by Stephen Deas
Doktor Avalanche isn’t at home. Wise.
It’s past midnight. I ought to be out of here, out of Bethlehem, but the riot is getting worse. So instead I slip into the Totally Wired. Maybe some of the Gothics will be there, keeping out of sight. Not their fight. I give Jez a call, tell her where I’ll be, tell her to check out the Vollstandige software houses. Back again in the smoke and the darkness and the noise and the smell of sweat and perfume I can almost forget what’s happening. I can hide in a corner, lie back, drift, let everything drain away. And wonder how the hell I’m ever going to forgive myself for Devotion.
‘Mystery!’
Someone shaking me. I look up. I don’t know her.
She tells me to call her Alice. She comes around the table and sits in my lap, wrapping her hands together behind my neck, pouting.‘Mr Pleasant said you were in Bethlehem. He didn’t say you were here though.’
I give her a tight smile.‘That’s because I didn’t tell him.’
‘Something’s happening tonight. What’s going on?’
‘Nothing that concerns the Gothics.’
‘They say the Surfers and the Ronin have gone to war. Shadowfax says we could take the Ronin down tonight. That’s when Mr Pleasant told him you were back.’ She giggles.‘He thinks you’re fighting for the Ronin. He hasn’t forgotten what you did.’ She smiles and wriggles but the smile doesn’t reach her eyes. None of us have forgotten.‘What are you up to, Mystery?’
‘Hiding. Keeping low. Waiting for it to pass.’
She wriggles again.‘Really?’
I blow smoke in her face.‘Go tell Shadowfax that the Ronin will eat him for breakfast. Tell him he’ll stay inside where it’s safe if he knows what’s good for him. But fuck it, if he wants to get dead, I won’t stop him.’
Alice glances behind me, gets up and backs away.
‘Hello Shadowfax,’ I say without looking up.
No reply. Alice runs off into the smoke. Fuck it– I turn around.
‘Hello,’ says Jezebel. She’s pointing a gun at me again. What is it with her and doing that? But I’m wrong, she’s putting it away. She sits on me, mimics Alice’s pose and pout.‘I’ve heard of a woman on every planet but not one in every club.’
‘Same difference.’ I give her my best winning smile. She tries to resist but I see some of it gets through. Maybe because right now I really am pleased she’s here though I can’t quite figure out why. I don’t belong any more. Maybe that’s it. This used to be my home, my centre, but that me doesn’t exist now.‘I’m surprised at you. Doesn’t strike me as your kind of atmosphere.’
‘I can let my hair down, can’t I?’
‘It’s not a good night to be out.’
‘So I see. But I have protection.’
‘What, bring Doyle in here did you?’
‘Actually, I brought the seek and destroy team.’ She grins. I haven’t the first idea whether she’s dead serious or full of shit.‘Besides, how the hell else am I ever going to find out what you’ve been up to? Use your contacts, I said, not make like a fucking submarine.’
She changes her grip on me, draws us tight together and kisses me with passion. I nearly lose my balance on the chair and send the two of us tumbling to the floor. She bites my neck, enough that it’ll show, then starts nibbling at my ear.‘Check out these software houses, you say. OK, I did that. Now tell me why.’
I tell her.
She grins.‘There’s one called Space Invader. Guess what– the owner got a payment of thirty thousand credits from Victor Longthorne a couple of weeks before Dr. Pike went missing.’
Gothics, Strange, Devotion, they vanish in a flash like they were all some dream and I just got kicked awake real hard.‘Victor?’ The music crashes on so loud right then that I feel the whole building shake. Victor’s dead.
We leave and head back to the flat. The police are out in force but they leave us be. I sense the shadows of Jez’s seek and destroy team moving around us like ghosts. Three of them, all men, dressed in black, HUD glasses and bulges under their armpits, jumping to every word she says like trained gerbils. Where does the Company find them?
I’m muttering as we go inside.‘Victor. Victor?’ He’s dead. I saw him explode. Didn’t I?
Jez throws off her coat.‘Interesting, neh?’
