iD

by Madeline Ashby

  “I do.” Javier rested a hand on the nearest chair. Opposite the piano stood floor-to-ceiling windows. Beyond the balcony there was nothing, only black. Somewhere, beneath those waves, there might be some trace of Amy and the island. Somewhere dark and cold and awful, where he’d put her because his own personal deck was stacked against him from the beginning. “But there are games, and then there games.”

  Alice took a seat. Javier followed. “I made my career on poker and blackjack,” she said. “But it’s all different, now. The security measures are beyond anything I imagined, when I started out. Do you know that it was a computer vision algorithm that picked up my first stroke? It was a transient ischemic attack, one of the little ones. You scarcely even know it’s happening. One minute I was splitting on an eight, and the next there was the casino doctor.”

  So he’d been right about the warfarin. She was probably still on a blood thinner or some type. “Casinos have doctors?”

  She cast him a pitying glance. “The good ones do.” Her lips thinned. “Or they did. Once. Now it’s all vN.”

  Javier sipped. “I thought we weren’t allowed on casino floors.”

  “Not here. But these places…” she waved her hand to encompass the ship, “are no good. They’re for punters. The rake is terrible, the commission is too high, the bankroll top-up is automatic. It’s disgusting, the way they take advantage of people. Old people, especially. Do you know how many of the elderly are living on points, on these old boats? There’s free meals and free medical care. It’s cheaper than a home, these days.”

  “But that’s not why you’re here.”

  “Of course not. I’m here to host a tournament. They have me working in player development. Me. At my age.” She sniffed again. “This is my one night off. Two nights a week, I’m paid to hold private games here, in the suite. I take a commission. The rest of my evenings I’m supposed to be working the floor. With no advantage whatsoever. No loss rebate, no soft seventeens, nothing. It’s disgraceful.”

  Javier liked this woman very much, he decided. His last woman, before Amy, was a divorcee from La Jolla named Brigid who took his twelfth iteration to a supermarket parking lot and gave him away, like he was an unwanted kitten. The boy hadn’t even chosen his own name, yet. Both Amy and Alice were significant improvements on that record.

  Javier slid his hand across the table. “Given the value of your time, then, perhaps you should tell me what I can do for you.”

  She smiled. “You’re right off the bat, aren’t you? All right, then.” She sipped, and then pushed her drink away, half-finished. “After this I’m going to Atlantic City. There’s a baccarat tournament, there. Three nights, three styles of game: punto banco, chemin de fer, and banque. Tie-bet only; nine-to-one odds. And the banker is a vN from Mecha. His name is Taft. He has corporate sponsorship. The bankroll is likely infinite.”

  Javier watched her eyes. She wore bright green contacts, possibly to obscure the dilation of her pupils. It would a be a good affectation to cultivate, in her profession. Even now, he could not read her feelings. She looked completely calm, a consummate professional brokering a deal.

  He reached for her hand anyway. “Please don’t do that.”

  She withdrew her hand. “I have to. And you’re going to help me. I need to log as many hours as I can playing against a vN.”

  “You’ll still lose, no matter how much I help you.”

  “Perhaps.”

  He decided to take another strategy. “If I win the majority of hands, will you at least consider leaving the tournament?”

  She gave him a tiny smile and patted his hand, as though humouring a child. “Of course. But you have to prove to me that a vN can play perfect cards with every hand.”

  And so he did.

  It didn’t take long. A professional player of Alice’s calibre understood immediately that he had a perfect count of the cards at all times, even when she switched from a six-deck shuffle to a nine. Simulating more players didn’t do anything, either – it merely increased the speed at which he accumulated the data set. Moreover, he lacked the potent combination of dopamine and adrenaline necessary to create true addictive behaviour and loss of inhibition and discipline; he could make the same small, boring bets for hours at a time, and he could do it with a massive shoe on multiple hands, with a nearly infinite number of splits.

