“What do you mean?”
He shrugs. “Mashaya, she had friends here. Nobody downtown cares if a few bangers OD.” He goes silent, and I know he’s thinking of Merc.
“You’re saying she was working on her own time.”
“It ain’t a crime unless white people or rich people die. She talked to a lot of people. Talked to me. Maybe got close to something.” His hands windmill slightly as he struggles to articulate his thoughts. “Somebody saw her get shot. Sniper bullet, one shot. Tore the back of her head clean off. White van came around the corner thirty seconds later and five guys cleaned up the scene and were gone before my boys even heard about the shooting. That’s fast.”
I start to see the outline of the picture he is painting for me, in his awkward way. Face isn’t stupid. He’s keen as the razor blade he keeps in his pants pocket. I’ve seen the man in a ten-thousand-dollar sharkskin suit cut to fit like a second skin, and you don’t get to be what he is if you’re not smart enough to remember the names and family histories of every petty criminal in the city.
Oral communication, however, is not his strong point. I finish the end of my sandwich as an excuse to think. “That’s professional. You’ve got a feeling about this,” I say at last.
“I got nothing but feelings, and they all making my knuckles itch. But I think we talk to the people Mashaya was talking to, we get close to the people she got close to …”
“We get shot in the head with a high-powered rifle and our bodies turn up in the river. Good plan, Razorface.”
He shrugged. “Actually, I was thinking of going on down to New York City. What do you say?”
I wipe my hands on my pants, leaving behind a greasy mayonnaise stain.
“I’ll drive.”
Allen-Shipman Research Facility
St. George Street
Toronto, Ontario
Evening, Friday 8 September, 2062
The door to Gabe Castaign’s office stood open on the gray-carpeted hallway, and Elspeth paused there. She heard his voice, carefully cheerful, the enunciated tones telling her that he was speaking to a machine. “… hope you’re out having a hot date on a Friday night, or at least down at that dive you call a corner pub watching the game. My money’s on Chelsea. Call me. Bye!” She rapped the door sharply and stepped into the room just as he tapped the disconnect. The fuzzy image hanging in the air over his phone dissolved into transparency. How odd—whoever he was calling still has the factory message up. “Gabe?”
He was already looking up to greet her knock. “Elspeth. Come in please.” He stood and came around the big desk, a mirror of her own, scooping a pile of manuals off the seat of the upholstered chair to his right. “What can I do for you?”
She stepped onto soft carpeting identical to that in her own office, except in a masculine medium gray blue, complemented by periwinkle drapes. He’d hauled them to the side and turned off the projected babbling-brook landscape, revealing a less-than-enticing view of slanting sunlight across a well-stocked parking lot. A breeze ruffled the curtains; Elspeth smelled warm concrete. She hadn’t realized the windows would open. “I was hoping you were settled in and we could sit down and talk about the project.”
“I’d like that. Pull up a chair.” He set the manuals on the edge of his desk, away from the interface plate, and gestured to the one he’d cleared. The skin of his hands showed faint irregularities of color, speaking to Elspeth of old deep burns or something else requiring skin grafts.
She shook her head. “How about I buy you dinner?”
He checked the time in the corner of the flat monitor pane canted at an angle like a reading stand over the top of his desk. Elspeth found it interesting that he preferred the pane to contacts or a holographic interface. Still, she imagined he spent a lot of time staring at it. “How did it get so late? Sure, let me grab my jacket. My roommates are at a friend’s place for dinner.” He wiggled his fingers in the air to indicate quotation marks.
I wonder what quote roommates unquote are. She stepped back as he walked around the desk, rolling down his shirtsleeves and buttoning the cuffs before he brushed past her to take his coat down off the peg beside the door. “What do you want?”
“Anything’s good,” she answered, wondering if he meant—or caught—the double entendre. “I wonder if that little noodle shop on the corner by the university is still there.”
He took the knob in his hand and held the door open for her. He passed his thumbprint over the sensor as well as turning the key in the lock. “When was the last time you were there?”
She almost laughed in realization. “About thirteen years.”
