Altered Carbon

by Richard Morgan

  'You got a point. How far is it?'

  'Couple of klicks. We'll take my car, that way if Little Miss Homecoming wakes up, she won't look out the window and panic.'

  'Sold.'

  I followed Trepp across the street to a low-slung black vehicle that looked as if it might be radar invisible, and climbed into a snug interior that smelled faintly of incense.

  'This yours?'

  'No, rented. Picked it up when we flew back in from Europe? Why?'

  I shook my head. 'Doesn't matter.'

  Trepp started up and we ghosted silently along the promenade. I looked out of the seaward window and wrestled with an insubstantial sense of frustration. The scant hours of sleep in the limo had left me itchy. Every­thing about the situation was suddenly chafing at me again, from the lack of solution to Bancroft's death to my relapse into smoking. I had a feeling that it was going to be a bad day, and the sun wasn't even up yet.

  'You thought about what you're going to do when this is over?'

  'No,' I said morosely.

  We found the dispensers on a frontage that sloped down to the shore at one end of the town. Clearly they had been installed with beach clientele in mind, but the dilapidated state of the shelters that housed them suggested that trade was no better here than for Elliott's Data Linkage. Trepp parked the car pointing at the sea and went to get the coffees. Through the window I watched her kick and slam the machine until it finally relinquished two plastic cups. She carried them back to the car and handed me mine.

  'Want to drink it here?'

  'Yeah, why not?'

  We pulled the tabs on the cups and listened to them sizzle. The mechanism didn't heat especially well, but the coffee tasted reasonable and it had a definite chemical effect. I could feel my weariness sliding away. We drank slowly and watched the sea through the windscreen, im­mersed in a silence that was almost companionable.

  'I tried for the Envoys once,' said Trepp suddenly.

  I glanced sideways at her, curious. 'Yeah?'

  'Yeah, long time ago. They rejected me on profile. No capacity for allegiance, they said.'

  I grunted. 'Figures. You were never in the military, were you?'

  'What do you think?' She was looking at me as if I'd just suggested she might have a history of child-molesting. I chuckled tiredly.

  'Thought not. See, the thing is, they're looking for borderline psychopathic tendencies. That's why they do most of their recruiting from the military in the first place.'

  Trepp looked put out. 'I've got borderline psychopathic tendencies.'

  'Yeah, I don't doubt it, but the point is, the number of civilians with those tendencies and a sense of team spirit is pretty limited. They're opposing values. The chances of them both arising naturally in the same person are almost nil. Military training takes the natural order and fucks with it. It breaks down any resistance to psychopathic be­haviour at the same time as it builds fanatical loyalties to the group. Package deal. Soldiers are perfect Envoy material.'

  'You make it sound like I had a lucky escape.'

  For a few seconds I stared out to the horizon, remem­bering.

  'Yeah.' I drained the rest of my coffee. 'Come on, let's get back.'

  As we drove back along the promenade, something had changed in the quiet between us. Something that, like the gradually waxing light of dawn around the car, was at once intangible and impossible to ignore.

  When we pulled up outside the data broker's frontage, Irene Elliott was waiting, leaned against the side of the limo arid watching the sea. There was no sign of her husband.

  'Better stay here,' I told Trepp as I climbed out. 'Thanks for the coffee.'

  'Sure.'

  'I guess I'll be seeing you in my rear-view screen for a while, then.'

  'I doubt you'll see me at all, Kovacs,' said Trepp cheerfully. 'I'm better at this than you are.'

  'Remains to be seen.'

  'Yeah, yeah. Be seeing you.' She raised her voice as I started to walk away. 'And don't fuck up that run. We'd all hate to see that happen.'

  She backed up the car a dozen metres and kicked it into the air in a showy, dropped-nose bunt that shattered the quiet with a shriek of turbines and barely cleared our heads before flipping up and out over the ocean.

  'Who was that?' There was a huskiness to Irene Elliott's voice that sounded like the residue of too much crying.

  'Back-up,' I said absently, watching the car trail out over the wrecked aircraft carrier. 'Works for the same people. Don't worry, she's a friend.'

