by Corey Ostman
The floor plan showed two street level entrances. One was just around the corner, and Raj noted only a single scanner port with minimal surveillance. As he peered through the windows, he saw why: the building was abandoned. The entranceway had a few items of outdated office furniture strewn haphazardly against a wall. Raj checked his data: Holist was still renting, and had been for years. Compstate categorized it as a research facility. Hmmm.
At least he wouldn’t have to enter through a ventilation duct this time. Raj used his grafty to activate the mechflesh of his left hand. It could duplicate the surface of any hand Raj had ever shaken. He hadn’t sold the patent yet. It was too useful to him during the liquid computer negotiation. Eventually he suspected it would make him a tidy sum from compstate.
He ran a search through his hand’s memory. The list was long: he’d pawed over a hundred hands in the last month alone. A search for likely ITB employees turned up a list of fifty-two. Raj clarified: ABANDONED. Twenty-two options. He looked at Tim. Even if this wasn’t an important building, a false attempt at entry might give them away.
The PodPooch flashed a repairman working on a machine and a janitor mopping a hallway before his face reset. Raj nodded in understanding. MAINTENANCE. Three possibilities remained. Raj recognized one of the men as a regular at a bar across from his lab. He had a beer with him last week. The guy had complained about being overworked because he serviced too many buildings.
“Here goes,” he said to Tim, as his hand tingled into a new configuration. He started to place his left hand on the scanner, then stared in dismay. It was an ancient model: right hands only. Raj clenched his left hand in a silent scream of frustration.
The scanner pad went dark, and Raj felt a tug at his coat, drawing him back.
“Hit her, Raj. Now!” Tim shouted.
Raj acted on pure instinct. His natural bicep flexed. His left hand, still balled in a fist and hard as steel, flew. He hit the jaw of a woman exiting the building.
Tim ran around Raj and blocked the door open before the woman, unconscious or worse, crumpled to the floor. Raj leaned over her, terrified he had hurt her, guilty he had acted without thinking.
“Matilda Cassel,” Raj said, recognizing her face.
“I know. I saw her ptenda send. She would have recognized you,” Tim whispered, slipping in past Raj.
“We should drag her in,” Raj said, putting his hands under her shoulders.
“Come on, then.”
The door clicked shut behind them. Raj laid Cassel on one of the shabby couches. A bruise was already purpling her cheek. He shook his head, regretful. She worked in medical acquisitions for ITB. He’d liked her, back when he thought he could work with the company.
“Raj!” Tim hissed.
“Right, coming.”
Away from the foyer, there were no lights. At first, Raj couldn’t see. He blinked his upgraded lids and the IR sweep ghosted on his retinas.
“All clear,” he whispered.
They moved down the dark hallway. The building was painstakingly spare and clean. Most of the doors opened to empty rooms. A few were locked and echoed hollowly when he tried them. Large power conduits hung overhead with no insulation or cosmetic disguise. Raj heard the hum of machinery somewhere ahead and perhaps above. The hum grew louder as they walked.
One of the closed doors was clearly marked as a stairwell entrance. The power conduits flowed above the stairwell door and disappeared in the wall.
“Let’s go up,” Raj said.
The stairwell was lit in a soft blue light. Tim started up the stairs. Raj paused, noting the power conduit: it appeared on the stairwell wall and ran up to the third floor. Raj rested his mechflesh hand on the conduit and sensed eight hundred volts at four hundred hertz, an unusual potential for an abandoned building.
Would it be as easy as following a string? Raj went up to the third floor, cautiously opened the door, and glanced beyond.
A wall of glass shimmered in the bright light, visible through the first door in the hallway. Glimpses of chairs and equipment, all recent tech and design. A few more steps, and Raj was standing in the doorway.
“Mango,” he whispered to Tim in reserved triumph.
It was an observation room, with rows of empty plastic seats facing a large glass wall. Beyond the glass was an operating room and laboratory, well-stocked with equipment and dominated by a closed medical pod. The pod was active.
