I manage a forced laugh. Janis’s issues aren’t my business, strictly speaking, but—“What are friends for?”
She looks at me oddly. “Thanks.” She takes a mouthful of her coffee and makes a face. “This stuff is vile, the only thing worse that I can think of is not having it at all.” Her frown lengthens. “I’m running late. See you back around lunchtime?”
“Sure,” I say, and she stands up, grabs her jacket from the back of the door, and heads off.
I finish my coffee, then go back to the front desk. There’s some filing to do, but the cleaning zombies have been thorough—they didn’t even leave me any dusty top shelves to polish. A couple of bored office workers drop in to return books or browse the shelves for some lunchtime entertainment, but apart from that the place is dead. So it happens that I’m sitting at the front desk, puzzling over whether there’s a better way to organize the overdue returns shelf, when the front door opens, and Fiore steps in.
“I wasn’t expecting you,” he says, pudgy eyes narrowing suspiciously.
“Really?” I hop off my stool and smile at him, even though all my instincts are screaming at me to be careful.
“Indeed not.” He sniffs. “Is the other librarian, Janis, in?”
“She’s out this morning, but she’ll be back later.” I get a horrible sense of déjà vu as I look at him, like a flashback to a bad dream.
“Hmm. Well, if I can trouble you to turn your back, I have business in the repository.” His voice rises: “I don’t want to be disturbed.”
“Ah, all right.” I take an involuntary step back. There’s something about Fiore, something not quite right, a feral tension in his eyes, and I’m suddenly acutely aware that we’re alone, and that he outweighs me two to one. “Will you be long?”
His eyes flicker past my shoulder. “No, this won’t take long, Reeve.” Then he turns and lumbers toward the reference section and the secure document repository, not bothering to look at me. For a moment I don’t believe my own instincts. It’s a gesture of contempt worthy of Fiore, after all, a man so wrapped up in himself that if you spent too long with him, you’d end up thinking you were a figment of his imagination. But then I hear him snort. There’s the squeak of the key in the lock, and a creak of floorboards. “You might as well come with me. We can talk inside.”
I hurry after him. “In what capacity am I talking to you?” I ask, desperately racking my brains for an excuse not to join him. “Is it about Janis?”
He turns and fixes me with a beady stare. “It might be, my daughter.” And that’s pure Fiore. So I follow him through the door and down the steps into the cellar, a hopeless tension gnawing at my guts, still unsure whether I’m right to be worried or not.
Fiore pauses when we get to the strange room at the bottom of the stairs. “What exactly do you think of Dr. Hanta?” he asks me. He sounds tired, weighed down with cares.
I’m taken aback. What is this, some kind of internal politicking? “She’s”—I pause, biting my tongue, acutely aware who I’m talking to—“refreshingly direct. She means well, and she’s concerned. I trust her,” I add impulsively, resisting the urge to add, unlike you. I manage to maneuver so my back is to the storage shelves on one wall. If I have to grab something—
“That’s not unexpected,” Fiore says quietly. “What did she do to you?”
“She didn’t tell you?”
“No, I want you to tell me in your own words.” His voice is low and urgent, and something in my heart breaks. I can’t pretend this isn’t happening anymore, can I? So I play for time.
“I was having frequent memory fugues, and I picked up a nasty little case of gray goo up top in the ship’s mass fraction tankage. That set my immune system off, and it began taking out memory traces. Dr. Hanta had to put me on antirobotics and give me a complete memory fixative in order to stop things progressing.” I move my hands behind my back and slowly shuffle backward, away from him and toward the wall. “I’d say she’s a surprisingly ethical practitioner, given the way everyone else here carries on in secret. Or do you know differently?”
“Hmm.” Fiore—fake-Fiore—leans over the assembler console and taps in some kind of code. “Yes, as a matter of fact I do.”
While he isn’t watching I take another step back until I bump up against shelves. Good. I’m already mentally preparing what I need to do next.
Fiore continues, implacably. “One of your predecessors here—yes, they’re still around in deep cover—got it worked out. Dr. Hanta isn’t her real name. She, or rather it, used to be a member of the Asclepian League.” I give a little gasp. “Yes, you do remember them, don’t you? She was a Vivisector, Reeve. One of the inner clade, dedicated to pursuing their own vision of how humanity should be restructured.”
