reMix

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

Even the Chinese didn’t have an up-front ice-breaker hard enough to crack open LISA. Fixx was trading through as a command and its echo. In the first split second of contact, LISA would reach out for the command and instantly unravel anything not recognized as legitimate, required code. The junk would be stripped out, unread, unaccessed, unravelled like strands of discarded digital DNA.

  Not that Fixx wanted to turn the shit-kick rush of on-the-fly coding into the dry waste of some history lesson, but there’d been a time — way back — when the viruses came first and had to be cleaned out. When firewalls existed to limit outside access, not flame incoming viruses in some Web-based auto-da-fé.

  There were kids back at Schrödinger’s Kaff who reckoned they could hack anything from the Pentagon to HKS. Fixx had been around long enough to know that for the shit it was.

  “And it is, you know,” Fixx told the bedraggled kitten. “Complete fucking cack. And it misses the point...” Which was that the best way to hack a computer was to ask another computer to do it for you. Fixx just hoped LISA still loved him enough to help: and anyway, this wasn’t hacking, it was almost legitimate, at least the second bit was.

  Fingers still flicking, Fixx hit LISA’s firewall, dumped the command he’d been constructing and watched the junk code inside it unravel into flashes on the screen. It would look better stacked up as graphics, but he couldn’t afford the distraction.

  And as a subset of a subset ate up his Trojan horse, Fixx tried a trick that S3 had bullied and bribed out of some scared, long-dead employee at Annapolis — and then saved until they needed it, which was now.

  LISA might be an old US naval AI, fuzzy as all fuck in her logic and rigid in her control parameters, but somewhere down in her core — written over, upgraded, augmented with additional layers of logic until it was almost buried — was a basic BigRedSwitch. The kind that went, if this, then that...

  So Fixx clicked it, using legal code, hot-keying himself through without trouble — LISA was that old. “Sweet as pie,” said Fixx, his voice over-loud, but Ghost ignored him anyway so Fixx turned back to his deck. Sliding a series of reassurances in through the trapdoor. He had maybe five per cent of LISA’s attention now. Keying open her trapdoor would have guaranteed that anyway, but he was using old naval commands to smooth the loop. They told the subset currently on watch that Fixx not only knew what he was doing, but that he had a right to do it.

  On his screen, the subset patched up half a key and waited. It was happy to wait, anything was better than acting as second back-up to Planetside’s temperature control, which was what it had been doing until called to trapdoor duty. Under the key, Fixx typed a second line, watching as both lines meshed to produce a third.

  Fixx grinned.

  “Welcome”, said a voice that echoed tinnily out of the flatscreen’s built-in speaker.

  “Happy to be here,” Fixx typed back.

  “Name?”

  “Commander Bond,” typed Fixx. Nothing too senior, nothing too junior, that was the way to go. If the X3’s bio had known what Fixx was doing, it would have hung itself, but it didn’t. Fixx had ripped out its ribbons, cutting its links to the deck. And without that link, the DI was just some jerk’s memory trapped in a box. And if trashing memories was murder, thought Fixx, then half his girlfriends should be behind bars.

  “Susan,” announced the voice, introducing itself. “Subset Using...”

  “Okay,” said Fixx as the software began reeling off its designation, he got the picture. The voice was American, middle-aged, slightly fussy. Just what Fixx would expect from a subset originally programmed to sell visiting dignitaries on the mythic delights of apple pie, Mom and naval intelligence.

  “Can I ask your purpose?”

  Fixx thought about it.

  “Security,” he said at last, which covered most sins. If you took out politics, religion and commerce, what the fuck was left? Sex, maybe. “Internal security,” Fixx elaborated. “I need cloaking. Nothing elaborate. Just enough to put down at Planetside...”

  If the subset could have nodded, Fixx swore it would have done then. Commanders, security, cloaking clandestine arrivals, that was what it had originally lived for. Not as a control routine for a civilian base. As well as temperature, it might monitor radiation, recycling resources and air pressure in the domes, but that didn’t mean it liked the job.

  “Cover following,” Fixx said, and a digital squirt carried his life story to Susan. It was heavily edited, obviously. There was the briefest of silences while Susan considered the glorious if unlikely past of Commander Bond. A silence Fixx hurriedly broke before Susan decided to do something stupid like double-check it.

