by Jeff Edwards
I changed tactics, and spent an hour having the hotel’s AI run net searches for me. He used his unseen holo projectors to cast visuals in the air at a comfortable viewing distance, and I discovered that his default samurai-of-doom voice could be toned down for lengthy discussions.
I was primarily interested in finding out about Akimura Nanodyne. The company was a closed corporation, with charter registration in something called the Confederated Extraplanetary Economic Enclave. I gathered this was some kind of financial entity formed by the collective orbital colonies. Not just an offshore tax haven, but an off-planet tax haven, free from the bureaucratic snarls, shifting government allegiances, and tiresome restrictions of international trade laws. The orbital equivalent of Zurich or the Caymans before the global banking crackdown. Safely beyond Earth-side regulatory and law enforcement agencies.
Stock ownership in Akimura Nanodyne was limited to members of the Akimura family and a small number of selected corporate officers. Company stock could not be sold, traded, or given to anyone who did not belong to that narrow circle.
Not a zaibatsu, then. A corporate oligarchy, small, prosperous, and—judging from the scarcity of publically-available information—almost pathologically secretive.
It was clear from Vivien’s comments that she already knew a lot of this. Her financial counselors had done considerable research before advising her to invest in some of Chiisai Teien’s commercial properties. They’d given her a similar assessment of Akimura Nanodyne. Agile, capable, and highly-insular.
The company’s founder, CEO, and majority shareholder was Akimura Hideaki. Fifty-eight years old and reputed to be both a technical genius of the first rank, and a recluse of nearly equal magnitude. The only available images of the man were from more than ten years earlier, prior to his descent into seclusion after the death of his oldest son, Ichiro, in a shuttle crash.
There was no shortage of images of Akimura’s second son, Jiro. There was also no shortage of net gossip about young Jiro, but every rumor seemed to be contradicted by another of opposite polarity. Jiro was a ne’er-do-well playboy, with poor impulse control and no sense of personal responsibility and family honor. Or he was a good and loyal son, working diligently and brilliantly to earn his position within the Akimura corpocratic family. He was an overindulged and decadent slime ball, running wild with the worst kinds of criminal lowlifes. Or he was a paragon of integrity, self-restraint, and social rectitude.
I had no idea how accurate any of these assertions might be. But if he was hanging out with the likes of Arm-twister, I wasn’t inclined to give Jiro the benefit of the doubt.
As a company, Akimura Nanodyne seemed to have almost no marketing footprint. No advertising campaigns, no pithy corporate catch phrases, and no slickly-persuasive info-vids. Apparently, they already had a solid client base, because they sure as hell didn’t seem to be trying to attract new customers.
Even the nature of their product line was hazy. Something to do with nano-scale fabrication under conditions of microgravity. From this, I assumed that some of the company’s facilities must be located near the axis of the colony’s torus, where the effects of centrifugal force would be close to zero.
I remembered LAPD’s structural analysis of the FANTASCAPE 389 chip found in Leanda Forsyth’s apartment. Supposedly, the chip had been manufactured in a microgravity environment.
I had no evidence that Akimura Nanodyne had fabricated the FANTASCAPE chip, beyond the fact that their vague technical prospectus hinted that they might have the capability. Given the possible link between Akimura Jiro and the Nine-fingers gang, I figured they would do as a suspect until I found something better. I was a long way from the proof stage anyway. I was still struggling to sketch in the basic outlines.
Twenty more minutes of searching with Shogun’s help failed to turn up anything that struck me as useful, so I told the AI that we were done for the moment.
Then I sat in silence and thought for a while, a process that could have been greatly aided by a couple of Marlboros.
Finally, I rolled my neck to get the kinks out, and stood up.
“I’m going to need your help,” I said.
Vivien’s ears perked up instantly. “Okay. What can I do?”
There was no good way to broach the subject, so I just jumped right in. “I need to become Japanese.”