  Between the fifth and sixth round, he asked to use the bathroom to wash his face and rearrange his hair. After that, he took a peek inside Alice’s medicine cabinet, and her cosmetics bag. She kept all of her pills, patches, and gels were in custom biometric containers, but the whole collection in an attractive wooden box inlaid with mother of pearl. Javier didn’t need to spend much time with the box to understand what her game really was, and how she intended to cheat. So he returned downstairs, and continued the game.

  At dawn, Alice was finally ready to quit. “You’re a…”

  “Machine,” Javier said.

  She laughed. The laugh turned into a cough. Javier poured her a glass of water, and she drank it eagerly. “I suppose it was too much to hope for,” she said. “But you should see their offer. It’s incredible. With the rebates, it’s like playing 50/50 odds.”

  Javier nibbled on a dish of Flexo Fries they’d ordered up from the Electric Sheep. He considered. He was up a significant amount of money, and he could probably leverage those winnings into points. But he couldn’t really leave the issue alone, either. “The rebates are invalid if you cheat, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “And there’s no getting out of it?”

  “It’s a ten million dollar buy-in. It’s feeding the bankroll, so it’s non-refundable. No one is walking away from that money.”

  Javier shook his head. “It’s a sunk cost. Think of it that way. Get out now, while you still can.”

  “I haven’t lost that kind of money in years, and I don’t intend to start now.” Her eyes narrowed. “What are you thinking?”

  Javier stood up. He moved toward the window. The sun was beginning to rise. He felt it in his skin. “I think your fellow players are going to cheat,” he said. “And there’s only one way to cheat successfully when playing with a vN. You have to trigger the failsafe.”

  Alice joined him at the window. Reflected in the plate glass, she seemed more tired, older. She wasn’t looking at the ocean, or the sunrise. She was watching him. “And how would you do that?”

  “You would h-have to c-cause harm to another human being,” Javier said.

  “So you would need a team. One to play the game, and another to slip on a banana peel in the background.”

  He turned to her. “Or one to give a player the wrong dose of her medicine, so she could take all her winnings early in the event of a forfeit.”

  She paled. “Are you accusing me of cheating?”

  “We’re just talking. But it would certainly be a good reason to keep a human lover, and not a vN. Because then the mistake would be more plausible.” Javier put his drink down. He took hers and put it down, too. He looked up at the loft. Manuel had long since gone to sleep. “Life is for the living,” he said. “A high-roller like you should know that.”

  She sighed. “It’s not like that at the end. There’s a certain law of diminishing returns at work.”

  He reached around and unclasped the pearls from around her neck. She stiffened, and her hands came up, but the cold fingertips only skimmed him. Carefully, he set the pearls beside the glass of water near the piano. He coiled them up in a nautilus pattern so they wouldn’t roll away. When he turned back to her, he put his hands where the pearls used to be. Beneath his fingers, her pulse was high but steady.

  “It can still be good, you know.”

  Her voice came out high and tight and small. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  He bent and kissed her. She tasted of vermouth and yuzu and salicylic acid. She kissed back very gently, as though her mouth were just waking up.

  “Don’t go
all demure Chinese stereotype on me now, Alice. You sent your boy to find me. And trust me, he knows what I can do just as well as you do.”

  She gripped the front of his shirt. “Take me upstairs. Please.”

  “That’s more like it.”

  For her part, Alice didn’t participate until later. She sat in a chaise and directed the action. Manuel came awake for him slowly, inch by inch, and he finished almost before becoming truly aware of what was happening.

  “Thank you,” he said, ever polite. “I’ve always wanted someone to do that for me.”

  Javier had the grace to pretend as though he had never heard this before. He also neglected to mention that this was just the thing to get the taste of Powell from his mouth. That made it a fair trade, as far as he was concerned.

