Alita

by Pat Cadigan

  Well, except him.

  He sometimes thought about actually calling her old number to see who, if anyone, would answer. He never did though—there was an ever-so-slight chance that Vector would answer, and Ido didn’t know what would happen if he heard that slick bastard’s voice answer the number she’d had when they’d still been together. He might scream or tear out his hair, break down and cry; his head might even explode, or he might just hang up without speaking. But no matter what he did, Vector would know that he’d got to him and that was the last thing Ido wanted. Vector had come out on top, just like he always did. He could ride around in his limo and tell himself he was the king of the world in his Factory penthouse. But he would never hear Ido say it.

  At least he never had to work for the son of a bitch again. No more long hours in the pits putting Paladins back together and Vector coming by supposedly to say, Nice job, you can expect a bonus, but in truth to stare at Chiren’s shapely behind like it was a steak and he hadn’t eaten for three days. Only when Chiren wasn’t looking, of course; it was a courtesy Vector hadn’t extended to Ido.

  Well, Chiren was on the menu now. Ido wondered if Vector had moved her in yet or whether he would go through the motions of courting her for a few days. No, he wouldn’t waste any more time locking down her services for his Motorball players. He probably hadn’t done sooner just to allow what he thought was a decent period of time since “the tragedy”. That was how Vector referred to their daughter’s death: “the tragedy”.

  Ido thought if he had ever heard Vector speak his daughter’s name, he’d plant the Rocket Hammer in his face. How smooth would he be after that?

  God, he needed something else to think about, something that wasn’t Vector or Chiren.

  “Shut up,” Ido told himself. “Work.”

  He had four replacement arms laid out on his largest workbench. Most of the components in each one were of the same generation or close enough that hesitation and drop-out wouldn’t be a problem for the cyborg. He’d found a way to make newer parts more backwards compatible with older parts, but some parts were just too old. He’d had some luck with rebuilding the older parts to fool them into thinking they were newer by resetting some of the interrupts. That was a new skill he’d taught himself quite recently. Dr Dyson Ido, cyber-surgeon, heavy on the cyber.

  The chip he was working on would make all the old fiddles and tricks unnecessary—he hoped. At the moment the chip was installed in a double arm he’d been upgrading for a musician. Hector played double-necked guitar and he made brilliant music with the vintage instrument. But then the signals for his fingering began scrambling on him. I know it ain’t life and death, Doc, and maybe nobody really needs to hear me playing classical pieces in the marketplace all day. But it’s a living—it’s my living, anyway. And if I can’t play, I might as well lie down and die.

  Without music, we all might as well lie down and die, Ido told him, meaning it. And it was a relief to work on something that had nothing to do with the Factory or bounty hunting.

  The guitar player’s double arm was highly complex; whoever had designed it had been a cut above the usual techie hard-head. This was the product of someone who knew something about music and musical instruments. When Ido had asked the musician about it, however, the man had been vague and obviously uncomfortable. Ido hadn’t pressed the matter. People in Iron City knew that talking too much never ended well. Ido could relate—he didn’t like answering questions about himself either. Besides, all he needed to know was right there in the arm.

  The chip worked well in the arm but only on the short term. Hector said he improvised a lot when he played; tests showed the chip would speed up the signals from his nerves a little too much, so that it would be more like the chip was playing the guitar than the man. A fast chip didn’t belong on a slow job. Ido had fixed the hardware to operate virtually free of conflicts, but Hector still had to come in and play while Ido fine-tuned him so he could get the kind of movement he wanted.

  The chip itself needed a lot more work. Speeding up nerve signals so movement felt as natural as it did for someone fully organic was a good idea in theory, but the chip kept jumping the gun. It would anticipate the next signals in the sequence, a little earlier each time. That was okay for a robot programmed to do one thing repeatedly. For a cyborg—a human being—the chip could get so far ahead of the nerve signals that it took over and the person lost autonomy and control.

