Hardwired

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Hardwired Page 14

by Walter Jon Williams


  “No way for us to get home?”

  “None where we won’t get assassinated the second we show up in the Free Zone. No one knows who to trust.”

  “Whom,” says Cowboy.

  He is walking fast for the far end of the alley, fists in his pockets, trying to keep his bootsteps quiet. One of the sleeping men stirs on his threadbare blanket and calls a name. His bulging, uncovered belly gleams pale in the night.

  “We’re on our own then,” Cowboy says. He steps to the end of the alley and glances left and right. A woman’s laughter echoes from the curb. He steps across the street and into another alley.

  Sarah’s voice behind makes him stop in his tracks. “I found out who Cunningham works for.”

  Cowboy spins in surprise. “The boy on the phone told you?”

  “I told him the Orbitals were involved, and why. And he knew Cunningham, had dealt with him on some security matter. ”

  The loathing in her voice is clear. Even in the darkness he can see the hatred plain in her eyes.

  “It’s Tempel. Tempel Pharmaceuticals I.G.”

  Cowboy hears the name and feels his heart quicken. Deep inside him he feels a howl building, a shriek of triumph like the panzer’s jets as he opens the valves of pressured alcohol. Because, however little good it will do him right now, he finally knows the name of the enemy.

  WOHNEN SIE IN LEID-STADT? ERLAUBEN SIE UNS IHNEN NACH HAPPYVILLESCHICKEN!

  -Pointsman Pharmaceuticals A.G.

  Tempel Interessengemeinschaft, Cowboy thinks. The Fellowship of Interests Tempel. A lot of the Orbitals have I.G. after their names, and no wonder. It’s such a perfect description of their state of mind.

  He and Sarah are back at the panzer, sitting on its dorsal armor while the creek ripples across the ramming prow. Sarah is cradling the machine pistol in her arms, a cold and deadly child. Clouds are moving across the stars and they are alone in the darkness.

  “I don’t have any money beyond pocket change,” Cowboy says. “I usually carry some gold in the panzer, to use if I have to buy some lawmen.” He shakes his head. “But this delivery was supposed to be legal. No reason to suppose the cops would be interested.” He gives an unamused laugh. “And I was supposed to be back in Florida tonight.”

  Sarah says nothing, simply shifts the weight of the machine pistol. She’s got the long suppressor on the barrel, and the thing won’t make so much as a whisper if she has to use it. He already knows she doesn’t have a dime.

  “I won’t be able to access my portfolio,” he goes on, thinking aloud. “If the laws are all cooperating, Arkady and his people will be able to follow every transaction, or even freeze my action. I’ve got gold cached back in New Mexico and Wyoming, but that’s a long walk from here.”

  “We’ve got the matrices,” Sarah says. Her voice seems loud after such a long silence. “They’re worth a fortune if we can move them.”

  Cowboy looks up at her. “Do you know anyone you can trust with that amount of merchandise? I don’t.”

  “We don’t have to sell the whole cargo. Just enough to get us where we want to go.”

  Cowboy hears a mosquito dancing near his ear. His nerves are urging him to take the panzer out of here, telling him they are too near the phone that they used to call two compromised lines. But until he knows where they’re going there doesn’t seem to be any sense in moving. His fuel situation is too critical for wandering in circles.

  Wait, he thinks. He looks up at the sky. Wait until the clouds move in.

  He remembers the nights he flew the Pony Express through storm clouds, his crystal tuned to the weather bureau so that he could track the bad weather and hide in it, the delta diving past the rain that drummed on the canopy, through crepe blackness so complete, so tangible, that the world of the hissing aircraft, the softly glowing instrument lights, seemed to be the entirety of existence, the boundaries of the universe extending no more than an arm’s length beyond the canopy and all his memories of an earthly existence now some fond, distant, entirely irrelevant hallucination, the only other thing existing in that world, besides Cowboy and the plane living in their interface, the echo of Cowboy’s own breath in the confined space of his helmet. Remembering the sudden eruption of sheet lightning that turned the velvet sky brighter than day, the delta a matte-black needle flung against the shimmering, streaming opalescent neverending electric dream...A vision he could never share, never achieve anywhere else. A belonging, a completeness, that he could never talk about. Not even to those who flew with him. Just a shining in his eyes, aglow in his mind. And sometimes, he could tell, in the mind of others.

