Engineman

by Eric Brown

  “Gassner sent me, Sita.”

  “That much I figured.”

  “He told me to make sure you did your stuff. To me, it doesn’t look like you’re doing that out here.”

  He hesitates, watching me. “I’ll let you into a secret, Sita. Gassner’s in big trouble. Business is bad and a few of the bigger Agencies are going for the take-over. They’d buy Gassner out for peanuts and employ him as a nothing button-pusher. As for you—you’d be taken on by whichever Agency buys. You’d be on longer shifts for less pay. You’re a second-grader, remember...”

  I let him mouth-off. His secret is no secret at all. He’s telling me nothing I don’t already know. I let my lazy posture describe apathy, and stare at the stars.

  Spider tries again. “This case is worth two million to Gassner. It would mean solvency for him, and who knows even a rise for you. But you’re blowing it.”

  “And won’t Mr Gassner be angry with me,” I say.

  “Sita... this is the biggest case you’ve ever had to crack. You don’t seem to be trying...”‘

  Languid, I give him a look, long and cool. “Maybe I don’t need to try,” I say.

  “Sita...” His Oriental features pantomime despair.

  “I’m serious, Spider. Hasn’t it occurred to you that maybe the reason I’m lazing around here is because I’ve got the case wrapped up?”

  His eyes glint with quick respect, then suspicion.

  “No shit,” I say. “I know where Becky Kennedy’s meat is hidden.”

  “You just this minute left the office, Sita.”

  I shrug. “How would you like to earn your Agency the two million riding on this case?” I ask him.

  He tries a probe. I feel it prickle my head like a mental porcupine in a savage mood. But my shield is up to it.

  “You don’t have to probe, Spider. I’m honest—I’ll tell you. Your Agency can pick up the creds from Kennedy when you find the body and deliver it to the resurrection ward-”

  “But Gassner...” Understanding hits him.

  “Yeah,” I say. “You’ve got it.”

  Spider looks at me.

  “Why you doing this, Sita? If Gassner folds, you get transferred, and that won’t be a picnic for you.”

  “Listen, Spider. I’m getting out of it altogether. No more probing for this kid after tomorrow.”

  “You’re not-” Alarm in his voice.

  I laugh. “No, I’m not. I’m getting out and I want to see Gassner sink...” But there’s an easier way than this to tell him.

  I take my shield and toss it to him. He catches it, holds it for a second, then throws it back. That’s all it takes for him to read what I’m planning. And he reads everything: my love for Joe and the reason I need big money, what I did yesterday and why I did it. He reads what I want him to do, and he slowly nods his head. “Very well, Sita. fine...” We finalise the arrangements, and then slap on it. We sit for a while, watching the starships and chatting, until Spider’s handset calls him away on a case. He cranes himself upright and strides off down the jetty like someone on stilts.

  I stay put a while. Above the city a hologram projection, like a stage in the sky, is beaming out world news. I watch the pictures but can’t be bothered with the sub-titles. Only when the business review comes on do I take an interest. After five minutes the takeover bids are flashed up. Multi-Tec International today made bids for a dozen small-fry—one of them, I learn, Gassner’s Investigative Agency. But the bid didn’t make it and Gassner is still independent. I smile to myself. By the time I finish with Gassner he’ll be wishing he never bought me, all those years ago.

  I leave the coast and ride back into the city. I stop off at a call booth and get through to the Kennedys, using the teleprinter to make the demand. Then, instead of going straight to the Union towerpile, I make a detour to take in the cryogenic hive-complex, uptown. I ride the chute to the seventh level and squat beside Joe’s pod. If I concentrate I can just make out his thoughts, deep down and indistinct. Even diluted, crystallised and fragmented by the freeze, his emotions are still as good and pure as always. I tell him that soon it’ll all be over, and he responds with a distant, mental smile.

  I’m tearful when I leave the hive and ride across town.

  * * * *

  After I heard about Joe’s death I began drifting again.

  I got back on the ‘gum and stopped eating and hit the darktime quarter. When I wasn’t working I got high and drifted without sleep for nights, probing, seeking... It was impossible, of course. What I was seeking I had found and lost, and there could be no substitutes, however good. There were no more Joes, and it was no good telling myself that there had to be. It was too soon after his death and I was still too close to him to accept anyone else.

  Then I got it into my head that Joe was still alive. I thought I could feel his brainvibes in the air, as if he existed somewhere in the world and was trying to get through to me. I concentrated and struggled to contact him, to prove to myself that he was still alive. Crazy, I know...

  But I was right.

  It was a month after the accident and I spent more and more time tripping on acid shorts and trying to forget. I reckoned that if maybe I could lose my identity, then the pain wouldn’t be so bad.

  Joe called a couple of nights later.

  I was laid out on my bunk, coming down after a week of crazy, crazy nights drifting and tripping. My head was alive with vivid nightmares and Joe played a starring role.

