by Pat Cadigan
Salazar was having a chew-and-spit when I arrived at her office. No drugs or surgery for her—she was too proud of her self-control. And none of that edible polyester, either—Salazar was a real-food gourmet. Chew-and-spit was her way of dealing with her lust for food versus her belief that obesity was an antisocial act. In a crowded world, she was fond of saying, it is obnoxious to take up more than your share of space. As far as I was concerned, her philosophy was her problem; my quarrel was with how she defined obesity, which was anyone who wasn’t thirty pounds underweight, me for certain. To her credit, she’d stopped hinting around about diets and surgical pruning after the first month we worked together and she did manage to keep a professional attitude in the face of my mass that, next to hers, was True Bulk.
Today she had a pocket sandwich. All the time I was telling her about Sovay, she would take a bite of her sandwich, chew it slowly and sensuously enough to make masticate a dirty word, and when it was all mashed to paste in her mouth, she’d lean forward and spit the mess into the suckhole in her desk. In spite of the Sally Lazer debacle, I was still one of the few who didn’t gag openly at this routine, which was one reason she was tolerant of me. The Sally Lazer debacle itself was another. Everyone else in my department was on a diet or pretending to be.
“Any ideas on who did it?” she asked when I was finished. Her mouth was full.
I shifted position in the overstuffed chair. All of Salazar’s office furniture was chubby. To make her feel that much thinner I supposed. “Some Very Nice People look good for it, if we could find them. Or it might be grandstanding newcomers with something to prove. Or they could be one and the same. The identities tend to get slippery in these cases.”
Salazar spat, took a drink of mineral water and spat that into the suckhole, too. For practice, maybe. Her saggy garnet eyes stared at me skeptically. “We’ve got nothing on Some Very Nice People. What about the grieving widow?” Bite.
“She’s not an actor so they couldn’t have been competitors in the strictest sense, and she has no history of personality disorders or identity buying or selling. No chance we’d be able to get a search warrant for cause. I didn’t mention that possibility to her.”
Salazar looked disappointed as she spat and took another bite. “If we could justify search warrants on general principle, we’d probably clear up half the unsolved sucks from the last five years.”
That kind of talk always made me uncomfortable. Tempting as it is to a Brain Police officer for the sake of all the victims like Sovay, I didn’t like the idea of access-on-demand to someone’s memories and I never would.
Salazar never seemed to understand it as an atrocity. Maybe she’d spent too much time in You Must Remember This.
“Sovay was a bit smaller than the stuff a really big operator might go for,” I went on. “He was just moving into Stage One prominence, where he was classified as a talent to watch. The big operators seem to prefer someone who’s just a little more of a brand name but won’t be too traceable. Drives the price up. And they never make house calls. Someone big could be behind it—whoever got Bateau’s cut of the pie, since Bateau himself is out of the question—but we’ll never connect them with the ones who did the actual suck. The trail will be covered by a lot of selective memory wiping and coding, so the little fish probably think they’re working for themselves anyway.”
Salazar spat again. “Sounds more complicated than it has to be.”
“Suckers always make it more complicated, hoping we’ll get lost in the spaghetti.”
“Spaghetti,” Salazar murmured dreamily. “Did they take anything else?”
“No, and not for lack of trying. They broke into his studio but there was nothing transportable. Probably they were looking for artifacts, familiar things the talent could relate to in its new home.”
Spit “The ancient Egyptians have nothing on us. How do you want to handle it?”
“The way I usually do. Get into the Downs and look around.”
She thought about that while she made love to the food in her mouth. Salazar’s never been comfortable with the idea that she can’t know exactly what the people under her are doing. She’d like to orchestrate everything the same way she’d like to stick her nose into any mind she wanted to. Fortunately, she was behind a desk—most of the time—where she could do only minimal damage. Most of the time.