  'She may be your friend,' said Elliott bitterly. 'She isn't mine. None of you people are.'

  I looked at her, then back out to sea. 'Fair enough.'

  Silence, apart from the waves. Elliott shifted against the polished coachwork of the limo.

  'You know what's happened to my daughter,' she said in a dead voice. 'You knew all the time.'

  I nodded.

  'And you don't give a flying fuck, do you? You're working for the man that used her like a piece of toilet tissue.'

  'Lots of men used her,' I said brutally. 'She let herself be used. And I'm sure your husband's told you why she did that as well.'

  I heard Irene Elliott's breath catch in her throat and concentrated on the horizon, where Trepp's cruiser was fading into the predawn gloom. 'She did it for the same reason she tried to blackmail the man I was working for, the same reason she tried to put drivers on a particularly unpleasant man called Jerry Sedaka who subsequently had her killed. She did it for you, Irene.'

  'You fuck.' She started to cry, a small hopeless sound in the stillness.

  I kept my eyes fixed on the ocean. 'I don't work for Bancroft any more,' I said carefully. 'I've swapped sides on that piece of shit. I'm giving you the chance to hit Bancroft where it hurts, to hit him with the guilt that fucking your daughter never gave him. Plus, now you're out of the store maybe you'll be able to get the money together and re-sleeve Elizabeth. Or at least get her off stack, rent her some space in a virtual condo or something. The point is, you're off the ice, you can do something. You've got options. That's what I'm offering you. I'm dealing you back into the game. Don't throw that away.'

  Beside me, I heard her struggling to force down the tears. I waited.

  'You're pretty impressed with yourself, aren't you?' she said finally. 'You think you're doing me this big favour, but you're no fucking Good Samaritan. I mean, you got me out of the store, but it all comes at a price, right?'

  'Of course it does,' I said quietly.

  'I do what you want, this virus run. I break the law for you, or I go back on stack. And if I squeal, or screw up, I've got more to lose than you. That's the deal, isn't it? Nothing for free.'

  I watched the waves. 'That's the deal,' I agreed.

  More silence. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her look down at the body she was wearing, as if she'd spilled something down herself. 'Do you know how I feel?' she asked.

  'No.'

  'I slept with my husband, and I feel like he's been un­faithful to me.' A choked laugh. She smeared angrily at her eyes. 'I feel like I've been unfaithful. To something. You know, when they put me away I left a body and a family behind. Now I don't have either.'

  She looked down at herself again. She lifted her hands and turned them, fingers spread.

  'I don't know what I feel,' she said. 'I don't know what to feel.'

  There was a lot I could have said. A lot that has been said, written, researched and disputed on the subject. Trite little magazine-length summings-up of the problems inherent in re-sleeving — How to make your partner love you again, in any body — trite, interminable psychological tracts — Some observations of secondary trauma in civil re-sleeving — even the sanctified manuals of the fucking Envoy Corps itself had something trite to say on the matter. Quotes, informed opinion, the ravings of the religious and the lunatic fringe. I could have thrown it all at her. I could have told her that what she was going through was quite normal for an unconditioned h
uman. I could have told her that it would pass with time. That there were psychodynamic disciplines for dealing with it. That millions of other people survived it. I could even have told her that which­ever God she owed nominal allegiance to was watching over her. I could have lied, I could have reasoned. It all would have meant about the same, because the reality was pain, and right now there was nothing anyone could do to take it away.

  I said nothing.

  The dawn gained on us, light strengthening on the closed-up frontages behind us. I glanced at the windows of Elliott's Data Linkage.

  'Victor?' I asked.

  'Sleeping.' She wiped an arm across her face and snorted her tears back under control like badly cut amphetamine. 'You say this is going to hurt Bancroft?'

  'Yeah. In a subtle way, but yeah, it'll hurt.'

  'Installation run on an AI,' said Irene Elliott to me. 'Installing an erasure penalty virus. Fucking over a known Meth. You know what the risks are? You know what you're asking me to do?'

  I turned to look her in the eye.

  'Yes. I know.'

  Her mouth clamped down on a tremor.

  'Good. Then let's do it.'

