Altered Carbon

  There was no image. No sound of connection. This was an internal chip. The voice spoke brusquely out of a blank screen.

  “Who is this?”

  “You gave me your card,” I said. “In case of anything major. Well, now it seems there’s something pretty fucking major we need to talk about, Doctor.”

  There was an audible click as she swallowed, just once, and then her voice was there again, level and cool. “We should meet. I assume you don’t want to come to the facility.”

  “You assume right. You know the red bridge?”

  “The Golden Gate, it’s called,” she said dryly. “Yes, I’m familiar with it.”

  “Be there at eleven. Northbound highway. Come alone.”

  I cut the connection. Redialed.

  “Bancroft residence. With whom do you wish to speak?” A severely suited woman with a hairstyle reminiscent of Angin Chandra’s pilot cuts arrived on the screen a fraction after she started speaking.

  “Laurens Bancroft, please.”

  “Mr. Bancroft is in a conference at present.”

  That made it even easier. “Fine. When he’s available, can you tell him Takeshi Kovacs called.”

  “Would you like to speak to Mrs. Bancroft. She has left instructions that—”

  “No,” I said rapidly. “That won’t be necessary. Please tell Mr. Bancroft that I shall be out of contact for a few days, but that I will call him from Seattle. That’s all.”

  I cut the connection and checked my watch. There was about an hour and forty minutes left of the time I’d given myself to be on the bridge. I went looking for a bar.

  I’m stacked, backed up and I’m fifth dan

  And I’m not afraid of the Patchwork Man

  The small coin of urchin rhyme gleamed up at me from the silted bed of my childhood.

  But I was afraid.

  The rain still hadn’t set in when we got onto the approach road to the bridge, but the clouds were massing sullenly above and the windshield was splattered with heavy droplets too few to trigger the truck’s wipers. I watched the rust-colored structure looming up ahead through the distortion of the exploded raindrops and knew I was going to get soaked.

  There was no traffic on the bridge. The rust-colored suspension towers rose like the bones of some incalculably huge dinosaur above deserted asphalt lanes and side gantries lined with unidentifiable detritus.

  “Slow down,” I told my companion as we passed under the first tower, and the heavy vehicle braked with uncalled-for force. I glanced sideways. “Take it easy. I told you, this is a no-risk gig. I’m just meeting someone.”

  Graft Nicholson gave me a bleary look from the driver’s seat, and a breath of stale alcohol came with it.

  “Yeah, sure. You hand out this much plastique on drivers every week, right? Just pick them out of Licktown bars for charity?”

  I shrugged. “Believe what you want. Just keep your speed down. You can drive as fast as you like after you let me out.”

  Nicholson shook his tangled head. “This is fucked, man—”

  “There. Standing on the walkway. Drop me there.” There was a solitary figure leaning on the rail up ahead, apparently contemplating the view of the bay. Nicholson frowned with concentration and hunched the vastly outsize shoulders for which, presumably, he was named. The battered truck drifted sedately but not quite smoothly across two lanes and came to a bumpy halt beside the right-hand barrier.

  I jumped down, glanced around for bystanders, saw none, and pulled myself back up on the open door.

  “All right now, listen. It’s going to be at least two days till I get to Seattle, maybe three, so you just hole up in the first hotel the city-limits datastack has to offer, and you wait for me there. Pay cash, but book in under my name. I’ll contact you between ten and eleven in the morning, so be in the hotel at those times. The rest of the time, you can do what you like. I figure I gave you enough cash not to get bored.”

  Graft Nicholson bared his teeth in a knowing leer that made me feel slightly sorry for anyone working in the Seattle leisure industry that week. “Don’t worry ’bout me, man. Old Graft knows how to grab a good time by the titties.”

  “I’m glad. Just don’t get too comfortable. We may need to move it in a hurry.”

  “Yeah, yeah. What about the rest of the plastique, man?”

  “I told you. You’ll get paid when we’re done.”

  “And what about if you don’t show up in three days?”

