Hardwired

by Walter Jon Williams

  Michael the Hetman is in his office when she calls. She speaks to him in Spanglish and he laughs.

  “I thought I’d hear from you today, mi hermana,” he says.

  “Yes?” she asks. “You know this orbiter Cunningham?”

  “So-so. We’ve done business. He has the highest recommendations. ”

  “Whose?”

  “The highest,” he says.

  “So you recommend that I trust him?” Sarah asks.

  His laugh seems a little jangled. She wonders if he is high. “I never make that kind of recommendation, mi hermana,” he says.

  “Yes, you would, Hetman,” Sarah says. “If you are getting a piece of whatever it is Cunningham is doing. As it is, you’re just doing him a favor.”

  “Do svidaniya, my sister,” says Michael, sounding annoyed, and snaps off. Sarah looks into the humming receiver and frowns.

  The door opens behind her and she spins and goes into her stance, balanced to jump forward or back. Daud walks carelessly in the door. Behind him, carrying a six-pack of beer, comes his manager, Jackstraw, a small young man with unquiet eyes. Daud looks up at her, speaks through the cigarette held in his lips. “You expecting someone else?” he asks.

  She relaxes. “No,” she says. “Just nerves. It’s been a nervous day.”

  Daud’s eyes move restlessly over the small apartment. He has altered the irises from brown to a pale blue, just as he’d altered the color of his hair, eyebrows, and lashes to a white blond. He is tanned, and his hair is shoulder-length and shaggy. He wears tooled leather sandals, and a tight white pair of slacks under a dark net shirt. He is taking hormone suppressants, and though he is twenty he looks fifteen and is beardless.

  Sarah moves over to him and kisses him hello. “I’m working tonight,” he says. “He wants to have dinner. I can’t stay long.”

  “Is it someone you know?” she asks.

  “Yes.” He gives a shadowy grin, meant to be reassuring. His blue eyes flicker. “I’ve been with him before.”

  “Not a thatch?”

  He shrugs out of her embrace and goes to sit on the sofa. “No,” he mumbles. “An old guy. Lonely, I guess. Easy to please. Wants to talk more than anything.” He sees the plastic pack of endorphins and picks it up, searching through it. Sarah sees two more vials vanish between his fingers.

  “Daud,” she says, her voice a warning. “That’s our food and rent– I’ve got to get it on the street.”

  “Just one,” Daud says. He drops the other back in the bag, holds up one to let her see it.

  Cigarette ash drifts to the floor.

  “You’ve already had your share,” Sarah says.

  His pale eyes flicker in his dark face. “Okay,” he says. But he doesn’t put the vial down. His need is too strong. She looks down and shakes her head. “One,” she agrees. “Okay.” He pockets it, then picks up the loaded injector and dials a dosage–– a high dosage, she knows. She resists the urge to check the injector, knowing that someday if he goes on this way he’ll put himself in a coma, but knowing how much he’d resent her concern. Sarah watches as the endorphin hits his head, as he lies back and sighs, his twitchy nervousness gone.

  She takes the injector and frees the vial, then puts it in the plastic bag. There is a half smile on Daud’s face as he looks up at her. “Thanks, Sarah,” he says.

  “I love you,” she says.

  He closes his eyes and strops his back on the sofa like a cat. His throat makes strange whimpering noises. She takes the bag and walks into her room and throws the bag on her bed. A wave of sadness whispers through her veins like a drug of melancholy. Daud will die before long, and she can’t stop it.

  Once it had been she who stood between him and life; now it is the endorphins that keep him insulated from the things that want to touch him. Their father had been crazy and violent, and half her scars were Daud’s by right; she had suffered them on his behalf, shielding him with her body. The madman’s beatings had taught her to fight back, had made her hard and quick, but she couldn’t be there all the time. The old man had sensed weakness in Daud, and found it. When Sarah was fourteen she’d run with the first boy who’d promised her a place free from pain; two years later, when she’d bought her way out of her first contract and come back for him, Daud had been shattered beyond repair, the needle already in his arm. She’d led him to the new house where she worked–– it was the only place she had–– and there he’d learned to earn his living, as she had learned in her own time. He is broken still, and as long as they are in the streets, there is no way of healing him.