  Chiren probably would have accused him of letting his perfectionist tendencies sabotage tech that was acceptable if not quite up to his lofty benchmark. The pursuit of perfection is the enemy of good, she’d told him more than once. He might have been more inclined to her point of view if she’d been talking about art, where there might be a million right answers or none at all. But Ido had always operated on the basis that there was an ocean of difference between good and good enough; settling for the latter when you could attain the former with more time and effort was—well—not good enough.

  Now Chiren could have everything her way. Good, good enough, functional for now—it was her call and no one would argue with her; Vector would just tell her to hurry up. Other than that, Vector would spoil her rotten with a laboratory full of nothing but the best, all stuff he’d skimmed from shipments bound for Zalem. He’d be as ostentatious about it as possible, to make sure Ido would know what he was missing now that he wasn’t working in the pits any more.

  And he did miss it. At first he hadn’t been sure he wanted to work on giant armoured cyborgs that dismembered each other while chasing a quirky motorised ball around a snaking track. He’d never watched any of the broadcasts on Zalem. But the game had hooked him faster than he cared to admit even to himself. Some kind of testosterone thing, he supposed; there were no activities in Zalem that involved extreme violence at high speed, nothing that would induce a man to feel like standing up and pounding his chest while he bellowed a challenge to the immediate world.

  Of course, this didn’t take the female players into account. Or Motorball’s popularity among people of any sex who weren’t given to displays of brute force.

  For Chiren it was pure escapism—she stopped thinking about where she didn’t live and what she didn’t have. If Vector had somehow been able to get his limo into the pit, Chiren would have turned it into a Paladin, no questions asked. She really was that good—better than Ido was. She liked having to think fast in the pressure cooker. She liked being the Paladins’ only hope, Hero to the Motorball Heroes, not the mother who got kicked out of heaven for producing a defective child.

  Ido wondered how much she had amped that up since she’d left him. How manic did she get? What did she have to do to get herself up there, and how did she come down afterwards?

  If she hadn’t been crazy before, she probably was now.

  Dammit, he’d sat down at the workbench to put her and Vector out of his mind. Ido took the chip out of the guitar-player’s double arm and replaced it with a more conventional type of controller, one that wouldn’t get ahead of the musician. He ran a brief diagnostic, with a sheet music subroutine, just to see the movement. Watching the fingers play invisible frets was a bit trippy but everything looked good.

  The next arm on the table had a hand that could be swapped for an array of surgical instruments. This one was for a nurse who’d been sideswiped by a truck; it had taken her left arm off at the shoulder. He was briefly acquainted with Gerhad—she’d sent a few patients from the ER his way, but that wasn’t the only reason he liked her. She was a very good nurse—you had to be to work in an emergency room—and she thought her career was over. What she made at the hospital wouldn’t have bought her so much as an elbow joint. Would she ever be surprised when he showed her what he’d cooked up for her. Ido really hoped she liked it, because he wanted to offer her a job too. What he made as a bounty hunter would be enough to tempt her with a better income than she had at the hospital.

  Getting a good nurse in to work with him would make his l
ife so much easier. He could train Gerhad as a full nurse-practitioner so she could prescribe lower-level drugs and prep patients for surgery. Together they could help more people than he could alone.

  Yeah. The Dyson Ido clinic: one-stop shop for all your cyber needs, lifeline for indigent cyborgs. Lives would not only be saved, they’d be improved; and all he’d have to do was collect one or two extra bounties per night—one or two extra heads. Dr Dyson Ido, life-saving cyber-surgeon by day, deadly Hunter-Warrior by night. Licensed by the Factory to kill. Where would you end up, under the knife or under the Hammer? Cure or kill? No refunds, all sales are final.

  Ido put his head in his hands. He could not let himself spiral. The last time had been that night, when he’d spiralled right out of his mind.

  He had been spiralling when he’d marched into the Factory to get a bounty hunter’s license. He’d looked calm enough to pass for normal, but then “normal” in Iron City was an extremely broad and highly vague designation. In any case, the deckman hadn’t challenged him and the Centurians hadn’t pointed their weapons at him. Apparently they hadn’t picked up on the fact that he was a hair’s breadth from losing his shit and screaming his grief and rage until his voice gave out. Or they’d determined that would pose no threat to the Factory.

