol back at ’Frame Internal. How is that good?”

  “Shut up!” she screamed. “Shut up or I’ll kill you!”

  “Then kill me, Claire,” I barked. “But by God make a choice or I’ll make it for you.”

  She screamed – it left her lips almost like a battle-cry, but it was all impotent rage. I’d given her every chance, but we couldn’t stay here.

  I ducked under the pistol’s reach quickly and leaned forward, bringing my right leg back into her midsection and kicking her back about six feet. Her gun arm swung wildly to the right, but she stayed on her feet, and glory-be, now she was just mad. She started to swing the Monitor towards me. She was raising it too high as she turned into the shot, she was going for my head and it was taking extra time. I brought the GAT up clean and placed a bolt dead center mass. No need to get fancy.

  She didn’t cry out. She didn’t speak. She just fell and lay still.

  “Damn it,” I said.

  I stood and watched the green-golden light in those eyes fade into something that was grey and flat and cold as any stone. I picked up the bar-coded bubble envelope from the ground where it lay and turned to go.

  I stopped. I shouldn’t have. But I had to know.

  I turned back and reached over to where the Monitor lay. I used her finger to pull the trigger one last time. The gun clicked and did nothing.

  “Damn,” I said to no one, and walked back into the darkness from which we had come.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Sitting in the back of a rented Hov that was registered to one of the richest, most powerful and above all, most recently dead men in the world might not have been a brilliant idea. It was, however, the best one I had at the moment. Like any luxury vehicle worth its salt, the Hov was wired with a level of Omnilink access that made it into a floating office for the rich and powerful. I was neither of those things, but maybe I would be soon.

  I felt strangely ambivalent about the prospect. Maybe it was the dead-certain knowledge that I might very well be the last person in the world that deserved such a thing. Maybe not the man I had become since I woke up behind Drake Finn’s desk, but the man I had been prior to that was, by all accounts, a monster. And I could only assume that one didn’t become a hired killer without a name because one’s life had, to that point, been an unfettered success.

  I looked out the tinted window for a while. I had driven the Hov a solid hour in the top lane before coming to the far edge of Bountiful City. I had seen patches of green here and there before me, and they would have become more and more common before too long if I had kept driving. But I had stopped and parked in the tiered lot of a retail center within sight of the glass and concrete sprawl of Bountiful. Carter had said I had uploaded an info pack on the city before coming here as part of his private army. Firing encyclopedic knowledge of anything directly into your hippocampus is generally considered pretty damned bad for you, and I guess that I was living proof of that. But it did mean that I, who knew next to nothing, knew that cesspool like the back of my hand. Somehow I couldn’t bring myself to leave it. Not yet.

  The Omnilink terminal sprang to life almost eagerly. This was why I needed the Hov. Whether I deserved a second chance at all would soon be a moot point. I had to have one, and I was the last one standing. The sum total of my worldly assets were three guns I couldn’t afford to reload, a pocket full of paper money I couldn’t spend and the QuikSwipe from Cyrus Carter’s pocket. Richest man in the world or not, it could still only hold fifty credits. I had the Golem Protocol and no ‘Link access to use it. So I had borrowed Mister Carter’s, who didn’t seem like he’d be needing it.

  I opened the envelope, half expecting at the last moment to find it empty. It wasn’t. I fed the mini-drive into the terminal and it started to hum. There was a good deal of whirring and the terminal began to reconfigure from the standard display every person living saw each day. Thirty seconds later it engaged in a hard restart and I saw an entirely new interface. It was a ’Frame Internal access. I drew a sharp intake of breath and looked nervously out the windows as the Protocol did its thing. Six or eight security violation warning screens popped up and were each automatically resolved in less than a second. This was an impressive piece of work all right.

  At last I saw a screen that bore the masthead “Master Identity Records. Restricted Access.” in deep red lettering. Ten seconds later the red changed to green and the words to “Access Granted”. There were four options. Search Records, Edit Record, Delete Record and Create New. Simple enough. I hit Create New and
was rewarded with a blue screen that was completely blank except for a single, flashing prompt. I waited five minutes for it to do something else, but eventually forced myself to admit that it was waiting for me.