“Thanks for reminding me what I came here to get away from,” I say shakily. “I’m going to be having nightmares about that for the next week.”
He turns and glares at me. “Are you stupid, or—” He stops himself. “I’m sorry. But if that’s all it means to you, you really are beyond—” He stabs at the console angrily. “Shit. I thought you’d be at least vaguely concerned for the rest of us in here.”
I take a deep breath, trying to get my nausea under control. The Asclepians were another of the dictatorship cults, a morphological collective. Much worse than the Solipsist Nation. They restructured polities one screaming mangled body at a time. If Dr. Hanta is an Asclepian, and she’s working with Yourdon and Fiore, the future they’re trying to sculpt is a thing of horror. “She can’t be. She just can’t.”
“And I suppose you think Major-Doctor Fiore is just a fat, egocentric psychiatrist?” He grins at me humorlessly. “Stop that, Reeve, I know what you’re up to. Hanta fucked with your head really well, didn’t she? Probably got you to give your consent first, too. They’re hot on formalities, Asclepians. Fiore and Yourdon are war criminals, too. Shit, most of the people here did things so nasty they want to forget everything. Do you remember why this is an experimental polity?”
“Remember?” That’s a new one on me.
“Oh. A memory fixative, that makes sense.” He takes a final poke at the console. It dings and turns luminous green. “Where would dictators be without our compliant amnesia? Make the collective lose its memory, you can conceal anything. ‘Who now remembers the Armenians?’ ” He takes a step back. “Listen, we’ll have to break whatever conditioning she loaded your implant with.”
My stomach churns for real this time. I feel sick. He’s a monster, and he wants to drag me back down into the turmoil I was in before Hanta sorted me out. And I’ve been up the ladder now, I know there’s no way out. We’re stuck here. Resistance is futile. I really ought to run for it, call the Bishop and get the police to take him away. But that’d be like betraying myself, too, wouldn’t it? “Did you kill Mick?” I whisper. “How did you get in that body?”
“Will you feel better if I say yes?” His voice is surprisingly gentle. “Or will you feel worse?”
“I’ll—” I take another gulp of air. “I want to know.”
Fake-Fiore, Robin, blinks slowly, pudgy eyes closing: I tense but he opens them again before I can gather my wits to move. “It was after you killed Fiore,” he says. “I got into the assembler and backed myself up, programmed in a body merge and neural splice, so I’d come out in Fiore’s skin instead of like . . .” He nods at me. “I put a two-hour hold on it to give you time to get the mess sorted out, but you must have blanked in between. So I wake up inside the gate and find the basement has been partially cleaned, and you’re missing, and I had to finish the job. Fiore’s backed up in the gate, and I’ve got his biometrics, so I manage to get a dump of his implant, and when one of him showed up to check on you, I told him you’d just gone missing. He believed me. He’s not very good at handling multiplicity.
“On Sunday morning I went to visit Cass in the hospital,” he says quietly. “It turns out I wasn’t her first visitor that morning. I haven’t heard any
thing about it through the rumor net, but it was pretty bad: I think Hanta covered it up afterward but if you were wondering . . . I caught Mick. He’d been living in the basement of an empty house, stealing stuff from folks’ kitchens while they were at work—we’re a trusting bunch, have you noticed that? We leave our back doors unlocked. He’d gagged her and you saw the tissue scaffolds Hanta had her legs in. She couldn’t do anything. I mean, she was trying to get away, but not getting very far. He was raping her again, Reeve, and you know what I think about third chances.”
