by Jeff Edwards
I put my left hand against the panel and the laser behind the glass flared again briefly.
“Mr. Stalin, my hard object scanner has detected a handgun on your person. I must advise you that any attempt to discharge your weapon inside this building will bring an immediate and lethal response from installed security systems. Please understand that this is a statement of security posture and is not intended as a threat. Our insurance coverage requires a verbal acknowledgment. Do you understand the preceding warning?”
“Yes.”
The doors whispered closed and the elevator ascended rapidly. “Thank you for your cooperation.”
“You’re quite welcome,” I said.
The elevator sighed to a stop and the doors opened. I stepped through into the foyer outside John’s apartment.
A sentry robot stood watch over the carved hardwood doors leading to John’s chambers. The robot was an armored, industrial-strength version of one of House’s service drones, with some kind of air-powered Gatling gun thrown in for good measure.
The doors opened almost immediately. I couldn’t see John, but I could hear his voice. “Sarge, come on in.”
The carved doors swung shut behind me a second after I stepped through them into John’s suite.
The decor was distinctly modern. Eggshell white walls, plush carpets in muted blues, and ergonomic furniture done in smoked glass, gray kid leather, and chrome.
“I’m out on the balcony.” John’s voice came from an intercom speaker near the front doors.
I walked to the sliding glass door that led to the balcony and slid it open.
I was about to step out onto the balcony when I caught sight of a picture sitting on an oval glass table to the left of the sliding door. It was a trid, a shot of Maggie that I’d never seen before. I found myself staring at it. Her chestnut brown hair was pulled around to one side of her neck and cascaded over her right shoulder gypsy fashion. Her chin was raised ever so slightly, making her pug nose seem turned up at the end. She’d been looking directly into the camera, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was staring at me.
Her wide almond-shaped eyes were a deep shade of brown that lightened to golden amber near the centers. This gave them a beautifully feral quality that never failed to take my breath away.
It had been her eyes that I’d spotted first. John and I had been carousing, alphabet drinking our way up the bars on Sunset Strip. It was about three months after Argentina, and we were still war heroes and the lords of all creation.
We were somewhere around the G’s, or maybe the H’s, when I caught sight of the most incredible eyes I’d ever seen from across a crowded room. I was fast approaching that critical threshold where not falling down becomes an act of concentration, but this woman’s raw animal gaze cut through the fog of my alcohol like a laser. I felt my mouth go dry.
I could hear John staggering around behind me, the servomotors that powered his exoskeleton whining crazily as the microprocessor strapped to his waist tried to interpret the addled signals coming from his alcohol-soaked brain.
He had still liked the exoskeleton back then. It was a symbol of his bravery, a dueling scar, something for bragging, and for raising the maternal instinct in women. And best of all, it was temporary. He was still confident that the Army’s bio-tech labs were just around the corner from repairing the notch that the perimeter laser had carved in his spinal cord. It was still a joke to him.
That would change.
He lumbered up behind me and threw an arm around my shoulder. “Sergeant Davey, what kind of drink starts with the letter ‘I’?”
I didn’t answer; I couldn’t. I was hypnotized.
John struggled to locate the object of my stare. He spotted her and made a show of craning his neck to get a better look.
“Good eye,” he said, and elbowed me conspiratorially. “I think I’m going to get me some of that.”
No, I thought. No, you’re not.
“Hey Sarge, are you lost?” John’s voice came in from the balcony.
I wrenched my eyes away from Maggie’s picture and stepped through the sliding door.
The balcony was a huge sundeck stretching across the west face of the building: John’s only real addition to the exterior architecture. It was bright out there; I stood squinting until I found my mirrored sunglasses and slipped them on.
John’s chair was stationed about three meters from the railing, to the right of the door. He wore a blue kimono made of raw silk. His gold-rimmed mirror shades looked a lot like mine, only his frames were probably real gold.
I walked across the balcony and stood by his chair. “Okay Wise Guy, what’s this miraculous thing that you can’t wait to show me?”
John handed me a trid. “Check this out.”
The trid was a digital artist’s conception of a dark castle: a shadowy stone fortress, complete with crumbling walls and twisted battlements. It was a dead-on rendering of the haunted castle from a B-horror vid. All that was missing was the werewolf or mad scientist of your choice.
I handed the trid back to John. “What’s this?”
“It’s my new holo-facade. I just got the software this morning. That ought to give this place some atmosphere when the sun goes down, don’t you think?”
I shrugged. “Beats the hell out of that Taj Mahal thing you’ve been running lately.”
I pulled out a cigarette and lit it. “That’s not really what you called me up here to see, is it?”
John tried to look hurt, an attempt made unsuccessful by the fact that his grin was almost as big as his head.
“Come on,” I said. “Out with it. What’s the big surprise?”
John stood up and walked to the railing. “No surprise,” he said. “I just wanted some company.” He raised his hands in a depreciative gesture. The blue silk of his kimono stood out in sharp contrast to the pale skin of his legs.