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  The run took less than three days to set up. Irene Elliott turned stone-cold pro and made it happen that way.

  In the limo back to Bay City, I laid it out for her. At first she was still crying inside, but as the detail mounted she clicked in, nodding, grunting, stopping me and backing me up on minor points I hadn't made clear enough. I showed her Reileen Kawahara's suggested hardware list and she OK'd about two thirds of it. The rest was just corporate padding and Kawahara's advisors, in her opinion, didn't know shit.

  By the end of the journey she had it down. I could see the run already unfolding behind her eyes. The tears had dried on her face, forgotten, and her expression was clean purpose, locked-down hate for the man who had used her daughter, and an embodied will to revenge.

  Irene Elliott was sold.

  I rented an apartment in Oakland on the JacSol account. Elliott moved in and I left her there to catch up on some sleep. I stayed at the Hendrix, tried to do some sleeping of my own without much success and went back six hours later to find Elliott already prowling about the apartment.

  I called the names and numbers Kawahara had given me and ordered the staff Elliott had ticked. The crates arrived in hours. Elliott cracked them open and laid out the hard­ware across the floor of the apartment.

  Together we went through Ortega's list of virtual forums and worked it down to a shortlist of seven.

  (Ortega had not turned up, or called me at the Hendrix.)

  Mid afternoon on the second day, Elliott kicked on the primary modules and cruised each of the shortlist options. The list fell to three, and Elliott gave me a couple more items to go shopping for. Refinement software for the big kill.

  By early evening the list was down to two, with Elliott writing up preliminary intrusion procedures for both. Whenever she hit a glitch, we backed up and compared relative merits.

  By midnight we had our target. Elliott went to bed and slept eight solid hours. I went back to the Hendrix and brooded.

  (Nothing from Ortega.)

  I bought breakfast in the street and took it back to the apartment. Neither of us felt much like eating.

  10.15 local time. Irene Elliott calibrated her equipment for the last time.

  We did it.

  Twenty-seven-and-a-half minutes.

  A piece of piss, said Elliott.

  I left her dismantling equipment and flew out to see Bancroft that afternoon.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  'I find this exceptionally difficult to believe,' said Bancroft sharply. 'Are you quite sure I went to this establishment?'

  Below the balcony on the lawns of Suntouch House, Miriam Bancroft appeared to be constructing an enormous paper glider from instructions in a moving holoprojection. The white of the wings was so bright it hurt to look directly at them. As I leaned on the balcony rail, she shaded her eyes from the sun and looked up at me.

  'The mall has security monitors.' I said, affecting dis­interest. 'Automated system, still operational after all these years. They've got footage of you walking right up to the door. You do know the name, don't you?'

  'Jack It Up? Of course, I've heard of it, but I've never actually used the place.'

  I looked round without leaving the rail. 'Really. You have something against virtual sex, then? You're a reality purist?'

  'No.' I could hear the smile in his voice. 'I have no problem with virtual formats, and as I believe I've told you already, I have used them on occasion. But this place Jack It Up is, how can I put it, hardly the elegant end of the market.'

  'No,' I agreed. 'And how would you classify Jerry's Closed Quarters? An elegant whorehouse?'

  'Hardly.'

  'But that didn't stop you going there to play cabin games with Elizabeth Elliott, did it? Or has it gone downhill recently, because — '

  'All right.' The smile in the voice had turned to a grimace. 'You've made your point. Don't: labour it.'

  I stopped watching Miriam Bancroft and came back to my seat. My iced cocktail was still standing on the little table between us. I picked it up.

  'I'm glad you take the point,' I said, stirring the drink. 'Because it's taken a lot of pain to sort through this mess. I've been abducted, tortured and nearly killed in the process. A woman called Louise, not much older than your precious daughter Naomi, was killed because she got in the way. So if you don't like my conclusions, you can go fuck yourself.'

  I raised my glass to him across the table.

  'Spare me the melodrama, Kovacs, and sit down for God's sake. I'm not rejecting what you say, I'm just ques­tioning it.'

