Altered Carbon

  “Yeah.” Ortega looked across to include me in the conversation, maybe as evidence of our new cooperation. “Last year the Coastals fished some kid out of the ocean. Mary Lou Hinchley. Not much left of the body, but they got the stack. Set it to spin, and guess what?”

  “Catholic?”

  “In one. That total-absorb stuff works, huh? Yeah, the first entry scan comes up with Barred by Reasons of Conscience decals. Usually the end of the line in a case like that, but El—” She stopped. Restarted. “The detective in charge wouldn’t let it go. Hinchley was from his neighborhood; he knew her when she was growing up. Not well, but . . .” She shrugged. “He wouldn’t let it go.”

  “Very tenacious. Elias Ryker?”

  She nodded.

  “He pushed the path labs for a month. In the end they found some evidence the body had been thrown out of an aircar. Organic Damage did some background digging and came up with a conversion less than ten months old and a hardline Catholic boyfriend with skills in infotech who might have faked the vow. The girl’s family are borderliners, nominally Christian, but mostly not Catholic. Quite rich, as well, with a vault full of stacked ancestors that they spin out for family births and marriages. The department’s been in virtual consultation with the lot of them on and off all of this year.”

  “Roll on, Resolution 653, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  We both went back to looking at the ceiling above the couches. The cabin was bottom-of-the-line bubblefab, blown from a single globe of polyfiber like chicle in a child’s mouth, doors and windows lasered out and reattached with epoxy hinges afterwards. The curved gray ceiling held absolutely nothing of interest.

  “Tell me something, Ortega,” I said after a while. “That tail you had on me Tuesday afternoon, when I went shopping. How come he was so much worse than the others? A blind man could have spotted him.”

  There was a pause before she spoke. Then, grudgingly, “All we had. It was a snap thing. We had to get you covered quick, after you dumped the clothes.”

  “The clothes.” I closed my eyes. “Oh, no. You tagged the suit? That simple?”

  “Yep.”

  I threw my mind back to my first meeting with Ortega. The justice facility, the ride out to Suntouch House. The total recall ripped through the footage on fast forward. I saw us standing on the sunlit lawn with Miriam Bancroft. Ortega departing . . .

  “Got it!” I snapped my fingers. “You hammered me on the shoulder when you left. I can’t believe I’m this stupid.”

  “Enzyme-bond bleeper,” Ortega said matter-of-factly. “Not much bigger than a fly’s eye. And we figured, with autumn well set in, you wouldn’t be going many places without your jacket. Course, when you off-loaded it into that trash bin we thought you’d tipped us.”

  “No. Nothing so bright.”

  “That’s it,” Micky announced suddenly. “Ladies and gentlemen, hold on to your spinal spiral, we are in the pipe.”

  It was a rougher ride than I’d expected from a government department installation, but no worse than many jury-rigged virtuals I’d done on the World. First the hypnos, pulsing their sonocodes until the dull gray ceiling grew abruptly fascinating with fishtail swirls of light, and meaning drained out of the universe like dirty water from a sink. And then I was

  Elsewhere.

  It spread out around me, racing away from my viewpoint in all directions like nothing so much as a huge magnification of one of the spiral steps we had used to get down from the gantry. Steel gray, stippled every few meters with a nipplelike swelling, receding to infinity. The sky above was a paler shade of the same gray with shiftings that seemed vaguely to suggest bars and antique locks. Nice psychology, assuming any of the felons interrogated had anything but race memory of what an actual lock looked like.

  In front of me softly shaped gray furniture was evolving from the floor like a sculpture from a pool of mercury. A plain metal table first, then two chairs this side, one opposite. Their edges and surfaces ran liquidly smooth for the final seconds of their emergence, then snapped solid and geometric as they took on an existence separate from the floor.

  Ortega appeared beside me, at first a pale pencil sketch of a woman, all flickering lines and diffident shading. As I watched, pastel colors raced through her, and her movements grew more defined. She was turning to speak to me, one hand reaching into the pocket of her jacket. I waited and the final gloss of color popped out onto her surfaces. She produced her cigarettes.

