“So why am I valuable? What are you doing here?”
Yuri took out a card and told Boris to spray a picture of Horatio on it. When he put it on the table next to the beer, Conrad gave it a cursory glance.
“Did you match him?” Yuri asked.
“No.”
“Okay, I’ll accept that for now. But it’s a small market; there can’t be many of you.”
“Is that a question?”
“No. Actually, I’m quite impressed. A Turing above G-five can do a similar job as you, but it requires access to a thousand databases. But you, you just look. I find that fascinating.” His finger tapped the picture on the card. “What do you see?”
“Him? A nobody, which is something of a paradox considering how desperate you are to find him.”
“Not really. He genuinely is a nobody. Your problem is that he met someone who is most definitely not a nobody. So tell me, what do you see, what do you match, when you have a contract?”
“This is hypothetical, right?”
“I don’t give a shit about you. Your value is measured solely in the information you provide me today. There is no deal on the table here. So? What do you look for?”
Conrad’s hands came up to massage his temple. “All right, it goes like this. You have a client, someone who wants information on a company, maybe for a share short, some corporate shit, and—”
“No.”
“What?”
“I don’t want a company scam. I’m a serial killer, a rich fuck who’s more twisted than any politician. The cops are closing in, and I need to escape.”
“What?”
“I need a new body. One I can transplant my brain into.”
“Oh, no. No no no! Do not do this. You have no idea who you’re fucking with.”
Yuri leaned in closer, his skin warming with excitement. Conrad’s reaction was the first indication that brain transplants might really be happening.
Conrad, of course, saw his reaction, and winced. “Walk away, pal. Tell your boss or whoever it is pulling your strings that you got it wrong. These people you’re asking about, they won’t respect who you are. You’ll wind up with someone like Cancer on your arse, or worse.”
“I didn’t think there was anyone worse than her.” Yuri knew all about Cancer—so called because she always got her victim in the end; a black ops specialist for the extremely wealthy, but illegitimate, playa. She’d never taken a contract that hadn’t been fulfilled, and never a contract from anyone remotely legitimate—presumably to make sure it wasn’t an entrapment sting. She was feared and respected by everyone in the trade, and the dream arrest of every law enforcement official in the Sol system.
“Don’t do this,” Conrad pleaded.
“If it helps, think of me as Cancer’s opposite. You are my target. When you give me what I want, then—and only then—will this be over.”
“It’s a death sentence for both of us, you understand?”
“Completely. But just so you understand, if these people are not scared of me, then they’re exceptionally stupid.”
“Fuck you! Look, this deal, what you’re asking for, it’s rarer than unicorn shit, okay?”
“What? Snatches for a brain transplant?”
Conrad winced, glancing around nervously. “Stop saying that. I don’t know what the client wants these people for, okay? It’s weird, but it pays well.”
“What people?”
“Low visibility people; that’s what they ask for. People so insignificant no one will ever notice when they go missing. There’s not as many as you’d think, actually.”
“So you don’t know for sure they’re being snatched for a brain transplant?”
“Listen, pal, we don’t exactly have contracts, you know.”
“Okay, so why get so twitchy whenever I mention brain transplants? What do you know? Are they real?” Yuri had to work hard at keeping the enthusiasm out of his voice.
“I just think it through, you know,” Conrad said edgily. “Working out the options. You gotta watch out for yourself in this trade, make sure nothing comes back to bite you. So when I look hard at some of the aspects I have to take into account, that kinda narrows the options, see?”
“All right, how does this work? Exactly? Tell me—all of it.”
“Okay, it plays like this: You’ve committed a serious crime, something the authorities are never going to quit on—like you said, a serial killer or pedophile, totally bad shit. The only way out for you is a fresh body for your brain, just like on the drama games. That way, not even a DNA sample can show who you really are, because cops only ever sample the body, saliva, or blood, semen a lot of the time—but never the brain. So the deal goes down, and I get the word, a request to match, along with the condition that they have to be low visibility. Now what else, apart from a brain transplant, could it be?”
“Right. What else do they want, apart from low visibility?”
“My client gives me a picture. It’s not an actual image, a photo file, or anything like that. This picture, it’s a description, a data sketch. Height and weight combination, skin color, hair color, eye color. That’s the basic parameter.”
“I don’t get it. Why would a criminal want to look the same? Why not go for someone who looks different?”
“Rejection. Come on; that part’s obvious! This is the mother of all transplants, so I figure you have to have the greatest match possible. Physical traits are a good baseline. I see someone who matches the picture, and I start to assess them. Are they basically healthy, are they overweight? Stuff like that. It’s amazing what you get to recognize. Some people are walking beacons for what’s happened to them. Accidents make them flinch at the smallest things. Careful around food, they’ve got allergies. It’s all there in the posture, you know? Once I have a potential, then secondary factors kick in, which are even more important. The biggest is: Is anyone going to care if they vanish? That rules out the rich, and most of the middle class. So I look for what they wear, where they live, what sort of places they visit, the kind of people they’re hanging out with. All these are big indicators of who a person is. So I work it down to maybe ten possibles and get physically close enough to snatch their altme code when they go online—which everybody is, all the time. Once I have that, an e-head friend grabs their digital profile for a real exam. Eighty percent of the time I’m right and they’re nonentities. Dig a little deeper, and they have awkward links—a good job, a big set of friends, things that make vanishing them different. So after you’ve run those filters, you’re left with maybe three or four. Then you step it up a level and go for their medical records. That’s when we find out blood type and any congenital conditions. There’s normally a genome sequence as well, which gets reviewed by specialist algorithms for biochemical compatibility. If they’re optimum, I’ll pass the file on to my client, and I’m out with a nice fat bonus.”
