redRobe

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  The entry point to the new world was the crater of what could have been a high and unlikely volcano, except for the final steel iris which unfurled to deliver the Nuncio’s cruiser high above lakes and dark oak forests set on the floor of a broad valley.

  From the crater, entering shuttles descended the high mountain towards Vajrayana City. The effect—carefully chosen—was as if the craft had merely flown in from another part of the new world.

  ‘You’ll need this.’ The cabin chief was back again. Manifesting as a cold emptiness in a world of darkness sticky with sparks of neural feedback, like snow burning up the screen of an untuned newsfeed. Axl could hear the toy breathing.

  ‘Need what?’ Axl asked. He wasn’t enjoying himself.

  ‘This...'

  It was soft and wet, round and sticky like a peeled plum. Axl realised the cabin chief was just waiting for the question and knew too that he wasn’t going to like the answer. But Axl asked it anyway.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Well,’ the voice was studiedly neutral. ‘How can I… ? But if you tell me whether you prefer to see with your left or right…’ Fingers began wiping crusted blood from below both eye sockets and Axl finally realised what he was holding. He didn’t know whether to laugh or weep.

  ‘Animal?’ Axl asked.

  ‘Synthetic. Red Cross standard issue.’

  That was worse. Polymer lens and liquid-plastic optic fluid. Primitive self-adhering nerve splice. They worked all right, after a fashion: if you didn’t mind the world in black and white. Rod cells were cheaper to mimic, even when you needed one hundred million of them. The colour-defining cone cells were more expensive.

  But that wasn’t the real problem with emergency-issue optics. No, getting them out again was the fuck up. And they were only really good if fitted within seventy-six hours of initial damage.

  Axl tried to count off the time from leaving Villa Carlotta in his head and realised he had little idea exactly how long he’d been on the shuttle. That he was actually on the Nuncio’s cruiser he didn’t know at all.

  Mind you, clinics on Samsara that could rush grow him two new eyes or enhance his body with integrated armour were likely to range from few to non-existent. And, he’d be lucky if he even found a decent gun. Tsongkhapa might be the most advanced post-Turing AI in existence but as a Buddhist it disliked weapons-relevant technology.

  Axl couldn’t fault the logic. Aggression in humans was hardwired. That’s why satori was so difficult… Difficult like sawing off your own maggot-infested leg was difficult. One madman with a blade could gut his family. With a Browning pulse/R he could clear his ‘hood. With a tank he could take out the next ‘burb and with a LockMart X37 the next country. Give the idiot a fission device and he could unmake his planet.

  Hardwiring didn’t change, only the technology to hand.

  Faultless logic, but shit understanding of how the real world worked. So far as Axl was concerned, Tsongkhapa was living proof that machine intelligence was overrated. He liked logic units where they belonged, in the handle of a gun or operating his fridge.

  ‘Okay,’ said Axl, flipping the peeled plum into the air, ‘how does this work?’

  ‘Plug and play,’ said the cabin chief brightly.

  ‘Yeah, right...' Axl fumbled a catch and caught the eye just as it was sliding off his lap.

  ‘Here.’ The cabin chief lent across and took the sticky ball. There was a quick hiss as the toy yanked the tab on a courtesy towel, breaking it out of its vacuum-packed silver foil, and then he was wiping grit and cotton fluff off the eye.

  ‘Just put it in,’ suggested the toy when he handed it back.

  Axl did.

  Pulling open his right eyelid Axl pushed and his new eye slide home with a wet slurp. Pain flared as tiny feelers burrowed through the damaged tissue of his eye socket like shoots, grappling the inferior rectus, lateral and superior oblique muscles. Cells divided, wasted muscle tissue started to regrow.

  Specialised shoots found and tapped what had once been the working optic nerve to Axl’s right eye. A complex pattern of send and receive began between the new eye’s control chip and Axl’s visual cortex, as the optic brought itself into sequence.

  Black faded to grey and then blinding white. All Axl felt was sick and frightened. Deep down sick for the first time in more years than he could remember.