  I sat and levelled a finger at him. 'No. You're squirming. This thing's pointing up a part of your character you despise for its appetites. You'd rather not know what kind of software you were accessing that night over at Jack It Up, in case it's even more grubby than you already imagine. You're being forced to confront the part of yourself that wants to come in your wife's face, and you don't like it.'

  'There will be no need to revisit that particular con­versation,' said Bancroft stiffly. He steepled his fingers. 'You are aware, I suppose, that the security camera footage you base your assumptions on could be faked very easily by anyone with access to newstape images of me.'

  'Yes, I am.' I'd watched Irene Elliott do exactly that only forty-eight hours previously. Easy wasn't the word. After the virus run, it had been like asking a concert total body dancer to encore with stretching exercises. I'd barely had time to smoke a cigarette while she did it. 'But why would anyone bother? A distractor, to tinsel me off course, as­suming of course that some wrong turn would have me sniffing around the ruins of a derelict Richmond mall in the first place. Come on, Bancroft, get real. The fact I was out there in the first place proves the validity of that footage. And in any case, those images aren't the basis for anything. They just confirm what I'd already worked out, which is that you killed yourself to avoid viral contamina­tion of your remote stack.'

  'That is a quite remarkable leap of intuition to make after only a six-day investigation.'

  'Blame Ortega,' I said lightly, though Bancroft's endur­ing suspicion in the face of unpleasant facts was beginning to worry me. I hadn't realised he would take so much wearing down. 'She's the one who put me onto the right track. She wouldn't wear the murder theory from the start. She kept telling me you were too tough and smart a Meth motherfucker to let anyone kill you. Quote, unquote. And that brought me back to the conversation we had here a week ago. You told me I am not the kind of man to take my own life, and even if I was, I would not have bungled it in this fashion. If it had been my intention to die, you would not be talking to me now. Envoys have total recall, those were your exact words.'

  I paused and set down my glass, searching for the fine edge of deceit that always lies right up against the truth.

&nb
sp; 'All this time, I've been working on the assumption you didn't pull the trigger because you weren't the type to commit suicide. I ignored all the evidence to the contrary because of that single assumption. The electron-tight security you've got here, the lack of any traces of intrusion, the handprint lock on the safe.'

  'And Kadmin. And Ortega.'

  'Yeah, that didn't help. But we straightened out the Ortega angle, and Kadmin, well, I'm coming to Kadmin in a moment. The point is, as long as I equated pulling that trigger with suicide, I was jammed. But then, what if those two acts were not synonymous. What if you'd torched your own stack, not because you wanted to die but for some other reason. Once I let myself think that, the rest was easy. What were the possible reasons that you'd do it? It's not an easy thing to put a gun to your own head, even if you do want to die. To do it when you want to live must take the will of a demon. No matter how much you might know intellectually that you'll be re-sleeved with the bulk of your mind intact, the person you are at that moment is going to die. You had to have been desperate to pull that trigger. It had to have been something,' I smiled faintly, 'life-threatening. Given that assumption, it didn't take long to come up with the virus scenario. Then all I had to do was work out how and where you'd been infected.'

  Bancroft shifted uncomfortably at the word, and I felt a stab of elation run through me. Virus! Even Meths were afraid of the invisible corroder, because even they, with their remote storage and their clones on ice, were not immune. Viral Strike! Stack down! Bancroft was off balance.

  'Now, it's virtually impossible to snug something as complex as a virus into a disconnected target, so you had to have been jacked in somewhere along the line. I thought of the PsychaSec facility, but they're sewed up too tight. And it couldn't have been before you went to Osaka for the same reasons; even dormant, the virus would have tripped every alarm at PsychaSec when they set up the 'cast. It had to have been some time in the last forty-eight hours, because your remote stack was uncontaminated. I knew from talking to your wife that the likelihood was you'd been out on the town when you got back from Osaka, and on your own admission that could quite possibly include some kind of virtual whorehouse. After that, it was just a matter of doing the rounds. I tried a half dozen places before I hit Jack It Up, and when I punched up their inquiries the viral contam siren nearly blew my phone out. That's the thing about AIs — they write their own security and it's second to none. Jack It Up is sealed off so tight it'll take the police months to tunnel in and see what's left of the core processors.'