Altered Carbon

  Ortega gestured. “Yeah, well. Busy city at night.”

  I offered her the pack. She looked at it as if I’d just posed a major philosophical question, then took it and shook out a cigarette. Ignoring the ignition patch on the side of the pack, she searched her pockets, produced a heavy lighter, and snapped it open. She seemed to be on autopilot, moving aside almost without noticing to let a forensics team bring in new equipment, then returning the lighter to a different pocket. Around us, the lobby seemed suddenly crowded with efficient people doing their jobs.

  “So.” She plumed smoke into the air above her head. “You know these guys?”

  “Oh, give me a fucking break!”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, I’ve been out of storage six hours, if that.” I could hear my voice starting to rise. “Meaning, I’ve talked to precisely three people since the last time we met. Meaning, I’ve never been on Earth in my life. Meaning, you know all this. Now, are you going to ask me some intelligent questions, or am I going to bed?”

  “All right, keep your skull on.” Ortega looked suddenly tired. She sank into the lounger opposite mine. “You told my sergeant they were professionals.”

  “They were.” I’d decided it was the one piece of information I might as well share with the police, since they’d probably find out anyway, as soon as they ran the make on the two corpses through their files.

  “Did they call you by name?”

  I furrowed my brow with great care. “By name?”

  “Yeah.” She made an impatient gesture. “Did they call you Kovacs?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Any other names?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Such as?”

  The weariness that had clouded her face retreated abruptly, and she gave me a hard look. “Forget it. We’ll run the hotel’s memory, and see.”

  Oops.

  “On Harlan’s World you’d have to get a warrant for that.” I made it come out lazily.

  “We do here.” Ortega knocked ash off her cigarette onto the carpet. “But it won’t be a problem. Apparently this isn’t the first time the Hendrix has been up on an organic damage charge. While ago, but the archives go back.”

  “So how come it wasn’t decommissioned?”

  “I said up on charges, not convicted. Court threw it out. Demonstrable self-defense. Course—” She nodded over at the dormant gun turret, where two members of the forensic team were running an emissions sweep. “—we’re talking about covert electrocution that time. Nothing like this.”

  “Yeah, I was meaning to ask. Who fits that kind of hardware in a hotel anyway?”

  “What do you think I am, a search construct?” Ortega had started watching me with a speculative hostility I didn’t much like. Then, abruptly, she shrugged. “Archive précis I ran on the way over here says it got done a couple of centuries back, when the corporate wars turned nasty. Makes sense. With all that shit breaking loose, a lot of buildings were retooling to cope. Course, most of the companies went under shortly afterwards with the trading crash, so no one ever got around to passing a decommissioning bill. The Hendrix upgraded to artificial-intelligence status instead and bought itself out.”

  “Smart.”

  “Yeah, from what I hear the A.I.s were the only ones with any kind of real handle on what was happening to the market anyway. Quite a few of them made the break about then. Lot of the hotels on this strip are A.I.” She grinned at me through the smoke. “That’s why no one stays in them. Shame, really. I read somewhere they’re hardwired to want customers the way people want sex. That’s got to be frustrating, right?”

  “Right.”

  One of the mohicans came and hovered over us. Ortega glanced up at him with a look that said she didn’t want to be disturbed.

  “We got a make on the DNA samples,” the mohican said diffidently, and handed her a videofax slate. Ortega scanned it and started.

  “Well, well. You were in exalted company for a while, Kovacs.” She waved an arm in the direction of the male corpse. “Sleeve last registered to Dimitri Kadmin, otherwise known as Dimi the Twin. Professional assassin out of Vladivostok.”

  “And the woman?”

  Ortega and the mohican exchanged glances. “Ulan Bator registry?”

  “Got it in one, chief.”

  “Got the motherfucker.” Ortega bounced to her feet with renewed energy. “Let’s get their stacks excised and over to Fell Street. I want Dimi downloaded into Holding before midnight.” She looked back at me. “Kovacs, you may just have proved useful.”