  * * * *

  Around him the dazzle of static faded and downward lines solidified into a grey bulkhead hung with a Bokhara carpet. Flat rectangles turned to seats, all empty. There were no real windows, but a Tosh screen framed by folded-back wooden shutters came into focus to show African children rolling in the waves on the edge of a beach.

  It didn’t look like something found on a shuttle.

  Axl pushed the thought to the back of his mind and kept looking round. He was seeing the world in monochrome low/Res with the colour, contrast and brightness turned right down.

  ‘Okay?’ The cabin chief was watching him. A child’s face with pouting lips and wide eyes offset by a sly smile. Blond hair probably ... it showed up pale in B&W anyway.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Axl, ‘just fine.’

  ‘Good,’ the cabin chief said blandly. ‘Let’s do the rest of it’

  Axl looked at him.

  ‘Your arm, that rig glued to your head ...”

  Oh, that stuff. Axl nodded, glancing down at the implant in his wrist, flesh puffed up around its edges. He couldn’t see the rig he was wearing and didn’t even want to think about the spike in the back of his skull, but something told him those wouldn’t be any better fitted either.

  ‘You want to do this unconscious?’

  No, he didn’t.

  ‘Whatever.’ The toy lent over and yanked out all four wrist feeds at once. Axl was pretty sure that wasn’t how disconnections were meant to be done.

  ‘Forehead’s going to hurt,’ the cabin chief said. It didn’t sound upset about the fact.

  The cabin chief was right too, but it didn’t hurt for long. A quick hiss of foamBone, a burst of cold and analgesic skin had been sprayed over the open wound almost before it had a chance to bleed.

  The movement was practised, maybe too practised. Axl looked at the toy again. Pouting, pretty, vacuous and quietly vicious, the cabin chief looked like the real thing. Maybe they were all trained in battlefield medicine or maybe this one was a special, something kept in reserve. Alternatively, maybe the Cardinal had just requisitioned it from the Vatican. If the Enquirer was to be believed, the city was filling up with vicious little blond boys now Joan was gone.

  ‘Spike,’ said the cabin chief and Axl tried not to freeze.

  ‘You know how to remove it?’

  The toy looked at Axl, eyes cold. ‘I put it in,’ the cabin chief said shortly. ‘Chances are, I can get it out again… Can’t do a foamBone heal though, not for a spike. The plug shouldn’t give you problems so long as you don’t try to pull it out.’

  Instant trepanning.

  Well, it went with all the other enlightenment shit. Axl didn’t know any real reason why he might want to remove a skull plug from the back of his head and he didn’t bother to ask. He just wanted off the shuttle. Followed by some sleep, maybe some food and a weapon. He’d never felt so naked in his life.

  Axl had no gun, not even a boot blade. All he did have were two tiny DNA polymerase wet chips, matched to Father Sylvester’s genome. Plus another two for Joan’s sister. Modified standards. Any body fluid from either would do—snot, blood, whatever. Drychips could have handled skin flakes, dirt and hair but they were bigger, more obvious. And besides drys weren’t Red Cross standard issue, while wet chips were. He had two dozen of the things. Only four of those were specifically modified, the rest cheap mass-produced refugee fodder. The kind of chip that told you if you were dying of flu or the retro Virus a couple of days ahead of it actually happening.

  ‘Okay’, said the cabin chief. ‘Final shot.’

  There was a hiss cold against the
side of Axl’s neck and then the darkness began to roll back in.

  Chapter Twenty

  The Diamond Way

  Its detractors might call Samsara a victimDisney themepark, but Vajrayana still had some of the best medical and legal AIs that money could hire.

  Axl woke only once, realised he wasn’t on a shuttle and tumbled back into darkness. At first sight, the demons that inhabited the dark were almost anachronistical Freudian, full of red snakes that twisted tight around his wrists or ate their way under his flesh until only their tails could be seen poking from ragged gashes in his skin.

  Only later, days later, did he realise that a mediSoft on Samsara had been reprocessing his blood. Siphoning it off to mix with interleukin-4, before adding heat-killed bacterium and retrovirus triggers to dentritic cells to sensitise them, feeding the mix back to his body to repair what was left of its immune system.