‘Jesus,’ I say, looking around.‘What happened to this place? Looks like a bomb hit it.’
‘Andreas was installing some surveillance cameras, but, like you, he seems to be easily distracted from what we’re paying him for. I’ve no idea where Toni is either.’
I bare my teeth. There’s a street war out there. Perfect material.
‘As long as they’re back tomorrow.’ Jez grabs my collar and walks me into one of the bedrooms.‘Weird, don’t you think? Victor had all sorts of accounts. He was stupendously rich, money everywhere, I mean so much that even you and all your dreams of avarice wouldn’t have the first clue what to do with it all. Probably didn’t even know where most of it was. But someone does.’ She closes the door behind us and orders the lights out.‘Find the money– didn’t I say?’ She shakes her head.‘There’s some real whacked out shit behind all this.’
I watch her silhouette against the curtained night sky as she slowly strips.
‘I thought you said it was all tied up in trusts for his research programmes.’
‘Yeah, but what if there was a load of credit stashed up somewhere that never made it that far? What if someone figured out a way to hide it?’
‘Who. And why?’
‘That’s the question. Can’t be many people with access to Victor’s cash. But right now I don’t give a shit.’ She slides onto the bed.‘Dammit, C, I’ve been banging my head against a wall for six months. Get into bed. The world owes me a breakthrough.’
Well, since you put it that way. I start to undress and then stop as my hand touches the Tesla. I look at Jez’s shape, sprawled over the sheets, and think of Devotion. My hand stays on the gun, reliving the feeling.
‘I’m kind of distracted. Might be a bit of a disappointment tonight.’
Laughter.‘And that’ll make a change how? All I need from you this time is to lie there and not fall asleep.’
Jez. A long time since I’ve seen her this happy with herself. Somehow she always knows how to press the right button in me. Devotion can fuck off. The past is the past. I crawl beside her, run my fingers over her skin.‘So, where’s the money coming from?’
She pushes me back and straddles me.‘Credit Lagrange. A sealed box job on Gateway. The only way we’re going to find out any more is by going up there and breaking in. Either that or we do it by the book and spend a month chasing paper, by which time the box will be cleared and squeaky clean, traceless. But we might get somewhere piecing together how it got there in the first place. Assuming it wasn’t already there before Victor died.’ Rocking back and forth, the first beads of sweat beginning to shine on her face.
‘The Company could…’ I yelp as she scrapes her fingernails across my chest, picking her way along the wiremarks still there.
‘Sex first. Business later,’ she whispers.
deGroot, K., & Gerdener, J. ‘Image processing in higher order brains.’ Biotechnical Journal, 138, 2214-2289 (2319).
A very long and boring study into how us humans process data. Pretty dull until you realise they’re actually looking at copying your mind. Theoretically, they could suck every image out of your memory through a brainweb and dump it into a clone through their eyes and ears and so forth, eliminating the messy, doesn’t-seem-to-work brainweb-to-brainweb link up that everyone else has been studying until now. I don’t get this though. How would the clone be me? I mean, if you made a copy of me like that, you might not be able to tell us apart, but we’d both still be alive at the same time. Like, which one of them is real? It’s got to be the original, right? So when the original snuffs it, I’m still dead, right? So I’m a copy of Ortov, not the original Ortov, and if ever you find me a body, you
’ll be making another copy of me inside that body, not me myself. There must be another way. I don’t want to die.
Twenty-Five – Surgical Strike
Jez usually just falls asleep, but not tonight. Tonight she’s high.‘You realise,’ she says, ‘that if Victor’s death is a part of all this then you might know more than you think.’
‘I was trying to bring that to your attention in my way. But oh, no, little miss one-trackmind here had to have her orgasms first, didn’t she.’ Amazing how sex can pick you up.
A pillow flies out of the darkness and into my face.‘Your file says some very unexpected things about you and Longthorne.’
‘Yeah, so I found out back on Szenchzuen. Care to comment?’
She snorts.‘The way I remember it was as a bungled mess.’
‘Yeah. That’s about the size of it. And thanks for the reminder.’