  If she hadn’t cracked, if she hadn’t run away, she might have been able to protect him. She won’t crack again.

  She returns to the other room and sees Daud lying on the sofa, one sandal hanging with the straps tangled between his toes. Tobacco smoke drifts up from his nostrils. Jackstraw is sitting next to him on the sofa and drinking one of his beers. He glances up.

  “You look like you’re limping,” Jackstraw says. “Would you like me to rub your legs?”

  “No,” Sarah says quickly; and then realizes she is being too sharp. “No,” she says again, with a smile. “Thank you. But it’s a bone bruise. If you touched me, I’d scream.”

  ARTIFICIAL DREAMS

  The Plastic Girl is a hustler’s idea of the good life. There is a room for zonedance, and there are headsets that plug you into euphoric states or pornography or whatever it is you need and are afraid to shoot into your veins. Orbital pharmaceutical companies provide the effects free, as advertising for their products. There are dancers on the mirrored bar in the back, a bar equipped with arcade games so that if you win, a connection snaps in one of the dancer’s garments and it falls off. If you win big, all the clothes fall off all the dancers at once.

  Sarah is in the big front room: brassy music, red leather booths, brass ornaments. She does not, and will probably never, rate the quiet room down the hall, all brushed aluminum and a lot of dark wood that might have been the last mahogany tree in Southeast Asia–– that room is for the big boys who run this fast and dangerous world, and though there isn’t a sign that says NO WOMEN ALLOWED, there might as well be. Sarah is an independent contractor and rates a certain amount of respect, but in the end she is still meat for hire, though on a more elevated plane than she once was.

  But still, the red room is nice. There are holograms, colors and helixes like modeled DNA, floating just above eye level, casting their variegated light through the crystal and sparkling liquor held in the patrons’ hands; there are sockets at every table for comp decks so that the patrons can keep up with their portfolios; and there are girls with reconstructed breasts and faces who come to each table in their tight plastic corsets, bring you your drink, and watch with identical and very white smiles as you put your credit needle into their tabulator and tap in a generous tip with your fingernail.

  Sarah is ready for the meet with Cunningham, wearing a navy blue jacket guaranteed to protect her against kinetic violence of up to 900 foot-pounds per square inch, and trousers good for 750. She has invested some of the endorphins and bought the time of a pair of her peers. They are walking loose about the bar, ready to keep Cunningham or his friends off her back if she needs it. She knows she needs a clear head and has kept the endorphin dose down. Pain is making her edgy, and she still can’t sit. She stands at a small table and sips her rum and lime, waiting. And then Cunningham is there. Bland face, brown eyes, brown hair, brown suit. A whispery voice that speaks of clean places she has never been, places bright and soft against the black and pure diamond.

  “Okay, Cunningham,” she says. “Business.”

  Cunningham’s eyes flicker to the mirror behind her. “Friends?” he asks.

  “I don’t know you.”

  “You’ve called the Hetman?”

  She nods. “He was complimentary,” she says, “but you’re not working for him; he’s repaying you a favor, maybe. So I’m cautious.”

  “Understanda
ble.” He takes a comp deck out of an inner pocket and plugs it into the table. A pale amber screen in the depths of the dark tabletop lights up, displaying a row of figures. “We’re offering you this in dollars,” he says.

  Sarah feels a touch of metal on her nerves, on her tongue. The score, she thinks, the real thing. “Dollars?” she says. ”Get serious.”

  “Gold?” Another set of figures appears.

  She takes a sip of rum. “Too heavy. ”

  “Stock. Or drugs. Take your pick.”

  “What kind of stock? What kind of drugs?”

  “Your choice.”

  “Polymyxin-phenildorphin Nu. There’s a shortage right now.”

  Cunningham frowns. “If you like. But there’ll be a lot of it coming onto the market in another three weeks or so.”