  Not a cheap process and the mediSoft did it before it even knew if the ‘fugee crimes board would allow him to stay.

  * * * *

  The old man nodded, nothing else. No questions were asked. In fact, so far as Axl could tell, the man with the odd-shaped felt hat kept his eyes shut throughout the interview. Though the abbot did stop chanting just long enough to mutter something that made even the small boy who’d led a staggering Axl into the cold, vast chamber look surprised.

  ‘Metal Monkey.’

  It sounded like a surf band, something West Coast classic that Axl just knew he’d hate. Chopping Gibson Les Pauls, rhyming verses and some over-easy, cheesy-listening bridge, all masquerading as garage chic. He hoped metal monkey meant something to the boy, because it sure as hell meant nothing to him.

  In total he was in the ice-cold room about five seconds, but given the length of the shivering queue he’d been bumped to the front of, Axl was surprised he’d got that long.

  And then it was on to a smaller, more clinical room to see someone else.

  ‘Are you a war criminal?’ The question was in English.

  Axl thought about it. Most of his brain was taken up with trying to remember. Except that while he was still hitting recall the young paralegal sat on the other side of the desk repeated the question, only this time in German.

  Axl was still thinking about it when the man asked again in Norwegian. Only this time Axl didn’t recognise the language but it didn’t matter, because by then he’d forgotten the question.

  Finally the man gave up asking if Axl had committed warcrimes and concentrated on finding a language in common. Not knowing he’d already achieved a hit rate of three out of seven.

  ‘Do you speak Japanese?’

  Not enough to answer. Axl frowned, shook his head and shivered. Ground zero in Samsara started at 6800 feet and rose steeply outside the central valley. At least it did where temperature, oxygen content and atmospheric pressure was concerned. If he got any colder he’d be doing involuntary cryo.

  The young man sat in front of Axl smiled. He was shaven-headed and hatless, bare to the waist, his lower half wrapped in a saffron robe. Rubber sandals were tied to his feet with twine. His smile was as gentle as his impossible questions were polite.

  Chinese, Axl thought. He’d heard that ultimate cool among Beijing’s refusniks was to turn Buddhist and go work for the Dalai Lama. Learn to be quiet, be serene… Things had been somewhat different the last time Axl had met someone Chinese. Back then, back there a doe-eyed girl had ripped every nail from Axl’s right hand, using pliers. And when he still refused to confess, her father had apologetically eased a cattle prod into Axl’s anus and fried his colon so badly the first thing Axl did on being sprung was stop-off at Delhi to get a quick and dirty transplant.

  The family was being rehabilitated, Axl learned later in their last week of being prepared to re-enter Beijing medical society. A week later, with his lower intestine in spasm, one hand missing and his jaw cracked in three places, two soldiers tossed Axl out of a moving Geep at the gates of the English Embassy.

  Right idea, wrong place. The English asked so few questions Axl could only assume they recognised him from WarChild and figured he was still legit…

  Axl came back to Beijing two months later as someone else. New eyes bought over the web, neatly cut hair, his skin bleached Norwegian White and an arm’s length of off-the-shelf, clone-grown Indian gut spliced into place in his lower abdomen. The man Axl should have killed first time round died in his bed, from a scorpion bite. And across the city, the sad-eyed apologetic doctor and his daughter slept soundly, undisturbed.

  That was the way Axl wanted it. The route Black Jack would have taken. So Axl did the job he’d been retained for and did it for free, because he’d missed his kill-by date and that was how contracts went.

  Still, best not to remember… Who knew who was listening in?

  Axl glanced across the table but the Chinese paralegal had turned into a different saffron-robed figure, sat there also smiling, quietly waiting for Axl’s attention. This boy’s eyes showed up to Axl as light grey, which made them blue or maybe green. He looked like a freshman from some exclusive East Coast college, all ivy leagues and quads. The kind where good SATs alone aren’t good enough. The boy glanced nervously at a screen in the table in front of him and read off his first question.