  “Smoke?”

  “No thanks, I—” Realizing the futility of worrying about virtual health, I accepted the pack and shook one out. Ortega lit us both with her lighter, and the first bite of smoke in my lungs was ecstasy.

  I looked up at the geometric sky. “Is this standard?”

  “Pretty much.” Ortega squinted into the distance. “Resolution looks a bit higher than usual. Think Micky’s showing off.”

  Kadmin scribbled into existence on the other side of the table. Before the virtual program had even colored him in properly, he became aware of us and folded his arms across his chest. If my appearance in the cell was putting him off balance as hoped, it didn’t show.

  “Again, Lieutenant?” he said when the program had rendered him complete. “There is a U.N. ruling on maximum virtual time for one arrest, you know.”

  “That’s right, and we’re still a long way off it,” Ortega said. “Why don’t you sit down, Kadmin.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “I said sit, motherfucker.” There was an abrupt undercurrent of steel in the cop’s voice, and magically Kadmin blinked off and reappeared seated at the table. His face betrayed a momentary flash of rage at the displacement, but then it was gone and he unfolded his arms in an ironic gesture.

  “You’re right, it’s so much more comfortable like this. Won’t you both join me?”

  We took our seats in the more conventional way, and I stared at Kadmin as we did it. It was the first time I’d seen anything quite like it.

  He was the Patchwork Man.

  Most virtual systems recreate you from self-images held in the memory, with a commonsense subroutine to prevent your delusions from impinging too much. I generally come out a little taller and thinner in the face than I usually am. In this case, the system seemed to have scrambled a myriad different perceptions from Kadmin’s presumably long list of sleeves. I’d seen it done before, as a technique, but most of us grow rapidly attached to whatever sleeve we’re living in, and that form blanks out previous incarnations. We are, after all, evolved to relate to the physical world.

  The man in front of me was different. His frame was that of a Caucasian Nordic, topping mine by nearly thirty centimeters, but the face was at odds. It began African, broad and deep ebony, but the color ended like a mask under the eyes, and the lower half was divided along the line of the nose, pale copper on the left, corpse white on the right. The nose was both fleshy and aquiline and mediated well between the top and bottom halves of the face, but the mouth was a mismatch of left and right sides that left the lips peculiarly twisted. Long straight black hair was combed manelike back from the forehead, shot through on one side with pure white. The hands, immobile on the metal table, were equipped with claws similar to the ones I’d seen on the giant Freak Fighter in Licktown, but the fingers were long and sensitive. He had breasts, impossibly full on a torso so overmuscled. The eyes, set in jet skin, were a startling pale green. Kadmin had freed himself from conventional perceptions of the physical. In an earlier age, he would have been a shaman; here, the centuries of technology had made him more. An electronic demon, a malignant spirit that dwelled in altered carbon and emerged only to possess flesh and wreak havoc.

  He would have made a fine Envoy.

  “I take it I don’t have to introduce myself,” I said quietly.

  Kadmin grinned, revealing small teeth and a delicate pointed tongue. “If you’re a friend of the lieutenant, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to here. Only the slobs
get their virtuality edited.”

  “Do you know this man, Kadmin?” Ortega asked.

  “Hoping for a confession, Lieutenant?” Kadmin threw back his head and laughed musically. “Oh, the crudity! This man? This woman, maybe? Or, yes, even a dog could be trained to say as much as he has said, given the right tranquilizers, of course. They do tend to go pitifully insane when you decant them if not. But, yes, even a dog. We sit here, three silhouettes carved from electronic sleet in the Difference Storm, and you talk like a cheap period drama. Limited vision, Lieutenant, limited vision. Where is the voice that said altered carbon would free us from the cells of our flesh? The vision that said we would be angels.”

  “You tell me, Kadmin. You’re the one with the exalted professional standing.” Ortega’s tone was detached. She system-magicked a long scroll of printout into one hand and glanced idly down it. “Pimp, triad enforcer, virtual interrogator in the corporate wars—it’s all quality work. Me, I’m just some dumb cop can’t see the light.”