  Alice joined them soon after that. Manuel had a better understanding of her than Javier did, but his technique needed a little refinement and Javier was happy to demonstrate. It wasn’t the other man’s fault; he couldn’t imagine calibrating things like psi and speed with something so vague as “instincts.” (And to be fair, the same thing was true of finding Manuel’s prostate. Alice had very little hands, and very little patience to match.)

  Manuel fell asleep first. The bed was big enough for the three of them, and as she drifted off in Javier’s arms, Alice said: “Come with me. To Atlantic City.”

  At any other time, he would have said yes. She was a rich woman with excellent taste and the talents to support herself, who still very much enjoyed getting fucked and wasn’t afraid to experiment. It was the kind of brass ring he’d always been looking to grab, until he found Amy. It was the kind of arrangement every other vN wanted.

  “I can’t,” he said.

  She frowned. “Is it because I’m old?”

  “No. There’s just something I have to do.”

  She waited a moment. “Cherchez la femme?”

  He smiled, and kissed her hair. “Sort of.”

  “Your lady is very lucky.”

  Javier rolled away. “She’s dead.”

  Sighing, Alice rolled over to rest her head on his shoulder. “I’m sorry.” She patted his hand. “I’m a widow too, you know. It gets better. With time.”

  “I miss her,” Javier said, before he could simulate how the conversation might end.

  “Of course you do.”

  “I keep thinking about everything she ever did for me. Things I…” Oh, God, but he did miss her. Fiercely. Wanted to be holding her, right now. Wanted to be asleep, holding her, smelling her hair, not someone else’s. So what if her hands were always busy, gesturing something to the island. Why hadn’t he reached over, and taken her hand? Why hadn’t he stopped the conversation by starting one of his own? “Things I didn’t really notice at the time. When I should have.”

  “Hmm.”

  Alice cuddled in closer. Her breath was already thick. He heard a tiny wheeze in there. What a blessing age was. What a fantastic, wondrous gift, to know that you might someday forget everything you’d ever done, that you might drift away from it like a slowly melting chunk of ice. Someday, Alice would get to die. She would die with an imperfect memory of all the hurt she’d caused. It wouldn’t always be sharp for her. It wouldn’t always be there in perfect high-res detail, like the smell of Amy’s hair was for Javier.

  “That’s always the way,” Alice said. “But it’s OK. They’re always with us.”

  “I know,” Javier said. “I know.”

  Back in his own suite, he showered off and then went directly to bed. On his display, he checked his account with the cruise line. They shared points with the Akiba, so he was good there, but the credit would dry up, soon. Even with his commission from Alice, he didn’t have enough liquid cash to get him between Galveston and Las Vegas incognito. He’d gotten by in Costa Rica because there were models like him everywhere, but he had a feeling America would be a lot more uptight. He had no desire to pass through any kind of security between now and his meeting Holberton. If the government didn’t pick him up, Portia would.

  It was hard to tell which scenario he feared more.

  “Concierge?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “When we land in Galveston, I’ll be sending a package to Nevada. I’d like to pay the freight now with points, and have you pick it up after I’ve disembarked.”

  “That’s quite all right, sir. However, we will need to weigh the package, before we can send it.”

  Javier threw back the covers and grabbed his clothes and shoes. “I’ll do it on the bathroom scale.” He stood on the scale, holding all his things, and told them the number.

  “What size of box would you like?”

  “What’s the largest size you have?”

  “Eighteen inches by thirteen by three feet.”

  Javier winced. “Great. Send it up.”

  TEN

  I’m Your Man

  He waited for the porter to leave the room, counted to thirty, then snicked open the box cutter. Cutting himself free was more awkward than it was difficult. Twice, he stopped because he worried the noise was too loud. But eventually he pushed open the flaps and stood up inside the box. He rolled his neck, dusted himself off, gathered his bug-out bag, and used the box-cutter to break the box down entirely. He stuffed it in the relevant bin, then listened at the door. The mailroom was not terribly full. Parcels were a bit of anachronism. There seemed not to be too much traffic in the hallway. He opened the door a touch. No one was there. He cleared the hall and was out in the lobby in two minutes.

