Altered Carbon

by Richard Morgan

  The Mongol made a noise in his throat. Jerry glanced across at him with faint distaste. 'No, not you. They're going places I don't want you to see. Don't worry, there'll be a disc.'

  'Sure, man,' said Deek over his shoulder. 'We'll bring it right back across.'

  'All right, that's enough,' said the woman roughly, moving to face me. 'Let's have an understanding here, Ryker. You got neurachern, so do I. And this is a high-impact chassis. Lockheed-Mitoma test pilot specs. You can't damage me worth a jack. And I'll be happy to burn your guts out if you even look at me wrong. They don't care what state you're in where we're going. That clear, Ryker?'

  'My name's not Ryker,' I said irritably.

  'Right.'

  We went through the frosted glass door, into a tiny space that held a make-up table and shower stall, and out onto a corridor parallel to the one at the front of the booths. Here the lighting was unambiguous, there was no music, and the corridor gave onto larger, partially cur­tained dressing rooms where young men and women slumped smoking or just staring into space like untenanted synthetics. If any of them saw the little procession go past, they gave no indication. Milo went ahead with the corpse. Deck took up position at my back and the synthetic woman brought up the rear, blaster held casually at her side. My last glimpse of Jerry was a proprietorial figure standing with hands on hips in the corridor behind us. Then Deek cuffed me across the side of the head and I turned to face the front again. Louise's dangling, mutilated legs preceded me out into a gloomy covered parking area, where a pure black lozenge of aircar awaited us.

  The synthetic cracked the vehicle's boot open and waved the blaster at me.

  'Plenty of room. Make yourself comfortable.'

  I climbed into the boot space and discovered she was right. Then Milo tipped Louise's corpse in with me and slammed the lid down, leaving the two of us in darkness together. I heard the dull clunk of other doors opening and closing elsewhere, and then the whispering of the car's engines and the faint bump as we lifted from the ground.

  The journey was quick, and smoother than a corre­sponding surface trip would have been. Jerry's friends were driving carefully — you don't want to be pulled down by a bored patrolman for unsignalled lane change when you've got passengers in the boot. It might almost have been pleasantly womb-like there in the dark, but for the faint stench of faeces from the corpse. Louise had voided her bowels during the torture.

  I spent most of the journey feeling sorry for the girl, and worrying at the Catholic madness like a dog with a bone. This woman's stack was utterly undamaged. Financial considerations aside, she could be brought back to life on the spin of a disc. On Harlan's World she'd be temporarily re-sleeved for the court hearing, albeit probably in a synthetic, and once the verdict came down there'd be a Victim Support supplement from the state added to what­ever policy her family already held. Nine cases out of ten that was enough money to ensure re-sleeving of some sort. Death, where is thy sting?

  I didn't know if they had VS supplements on earth. Kristin Ortega's angry monologue two nights ago seemed to suggest not, but at least there was the potential to bring this girl back to life. Somewhere on this fucked-up planet, some guru had ordained otherwise, and Louise, alias Anenome, had queued up with how many others to ratify the insanity.

  Human beings. Never figure them out.

  The car tilted and the corpse rolled unpleasantly against me as we spiralled down. Something wet seeped through the leg of my trousers. I could feel myself starting to sweat with the fear. They were going to decant me into some flesh with none of the resistance to pain that my current sleeve had. And while I was imprisoned there, they could do whatever they liked to that sleeve, up to and including physically killing it.

  And then they would start again, in a fresh body.

  Or, if they were really sophisticated, they could jack my consciousness into a virtual matrix similar to the ones used in psychosurgery, and do the whole thing electronically. Subjectively, there'd be no difference, but there what might take days in the real world could be done in as many minutes.

  I swallowed hard, using the neurachem while I still had it to stifle the fear. As gently as I could, I pushed Louise's cold embrace away from my face and tried not to think about the reason she had died.

  The car touched down and rolled along the ground for a few moments before it stopped. When the boot cracked open again, all I could see was the roof of another covered car park strung with illuminum bars.