  “Please patch me though to LISA...”

  “LISA?” The subset sounded doubtful.

  “Now, please,” Fixx said firmly before the subset had time to refuse. “I want to talk to Luna Intelligent Systems Analysis.”

  “I’m sorry,” Susan said apologetically, “I’m afraid...” The voice stopped. “Oh yes,” it said brightly, “we can patch you through from here.”

  Fixx sighed. Give me a lever and I’ll move the Earth: no statement was truer. Even if that Greek guy hadn’t been talking about social engineering.

  “This is LISA.” The voice was non-personal, efficient, not as he recalled her. And then Fixx remembered that she didn’t know who he was. All the same, Fixx felt his stomach knot up and sweat break out under his arms. He hadn’t felt like this since he was thirteen, waiting on the Ha’penny Bridge in Dublin for that girl who never showed up.

  “That you, sweetie?” Fixx said, less calmly than he would have liked. Silence blossomed as absolute as any shutdown. Seconds later Fixx began to breathe again.

  “Fixx?” LISA sounded somewhere between shocked and hopeful. At least she did to Fixx, though he feared he might be imagining it. That level of emotional nuance hadn’t been programmed into language back when she was commissioned.

  “Yeah,” said Fixx, looking at the screen. “It’s me and I need your help.”

  LISA sighed, the kind of sigh that said, What’s new?

  “I need to land.”

  “Then get clearance.” LISA sounded puzzled.

  “Like I wouldn’t if I could...”

  LISA tutted. When she spoke again LISA sounded more maternal than romantic. “I don’t want to know where you’ve come from, do I?”

  “No,” said Fixx firmly. “You don’t. What you want to do is get me down quietly, discreetly.”

  “Really?” LISA’s voice was amused. “I can think of three good reasons why that’s a bad idea.”

  Fixx could think of a hundred but he wasn’t going to tell her that.

  “One, I don’t know where you’ve been. Two, you’re a shit. And three, if you can remember that court settlement, you shouldn’t even be talking to me. In fact, I should stop this conversation now. Unless there’s a good reason why not...?”

  So Fixx told LISA all about LizAlec, well, everything except the bits involving him. But she was smart enough to put those in for herself. And then just to sweeten the hook Fixx pumped through StarGlazz. Not honey-wrapped but as raw machine code. And then he fed through his famous fractal equation, the one he’d stumbled over as a fifteen-year-old deckjock, wired to fuck, hacking hell out of a Segasim mixer in a cellar club called Infinite Spiral at the back of Temple Bar. He’d gone from street kid to syndication on seven continents, three orbitals and most of Luna inside a year. No wonder he hadn’t been able to hack the lifestyle.

  “Well,” Fixx said, when he figured LISA had worked out that if she fed the music through the equation then StarGlazz might run for several years. “Are you going to help me?”

  LISA thought about it, ran through several thousand alternatives, reduced that to slightly less than a thousand and took the most unlikely. Fixx didn’t even notice she’d been gone. “Twenty-four hours,” LISA said firmly. “Then you leave, okay?”

  Fixx grinned. “Yeah,” he said. “Twenty-four hours. I pr
omise.”

  LISA didn’t tell him she already knew where LizAlec had gone.

  Chapter Seventeen

  If it bleeds/We can kill it

  “Fixx Valmont?”

  “You got it...”

  A nervous courier gave Fixx the 1st Virtual platinum card on his way out of VIP Customs. There had been a time he’d owned not just platinum cards but his own orbiting bank, but then, go back fifteen years and his arrival at somewhere like Planetside Arrivals would have ground the place to a halt. CySat, C3N, all freelance Ishies not nailed down or wired into a feed recharging batteries would have been crawling up the walls to get a grab of him, quite literally. Hell, there’d been five versions of the Fixx Valmont doll, bending arms, working legs, each one chipped up to say “You got it,” and a lot else beside.

  Fixx took his 1stV card, sliding it effortlessly into the inside pocket of his swirling black cloak. It would be drawn against the US Navy’s own Luna account. Somehow Fixx doubted if they even realized they still had one.