  “In that case,” I said pleasantly, “I’ll be dead. That happens, it’d be better to drop out of sight for a few weeks. They’re not going to waste time looking for you. They find me, they’ll be happy.”

  “Man, I don’t think I’m—”

  “You’ll be fine. See you in three days.” I dropped back to the ground, slammed the truck door, and banged on it twice. The engine rumbled into drive, and Nicholson pulled the truck back out into the middle of the highway.

  Watching him go, I wondered briefly if he’d actually go to Seattle at all. I’d given him a sizable chunk of credit, after all, and even with the promise of a second payment if he followed instructions, the temptation would still be to double back somewhere up the coast and head straight back to the bar I’d picked him out of. Or he might get jumpy, sitting in the hotel waiting for a knock on the door, and skip before the three days were up. I couldn’t really blame him for these potential betrayals, since I had no intention of turning up myself. Whatever he did was fine by me.

  In systems evasion, you must scramble the enemy’s assumptions, Virginia said in my ear. Run as much interference as you can without breaking pace.

  “A friend of yours, Mr. Kovacs?” The doctor had come to the barrier and was watching the car recede.

  “Met him in a bar,” I said truthfully, climbing over to her side and making for the rail. It was the same view I’d seen when Curtis brought me back from Suntouch House the day of my arrival. In the gloomy, prerain light the aerial traffic glimmered above the buildings across the bay like a swarm of fireflies. Narrowing my eyes, I could make out detail on the island of Alcatraz, the gray-walled and orange-windowed bunker of PsychaSec S.A. Beyond lay Oakland. At my back, the open sea, and to north and south a solid kilometer of empty bridge. Reasonably sure that nothing short of tactical artillery could surprise me here, I turned back to look at the doctor.

  She seemed to flinch as my gaze fell on her.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked softly. “Medical ethics pinching a little?”

  “It was not my idea—”

  “I know that. You just signed the releases, turned a blind eye, that kind of thing. So who was it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said not quite steadily. “Someone came to see Sullivan. An artificial sleeve. Asian, I think.”

  I nodded. Trepp.

  “What were Sullivan’s instructions?”

  “Virtual net locater, fitted between the cortical stack and neural interface.” The clinical details seemed to give her strength. Her voice firmed up. “We did the surgery two days before you were freighted. Microscalpeled into the vertebrae along the line of the original stack incision, and plugged it with graft tissue. No show under any kind of sweep outside virtual. You’d have to run a full neuroelectrical to find it. How did you guess?”

  “I didn’t have to guess. Someone used it to locate and lever a contract killer out of the Bay City police holding stack. That’s Aiding and Abetting. You and Sullivan are both going down for a couple of decades minimum.”

  She looked pointedly up and down the empty bridge. “In that case, why aren’t the police here, Mr. Kovacs?”

  I thought about the rap sheet and military records that must have come to Earth with me, and what it must feel like standing here alone with someone who had done all those things. What it must have taken to come out here alone. Slowly, a reluctant smile crept out of one corner of my mouth.

  “All right, I’m impressed,” I said. “Now tell me how to neutralize the damn thi
ng.”

  She looked at me seriously, and the rain began to fall. Heavy drops, dampening the shoulders of her coat. I felt it in my hair. We both glanced up and I cursed. A moment later she stepped closer to me and touched a heavy broach on one wing of her coat. The air above us shimmered, and the rain stopped falling on me. Looking up again, I saw it exploding off the dome of the repulsion field over our heads. Around our feet, the paving darkened in splotches and then uniformly, but a magic circle around our feet stayed dry.

  “To actually remove the locater will require microsurgery similar to its placement. It can be done, but not without a full micro-op theater. Anything less, and you run the risk of damaging the neural interface, or even the spinal nerve canals.”

  I shifted a little, uncomfortable at our proximity. “Yeah, I figured.”

  “Well, then you’ve probably also figured,” she said, burlesquing my accent, “that you can enter either a scrambling signal or a mirror code into the stack receiver to neutralize the broadcast signature.”

  “If you’ve got the original signature.”