I nod, gulping for breath. The horror of it is that I can see everything in my mind’s eye: me-in-Fiore’s-flesh creeping up on Mick as he humps away, Cass thrashing around helplessly—Mick’s probably tied her arms out of the way—and me-in-Fiore’s-flesh saps Mick at the base of the skull. He doesn’t do it very carefully, because he’s beyond fury at this point; beyond caring about inflicting subarachnoid hemorrhages. He doesn’t care at all whether Mick wakes up again. In fact he thinks Mick’s waking up would be a very bad idea, at least for Cass, and maybe come to think of it he can use Mick to send a message to any borderline sociopaths who are thinking about following his example—
It’s very me. Me as I used to be, not me as I was before (quiet, peaceful historian, devoted family man) or me as I am now (slightly squirrelly, evanescent with the joy of discovering what it’s like to surrender after fighting for what seems like my entire life), but me as I was in the middle, the grim-faced killing machine. But then I meet his eyes, and I see an awful sadness in them, a sick sense of guilt that mirrors what I feel at the knowledge that I’m absolutely going to have to shop him to the Bishop because we can’t afford to have a murderous doppelganger of one of our most respected citizens running around—
I grab the first thing my fingers scrabble across: a heavy file of paper hardcopy, part of the dump of Curious Yellow from the closet upstairs. I take two brisk paces forward as I raise it and bring it down on top of his head as hard as I can. He sags and falls over, but I don’t stick around to finish the job. Instead, I turn and run for the stairs. If I can make it to the top and slam the door, he’ll be trapped down here for long enough to call—
“Going somewhere?” drawls Janis, pointing a stungun at me from the top step. I can see her trigger finger whitening behind the guard.
I start to raise my hands. “Don’t—”
She does.
I groan and reach up to touch my head, which hurts like hell where Reeve thumped me. Someone grabs my wrist and tugs experimentally, and I open my eyes. It’s Janis. She looks concerned. “What happened?” I ask.
“I caught her running up the stairs, in a real hurry to get somewhere.” Janis peers at me. “What about you?”
I touch my head finally and wince at the sharp pain. “She thumped me with something, a box file I think. I fell over.” Stupid, stupid. I feel a bit sick. Looking round brings a stab of pain to my neck. “Hit my head on the A-gate plinth.”
“Then it was lucky I was in time.”
“Huh. There’s no such thing as luck where you’re involved.”
“That was in another life,” she says pensively. “Are you going to be all right on your own? I need to close up shop.”
“Get it closed, already.” I wince and push myself upright, breathing heavily. This body has a lot of momentum, and a lot of insulation, but it’s not built for bouncing around. “If anybody finds us—”
“I’ll sort them out.”
Janis vanishes upstairs. I sit up and manage not to retch. Reeve almost ruined it for both of us, and I’m horrified at how close I came to blowing it. If I hadn’t figured out who Janis was, I’d be on my own down here and Reeve would have killed me without blinking. Doctor’s orders.
I’m going to have to do something about Reeve, and I’m not looking forward to this. Surely Hanta—let’s make that Colonel-Surgeon Vyshinski, to give her her real name—got to her, but losing a week isn’t something that I take lightly, and besides, she knows stuff that might come in useful. Dilemmas, dilemmas. If there was some way to trivially reverse the brainwashing that Hanta’s applied . . . shit. Hanta’s an artist, isn’t she? It’ll be some sort of motivational/value abreactive hack, subtle as hell, leaves the personality intact but tweaking the gain on a couple of traits, just enough to turn Reeve into a good little score whore.
I sit with my legs apart, panting a trifle heavily over my enormous wobbling gut-bucket, and try to come to terms with the fact that I’m going to have to kill my better half. It’s upsetting, however often you’ve done it before.
There’s some clattering upstairs. I stand up, wheezing, and waddle over to see what’s going on. I hate this body, but it’s been useful for getting me into places none of us could otherwise go—they’ve been letting their internal security get sloppy, forgetting the authenticator rhyme: something shared, something do, something secret, something you? I suppose settling for something you is sufficient if you’ve got control over all the assemblers in a polity, but still. I wait at the bottom of the stairs. “Who is it?” I call quietly.
“Me,” says Janis. “I need a hand with her.”
“Humph.” I haul myself up the steps. Janis is waiting at the top with Reeve, whose wrists and ankles she’s trussed together with a roll of library tape. Reeve is twitching a little and showing signs of coming to. “What are you thinking we should do with her?” I ask.
“Can you get her downstairs?” Janis asks breathlessly.
“Yes.” I lean forward and grasp Reeve by the ankles: For all that this body is grotesquely overweight, it’s not weak. I lift and drag, and Janis holds Reeve’s arms up enough to stop her head banging on the steps. At the bottom I pull her toward the A-gate. By this time her eyes are rolling, and she’s turning red in the face. Hating myself, I lean forward. “What would you do?” I ask her.
“Mmph! Mmmph.”