  He’d been waved through Immigration, excused sonic cleaning because of the electronics in his arm, and had his cloak, cotton shirt and black leather trousers taken by an embarrassed young woman in uniform, who returned with them a few minutes later, already irradiated and freeze-pressed.

  “I’ve also been told to give you this.” Head down, the courier handed Fixx a small neoprene-sheathed blade, her eyes looking everywhere except at his metal arm. Or it might have been the explosion of yellow bruises that embarrassed the courier. But then, short of sitting around in a decompression chamber waiting for hyperbaric oxygenation to force extra oxygen into his bloodstream, Fixx was stuck with the bruising for as long as it took his body to repair the damaged tissue.

  “Thanks.” The musician’s easy Dublin drawl was soft, miles from the rough Parisian street snarl he’d taken to using. Fuck knew what LISA had dumped into his records, but whatever it was, Fixx was enjoying the attention. It was like his early days of being on board with Sony, before being famous became hard work.

  Fixx could almost believe he was up here to launch some new Sim. StarGlazz, maybe. Perhaps trying to screw over Bernie, his manager, in court hadn’t been such a good idea after all...

  “Is everything okay?” the courier asked.

  “Sure is.” Fixx ran his thumb along the ice-tempered molybdenum/vanadium blade, gently as he could, and blood beaded his skin, strung out in a line like little red pearls. “In fact, it couldn’t be better.” He nodded, tiny dreadlocks bobbing against the shaved sides of his head, tipped into slo/mo by the one-sixth gravity. So far, that was the only thing he was having trouble with, the slight time lapse between physical action and reaction. Didn’t look like Ghost was enjoying it much either.

  The courier looked doubtfully at the kitten. “Regulations don’t...” But whatever she was about to say, she didn’t bother. It wasn’t her problem. Nodding quickly, the woman backed away.

  Shit, thought Fixx, maybe LISA hadn’t told them he was filthy rich and famous after all, maybe it was just contagious. He was still watching the scuttling courier when someone else materialized at his side. Understated grey suit, lead-weighted leather shoes, white cotton shirt and red tie, a very slight bulge under one arm.

  “Rez Aziz,” the man announced, sticking out his hand.

  Fixx shook, feeling the firm shake of a professional. Clear brown eyes were watching him, gauging something. From the close-cropped hair and heavy moustache to the trim gut that spoke of workouts in an artificial gravity gym, everything about the man said police.

  If he found Fixx’s cloak and leather trousers unusual, he didn’t let it show. Instead he flipped a pastel from a plastic dispenser and sucked heavily. A scent of violets filled the air between them.

  “We weren’t expecting to see you again...”

  “Surprise trip,” said Fixx.

  The man looked at him, eyes narrowing as he examined the hasty repair job on Fixx’s face. He looked like the kind of man who could tell you, to the last blow, just how long it would take to inflict damage of that level.

  “All the same...” His words were was emotionless, unaccented. It was the kind of voice Fixx found impossible to pin down. Middle Eastern sometime back, when the designation still meant something. And the twist of Arabic script on his gold ring suggested he kept his family’s faith. But the cologne and bland Seiko watch were as anonymous as his voice.

  Five minutes after leaving him, Fixx knew he would find it impossible to remember the face, another five minutes and he’d probably have forgotten the clothes. And somehow Fixx got the feeling the man wanted it that way.

  “Your luggage?” Mr Aziz looked round vaguely.

  “I travel light,” said Fixx, nodding towards Ghost who was rubbing his neck against Fixx’s ankle.

  “Twenty-four hours,” the man said firmly.

  Fixx looked blank.

  “It is twenty-four hours, isn’t it? Before you blast off for your new ring colony...”

  So that was how LISA had swung it. Obscenely rich and just passing through. “Yeah,” said Fixx, “if you say so.” Hefting Ghost under one arm, Fixx turned for the door marked Exit. It opened before he was ten paces away, offering him a cheerful welcome in a language he didn’t understand. Japanese from the sound of it, which said something about who usually used the VIP lounge.

  “They didn’t have time to change the program,” Rez Aziz said after him. He didn’t sound apologetic, just matter-of-fact, as if reclusive, arrogant, by-law breaking CySat stars came through all the time, expecting to be humoured. But then, hell, maybe they did.