  “If, as you say, you have the original signature.” She reached into her pocket and produced a small, plastic-sheathed disk, weighed it in her palm for a moment, and then held it out to me. “Well, now you have.”

  I took the disk and looked at it speculatively.

  “It’s genuine. Any neuroelectrical clinic will confirm that for you. If you have doubts, I can recommend—”

  “Why are you doing this for me?”

  She met my eye, without flinching this time. “I’m not doing it for you, Mr. Kovacs. I am doing this for myself.”

  I waited. She looked away for a moment, across the Bay. “I am not a stranger to corruption, Mr. Kovacs. No one can work for long in a justice facility and fail to recognize a gangster. The synthetic was one of a type. Warden Sullivan has had dealings with these people as long as I have had tenure at Bay City. Police jurisdiction ends outside our doors, and administration salaries are not high.”

  She looked back at me. “I have never taken payment from these people, nor, until now, had I acted on their behalf. But equally, I have never stood against them. It has been very easy to bury myself in my work and pretend not to see what goes on.”

  “The human eye is a wonderful device,” I quoted from Poems and Other Prevarications absently. “With a little effort, it can fail to see even the most glaring injustice.”

  “Very aptly put.”

  “It’s not mine. So how come you did the surgery?”

  She nodded. “As I said, until now I had managed to avoid actual contact with these people. Sullivan had me assigned to Offworld Sleeving because there wasn’t much of it, and the favors he did were all local. It made it easier for both of us. He’s a good manager in that respect.”

  “Shame I came along then.”

  “Yes, it presented a problem. He knew it’d look odd if I was taken off the procedure for one of his more compliant medics, and he didn’t want any waves. Apparently this was something big.” She placed the same derisive stress on the words as she had on my figured earlier. “These people were jacked in at high level, and everything had to be smooth. But he wasn’t stupid; he had a rationale all ready for me.”

  “Which was?”

  She gave me another candid look. “That you were a dangerous psychopath. A killing machine turned rabid. And that, whatever the reasons, it wouldn’t be a good idea to have you swimming the dataflows untagged. No telling where you could needlecast to once you’re out of the real world. And I bought it. He showed me the files they have on you. Oh, he wasn’t stupid. No. I was.”

  I thought of Leila Begin and our talk of psychopaths on the virtual beach. Of my own flippant responses.

  “Sullivan wouldn’t be the first person to call me a psychopath. And you wouldn’t be the first person to buy it, either. The Envoys, well, it’s . . .” I shrugged and looked away. “It’s a label. Simplification for public consumption.”

  “They say a lot of you turned. That twenty percent of the serious crime in the Protectorate is caused by renegade Envoys. Is it true?”

  “The percentage?” I stared away through the rain. “I wouldn’t know. There are a lot of us out there, yes. There’s not much else to do once you’ve been discharged from the corps. They won’t let you into anything that might lead to a position of power or influence. On most worlds you’re barred from holding public office. Nobody trusts Envoys, and that means no promotion. No prospects. No loans, no credit.”

  I turned back to her. “And the stuff we’ve been trained to do is so close to crime, there’s almost no difference. Except that crime is easier. Most criminals are stupid; you probably know that. Even the organized syndicates are like kid gangs compared to the corps. It’s easy to get respect. And when you’ve spent the last decade of your life jacking in and out of sleeves, cooling out on stack, and living virtual, the threats that law enforcement has to offer are pretty bland.”

  We stood together in silence for a while.

  “I’m sorry,” she said finally.

  “Don’t be. Anyone reading those files on me would have—”

  “That isn’t what I meant.”

  “Oh.” I looked down at the disk in my hands. “Well, if you were looking to atone for something, I’d say you just have. And take it from me, no one stays totally clean. The only place you get to do that is on stack.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  “Yeah, well. There is just one more thing I’d like to know.”

  “Yes?”

  “Is Sullivan at Bay City Central right now?”

  “He was when I went out.”

  “And what time is he likely to leave this evening?”

  “It’s usually around seven.” She compressed her lips. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to ask him some questions,” I said truthfully.

