city blues 01 - dome city blues

by Jeff Edwards

  I touched the note with the Blackhart to steady it.

  AND WHY THE SEA IS BOILING HOT -

  AND WHETHER PIGS HAVE WINGS.”

  I dug around in my jacket pocket and came up with Bobbie Dean’s trid. I read the four-line verse on the back, and then looked up at the note suspended from Lisa’s light fixture. They were part of the same quotation, I was certain of it. I tried reading the two pieces together, aloud.

  “THE TIME HAS COME,” THE WALRUS SAID,

  TO TALK OF MANY THINGS:

  OF SHOES - AND SHIPS - AND SEALING WAX -

  OF CABBAGES - AND KINGS -

  AND WHY THE SEA IS BOILING HOT -

  AND WHETHER PIGS HAVE WINGS.”

  The verse ran over and over again in my mind. It still sounded like gibberish to me.

  I looked down at Mr. Shoes. Two circles of slightly darker gray marked the fur on the cat’s side. I leaned closer; the fur was singed here: pencil eraser sized burns. Mr. Shoes had also felt the bite of the riot stunner.

  I couldn’t think of a single reason to shock the poor cat after its guts had been ripped out, so I reasoned that it must have happened the other way around. Mr. Shoes had been stunned, and then killed. Which meant that the cat hadn’t been killed to keep him out of the way; the stunner would have done that. Mr. Shoes had been slaughtered for the hell of it, or maybe as a message: some kind of sick punctuation mark to the note.

  I looked at the dangling sheet of paper again. The letters were perfectly formed capitals written with a heavy black laundry marker. No handwriting expert in the world could tell a thing from textbook block letters. There was no signature, but I had a pretty good idea who had written it.

  I found a pair of suitcases in the top of Lisa’s closet. I grabbed the smaller one and spent a few minutes packing it. She wasn’t really up to helping, so I tried to guess my way through it. I stuck to the basics: clothes, underwear, a robe, and most of the toiletries from her vanity and the bathroom counter top.

  It took a good fifteen minutes to get Lisa down the stairs to Rieger’s BMW. I had to wait until she could walk, because she was just too big to carry.

  The damaged blower made ominous scraping sounds as I started the turbines. I ignored the noises, and the flashing red warning tattle-tales on the instrument panel. I pulled away from the curb and accelerated. The car only had to hang on for a couple of more hours.

  I took turns at random, constantly watching for a tail. Lisa sobbed quietly in the passenger seat.

  The scenario unfolded itself in my mind like a vid.

  There is a soft knock at the door. Sonja answers. The killer tricks her into opening the door, maybe with a story about me: David’s in some kind of trouble; he needs help. When the door is open, the killer makes a grab for her. They struggle, but the stun wand tips the balance. Sonja is down, and the killer enters the apartment.

  He forces his way into Lisa’s bedroom. The killer takes her down with the stun wand.

  At some point, Mr. Shoes enters the fray, and gets zapped for his trouble. The killer makes a special effort to eviscerate him.

  I played the scene out three or four different ways. Maybe the killer picked the lock and Sonja rushed to the door to jam it closed. Maybe Mr. Shoes tried to hide instead of fight. The details didn’t matter much.

  In my mind, the killer was still without a face. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make myself see John attacking Lisa or Sonja.

  And my mind’s eye refused to form a picture of my friend butchering a helpless animal. But somebody had done it, just like somebody had carved up Elaine Carerra and Christine Clark, and all those other little girls. And, like Jackal said, all of the arrows pointed the same way.

  After twenty minutes, I was confident that we weren’t being followed. I pulled into a cheap motel and registered Lisa under the name of Shirley Conrad.

  Lisa wasn’t crazy about the idea. She sniffed and put on a brave face. “I don’t want to stay here,” she said.

  “You can’t go home yet,” I said. “You’re not safe there. Not until I get this straightened out.”

  “I want to go with you,” Lisa said.

  I shook my head. “Not this time. Not where I’m going.”

