Altered Carbon

  It got pretty dull after that. PsychaSec, like most D.H.F. depots, wasn’t much more than a gigantic set of air-conditioned warehouse shelves. We tramped through basement rooms cooled to the seven to eleven degrees Celsius recommended by the makers of altered carbon, peered at racks of the big thirty-centimeter expanded-format disks, and admired the retrieval robots that ran on wide-gauge rails along the storage walls. “It’s a duplex system,” Nyman said proudly. “Every client is stored on two separate disks in different parts of the building. Random code distribution, only the central processor can find them both, and there’s a lock on the system to prevent simultaneous access to both copies. To do any real damage, you’d have to break in and get past all the security systems twice.”

  I made polite noises.

  “Our satellite uplink operates through a network of no less than eighteen secure clearing orbital platforms, leased in random sequence.” Nyman was getting carried away with his own sales pitch. He seemed to have forgotten that neither Prescott nor myself were in the market for PsychaSec’s services. “No orbital is leased for more than twenty seconds at a time. Remote storage updates come in via needlecast, with no way to predict the transmission route.”

  Strictly speaking, that wasn’t true. Given an artificial intelligence of sufficient size and inclination, you’d get it right sooner or later, but this was clutching at straws. The kind of enemies who used A.I.s to get at you didn’t need to finish you off with a particle blaster to the head. I was looking in the wrong place.

  “Can I get access to Bancroft’s clones?” I asked Prescott abruptly.

  “From a legal point of view?” Prescott shrugged. “Mr. Bancroft’s instructions give you carte blanche as far as I know.”

  Carte blanche? Prescott had been springing these on me all morning. The words almost had the taste of heavy parchment. It was like something an Alain Marriott character would say in a Settlement years flick.

  Well, you’re on Earth now. I turned to Nyman, who nodded grudgingly.

  “There are some procedures,” he said.

  We went back up to ground level, along corridors that forcibly reminded me of the resleeving facility at Bay City Central by their very dissimilarity. No rubber-wheeled-gurney tracks here—the sleeve transporters would be air-cushion vehicles—and the corridor walls were decked out in pastel shades. The windows, bunker peepholes from the outside, were framed and corniched in Gaudi-style waves on the inside. At one corner we passed a woman cleaning them by hand. I raised an eyebrow. No end to the extravagance.

  Nyman caught the look. “There are some jobs that robot labor just never gets quite right,” he said.

  “I’m sure.”

  The clone banks appeared on our left, heavy sealed doors in beveled and sculpted steel counterpointing the ornate windows. We stopped at one, and Nyman peered into the retina scan set beside it. The door hinged smoothly outward, fully a meter thick in tungsten steel. Within was a four-meter-long chamber with a similar door at the far end. We stepped inside, and the outer door swung shut with a soft thud that pushed the air into my ears.

  “This is an airtight chamber,” Nyman said redundantly. “We will receive a sonic cleansing to ensure that we bring no contaminants into the clone bank. No reason to be alarmed.”

  A light in the ceiling pulsed on and off in shades of violet to signify that the dust-off was in progress, and then the second door opened with no more sound than the first. We walked out into the Bancroft family vault.

  I’d seen this sort of thing before. Reileen Kawahara had maintained a small one for her transit clones on New Beijing, and of course the corps had them in abundance. Still, I’d never seen anything quite like this.

  The space was oval, dome ceilinged, and must have extended through both stories of the installation. It was huge, the size of a temple back home. Lighting was low, a womblike orange, and the temperature was blood warm. The clone sacs were everywhere, veined translucent pods of the same orange as the light, suspended from the ceiling by cables and nutrient tubes. The clones were vaguely discernible within, fetal bundles of arms and legs, but fully grown. Or at least, most were; toward the top of the dome I could see smaller sacs where new additions to the stock were being cultured. The sacs were organic, a toughened analog of womb lining, and they would grow with the fetus within to the meter and a half lozenges in the lower half of the vault. The whole crop hung there like an insane mobile, just waiting for some huge sickly breeze to stir it into motion.