“Your client always asks for medical data?”
“Yes, of course. That’s something else that’s telling me what’s actually going down. I mean, what else could they need that for, right? And I’ll tell you something: Crime isn’t race specific. All these requests have been really varied.”
“All, the requests? I thought you said this kind of snatch was rare.”
Conrad flinched. “It is. Compared with the other matches I make.”
“So these rare cases—your victim is taken away and killed?”
“The body’s still walking around.”
“You know what you are?”
“Yeah yeah: inhuman, a psycho. Call me a bastard to my face, please. This is a tough life, pal. We all do what we have to.”
“No, none of that. I’m beyond insults in your case. You’ve just described yourself. Who would ever notice or care if you disappeared?”
“Fuck you!”
&n
bsp; “Okay, we’re almost finished. Who is your client? Who puts in the order for a match?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Does my face match someone who’s kidding right now? Give me the name.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Can and will. Don’t make me ask again.” Yuri watched with cold amusement as the warring emotions played across Conrad’s face. Fear dominated.
“If I do this—”
“When,” Yuri said.
“I’m protected, right?”
“Oh, yeah. Just like doctor-patient confidentiality; I signed the oath and everything. Give me the fucking name, dickhead.”
Boris sprayed the incoming file across his tarsus lenses: Baptiste Devroy.
Yuri got up and walked away without another word, heading for the nearest hub out of the six on the bridge.
“Do you want Conrad’s Connexion account reactivated?” Boris asked.
“Yes. Let him into the hub network again, but have the tactical team intercept him. He is to be dropped on Zagreus today.”
“Confirmed.”
“Then get me a complete profile on Baptiste Devroy, and run a cross-reference with Althaea; I want to know why the fake Tarazzi van went there. When you get that, send the file straight to Jessika; she can start checking it out. Oh, and put another tactical team on standby for me, a dark one. As soon as we have a location on Devroy, they’re to bring him in to the Glastonbury safe house. I’ll talk to him there.”
“Processing now.”
Yuri ducked into the nearest hub and walked around the loop until he came to a major junction. It had a private access to Connexion’s internal network. From there it was five portals until he was walking out of the company’s Geneva headquarters. The heat wave seemed to be Europe-wide; it was just as hot and humid walking Geneva’s streets as it was in London. It took him three minutes to get to the Olyix European Trade and Exchange embassy on the Quai du Mont Blanc. Baptiste Devroy’s file splashed up on his lens within the first twenty seconds. He was rumored to run a crew for the Woodwarde Macros, a south London gang that was rumored to deal in biosynth narcotics. Also rumored to have killed a rival gang soldier two years ago.
“Too many rumors,” Yuri told Boris. “Do we have anything concrete?”
“His criminal activities are coming from the London Metropolitan Police gang intelligence task force files,” Boris replied. “Legally, they cannot confirm his activities without proof. The information they’ve gathered on him has come from informers, and is not admissible in court.”
“Fucking lawyers,” Yuri muttered under his breath. “Do you have a location on him?”
“He has a flat in Dulwich Village. According to his Connexion account, he exited the hub on his road at twenty-three forty-seven hours last night. He has not used the account again so far today, which implies he’s either at home in the flat or within walking distance. The tactical team are en route to Dulwich. Their G7Turing is reviewing local civic surveillance, and they will ping his altme before entering the flat to confirm his location before they intercept.”
“Okay, keep me updated.”
The Olyix European Trade and Exchange embassy was a modern nine-story structure of glass and concrete, facing the Jet d’Eau out in the lake. As well as two armed Swiss diplomatic police outside the doorway, there were twin security pillars who scanned Yuri as he walked past them. The police waved him in.
Stéphane Marsan was waiting for him inside—an elegantly suited Frenchman who served as a technology liaison officer for the aliens.
“Thank you for arranging this at such short notice,” Yuri said as they went through the decontamination suite.
“Happy to oblige,” Stéphane said, pressing his antique black glasses back onto his nose. “The Olyix are sensitive to any abuse of their technology.”
Decontamination wasn’t as intense as Yuri was expecting. A room with big glass doors at both ends was filled with a mist that he had to stand in for two minutes, eliminating the microbes clinging to his clothes—the kind that saturated the city air. Light heavy with UV shone down on him.
On the other side, the temperature was several degrees colder than outside. The embassy had its own life-support mechanism; no alien air was released into Geneva’s atmosphere, and vice versa.