  ‘Do you speak Portuguese?’

  Axl nodded, shifting on his chair. Any half-decent semiAI could have done the interview better. But then, any half-decent AI would just have got Axl to say something and then run semantics on the result. Even something basic like KnowWho would be able to pin him down to a country, maybe even a particular city. To get his district, background or age took something heavier like SoftSP. The studios in Day Effé had been using that for decades to put accents to v'Actors for their interminable novelets, Axl presumed everyone else did as well.

  ‘Is Portuguese your main language?’

  Axl thought about it, or maybe he just pretended to think, he wasn’t sure. There was a time lag between words and thoughts. And besides, how the fuck did he know what his first language was? He’d been seven before he remembered uttering his first word and that had been muerto.

  ‘Spanish,’ said Axl.

  The young American switched to fractured barrio slang and Axl smiled for the first time in days. He always felt that way in reverse, when he used German.

  ‘Not my best language,’ the man admitted with a grin, switching back to Portuguese, ‘but Tsongkhapa doesn’t like implants… And I don’t rate using a box…’ He jerked his head towards a BabelFisk translator resting lifeless on the desk. The boy hadn’t even bothered to turn it on.

  ‘English,’ Axl said slowly. ‘I can do English.’ The words rasped in his throat, broken before they’d even left his mouth… ‘And no, I’m not a war criminal.’

  ‘Okay,’ the American flipped the screen up off the desk and swivelled it towards Axl. On it was a real-time grab of the interview. ‘Look at the screen,’ said the man and Axl did. In place of the room, words now hovered.

  ‘Can you read it?’

  Axl nodded.

  ‘Good. Check the words and if they’re true read them aloud, facing the screen. By reciting these words you assert that you’ve not committed a war crime, not been proscribed sanctuary by the UN PaxForce and you are not—in so far as you know—under edict from WorldBank, the IMF or the Human Rights Court at the Hague ...'

  The man kept his voice soft, as if worried he might give offence. But underneath the gentleness was the flatness of lines recited hundreds of times before.

  Axl swore the oath without hesitation. And in swearing gave up his right to sanctuary if the UN could prove he’d lied.

  * * * *

  ‘A bridge that travellers walk over, moonlight that cools flames of passion, herbs that cure disease, and sun which illuminates darkness…’ The doctor was reciting something but Axl wasn’t listening, merely watching the way sunlight showed up tiny blonde hairs on her wrist. Not that this was what he saw. Axl got shades of grey bleachi
ng out to white and not even in real 3D either.

  The doctor deserved a soft synth loop, something exotic like a late riff or soloing balafon. She didn’t get that either. Too many empty spaces, too much silence.

  There’d been other borders to be crossed, years back when the world was a different kind of black and white. Crawling under the wire into besieged Bogotá. Passing through the razor fence surrounding the Cabal, back when the Az virus had just started raging, before towerblocks crumbled and Spanish flu turned Colombia to a mountainous wasteland.

  That was professionalism, crawling into a city under siege to kill somebody who was probably going to die anyway. Either that or stupidity. Axl did it though, and got out to rack up that week’s highest ratings and a prize at Cannes. The networks hated that. Seeing freelancers walk away with awards.

  The voice that broke through his tumbling memories was patient, soft and understanding. So kind and rational Axl wanted to scream. It was asking him a question. Something he thought it had asked him before.

  ‘Can you remember your name?’

  Axl looked at the doctor who smiled gently.

  ‘If not, we can always try a DNA match using the composite Red Cross database for Europe. But you know it was logic bombed…’ She caught herself and blushed. When she spoke again it was to say exactly the same thing, but more slowly and using simple words. Which told him all he needed to know about how convincing he looked in his new part.

  Axl grinned sourly.

  ‘Name’s Jack,’ he said, ‘Black Jack Hot. Hell, you’ve probably heard of me?’

  Too young to have watched the series first time round and too grown-up now to be interested in the revival, it was obvious she didn’t get the gag. All he saw on her face was pity. Which wasn’t enough to stop Axl pasting the patented shit-eating grin onto his hollow face.