by Nas Hedron
Nor does Porsche resemble her aimless, self-destructive mother—not at all. She’s focused, ludicrously ambitious, self-controlled, and controlling of others. She uses her father’s name as a key to open doors to innumerable deals—sim roles, recording contracts, product endorsements—which inevitably fall apart before they’ve begun or stutter to an abortive end partway through because her talent at anything artistic is inversely proportional to her greed. All she has going for her, apart from naked avarice, is her looks.
She was born beautiful, but that isn’t enough for her. She’s had herself enhanced to the point that it’s hard to believe she’s a real person and not an erotic cartoon character. She is stacked and wasp-waisted, with shimmering blonde hair, icy blue eyes, and perfect skin. At twenty-four—not exactly ancient to begin with—she has the body of a sixteen year old cheerleader crossed with a porn queen. The only flaw in her appearance is her face: it should be beautiful, but it betrays her soul a little too openly. Her lips are thin, and usually wear an expression that is either haughty or overtly cruel. Her eyes are narrow and piercing. She looks like what she is, a spoiled little rich girl for whom nothing is ever enough.
Her face makes things difficult for me. I’ve met some beautiful women in my work, and been tempted by a few, but for whatever perverse reason it’s precisely this kind—the manipulative, selfish, shallow kind—that attracts me the most. I’ve never thought long enough about this to work out why it should be so. Maybe I’m a masochist. Or maybe the sheer transparency of women like that, the openness of their self-promotion, makes them seem more naked than other women can ever be. Or maybe I’m just fucked up. I could see a shrink, but introspection is not my forte. I sometimes indulge in self-analysis for a moment here and there, particularly after being fucked over by someone like Porsche who’s traded me in for a richer or better looking guy, but I can never stick with it. Maybe the real secret is that I’m just as shallow as they are.
In any event, that face is a problem, because she’s a suspect and I can’t afford to allow my perceptions to be clouded by my hormones. To make matters worse, her appearance isn’t the only thing she’s had augmented. Porsche Prince is dedicated to living the life her body is suited to. Her nerves have been finely tuned to enhance her responsiveness during sex, turning ordinary parts of her body into erogenous zones, and her erogenous zones into roiling seas of erotic sensitivity. I know this because everyone knows it. She makes no bones about her inclinations or the delicate surgical enhancements she’s undergone to allow her to indulge them with as much abandon as possible.
I’m examining some flowers I can’t identify when Porsche enters through the garden arch. She’s wearing jeans and a cut-off T-shirt that displays her tight midriff and rides high on the tide of her breasts, their undersides just visible. She throws herself full-length onto a sofa and lies on her side, one arm bent so that her hand supports her head. I sit in an armchair.
“So are you going to arrest me?” she chides. Her expression is somewhere between an amused smile and a sneer. “I’m not a cop,” I remind her.
“Oh, right, I forgot. You’re hired muscle.”
“Actually, it’s my brain Max is paying for.”
“Hmm.”
She says this in a non-committal way that could mean anything. It’s hard to know what to say in response to such an ambiguous sound.
“Anyway, arresting you isn’t an issue just now.”
She squints and adjusts herself on the sofa, her breasts bobbing and shifting. I swear I can smell the sex of her. I don’t mean perfume, but sex—funky, deep, and slick.
“You think it was me though.”
That’s one thing I love about bitchy women—directness. Sometimes it’s directness to the point of rudeness, or even cruelty, but at least they say what they mean. “I haven’t decided what I think yet, but yeah, you’re on the list. High up there.” She sits up and sighs as though she’s suddenly bored. “Well, let me save you some trouble so we can both get on with other things. It can’t be me.”
“Why is that?”
“You haven’t done your homework, have you?”
“I just got here. My first job was to check house security.”
“Look, Max is too brain-dead to talk to, but if you ask James—the lawyer?—he’ll tell you. I’ve had augmentation.”
“I know that. Everyone knows that. I don’t see how it’s relevant.” I have every intention of talking to James Jerome, Max’s lawyer, but he’s out of town this morning. I have an appointment with him later today.
“What you don’t know is that not all of the augmentation was by choice. Max started getting paranoid long before he went totally wacko, you know. He’s always been worried about people coming after his money. My mom was no threat—she was too wasted to tie her own shoes, much less pull off some kind of palace coup—but he thought I might be trouble eventually, so one day when I was seven years old he bullied her into having me wired up.”
She lets that sink in for a moment. The invasiveness of forced neural controls, her young age, the ineffectual mother, the absent father, and the paranoid, manipulative grandfather. It’s an unthinkably ugly scenario.
“He’s a gross old fuck and he makes me sick and yes, I want all his money. I can’t wait until he pops one pill too many and his greasy heart bursts in his chest.” She pauses here to smile sweetly at me. “But the wiring they put in me won’t let me do anything about it. If he hit me—which he never does, I don’t even think he remembers I exist half the time—but if he ever did hit me, I wouldn’t be able to hit him back. I couldn’t even ask someone else to hit him for me. I can barely think the thought of hitting him without starting to feel nauseous. And if I ever held the thought long enough to get past the nausea, it would turn into pain, then whole-body muscle cramping, then complete paralysis, then unconsciousness. And that’s just the thought of slapping him. You can imagine what it’d be like if I thought something worse.”