  The mohican reached under his double-breasted suit and produced a heavy-bladed killing knife with the nonchalance of a man getting out cigarettes. Together, they went over to the corpse and knelt beside it. Interested uniformed officers drifted across to watch. There was the wet cracking sound of cartilage being cut open. After a moment, I got up and went to join the spectators. Nobody paid any attention to me.

  It was not what you’d call refined biotech surgery. The mohican had chopped out a section of the corpse’s spine to gain access to the base of the skull, and now he was digging around with the point of the knife, trying to locate the cortical stack. Kristin Ortega was holding the head steady in both hands.

  “They bury them a lot deeper in than they used to,” she was saying. “See if you can get the rest of the vertebrae out; that’s where it’ll be.”

  “I’m trying,” the mohican grunted. “Some augmentation in here, I reckon. One of those antishock washers Noguchi was talking about last time he was over— Shit! Thought I had it there.”

  “No, look, you’re working at the wrong angle. Let me try.” Ortega took the knife and put one knee on the skull to steady it.

  “Shit, I nearly had it, chief.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m not spending all night watching you poke around in there.” She glanced up and saw me watching her, nodded a brief acknowledgment, and put the serrated point of the blade in place. Then with a sharp blow to the haft of the knife, she chopped something loose. She looked up at the mohican with a grin.

  “Hear that?”

  She reached down into the gore and pulled out the stack between finger and thumb. It didn’t look like much, impact-resistant casing streaked with blood and barely the size of a cigarette butt, with the twisted filaments of the microjacks protruding stiffly from one end. I could see how the Catholics might not want to believe this was the receptacle of the human soul.

  “Gotcha, Dimi.” Ortega held up the stack to the light, then passed it and the knife to the mohican. She wiped her fingers on the corpse’s clothing. “Right, let’s get the other one out of the woman.”

  As we watched the mohican repeating the procedure on the second body, I tipped my head close enough to Ortega to mutter.

  “So you know who this one is, as well?”

  She jerked around to look at me, whether out of surprise or dislike of my proximity I couldn’t be sure. “Yeah, this is Dimi the Twin, too. Ha, pun! The sleeve’s registered out of Ulan Bator, which for your information is the black-market downloading capital of Asia. See, Dimi’s not a very trusting soul. He likes to have people he can be sure of backing him up. And the circles Dimi mixes in, the only person you can really trust is you.”

  “Those sound like familiar circles. Is it easy to get yourself copied on Earth?”

  Ortega grimaced. “Getting easier all the time. Technology the way it is now, a state-of-the-art resleeving processor fits into a bathroom. Pretty soon it’s going to be an elevator. Then a suitcase.” She shrugged. “Price of progress.”

  “About the only way you can get it done on Harlan’s World is to file for a stellar-range ’cast, get an insurance copy held for the duration of the trip, and then cancel the transmission at the last minute. Fake a transit certificate, then claim a vital interest for a temporary download from the copy. This guy’s offworld and his business is crumbling, that kind of thing. Download once from the original at the transmission station, a
nd again through the insurance company somewhere else. Copy One walks out of the station legally. He just changed his mind about going. Lots of people do. Copy Two never reports back to the insurance company for restorage. Costs a lot of money, though. You’ve got to bribe a lot of people, steal a lot of machine time to get away with it.”

  The mohican slipped and cut his thumb on the knife. Ortega rolled her eyes and sighed in a compressed fashion. She turned back to face me.

  “It’s easier here,” she said shortly.

  “Yeah? How’s it work?”

  “It—” She hesitated, as if trying to work out why she was talking to me. “Why do you want to know?”

  I grinned at her. “Just naturally nosy, I guess.”

  “Okay, Kovacs.” She cupped both hands around her coffee mug. “Works like this. One day Mr. Dimitri Kadmin walks into one of the big retrieval and resleeving insurance companies. I mean someone really respectable, like Lloyd’s or Cartwright Solar, maybe.”