  Nyman cleared his throat, and both Prescott and I shook off the paralyzed wonder that had gripped us on the threshold.

  “This may look haphazard,” he said, “but the spacing is computer generated.”

  “I know.” I nodded and went closer to one of the lower sacs. “It’s fractal derived, right?”

  “Ah, yes.” Nyman seemed almost to resent my knowledge.

  I peered in at the clone. Centimeters away from my face Miriam Bancroft’s features dreamed in amniotic fluid beneath the membrane. Her arms were folded protectively across her breasts, and her hands were folded lightly into fists under her chin. Her hair had been gathered into a thick, coiled snake on the top of her head and covered in some kind of web.

  “The whole family’s here,” Prescott murmured at my shoulder. “Husband and wife, and all sixty-one children. Most have only one or two clones, but Bancroft and his wife run to six each. Impressive, huh?”

  “Yeah.” Despite myself, I had to put out a hand and touch the membrane above Miriam Bancroft’s face. It was warm and gave slightly under my hand. There was raised scarring around the entry points of the nutrient feeds and waste pipes, and in tiny pimples where needles had been pushed through to extract tissue samples or provide IV additives. The membrane would give in to such penetrations and heal afterwards.

  I turned away from the dreaming woman and faced Nyman.

  “This is all very nice, but presumably you don’t shell one of these whenever Bancroft comes in here for transit. You must have tanks, as well.”

  “This way.” Nyman gestured us to follow him and went to the back of the chamber where another pressure door was set into the wall. The lowest sacs swayed eerily in the wake of our passage, and I had to duck to avoid brushing against one. Nyman’s fingers played a brief tarantella over the keypad of the pressure door, and we went through into a long, low room whose clinical illumination was almost blinding after the womb light of the main vault. A row of eight metallic cylinders not unlike the one I’d woken up in yesterday were ranked along one wall, but where my birthing tube had been unpainted and scarred with the million tiny defacements of frequent use, these units carried a thick gloss of cream paint with yellow trim around the transparent observation plate and the various functional protrusions.

  “Full life-support suspension chambers,” Nyman said. “Essentially the same environment as the pods. This is where all the resleeving is done. We bring fresh clones through, still in the pod, and load them here. The tank nutrients have an enzyme to break down the pod wall, so the transition is completely trauma-free. Any clinical work is carried out by staff working in synthetic sleeves, to avoid any risk of contamination.”

  I caught the exasperated rolling of Oumou Prescott’s eyes on the periphery of my vision, and a grin twitched at the corner of my mouth.

  “Who has access to this chamber?”

  “Myself, authorized staff under a day code. And the owners, of course.”

  I wandered down the line of cylinders, bending to examine the data displays at the foot of each one. There was a Miriam clone in the sixth, and two Naomis at seven and eight.

  “You’ve got the daughter on ice twice?”

  “Yes.” Nyman looked puzzled, and then slightly superior. This was his chance to get back the initiative he’d lost on the fractal patterning. “Have you not been informed of her current condition?”

  “Yeah, she’s in psychosurgery,” I growled. “That doesn’t explain why there’s two of her here.”
r />   “Well.” Nyman darted a glance back at Prescott, as if to say that the divulging of further information involved some legal dimension. The lawyer cleared her throat.

  “PsychaSec has instructions from Mr. Bancroft to always hold a spare clone of himself and his immediate family ready for decanting. While Ms. Bancroft is committed to the Vancouver Psychiatric stack, both sleeves are stored here.”

  “The Bancrofts like to alternate their sleeves,” Nyman said knowledgeably. “Many of our clients do; it saves on wear and tear. The human body is capable of quite remarkable regeneration if stored correctly, and of course, we offer a complete package of clinical repair for more major damage. Very reasonably priced.”

  “I’m sure it is.” I turned back from the end cylinder and grinned at him. “Still, not much you can do for a vaporized head, is there?”

  There was a brief silence, during which Prescott looked fixedly at a corner of the ceiling and Nyman’s lips tightened to almost anal proportions.

