Altered Carbon

  There’s no kind of conditioning in the known universe that can prepare you for having your feet burnt off. Or your nails torn out.

  Cigarettes stubbed out on your breasts.

  A heated iron inserted into your vagina.

  The pain. The humiliation.

  The damage.

  Psychodynamics / Integrity training.

  Introduction.

  The mind does interesting things under extreme stress. Hallucination, displacement, retreat. Here in the corps, you will learn to use them all, not as blind reactions to adversity, but as moves in a game.

  The red-hot metal sinks into flesh, parting the skin like polyethylene. The pain consumes, but worse is seeing it happen. Your scream, once disbelief, is by now gruesomely familiar in your ears. You know it won’t stop them, but you still scream, begging—

  “Some fucking game, eh, pal?”

  Jimmy grinning up at me from his death. Innenin is still around us, but that can’t be. He was still screaming when they took him away. In reality—

  His face changes abruptly, turns somber.

  “You keep reality out of this; there’s nothing for you there. Stay removed. Have they done her any structural harm?”

  I wince. “Her feet. She can’t walk.”

  “Motherfuckers,” he says matter-of-factly. “Why don’t we just tell them what they want to know?”

  “We don’t know what they want to know. They’re after this guy Ryker.”

  “Ryker, who the fuck’s he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He shrugs. “So spill about Bancroft. Or you still feeling honor bound or something?”

  “I think I already spilled. They don’t buy it. It’s not what they want to hear. These are fucking amateurs, man. Meatpackers.”

  “You keep screaming it, they got to believe it sooner or later.”

  “That isn’t the fucking point, Jimmy. When this is over, it doesn’t matter who I am, they’re going to put a bolt through my stack and sell the body off for spare parts.”

  “Yeah.” Jimmy puts one finger into his empty eye socket and scratches absently at the clotted gore within. “See your point. Well, in a construct situation, what you got to do is get to the next screen somehow. Right?”

  During the period on Harlan’s World known, with typical grim humor, as the Unsettlement, guerrillas in the Quellist Black Brigade were surgically implanted with a quarter kilo of enzyme-triggered explosive that would, on demand, turn the surrounding fifty square meters and anything in it to ash. It was a tactic that met with questionable success. The enzyme in question was fury related, and the conditioning required for arming the device was patchy. There were a number of involuntary detonations.

  Still, no one ever volunteered to interrogate a member of the Black Brigade.

  Not after the first one, anyway. Her name—

  You thought they could do nothing worse, but now the iron is inside you and they are letting it heat up slowly, giving you time to think about it. Your pleading is babbled—

  As I was saying . . .

  Her name was Iphigenia Deme, Iffy to those of her friends who had not yet been slaughtered by Protectorate Forces. Her last words, strapped to the interrogation table downstairs at Number Eighteen, Shimatsu Boulevard, are reputed to have been: That’s fucking enough!

  The explosion brought the entire building down.

  That’s fucking enough.

  I jackknifed awake, the last of my screams still shrilling inside me, hands scrabbling to cover remembered wounds. Instead, I found young, undamaged flesh beneath crisp linen, a faint rocking motion, and the sound of small waves lapping nearby. Above my head was a sloping wooden ceiling and a porthole through which low-angled sunlight flooded. I sat up in the narrow bunk, and the sheet fell away from my breasts. The coppery upper slopes were smooth and unscarred, the nipples intact.

  Back to start.

  Beside the bed was a simple wooden chair with a white T-shirt and canvas trousers folded neatly over it. There were rope sandals on the floor. The tiny cabin held nothing else of interest apart from another bunk, the twin of mine, whose covers were thrown carelessly back, and a door. A bit crude, but the message was clear. I slipped into the clothes and walked out onto the sunlit deck of a small fishing boat.

