Altered Carbon

  The doctor led me down a long white corridor whose floor bore the scuff marks of rubber-wheeled gurneys. She was moving at quite a pace, and I was hard-pressed to keep up, wrapped as I was in nothing but a plain gray towel and still dripping tank gel. Her manner was superficially bedside, but there was a harried undercurrent to it. She had a sheaf of curling hardcopy documentation under her arm and other places to be. I wondered how many sleevings she got through in a day.

  “You should get as much rest as you can in the next day or so,” she recited. “There may be minor aches and pains, but this is normal. Sleep will solve the problem. If you have any recurring comp—”

  “I know. I’ve done this before.”

  I wasn’t feeling much like human interaction. I’d just remembered Sarah.

  We stopped at a side door with the word SHOWER stenciled on frosted glass. The doctor steered me inside and stood looking at me for a moment.

  “I’ve used showers before, as well,” I assured her.

  She nodded. “When you’re finished, there’s an elevator at the end of the corridor. Discharge is on the next floor. The, ah, the police are waiting to talk to you.”

  The manual says you’re supposed to avoid strong adrenal shocks to the newly sleeved, but then she’d probably read my file and didn’t consider meeting the police much of an event in my lifestyle. I tried to feel the same.

  “What do they want?”

  “They didn’t choose to share that with me.” The words showed an edge of frustration that she shouldn’t have been letting me see. “Perhaps your reputation precedes you.”

  “Perhaps it does.” On an impulse, I flexed my new face into a smile. “Doctor, I’ve never been here before. To Earth, I mean. I’ve never dealt with your police before. Should I be worried?”

  She looked at me, and I saw it welling up in her eyes, the mingled fear and wonder and contempt of the failed human reformer.

  “With a man like you,” she managed finally, “I would have thought they would be the worried ones.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said quietly.

  She hesitated, then gestured. “There is a mirror in the changing room,” she said, and left. I glanced toward the room she had indicated, not sure I was ready for the mirror yet.

  In the shower I whistled my disquiet away tunelessly and ran soap and hands over the new body. My sleeve was in his early forties, Protectorate standard, with a swimmer’s build and what felt like some military custom-carved onto his nervous system. Neurachemical upgrade, most likely. I’d had it myself, once. There was a tightness in the lungs that suggested a nicotine habit and some gorgeous scarring on the forearm, but apart from that I couldn’t find anything worth complaining about. The little twinges and snags catch up with you later on, and if you’re wise, you just live with them. Every sleeve has a history. If that kind of thing bothers you, you line up over at Syntheta’s or Fabrikon. I’d worn my fair share of synthetic sleeves; they use them for parole hearings quite often. Cheap, but it’s too much like living alone in a drafty house, and they never seem to get the flavor circuits right. Everything you eat ends up tasting like curried sawdust.

  In the changing cubicle I found a neatly folded summer suit on the bench and the mirror set in the wall. On top of the pile of clothes was a simple steel watch, and weighted beneath the watch was a plain white envelope with my name written neatly across it. I took a deep breath and went to face the mirror.

  This is always the toughest part. Nearly two decades I’ve been doing this, and it still jars me to look into the glass and see a total stranger staring back. It’s like pulling an image out of the depths of an autostereogram. For the first couple of moments all you can see is someone else looking at you through a window frame. Then, like a shift in focus, you feel yourself float rapidly up behind the mask and adhere to its inside with a shock that’s almost tactile. It’s as if someone’s cut an umbilical cord, only instead of separating the two of you, it’s the otherness that has been severed and now you’re just looking at your reflection in a mirror.

  I stood there and toweled myself dry, getting used to the face. It was basically Caucasian, which was a change for me, and the overwhelming impression I got was that if there was a line of least resistance in life, this face had never been along it. Even with the characteristic pallor of a long stay in the tank, the features in the mirror managed to look weather-beaten. There were lines everywhere. The thick, cropped hair was black shot through with gray. The eyes were a speculative shade of blue, and there was a faint, jagged scar under the left one. I raised my left forearm and looked at the story written there, wondering if the two were connected.