‘Gregori Marshall wrote all that stuff. Used to be head of the Analysis Division back then. He’s a director now. You know what else I noticed? The entry’s dated like he’d written it as it happened, but he didn’t– it’s my file, for fucks sake. Someone’s been messing with it. In fact, I don’t think Marshall wrote it at all, but the authorisation checks out, the audit trail looks fine, there’s absolutely nothing to suggest I’m right except it’s just not the sort of thing he’d say. Frankly that scares the crap out of me.’
I yawn and stretch. Sated and sleepy. Don’t want to think about complicated stuff now.‘If someone’s messing with it to make me look good, that’s fine by me.’
She tweaks my ear.‘He’s making you look like you’re part of it. I’m sure you’d have told me if there was anything I should know, eh?’
‘I told you everything two years ago.’ Almost everything. Everything except the tiny little Gemini thing which is surely entirely irrelevant. Oh yes, definitely irrelevant.
‘Someone sent a mail bomb to Jessica Longthorne a few months ago. She’s the last one, you know. Security spotted it at once. Amateur affair. Didn’t think much of it at the time– just another head case, right? But this makes things different. Someone snuffed Victor and now they’re using his money to kidnap Pike. Someone else starts taking pot shots at Longthorne shuttles. Maybe the letter bomb fits in somehow.’ She snuggles beside me. Endorphins fading. Drifting away…
‘How much money did Victor Longthorne really have?’
‘Hmm?’ She snuggles some more and yawns.‘Victor? More than God. He pretty much owned the planet.’
‘How’d he get it?’
I don’t get an answer. Jez is asleep.
I lie still and stare at the dark, listening to her breathe. The Longthornes own Cestus. So they own the government, the Company. A billion people. They own us all. I ought to be shocked; but shit, why shouldn’t one man have a whole world all to himself? No different from a corporation really, and corporate worlds are nothing new. GZW own New Amazonia. Used to own part of Szenchzuen as well. Hardly any planets belong to the people who live on them. Who owns it now that Victor’s gone? Jessica? But Jessica’s a fruitbat– one hostile takeover and we could be working for the Brotherhood.
Ortov. Maybe I ought to talk to him more. Like maybe I could at least give him the number of my headphone…
But Ortov has to wait. There’s sleeping to be done, and then the small hours waking each other up and misbehaving, and then more sleeping and a rush of coffee and processed carbohydrates and the next thing you know, looking as innocent as we can manage, I’m walking with Doyle beside me down Vollstandige Road. The seek and destroy team have gone in secret pursuit of the woman, leaving us with the man. I get to be Doyle’s partner because Doyle’s got the same personality template as Jester, and Jester and I managed to not kill each other under stress. Personally, I think this reasoning sucks.
We vanish into a narrow black alley. Old stone walls, damp and stained. The smell of urine. The stoneglass underfoot is cracked and uneven, each footstep loud, reflected on itself by high bare walls.
The man is tall and blond and black. We call him Mr Guinness.
Some way off, Toni and Andreas are filming everything we do. Tonight, Untamed News! will have its next exclusive. Daring live footage of Dr. Pike’s rescue if we’re lucky. Or nothing at all, or perhaps his grisly death. On top of another house and then another, Su and Jez lie in wait with a smart gun apiece. All they have to do is put the cross hairs on Mr Guinness and pull the trigger and the gun will do the rest. But I fear we’ll find Mr Guinness is far too accustomed to this game to let that happen. I think of Jester– how would he be ready for us? He’d know we were coming. As soon as we stepped off the street and into the alley, he’d know. He’d be too smart for the smart gun.
But not smart enough for me and not quick enough for Doyle. That’s the hope.
I remember the Crypt, the bullets, the impact, the pain. Jez has given us a brace of grenades. It occurs to me to level the building. Pike, Doyle, Mr Guinness, the lot of them together. But for Jez I content myself with the knowledge that Doyle will be on her own as she goes into the flat. Me, I get to watch the alley and pop slugs into anyone that comes out. Technically I think that’s supposed to exclude Doyle, but hey, people make mistakes.