  “I consider that remark in very poor taste,” the director said finally. “Do you have any more important questions, Mr. Kovacs?”

  I paused next to Miriam Bancroft’s cylinder and looked into it. Even through the fogging effect of the observation plate and the gel, there was a sensual abundance to the blurred form within.

  “Just one question. Who decides when to alternate the sleeves?”

  Nyman glanced across at Prescott as if to enlist legal support for his words. “I am directly authorized by Mr. Bancroft to effect the transfer on every occasion that he is digitized, unless specifically required not to. He made no such request on this occasion.”

  There was something here, scratching at the Envoy antennae; something somewhere fitted. It was too early to give it concrete form. I looked around the room.

  “This place is entry monitored, right?”

  “Naturally.” Nyman’s tone was still chilly.

  “Was there much activity the day Bancroft went to Osaka?”

  “No more than usual. Mr. Kovacs, the police have already been through these records. I really don’t see what value—”

  “Indulge me,” I suggested, not looking at him, and the Envoy cadences in my voice shut him down like a circuit breaker.

  Two hours later I was staring out of the window of another autocab as it kicked off from the Alcatraz landing quay and climbed over the Bay.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  I glanced at Oumou Prescott, wondering if she could sense the frustration coming off me. I thought I’d got most of the external giveaways on this sleeve locked down, but I’d heard of lawyers who got empath conditioning to pick up more subliminal clues to their witnesses’ state of mind when on the stand. And here, on Earth, it wouldn’t surprise me if Oumou Prescott had a full infrared subsonic body-and-voice scan package racked into her beautiful ebony head.

  The entry data for the Bancroft vault, Thursday 16th of August, was as free of suspicious comings and goings as the Mishima Mall on a Tuesday afternoon. Eight A.M., Bancroft came in with two assistants, stripped off, and climbed into the waiting tank. The assistants left with his clothes. Fourteen hours later his alternate clone climbed dripping out of the neighboring tank, collected a towel from another assistant, and went to get a shower. No words exchanged beyond pleasantries. Nothing.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t really know what I’m looking for yet.”

  Prescott yawned. “Total absorb, huh?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.” I looked at her more closely. “You know much about the corps?”

  “Bit. I did my articles in U.N. litigation. You pick up the terminology. So what have you absorbed so far?”

  “Only that there’s a lot of smoke building up around something the authorities say isn’t burning. You ever meet the lieutenant who ran the case?”

  “Kristin Ortega. Of course. I’m not likely to forget her. We were yelling at each other across a desk for the best part of a week.”

  “Impressions?”

  “Of Ortega?” Prescott looked surprised. “Good cop, as far as I know. Got a reputation for being very tough. The Organic Damage Division are the police department’s hard men, so earning a reputation like that wouldn’t have been easy. She ran the case efficiently enough—”

  “Not for Bancroft’s liking.”

  Pause. Prescott looked at me warily. “I said efficiently. I didn’t say persistently. Ortega did her job, but—”

  “But she doesn’t like Meths, right?”

  Another pause. “You have quite an ear for the street, Mr. Kovacs.”

  “You pick up the terminology,” I said modestly. “Do you think Ortega would have kept the case open if Bancroft hadn’t been a Meth?”

  Prescott thought about it for a while. “It’s a common enough prejudice,” she said slowly, “but I don’t get the impression Ortega shut us down because of it. I think she just saw a limited return on her investment. The police department has a promotion system based at least partly on the number of cases solved. No one saw a quick solution to this one, and Mr. Bancroft was alive, so . . .”

  “Better things to do, huh?”

  “Yes. Something like that.”

  I stared out the window some more. The cab was flitting across the tops of slender multistory stacks and the traffic-crammed crevices between. I could feel an old fury building in me that had nothing to do with my current problems. Something that had accrued through the years in the corps and the emotional rubble you got used to seeing, like silt on the surface of your soul. Virginia Vidaura, Jimmy de Soto dying in my arms at Innenin, Sarah . . . A loser’s catalog, any way you looked at it.