“Ah.”
Elspeth could see evening light through the double glass doors at the end of the corridor as they walked. She knew he was waiting for an explanation. “I’ve been out of Toronto for a while. I’ll tell you about it if I get a couple of beers in me.”
“You do that,” he said, as the outside doors whisked open before them, enfolding them in warm autumn air like a humid exhalation.
An hour later at a restaurant still called “Lemon Grass,” Elspeth picked up her chopsticks and leaned forward over the steaming bowl of noodles, closing her eyes to inhale. “Jesus, that smells good.”
Across the table, Gabe tilted his bowl toward his mouth. Slurping noodles, he nodded. He chewed, swallowed, and cleared his throat. “I love this stuff. So tell me about your project. Our project. Do you want another beer?”
“Please. Well, here’s the thing. I don’t know how much you remember from about thirteen years back … Do you recall anything what the media said then? About my work in particular?”
Gabe signaled the waitress. He had a knack, Elspeth noticed, for catching people’s eye. “I saw you on Network Tonite. The night Alex Ugate was shot.”
“Oh.” Elspeth set her chopsticks aside. “That was a bad business.” She picked the Sapporo up before the waitress’s hand had really left it and took a swallow. Two should be my limit. You’re cut off after this one, Elspeth. “That was about the worst night of my life.”
“I imagine. I’ve had a few of those myself.” He set his bowl down and laid the chopsticks on the blue porcelain rest, reaching for the teapot. The bowls and teacups were still as mismatched as she remembered: Gabe’s cup was red and blue, and Elspeth’s was white with translucent rice grains throughout. “I remember they showed the VR feed, and you talking with some dead engineer …”
She chuckled, distracted enough to pick her chopsticks back up, fingertips fretting the splintery wood. “Nikola Tesla. He wasn’t a true AI, though—just a construct personality. A responder designed to mimic a long-dead man.”
Gabe nodded. “And then a riot broke out in the TV studio, as I recall.” As if realizing what he had said, he continued quickly. “Do you still think you were on the right track?”
After a long pause, she forced herself to keep chewing. “Gabe, I’m sure of it. It’s just a matter of creating the right construct personality. After a certain point, I believe they’ll self-generate. Given sufficient system resources, that is.”
“Ah.” He seemed pensive.
She reached out and tapped his hand. “Speak.”
His shoulder rose and fell under light-blue broadcloth. “I’m wondering if the research would still be as controversial now. Ten years later.” She didn’t answer immediately, and after a sip of beer he continued. “Course, I never much understood what the fuss was then.”
“It won’t be controversial,” she whispered, “because no one will know that we’re doing it this time.” She nibbled on the edge of her thumbnail. “And as for what the fuss was—well, what was the fuss over nanotech, or bio-engineering, or cloning? People used to get shot for performing abortions, for Christ’s sake. Fundamentalists are nuts.” Self-consciously, she touched her gold cross, watching fish circle in the tank on the wall.
“In the U.S., the only reason people don’t still get shot for performing abortions is because they’r
e not legal anymore,” Gabe replied. He picked up his chopsticks and sucked up another mouthful of noodles. “How on earth did you wind up going to jail for sedition, of all things?”
“It wasn’t sedition.”
“I remember the trial. Military Powers Act. Something else? Not espionage, or they wouldn’t have you on this project.”
Elspeth smoothed the palm of her hand over the speckled linoleum tabletop. Dark red vinyl crinkled under her thighs as she shifted position in the booth. “There is that.” She poured herself tea so she wouldn’t finish her beer too quickly.
Gabe watched quietly while she fidgeted.
“It was—noncooperation, I suppose you’d call it. Valens wanted someone—I mean, something—I wasn’t prepared to give him.” She changed the subject none too smoothly. “Where did you learn programming?”
“Now that is a long and ugly story. I used to play around for fun when I was a kid. There’s not much to do in the winters up north. We played a lot of Monopoly.”
Elspeth glanced up at him, surprised. Her eyes met his bay-blue ones, which twinkled amid sunbaked creases. Is he kidding? Yes. And no. “And you kept it up in the army?”