  It probably wouldn’t have mattered if he’d come in stark naked, covered in mud and calling himself the Queen of May. As long as he directed any homicidal tendencies towards criminals with prices on their heads, he wasn’t their worry. Or maybe he was wrong and the Centurians would have shot him if he’d put a foot out of line. You never really knew with Centurians; you weren’t supposed to.

  In any case, they’d given him his license and told him to read the fine print on the back, which was the Hunter’s Code. That was all he needed to become one of Iron City’s Hunter-Warriors. Some of them were good men, like Master Clive Lee and McTeague with his Hellhounds. Others were cruel and violent, like Zapan, who seemed to spend all his money on plastic surgery.

  The rest were mostly ex-Motorball players, which answered a question he had never thought to ask—namely, what happened to those who washed out or got cut from the team?

  Back when he and Chiren had been busy building bigger and better Paladins, he’d never wondered about the players who never made the big time. Now he knew: if they didn’t end up on the street selling off parts for a fix of the performance drugs, they might get work as hired muscle in the ever-popular security industry. (If they were really lucky Vector would put them on his payroll.) Or they pulled themselves together and became Hunter-Warriors.

  Ido was one of the very few residents of Iron City who knew any real history—not just about the War, but also how things had been before that, when civilisation had been more orderly and regulated, and civil servants protected the weak and, if possible, prevented the strong from victimising them. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. There had been problems—the haves had so much more than the have-nots, and corruption had kept it that way. Other problems were inherent to the system—bureaucracy slowed the process of justice. People were convicted of crimes they hadn’t committed and spent years trapped in overcrowded prisons, and if they hadn’t been criminals when they’d gone in, they were when they came out… if they came out.

  Now there were only Hunter-Warriors and Centurians. Crimes against persons all had the same penalty, carried out either by a Hunter-Warrior or a Centurian. Case closed.

  With very few exceptions, Hunter-Warriors were only allowed to take the heads of those with markers on them. Once the identity was verified by the Factory, the hunter could collect the bounty and spend it at a Hunter-Warrior hang-out like the Kansas Bar. Poaching another hunter’s mark was expressly forbidden by the Hunter Code and was grounds for execution. That was as complicated as it ever got.

  Under this streamlined system, however, there was no provision specifically for the protection of the weak. In Iron City the best thing you could do was not be weak and hang around other people who were also not weak.

  As for the question of what Hunter-Warriors could do if they sustained any damage or serious injury in the course of taking down a mark, that was an easy one: you went to Doc Ido’s clinic and he’d fix you right up, even if you’d lost the bounty and couldn’t pay.

  This was quite a recent development, but it was in keeping with the original idea behind the clinic. Ido had met a lot of Hunter-Warriors that way, even before he became one of them—putting them back together, rewiring nervous systems, replacing ribcages and pelvic connectors. They were grateful and paid as and when they could, even tipping him off to an especially profitable mark to support the clinic.

  He was the total package: healer of cyborgs and killer of criminals. Dyson Ido, cyber-surgeon and professional contradiction. First, do no harm. That wasn’t actually part of the Hippocratic Oath. Neither was kill or cure.

  Well, it could have been worse, Ido thought, reaching for the third arm on his workbench. That was another feature of life in Iron City: no matter how bad anything was, it could always be worse. No matter how far down you fell, you’d find there was at least one more level lower than that.

  Well, unless you ended up with your head in a bag. Then you were done. You couldn’t fall off that floor.

  His daughter’s face appeared in his mind’s eye, pale, her lips a little blue from the exertion of pushing herself around in her chair. I’ll use the motor later, Daddy. I want to build up my arm muscles. Check it, my biceps are already bigger!

  Oh, yes, it could have been so much worse. His daughter hadn’t lived to see what a sorry pass he had come to. If she had, Ido wouldn’t have been able to look her in the eye.