The alley empties into another, as dark and uncaring as the first. Even in the middle of the day the sun can barely slip between the walls to touch the ground. Water splashes under my feet. I see Doyle twitch. High above, window gardens hang steeped in sunlight, frozen starbursts of colour.
We reach steps. Steep, metal. Even down here they seem bright, their fluorescent emergency pink dulled with dirt but still shining out of the gloom. Doyle climbs, step, pause, step, pause. Everything is quiet, shielded from the rest of the city by walls of cheap housing. I filter out what little background there is until all I hear is the soft touch of my feet on the plastic and the sound of my breathing. Doyle is silent. Not even a heartbeat.
We stop outside the door. The place Mr Pleasant has given us. Wooden. Expensive once, but its dark finish has been scorched and blistered by the sun exposing pale flesh underneath. The lock is new. A good one. Probably very hard to crack but it looks weak, vulnerable to a brutal kicking. I don’t see a camera…
There’s a mat on the ground, also new. It says welcome.
This is wrong. The lock begs us to kick it down. There must be a camera somewhere. For fuck’s sake, even someone who wasn’t a terrorist would have a camera on the door.
A trap. Three floors up and I’d like to leap over the railings, swing and fall my way back to the ground, take my chances with a few broken bones rather than stay here another moment…
Doyle leaps onto the guard rail, twists, perches in a crouch for an instant, a Tesla in each hand, then dives head first through a window, so quick that I’m still staring at where she was when the first explosions ripple through the flat. Glass blows out a second window. I cringe. Long bursts of gunfire, two or three at once. I take a step forward…
The door explodes from its hinges, topples over the rail and into the alley below. Mr Guinness follows it, a Tesla in one hand, still firing back into the flat as his other hand reaches for the rail and begins to swing him over. I start to duck. I don’t think he even sees me, but I’m wrong. As he arcs over the rail, the Tesla turns towards me. I raise my own, pull the trigger and hold it in while my feet kick me back, away, down. Bullets scatter across the wall, spraying my face with needles of stone as I land on my back, wrenching God knows how many muscles. A moment later and he’d have cut me in half. My Tesla is whirring to itself but has nothing left to say. I let go of the trigger.
I have no idea whether I hit him.
Doyle runs out of the flat in a sprint and leaps over the rail. Straight down. She doesn’t even look at me. There’s a dark red stain on the side of her armoured jacket. Hers or his I have no idea. I don’t really care.
Jester. What would Jester do? Jester would fire up from underneath at where he saw me fall. Who knows whether or not these pink plastic w
alkways would stop a Tesla bullet, but probably not, and there are better ways to find out than staying where I am. I pull myself to my feet and dive through the window. Far too slow but no one guns me down. Yet.
I’m in a kitchen, or what’s left of it. The air is thick with dust and some sort of powder. Flour, I think. The doors to the cupboards hang open. Steel pans and plastic plates lie scattered across the floor. The taps are bent and broken, water fountaining from their remains, pooling on the worktop, spattering the debris at my feet. I can see the hallway from here. Something on the floor. I move closer. A rocket launcher. So that was our welcome. I move deeper into the flat. The walls between the rooms are lined with Tesla holes. I almost expect to see writing beside them: please tear along dotted line.
I find Dr. Pike in one of the bedrooms. Drugged and drooling, naked except for a sliver turban wrapped around his head. Shielding, hiding the transponder inside, I suppose.
‘Constantine?’ My headphone. Sounds like Jez but there’s a lot of noise. I fiddle with my filters.
‘Yup.’
‘Mr Guinness is down. Where are you?’
‘Inside. Pike’s here, but no one else.’
‘How is he?’
I watch the slow rise and fall of his chest and sniff the air.‘He needs a bath. Badly.’ I start to take the metal foil away from his head, then stop. Jester would have another bomb somewhere. In here. One to turn Dr. Pike and whoever tried to move him into a bloodshake. ‘I don’t want to move him. Can you get a bomb expert in here?’
‘No problem. What have you found?’
‘Nothing. I just have a bad feeling. This was too easy.’