I nod, not saying anything. I act as though I accept her explanation at face value, but the truth is that there are sometimes ways to get around that kind of nerve-job, especially if you have an allowance as generous as Porsche’s. You can even have it put back to its original state afterward so that no one will know it’s been tampered with.
Porsche stands and brushes imaginary dirt off her perfect ass. The pale light of the garden, filtered through the foliage, plays across her skin and, for a moment, I can’t prevent myself from thinking about what that skin would feel like. She starts out of the garden then, walking past me as she goes. On the way she stops and runs her finger along my forearm, letting it hesitate at the last tattoo.
“Tijuana,” she says, leaving it at that.
I nod, not trusting myself to say anything. Porsche gazes at the tattoo, stroking it with two fingers.
“So was it a rush, Tijuana?”
“It was a Brace and Erase. I don’t remember.”
It’s a lie, of course, and my traitor brain punishes me by allowing a little taste of Tijuana to seep in around the edges of reality. The heavy, almost gentle thup—thup—thup of helicopter rotors slowly bleeds into my world, blending with the rustle of the leaves in the garden. I don’t see the past just yet, but I can hear it and I can smell it—the heavy, soft air of Mexico. It smells like heaven as long as you’re upwind of the dead.
“Hmmm, Brace.” Porsche says, almost chuckling. “Pharmacological sociopathy.” She enunciates the last words slowly, rhythmically, as if she’s tasting them as she says them. “I wonder what that would be like.”
“Along with Erase,” I manage to say, trying to ignore the shouts of the imaginary squad rushing out of the hallucinated Jenny, boots thumping to the ground. “You don’t remember afterward.”
She flicks her eyes up to meet mine, smiles a little.
“You never remember? Not even a little?”
“No.”
I must hesitate fractionally before I answer, or maybe my intonation is off.
I can see in her eyes that she doesn’t believe me.
“Nothing? I would have thought that it wasn’t possible to forget something like that, not completely. All that mayhem?” The expression on her face is serious, but the undertow in her voice is appreciative, like someone at a wine tasting.
“It’s not a matter of forgetting.” I force myself to focus on Porsche’s face and the sounds of the Tijuana deployment retreat a little, although I can still smell the night desert. “Erase prevents you from forming long-term memory in the first place. There’s nothing to remember.”
“And it works every time, all the time?”
I don’t bother to lie this time, just shake my head. I say nothing, but it doesn’t seem to make any difference. Porsche’s very practiced at reading people and right now she’s reading my shame.
“Oh come on,” she says matter of factly. “Pangs of conscience? Seriously? I mean, you enlisted. You’re not going to tell me you didn’t know what you were getting into.”
“James tell you how old I am?”
She shakes her head.
“I was born in seventy-one.”
She shrugs.
“Twenty-seventy-one.”
She gets it quickly and her face lights up.
“You’re a revenant!”
Her glee seems as real and guileless as a child’s. The sunshine of it dispels the last of the Mexican memories. It’s a relief to see and hear and smell nothing but the garden around me.
“Yes, I am.”
“That’s, like, a hundred and fifty years?”
She’s canny, but math is not her strong point.
“Closer to one-seventy-five.”
“So—what?—when you were growing up California was just some state? Did you actually go through the Fall?”
“No,” I shrug. “I flatlined in a car accident and they stuck me in stasis. We didn’t have shells yet, so that was the best they could do. I missed everything.”
It’s clear that Porsche lives for novelty. Before I had bored her, but meeting someone who was alive during the American Empire has her wide awake and full of questions.
“Freaky.”
I laugh despite myself.
Porsche looks at me for a long moment. I didn’t raise the topic of my stasis just to entertain her—I had a point and I’m thinking about how to navigate toward it, but she bypasses all the details and jumps straight to the conclusion.
“You’re afraid of dying.”
I back away from the point a little.
“Everyone is.”
Her hair moves when she shakes her head.
“Not like you.” She takes a step toward me, closer than most people would stand. “You’re no soldier. I’d smell it on you.” She manages to make her judgment sound disdainful and sweet at the same time. “You died, more or less, right? Lost everything. You woke up and found yourself here.” She tilts her head. “Your family’s gone, dead. Everything in your world gone, dead. You were dead.”
I don’t answer, but she’s caught my scent all right and she knows it. She pokes me in the chest with her finger and drops her voice to a scratchy whisper.
“But death’s not going to get you again, am I right? Not if you can hold it off. So you join the Forces and you get this shell.” Her hand moves up and down me, casually brushing my military-issue body with her fingertips. “You could never have afforded this. You have skills two centuries old, what kind of a job are you going to get?”
“No job at all. Without the Forces I’d have been krill.”