  “Aha, the dreamer.” The woman seated in the stern of the skiff clapped her hands together as I emerged. She was about ten years older than the sleeve I was wearing, and darkly handsome in a suit cut from the same linen as my trousers. There were espadrilles on her bare feet and wide-lensed sunglasses over her eyes. In her lap was a sketch pad shaded with what looked like a cityscape. As I stood there, she set it aside and stood up to greet me. Her movements were elegant, self-assured. I felt gawky by comparison.

  I looked over the side at the blue water.

  “What is it this time?” I said with forced lightness. “Feed me to the sharks?”

  She laughed, showing perfect teeth. “No, that won’t be necessary at this stage. All I want to do is talk.”

  I stood loose limbed, staring at her. “So talk.”

  “Very well.” The woman folded herself gracefully back onto the seat at the stern. “You have . . . involved yourself in matters that are clearly not your affair, and you have suffered as a result. My interest is, I think, identical to yours. That is, to avoid further unpleasantness.”

  “My interest is in seeing you die.”

  A small smile. “Yes, I’m sure it is. Even a virtual death would probably be very satisfying. So, at this point, let me point out that the specifics for this construct include fifth-dan Shotokan proficiency.”

  She extended a hand to show me the callouses on her knuckles. I shrugged.

  “Moreover, we can always return to the way things were earlier.” She pointed out over the water, and following her arm, I saw the city she had been sketching on the horizon. Squinting into the reflected sunlight, I could make out the minarets. I almost managed to smile at the cheap psychology of it. A boat. The sea. Escape. These boys had bought their programming off the rack.

  “I don’t want to go back there,” I said truthfully.

  “Good. Then tell us who you are.”

  I tried not to let the surprise show on my face. The deep-cover training awoke, spinning lies. “I thought I had.”

  “What you have said is somewhat confused, and you . . . curtailed the interrogation by stopping your own heart. You are not Irene Elliott, that much is certain. You do not appear to be Elias Ryker, unless he has undergone substantial retraining. You claim a connection with Laurens Bancroft, and also to be an offworlder, a member of the Envoy Corps. This is not what we expected.”

  “I bet it isn’t,” I muttered.

  “We do not wish to be involved in matters that do not concern us.”

  “You already are involved. You’ve abducted and tortured an Envoy. You got any idea what the corps will do to you for that? They’ll hunt you down and feed your stacks to the E.M.P. All of you. Then your families, then your business associates, then their families, and then anyone else who gets in the way. By the time they’ve finished, you won’t even be a memory. You don’t fuck with the corps and live to write songs about it. They’ll eradicate you.”

  It was a colossal bluff. The corps and I had not been on speaking terms for at least a decade of my subjective lifetime, and the best part of a century of objective time. But throughout the Protectorate, the Envoys were a threat that could be dealt across the table to anyone up to and including a planetary president with the same assurance that small children in Newpest are threatened with the Patchwork Man.

  “It was my understanding,” the woman said quietly, “that the Envoy Corps were banned from operations on Earth unless U.N. mandated. Perhaps you have as much to lose by revelation as anyone else?”

  Mr. Bancroft has an undeclared influence in the U.N. Court, which is more or less common knowledge. Oumou Prescott’s words came back to me, and I leapt to parry.

&nbs
p; “Perhaps you would like to take that up with Laurens Bancroft and the U.N. Court,” I suggested, folding my arms.

  The woman looked at me for a while. The wind ruffled my hair, bringing with it the faint rumble of the city. Finally she said, “You are aware we could erase your stack and break down your sleeve into pieces so small there would be no trace. There would, effectively, be nothing to find.”

  “They’d find you,” I said, with the confidence that a strand of truth in the lie provides. “You can’t hide from the corps. They’ll find you whatever you do. About the only thing you can hope for now is to try to cut a deal.”

  “What deal?” she asked woodenly.

  In the fractions of a second before I spoke, my mind went into overdrive, measuring the tilt and power of every syllable chosen before it was launched. This was the escape window. There wouldn’t be another chance.

  “There’s a biopirate operation moving stolen military custom through the West Coast,” I said carefully. “They’re being fronted by places like Jerry’s.”