He shrugged and took a pull of his beer. “Not really. I was special forces. I got shot at.” The eyes looked down, and the twinkle left them. “Then I got out, got married, and had to get a real job. Which reminds me—I think we’ve got an unusually persistent somebody poking around the edges of the intranet. He hasn’t made it in, but he’s giving me a run for my money.”
“I’m keeping all my project work on the isolated intranet. Are you?”
“Yes. Although I can’t help but feel a bigger system might provoke things. Kind of a neurons-and-synapses kind of deal, n’est ce pas?” He trailed off, poking at his food. “How did you get into this line of work?”
“I started with an MSW and decided I was sick of watching inner city kids get chewed up by the system, so I went back to school for medicine and figured out I was too scared of hurting people to be a physician. That led me into psychiatry until I figured out I could hurt them worse. Thus,” she spread her hands wide, as if releasing a dove, “research.”
He raised his Sapporo and tapped it against hers. “Here’s to winding up someplace other than where you intended.”
“I already did that, Gabe.” The words came out too easily, revealing more than she had meant to.
“Yeah.” He finished the beer and set the bottle aside for the alert waitress to carry off.
In a moment, she was back with two more. Elspeth eyed hers uncertainly. “I should stop with these.”
“Do you have somewhere to be?”
She chewed, swallowed, regretting already the need to leave the warm, ginger-scented restaurant and go back to the hospital, to the reek of antiseptic and death. “Well … yeah.”
“Hell,” he said. “Drink the beer. I’ll walk you over. It is walkable?”
“Subway,” she replied, and he nodded.
“Close enough.”
1530 hours, Friday 8 September, 2062
Sigourney Street
Abandoned North End
Hartford, Connecticut
“Jenny, it’s Gabe. Hope everything’s okay—sorry I missed you. I was just calling to let you know I’ve moved back to Toronto and give you my new contact information, but I guess I’ll e-mail it to you instead. Yes, as you’re guessing, that means I finally found work. It’s a good job, too, but I have to warn you about the shocker—I’m working with your old ‘friend’ Captain Valens. Except he’s Colonel Valens now, but anyway, I figured I should warn you before you heard it through the grapevine.
“I hope you’re out having a hot date on a Friday night, or at least down at that dive you call a corner pub watching the game. My money’s on Chelsea. Call me. Bye!”
I step away from the one-tenth-scale holographic projection of the head of Gabriel Castaign, formerly holding the rank of captain in the Canadian Army. Razorface watches over my shoulder. Boris stands on the fender of the Cadillac, and Face scratches him under the chin. The old tomcat rocks his head from side to side, leaning into the caress. “Jenny?”
“Don’t push your luck, Dwayne.”
He curls a corner of his lip at me in a close-mouthed smile. I’m probably the only person other than his momma who knows that name anymore. “Mexican standoff,” he says. “That your only message? You nearly ready to roll?”
“Yeah,” I say, downloading the information Gabe e-mailed me into my HCD. The H stands for holistic, but through the magic of linguistics, everybody calls it a “hip.” Whatever.
Valens? Fucking A, Gabe, you’d better have a hell of a good reason for that. He does, though. And it’s hard to be angry, because I know perfectly well what his reasons are.
His wife’s name had been Geniveve, and the irony of that still scalded me if I thought about it too hard. He’d married her after we were both out of the army, and their daughters were born late—the younger one only a year or so before Geniveve died. Long after he’d forgotten that he saved my life that time. I never forgot, even if I never got around to mentioning it to him. Like I never got around to mentioning some other things he didn’t need to know. We can put bases on Mars and miners on Ceres, but we can’t cure common heartbreak.
I stop playing with my HCD, thumb it off, and refill Boris’s automatic cat feeder and water fountain. He’s got a cat door keyed to a microchip. Face watches me, not quite letting me see him smile. Yeah, dammit, I take in strays. When I’m done, I grab my jacket and an overnight bag and lead Face over to the only-just-antique Bradford Tempest pickup in the left-hand bay.