“If we start asking questions or pulling in likelies, it’ll just alert our suckers and maybe every other sucker we’d like to hotbox, and they’ll just have themselves wiped so we couldn’t get anything on them even if we did find them. The State v. Marto. I quote: ‘A mindwipe’s new personality may not be held accountable for crimes—’ ”
Salazar spat forcefully and I shut up. “What about backup?”
I winced. She always did this to me and she should have known better. But that’s what happens when you promote administrators with no field experience, or at least none that sticks. “Post them or don’t post them, but don’t tell me either way. If I don’t know, no one else can find out if something goes wrong and I get sucked myself. Let’s not discuss it anymore, all right?”
Salazar nodded, brought the sandwich up to her face, and then paused. “Say, you want the rest of this?” She thrust it at me. “I’m full.”
“No. Thanks.”
“You sure? It’ll just go to waste.”
“It’s not on my diet.”
She frowned at me accusingly. “You don’t diet.”
No sense of humor, that woman. She tossed the sandwich into the suckhole, which seemed to choke on it briefly, unused to anything solid after the pap she’d been feeding it. She had nothing further to add so I left her searching her mouth for stray food particles and took myself over to Wardrobe to pick out an appropriate Downs persona.
If Sovay’s mind went anywhere at all, it would go to the Downs first, where there was plenty of merchandise floating around in and among the cheap dreamlands, memory lanes, trip parlors, pawnshops, storefront talent brokers, and street vendors to camouflage anything that had been parted out. The mutilated remains of a person’s identity could disappear pretty quickly there.
I took a quick look at some surveillance footage the regular police had shot a couple of days before. Things hadn’t changed much in a month. The fashion clothingwise was still ragpicker ratatat. No problem there, I’d just get into the closet, throw everything up in the air, and wear whatever landed on me. I was more interested in faces. Wearing my own was out of the question, but just getting another wasn’t the answer, either. A brand-new face in the Downs could attract dangerous attention from people with cause to be nervous; someone might decide to suck me on general principle. I shot about a dozen stills off the footage and had the computer do me a composite that any Downsite would find subliminally familiar.
The result was no one to fall in love with. Working from the composite, Wardrobe straightened my eyebrows, changed my eyes from clean onyx to cheap sapphire, tacked on a squint, broke my nose, stretched my mouth, and ruined my hair with a bad cut and fade. They wanted to mess with some muscles and ligaments to change my posture and movement but I told them there wasn’t time. Wardrobe always got carried away; it was all just theatre to them. They settled for coating my vocal cords with what felt like liquid sandpaper, large grain; gave me a nasty gargle on the aspirants. I paired a man’s tunic with a colorless plastic skirt and added broken-down boots.
“Trèa authentic,” said the Wardrobe Captain. This week, it was a young guy named Flaxie. He was brand-new, fresh out of some polytech with a degree in urban camouflage.
“Urban camouflage?” I said. “You can really get a degree in that?”
“Believe it or leave it,” he said cheerfully. “I was in theatrical costuming up until almost the last minute but I decided I was more interested in law enforcement than theatre. Theatre’s full of neurotics, you know. They’ll make you positively nutsoid.”
“Do tell.”
He flashed me a thou
sand-watt smile that made him look even younger than he was. “You want an imp or are you going to brass it out on adrenaline?”
I laughed, gargling. “I’m not excitable enough for adrenaline unassisted. Give me a global imprint, debossed. In case someone wants to check how authentic I really am. If they’re in a hurry, which they usually are, they probably won’t get all the way through the overlay.”
Flaxie prepared a hookup to the computer system while I mounted a program for myself out of the characteristics-available file. Generally I tried for things that weren’t too far from my own quirks and idiosyncrasies so I could slip in and out of character without too much noticeable difference.
I showed my final program to Flaxie for his educated opinion. He took a long time studying it and then gave me an odd look.
“You’re sure this is what you want?”
“Is there something wrong with it?”