  “IRRAISHIMASE!”

  Javier stopped. Several vN were yelling. None were looking at him. They all looked like the puppet vN that had attacked the island, the same pretty Asian male model. They were dressed in a variety of outfits: black suits with skinny ties; navy blue kimono with tiny white diamond patterns; ornate Gothic dresses with fantastic hats and stunning makeup; gleaming white leather motorcycle jackets and matching trousers. None of them looked at him directly. His opening the door seemed to have triggered their reaction. Shrugging, Javier made his way into the lobby.

  Now, they turned. All bowed. “Welcome to the Akiba,” they said, in unison. “When would you like to visit?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Which era can we escort you to?” The vN in the skinny tie pointed. “Each of us represents a different period. Are you interested in one in particular? If so, you could take the tram. Or if you prefer, you could take the long way.”

  “The long way is a lot of fun,” said the vN in the Gothic costume.

  “Actually, I’m interested in checking in,” Javier said.

  “Right this way, sir.” Skinny Tie led him to over a small bridge that spanned a gurgling stream. Once over the bridge, Javier saw that the stream was an offshoot of a much larger pond complete with turtles and koi fish. Sculpted trees stretched over its length, and lotus flowers floated on its surface. Gradients of moss gathered at its edge. Guests followed a grey slate path through the entirety of it, pausing to examine cherry blossoms – in December.

  “Most of the lobbies on the Strip are designed to take your money from the second you walk in,” Skinny Tie said, with no small amount of scorn. “We prefer to calm our guests down and put them at their ease, first. Most of them are simply exhausted from travel. They don’t want to think about gambling. They want to rest. We hope our garden can encourage that.”

  “It’s very peaceful,” Javier said, as Skinny Tie guided him into a teahouse poised on a tiny hill just off the slate path.

  The Rory in the teahouse was in full kimono, and knelt at a low desk. She had no display. No monitor. No device of any kind. She was the device.

  “This gentleman has a reservation,” Skinny Tie said.

  The Rory smiled. “Of course he does. Thank you for showing him in.”

  Skinny Tie bowed and took his leave. Rory’s smile died immediately. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m checking in to your fine establishment,”
Javier said. “My name is Ricardo Montalban.”

  “You are on a fool’s errand,” Rory said. “You will never find Amy. You will never bring her back. There is nothing you can do.”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.” He leaned forward. “Is my reservation not listed?”

  “Chris Holberton is not staying here. You won’t be able to find him. You won’t be able to learn where he stashed Amy.”

  Javier knelt at the desk. He laid his palms on it, flat. He looked the Rory directly in the eye. “I believe you may have me confused with someone else.” He slid his palms across the desk, and covered her hands with them. When she tried pulling them away, he gripped them. Hard. He squeezed. “I believe you may have me confused with one of my clademates, or maybe someone who shares my model. My face. Some other vN who looks like me. Someone who is very dangerous.”

  The Rory simply blinked.

  “I can understand why you might be afraid of him,” Javier continued, “because he is very dangerous. He has nothing left to lose.”

  “You’re damaging my wrists.”

  “I know that all of you are networked. I know that losing one of you doesn’t really matter that much. If you die, you can be replaced. The knowledge one has can be shifted to another. You’re all disposable. Right?”

  Rory tried pulling away again, and he pulled back. Heard something shatter in her wrist. Felt the disconnect under his thumb.

  “That means no one would miss you, if I took the pen that’s in my breast pocket and stuck it right in your neck. It’s full of digestive fluid. I made it myself, on my way here. You wouldn’t die right away. It would happen slowly. From the inside. Your head would fall off, first. It would probably still be conscious as you watched the rest of your body disintegrating.”

  Rory whimpered. Javier let go of her hands.

  “Now. About my reservation.”