  “And if he won’t answer them?”

  “Like you said, he’s not stupid.” I put the disk into my jacket pocket. “Thank you for your help, Doctor. I’d suggest you try not to be around the facility at seven tonight. And thank you.”

  “As I said, Mr. Kovacs, I am doing this for myself.”

  “That’s not what I meant, Doctor.”

  “Oh.”

  I placed one hand lightly on her arm, then stepped away from her and so back out into the rain.

  CHAPTEr TWENTY–FOUr

  The wood of the bench had been worn by decades of occupants into a series of comfortable, buttock-shaped depressions, and the arms were similarly sculpted. I molded myself lengthwise into the curves, cocked my boots on the bench end nearest the doors I was watching, and settled down to read the graffiti etched into the wood. I was soaked from the long walk back across town, but the hall was pleasantly heated and the rain rattled impotently on the long transparent panels of the tilted roof high above my head. After a while, one of the dog-sized cleaning robots came to wipe away my muddy footprints from the fused glass paving. I watched it idly until the job was done and the record of my arrival on the bench was totally erased.

  It would have been nice to think my electronic traces could be wiped in the same way, but that kind of escape belonged to the legendary heroes of another age.

  The cleaning robot trundled off, and I went back to the graffiti. Most of it was Amanglic or Spanish, old jokes that I’d seen before in a hundred similar places—CABRON MODIFICADO! and ABSENT WITHOUT SLEEVE!, the old crack THE ALTERED NATIVE WAS HERE!!—but high on the bench’s backrest and chiseled upside down, like a tiny pool of inverted calm in all the rage and desperate pride, I found a curious haiku in kanji:

  Pull on the new flesh like borrowed gloves

  And burn your fingers once again.

  The author must have been hanging over the back of the bench when he cut it into the wood, but still each character was executed with elegant care. I gazed at the calligraphy for what was probably a long time, while memories of Harlan’s World sang in my head
like high-tension cables.

  A sudden burst of crying over to my right jolted me out of the reverie. A young black woman and her two children, also black, were staring at the stooped, middle-aged white man standing before them in tattered U.N. surplus fatigues. Family reunion. The young woman’s face was a mask of shock—it hadn’t hit her properly yet—and the smaller child, probably no more than four, just didn’t get it at all. She was looking right through the white man, mouth forming the repeated question where’s daddy, where’s daddy? The man’s features were glistening in the rainy light from the roof; he looked like he’d been crying since they dragged him out of the tank.

  I rolled my head to an empty quadrant of the hall. My own father had walked right past his waiting family and out of our lives when he was resleeved. We never even knew which one he was, although I sometimes wonder if my mother didn’t catch some splinter of recognition in an averted gaze, some echo of stance or gait as he passed. I don’t know if he was too ashamed to confront us, or more likely too set up with the luck of drawing a sleeve sounder than his own alcohol-wrecked body had been, and already plotting a new course for other cities and younger women. I was ten at the time. The first I knew about it was when the attendants ushered us out of the facility just short of locking up for the night. We’d been there since noon.

  The chief attendant was an old man, conciliatory and very good with kids. He put his hand on my shoulder and spoke kindly to me before leading us out. To my mother, he made a short bow and murmured something formal that allowed her to keep the dam of her self-control intact.

  He probably saw a few like us every week.

  I memorized Ortega’s discreet destination code, for something to do with my mind, then shredded that panel of the cigarette pack and ate it.

  My clothes were almost dried through by the time Sullivan came through the doors leading out of the facility and started down the steps. His thin frame was cloaked in a long gray raincoat, and he wore a brimmed hat, something I hadn’t seen any of so far in Bay City. Framed in the V between my propped feet and reeled into close-up with the neurachem, his face looked pale and tired. I shifted a little on the bench and brushed the holstered Philips gun with the tips of my fingers. Sullivan was coming straight toward me, but when he saw my form sprawled on the bench, he pursed his mouth with disapproval and altered course to avoid what he presumably took for a derelict cluttering up the facility. He passed without giving me another glance.