I figure I’ll answer Gabriel’s call when I get home and have a little time to talk. And when I’ve cooled off a little, to be honest.
The Bradford isn’t much to look at, but it runs. The solid rubber tires and boulder-climbing suspension aren’t easy on the kidneys as we bushwhack our way to the highway, but thirty minutes later we’re southbound on I-91, passing the exit sign that reads “Dinosaur State Park / Veteran’s Home and Hospital” and accelerating steadily toward New York City.
Because, baby, it’s Friday night.
We ride in silence, down highways older than my grandmother, through the acid-rain-etched hills and the centers of commerce of southern Connecticut. The highway unwinds before us, the sun gliding down the sky. Our first sight of the city is burn-scarred gray concrete towers flanking the highway—deserted now and unmaintained.
It’s still only early evening—three hours transit, more or less, and then another half hour looking for a spot before I pay too much to park the brave old truck in a guarded lot. I disarm the security system so Face can climb out the passenger side. I’ve got my gun unholstered and am leaning across to open the glove box when he stops, turns back, and slides his own piece out of the shoulder holster. He weighs it in his hand, standing close enough so the door blocks him from casual sight.
“Leave it,” I say.
He looks like he wants to chew his lip. I admire his restraint. “New York,” he says.
“Not the place to carry a gun.” New York City has a shoot-on-sight law, and the cops here aren’t content to let the neighborhoods run themselves. Never mind the martial law that’s gone into effect since the dikes went up between the City and the cold, rising Atlantic. That spot between my shoulderblades starts to itch as soon as I get within smelling distance of the place. I meet his eyes and frown. “Glove box, Face.”
He takes a breath to argue, so I let my expression slide toward Sergeant and he lets it out again and puts the gun in the box like a good boy, only slamming the door a little. I meet him by the front bumper. “So, do you have any idea where to go?”
He’s already walking, and I set the alarm and the flamethrowers before I follow.
He nods, but doesn’t say anything. The narrow street is dark and smells of garbage and the salt-sewage tang of the sea. I hurry to catch up, matching strides with him as he reaches the sidew
alk. His shoulders are squared hard, and as I fall in on his right side I lay my metal hand on his elbow. “Talk to me.”
He turns his head away and spits. “Nothing to talk about. Will you stop fussing at me? You been acting like my grandmother all day. We just going to see a guy.”
I’m annoyed with myself, because he’s right; I have been clingy. It has something to do with the dark-haired woman who knows my name, though, and I’m not going into that right now. What sort of a guy? I would ask, but my head whirls as if I had spun in place for too long. I gasp and steady myself, one hand on a tenement wall in wet brick. Not good, Casey. Not good at all. I can almost feel the eyes of the predators marking me as my hand comes off Face’s arm. He checks himself midstride and turns back, irritation blending into concern.
Blurring, and the smell of dead people in the sun. Sound of rotors as I bring the chopper in low, a steaming clearing among strangler fig and vines. The door gunner swearing, and—
No.
I get it under control and stand up, leaning on the wall more than I want to. “S’all right, Face.” He doesn’t believe me, and I wave him off, striding forward again. I try not to let him see me clenching my jaw. “Just old bones and the drive.”
It isn’t, though. I know what it is—it’s feedback from my neural taps, and flashbacks, and I haven’t had one that bad in twenty years.
Ignoring Face’s anxiety, I move down the street toward wherever he’s leading me.
Avatar Gamespace
Phobos Starport
Circa A.D. 3400 (Virtual Clock)
Interaction logged Friday 8 September,
2062, 1900 hours
Leah gulped, leaning against the triple-thick crystal plates of the reception lounge view port, her booted feet firmly magnetized to the floor. If her VR were better, she would have been able to feel the space-chill seeping through them. She focused beyond the blinking sponsor-ship logos hanging in the glass just at eye level (AppleSoft, Venus Consolidated Erotic Industries, Unitek, Miller Genuine Draft, Amalgamated Everything) and let a long cool comforting draft of air flow into her mouth. “My God,” she whispered.
Hammered Page 9