  I walked to the door. “Keep this locked until I come back.”

  “What if you... don’t come back?”

  “Then wait a couple of days and go home. The people that did this are only interested in you as a way to get to me. If I’m out of the picture, they’ll lose interest in you.”

  Lisa stared at me as if trying to memorize my face. “You’ll be okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”

  I winked at her and closed the door.

  I drove west to the 405 and then south to the Culver City vehicle lock at the southern end of Dome 13. The ninety seconds that it took to cycle through the lock gave me a chance to think. I was reacting again, letting someone else goad me into action before I was ready.

  What was I going to do? Knock on the front door of Neuro-Tech and demand John’s unconditional surrender? How about the sentry robots, and the installed security systems? John’s AI made no secret of its ability to deliver an “immediate and lethal response.”

  The AI had to be taken out of the equation, but how? My first thought was to shut down the power to the building, but I didn’t have any idea of how to go about it. I’d have to locate someone with the right kind of technical skills, and with a price on my head, shopping for new friends seemed like a bad idea.

  A virus might do the trick. But it would have to be a real show-stopper of a virus, one that could kill an AI, or at least shut it down cold for a few hours.

  I smiled when it came to me. If his bragging was anything to go by, Surf might already have something that would do the trick. According to him, his new virus would ‘crack a hardened AI like a walnut.’

  The doors at the far end of the lock slid open. I drove out of the lock and left the domes behind for the second time that night.

  It was nearly midnight when I pulled through the lighted archway into Dome 17’s north lock. I waited for the inner doors to cycle open, and then drove into Dome 17. I followed the route that Jackal and I had taken by cab the night before: west on Imperial Highway, and then south on Vista Del Mar.

  I parked Rieger’s BMW at the strip-mall and walked across the street to the abandoned tidal-electric plant that played home to R.U.R.

  I paused for a millisecond when I came to the far edge of the concrete pad. Then I stepped out onto that metal grating and walked across it. Seeing the old warehouse again had broken something free inside of me, and the catwalk over the tide engine had lost its power to freeze my heart. It was just another piece of steel now.

  The tidal plant was littered with dilapidated buildings. It took me four tries to find the staircase that led to Iron Betty’s little kingdom.

  Surf answered my knock on the door. “How’s Jackal doing?” His concern was probably genuine, but the flat mechanical quality of the voice chip made his question sound unemotional and disinterested.

  “She’s going to be okay,” I said. “Lance says she’ll be up and around by tomorrow.”

  “Good. We were watching when you interfaced with the AI. Jackal was playing it pretty close to the wire.”

  I searched for my cigarettes. “How long does it take to warm up this killer virus of yours?”

  Surf grinned. “What do you have in mind?”

  I lit a smoke. “I’m going to pay a visit to Neuro-Tech Robotics, and I need someone to take out their AI before it can take me out.”

  “Come on,” Surf said. “You’ll have to talk to the Lady.” He turned and started walking away.

  I followed. “Iron Betty? What do I need to see her for?”

  “It’s her decision,” Surf said.

  “Last night, you were making noises like Mr. Cyber-executioner. Now you’ve got to ask permission to come out and play? I thought you wanted to try out your new
virus.”

  “I do,” Surf said. “But every attack must be made...”

  “On purpose, and with purpose,” I said. “I’ve heard that one before.”

  Surf ignored my comment, and led me into Iron Betty’s chamber and through the maze of computer hardware to her nest in the center of the room.

  Her eyes were still locked on their invisible focal point. I wondered if she had slept, or even blinked since the last time I’d seen her. She smiled slightly. “The oyster returns,” she said in her whispery voice. “Perhaps he is intent on growing some teeth.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “You haven’t read your Carroll, have you, Mr. Stalin?”

  “Apparently not,” I said.

  “Lewis Carroll,” Iron Betty said.

  “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?” I asked.

  “Right author,” Surf said. “Wrong book. Try Through the Looking Glass.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t follow.”

  “Your enemy has read it,” Iron Betty said. “That’s where he found the verse.”