  “Maybe I know someone,” he says. “Maybe I know someone who’s been out of the game so long they won’t be looking for him.”

  HEARTS AND MINDS

  It is late afternoon. The world has paused to catch its breath, and the ice-cream streets melt slowly in the sun. The people of Pennsylvania wait in the hush for the twilight that will soften the tempered Gerber edges of their world.

  The panzer is hidden in a half-flooded quarry, the old road leading to the place now overgrown by brush so thick only the badgers know the crumbling pair of ruts. Cowboy and Sarah walk down the half-rural street that is called the something-or-other pike, Cowboy with a cardboard box propped on his shoulder, shielding his face from the traffic. Sarah treads quietly behind, her footsteps smothered by the grassy verge. Another pair of refugees with their rucksacks, not worth a second glance, not even bothering to stick out a hopeful thumb.

  Since midnight they’ve been heading west, winding up the Alleghenies, following the Youghiogheny River through the passes of the western Appalachians, switching afterward to the old Penn Central roadbed as it loops northwest to the city. Pittsburgh is a boomtown now after decades of decline, reviving as a transportation center and the new capital of Pennsylvania, one of the places the blocs hadn’t bothered to smash to ruins. Cowboy has seen pictures of the new capital, a granite fortress rising in halfhearted celebration of the old city’s luck, complete with a holochrome image of the Liberty Bell, the original having been mashed flat along with Independence Hall and then washed out into Delaware Bay by the rising salt tide, swirling out as gray streamers in the murky water along with the tons of stone and ash and blackened bone that had been the City of Brotherly Love.

  As night faded, there was only a few hundred miles’ range in the fuel tanks, and the landscape was growing too urban for safety. After Cowboy found the old quarry, he and Sarah slept the length of the morning and then began their hike, two more walkers coming to the boomtown to find work, obviously destined to squat with the others in the shacks and cardboard boxes that circle the city, staining the green walls of the Monongahela valley with the smoke of their cookfires, haunting the city looking for work and avoiding the dark corners where people got murdered for the change in their pockets.

  One of Cowboy’s old colleagues lives here in one of the city’s suburbs. Cowboy finds the address courtesy of directory assistance and wonders how much contact Reno still has with the business. He knows Reno made a lot of money in his days as a deltajock and hadn’t seemed the sort of person to lose it in the time since. If he’s entirely on the legal side now, that may even make things easier.

  A wall surrounds Reno’s house, and on one side an old man with three days’ growth of beard under a torn straw hat waits next to his packstaff, smoking a cigarette and waiting for the cool of twilight before continuing his pilgrimage. Cowboy’s nerves shriek an alarm at what might be an enemy staking out Reno’s house, but he does his best to silence them. Such sights are not unusual in this or any other part of the world.

  Reno’s gate is a polished chromium alloy that reflects Cowboy’s image, standing spindly and haggard next to the tall dirtgirl with the shades like an asphalt shimmer. In answer to the gate’s questions, he pulls off his cap and wig. The gate’s voice burbles in mirthless joy, the voice of something drowning. “I seem to remember seeing you on video. By all means com
e in. ” The gate itself is soundless as it opens.

  The house is a hymn to the interface, a geometric singularity composed of crystal and expensive off-planet alloy, suggesting the linkage of the human mind with digital reality. Jagged antennas seek the sky, transparent plastic tubes, part of some heating/cooling system, writhe over the house in a complex arterial pattern, carrying brightly colored liquids of exotic properties; streams of fluid insulated by bubbles, that suggest electrons speeding through their matrix. The walkway leading to the house is paved with millimeter-thin slices of meteorite protected by hard, transparent gas-planet plastic, the shining veins of nickel and magnesium bright against the shadowy; unoxidized iron, spotted with flecks of chromium and silicon. Other meteorites stand frozen in glass on alloy pillars in the forecourt. The door is inset, more polished alloy. It opens, like the other, without sound.