  When his face appeared on the vidscreen I knew it was a hallucination. “Sita!” it shouted. “It’s me—Joe!”

  I giggled. “I know you’re dead, Joe. You died Out-there. You can’t kid me.”

  “Sita...” His arms were braced on either side of the screen, and his head hung close. It looked like Joe, but there was something wrong with the geometry of the features. They were too clean-cut and perfect to be Joe’s, even though they resembled his. Some effect of the acid, obviously...

  “Sita, please—listen!” He was near to tears. “I know I died a fluxdeath. But they got me out in time. They saved me. They put me back together in a Soma-Sim and-”

  “Where are you?” But I didn’t believe. I was still hallucinating. Joe was dead, and what I saw on the screen was a phantom of my imagination.

  “That’s why I called. I need your help. I’m at the city sub-orb station. I just got in. I need your help...” He looked over the screen, then behind him. When he stared at me again I saw that he was swaying, holding the set for support.

  I crawled across the bunk and sat on the edge. I could not bring myself to believe, however much I wanted to. If I rested all my hope on what turned out to be cruel illusion...

  “Joe... What’s wrong, Joe?”

  “They’re after me, Sita. The pirates. They almost had me. I got away. Please... come and get me.” He grinned then, a wry quirk of the lips I knew so well and loved. “I can’t move. They hit me and I can’t move. I managed to get this far...”

  I staggered around the room and collected my clothes. I struggled into the bare minimum required for decency and dropped to the street. I hailed a flier, gave the destination and collapsed in the back seat. I knew there’d be no Joe when I got there; already our dialogue was becoming dreamlike. It was too much to hope that I could save him a second time...

  At the station I told the flier to wait and stumbled into the crowded foyer. I wasn’t wearing my ferronniere and the absence of brainhowl was a relief. The call-booths were ranked at the far end beside a Somalian fast-food joint. I pushed through the crowd and collapsed against the first crystal pod. The caller inside gestured me away. I staggered from booth to booth, my desperation increasing when each one turned out to be empty. With three to go and still no sign of Joe I gave up and went berserk. I crashed against them one after the other, flailing at the doors with my fists. The last door remained stubbornly shut, as if pinned by a weight on the inside. I peered over the privacy screen and my heart went nova. Joe had sli
pped to the floor with his cyber-legs folded beneath him at crazy angles. He grinned when he saw me and reached out his arms...

  I managed somehow to get him into the flier and back to my pad.

  Once inside he collapsed on the bunk, the Joe Gomez I knew and loved, but different. The only part of him that had survived the fluxdeath was his brain, and the rest of him was a power-assisted Somatic-Simulation with all the sex bits and the latest Nikon optics. It was impossible to tell that the body was a Soma-Sim; the surgeons had been faithful to Joe’s old appearance, if anything making him even more good looking than the original version.

  I thought maybe I was still hallucinating...

  “They were waiting at the port,” he said. “They waited till I got in from the medic-base and they shot me, Sita. But I got away...” And he indicated his leg.

  There was a hole in his thigh big enough to contain my fist. Charred strands of microcircuitry fuzzed the circumference, and the synthetic flesh had melted and congealed in dribbles like cold wax.

  “It doesn’t hurt,” Joe reassured me, peering down. “I don’t feel a thing. It’s just that I can’t walk...”

  “We’ll get you fixed up,” I said.

  “You’ve got a spare half million?”

  “Surely the Line-?”

  He laughed. “They took all my savings to put me in this.”

  “We’ll find some way,” I said. “Can’t you go back-?”

  His hand moved to touch the hole, with just the faintest whirr of servo-motors. “The Line’s fired me, Sita. I’m in no condition to flux and I’m out of a job...” Tears were beyond the expertise of 21st-century cyberneticists, or Joe would have cried, then.

  “Can you remember anything about the attack?” I asked.

  “Not much. Three guys piled out of an air-car and called out to me. When I began to run, they opened fire-”

  “Did you get the flier’s plate?”

  “I was too busy trying to survive, Sita.”

  I probed. I relived the attack and saw the same three guys I’d seen outside the Yin-Yang. The subconscious mind forgets nothing, and the quick glance Joe had taken at the air-car had lodged the plate code in his head. I memorised the code and came out. It was a slim lead, but perhaps a valuable one.

  Joe reached out and pulled me to him. “You haven’t said how good it is to have me back, Sita.”

  “No?” I opened up, and we merged. Beyond his relief at being with me I saw a dark shadow in the background, a sharp regret that he would never flux again. He was like a junkie deprived his fix, and the withdrawal symptoms were craving and melancholia. I shouldn’t have felt jealous, but I did.

  The following day I decided that my pad was not a safe place for Joe. Too many people had seen his arrival, and all it would take was for the scrape-tape pirate’s telepath to send out a chance probe in the vicinity.

  I had a contact in the cryogenic-hive complex uptown, and Joe agreed that this would be the best place for him until I came up with the creds to buy the services of a cyber-surgeon. I had a few ideas I wanted to think over during the next couple of days. I installed him in the hive, then left for Gassner’s office.