  Her eyes challenge him. “Did you bring it down from orbit with you?” she asks.

  His face fails so much as to twitch. “No,” he says. “But if I were you, I’d try chloramphenildorphin. Pfizer is arranging an artificial scarcity that will last several months. Here are the figures. Pharmacological quality, fresh from orbit.”

  Sarah looks at the amber numbers and nods. “Satisfactory,” she says. “Half in advance.”

  “Ten percent now,” Cunningham says. “Thirty on completion of training. The rest on completion of the contract, whether you succeed or not.”

  She looks up at one of the bar’s moving holograms, the colors clean and bright, as pure as if seen through a vacuum. A vacuum, she thinks. The stock isn’t bad, but she can do more with the drugs. Cunningham is offering her the drugs at their orbital value, where they are made and where the cost is almost nothing. The street value is far more, and with it she can buy more stock than the amount they were offering. Ten percent of that figure is more than she’d made last night, when she’d gone after the snagboy.

  To get into the Orbitals you have to have skills they need, skills she can never acquire.

  There is another way: they can’t refuse someone who owns enough shares. They are sucking up all of Earth’s remaining wealth, and if you help them and buy up enough stock, they might free you from the mud forever. This is almost enough, she calculates. Almost enough for a pair of tickets to the top of the gravity well.

  She brings her drink to her lips. “Let’s say a quarter now,” she says. “And then I’ll let you buy me a drink, and you can tell me just what you want me to do to earn it.”

  Cunningham turns and signals to one of the smiling corset girls. “It’s very simple,” he says, and he looks at her with his ice-cold eyes. “We want you to make someone fall in love with you. Just for a night.”

  IS YOUR LOVER LOOKING FOR SOMEONE YOUNGER? YOU CAN BE THAT SOMEONE!

  “The Princess is about eighty years old,” Cunningham says. The holo he gives Sarah shows a pale blond girl of about twenty, dressed in a kind of ruffled blouse that exposes her rounded shoulders, the hollows of her clavicles. She has Daud’s watery blue eyes and freckles above her breasts. She projects an air of vulnerable innocence.

  “We think he was originally from Russia,” Cunningham goes on, “but the Korolev Bureau has always been secretive and we don’t have a complete list of their senior staff and designers. When he rated the new body, he asked to be a woman. He’s important enough so that they gave it to him, but they gave him a demotion–– they rotate out all their old people to make way for the new. She’s doing courier duty now. ”

  Not unusual, Sarah thinks. These days you can get pornography read straight into the brain, plenty of chances to sample whatever pleasures you like and then, if rich enough, get yourself a new body to suit your tastes. But the technology of personality transfer is imperfect--- sometimes bits get left behind: memories, abilities, traits that might be useful. A succession of bodies can mean successive senility. If you get a new body and aren’t so powerful you can’t be moved, you are often demoted until you can prove yourself.

  “What’s her new name?” she asks.

  “She’ll tell you, I’m sure. Let’s just call her Princess for now.”

  Sarah shrugs. There are half a dozen imbecilic security rules in this operation, and she guesses that most of them are simply to test her capacity for obedience.

  “Her new body doesn’t seem to have altered his sexual orientation, just his manner of expressing it,” Cunningham says. “Princess has exhibited some characteristic behaviors since she’s started her new job. When she’s on the ground, she likes to go slumming. Find herself a working girl--- sometimes a dirtgirl, most often a jock– and take her home for a night or two. She wants a pet, but a dangerous one. Not too clean. A little rough. Not too removed from the street. But civilized enough to know how to please. Not a thatch. ”

  “That’s me?” Sarah asks, with no surprise. “Her new pet?”

  “We’ve researched you. You were a licensed prostitute for five years. And rated highly by your employers. ”

  “Five and a half,” she says. “And not with girls.”

  “He’s a man, really. An old man. Why should it be hard for you?”