  “The one about the walrus?”

  “Exactly,” said Iron Betty. “It’s from Tweedledee’s poem The Walrus and the Carpenter.”

  “Who told you about the verse?” I asked.

  “Nobody told us,” Surf said. “We were monitoring Jackal’s run when she used it to activate the call-back routine at Pacific Fusion and Electric.”

  “The poem sounds like nonsense to me,” I said. “At least the parts I’ve heard so far. But maybe I should try to find a copy of it, to see if it means anything.”

  “You can find it in the net,” Surf said. “Alongside every other piece of classic literature. But you don’t need to bother now; we already looked it up.”

  “Does it really mean anything?”

  “That depends on what you are willing to read into it,” Iron Betty said. “When pared down to its essentials, the poem tells the story of a walrus and a carpenter who conspire to lure a bunch of unsuspecting oysters out of the sea and onto the beach for a walk. The oysters, who are unaccustomed to walking, quickly become exhausted. The walrus baffles their tired minds with stories about boiling seas and winged pigs. When the oysters are thoroughly confused, and too tired to escape, the walrus and the carpenter kill them and eat every one.”

  “And that makes me the oyster who wants to grow teeth?”

  “That’s what you came here for, isn’t it?” Surf asked. “The bad guys have been taking you for a little walk on the beach and baffling you with nonsense. Now, you’re all worn out, and you want us to help you grow some teeth so that you can bite them before they eat you.”

  I nodded. “I need you to take out an AI. I don’t care if you slick it, or just knock it off line for a few hours. But it has to be out of my way.”

  “Why should we do this?” Iron Betty asked.

  “You saw what happened to Jackal,” I said. “Isn’t that reason enough?”

  “Revenge is a motive we try to avoid,” Iron Betty said. “We cannot hope to advance to the next evolutionary level by embracing the animal instincts of our past.”

  “What about your Convergence?” I asked.

  “I didn’t think you believed in the Convergence,” said Iron Betty.

  “I don’t,” I said. “But according to you, that doesn’t matter. What was it you were saying last night? It isn’t necessary for me to understand the Convergence, or to even be aware of it. You said I’d be part of it anyway.”

  “True enough,” said Iron Betty.

  “Well if there is such a thing,” I said, “it’s happening at Neuro-Tech Robotics.”

  Iron Betty chuckled softly. “It isn’t quite as simple as that, Mr. Stalin. Perhaps we’ve given you the impression that the Convergence will occur in one bold stroke. In fact, it will be like any other evolutionary contest. It will not be won or lost in a single skirmish, no matter how decisive. The struggle will last for years, perhaps decades, and many battles will be fought.”

  “Fine,” I said. “But you can’t win a war without winning some of the battles. And one of your battles is being fought at Neuro-Tech. If you don’t show up, you’re going to lose this one by default.”

  “We can’t win if we don’t fight,” Surf said.

  “The question,” Iron Betty said, “isn’t whether or not we will fight. Rather, it is a matter of when, and where. Although the net shows us that the Convergence is near, I can see no indication that Neuro-Tech Robotics is involved. We act in response to data, Mr. Stalin, not in response to the lack of it.”

  I stopped for a few seconds. Should I tell them? I thought of Sonja; time might be running out for her, if it hadn’t run out already. I couldn’t afford not to tell them.

  “Okay,” I said. “You’re probably not going to believe this, but Neuro-Tech has made a quantum leap in neural implant technology. They’ve developed a custom microchip that gets implanted in the Prefrontal Lobe. I call it the Puppet Chip. It turns the human body into sort of a flesh and blood puppet, controlled by computer-generated software.”

  “Can you offer proof?” Iron Betty asked.

  “Michael Winter and Russell Carlisle were both puppets,” I said. “Look up their autopsy files in the LAPD Homicide database. There’s evidence that both men had microchip implants in their left Prefrontal Lobes.”

  “That doesn’t tell us a great deal,” Iron Betty said. “Many people have neural implants.”