It took a second to hit me. When it did, the cigarette fell out of my mouth and bounced off the floor of the balcony. His legs... They were bare. No carbon-laminate ribbing. No exoskeleton. He was standing without his exoskeleton!
“Holy shit. You’re...”
“Walking?” he asked. He nodded vigorously. “That is a fact.”
“What happened to your exo?”
“The Beast is in the closet, where it belongs.”
“This is great. This is fantastic! Jesus. I don’t know what to say.”
John laughed. “You don’t have to say anything,” he said. “But I get to say, ‘I told you so’.”
I grinned back at him. “You go right ahead and say it.”
“Proves what I’ve been telling you all along,” John said, “If you throw enough money around, Medical Technology can accomplish anything.”
He walked to the edge of the balcony and leaned on the railing. “I told you I had something to show you. What do you think?”
“I’m overwhelmed! You should have told me, I’d have brought a bottle of champagne.”
“Funny you should mention that,” John said. He looked toward the door and whistled.
The door slid open and a service drone rolled out onto the balcony. It glided silently to a spot a meter or so from John. Cradled in its tubular alloy arms were an ice-filled champagne bucket and two slender fluted glasses.
John reached into the bucket and fished out a dark green bottle swaddled in a white linen napkin. He held the bottle up and read the label. “Dom Perignon twenty-two. A good year, I think.” He went to work on the cork.
“Since when do you know anything about champagne?”
“I don’t,” he said. “But that’s what the kid at the wine shop told me.”
“I’ll bet it cost a bundle.”
“It did.” John grimaced, as though opening the bottle was strenuous work. The cork popped loudly and sweet-smelling white foam gushed from the neck of the bottle and splattered onto the balcony.
I plucked the glasses from the drone’s manipulators and tried to maneu
ver one of them under the bottle to catch the foam.
John moved the bottle away. “You’re supposed to let that go,” he said. “It’s part of the champagne ritual.”
“Really?”
He cocked one eyebrow theatrically and shrugged. “Hell if I know, but it sounded good, didn’t it?”
When most of the foaming action had died down, John poured champagne into both of our glasses and set the bottle back into the bucket. He looked at the drone. “Don’t go anywhere with that.”
I handed John a glass and we both raised them in salute. “You get to pick the toast,” he said. “After all, you paid for the bubbly.”
“I did?”
“Yep. I had the bill sent to you. I knew you wouldn’t mind, considering the occasion.”
“I had no idea that I was such a generous guy,” I said.
John nodded. “You are, old buddy. Trust me on this. You are.”
I thought for a couple of seconds and then raised my glass a few centimeters higher. “To dreams,” I said. “And to miracles.”
“Dreams and miracles,” John repeated.
I don’t know much about champagne, but this seemed unbelievably rich and smooth.
John lowered his glass and nodded. “Not bad.” He leaned close and whispered out of the side of his mouth, “you should have brought beer.”
“I don’t know what came over me.”
John reached for the champagne bucket. “Next time you’ll know better.”
I grinned. “God, I can’t believe this. I am so happy for you.”
“Me too,” John said.
When the last of the champagne was gone, John dropped the empty bottle and glasses into the bucket and shooed the drone away.
“Okay,” I said. “Give it up. How did you do it?”
John looked at the retreating robot. “Same way I always do it. I said ‘go away,’ and it went away.”
I exhaled through my nose in mock exasperation. “You know what I’m talking about.”
“Oh that,” John said. “The neural shunt. We finally got it to work right.”
“The neural shunt?”
John nodded. “Yep. I let them put a chip in my head and wires down my backbone. You didn’t think I was going to allow all that hardware to go to waste, did you?”
“Wait a second,” I said. “What about the seizures?”
John stared up toward the apex of the dome. “Not a problem any more.”
I stood beside him and tried to follow his gaze. A trio of radon-scavengers circled in the distance like robotic vultures, black mylar delta-wings gliding in looping spirals under the soaring arch of the dome.
John pointed up to them. “Have you ever seen a radon-scavenger up close?”
I shook my head.
“There’s not much to one,” John said. “It’s like a plastic bat-wing with a thousand tiny electrodes glued to it. As it glides through the air, the electrodes generate some kind of electrostatic field that attracts radon particles.”
I waited for him to continue. I had no idea where he was going with this.
After a few seconds, he sighed heavily. “They’ve got little processors on board. Computers that only know how to do two things: sniff out concentrations of radon, and find their way home to charging stations when their power runs low.”
“I don’t mean to be rude,” I said, “but is this a science lesson, or are you trying to tell me something?”
“I’m like those bats,” he said. “Completely single-minded. I’ve been trying to get my legs back for so long that I don’t know what else to do with my life.”
He continued staring up at the dome for a few seconds and then turned back to face me suddenly. There was a strange look in his eyes. He quickly covered it up with a grin. “Enough about me. How’s the case going, Sarge?”
“I’m still poking around,” I said.
“Be careful where you poke,” John said. “You’ve got somebody’s attention.”
“What do you mean?”
“I watch the net pretty closely.” He rubbed absently at his thigh. “And lately, your name has been popping up all over the place. Somebody is making some very oblique inquiries about you.”