  They took me out with professional caution, the woman standing well back, Deck and Milo to the sides giving her a clear field of fire. I clambered awkwardly over Louise and out onto a floor of black concrete. Scanning the gloom co­vertly, I saw about a dozen other vehicles, nondescript, registration bar codes illegible at this distance. A short ramp at the far end led up to what must be the landing pad. Indistinguishable from a million other similar installa­tions. I sighed and as I straightened up I felt the damp on my leg again. I glanced down at my clothes. There was a dark stain of something on my thigh.

  'So where are we?' I asked.

  'End of the line's where you are,' grunted Milo, lifting Louise out. He looked at the woman. 'This going to the usual place?'

  She nodded, and he set off across the car park towards a set of double doors. I was moving to follow when a jerk of the woman's blaster brought me up short.

  'Not you. That's the chute — the easy way out. We got people want to talk to you before you get to go down the chute. You go this way.'

  Deck grinned and produced a small weapon from his back pocket. 'That's right, Mr Badass Cop. You go this way.'

  They marched me through another set of doors into a commercial capacity elevator which, according to the flashing LED display on the wall, sank two dozen levels before we stopped. Throughout the ride, Deck and the woman stood in opposite corners of the car, guns levelled. I ignored them and watched the digit counter.

  When the doors opened there was a medical team waiting for us with a strap-equipped gurney. My instincts screamed at me to try and jump them, but I held myself immobile while the two pale-blue-clad men came forward to hold my arms and the female medic shot me in the neck with a hypodermic spray. There was an icy sting, a brief rush of cold and then the corners of my vision disappeared in webbings of grey. The last thing I saw clearly was the incurious face of the medic as she watched me lose consciousness.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I awoke to the sound of the ezan being called somewhere nearby, poetry turned querulous and metallic in the multi­ple throats of a mosque's loudspeakers. It was a sound I'd last heard in the skies over Zihicce on Sharya, and it had been shortly followed by the shrill aerial scream of marauder bombs. Above my head, light streamed down through the latticed bars of an ornate window. There was a dull, bloated feeling in my guts that told me my period was due.

  I sat up on the wooden floor and looked down at myself. They'd sleeved me in a woman's body, young, no more than twenty years old with copper-sheened skin and a heavy bell of black hair that, when I put my hands to it, felt lank and dirty with the onset of the period. My skin was faintly greasy and from somewhere I got the idea that I had not bathed in a while. I was clothed in a rough khaki shirt several sizes too big for my sleeve and nothing else. Beneath it, my breasts felt swollen and tender. I was barefoot.

  I got up and went to the window. There was no glass but it was well above my new head height, so I hauled myself up on the bars and peered out. A sun-drenched landscape of poorly tiled roofs stretched away as far as I could see, forested with listing receptor aerials and ancient satellite dishes. A cluster of minarets speared the horizon off to the left and an ascending aircraft trailed a line of white vapour somewhere beyond. The air that blew through was hot and humid.

  My arms were beginning to ache, so I lowered myself back down to the floor and padded across the room to the door. Predictably, it was locked.

  The ezan stopped.

  Virtuality. They'd tapped into my memo
ries and come up with this. I'd seen some of the most unpleasant things in a long career of human pain on Sharya. And the Sharyan religious police were as popular in interrogation software as Angin Chandra had been in pilot porn. And now, on this harsh virtual Sharya, they'd sleeved me in a woman.

  Drunk one night, Sarah had told me Women are the race, Tak. No two ways about it. Male is just a mutation with more muscle and half the nerves. Fighting, fucking machines. My own cross-sleevings had borne that theory out. To be a woman was a sensory experience beyond the male. Touch and texture ran deeper, an interface with environment that male flesh seemed to seal out instinctively. To a man, skin was a barrier, a protection. To a woman it was an organ of contact.

  That had its disadvantages.

  In general, and maybe because of this, female pain thresholds ran higher than male, but the menstrual cycle dragged them down to an all-time low once a month.