  The envelope beneath the watch contained a single sheet of printed paper. Hardcopy. Handwritten signature. Very quaint.

  Well, you’re on Earth now. Most ancient of civilized worlds. I shrugged and scanned the letter, then got dressed and folded it away in the jacket of my new suit. With a final glance in the mirror, I strapped on the new watch and went out to meet the police.

  It was four-fifteen, local time.

  The doctor was waiting for me, seated behind a long curve of reception counter and filling out forms on a monitor. A thin, severe-looking man suited in black stood at her shoulder. There was no one else in the room.

  I glanced around, then back at the suit.

  “You the police?”

  “Outside.” He gestured at the door. “This isn’t their jurisdiction. They need a special brief to get in here. We have our own security.”

  “And you are?”

  He looked at me with the same mixture of emotions the doctor had hit me with downstairs. “Warden Sullivan, chief executive for Bay City Central, the facility you are now leaving.”

  “You don’t sound delighted to be losing me.”

  Sullivan pinned me with a stare. “You’re a recidivist, Kovacs. I never saw the case for wasting good flesh and blood on people like you.”

  I touched the letter in my breast pocket. “Lucky for me Mr. Bancroft disagrees with you. He’s supposed to be sending a limousine for me. Is that outside, as well?”

  “I haven’t looked.”

  Somewhere on the counter, a protocol chime sounded. The doctor had finished her inputting. She tore the curling edge of the hardcopy free, initialed it in a couple of places, and passed it to Sullivan. The warden bent over the paper, scanning it with narrowed eyes before he scribbled his own signature and handed the copy to me.

  “Takeshi Lev Kovacs,” he said, mispronouncing with the same skill as his minion in the tank room. “By the powers vested in me by the U.N. Justice Accord, I discharge you on lease to Laurens J. Bancroft, for a period not to exceed six weeks, at the end of which time your parole status will be reconsidered. Please sign here.”

  I took the pen and wrote my name in someone else’s handwriting next to the warden’s finger. Sullivan separated the top and bottom copies and handed me the pink one. The doctor held up a second sheet, and Sullivan took it.

  “This is a doctor’s statement certifying that Takeshi Kovacs (D.H.) was received intact from the Harlan’s World Justice Administration and subsequently sleeved in this body. Witnessed by myself, and closed-circuit monitor. A disk copy of the transmission details and tank data are enclosed. Please sign the declaration.”

  I glanced up and searched in vain for any sign of the cameras. Not worth fighting about. I scribbled my new signature a second time.

  “This is a copy of the leasing agreement by which you are bound. Please read it carefully. Failure to comply with any of its articles may result in you being returned to storage immediately to complete the full term of your sentence, either here or at another facility of the administration’s choice. Do you understand these terms and agree to be bound by them?”

  I took the paperwork and scanned rapidly through it. It was standard stuff. A modified version of the parole agreement I’d signed half a dozen times before on Harlan’s World. The language was a bit stiffer, but the content was
the same. Bullshit by any other name. I signed it without a blink.

  “Well then.” Sullivan seemed to have lost a bit of his iron. “You’re a lucky man, Kovacs. Don’t waste the opportunity.”

  Don’t they ever get tired of saying it?

  I folded up my bits of paper without speaking and stuffed them into my pocket next to the letter. I was turning to leave when the doctor stood up and held out a small white card to me.

  “Mr. Kovacs.”

  I paused.

  “There shouldn’t be any major problems with adjusting,” she said. “This is a healthy body, and you are . . . used to this. If there is anything major, call this number.”

  I put out an arm and lifted the little rectangle of card with a machined precision that I hadn’t noticed before. The neurachem was kicking in. My hand delivered the card to the same pocket as the rest of the paperwork and I was gone, crossing the reception and pushing open the door without a word. Ungracious maybe, but I didn’t think anyone in that building had earned my gratitude yet.