  “Looks like an illustration from Cyborg Life,” Sarah mutters. The dark laser-cut stone of the walls merges with bright alloy beams like the wood and plaster of a half-timbered house. Liquid-crystal art re-forms itself continually on the walls. Cowboy recognizes one of the patterns as a giant-sized schematic of one of his motor-reflex chips.

  “Leave your guns in the foyer, please. I won’t touch them.” Inside the house, the voice has a smoother quality.

  Sarah has insisted on carrying the Heckler & Koch in her ruck, and with a grudging smile she puts the ruck on a table. Cowboy puts his belly gun next to it. They step into the next room. Soft gelatine-filled furniture glows Cherenkov blue from internal light sources. Aquariums filled with genetically altered fish emit the same cold spidery light as a computer display. Randomly generated tones sound in pointillist pattern from concealed speakers. Reno enters the room from an alloy-rimmed door.

  “Hi, Cowboy. It’s been a while.”

  “Hi, Reno.” Cowboy looks at his surroundings in a studied way. “You seem to be doing well for yourself,” he says.

  Five years ago Reno’s delta had sucked a missile into its port engine over Indiana and then buried itself in some dark West Virginia hollow, sending a potential 200-million-dollar profit in pharmaceuticals skyward in a clean blue alcohol blaze. It was one of the last big delta runs and a turning point in the shift toward the use of panzers. Reno had got out of the plane before it screwed itself into Cheat Mountain, but he’d burned himself badly trying to horse the delta over the tree-crowned ridges to the landing field in Maryland, and his parachute hadn’t developed properly. Parts of him had been scraped off the trees with a shovel. In Cowboy’s world Reno’s bad luck was still talked about with respect.

  Cowboy had visited him in the hospital a few times, and talked by phone once or twice a year since. Reno’s body had been put back together, Cowboy had been told, but there had been too much brain damage for it to work right; and that ruled out running the mail.

  The rebuild job looks good. Arms and legs in fine working order. The blue eyes match. He looks fit in flannel pants and a Hawaiian shirt. Reno’s face is young except for the fine networking of lines around the eyes, and his teeth gleam white and even in the twilit room. The dark sockets in his head are covered by shoulder-length brown hair.

  “I keep up with my portfolio,” he says. There is a strange vacancy behind his eyes.

  “Reno, this is Sarah. Sarah, Reno.” They nod at each other while Cowboy puts down his box of hearts. Cowboy reaches out to shake Reno’s hand.

  And it feels wrong. A little too warm, perhaps, a little too...dry. Even the best of palms are just the least bit moist. Cowboy looks down at the arm with his infrared eyes and sees that the heat distribution is uniform, which is not the case with any arm Cowboy has ever seen.

  “A prosthesis,” says Reno, seeing Cowboy’s expression. “This and the two legs and other bits here and there.”

  “But you could have got real legs,” says Cowboy.

  Reno taps his skull. “I got real legs, but there was too much brain damage. My motor coordination was shot to hell, and my sense of touch was pretty much gone–– I’d lost too much skin, too many neurons. But Modernbody was looking for someone to test their latest prostheses. ” He shrugs. Cowboy gets an odd feeling from the gesture, as if the shrug weren’t real but rehearsed. Maybe Reno’s given this explanation a few too many times.

  “The arm and legs are hardwired in. There’s a liquid-crystal computer replacing a damaged part of the brain. The feedback isn’t very good on my sense of touch, but then it wasn’t any good after the crash anyway. It’s all experimental stuff, very advanced. Light alloy, lighter than bone and muscle. I’m a lot more mobile than I used to be. And if they go into production, the experimental prostheses will be cheaper than cloning new legs and regrafting. ”

  “I didn’t know,” Cowboy says.

  “Modernbody pays me a nice pension,” Reno says. “It bought this house. All it costs me is a checkup every couple months, sometimes a rewiring with an improvement. And my new parts will last longer than the originals.”

  The coming thing, Cowboy thinks. Live forever in a bodily incarnation of the eye-face, not limited to the speed of artificially enhanced neurotransmitters but approaching the speed of light, extending the limits of the interface, the universe. Brain contained in a perfect liquid-crystal analog. Nerves like the strings of a steel guitar. Heart a spinning turbopump. The Steel Cowboy, his body a screaming monochrome flicker, dispensing justice and righting wrongs. Who was that masked AI? Dunno, pardner, but he left this silver casting of a crystal circuit.

