He’s on a bunk, a brick wall to his immediate left, a narrow strip of floor and then another bare brick wall to the right. There’s a door at one end of the cell, past his feet, with a viewing panel set into it. In one corner of the room, where two walls meet ceiling, the glinting eye of a security cam peers back at him.
He sits, rubs at his temples as dizziness settles.
Down on the concrete floor, he presses his feet against the wall and starts on sit-ups, rapid and regular, enjoying the rush of blood and adrenalin that kick in with the exercise. Bartie likes to look after himself. It keeps the brain in tune as well as the body. And his rich clients like a fit sweat to ride in, so it’s a good career move, if sweating can really be considered a career.
He’s past 150 when he hears the door. He carries on until a man says, “Bartie Davits. You’re wanted for interview.”
“Interview?” he asks, pausing, twisting to see the uniformed man framed by the doorway. “Like for a job?”
The policeman just looks at him, waits for him to stand, steps back to let him out into the corridor.
A short time later, Bartie is sitting in another room, elbows on a desk. There’s a plainclothes officer across the table from him, a uniformed man on the door.
“Bartholomew Brooklyn Davits,” says the officer, “we have reason to suspect your involvement in the murder of Elector Nathan Burnham at his retreat in Jakarta on the 23rd of this month. This interview is being recorded and your responses processed for veracity by smart systems from two independent vendors. Anything you do or say may be used as evidence in a court of law. Do you understand?”
Bartie stares at the man. “I understand your words,” he says slowly, “but fuck no, I don’t understand.”
The officer has a feed going into his ear. He receives some kind of input, nods, and his eyes meet Bartie’s again.
Then Bartie adds, “Burnham? Elector Burnham? The virtual worlds guy? Dead?” At a brief nod, he continues, “I . . . I’ve been out of it a couple of days. I hadn’t heard. I sweat rides, you know? I was sweating, warehoused in a data bank somewhere while some rich fuck rode my bones, you know?”
Another pause, while the officer listens to his feed, then: “Elector Burnham was killed by a kid called Joey Bannerman.”
“So . . . I don’t understand?”
“Bannerman was gapyearing round the world, ran out of cash, took to sweating to get by. He was ridden by the killer.”
Bartie gets it, he thinks. “Not me, man . . . I didn’t do nothing. I was warehoused, playing TrueSim strategy games in perfect isolation. Check out the records: I was pumped into a data bank and kept clean and cut off from the world. They have to do that. Data integrity and all that—have to put back what they take out!” He laughs awkwardly.
“We don’t think it was you, as such,” says the officer.
Bartie relaxes, hasn’t realized how much tension he’d been holding in. Then he registers the “as such,” and he sees from the officer’s expression that there’s more, a layer yet to unpick. “And?”
“We’ve pattern-matched traits identified from the data feed that injected the killer into Bannerman’s skull. The killer was an amalgam, a construct. Whoever was behind the assassination took a few traits from here, a few from there, and built the killer suited for the job.”
Bartie waits. There’s more.
“It’s a known technique. Developed by the Yakuza, but it’s been seen in a number of cases now. The way they do it is they have to have a solid foundation, a template, someone who could easily be a killer in the right circumstances, with the right traits added, remixed, recompiled. We’ve identified the template, Davits. We’ve tracked down that individual. It’s you.”
Bartie shakes his head. “But it wasn’t me!” he finally says. “I was warehoused, isolated. . . . It wasn’t me.”
“Your profile was used,” says the officer. “Edited, built upon. We’re talking legal gray areas here. Our advice is that this could be the test case to beat all test cases. Could take years.”
The officer is enjoying this, Bartie suddenly realizes. “How do you mean?”
“It’s all about legal culpability,” the officer explains. “When due process proves that you were the template used in this crime, and when it is demonstrated that the killer was substantially you, then you will share legal culpability for the killing.”
“But . . . I wasn’t there.”
“No, that’s true. But there is evidence to show that a statistically significant instance of you was . . .”
Dogs.
Fucking dogs. A whole pack of them, ragged-looking beasts, sniffing at the trash stacked high. Don’t they eat the fucking dogs in this part of the world?
I press back into the corner of the doorway, hugging myself, trying to think.
One of the dogs starts pawing at the side of a box, and the soft cardboard gives way immediately in the humid heat.
A steady flow of people passes the end of the alleyway. It’s several minutes since the two cops passed. Should be safe to emerge again. But I’m no fool. The security cams will be watching for me, sniffing me out as they must have done when I crossed the city immediately after the hit. They have my host-body’s signatures mapped out: scent, pheromone mix, facial geometrics, gait. As soon as I pass one of the cams, I’ll be flagged up back at the control centre.
I have to get out of here. Out of this city. But how? Where?
Out of the city there will be fewer cams, but as soon as I hit civilization again, I’ll be exposed. Do I really want to see out my days in a borrowed body in the middle of some fucking jungle?
I need to get out of this body, shed this skin like a snake.
I rack my brain, struggling to come up with some kind of plan.
A dog spots me, all bone and shaggy coat. It starts to growl, shuffling toward me, one leg lame, bent. I squat, hold out a hand, and in seconds it’s nuzzling my wrist as I scratch its mangy neck.