  You’re a lucky man, Kovacs. Sure. A hundred and eighty light-years from home, wearing another man’s body on a six-week rental agreement. Freighted in to do a job that the local police wouldn’t touch with a riot prod. Fail and go back into storage. I felt so lucky I could have burst into song as I walked out the door.

  CHAPTEr TWO

  The hall outside was huge, and all but deserted. It looked like nothing so much as the Millsport rail terminal back home. Beneath a tilted roof of long transparent panels, the fused glass paving of the floor shone amber in the afternoon sun. A couple of children were playing with the automatic doors at the exit, and there was a solitary cleaning robot sniffing along in the shade at one wall. Nothing else moved. Marooned in the glow on benches of old wood, a scattering of humanity waited in silence for friends or family to ride in from their altered carbon exiles.

  Download Central.

  These people wouldn’t recognize their loved ones in their new sleeves; recognition would be left to the homecomers, and for those who awaited them the anticipation of reunion would be tempered with a cool dread at what face and body they might have to learn to love. Or maybe they were a couple of generations down the line, waiting for relatives who were no more to them now than a vague childhood memory or a family legend. I knew one guy in the corps, Murakami, who was waiting on the release of a great-grandfather put away over a century back. Was going up to Newpest with a liter of whiskey and a pool cue for homecoming gifts. He’d been brought up on stories of his great-grandfather in the Kanagawa pool halls. The guy had been put away before Murakami was even born.

  I spotted my reception committee as I went down the steps into the body of the hall. Three tall silhouettes were gathered around one of the benches, shifting restlessly in the slanting rays of sunlight and creating eddies in the dust motes that floated there. A fourth figure sat on the bench, arms folded and legs stretched out. All four of them were wearing reflective sunglasses that at a distance turned their faces into identical masks.

  Already on course for the door, I made no attempt to detour in their direction, and this must have occurred to them only when I was halfway across the hall. Two of them drifted over to intercept me with the easy calm of big cats that have been fed recently. Bulky and tough-looking with neatly groomed crimson mohicans, they arrived in my path a couple of meters ahead, forcing me either to stop in turn or cut an abrupt circle around them. I stopped. Newly arrived and newly sleeved is the wrong state to be in if you plan to piss off the local militia. I tried on my second smile of the day.

  “Something I can do for you?”

  The older of the two waved a badge negligently in my direction, then put it away as if it might tarnish in the open air.

  “Bay City police. The lieutenant wants to talk to you.” The sentence sounded bitten off, as if he was resisting the urge to add some epithet to the end of it. I made an attempt to look as if I was seriously considering whether or not to go along with them, but they had me and they knew it. An hour out of the tank, you don’t know enough about your new body to be getting into brawls with it. I shut down my images of Sarah’s death and let myself be shepherded back to the seated cop.

  The lieutenant was a woman in her thirties. Under the golden disks of her shades, she wore cheekbones from some Amerindian ancestor and a wide slash of a mouth that was currently set in a sardonic line. The sunglasses were jammed on a nose you could have opened cans on. Short, untidy hair framed the whole face and stuck up in spikes at the front. She had wrapped herself in an outsize combat jacket, but the long, black-encased legs that protruded from its lower edge were a clear hint of the lithe body within. She looked up at me with her arms folded on her chest for nearly a minute before anyone spoke.

  “It’s Kovacs, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Takeshi Kovacs?” Her pronunciation was perfect. “Out of Harlan’s World? Millsport via the Kanagawa storage facility?”

  “Tell you what, I’ll just stop you when you get one wrong.”

  There was a long, mirror-lensed pause. The lieutenant unfolded fractionally and examined the blade of one hand.

  “You got a license for that sense of humor, Kovacs?”

  “Sorry. Left it at home.”

  “And what brings you to Earth?”

  I gestured impatiently. “You know all this already, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. Have you got something to say to me, or did you just bring these kids along for educational purposes?”

  I felt a hand fasten on my upper arm and tensed. The lieutenant made a barely perceptible motion with her head, and the cop behind me let go again.