  He put his head down on the workbench and let himself fall apart. It had been some weeks since the last time; he might as well get it over with so he could pull himself together and get back to work on these damned arms.

  Three hours later he woke to find he’d been tightly gripping one of the cyborg hands with his own, as if he’d needed to hold on for dear life. He raised his head and slowly let go of the cyborg hand. He uncurled his fingers slowly, absently aware his ribs hurt a lot more now.

  Thanks for the helping hand, he told the cyborg arm silently. Otherwise, who knows how far I would have fallen?

  CHAPTER 9

  “He lives!” Tanji said as Hugo joined him and Koyomi outside the CAFÉ café. “Your face looks better. More like a human’s.”

  “Thanks,” said Hugo. “Can’t say the same about yours.”

  Koyomi laughed. “Ooh, he gotcha!” She ran a hand through Tanji’s frizzy halo of hair. “And the ’do isn’t even warm after a burn like that. It’s a miracle!”

  Tanji pushed her hand away but without much effort. How much longer were the two of them going to dance around each other, Hugo wondered; they were starting to drive him crazy.

  Koyomi turned Hugo on the sidewalk so he was facing the late-afternoon sun. “Yeah, definitely a lot better,” she said, peering at his face. “I’d never know just by looking at you that you got beat up for your lunch money.” She frowned slightly. “Are you ever gonna tell us what really happened? Jealous boyfriend? Pissed-off cyborg?”

  Hugo grimaced. “Something stupider,” he said, then hesitated. Tanji and Koyomi were his closest friends. If he didn’t tell them about it, he’d never tell anyone. He hadn’t even told Ido the whole story; the doc had just patched him up, no questions asked, for which he’d been grateful. Some things he didn’t want to talk about. But he didn’t need one more thing to carry around all by himself.

  “Okay,” he said after a bit. “But this stays between the three of us. The rest of the crew doesn’t have to know.”

  Koyomi mimed locking her lips with a key while Tanji raised his left hand and put his right over his heart.

  “I was down in southie—” Hugo began.

  “On purpose?” Koyomi made an incredulous face. “Did your brain fall out of the holes in your head?”

  “If
you wanted to get beat up, you coulda just asked me,” Tanji said. “I’d’ve punched you out and saved you the trip. Unless you wanted to pick up lice too. That’s all they got in southie—beat-downs, lice and some incurable skin diseases.”

  Hugo sighed heavily. “Let me know when you guys are done.”

  “Gimme a second.” Tanji frowned as if he were thinking hard. “Yeah, I’m done. You?” He tugged one of Koyomi’s skinny braids.

  “I’m good for now.” She turned back to Hugo. “You were saying?”

  His friends listened as Hugo told them about the bracelet, although he left out the part about going to live with his brother and Nana and the drone that never was, saying only that he’d run away from home after his mother died. Tanji had already known Hugo’s father had been a TR but the whole thing was new to Koyomi. She looked so upset, Hugo was afraid she might cry. Neither of them gave him any grief about his swiping the bracelet off the woman’s arm, which surprised him. He’d expected Tanji at least to say something about the kind of people who took other people’s stuff, but his friend didn’t look even slightly disturbed by what he’d done.

  “I know, I shoulda stayed outta southie,” Hugo added after he finished the story. “I didn’t even really know where I was, just that I was by the trash pile, and that belongs to everybody.”

  “The south-town crew’s been trying to stake a claim on that part of the trash pile,” Tanji told him. “They’ve been hassling people picking there. They got into it a couple of times with the westies after they chased off one of their aunts or cousins or something.”

  Hugo winced. “Well, geez, don’t you think you coulda maybe mentioned this? Because if I’d’ve known, I’d’ve been more careful.”

  “You didn’t ask,” Tanji said coolly. “But you being our fearless leader and all, I’d’ve thought you already knew. Because you know everything, right? Including everything they do in southie.”

  Hugo gave him a look. “No, that’s your job. I’m your fearless leader. You’re supposed to tell me things.”