He seemed to be about to say something. Then he shrugged. “Can you take your own eyes out?”
I could and did. Imprinting wasn’t something I was fond of but I could put up with a debosst which was pressed on from the outside, the mental equivalent of a mask. Emboss was more reliable since it came from within your own personality, but it was a lot harder to clean out later. A global debossed facade personality would pass a glancing inspection for a short period of time if I ended up directly mind-to-mind with some lowlife. The imp had no memory of its own and I could bar it from accessing mine and giving me away. But that was a situation I was planning to avoid.
Flaxie was a real adept. The connections for my optic nerves were primed and a relaxation exercise was already in progress, a swirling, colors thing. It went on exactly long enough to let my mind settle into a receiving mode.
The mechanics were the opposite of a mindsuck. If the system operator is any good, the process should be nearly instantaneous (and painless). There was a mental moment of the sort of pressure you feel when you’re concentrating intensely—
—Guy musta been a juggler in his previous lifetime. I was out in the wide-awake so fast I barely had time to be blind. Not that it made a squat of difference. I don’t need eyes to know when I’ve been pulled in by the Brain Police. Right away, my ruff goes up. I can’t help it. You never know what they’ve been up to.
“Next time, I’ll take care of my own eyes, thank you so much I’m very sure!”
His Blondness just gives me this friendly look at all his teeth. “Take a minute or two. A fresh imp’s always on a hair trigger.”
Now, this is supposed to make sense? He’s been partying with my equipment, I know that.
“Where’s my eagle? I want my eagle.” I look around but there’s no eagle in the room, just him and me and one of those big main-brain banks they use to tapdance on your grey. “Oh, Blondie, you gotta problem here, illegal search and seizure, amnesia without benefit of counsel, hail me the first cab to court—”
He’s grinning like I’m the best entertainment he’s had in a week. “You in there, Mersine?”
It was what I imagined it must be like to be a program called up within a system. The world lit up like a screen, or maybe I did.
“Yeah.” I felt myself relax several degrees. “Yeah, it’s me. The imp’s pretty solid. Settling now, though. I can feel it.” I let my breath out slowly, counting to twenty.
“Remember anything?” Flaxie studied me solemnly.
“Everything.” I grinned, mildly embarrassed. “She’s pretty obnoxious.”
“She’s all yours. You want anything modified?”
I thought it over. “Nah. She’s fine the way she is. Nobody’ll give her a second look in the Downs.” I thought some more but there were some curious blank spaces that didn’t feel right. “Do I have everything I need? I feel like I’m missing something.”
Flaxie nodded. “The imp knows a bit more than you do right now. Not to worry. You’ll know it, too, when you’re supposed to.”
“Right.” I took another deep breath, counting it in and out again. “That’s the part I’ve never been too crazy about. Hiding my own information from myself.”
“Standard stuff. But if it makes you that uncomfortable, we could go back in and put dummy data in the blanks.”
I shook my head. “It’s okay. It’s just kind of—” I shrugged. “Weird.”
“You think this is weird? Costume a road show sometime.” He smiled briefly and turned toward the system, reaching for something on the panel. Then suddenly he whirled and lunged at me, grabbing a fistful of my tunic. “Who are you, what do you want here?” he barked—
Just like that, we’re nose’to-nose. I let out a yell that blew back his eyelashes and most of his hair.
“Marya Anderik, I gotta thing about memories, anybody’s but mine, all right. That bother you, Blondie?” I got his wrist now. “Let go of me or I’ll make you eat this hand.”
He backed off. “Mersirte. Come on
up.”
“Wow,” I said, heart pounding. “That’s a hot one.” “It’s the usual setup—dual conscious reflex control for when she comes up and when she goes down again. Anyone addressing you directly with your real name can bring you up, but only you and I can bring the imp up. Anything you know won’t leak over to the imp unless you command it to. Certain situations might make you flash a little but considering what you’re supposed to be, nobody in the Downs is going to find your momentary lapse of attention unusual. You’d stick out if you didn’t fugue off or show a little petit mal once in a while. Come back when you want it taken off.”