  I told my boss I was using the Batan II to check detail on the current case, and instead tapped into the city plate file. I found the number of the flier Joe had seen, and I was in luck. The flier was a company vehicle belonging to the Wringsby-Saunders Corporation. I looked them up and found they were into everything, but their biggest turnover was in the personatape market...

  So I dropped to the boulevard and rode uptown.

  The Wringsby-Saunders Corporation had a towerpile all to themselves, a hundred storey obelisk with a flashy WS entwined and rotating above the penthouse suit.

  I marched in, exuding bravura.

  I roamed. I was looking for company personnel with faces that matched those I carried around in my head. I took in every level and a couple of hours later found what I wanted. A tall executive left his office and strode along the corridor towards me. He wore silvered shades and an arrogant expression. He was shielded, of course—as he was on the last occasion I had encountered him. In the defective fluorescent lighting outside the Yin-Yang bar.

  The glow-tag on the door of his office told me: Martin Kennedy. He was the marketing director of the personatape division, one of the top jobs in the Corporation. And not satisfied with a director’s fat salary, Kennedy dirtied his fingers with illegal scrape-tape dealings. Some people...

  Over the next few days I neglected my duties for Gassner and followed Kennedy. It was my intention to blackmail him; his superiors at Wringsby-Saunders would not be amused that one of their top executives was dealing in death...

  Then something happened to make me change my mind. There was a better way of extracting what I wanted from Kennedy, one that did away with the risk to myself.

  It came to me as I watched him arrive home one evening and meet his daughter in the drive. It was one of the few occasions when he was unshielded, and I learned that the only pure and unsullied emotion in Kennedy’s head was the love he had for his daughter, Becky.

  While Kennedy was unshielded I slipped him the sly, subliminal suggestion than Gassner’s Investigative Agency was the best in town, specialising in murders, kidnappings, missing persons... The first place he’d think of when he found his daughter gone would be Gassner’s.

  I turned my attention to Becky and checked her movements. She had her own bodyguard who escorted her everywhere. Well, almost everywhere. He was a big, ugly bastard, but I wasn’t going to let him stand in my way at this stage of the game.

  I decided the best place to strike would be in the gym she used every Tuesday morning. I joined up for the classes and obeyed all the instructions like a good girl, despite the protests from my drug-wrecked body. I arrived early Tuesday morning and watched Becky at her callisthenics while her minder did the same, only with more interest in how she filled her leotard in all the erogenous-zones-to-be.-

  I was right behind them when they left the free-fall chamber. I’d taken the precaution of putting the chute out of action and barring the communicating doors. We were quite alone.

  I hit the bodyguard with the neural-incapacitator and he dropped like a sack of wet sand. Then I did the same to Becky before she got a look at me. While the guy was still jerking his beef on the floor I dragged Becky along the corridor and into the service chute.

  I’d prepared myself for this part of the operation all week. I’d told myself over and over that this was not murder, that before the three days had elapsed little Becky would be patched up and resurrected and as good as new. If not better. Inside a fortnight she’d be back working out at the gym, her death a thing of the past. Even so, as I pulled the trigger of the pistol I had to close my eyes and think of Joe... Then I photographed the corpse and concealed it behind a sliding panel. I’d done my homework and checked. The next chute inspection was due in a week.

  I left the gym and mailed the developed print to the Kennedys. Then I made for the Supernova and drank acid shorts to help me forget.

  Hours later, the call from Gassner came through.

  * * * *

  I cross town and head for the Union towerpile. “Bangladesh!” the cackle greets me. Old Pete the Beggar grins toothless along the sidewalk. I slip him ten and he lays ‘gum on me. I’m high by the time I hit the foyer.

  Spider Lo has done his stuff. He sits with Kennedy in the ground floor bar, done out in the deco of a bigship. I hoist myself onto a highstool, businesslike.

  Kennedy gives me the inscrutable look through his silvered shades, but the empty glasses at his elbow belie his cool. “I’d like to know what’s going on?” he asks me. “This... this gentleman apprehended me outside and claimed to be working with you on the case. I hope you’ve found my daughter-”

  “Do you have the crystals?” I ask.

  Kennedy hesitates, then lifts a valise onto the table. He opens it to reveal two sparkling crystals burning within t
he leatherette gloom. The substance locked inside them glints like powdered diamond. I take the valise.

  “The Gassner Agency has been taken over,” I tell Kennedy now. “As such, it no longer exists. Mr Lo here represents the Massingberd Agency. You will pay his Agency upon completion of the case.”

  “My daughter?”

  “By the time I deliver the crystals, your daughter will be in the safe care of the city hospital.”

  Kennedy nods his understanding. Spider Lo pushes papers across the table and Kennedy signs. “Mr Lo will take you to the hospital, Mr Kennedy.” I shake him formally by the hand, but his shield deflects my probe.