Tim sniffed. “No perimeter alarms, Raj,” he said. “We can enter.”
“Just me, Tim. Stay here in case you need to LEMP somebody. You fire in the lab and you’re liable to kill whoever is in the pod.”
Tim sat on his haunches as Raj turned to open the door. The hum was loud, now. Raj walked over and looked at the displays.
He pegged it as a surgical modification unit: crude, but functional. Judging by the machines surrounding the pod, somebody had been modified and now recovered post-op.
Or was someone in the middle of a process requiring no attendants? He looked at the screens surrounding the pod. According to them, the operation had only recently begun. It was scheduled to run for another seven hours. Life support showed the patient perfectly fine and entirely unconscious.
Raj felt a twinge of professional anger. Vitals might be monitored from elsewhere, but an attending surgeon and technicians should be present. Standard procedure dictated several attending technicians to pull the plug if anything went wrong.
Raj peered inside the pod as robotic surgeons proceeded with their modifications. He desperately hoped he wouldn’t recognize the patient within.
Instead, he saw a pale, familiar face.
“Grace,” he exhaled.
Was she that badly hurt in the blind bang? Raj hoped it was just a repair job. He hoped ITB was at least good for that. But as he read the computer displays, it was clear Grace wasn’t being repaired. She was being damaged.
“No!” Raj’s fingers flew over the touch screen controlling the pod. A bead of sweat rolled off his forehead and dripped on the surface.
“It’s Grace, isn’t it?” Tim spoke from the doorway.
“Grace. Some kind of malware operation. Cripple and maim.”
“The alarms will sound once you stop it.”
“Yes.” Raj kept working.
“Can you carry her?”
“She should be easy to hoist out…” Raj paused. “Hell.”
“We can’t carry her back to the lab.”
“This is a medical facility: see if you can find any wheelchairs. I’ll wait. I can’t turn this off completely, or someone will be notified. We have to be ready to run.”
Tim turned. Raj kept working.
“Raj,” Tim said, “besides being unconscious, is she okay?”
“She’s stable, whatever that means.”
“If you connect Grace’s medical port to me, I think I can control her body. I still remember how humans walk, and anybody who glances our way will just think she’s taking me for a stroll.”
Raj visualized the conduit extending from Grace’s wrist to Tim’s neck. “A leash.”
“Exactly. And all we need to do is walk as far as a mover.”
Raj turned to the controls. The procedures were in holding mode. He had to make this fast. Raj shut down all of the operations he figured wouldn’t trip the alarm, and then turned off the pod completely, unsealing the hatch. He grabbed the cable extending from the port in Grace’s wrist and plugged it into the PodPooch chassis at the neck port.
A few seconds passed. Raj removed medical tethers and electrodes.
“I have control,” Tim said, then paused as if listening to a far away voice. “She isn’t happy about this.”
Raj looked down at Grace. Her eyes were open, but her body was completely rigid.
“Grace probably isn’t happy about a lot of things, Tim. Let’s get out of here.”
Tim trotted back to the doorway and turned to focus on the pod. Grace’s legs quivered as she threw them over the
side of the pod. Then she stood up. It was wobbly at first, but she didn’t fall.
She was also nude.
“Naked,” Raj muttered, averting his eyes. “This’ll be a problem.”
“Your problem, Raj. I need to concentrate.” Grace began to walk toward the glass door.
Raj didn’t see anything resembling clothing nearby. He dashed into the observation room and spotted a blue tarp draped over a table. It would have to do. He grabbed the tarp and wrapped it around Grace. It didn’t look bad. It was still more conservative than the scraps some wore in Bod Town.
Grace’s body lurched toward the hall. Raj grabbed a semi-limp arm and slung it over his shoulder.
“I thought you said you remembered how to walk,” Raj said to Tim.
“I’ve never walked for two.”
“All the same, I don’t think we’re safe with the stairs. According to the floor plan, there’s a lift over this way.”