  No neurachem. I checked.

  No combat conditioning, no reflex of aggression.

  Nothing.

  Not even calluses on the young flesh.

  The door banged open, and I jumped. Fresh sweat sprang out on my skin. Two bearded men with eyes of hot jet came into the room. They were both dressed in loose linen for the heat. One held a role of adhesive tape in his hands, the other a small blowtorch. I flung myself at them, just to unlock the freezing panic reflex and gain some measure of control over the built-in helplessness.

  The one with the tape fended off my slim arms and backhanded me across the face. It floored me. I lay there, face numb, tasting blood. One of them yanked me back to my feet by an arm. Distantly, I saw the face of the other, the one who had hit me, and tried to focus on him.

  'So,' he said. 'We begin.'

  I lunged for his eyes with the nails of my free arm. The Envoy training gave me the speed to get there but I had no control and I missed. Two of my nails drew blood on his cheek. He flinched and jumped back.

  'Bitch cunt,' he said, lifting a hand to the claw mark and examining the blood on his fingers.

  'Oh, please,' I managed, out of the unnumbed side of my mouth. 'Do we have to have the script too? Just because I'm wearing this — '

  I jammed to a halt. He looked pleased. 'Not Irene Elliott, then,' he said. 'We progress.'

  This time he hit me just under the ribcage, driving all the breath out of my body and paralysing my lungs. I folded over his arm like a coat and slid off onto the floor, trying to draw breath. All that came out was a faint creak­ing sound. I twisted on the floorboards while, somewhere high above me, he retrieved the adhesive tape from the other man and unsnapped a quarter-metre length. It made an obscene tearing sound, like skin coming off. Shredding it free with his teeth, he squatted beside me and taped my right wrist to the floor above my head. I thrashed as if galvanised and it took him a moment to immobilise my other arm long enough to repeat the process. An urge to scream that wasn't mine surfaced and I fought it down. Pointless. Conserve your strength.

  The floor was hard and uncomfortable against the soft skin of my elbows. I heard a grating sound and turned my head. The second man was drawing up a pair of stools from the side of the room. While the one who had beaten me taped my legs apart, the spectator sat down on one of the stools, produced a packet of cigarettes and shook one out. Grinning broadly at me, he put it in his mouth and reached down for the blowtorch. When his companion stepped back to admire his handiwork, he offered him the packet. It was declined. The smoker shrugged, ignited the blowtorch and tilted his head to light up from it.

  'You will tell us,' he said, gesturing with the cigar­ette and pluming smoke into the air above me, 'everything you know about Jerry's Closed Quarters and Elizabeth Elliott.'

  The blowtorch hissed and chuckled softly to itself in the quiet room. Sunlight poured in through the high window and brought with it, infinitely faintly, the sounds of a city full of people.

  They started with my feet.

  The screaming runs on and on, higher and louder than I ever believed a human throat could render, shredding my hearing. Traceries of red streak across my vision.

  Innenininennininennin . . .

  Jimmy de Soto staggers into view, Sunjet gone, gory hands plastered to his face. The shrieks peel out from his stumbling figure, and for a moment I can almost believe it's his contamina­tion alarm that's making the noise. I check my own shoulder meter reflexively, then the half-submerged edge of an intelligible word rises through the agony and I know it's him.

  He is standing almost upright, a clearcut sniper target even in the chaos of the bombardment. I throw myself across the open ground and knock him into the cover of a ruined wall. When I roll him onto his back to see what's happened to his face, he's still screaming. I pull his hands away from his face by main force and the raw socket of his left eye gapes up at me in the murk. I can still see fragments of the eye's mucous casing on his fingers.

  Jimmy, JIMMY, what the fuck . . . '

  The screaming sandpapers on and on. It's taking all my strength to prevent him going back for the other undamaged eye as it wallows in its socket. My spine goes cold as I realise what's happening.

  Viral strike.

  I stop yelling at Jimmy and bawl down the line.