  “And they called the Envoys?” The woman’s tone was scornful. “For biopirates? Come on, Ryker. Is that the best you can do?”

  “I’m not Ryker,” I snapped. “This sleeve’s a cover. Look, you’re right. Nine times out of ten, this stuff doesn’t touch us. The Envoys weren’t designed to take on criminality at that level. But these people have taken some items they should never have touched. Rapid-response diplomatic bioware. Stuff they should never even have seen. Someone’s pissed off about it—and I mean at U.N. presidium level—so they called us in.”

  The woman frowned. “And the deal?”

  “Well, first of all you cut me loose, and no one talks about this to anybody. Let’s call it a professional misunderstanding. And then you open some channels for me. Name some names. Black clinic like this, the information circulates. That might be worth something to me.”

  “As I said before, we do not wish to involve ourselves—”

  I came off the rail, letting just enough anger bleed through. “Don’t fuck with me, pal. You are involved. Like it or not, you took a big bite of something that didn’t concern you, and now you’re going to either chew it or spit it out. Which is it going to be?”

  Silence. Only the sea breeze between us, the faint rocking of the boat.

  “We will consider this,” the woman said.

  Something happened to the glinting light on the water. I shifted my gaze out past the woman’s shoulder and saw how the brightness unstitched itself from the waves and scribbled into the sky, magnifying. The city whited out as if from a nuclear flash; the edges of the boat faded, as if into a sea mist. The woman opposite went with it. It became very quiet.

  I raised a hand to touch the mist where the parameters of the world ended, and my arm seemed to move in slow motion. There was a static hiss like rain building under the silence. The ends of my fingers turned transparent, then white like the minarets of the city under the flash. I lost the power of motion, and the white crept up my arm. The breath stopped in my throat; my heart paused in midbeat. I was

  Not.

  CHAPTEr FOUrTEEN

  I woke once more, this time to a rough numbness in the surface of my skin, like the feeling your hands get just after you’ve rinsed them clean of detergent or turpentine, but spread throughout the body. Reentry into a male sleeve. It subsided rapidly as my mind adjusted to the new nervous system. The faint chill of air-conditioning on exposed flesh. I was naked. I reached up with my left hand and touched the scar under my eye.

  They’d put me back.

  Above me the ceiling was white and set with powerful spotlights. I propped myself up on my elbows and looked around. Another faint chill, this one internal, coasted through me as I saw that I was in an operating theater. Across the room from where I lay stood a polished steel surgical platform complete with runnels for the blood and the folded arms of the autosurgeon suspended spiderlike above. None of the systems were active, but there were small screens blinking the word STANDBY on the walls and on a monitor unit beside me. I leaned closer to the display and saw a function checklist scrolling down repeatedly. They had been programming the autosurgeon to take me apart.

  I was swinging myself off the waiting tray when the door cracked open and the synthetic woman came in with a pair of medics in tow. The particle blaster was stowed at her hip, and she was carrying a recognizable bundle.

  “Clothes.” She flung them at me with a scowl. “Get dressed.”

  One of the medics laid a hand on her arm. “Procedure calls for—”

  “Yeah,” the woman sneered. “Maybe he’ll sue us. You don’t think this place is up to a simple De- and Re-, maybe I’ll talk to Ray about moving our business through someone else.”

  “He’s not talking about the resleeve,” I observed, pulling on my trousers. “He wants to check for interrogation trauma.”

  “Who asked you?”

  I shrugged. “Suit yourself. Where are we going?”

  “To talk to someone,” she said shortly, and turned back to the medics. “If he is who he says he is, trauma isn’t going to be an issue. And if he isn’t, he’s coming right back here anyway.”

  I continued dressing as smoothly as I could. Not out of the fire yet, then. My crossover tunic and jacket were intact, but the bandanna was gone, which annoyed me out of all proportion. I’d only bought it a few hours ago. No watch, either. Deciding not to make an issue of it, I press-sealed my boots and stood up.

  “So who are we going to see?”