They lurched down the hall together, a jumble of crackling tarp. Raj punched the button for the first floor as they entered the lift.
“There was no lift where we entered, Raj. This is going to put us closer to the other door.”
“Can we go…” Raj trailed off as the door opened.
“Stop!” commanded a protector, unholstering his sidearm.
Raj stepped back, but there was nowhere to go. He took pride in planning contingencies, but he was trapped now.
“What’s the problem, protector?” Raj managed to stammer.
“Wilmer-13324-Epsilon. The perimeter alarm tripped; you are coming with me.” The protector was a young male in his early twenties. Judging by the shake in his voice and the twitch in his eyes, he hadn’t been on too many missions.
“Protector, we work here. Take your weapon off me and let me send you my ID,” Raj started to explain, but was interrupted as Grace’s body pivoted beside him. Her right foot made a fast horizontal arc and caught the protector’s weapon, sending it crashing to the floor. Wilmer lunged after Grace, but her hand, balled in a tight fist, struck the man across the temple. His body hit the floor.
“I always wanted to do that,” Tim said with satisfaction, “but I never had a decent enough body to pull it off.” Tim paused. “Ms. Donner wants to let us know we’re being sloppy. And her foot hurts.”
“As long as we get out of here.” Raj gathered the tarp from the floor and fitted it back on Grace.
The street in front of the building was deserted. Raj hastened them toward the main road, looking for a crowd or mover. Bod Town wasn’t far. A few blocks.
As they walked, some would glance at Grace but then quickly look away.
“Don’t worry about the gawkers,” Raj said to Grace as though conversing. “We enter Bod on the next block, and that tarp will look normal. Fashionable, even.”
Raj caught himself giggling nervously, and stopped.
“Left turn, next block,” he said. He wanted to give Tim plenty of warning. Any sudden course change might cause Grace to stumble. Or worse, fall.
They made the turn awkwardly, but Grace remained vertical. The Bod Town Gate opened its fanged maw before them, its neon eyes gleaming in the drizzle and fog.
Home. “We’ll head toward the loft, not the apartment,” said Raj. “There’s a medical pod there.”
He didn’t expect Tim to answer, but the PodPooch had been “born” in that loft. He’d know where to go.
They stumbled into Bod Town. Raj trailed behind the human-minded PodPooch and the protector with an AI-controlled body. He felt entirely too normal for his company.
Chapter 29
Maud growled to herself as she stepped off the walker pad. Her virtual walks on Mars usually relaxed her. Now, with Hopper on everyone’s lips, the sights of Mars offered no comfort. She kept wondering if the red planet would be the place of her exile, rather than her opportunity.
No, she thought. She was still in control. She had found the breach and isolated her original files. Donner had only introduced a few permutations into ITB’s network. She could fix that with time.
A smile played across her lips. Donner was paying for that. She would be finishing the initial phase of modification about now. Soon Red Fox’s best would be reduced to a mechflesh freak. That young face scarred with the cicatrix network of plastic and metarm, her arms threaded with grabbers and hydro drills, and a grafty hard-coded with a routine that routed scrambled sensory readings to her short-term memory. She’d never get any sleep without heavy tranquilizers.
She glanced at her ptenda. Get it over with, she thought. You said you’d message me. Do it.
She was just about to get back on the walker pad when the ptenda bleeped: LIFT 4R. DO NOT GET OUT.
There it was. Only twice before had she been summoned to Varghese’s sanctuary. The first time was shortly after he had assumed both the chairman and CEO roles of ITB. The second time was only three months ago, when rumors of the liquid computer surfaced in Port Casper.
Maud walked over to her desk. It was customary to go unarmed in the building, but she wanted a gun on her hip today. She pulled open the bottom drawer and removed her holstered phasewave. She pressed it to her side, and the metarm clamps of her body suit and the holster met and engaged.
She quickly surveyed her office. Would she be coming back here? Would she even make it back down from the penthouse? She let her right hand brush against the phasewave. Yes, she thought, I’ll at least make it back down.