  'Medic! Medic! Stack down! Viral strike!'

  And the world caves in as I hear my own cries echoed up and dawn the Innenin beachhead.

  After a while, they leave you alone, curled around your wounds. They always do. It gives you time to think about what they have done to you, more importantly about what else they have not yet done. The fevered imagining of what is still to come is almost as potent a tool in their hands as the heated irons and blades themselves.

  When you hear them returning, the echo of footsteps induces such fear that you vomit up what little bile you have left in your stomach.

  Imagine a satellite blow-up of a city on mosaic, 1:10,000 scale. It'll take up most of a decent interior wall, so stand well back. There are certain obvious things you can tell at a glance. Is it a planned development or did it grow organically, responding to centuries of differing demand? Is it or was it ever fortified? Does it have a seaboard? Look closer, and you can learn more. Where the major thor­oughfares are likely to be, if there is an IP shuttle port, if the city has parks. You can maybe, if you're a trained cartographer, even tell a little about the movements of the inhabitants. Where the desirable areas of town are, what the traffic problems are likely to be and if the city has suffered any serious bomb damage or riots recently.

  But there are some things you will never know from that picture. However much you magnify and reel in detail, it can't tell you if crime is generally on the increase, or what lime the citizens go to bed. It can't tell you if the mayor is planning to tear down the old quarter, if the police are corrupt, or what strange things have been happening at Number Fifty-One, Angel Wharf. And the fact that you can break down the mosaic into boxes, move it around and reassemble it elsewhere makes no difference. Some things you will only ever learn by going into that city and talking to the inhabitants.

  Digital Human Storage hasn't made interrogation ob­solescent, it's just brought back the basics. A digitised mind is only a snapshot. You don't capture individual thoughts any more than a satellite image captures an individual life. A psychosurgeon can pick out major traumas on an Ellis model, and make a few basic guesses about what needs to be done, but in the end she's still going to have to generate a virtual environment in which to counsel her patient, and go in there and do it. Interrogators, whose requirements are so much more specific, have an even worse time.

  What d.h. storage has done is make it possible to torture a human being to death, and then start again. With that option available, hypnotic and drug-based questioning went out the window long ago. It was too easy to provide the necessary chemical or mental counterconditioning in those for whom this sort of thing was a hazard of their trade.

  There's no kind of conditioning in the known universe that can prepare you for having
your feet burnt off. Or your nails torn out.

  Cigarettes stubbed out on your breasts.

  A heated iron inserted into your vagina.

  The pain. The humiliation.

  The damage.

  Psychodynamics/Integrity training.

  Introduction.

  The mind does interesting things under extreme stress. Hallucination, displacement, retreat. Here in the Corps, you will learn to use them all, not as blind reactions to ad­versity, but as moves in a game.

  The red hot metal sinks into flesh, parting the skin like polythene. The pain consumes, but worse is seeing it happen. Your scream, once disbelief, is by now graesomely familiar in your ears. You know it won't stop them, but you still scream, begging —

  'Some fucking game, eh pal?'

  Jimmy grinning up at me from his death. Innenin is still around us, but that can't be. He was still screaming when they took him away. In reality —

  His face changes abruptly, turns sombre.

  'You keep reality out of this, there's nothing for you there. Stay removed. Have they done her any structural harm?''

  I wince. 'Her feet. She can't walk.'

  'Motherfuckers,' he says matter of factly. 'Why don't we just tell them what they want to know?'

  'We don't know what they want to know. They're after this guy Ryker.'

  'Ryker, who the fuck's he?'

  'I don't know.'

  He shrugs. 'So spill about Bancroft. Or you still feeling honour-bound or something?'

  'I think I already spilled. They don't buy it. It's not what they want to hear. These are fucking amateurs, man. Meatpackers.'

  'You keep screaming it, they got to believe it sooner or later.'

  'That isn't the fucking point, Jimmy. When this is over, it doesn't matter who I am, they're going to put a bolt through my stack and sell the body off for spare parts.'