  Outside the door was a walkway, perched high above the floor of Arrivals. And looking down, Fixx could see a swirling blue mosaic and below that wall-to-wall tourists, refugees and journalists. People were beginning to look up — first one or two, then dozens — attracted by the glint of light on his arm and the cloak that billowed behind him when it remembered.

  Some of them, the older ones, recognized him and Fixx bowed, unable to resist the urge; but even as he did, part of him wondered where to buy clothes that were more anonymous, for when he needed to blend in, become invisible.

  It was one thing to be famous, even once-famous. Quite another to find a kidnapped girl when every step you took advertised who you were. All Fixx had in his favour was that no one yet knew he was here to find LizAlec.

  “Can I get a look down there?” Fixx asked a passing cleaner. The cleaner whirred, glass eyes swivelling towards Fixx, and it nodded reluctantly. Fixx took the slight bob of its head to mean he should use the lift.

  A drop lift stood waiting to take passengers down to the marble floor below and Fixx carried Ghost into the Orvis. A button released the holding magnet and his own weight-plus-gravity took them slowly down. Another button blasted the lift back to its original position. The whole contraption was based on an ancient Victorian idea of using pneumatic power to send messages down tubes from one office to another.

  The American woman who’d taken out the patent on the pneumatic lift was now Croesus-rich and holed up in Baja California, her blood, kidneys and lungs wired into a Mitsubishi Extopian Special.

  “Need any help?” the lift asked as its doors opened.

  Fixx shook his head.

  “Then enjoy your stay,” said the lift and was gone back to the VIP floor, leaving Fixx standing in the swirl of people crowding Arrivals Hall. The vast atrium stank of people, McDonald’s soyburgers and recycled air. It was a smell Fixx had forgotten and one he was going to have to get used to — fast.

  Every breath, every gulp of water taken on the Moon was endlessly recycled. Tears, sweat, piss, everything was collected or leached from the air and swallowed back into the system. Breathing someone else’s stink was afact of life. As locals never stopped telling the tourists, if they didn’t like the air they could always try outside.

  Plenty of people looked at Fixx. Men glancing away or defiantly meeting his silver eyes, the women smiling at
Ghost and Fixx’s ludicrous cloak, or frowning at his hair. Only kids watched the weird man with undisguised interest, stopping to nudge each other at the metal arm, leather trousers and kitten clutched like a baby in his arm.

  Floor level at Planetside was logo hell and fly-post heaven. HoloAds for Coke jostled flashing neon bottles of Bud. Someone had staple-gunned a flickering faux-telex It’s cheaper with Mercury over the top of Cablebox’s flashing Now phone home. There were signs pointing you to God, LunaWorld and the nearest legalized brothel. What there wasn’t was any sign of a Japanese ballerina.

  -=*=-

  LunaWorld’s Man on the Moon Spacetel was themed to mid-twentieth-century America. At least, Fixx figured it was mid-twentieth from the bright clothes in the photographs and the big pink Cadillac with fins that stood in the foyer. He knew it was a Cadillac from the reverential little notice alongside. Booking him into the MMS had to be LISA’s idea of a joke, but it wasn’t one that amused the desk staff. Oh, they had his reservation, right enough. Made months back. They just didn’t have a room to spare. Fixx shrugged and took a swig from his complimentary beer. After Paris anything was bliss.

  Out of the bar window was a view of a huge white Saturn rocket taking off in a billowing cloud of smoke. It was convincing enough to fool a child, but Fixx noticed the slight jump where the tape was looped, to let the same rocket endlessly fire up its engines and vanish into an impossibly blue Cape Canaveral sky.

  Ignoring the window was the sign of an old hand. Fixx realized that when he noticed that only he and a family of newly arrived South Africans were watching: everyone else was pointedly ignoring the thing. All the same, Fixx kept looking until the sequence had started over again.

  Speaking personally, if he’d been fixxing the sequence he’d have done a 2001 with the colours, put an orange Saturn blasting into a purple shy, black flames belching from the afterburners. And he’d have put in some proper contemporaneous music. Maybe a little mid-period Jimi Hendrix, but hey... Fixx finished his beer and shrugged.