Maud walked from the office and turned right. Lift 4R was at the very end of the hallway. There were five people waiting for the lift. She thought again of her phasewave. Please don’t talk to me. I cannot be held responsible for my actions.
She stopped in front of the lift and nodded to the others, clasping her hands behind her back, relieved to see that the lift was heading up. Maud hoped the phasewave might discourage fellow travelers, but when the lift opened, everybody stepped inside. She moved to a rear corner and fingered her ptenda for the top floor.
Four passengers got off midway.
At the top floor, the remaining man motioned for Maud to exit first. She shook her head and he stepped off.
She waited.
Two women approached the lift. She held up a hand and they stopped.
The door closed and the lift continued up.
Her ptenda pinged: EXIT THE LIFT.
The doors opened and she stepped into sunlight. She stopped and waited for her eyes to adjust. The lift doors closed.
Maud looked around. Where was he? The garden was in full bloom now, much different than her last visit, when the roof was barely green. Now, the lawn popped with wildflowers and the wet stone pavers had bright green moss in their cracks. The trees, brown skeletons before, now shimmered with leaves in the gentle breeze.
Maud heard the fountain beyond the dwarf maple. She walked around it, her hand on her phasewave, and there he was. Varghese sat under the grape arbor that encircled the pond. He was in a lotus position at the water’s edge, his arms extended along his thighs. His eyes were closed, his head upright.
Maud closed the distance quickly, silently. As she crossed beneath the arbor, she saw a loafer patrolling just beyond the roof. Then she spotted two more. Vision for his closed eyes.
“Thank you for coming, Maud,” Varghese said.
“Good morning, sir.”
“Please,” he gestured for her to sit, his eyes opening.
Maud relaxed. She knew his body language. Varghese was in a good mood. She sat down beside him.
“Tea?”
Varghese gestured to a bamboo tray with an ancient blue porcelain tea service. Maud found herself grateful for his love of tea. She couldn’t imagine a meeting like this with a cup of coffee.
Varghese poured out, handing one cup to her and leaving the other on the tray.
“Maud, now that we’re pushing Wyoming Compstate for full recognition of AIs, I wanted to talk to you about the Hopper initiative.”
She nodded again, letting hi
m speak. It bothered her that he spoke about artificial intelligence so calmly. A month ago, he’d have fired anyone who suggested investing in the legal nightmare to make AI acceptable. My idea, she screamed inwardly. You took it and now you’re preening as though Hopper were yours.
Varghese folded his hands. “Now more than ever, it’s critical that you get the liquid computer,” he said. “We can begin building AIs for Earth market immediately: we’ve got plenty of inventors willing to share contraband ideas. But I want our AIs to be liquid. There will be a lot of artificials on the market when the laws change, but an AI in liquid form will destroy the competition. My next compstate speech will start the ball rolling. The second speech will bring about the vote and we’ll be ready to sell.”
She almost felt pity for him. He was ambitious, determined—and stupid. She put Hopper on Mars because legal AI on Earth was next to impossible. ITB would not get AIs to market on Earth. Not in the next quarter, not in the next decade.
“Aren’t you worried about steelback protests? Mechflesh protests in general?” she asked.
Varghese laughed, reaching for his cup. “They can always find work in the Belt. We’d be happier if they left Earth, wouldn’t we?”
I’d be happier leaving too, she thought.
“But once you change the law, wouldn’t Mars be able to swoop in and start selling? They have ready-made AI that they could sell much cheaper than—”
“No, Maud. The creaky robots on Mars would be no match for the liquid computer. Remember what Gobi found? The interconnects are two orders of magnitude finer than what we have up here,” he said, tapping his head. “Don’t think about Mars.”
She looked into his eyes. He smiled, but his eyes were cold.
Don’t think about Mars.
Varghese leaned forward and put his cup down. She saw his furtive glance at her phasewave. He grabbed a pebble and threw it into the pond.