  To Cowboy, it sounds pretty good. If they can lick that feedback problem.

  Reno looks at him with his old-young eyes. Eyes that were a lot younger until that port engine spewed its molten remains into the thin air of Indiana and the horizon began to do flip-flops.

  “So,” Reno says. “You people get caught in a crossfire?”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  The eyes narrow. “From what I hear the crossfire extends all the way to California.”

  “I’ll worry about that when I get West. After that, if you have any Tempel Pharmaceuticals stock in your portfolio, I’d sell.”

  Reno frowns into one of his crystal pieces of art. “Sit down,” he says, “and tell me about it.”

  They sit next to each other on a pair of armchairs while Cowboy gives a brief recapitulation of what he knows. Sarah assumes a half-lotus on a glowing nuclear blue couch, not offering comment. Staying unobtrusive, as bodyguards should.

  Reno rubs his chin. “So what do you need? Transportation west? A place to hide?”

  Again Cowboy has a strange feeling. As if Reno is somehow cruising on automatic pilot. That, for all his apparent helpfulness, it’s all reflex, that he’s not really interested.

  “We want to sell something.” Cowboy reaches for his box of computer matrices and tears open the cover. Reno leans forward and peers into the container.

  “We want to move a thousand of these,” Cowboy says. “All perfect, all Orbital quality, made for Yoyodyne by their Olivetti subsidiary. OCM Twenty-two Eighty-ones, to be precise.” There are matrices times fifteen K in the panzer, but he doesn’t want to take more of the Hetman’s property than necessary. He hasn’t forgotten whom Sarah is really working for.

  “Heart crystals,” Reno murmurs. He makes a breathy sound with his lips. “So this is what that battle was over.”

  Cowboy feels he has succeeded in attracting Reno’s attention.

  They make the world go around, so central that the nickname “heart” isn’t out of place, for if the hearts stopped, the body would die. Computer cores made of liquid-crystal that can re-form itself in any configuration, creating the ultimate efficiency for any particular piece of cybernetic business that needs doing, shifting from storage of data to moving it to analyzing it and then altering to a form most efficient for acting on the analysis. Hearts that can make minds, from little bits of brightness in Cowboy’s skull that let him move his panzer, to larger models that create working analogs of the hu
man brain, the vast artificial intelligences that keep things moving smoothly for the Orbitals and the governments of the planet.

  All in miniature potential, here in the cardboard box.

  “Forty hearts per box,” Cowboy says. “The other boxes are in a safe place. You get thirty percent for being our thirdman. ”

  Reflected crystals gleam like rubies in Reno’s eyes. “Let me check the market,” he says.

  He touches two places on the midnight-black table in front of him and a comp board glows in the interior, projecting its colors onto Reno’s face. From underneath he slides a black box wired to the comp in the table and a box of crystal memories. He slips a memory cube into the trapdoor of the box, then unspools a stud from the box and puts it into his temple. He presses some of the keys on the deck face and leans back in his chair.

  The fish tanks bubble in the far-off humming distance. Reno’s expression softens, then hardens again. He is flying the face for a long time. Then his eyes flick to Cowboy, and his eyes show surprise.

  “Tempel stock has gone up twelve points since noon.” Reno’s voice is dreamy, reluctant to unfuse with the interface. “They’re moving against Korolev, a major takeover attempt. Korolev’s vulnerable right now–– they’ve made a lot of bad moves.” Cowboy sees Sarah’s startled expression from the corner of his eye and knows she understands more of this than she’s been letting on, and that he’ll have some questions for her later. But Reno’s voice drones on from his chair.

  “Tempel is strong in pharmaceuticals and mining, but their aerospace division is weak. Acquisition of Korolev would strengthen them. The market seems to be saying Tempel will win, but my guess is that it won’t be a sure thing. Korolev has a lot of resources to call on...and they’re so secretive there are bound to be some things Tempel doesn’t know about.”

 

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