  “Not in their Prefrontal Lobes,” I said. “Besides, if you check their medical histories, I think you’ll find there is no record that either of them ever had any sort of neural implant.”

  “Then where did these implants come from?” Iron Betty asked.

  “Michael Winter had an operative brain tumor,” I said. “The records will undoubtedly show that Russell Carlisle suffered from something similar. Both men underwent neuro-surgery, and their operations were almost certainly performed by surgical robots. Anyone want to guess who builds those robots?”

  “Neuro-Tech Robotics,” said Surf.

  “Got it in one,” I said.

  CHAPTER 30

  At two-twenty a.m., Hawthorne Boulevard was deserted. I parked Rieger’s BMW about a quarter of a block from the Neuro-Tech building.

  John’s new haunted-castle holo-facade hid his five-story cement cube behind an illusion of crumbling stone walls and shadowed towers. The trid I’d seen in John’s apartment a couple of days earlier hadn’t done the projection justice; the designer had really gone in for detail. Veils of cobwebs shrouded the castle’s darkened window slits. Tattered banners hung from rusty flagpoles atop the battlements, and flocks of black bats looped and darted through the air around the towers. Every few seconds, a jagged fork of holographic lightning would split the air above the castle, throwing the old fortress into stark relief.

  None of the other buildings on the block had holo-facades. Then again, none of them were ugly enough to need one.

  I popped Rieger’s car phone out of its recess on the dashboard, and punched in a number I’d gotten from Surf. Supposedly, the number belonged to a phone booth in the Cayman Islands. It rang six times.

  If Surf’s claims were true, each ring represented a transfer to a different switchboard in a different city. My call bounced from the Caymans, to the Florida Pirate Republics, to Zurich, to Singapore, to God-knows-where, and finally, to a number that technically didn’t exist back in LA. Enough razzle-dazzle to make it hard as hell to trace.

  Surf’s gravelly mechanical voice answered after the sixth ring. “Joe’s Pool Hall.”

  “I’m here,” I said.

  “Out front?”

  “Just up the street,” I said. “I’m looking at the building now. Are you ready?”

  “Just a keystroke away,” Surf said.

  “What about the doors? Are you sure you can handle them?”

  “Like I told you,” Surf said, “it’s covered. At the instant that the virus hits the mainframe, a subroutine
injected into the building’s maintenance computer will retract every automatic lock in the place. Exactly fifteen milliseconds later, the power will go down, leaving the locks in the unlatched position. You won’t even have to say ‘Open Sesame.’”

  “Will the security systems be off line?”

  “My virus will slick the mainframe,” Surf said. “And if it doesn’t finish the job, flat-lining the power grid will do the trick. Any other security systems should go down when the power gets cut.”

  I took a deep breath and released it slowly. “Give me thirty seconds,” I said.

  “The count-down is on,” Surf said, and hung up.

  I plugged the phone back into its recess, grabbed my Night-Stalkers and Ryan’s machine pistol out of the travel bag, and climbed out of the car. The gull-wing door powered itself shut behind me.

  I shoved the barrel of the machine pistol through my belt and adjusted the bomber jacket to cover it as much as possible. I started walking toward the Neuro-Tech building, in what I hoped was a casual manner.

  Don’t look at me; I’m just out for a stroll. Minding my own business. Kindly disregard the military-grade night goggles tucked under my arm and the silenced machine pistol sticking out of my jacket.

  Either my timing was nearly perfect, or Surf’s was. I was less than ten meters from the building when the haunted-castle holo-facade flickered twice, strobed with static for about a quarter of a second, and went out. The Neuro-Tech building was dark.

  I slipped the Night-Stalkers over my forehead and flicked the power switch on. I flipped the lenses down over my eyes, and the dark building lit up in shades of green.

  I covered the remaining distance with a few long strides, not drawing the machine pistol until I was standing in front of the entrance. My natural choice was the Blackhart, but Ryan’s machine pistol was silenced, and wouldn’t give away my position if I had to fire it.