  I locked it down.

  The scar under my eye was itching, and there was the curl of the nicotine craving in my fingertips. I rubbed at the scar. Left the cigarettes in my pocket. At some indeterminate point this morning I’d determined to quit. A thought struck me at random.

  “Prescott, you chose this sleeve for me, right?”

  “Sorry?” She was scanning through a subretinal projection, and it took her a moment to refocus on me. “What did you say?”

  “This sleeve. You chose it, right?”

  She frowned. “No, as far as I know, that selection was made by Mr. Bancroft. We just provided the shortlist according to specifications.”

  “No, he told me his lawyers had handled it. Definitely.”

  “Oh.” The frown cleared away, and she smiled faintly. “Mr. Bancroft has a great many lawyers. Probably he routed it through another office. Why?”

  I grunted. “Nothing. Whoever owned this body before was a smoker, and I’m not. It’s a real pain in the balls.”

  Prescott’s smile gained ground. “Are you going to give up?”

  “If I can find the time. Bancroft’s deal is, I crack the case, I can be resleeved no expense spared, so it doesn’t really matter long term. I just hate waking up with a throatful of shit every morning.”

  “Do you think you can?”

  “Give up smoking?”

  “No. Crack this case.”

  I looked at her, deadpan. “I don’t really have any other option, counselor. Have you read the terms of my employment?”

  “Yes. I drew them up.” Prescott gave me back the deadpan look, but buried beneath it were traces of the discomfort that I needed to see to stop me reaching across the cab and smashing her nose bone up into her brain with one stiffened hand.

  “Well, well,” I said, and went back to looking out of the window.

  AND MY FIST UP YOUR WIFE’S CUNT WITH YOU WATCHING YOU FUCKING METH MOTHERFUCKER YOU CAN’T

  I slipped off the headset and blinked. The text had carried some crude but effective virtual graphics and a subsonic that made my head buzz. Across the desk, Prescott looked at me with knowing sympathy.

  “Is it all like this?” I asked.

  “Well, it gets less coherent.” She gestured at the holograph display floating above the desktop, where representation
s of the files I was accessing tumbled in cool shades of blue and green. “This is what we call the R and R stack. Rabid and Rambling. Actually, these guys are mostly too far gone to be any real threat, but it’s not nice, knowing they’re out there.”

  “Ortega bring any of them in?”

  “It’s not her department. The Transmission Felony Division catches a few every now and then, when we squawk loudly enough about it, but dissemination technology being the way it is, it’s like trying to throw a net over smoke. And even when you do catch them, the worst they’ll get is a few months in storage. It’s a waste of time. We mostly just sit on this stuff until Bancroft says we can delete it.”

  “And nothing new in the last six months?”

  Prescott shrugged. “The religious lunatics, maybe. Some increased traffic from the Catholics on Resolution 653. Mr. Bancroft has an undeclared influence in the U.N. Court, which is more or less common knowledge. Oh, and some Martian archaeological sect has been screaming about that songspire he keeps in his hall. Apparently last month was the anniversary of their founder’s martyrdom by leaky pressure suit. But none of these people have the wherewithal to crack the perimeter defenses at Suntouch House.”

  I tilted my chair back and stared up at the ceiling. A flight of gray birds angled overhead in a southward-pointing chevron. Their voices were faintly audible, honking to each other. Prescott’s office was environment formatted, all six internal surfaces projecting virtual images. Currently her gray metal desk was incongruously positioned halfway down a sloping meadow on which the sun was beginning to decline, complete with a small herd of cattle in the distance and occasional birdsong. The image resolution was some of the best I’d seen.

  “Prescott, what can you tell me about Leila Begin?”

  The silence that ensued pulled my eyes back down to ground level. Oumou Prescott was staring off into a corner of the field.

  “I suppose Kristin Ortega gave you that name,” she said slowly.

  “Yeah.” I sat up. “She said it would give me some insight into Bancroft. In fact, she told me to run it by you to see if you rattled.”