  The woman gave me a sour look. “Someone who knows enough to check out your shit. And then, personally, I think we’ll be bringing you back here for orderly dispersal.”

  “When this is over,” I said evenly, “maybe I can persuade one of our squads to pay you a visit. In your real sleeve, that is. They’ll want to thank you for your support.”

  The blaster came out of its sheath with a soft strop and was under my chin. I barely saw it happen. My recently resleeved senses scrabbled for a reaction, eons too late. The synthetic woman leaned close to the side of my face.

  “Don’t you ever threaten me, you piece of shit,” she said softly. “You got these clowns scared; they’re anchored in place, and they think you’re carrying the weight to sink them. That doesn’t work with me. Got it?”

  I looked at her out of the corner of my eye, the best I could manage with my head jammed up by the gun.

  “Got it,” I said.

  “Good,” she breathed, and removed the blaster. “You check out with Ray, I’ll line up and apologize with everybody else. But until then you’re just another potential wipeout gibbering for your stack.”

  We went at a rapid pace down corridors that I tried to memorize and into an elevator identical to the one that had delivered me to the clinic. I counted the floors off again, and when we stepped out into the parking area my eyes jerked involuntarily to the door that they had taken Louise through. My recollections of time during the torture were hazy—the Envoy conditioning was deliberately curtaining off the experience to avert the trauma—but even if it had gone on a couple of days, that was about ten minutes real time. I’d probably only been in the clinic an hour or two maximum, and Louise’s body might still be waiting for the knife behind that door, her mind still stacked.

  “Get in the car,” the woman said laconically.

  This time my ride was a larger, more elegant machine reminiscent of Bancroft’s limousine. There was already a driver in the forward cabin, liveried and shaven headed with the bar code of his employer printed above his left ear. I’d seen quite a few of these on the streets of Bay City, and wondered why anyone would submit to it. On Harlan’s World no one outside the military would be seen dead with authorization stripes. It was too close to the serfdom of the Settlement years for comfort.

  A second man stood by the rear cabin door, an ugly-looking machine pistol dangling negligently from his hand. He, too, had the shaven skull and the bar code. I looked hard at it a
s I passed him and got into the rear cabin. The synthetic woman leaned down to talk to the chauffeur, and I cranked up the neurachem to eavesdrop.

  “. . . head in the clouds. I want to be there before midnight.”

  “No problem. Coastal’s running light tonight and—”

  One of the medics slammed the door shut on me, and the solid clunk at max amplification nearly blew my eardrums. I sat in silence, recovering, until the woman and the machine pistoleer opened the doors on either side and climbed in next to me.

  “Close your eyes,” the woman said, producing my bandanna. “I’m going to blindfold you for a few minutes. If we do let you go, these guys aren’t going to want you knowing where to find them.”

  I looked around at the windows. “These look polarized to me anyway.”

  “Yeah, but no telling how good that neurachem is, huh? Now hold still.”

  She knotted the red cloth with practiced efficiency and spread it a little to cover my whole field of vision. I settled back in the seat.

  “Couple of minutes. You just sit quiet and no peeking. I’ll tell you when.”

  The car boosted up and presumably out because I heard the drumming of rain against the bodywork. There was a faint smell of leather from the upholstery, which beat the odor of feces on the inbound journey, and the seat I was in molded itself supportively to my form. I seemed to have moved up in the order of things.

  Strictly temporary, man. I smiled faintly as Jimmy’s voice echoed in the back of my skull. He was right. A couple of things were clear about whoever we were going to see. This was someone who didn’t want to come to the clinic, who didn’t even want to be seen near it. That bespoke respectability, and with it power, the power to access offworld data. Pretty soon they were going to know that the Envoy Corps was an empty threat, and very shortly after that I was going to be dead. Really dead.

  That kind of dictates the action, pal.

  Thanks, Jimmy.

  After a few minutes the woman told me to take off the blindfold. I pushed it up onto my forehead and retied it there in its customary position. At my side, the muscle with the machine pistol smirked. I gave him a curious look.