  I cussed a little, but I don’t know what I’d expected. No one who was supposed to see this screen would have needed user-friendly menus. They knew exactly what a Master Identity Record looked like. I had no idea.

  I moved back to the screen before. Maybe if I looked at a few I would have an idea of where to start.

  I hit Search Records and entered Carter, Cyrus. It wasn’t hard to figure out which one I wanted. I opened the file.

  To say that I was stunned was an understatement. The record was massive. It was... it was everything. Every dollar in, every dollar out, every interface with the Omniframe, no matter how trivial. It went on and on and on..... This was hopeless.

  I took a breath. Maybe if I hadn’t asked for what had to be one of the six or seven most complex records in the ’Frame. I tried for something simpler, something new. Marsland, Claire. Too many options. New Coast Prefecture. That did it. I opened her file, the identity she had created for herself to try and get where I was now sitting. She obviously hadn’t had much time to work with the test copy of E2-476, or she wouldn’t have needed to track down the only copy that existed outside of ’Frame Internal. It had to be the bare minimum.

  My heart sank. The file wasn’t Cyrus Carter big, but it was huge. School records, medical records, telephone logs, financial records, Omnilink access going back to when she was two years old. This on behalf of a girl that hadn’t really existed. How had she made all of this?

  I sat and stared at the screen for a moment and tried not to wish that I had let her shoot me. And I tried even harder to forget that she couldn’t have if she had tried. Having her picture stare back at me didn’t help. I browsed back through the history. There were more pictures... old ID cards, school pictures.... how had she...

  I thought about it for another minute. When the answer came I felt like a real dim bulb all right. She couldn’t have left her old file in the Omniframe. She couldn’t have two identities... so she must have altered the one she was born with.

  Her file listed her as Viktor Marsland’s biological daughter. But their DNA records confirmed this. Claire couldn’t have got far walking around with a gene-scan that didn’t match her file. I searched for Katryn Marsland and was greeted by a photo of a black-haired girl with wire frame glasses who looked to have a real “naughty librarian” thing going, or maybe it was just me. She was also listed as recently deceased. I tried not to wonder if I had killed her.

  Katryn’s DNA matched Viktor and Claire’s. How was this possible? Unless... I searched back seven generations before I found the error, and the instant it was found it self-corrected. I chased it back to the earliest records on file. Soon every deceased member of the Marsland clan had a gene profile that was compatible with Claire. The Golem Protocol had done it all. It was still doing it. She had made herself into a new person and the musically named E2-476 had done all the heavy lifting. Maybe I could do this after all.

  Except I didn’t have a file to alter. I was an un-person, which was what I was risking life in front of a firing squad to fix. I thought about this a moment. A woman with a very small dog on a very long lead walked past the car. She did not seem to notice me.

  I hit Search Records again and typed Finn, Drake. There was, unsurprisingly, only one. I looked him in the face. Here was one that I knew damn well that I had killed. Not to save my own hide, like the punks in Freeville. Not to save a Synthetic in spite of myself, not to save Claire. Not Claire herself, who did her best to make it her-or-me. This was Monarch’s work. My work. I wondered if I would be able to let go of his many sins when I became someone else. I began to suspect that it didn’t work that way.

  I had killed Drake Finn for all the wrong reasons. But he had been a scumbag of some note, in my limited experience. I took some solace in this as I searched his records. He’d been a private eye for eight years, but he’d only been in Bountiful for five months. Everything else said he was from New Utopia. I wondered how bad you had to screw up to pick up your life and move from N.U. to Bountiful City. There was nothing in Drake Finn’s records to say. No family. An uncle had died six months ago... maybe that had something to do with it. I looked at his tax returns. Looked like he’d never been much more than a loser. Probably grifted off the uncle as long as he could and then got out of town when he was gone.

  Drake Finn would not have been amused by what I was considering.

  Thirty-eight years old. Could work. Obviously there were a few problems, but if I made too much of a hash of his records I could probably wipe him from history without hurting history’s feelings.

  I hit Edit Record.

  I removed the flag that read “deceased”. That was a good start.

  Changed his particulars to match mine. I was guessing at the height and weight, but I didn’t think I was that far off.