  “I’m not going to quarrel with you there, Lieutenant.”

  “Says here you were a wiper for MeritCon a while back, scaring archaeologue miners off their claims in Syrtis Major. Slaughtering their families by way of incentive. Nice job.” Ortega tossed the printout back into oblivion. “We’ve got you cold, Kadmin. Digital footage from the hotel surveillance system, verifiable simultaneous sleeving, both stacks on ice. That’s an erasure mandatory, and even if your lawyers dance it down to Compliance at Machine Error, the sun’s going to be a red dwarf by the time they let you off stack.”

  Kadmin smiled. “Then what are you here for?”

  “Who sent you?” I asked him softly.

  “The Dog speaks!

  Is it a wolf I hear,

  Howling his lonely communion

  With the unpiloted stars,

  Or merely the self-importance and servitude

  In the bark of a dog?

  How many millennia did it take,

  Twisting and torturing

  The pride from the one

  To make a tool,

  The other?”

  I inhaled smoke and nodded. Like most Harlanites, I knew Quell’s Poems and Other Prevarications more or less by heart. It was taught in schools in lieu of the later and weightier political works, most of which were still deemed too radical to be put in the hands of children. This wasn’t a great translation, but it captured the essence. More impressive was the fact that anyone not actually from Harlan’s World could quote such an obscure volume.

  I finished it for him.

  “And how do we measure the distance from spirit to spirit?

  And who do we find to blame?”

  “Have you come seeking blame, Mr. Kovacs?”

  “Among other things.”

  “How disappointing.”

  “You expected something else?”

  “No,” Kadmin said with another smile. “Expectation is our first mistake. I meant, how disappointing for you.”

  “Maybe.”

  He shook his great piebald head. “Certainly. You will take no names from me. If you seek blame, I will have to bear it for you.”

  “That’s very generous, but you’ll remember what Quell said about lackeys.”

  “Kill them along the way, but count your bullets, for there are more worthy targets.” Kadmin chuckled deep inside himself. “Are you threatening me in monitored police storage?”

  “No. I’m just putting things into perspective.” I knocked ash off my cigarette and watched it sparkle out of existence before it reached the floor. “Someone’s pulling your strings; that’s who I’m going to wipe. You’re nothing. You I wouldn’t waste spit on.”

  Kadmin tipped his head back as a stronger tremor ran through the shifting lines in the sky, like cubist lightning. It reflected in the dull sheen on the metal table and seemed to touch his hands for a moment. When he looked down at me again, it was with a curious light in his eyes.

  “I was not asked to kill you,” he said tonelessly. “Unless your abduction proved inconvenient. But now I will.”

  Ortega was on him as the last syllable left his mouth. The table blinked out of existence, and she kicked him backwards off the chair with one booted foot. As he rolled back to his feet, the same boot caught him in the mouth and floored him again. I ran my tongue around the almost healed gashes inside my own mouth, and felt a distinct lack of sympathy.

  Ortega dragged Kadmin up by the hair, the cigarette in her hand replaced by a vicious-looking blackjack courtesy of the same system magic that had eliminated the table.

  “I hear you right?” she hissed. “You making threats, fuckhead?”

  Kadmin bared his teeth in a bloodstained grin.

  “Police brutal—”

  “That’s right, motherfucker.” Ortega hit him across the cheek with the blackjack. The skin split. “Police brutality in a monitored police virtuality. Sandy Kim and WorldWeb One would have a field day, wouldn’t they. But you know what? I reckon your lawyers aren’t going to want to run this particular tape.”

  “Leave him alone, Ortega.”

  She seemed to remember herself then, and stepped back. Her face twitched and she drew a deep breath. The table blinked back, and Kadmin was suddenly sitting upright again, mouth undamaged.

  “You, too,” he said quietly.

  “Yeah, sure.” There was contempt in Ortega’s voice, at least half of it directed at herself, I guessed. She made a second effort to bring her breathing back under control, rearranged her clothing unnecessarily. “Like I said, going to be a cold day in hell by the time you get the chance. Maybe I’ll wait for you.”