  “Is that here?” I gestured out at the bridge lights visible beyond the windows of my room. “In Bay City?”

  The mohican had given Ortega some odd looks when she stayed behind as the police departed the Hendrix. She saw him off with another admonition to get Kadmin downloaded rápido, and then we went upstairs. She barely watched the police cruisers leave.

  “Bay City, East Coast, maybe even Europe.” Ortega sipped her coffee, wincing at the overload of whiskey she’d asked the Hendrix to dump in it. “Doesn’t matter. What matters is the company. Someone established. Someone who’s been underwriting since downloading happened. Mr. Kadmin wants to take out an R and R policy, which, after a long discussion about premiums, he does. See, this has got to look good. It’s the long con, with the one difference that what we’re after here is more than money.”

  I leaned back against my side of the window frame. The Watchtower suite had been aptly named. All three rooms looked out across the city and the water beyond, either north or westward, and the window shelf in the lounge accounted for about a fifth of the available space, layered with psychedelically colored cushion mats. Ortega and I were seated opposite each other with a clean meter of space between us.

  “Okay, so that’s one copy. Then what?”

  Ortega shrugged. “Fatal accident.”

  “In Ulan Bator?”

  “Right. Dimi runs himself into a power pylon at high speed, falls out of a hotel window, something like that. An Ulan Bator handling agent retrieves the stack, and, for a hefty bribe, makes a copy. In comes Cartwright Solar or Lloyd’s with their retrieval writ, freights Dimi D.H. back to their clone bank, and downloads him into the waiting sleeve. Thank you very much, sir. Nice doing business with you.”

  “Meanwhile . . .”

  “Meanwhile the handling agent buys up a black-market sleeve, probably some catatonia case from a local hospital, or a scene-of-the-crime drug victim who’s not too physically damaged. The Ulan Bator police do a screaming trade in D.O.A.s. The agent wipes the sleeve’s mind, downloads Dimi’s copy into it, and the sleeve just walks out of there. Suborbital to the other side of the globe and off to work in Bay City.”

  “You don’t catch these guys too often.”

  “Almost never. Point is, you’ve got to catch both copies cold, either dead like this or held on a U.N. indictable offense. Without the U.N. rap, you’ve got no legal right to download from a living body. And in a no-win situation, the twin just gets its cortical stack blown out through the back of its neck before we can make the bust. I’ve seen it happen.”

  “That’s pretty severe. What’s the penalty for all this?”

  “Erasure.”

  “Erasure? You do that here?”

  Ortega nodded. There was a small, grim smile playing all around her mouth, but never quite on it. “Yeah, we do that here. Shock you?”

  I thought about it. Some crimes in the corps carried the erasure penalty, principally desertion or refusal to obey a combat order, but I’d never seen them applied. It ran counter to the conditioning to cut and run. And on Harlan’s World erasure had been abolished a decade before I was born.

  “It’s kind of old-fashioned, isn’t it?”

  “You feel bad about what’s going to happen to Dimi?”

  I ran the tip of my tongue over the cuts on the inside of my mouth. Thought about the cold circle of metal at my neck and shook my head. “No. But does it stop with people like him?”

  “There are a few other capital crimes, but they mostly get commuted to a couple of centuries in storage.” The look on Ortega’s face said she didn’t think that was such a great idea.

  I put my coffee down and reached for a cigarette. The motions were automatic, and I was too tired to stop them. Ortega waved away the offered pack. Touching my own cigarette to the pack’s ignition patch, I squinted at her.

  “How old are you, Ortega?”

  She looked back at me narrowly. “Thirty-four. Why?”

  “Never been D.H.’d, hmm?”

  “Yeah, I had psychosurgery a few years back; they put me under for a couple of days. Apart from that, no. I’m not a criminal, and I don’t have the money for that kind of travel.”

  I let out the first breath of smoke. “Kind of touchy about it, aren’t you?”

  “Like I said, I’m not a criminal.”