I straighten.
Cautiously, I approach the end of the alleyway. No sign of the cops. I step out, joining the flow. I walk with a limp, and I have a hand over my face, occasionally rubbing as if I have a permanent itch. I can obscure my facial geometrics, and I can disguise the normal pattern of this body’s movement, but there’s nothing I can do to hide its scent signature. That’s a risk I have to accept: All the cams supply a feed that’s processed for visual patterning, but far fewer are equipped with the full bodystamp sensors.
I need to get my bearings, but then what? I don’t know what city this is, don’t even know which country. And even if I did know . . . why should I trust any knowledge I have? What if my controllers really do just want to erase me as soon as I upload? I can’t rely on any knowledge they’ve given me, just in case they’re leading me toward my own end.
I need to upload, but on my own terms. And then . . . time to go looking for myself, the original me. Time to find me and ask myself some tough questions. Time to look for daddy.
“. . . a statistically significant instance of you was . . .”
Bartie Davits hits 280 and then stops the sit-ups, head between his knees, gasping, chest aching, head pounding, abdominal muscles burning.
He can’t shake the sound of the officer’s voice, the half smile on the bastard’s face. They were having fun, toying with him. Fuck with his life, but for them it’s just a new twist on an otherwise dull and routine day at the station.
Slowly, his breathing calms, and his thoughts calm too.
They’re playing games with him. But if they want to play, then bring it on! Bartie plays games all the time. Other than the dealing and the sweating, online gaming is his main source of income to fund business school.
This is just a game, a strategy game.
It’s time to stop acting like a frightened rabbit, caught in the headlights. Time to take control, take the initiative.
If the bastards want to play with Bartie Davits, then Bartie Davits is ready for them. And th
en some.
Another back street, another alleyway piled high with garbage and the ever present dogs darting in and out between people’s legs, amazing they don’t trip anyone. It’s dark now, early evening, hot and sultry so that sweat makes tracklines down my neck. There are crowds of people everywhere I go in this city. People and dogs. This is the city of people and dogs. I still don’t know where I am. Haven’t thought to ask—I don’t intend to be here much longer.
The door, just as the guy had said. An ordinary door, no sign or anything, no shiny lock to say there’s something special here, someone special.
The guy . . . It was a risk, but I had gone back to the gun dealer, the guy who’d had my Heckler and Koch there just waiting for me.
He recognized me straight away. Claimed the police weren’t onto him yet, and I believed him because if they’d traced my pistol to him, he’d either be in a cell or his shop would be staked out, and they’d have closed in on me as soon as I turned up.
I didn’t try any strong-arm tactics on him. He was maybe midforties, refined . . . On the face of it, I could easily have scared the shit out of him and done quite a lot of damage, but I’m not stupid. No gun dealer in a city like this, wherever this is, goes unprotected—he’d be armed, he’d have security systems in place, panic systems, debilitators, the works.
“You going to tell me who set this up?” I asked him instead. “Who ordered my piece and told you to have it ready for me today?”
He smiled, and there was at least a trace of genuine sympathy in that smile. “I don’t know,” he said. “And if I did, I would not be indiscreet enough to divulge that data. I’m sure you understand my position.”
“I need help,” I said. “I don’t have money. I’ll never see you again, so I can’t repay any debts. But I need help.”
Silence invited me to at least continue.
“Someone to help me. Someone who understands ghosting, netspace, virtual intelligence systems . . . Someone I can talk to . . .”
He gave me a name. And the name gave me another name. And now I’m here, eyeing this anonymous door in an unlit back street, crowds swirling past, sweat running down my body, hopes hanging by a thread, a virtual thread.
I push, walk inside, just as I’d been told.
It’s dark in here, dim wall lights, a single bright desk lamp over on the far side of the junk-filled room where a short round guy is turning slowly to face me.
He is shirtless in the heat, a shiny black ponytail halfway down his back, partly covering the winged dragon tattoo that covers most of the exposed skin. He has sensuous lips and tiny oriental eyes.
“Ah,” he says, a long drawn out sound, almost a sigh. “The Assassin, I presume? I have been expecting you. Please, come over, sit. I would like to talk. Tell me, Mr. Assassin, what it is like . . .”
I walk over, threading a path through stacks of papers and boxes and panels with wires and transistors and chips and crystal boards. On his chest there is another dragon, this one breathing fire.
I sit on an office chair with one arm broken off.
“I—”
“What it is like to be you, Mr. Assassin. To be a man of many parts. Parts of other men—and maybe women, who knows?—and VI modules, a mix, a remix. All riding in another man’s body. What is it like? What is it like to be something new, something unique, one of the first of your kind? A new variety of man for the first time in, what, twenty thousand, a hundred thousand years?”
“I . . . I don’t know. I just want out . . .” Then: “How do you know so much about me?”
He smiles. He’s been smiling all the time, but now he smiles a bit more.
“It is my business to know things. I know that your victim, Elector Burnham, is now resident in the Accord that he hates so much. His afterlife has begun.”