Vivien smiled. “No problem. They’ve got a pill for that. Take one to become Japanese-American. Take two pills, and you’re full-on Nihonjin.”
“This isn’t a joke,” I said. “I need to become Japanese.”
Vivien gave me a sideways look. “If you’re not kidding, then you’re crazy.”
I shrugged. “I won’t deny the possibility. But let me tell you what I’ve got in mind, and you can decide for yourself...”
CHAPTER 33
We walked under the holo-sign and through the front entrance of the Face Replace boutique. The front room/sales area was clean to the point of near sterility. The design ethic was a paradoxical balance between the restrained elegance of a hover-car showroom and the plasticized commercial slickness of a fast food restaurant.
There were five or six other potential customers paging through the holographic sample catalogues, but most of them had that desultory manner that separates casual browsers from actual buyers.
Vivien elbowed me in the ribs and nodded toward a woman who was shopping for a breast upgrade. The woman in question had that over-optimized look that comes from addiction to cosmetic enhancement. Her upper chassis was already so exaggerated that she would probably need spinal reinforcement to go any larger.
“What do you think?” Vivien whispered. “Should I get some of those?”
“That depends,” I said. “Do you want to look like a human being, or a cartoon character?”
“Maybe just for a few days,” she said. “For fun.”
I shrugged. “If that’s your idea of fun, go right ahead.”
She elbowed me again. “Asshole.”
I caught the eye of a sales rep, and motioned him over.
He stopped a respectful distance away, smiled, and gave the middle-of-the-road bow that’s apparently appropriate when you are not certain of the other person’s social station.
He was still smiling when he straightened up. “Konichiwa.”
Vivien started speaking before I could open my mouth. “Konichiwa. Watashitachiha, atarashī kao o kōnyū shitai to omoimasu. Watashi no yūjin de hajimaru kudasai.”
I tried not to look surprised. I’d never thought to ask Vivien if she spoke Japanese. Come to think of it, I didn’t know very much about her at all.
The sales rep looked at me and shifted to English. “Do you have a particular face in mind, sir? If not, may I suggest something from our Justin Reinholt line? Handsome, but not too handsome. Very popular, but not too trendy.”
I pulled a trid out of my pocket and handed it over. It was a reproduction of the face from the security badge I had stolen. I wasn’t willing to show the actual badge, because I didn’t want anyone in this place to link me to Akimura Nanodyne. Their staff would be understandably suspicious if they knew that I was trying to make myself look like an Akimura employee. One phone call to the wrong person, and my neck would be in a noose.
The salesman examined the trid, regarding the nondescript Japanese face from several angles. “Interesting,” he said. “May one ask who this is?”
Once again, Vivien forged ahead. “Don’t you know? That’s Richie Kato, lead guitar for Hedgehog Rocket. Isn’t he just a cream-dream?” This last came out of her mouth in something close to a squeal.
That seemed to be my cue. “You have heard of Hedgehog Rocket, right? Slash-rock band out of Phoenix. Cutting-edge, and coming up fast. They crash a real hover-car on stage at the end of every performance, did you know that?”
The sales rep nodded sagely, as if a band as up-to-the-minute as Hedgehog Rocket couldn’t possibly have escaped his attention.
I swatted Vi
vien on the rump. “Sugar britches here is wetting her pants over Richie Kato. So I figure I’ll take him out for a spin, before he gets so famous that everybody is wearing his face. Know what I’m saying?”
The rep glanced at the trid again and then gave my face an extended visual appraisal. “We’ll need to do some work with bone structure, but nothing drastic. Basic morphology doesn’t look too far from the target. Some adjustments to melanin loading, to adjust the skin color. And then of course, the eyes.”
I nodded. “Epicanthic folds?”
“Certainly,” the man said. “But I was speaking of color. Your eyes are green. Mr. Kato’s appear to be brown. Unless you prefer to retain your natural eye color, and change only the face.”