“Yeah, but that’s not the point. Without the Forces you’d have been mortal,” she says, poking me again, but grinning at me this time, grinning at her own deductions, hateful and playful. “Now you have a top of the line shell and skills that might just let you buy a new one when this one ages out. But to get it you had to stomp on the peasants, cause pain, ruin lives, end lives, tear up families.” She’s still grinning. “What was so important in Tijuana anyway? It’s not like they have anything.”
“They have the border. Guiterrez was losing control of the population—too much rebellion. You can’t have that on the border. To Sacramento the border is like its own skin—you don’t want things happening that close. You could get an infection.”
“So you guys, what? Restored order? Disinfected?”
“That’s the way Sacramento talks about it. Look, your father must have other people who hate him, who want his money.”
I can’t talk any more about Tijuana, I need to change the subject back to the task at hand, but she waves my words away. The investigation bores her, but apparently I no longer do.
“What are you doing later?””
“Working, Porsche.”
“Do you ever stop working?”
“When I go to bed.”
“Bed? Perfect!” she says cheerily, and finally walks past me, leaving a trail of pheromones in her wake. My body stays where it is, ninety-nine percent certain she’s doing no more than toying with me, but my lust follows her out of the room anyway.
Four: 3% Threats and Paradoxical Data
James Jerome is nominally Max’s lawyer, but he is really far more than that. In the elaborate bureaucracy that manages Max’s money, his health, his temper, and a myriad of other details, Jerome is the unofficial ringleader, CEO, and unelected president-for-life.
He hires and fires the household staff, oversees the licensing and distribution of Max’s sims and audio recordings, decides what doctor or dentist can be trusted, invests Max’s money and doles it out to him, and administers Porsche’s trust fund. He was the one who hired me, although we haven’t met in person until today.
Jerome is one of the most competent and expensive lawyers in the state. The only thing his polished perpetual motion can’t achieve is to persuade his fat, unhealthy, aging charge to be decanted into a shell, or for that matter to have his weight surgically reduced, to go to a rehab center, or even to exercise. Everything else Jerome does with a competence bordering on mania.
Given his pathological need to manage every detail of Max’s life, the near-fatal shooting has upset him badly. He sees it as his failure—as indeed it is—and he doesn’t really know what to do with failure. I doubt he’s encountered it since the age of five. Now, as it slides its unwholesome caresses all over him, he has no plan ‘B’ to fall back on, so he does what comes naturally to him when anyone else fails: he gets angry.
I meet him in his office, which is in Cloud City, though not in the main house. Of the numerous buildings on the estate, Jerome has chosen a Victorian era house, transplanted brick by numbered brick from London, England at ridiculous cost and then reassembled here in California, as his home base. He lives upstairs, but the main floor is reserved for work. Despite the fidelity with which the exterior of the house has been reconstructed, Jerome seems to have found the rooms too confining because he’s knocked out all the interior walls on the ground floor. It makes for one hell of a space, and he is pacing its entire carpeted expanse.
“What progress have you made?” he asks me in the clipped tone of someone who is used to issuing orders and getting results. He is a tall man and is wearing a dark suit that fairly screams ‘I make more money than you do.’ Empire period Brooks Brothers I think, but I was no expert on high fashion even before the Fall, so I could easily be wrong. I try to pretend that his manner and tone don’t infuriate me.
“My tech is diagnosing the system now. I’ll know more about that side of things later. In the meantime I interviewed Porsche.”
He continues pacing and nods, his stylish grey forelock bouncing, but says nothing.
“She claims that she’s wired against harming Max,” I say.
Jerome waves his hand, as though a fly is bothering him.
“Forget her. She’s wired to the teeth. I’ve seen sims of the surgery and she has to submit to regular, random check-ups. The reports come straight to me.”
“What happens if she refuses a check-up?”
“No check-up, no allowance,” he says.
It’s my turn to nod. To judge by the involuntary smile, James Jerome wouldn’t mind cutting Porsche off at the knees, financially speaking. No love lost amongst parasites.
“I’ll need to talk to the AI,” I tell him.
“I know, I’ve already had him decanted into a shell to make interaction easier. He’s at the house with your tech now.”
“Him?”
For the most part being decanted in a human body is just an impediment for a security AI. It imposes a distractingly narrow point of view when the AI’s job is to mentally encompass the entire domain it protects, literally living within the cameras, the sensors, the alarm plates, the very wires themselves.
As well, the human body has somatic distractions: sleepiness, hunger, pain. A security AI is not at its optimum functionality if it has to stop what it’s doing every once in a while to piss.
But even though AIs generally remain incorporeal, or at least don't inhabit human shells, almost all of them are artificially gendered to make humans more comfortable in dealing with them. Nonetheless, they are almost invariably given female personas, since statistically both sexes seem to react better to them.
Jerome makes a face at my question, as though he’s tasted something and doesn’t like it.
“Max’s attitude toward women is about equal parts misogyny and fetishization. Gendering it as a male seemed less complicated.”
“What’s he called?”
“Hmm?” Jerome looks up from some thought of his own.