The Accord . . . The consensus reality that hit critical mass about a year ago: a vast virtual reality populated by saved personality copies of the deceased. A virtual heaven. That was Burnham’s schtick as an Elector: He’d been trying to pull the plug on it, trying to close it down. And now he’s there, clinging to virtual existence in the system he had opposed.
“And so you know why I need to get out of this body.”
A dip of the head acknowledges what I don’t need to explain. I can’t stay in the sweat’s body or I’ll be caught.
“I need to upload to netspace,” I tell him. “I need to track down my original.”
“But you are a construct, an amalgam. You have no original, just a template, based on an individual who is at best only mostly you.”
“Well in that case ‘mostly’ will have to do.”
“If you upload to netspace, you will have to avoid your originators. They will be waiting. They will want to erase you.”
I nod. I know all this.
“Upload me direct to the Accord,” I tell him. The Accord: a virtual world within netspace, a distributed world, a fractal construction of the ether. “Sidestep netspace itself, and get me into heaven.”
He shakes his head. He has stopped smiling now. “The Accord is a consensual reality governed by the strictest protocols,” he says. “There is no way to break these protocols. It is rigid, inflexible.”
“There must be a way . . .”
“The only way to enter the Accord is through death. Only then will the warehoused copy of your self be uploaded. It is governed by the protocols.”
“There must be a way . . .”
“Even if I were to kill you now, the protocols dictate who gets in and who does not. You have not been warehoused, my friend. If you are to enter heaven, then first you must be saved. But even then, you are not whole, you are other . . . the protocols would deny you entrance.”
“There must be a way . . .”
He is smiling again now. “There is often a way where at first there appeared to be none,” he says. “But if there is a way, then there will be a price . . .”
“I have nothing.”
“You have everything, my friend. You are alien. You are novel. Talk to me. Tell me how it is to be one of the first of a new variety of man . . .”
The beach is composed of white sand and shell fragments that glitter under the azure sky. It burns my feet. I look down, see my toes curling in the sand. My skin is white, my toes long and slender.
I squat, take a handful of the sand, let it drain between my fingers. I feel its smooth grittiness, savor the soft touch of a breeze on my face, smell salt on the air.
This, then, must be heaven.
Down in the water, two women in bikinis splash and play. A man runs past, in step with a gently loping Irish wolfhound. A road leads away from the beach.
I do not remember dying. This must be the way for everyone here: We are saved before we die; we do not recall death itself.
I breathe heaven’s air deep. Lee has sidestepped the protocols, he has crafted masqueware to slip me into the Accord, but already I feel that I do not belong here. I wonder how long I must keep running.
I walk, tarmac hot beneath my feet, where before it had been the sand that burned.
Heaven, it would appear, is a tropical island.
This place, this world—it has been constructed from the consensual perceptions of all its inhabitants, a shared world, reinforced and governed by the protocols and algorithms of common belief in its existence and nature.
Those people on the beach behind me: dead, all dead, all here to stay. I am an anomaly: I have come to heaven, but I am merely a visitor, passing through.
There is a bar where the road loops back across the top of the beach. Palm trees stand around a cabin with a banana-leaf roof. Seating is scattered across the sand, people laughing and chatting, drinks on tables. A bar runs the length of one wall of the cabin, a barwoman lolling behind it, chewing gum, chilled. For a moment, I wonder who in heaven decides who gets to sit and drink and who gets to tend bar, but then I don’t. It’s the consensus: Rules emerge from shared beliefs and perceptions. All societies n
eed rules, even in heaven.
“Get a drink around here?”
“Sure,” she says, still chewing. “You new here? First drink’s free for debutantes.”
I shrug, then point to the bottles of chilled beer in a cooler deep in the cabin’s shade.
“So tell me . . . how do I find somebody around here?”
“That all depends,” she tells me over her shoulder as she stoops for a beer, “on whether they want to be found.”
Turns out the late Elector Burnham is none too keen to be found, which kind of makes sense. He had been, after all, the politician most active in trying to get the Accord closed down, organizing a ragbag coalition of religious fundamentalists and neocon noninterventionists to do battle against what they called a caricature of existence, a vast VR experiment in social engineering, an insult to whichever god was appropriate.
Now he’s here, in heaven, lying low.
It’s taken me a week to track him down, asking people, hacking virtual directories and surveillance logs, until I ended up here, walking up a narrow lane somewhere in southern England, heading toward a row of three cottages that at some point in the past have been knocked together into a single house. A modest place for someone as influential as Burnham had been. A modest home.
I wonder what happens if I kill him here. I wonder if that’s why I am here, why I have followed this tenuous lead to the door of the one man I know who will be working on every possible way to extract himself from this virtual heaven.
I should have a plan, but I don’t.
I just know I have to come here, find him. It’s as if I’m drawn to him, like magnetic north needs magnetic south. Is this some perverse protocol of the Accord? The guilty drawn to their victims? Maybe I will go down on my knees and beg his forgiveness . . .
Or maybe there is still some protocol buried deep in my being that draws me here to finish what I began in that sultry Asian city.
We Think, Therefore We Are Page 21