A lift took them up to the fifth floor. When the doors opened, dry, spicy air wafted in. Yuri peered around curiously. The fifth floor was different from the rest of the building, which mainly housed human-style offices. In front of him was a wide open space, with a hologram ceiling of an alien sky. Two huge gas giants hung above him, one with a vivid emerald cloudscape, the other more like Saturn but without the rings. Both had a plethora of moons, every one of them different, from planetoids locked under ice oceans to smog-smothered continents studded with sulfur volcanoes, from barren mono-deserts to jungle hellholes.
“Is that…?” Yuri began.
“Their original home world?” Stéphane finished for him. “Non. It’s an enhanced Jim Burns picture; they bought the rights to the original. Something about it appealed to them.”
Yuri shook his head. Just when you thought you had a handle on the Olyix, the universe twisted ninety degrees and took it away from you again.
There were several of the aliens lumbering about the room. The main bulk of an Olyix was a fat disk two meters in diameter, with a semi-translucent skin that revealed a great many purple organ shapes lurking inside. The thin curving fissures between them were filled with thick fluid, which pulsed slowly around the body, and always made Yuri slightly queasy. Five stumpy legs emerged from the underside, with the forward limb nearly twice as thick as the other four. Clearly visible within each leg were helixes of muscle bending and flexing around a dark central rod of gristle. The wide hooves lacked the elegance of the legs with their sophisticated flexibility, which for some reason always made Yuri think of a donkey clopping along.
He watched carefully as one approached—and yes, each footfall was cumbersome, thudding down loudly on the marble floor. That was to be expected; not one of the weird creatures weighed less than 150 kilograms. There was a broad oval head above the body, and a fat ring-neck provided it with limited mobility. The nose extended to the circumference of the body, with a bulging gold-tinted compound apposition eye on the upper surface. At the front of the body’s midsection was a flaccid skirt of clear tissue hanging down, which put Yuri unnervingly in mind of a loincloth of jellyfish. The lucid substance formed a shape mimicking a human hand and extended it toward Yuri on the end of a stubby tentacle.
Yuri clenched his jaw against the revulsion he knew he was about to experience and put out his hand. The Olyix flesh flowed around his palm, feeling like oiled velvet that had just come out of a fridge. He smiled as he shook hands. Someone had explained the whole human etiquette routine to the Olyix when their arkship arrived in the Sol system, and the aliens had swiftly incorporated the correct formal procedures into their dealings with people ever since. Privately, Yuri wished a prankster had got there first and shown them Star Trek’s Vulcan salute instead.
Boris reported a link being opened. “Pleased to meet you, Director Alster,” the Olyix’s vocalizer unit said in a husky female voice. Another attempt at endearment. If you were male they used a female voice, and vice versa. Yuri wondered why nobody had ever bothered explaining political correctness to them. Pick a gender and stick with it, guys. The aliens themselves were indefinable by human standards in both biology and gender. Every Olyix defined itself by its mind, which was always distributed between its quint: five bodies linked via a form of quantum entanglement between the neural structure of its separate brains.
“That’s just Yuri, please,” he said, withdrawing his hand as soon as politeness allowed.
“Of course. My quint designation is Hai. I personally am Hai-3.”
�
�Thank you for agreeing to see me, Hai-3.” Yuri resisted the impulse to look around the room and guess which, if any, of the other Olyix bodies were also Hai. An Olyix quint always kept at least a couple of itself on board the Salvation of Life, their arkship.
“I am happy to assist. Your message indicated you proceed with some urgency.”
Yuri glanced at Stéphane. “That is correct.”
“You need me gone?” Stéphane asked.
“This could be quite sensitive.”
“Officer Marsan has our full confidence,” Hai-3 said.
“Okay. I’m tracking a missing human, who may be a case of an illegal brain transplant. So I need to know if such a thing is theoretically possible, and the critical component behind the theory seems to be Kcells, which would be used to reconnect the nervous system. Is it possible to use them like that?”
A slow ripple made its way along Hai-3’s loose flesh, tracking left to right. “This is most unfortunate,” it said. “We have heard rumors of our Kcells being misused in this fashion.”
“That’s all we have as well, rumors and conspiracy theories. Which is why I’m here. I need to know once and for all if it is real.”
“Have you any proof of this allegation?” Stéphane asked flatly.
“Nobody is making allegations,” Yuri countered quickly. “Nor leveling charges of illegality. Right now, I have a kid I need to find—and fast. So I need to eliminate as many possibilities as I can, so I’m not wasting time. That’s all.”
“Once we heard claims of this abuse, our growthmasters looked into the process,” Hai-3 said. “From a theoretical viewpoint only. We wished to see if it was indeed possible.”
“Of course. And is it?”
“Without actually using a test subject, we cannot give a definitive answer.”
“Best guess will do for me.”
“Our simulation indicated it would ultimately be possible to transplant a human brain from one body to another, given the correct circumstances.”
“What are those circumstances?”
“That the host and donor bodies would have to share a very similar biochemistry, extending far beyond simple blood type matching. The most ideal match would be between humans in the same family.”
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