  “No.” I thought back to the last time I had seen Virginia Vidaura. “If you were, you wouldn’t think two hundred years’ dislocation was such an easy rap.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You didn’t have to.” I didn’t know what had led me to forget that Ortega was the law, but something had. Something had been building in the space between the two of us, something like a static charge, something I might have been able to work out if my Envoy intuitions hadn’t been so blunted by the new sleeve. Whatever it was, it had just walked out of the room. I drew my shoulders in and pulled harder on the cigarette. I needed sleep.

  “Kadmin’s expensive, right? With overheads like that, risks like that, he’s got to cost.”

  “About twenty grand a hit.”

  “Then Bancroft didn’t commit suicide.”

  Ortega raised an eyebrow. “That’s fast work, for someone who just got here.”

  “Oh, come on.” I exploded a lungful of smoke at her. “If it was suicide, who the fuck paid out the twenty to have me hit?”

  “You’re well liked, are you?”

  I leaned forward. “No, I’m disliked in a lot of places, but not by anyone with those kind of connections or that kind of money. I’m not classy enough to make enemies at that level. Whoever set Kadmin on me knows I’m working for Bancroft.”

  Ortega grinned. “Thought you said they didn’t call you by name?”

  Tired, Takeshi. I could almost see Virginia Vidaura wagging her finger at me. The Envoy Corps doesn’t get taken apart by local law.

  I stumbled on as best I could.

  “They knew who I was. Men like Kadmin don’t hang around hotels waiting to rip off the tourists. Ortega, come on.”

  She let my exasperation sink into the silence before she answered me. “So Bancroft was hit, as well? Maybe. So what?”

  “So you’ve got to reopen the inquiry.”

  “You don’t listen, Kovacs.” She bent me a smile meant for stopping armed men in their tracks. “The case is closed.”

  I sagged back against the wall and watched her through the smoke for a while. Finally, I said, “You know, when your cleanup squad arrived tonight, one of them showed me his badge for long enough to actually see it. Quite fancy, close-up. That eagle and shield. All the lettering around it.”

  She made a get-on-with-it gesture, and I took another puff on my cigarette before I sank the barb in.

  “To protect and serve? I guess by the time you make lieutenant, you don’t really believe that stuff anymore.”

  Contact. A muscle jumped under one eye, and her cheeks pulled in as if she was sucking on something bitter. She stared at me, and for that m
oment I thought I might have pushed too far. Then her shoulders slumped and she sighed.

  “Ah, go ahead. What the fuck do you know about it anyway? Bancroft’s not people, like you and me. He’s a fucking Meth.”

  “A Meth?”

  “Yeah. A Meth. You know, and all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years. He’s old. I mean, really old.”

  “Is that a crime, Lieutenant?”

  “It should be,” Ortega said grimly. “You live that long, things start happening to you. You get too impressed with yourself. Ends up, you think you’re God. Suddenly the little people, thirty, maybe forty years old, well, they don’t really matter anymore. You’ve seen whole societies rise and fall, and you start to feel you’re standing outside it all, and none of it really matters to you. And maybe you’ll start snuffing those little people, just like picking daisies, if they get under your feet.”

  I looked seriously at her. “You pin anything like that on Bancroft? Ever?”

  “I’m not talking about Bancroft.” She waved the objection aside impatiently. “I’m talking about his kind. They’re like the A.I.s. They’re a breed apart. They’re not human. They deal with humanity the way you and I deal with insect life. Well, when you’re dealing with the Bay City police department, having that kind of attitude can sometimes back up on you.”

  I thought briefly of Reileen Kawahara’s excesses and wondered how far off the mark Ortega really was. On Harlan’s World, most people could afford to be resleeved at least once, but the point was that unless you were very rich, you had to live out your full span each time and old age, even with antisen treatment, was a wearying business. Second time around was worse because you knew what to expect. Not many had the stamina to do it more than twice. Most people went into voluntary storage after that, with occasional temporary resleevings for family matters, and of course, even those resleevings thinned out as time passed and new generations bustled in without the old ties.