“No, we should definitely do something with the eyes,” Vivien said. “Otherwise, you won’t look like the real Richie.”
I forced myself to smile. I wasn’t crazy about the idea of going under the knife at all. I was even more dubious about letting someone mess with my eyes. I hadn’t forgotten the SCAPE torture I’d been subjected to in Leanda’s apartment. My eyeballs flashing to steam under the laser, seared tissue erupting from my scorched eye sockets as I screamed and tried to wriggle away from the deadly beam. A cycle of unimaginable pain that repeated itself over, and over, and over…
I did my best to force the memory out of my mind. “You heard the lady,” I said. “Gotta do the eyes. What are the options?”
The man looked thoughtful. “We can do a viral intervention in chromosome 15. A minor adjustment to a gene called OCA2, to stimulate production of tyrosine. We have expert software that calculates the precise codons needed to achieve the desired shade. Or, if you’d like a less permanent solution, you can use colored contact lenses.”
His tone of voice made it clear that this last option was vastly inferior, which probably meant that his sales commission would be significantly lower.
I was tempted to go with the contacts anyway, just to keep these people from monkeying with my chromosomes. But contacts give me a splitting headache after about five minutes, and it would be embarrassing to lose a lens somewhere in the bowels of Akimura Nanodyne.
“No contacts,” I said. “Let’s go with the viral thing.”
The sales rep’s expression brightened visibly.
“How long to do it all?” Vivien asked.
The rep gave her a measured look, as if we had reached the difficult part of the pitch, and he had to proceed with caution to keep us from slipping off the hook. “Fees are determined by specialized software, based on the difficulty of the procedures, the per-minute charge for the robot surgeon, bio materials expended, and recovery time in the dermal stimulation unit.”
“I’m not asking how much,” Vivien said. “I’m asking how long.”
The sales rep seemed to find this question much more to his liking. “About two hours for the prep work and surgery. Then six to eight hours of dermal stim, depending on how the gentleman’s metabolism responds to accelerated tissue regeneration protocols.
Vivien looked at me. “Does that work for you?”
In point of fact, I was having second thoughts. I’d managed to get through my entire life wearing the face that nature had given me, and I was reluctant to change it now. It wasn’t vanity. As far as I knew, no one with good eyesight had ever called me handsome, but it was my face. The one I had inherited from my genes. The face I was used to seeing in the mirror.
I swallowed my hesitation and nodded. “Yeah. Sounds good.”
The sales rep launched into a recitation of financing options, which Vivien silenced by pulling out a bank chip with a platinum stripe.
The rep accepted the chip and zipped it through his reader. Whatever he saw on the screen brought about a profound change in his demeanor. He went from friendly and solicitous to utterly obsequious in the space of about one heartbeat. As though he had suddenly discovered that he was in the presence of royalty.
He bowed low when he passed the chip back to Vivien, using both hands in a palms-up gesture of formal presentation.
Vivien gave my hand a quick squeeze, and then I followed the sales rep behind the counter and into the pre-op area.
Fifteen minutes later, I was scrubbed, gowned, and laid out in a powered contour chair, waiting for the row of dermal anesthesia patches on my wrist to do their magic. I was out before the orderlies wheeled me into operating suite, and that was probably not an accident.
Taken as an abstract concept, a lot of people prefer surgical robots to human doctors. And I wouldn’t argue with them. Robots don’t get tired; they don’t get distracted, and they’re supposedly immune to the kinds of errors that human surgeons are known to make. But there’s a world of difference between watching a surgical robot from the perspective of an observer, and actually laying helpless under the blades of the machine.
It doesn’t have one laser scalpel, or even ten. It’s got fifty. Plus radial bone saws, suction hoses, pressure syringes, intravenous tubes, cauterizing electrodes, and a forest of manipulators ranging from nearly microscopic fingers, to articulated claws large enough to rip your leg off. And oh my God do those things have eyes. Vid cameras, IR cameras, multispectral cameras, micro lenses, macro lenses, and clusters of multifaceted lenses that look like the compound eyes of insects.