  “Cool down, Kovacs. I’m just making conversation here. Yeah, I know Laurens Bancroft sprung you. Matter of fact, I’m here to offer you a lift up to the Bancroft residence.” She sat forward suddenly and stood up. On her feet she was almost as tall as my new sleeve. “I’m Kristin Ortega, Organic Damage Division. Bancroft was my case.”

  “Was?”

  She nodded. “Case is closed, Kovacs.”

  “Is that a warning?”

  “No, it’s just the facts. Open-and-shut suicide.”

  “Bancroft doesn’t seem to think so. He claims he was murdered.”

  “Yeah, so I hear.” Ortega shrugged. “Well, that’s his prerogative. I guess it might be difficult for a man like that to believe he’d blow his own head clean off.”

  “A man like what?”

  “Oh, come—” She stopped herself and gave me a small smile. “Sorry, I keep forgetting.”

  “Forgetting what?”

  Another pause, but this time Kristin Ortega seemed to be off balance for the first time in our brief acquaintance. There was hesitancy blurring her tone when she spoke again. “You’re not from here.”

  “So?”

  “So anyone from here would know what kind of man Laurens Bancroft is. That’s all.”

  Fascinated at why someone would lie so ineptly to a total stranger, I tried to put her back at her ease. “A rich man,” I hazarded. “A powerful man.”

  She smiled thinly. “You’ll see. Now do you want this lift or not?”

  The letter in my pocket said a chauffeur would be outside the terminal to pick me up. Bancroft had made no mention of the police. I shrugged.

  “I’ve never turned down a free ride yet.”

  “Good. Then shall we go?”

  They flanked me to the door and stepped out ahead like bodyguards, heads tilted back and lensed eyes scanning. Ortega and I stepped through the gap together, and the warmth of the sunlight hit me in the face. I screwed up my new eyes against the glare and made out angular buildings behind real wire fences on the other side of a badly kept landing lot. Sterile, and off-white, quite possibly original premillennial structures. Between the oddly monochrome walls, I could see sections of a gray iron bridge that came vaulting in to land somewhere hidden from view. A similarly drab collection of sky and ground cruisers sat about in not particularl
y neat lines. The wind gusted abruptly, and I caught the faint odor of some flowering weed growing along the cracks in the landing lot. In the distance was the familiar hum of traffic, but everything else felt like a period-drama set piece.

  “. . . and I tell you there is only one judge! Do not believe the men of science when they tell you . . .”

  The squawk of the poorly operated ampbox hit us as we went down the steps from the exit. I glanced across the landing area and saw a crowd assembled around a black-clad man on a packing crate. Holographic placards wove erratically in the air above the heads of the listeners. NO TO RESOLUTION 653!! ONLY GOD CAN RESURRECT!! D.H.F. = D.E.A.T.H. Cheers drowned out the speaker.

  “What’s this?”

  “Catholics,” Ortega said, lip curling. “Old-time religious sect.”

  “Yeah? Never heard of them.”

  “No. You wouldn’t have. They don’t believe you can digitize a human being without losing the soul.”

  “Not a widespread faith then.”

  “Just on Earth,” she said sourly. “I think the Vatican—that’s their central church—financed a couple of cryoships to Starfall and Latimer—”

  “I’ve been to Latimer. I never ran into anything like this.”

  “The ships only left at the turn of the century, Kovacs. They won’t get there for a couple more decades yet.”

  We skirted the gathering, and a young woman with her hair pulled severely back thrust a leaflet at me. The gesture was so abrupt that it tripped my sleeve’s unsettled reflexes and I made a blocking motion before I got it under control. Hard-eyed, the woman stood with the leaflet out, and I took it with a placating smile.

  “They have no right,” the woman said.

  “Oh, I agree . . .”

  “Only the Lord our God can save your soul.”

  “I—” But by this time Kristin Ortega was steering me firmly away, one hand on my arm in a manner that suggested a lot of practice. I shook her off politely but equally firmly.

  “Are we in some kind of hurry?”

  “I think we both have better things to do, yes,” she said, tight-lipped, looking back to where her colleagues were engaged in fending off leaflets of their own.