Defiant to the end—that’s me. I look up at Janis. “Why didn’t you kill her?”
“I didn’t want to,” says Janis.
“What, you’re going to just—”
“Just put her in the gate!” She sounds stressed.
I get my hands under Reeve’s armpits and lift. She goes limp, trying to deadweight on me. “I don’t like this any more than you do,” I tell her. “But this town’s too small for both of us.”
As I dump her into the A-gate, she kicks out with both legs, but I’m expecting that, and I punch her over the left kidney. That makes her double up. I swing the door shut. “Well?” I glare at Janis. “What now?” I feel like shit. Killing myself always makes me feel like shit. That’s why I’m deferring to Janis, I think. Pushing the tough choice off onto someone else’s shoulders.
Janis is bending over the control station. “Figuring this out,” she murmurs. “Look, I’m going to lift a template from her, okay?
“Fuck.” I shake my head, a parody of resignation. There’s a thud from inside the A-gate, and I wince. I feel for Reeve: I can see myself in her place, and it’s horrifying. “Why?”
“Because.” Janis looks up at me. “Fiore’s going to suspect if we keep you running around in drag. Don’t you think it’s time for you to go back?”
“Back?”
“To being Reeve,” she says patiently.
“Oh,” I echo. “Oh, I see.” Being thumped on the head has left me sluggish and stupid. Janis is right, we don’t have to kill her. And suddenly I feel a whole lot better about punching Reeve and dumping her into a macro-scale nanostructure disassembler, for the same reason that punching yourself in the face never feels quite as bad as having someone else do it for you.
“I’m going to template from her, and then you’re going to follow her, and I’m going to take a delta from your current neural state vector and overlay it on Reeve. You’ll wake up back in her body, with both sets of memories, but you’re going to be the dominant set. Think that’ll work?”
There’s another muffled thump from inside the A-gate, then muffled retching
noises—Janis has triggered the template program, paralyzing Reeve via her netlink, and the chamber is filling with ablative digitizer foam. “It had better,” I say.
“I’m worried Fiore may suspect what’s going on. The thing with Mick could blow it completely if he puts two and two together.”
I sigh heavily. “Okay, I’ll go back to being Reeve. I suppose that makes sense.”
“You agree?” She looks haggard in the dim light from the ceiling bulbs. “Good, then it’s not entirely stupid. What then . . . ?”
“Then we sit down and figure out how to nail down the lid on this mess. Once I know what she knows.”
“Right.” Her lips quirk in a faint smile. “Your direct, no-nonsense approach is always like a breath of fresh air.”
“Once a tank, always a tank,” I remind her.
“Right,” she echoes, and for a moment I can see a shadow of her former self. That sends a pang through my chest.
“The sooner I’m myself again, the better.”
We sit in silence for long minutes while the gate chugs to itself, then finally the console chimes, and there’s a click as the door unlatches. I walk over and swing it open: as usual, the chamber is bare and dry. I glance over and see that she’s watching me.
“Ready?” she asks.
“See you on the other side, Sanni,” I say as I close the door.
That’s all.
SECURITY Cell Blue used to be part of the counterespionage division of the Linebarger Cats. It was supposedly disbanded, all memory traces erased, at the end of the censorship wars. I know this is not the case because I’m a member. We didn’t disband, we went underground—because our mission wasn’t over.
This is a risky business. Our job is to do unpleasant things to ruthless people. Covering our tracks costs money—lots of it, and it isn’t always fungible across polity frontiers these days. Local militias and governments have reinvented exchange rates, currency hedges, and a whole host of other archaic practices. Some polities are relatively open, while others have fallen into warlordism. Some place great stock on authentication and uniqueness tracking, while others don’t care who you think you are as long as you pay your oxygen tax. (The former make great homes; the latter make great refuges.) As a consequence of the postwar fragmentation, we end up moving around a lot, shuffling our appearances and sometimes our memories, forking spares and merging deltas. At first we live off the capital freed up by the Cats’ liquidation; later we supplement it by setting up a variety of business fronts. (If you’ve ever heard of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, or Cordwainer Heavy Industries, that’s us.) Operationally, we work in loosely coupled cells. I’m one of the heavy hitters, my background in combat ops meshing neatly with my intelligence experience.
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