  Sarah looks at the blond freckled girl in the holo, trying to find the old Russian in those eyes. The look that was always the same, wanting her to be some piece of private fantasy, real but not too real, orgasms genuine but never with genuine passion. The plastic girl, an object for things that grew hidden in their minds, something they could get rid of quickly and never have to take home. They were upset, somehow, if you didn’t understand their fantasy right away. After a while she had got so that she could.

  No different from all the other old men, she thinks as she looks at the picture. Not really. They want power, over their own flesh and another’s. Pay not so much for sex, but for power over sex, over the thing that threatens to control them. And so they take their passion and use it to control others. She understands control all right.

  She looks up at Cunningham. “Did they give you a new body as well?” she asks. “Guaranteed inconspicuous? Or did you have Firebud make you over, so that you had no style at all?”

  He gazes at her steadily, the same calm gaze. She can’t seem to touch it, or him. “I can’t say,” he says.

  “How long have you worked for them?” she asks. “You were a mudboy once– you don’t have the look that they do. But you work for them now. Is that what they promised you? A new body when you get old? And if you die on one of these jobs here in the mud, a nice funeral with the corporate anthem sung over your body?”

  “Something like that,” he agrees.

  “Got you heart and soul, have they?” she asks.

  “That’s how they want it.” Dryly, accepting. He knows the price of his ticket.

  “Control,” she says. “You understand that. You are owned by people who worship control, and so you control yourself well. But you’re a pressure cooker, and the steam is just under the surface. Do you go slumming in your off hours, like Princess? To the clubs, to the houses? Are you one of my old customers?” She gazes into his expressionless eyes. “You could be,” she says. “I never remembered faces.”

  “As it happens, I’m not,” he says. “I never saw you before I was given this assignment.”

  He is beginning to look a little out of patience.

  Sarah grins. “Don’t worry,” she says, and throws the holo of Princess on the table. “I’ll do your owners proud.”

  “I’m sure you will,” he says. “They won’t have it any other way.”

  IN THE ZONE/YES

  Like Times Square neon, the amber LED tracks across the upper limits of Sarah’s vision, just where the shadow of her brows would be.

  PRINCESS MOVING PRINCESS MOVING PRINCESS MOVING...

  The Aujourd’Oui is Princess’s favorite spot, but there are others. Sarah should be ready to move at need.

  The washroom at the Aujourd’Oui is a conglomeration of mirrors and soft white lights, red flock on the gold wallpaper, bronze waterspouts above the sinks, chromed tissue dispensers. Sarah s
houlders through the door, and a pair of dirtgirls standing in front of the mirrors glance at her. There is envy in their glance, and a kind of desperate awe, and then the eyes turn self-consciously back to the mirrors. The satin jacket represents something they want and will most likely never have, the freedom of the white crane to climb into the sky amid the silver glitter of stars. Sarah is suddenly aware of the sound of sobbing, magnified by the low ceiling, the hard edges of the room. The dirtgirl’s eyes stay fixed in their own reflections as she passes and steps into a stall.

  It is the girl in the next stall who is weeping, pausing only to draw massive shuddering breaths before bringing the air out again through the tortured muscles of the throat. It hurts to cry that hard, Sarah knows. The ribs feel as if they are breaking. The stall shudders to the impact as the girl drives her head against its wall, and Sarah knows that it is pain the girl is seeking, perhaps to drive out pain of another kind.

  Sarah makes it a policy not to get between people and what they need.

  To the sound of the impacts Sarah takes her inhaler from her belt, puts it to her nose, and triggers it. There is a brief hiss of compressed gas. Sarah throws her head back, feeling the rush of hardfire racing along her nerve paths. The stall quakes. Sarah inhales again, using the other nostril, and she feels her body go warm and then cold, the hair on her forearms prickling. Her lips peel back from her teeth, and she feels at once abnormally sensitive and abnormally hard, as if her skin is made of razor blades that can feel every mote of dust. She needs the bite of the drug, needs it to give herself that extra piece of conviction. She hadn’t mentioned it to Cunningham. The hell with him-she’ll play it her own way...

  PRINCESS MOVING PRINCESS MOVING...