  Now I was sailing in uncharted waters. I toggled the master photo and selected “input new image”. I picked “new scan” from the dropdown menu and Mister Carter’s top-of-the-line Omnilink terminal began to buzz. Five seconds later there was a detailed 3-D scan of my face in the memory. A little prompting and the head wound was cleaned out of the image. Select “upload” and...

  ...Drake Finn had my face.

  What happened next took my breath away. The Golem Protocol was so much more than just access to the records. As I watched it took that scan and altered every photograph ever taken of Drake Finn and changed the face to match mine. Perfectly. I saw pictures of myself as a child and I knew that if I called up the files of any of the other children in the class pictures that every copy would have my face. Because that was Drake Finn’s face. The Omniframe said so. I wondered how much of this was the Golem Protocol and how much was the Omniframe’s ability to heal itself. It didn’t seem to matter, but maybe one day it would.

  I found a lancet and provided a DNA scan and watched the program bend reality again. Change history. I was Drake Finn and I always had been.

  I kept playing for another hour. It was hard to stop. I decided to improve my grades, as I was pretty sure that I was brighter than the first Drake Finn. If he’d been smarter than me the poor bastard might still be alive. I gave myself a degree, but made sure it was a useless one, so no one would ever expect me to actually know anything. A Bachelor of Arts ought to do it. I made it an honors degree for the heck of it.

  I registered all three guns in my name and wiped clean any records of their being lost, stolen or wanted in connection with a crime. I made sure Drake Finn’s detective license was valid and paid up. I added a couple of small citations in New Utopia that I was pretty sure no one would check. Of course, if they had, they would have found them perfectly valid. I was starting to enjoy this too much.

  I thought about what should happen next for a long time. ’Frame Internal had been warned about this program. Sooner or later they’d be able to defend against it. I couldn’t count on getting a second crack at this. I didn’t deserve the life of luxury the Locust had offered me and Claire Marsland hadn’t. I knew I had too damn much to atone for. But I’m not sure even I deserved Drake Finn’s credit rating.

  I gave him a savings account. I padded it. It looked nice. I opened a retirement fund in case I lived too long to be a professional hard-ass, and filled it up. Not to the point of extravagance, but if there was something worse than being poor and old in Bountiful, I couldn’t imagine what it could be.

  I looked back at his tax records. They had all been changed to make complete sense of this new reality, and they were all paid in full. I created a little trust fund from the dead uncle... and a little place out in the country... just an open patch of land I pried out of the edges of a government preserve and grandfathered back a hundred years.

  Three was no question about it, I was making this too damn easy on myself.

  I return
ed the parcel of land to the preserve. I’d probably regret that one day, but I had bigger fish to fry. If I was going to be Drake Finn, he needed an office you could bring a client to. I knew there was a complex just completed in WestCenter... the data pack on all things Bountiful I had absorbed told me there were still units available.

  Five minutes later one of them was mine. Second level with an entrance off the street and a small sign where passers-by could see it. Living quarters on the level above. Absolutely not a palace, but it was mine and it was paid in full. According to Omniframe it was paid in full five months ago and Omniframe was always right. I was scheduled to pick up the keys yesterday, but obviously I had been a little busy.

  I frowned at no one in particular. I had been reported dead. There must be police reports...

  It took me seven minutes to find the files. The Golem Protocol had taken care of everything. The mistake had been attributed to human error. I didn’t need that. There were cops who had looked at that file and seen one thing and might know damn well that something wasn’t right. They would know, but they might not care unless someone suggested it was their fault. I altered the official explanation into a processing glitch caused by an electrical failure. I wrote commendations for the department for identifying and correcting the problem so quickly and efficiently. Absent a Master Identity Record, the dead man was now considered to be a Shade, which meant they couldn’t even file a report that mentioned him. Shades were impossible. Omniframe said so. The whole nasty scar on the official reality faded to nothing before my eyes.

  I found a pad of paper in a compartment and spent an hour writing down the sort of things a person ought to know about themselves. Mother’s name. Father’s name. Medical history (now altered to match my gene scans). Schools attended. Teachers’ names, classmates, names, dates, grades... the flotsam and jetsam of a life I had never lived. I would study it until I knew it as well as I could. I put the pad in a nice leather satchel I found and got into the front seat of the Hov.