“Any idea who that somebody might be?”
John shook his head. “I chased down one of the go-fetch routines they’re using and tried to backtrack it to the source. No luck. It changed color maybe thirty times in ten microseconds.”
“Changed color?”
“Like a chameleon,” John said. “A good piece of intruder-ware changes its appearance to match its environment. Makes it harder for guard-dog routines to spot and kill it. This one pretended to be everything from a bank credit check, to a police subpoena, to a random power surge. Once it even changed into a call-back from one of those psychic advisor hot lines. I managed to copy a little piece of it. It was a really clean piece of code, cutting-edge. My guess is, it was written by one monster of an AI.”
“Who would be likely to own an AI capable of writing something like that?”
“It could be the Yakuza,” he said. “They could certainly field the software and the hardware. Have you done anything to piss off the Sons of the Rising Sun lately?”
I shook my head. “It’s probably not the Yak. If they were unhappy with me, they wouldn’t keep it a secret; I’d just wake up one morning and find my head in the refrigerator between the leftover meat loaf and the bologna.”
“How about somebody corporate?”
I thought about it. Somebody with corporate influence who might have cause to check me out. Somebody with a lot of processing power at his disposal. I could only think of one candidate: Kurt Rieger.
I shrugged. “Maybe.”
“LAPD is interested in you too,” John said. “They’ve got your name flagged in connection with a couple of murder cases. You’re listed as a material witness in one case, and an ex-suspect in the other. Their inquiries weren’t too hard to spot. Their idea of camouflage is a rubber nose-and-glasses.”
“Thanks, John. I appreciate you watching my back.”
He looked out over the city. “No problem, Sarge.”
I was digging out another cigarette when I remembered something I’d been meaning to ask about. “Hey partner, do you remember that Turing Scion that you made of Maggie?”
“Sure,” John said. “I remember.”
“Do you still have it?”
John looked at me. “Of course. Do you want to talk to her? I could go plug it in.”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to talk to it,” I said. “In fact, I’d appreciate it if you would erase that damned thing.”
John cocked his head to the side. “Erase it? I can’t erase it. That Scion is all that’s left of her. Everything that she ever was is in there.”
“She’s dead,” I said. “It’s time we let her go.”
John shook his head. “I can’t do that, Sarge. It would be like … murder.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “It’s just a recording. One’s and zero’s. It isn’t Maggie.”
“I plug her in sometimes,” John said. “You should talk to her. She misses you.”
“Maggie is dead,” I said. My voice had an edge to it that I hadn’t intended.
“What if she had been in a Lev accident?” John asked. “And she was still alive, but she had lost her legs.”
“It’s not the same thing,” I said.
“It is the same thing,” he said. “Did I stop being me when I was strapped into that damned exoskeleton?”
“Don’t do this, John. Please.”
“What if it were her arms and her legs? Would she still be Maggie?”
“Yes,” I said quietly. “She would still be Maggie.”
John said, “It’s the same principle. She’s lost her body, but her soul is alive.”
“Don’t,” I said.
“She’s still Maggie,” he insisted.
I stared at him for a couple of seconds, but I couldn’t thin
k of anything to say that wouldn’t have made it worse. I turned toward the sliding glass door. “I think I’d better go.”
As I rode the elevator down, I tried not to think about Maggie. The Turing Scion was a hideous thing to me, but it wasn’t the worst. Her body was out there. Pieces of her were walking around as spare parts grafted onto other people’s bodies.
Every minute of every day, I carried around the secret fear that I might someday meet the organ recipient who’d bought Maggie’s eyes. I’d just be walking down the street, and I’d suddenly find Maggie’s beautiful animal eyes staring at me from out of someone else’s face.
It was almost enough to keep me off the streets.
CHAPTER 15
When I got home, there was a message waiting for me. Tommy Mailo had finished his analysis of Michael Winter’s suicide recording.
I looked at my watch. It was a little after five. I called to let Tommy know that I was on my way.
I walked into Alphatronics just as Henry was letting himself out the front door. He jerked a thumb toward the curtain. “Tommy’s in the back,” he said. “He’ll let you out when you’re done.”
I walked into the shop and Henry locked the door behind me. He waved at me through the window and walked away.
I parted the curtain and stepped into the back of the store. Three-quarters of the room was dedicated to shelves stacked with stock. The remaining space contained a steel workbench crammed with electronic test equipment, cabling, and boxes full of repair parts. On the far end sat two holo-decks and a flat-screen video monitor.
Tommy was perched on a high stool, eating a take-out burger and drinking a Coke from a plastic squeeze bulb. He looked up when I walked in. “Mr. Stalin, come on back.”
I smiled as I covered the distance to his workbench. “It’s David.”
He grinned back at me. “Okay, David.”
I pulled up another stool and sat down. “What have you got?”
Tommy turned back to his equipment. “I started out with a vectorscan,” he said. “It told me that my recording was a copy, but we already knew that.”
I nodded. “What did you find out? Has the recording been altered?”