He turned back to the system and busied himself with the settings. I let myself out. When I stopped at Sign-out to pick up some informant addresses (the imp had the names, concealed from me; I would only know where to find them), I found a message from Salazar ordering me to take a gun. There was no use trying to explain to her about the dangers of that false sense of security a gun gives you, let alone that there was no reason for my persona to run packed. Some supervisors you can’t tell anything, mainly the ones with no field experience. I checked a stinger out of Arsenal and mailed it interoffice to my desk, where it would arrive several hours after I hit the Downs. I had a few steel-pointed combs in my rat’s-nest coiffure; if they didn’t get lost in there, they’d be enough. If they weren’t, then I’d be beyond any help a gun could have given me anyway.
I was just, about to leave the building when I got another phone call, addressed simply to Sovay Case Of-Gcer. Damn that Salazarr I thought, picking up the sound-only receiver in the hall near Sign-out. How had she found out about the gun so quickly?
But it wasn’t Salazar. It was Sovay.
“How do I know you’re Sovay?” I said.
The man on the other end of the line laughed weakly. “I guess you don’t. But trust me, that’s who I am. I’m trapped in this, uh, I don’t know what he is. It’s a he, I can tell you that much. I don’t know where I am or why—”
“You said, already. Can’t you give me a description, a name, anything?”
“It’s all jumbled up in here. It was better back in that other place. I had no body so I just re-created everything in my head. No, I didn’t have a head. You know what I mean, though. You have to, you’re the Brain Police.”
“Just try to remain calm.” The officer on Sign-out duty slid me a chair and a scratch pad while someone else went to get a terminal so I could trace the call. “What seems to have happened is, the mindsuckers who took your mind sold you off to someone intact. But the implant didn’t take very well and you’re fighting for dominance instead of being assimilated—”
Another weak laugh. “No, that’s not it. I mean, they think that’s it. Or they thought that was it. But I’m back there, too.”
“Back where?”
“In the other place. Where I had no body.”
I hesitated. I should have taken this call in my office, but I risked having him hang up in the time it would have taken to sprint back there.
“It’s true,”
he went on, a little breathlessly. “I’m waiting back there, playing for time. I don’t know where that is, though. I sent me out—that J sent this me, I mean—intending to get help. The me back there has no way of knowing if J, this talking to you, succeeded or just went crazy or what.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m not sure—”
He sighed heavily. “They keep trying to send me out, sell me off. Me, just the one person. So I create one of my characters and send him out. Do you see? I’m Sovay-in-character, a character from one of the plays I’ve done. Do you see now?”
I saw. You see all kinds of things in the Brain Police. A disembodied, self-replicating mind was a more bizarre sight than usual, but stranger things have happened. Probably.
“Okay. Which character are you?”
“No, listen, this is important. You have to understand that I’m not the Character. I’m Sovay’s interpretation of that character. Do you understand the difference?”
“I’m not sure. Just tell me which character from which play.”
“Dennie Moon from Brickboy. It’s great, about a quiet guy who serves as the living museum of his family’s memories. He takes all the most significant ones before any of the relatives die, and he’s got them from three generations. But now he’s hit his storage capacity and he’s got to stop and let someone else pick it up. His successor is his daughter and he’s caught in this three-way conflict where he’s jealous because he can’t do it anymore but also he realizes it can be a painful experience and she’s still very young. But he also wants to keep it all in his own line of descent—really powerful piece of work.” He gave a happy sigh. “The character’s a good learning role for an actor.”
A small light went on in my head. “Ah. Okay, I want you to concentrate—”
“I am concentrating. I have to, just to stay up.”
“Concentrate harder and tell me why you chose to send Dennie Moon to the person you’re in right now.”