  “Whoever sent you worth this much, Kadmin?” I wondered softly. “You going down silent out of contractual loyalty, or are you just scared shitless?”

  For answer, the composite man folded his arms across his chest and stared through me.

  “You through, Kovacs?” Ortega asked.

  I tried to meet Kadmin’s distant gaze. “Kadmin, the man I work for has a lot of influence. This could be your last chance to cut a deal.”

  Nothing. He didn’t even blink.

  I shrugged. “I’m through.”

  “Good,” Ortega said grimly. “Because sitting downwind of this piece of shit is beginning to eat away at my usually tolerant nature.” She waggled her fingers in front of his eyes. “Be seeing you, fuckhead.”

  At that, Kadmin’s eyes turned up to meet hers, and a small, peculiarly unpleasant smile twisted his lips.

  We left.

  Back on the fourth floor, the walls of Ortega’s office had reverted to a dazzling high noon over beaches of white sand. I screwed up my eyes against the glare while Ortega trawled through a desk drawer and came up with her own and a spare pair of sunglasses.

  “So what did you learn from that?”

  I fitted the lenses uncomfortably over the bridge of my nose. They were too small. “Not much, except that little gem about not having orders to wipe me. Someone wanted to talk to me. I’d pretty much guessed that anyway, else he could have just blown my stack out all over the lobby of the Hendrix. Still, means someone wanted to cut a deal of their own, outside of Bancroft.”

  “Or someone wanted to interrogate the guts out of you.”

  I shook my head. “About what? I’d only just arrived. Doesn’t make any sense.”

  “The corps? Unfinished business?” Ortega made little flicking motions with her hand as if she were dealing me the suggestions. “Maybe a grudge match?”

  “No. We went through this one when we were yelling at each other the other night. There are people who’d like to see me wiped, but none of them live on Earth, and none of them swing the kind of influence to go interstellar. And there’s nothing I know about the corps that isn’t in a low-wall database somewhere. And anyway, it’s just too much of a fucking coincidence. No, this is about Bancroft. Someone wanted in on the program.”

  “Whoever had him killed?”

  I tipped my hea
d down to look at her directly over the sun lenses. “You believe me, then.”

  “Not entirely.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  But Ortega wasn’t listening. “What I want to know,” she brooded, “is why he rewrote his codes at the end. You know, we’ve sweated him nearly a dozen times since we downloaded him Sunday night. That’s the first time he’s come close to even admitting he was there.”

  “Even to his lawyers?”

  “We don’t know what he says to them. They’re big-time sharks, out of Ulan Bator and New York. That kind of money carries a scrambler into all privy virtual interviews. We get nothing on tape but static.”

  I raised a mental eyebrow. On Harlan’s World, all virtual custody was monitored as a matter of course. Scramblers were not permitted, no matter how much money you were worth.

  “Speaking of lawyers, are Kadmin’s here in Bay City?”

  “Physically, you mean? Yeah, they’ve got a deal with a Marin County practice. One of their partners is renting a sleeve here for the duration.” Ortega’s lip curled. “Physical meetings are considered a touch of class these days. Only the cheap firms do business down the wires.”

  “What’s this suit’s name?”

  There was a brief pause while she hung on to the name. “Kadmin’s a spinning item right now. I’m not sure we go this far.”

  “Ortega, we go all the way. That was the deal. Otherwise I’m back to risking Elias’s fine features with some more maximal-push investigation.”

  She was silent for a while.

  “Rutherford,” she said finally. “You want to talk to Rutherford?”

  “Right now, I want to talk to anyone. Maybe I didn’t make things clear earlier. I’m working cold here. Bancroft waited a month and a half before he brought me in. Kadmin’s all I’ve got.”

  “Keith Rutherford’s a handful of engine grease. You won’t get any more out of him than you did Kadmin downstairs. And anyway, how the fuck am I supposed to introduce you, Kovacs? ’Hi, Keith, this is the ex-Envoy loose cannon your client tried to wipe on Sunday. He’d like to ask you a few questions.’ He’ll close up faster than an unpaid hooker’s hole.”