Seen up close, a surgical robot ceases to be an abstract concept. It’s a ceiling-sized mechanical monster, with more arms and eyes than you can count.
Which presumably explained why the Face Replace medical staff was so careful about making sure that patients never saw the machine. It wouldn’t do to have clients jump off the operating table and start screaming bloody murder. That kind of thing couldn’t possibly be good for business.
The staff certainly followed protocol with me. I never laid eyes on the robot. I was gone from the world long before its blades ever touched me.
I dreamed about the endless beach and the imperfectly perfect moon. Wandering aimlessly along the shore line while the rushing waves whispered dire secrets into the heavy salt air. I couldn’t quite make out the words buried in the low hiss of the surf, and I knew that I didn’t want to. The half-heard whispers spoke of dark things. Cruel things. Deception. Treachery. Betrayal.
I was following in the footsteps of a man with no face. His silhouette was a deeper shade of shadow against the night, always on the verge of disappearing into the deepening gloom.
I lengthened my stride, but I didn’t gain on him. My increased pace was barely enough to maintain position on the retreating stranger.
I tried putting on another burst of speed, picking up to a half trot. No good. The faceless man never seemed to alter his gait, but he always remained at the far edge of my vision.
His joints made odd mechanical noises as he strode through the darkness. Low gronks and whines that reminded me of overloaded servomotors, shot through with metallic scissoring, like the gnashing of steel teeth, or the stropping of a hundred scalpel blades.
At some point, I noticed that his feet were not leaving prints in the sand. I drew up short, and turned to examine my own footprints. A trail of them led off into the gloom.
As I watched, each of the foot-shaped depressions began filling with dark fluid. At first, I thought it might be blood, but when I knelt to get a closer look, I realized that it wasn’t liquid at all. Thousands (or millions) of speck-sized particles crawling over each other in a hideously biological parody of Brownian motion.
I reached out a finger to touch the seething surface of the not-liquid. Before I made contact, the world changed, and I was somewhere else, doing something that involved plastic shipping crates packed to overflowing with pieces of broken musical instruments.
Perhaps there were other dreams, but none of the rest made impressions on my memory. Just the shadow man, who left no footprints on the beach that never ends.
I woke to find a young Japanese woman leaning over me, brushing a strand of hair from my forehead. She was dressed in the disposable paper ro
be of a patient, rather than the green surgical scrubs of the medical staff.
As my eyes regained enough focus to see her features more clearly, it dawned on me that there was something familiar about her.
She spotted the flicker of semi-recognition in my eyes, and gave me a smile. The expression vanished instantly, replaced by something closer to a grimace. “Damn it, that hurts!”
Her voice wasn’t just familiar. I knew it well.
“Vivien?”
This triggered another round of the smile-to-grimace cycle. “You were expecting someone else?”
I must have furrowed my brow or shown some other expression of surprise, because suddenly my face hurt like hell. Not the sharply immediate pain of an open wound, but the deep ache of muscles that haven’t quite recovered from some non-trivial injury.
“I forgot about the Zen face,” Vivien said.
“The what?” The second word came out with an odd intonation, because it also hurt to talk.
“Zen face,” Vivien said. “They’ve got us pumped full of analgesics and anti-inflammatories, but you can’t go poking sharp instruments into human tissue without causing some discomfort. So we try to keep facial expressions to a minimum for a day or two until the worst of it is past. Zen face. Or poker face, if you prefer.”
I was still thrown off by the sight of Vivien’s voice coming out of a Japanese woman’s face. But I could actually see some of Vivien’s facial structure beneath the modifications. Her gray eyes were now brown and almond shaped, with the suggestion of epicanthic folds, but they had lost none of their playful intensity. Her chin was more pointed, but her cheekbones were apparently unchanged. They had done something subtle to the shape of her mouth, and her nose seemed smaller and more turned up at the end.
