Altered Carbon

by Richard Morgan

  I felt a vague pang of guilt as I thought of the AI thrashing like a man in an acid vat as its systems dissolved around it, consciousness shrivelling down a tunnel of closing perspectives into nothing. The feeling passed rapidly. We'd chosen Jack It Up for a variety of reasons: it was in a roofed-over area that meant there would be no satellite coverage to dispute the lies we'd planted in the mall surveillance system, it operated in a criminal environ­ment so that no one would have a problem believing an illicit virus had somehow got loose inside it, but most of all it ran a series of software options so distasteful that it was unlikely the police would ever bother to investigate the wreckage of the murdered machine more than cursorily. Under its heading on Ortega's list, there were at least a dozen copycat sex crimes which the Organic Damage department had traced to software packages available from Jack It Up. I could imagine the curl of Ortega's lip as she read the software listings, the studied indifference with which she would handle the case.

  I missed Ortega.

  'What about Kadmin?'

  'It's hard to know, but I'm betting whoever infected Jack It Up in the first place probably hired Kadmin to silence me and make sure the whole thing stayed covered up. After all, without me stirring things up, how long would it have been before anyone realised Jack had been iced? Can't see any of its potential clients calling the police when they got refused entry, can you?'

  Bancroft gave me a hard look, but I knew from his next words that the battle was almost over. The balance of belief was tipping towards me. Bancroft was going to buy the package. 'You're saying the virus was introduced deliberately. That someone murdered this machine?'

  I shrugged. 'It seems likely. Jack It Up operated on the margins of local law. A lot of its software appears to have been impounded by the Felony Transmission department at one time or another, which suggests that it had regular dealings with the criminal world in one form or another. It is possible that it made some enemies. On Harlan's World the yakuza have been known to perform viral execution on machines judged to have betrayed them. I don't know if that happens here, or who'd have the stack muscle to do it. But I do know that whoever hired Kadmin used an AI to pull him out of police storage. You can verify that with Fell Street, if you like.'

  Bancroft was silent. I watched him for a moment, seeing the belief sink in. Watching the process as he convinced himself. I could almost see what he was seeing. Himself, hunched over in an autocab as the sordid guilt over what he had been doing at Jack It Up merged sickeningly with the horror of the contamination warnings sirening in his head. Infected! Himself, Laurens Bancroft, stumbling through the dark towards the lights of Suntouch House and the only surgery that could save him. Why had he left the cab so far from home? Why had he not wakened anybody for help? These were questions I no longer needed to answer for him. Bancroft believed. His guilt and self-disgust made him believe, and he would find his own answers to reinforce the horrific images in his head.

  And by the time Transmission Felony cut a safe path through to Jack It Up's core processors, Rawling 4851 would have eaten out every scrap of coherent intellect the machine ever had. There would be nothing left to dispute the carefully constructed lie I'd told for Kawahara.

  I got up and went back to the balcony, wondering if I should allow myself a cigarette. It had been tough to lock down the need the last couple of days. Watching Irene Elliott at work had been nerve-racking. I forced my hand to relinquish the packet in my breast pocket, and gazed down at Miriam Bancroft, who by now was well on the way to completing her glider. When she looked up, I glanced away along the balcony rail and saw Bancroft's telescope, still pointed seaward at the same shallow angle. Idle curi­osity made me lean across and look at the figures for angle of elevation. The finger marks in the dust were still there.

  Dust?

  Bancroft's unconsciously arrogant words came back to me. It was an enthusiasm I had. Back when the stars were still something to stare at. You wouldn't remember how that felt. Last time I looked through that lens was nearly two centuries ago.

  I stared at the finger marks, mesmerised by my own thoughts. Someone had been looking through this lens a lot more recently than two hundred years ago, but they hadn't kept at it very long. From the minimal displacement of dust it looked as if the programming keys had only been used once. On a sudden impulse, I moved up to the tele­scope and followed the line of its barrel out over the sea to where visibility blurred in the haze. That far out. the angle of elevation would give you a view of empty air a couple of kilometres up. I bent to the eye-piece as if in a dream. A grey speck showed up in the centre of my field of vision, blurring in and out of focus as my eyes struggled with the surrounding expanses of blue. Lifting my head and checking the control pad again, I found a max amp key and thumbed it impatiently. When I looked again, the grey speck had sprung into hard focus, filling most of the lens. I breathed out slowly, feeling as if I'd had the cigarette after all.

  The airship hung like a bottleback, gorged after feeding frenzy. It must have been several hundred metres long, with swellings along the lower half of the hull and protruding sections that looked like landing pads. I knew what I was looking at even before Ryker's neurachem reeled in the last increments of magnification I needed to make out the sun-burnished lettering on the side that spelled it out; Head in the Clouds.

  I stepped back from the telescope, breathing deeply, and as my eyes slid back to normal focus I saw Miriam Bancroft again. She was standing amidst the parts of her glider, staring up at me. I almost flinched as our eyes met. Dropping a hand to the telescope programme pad, I did what Bancroft should have done before he blew his own head off. I hit memory-wipe, and the digits that had held the airship available for viewing for the last seven weeks blinked out.

  I had felt like many kinds of fool in my life, but never quite as completely as I did at that moment. A first-order clue had been waiting there in the lens for anyone to come along and pick it up. Missed by the police in their haste, disinterest and lack of close knowledge, missed by Ban­croft because the telescope was so much a part of his world view it was too close to give a second glance to, but I had no such excuses. I had stood here a week ago and seen the two mismatched pieces of reality clash against each other. Bancroft claiming not to have used the telescope in centuries almost at the same moment that I saw the evidence of recent use in the disturbed dust. And Miriam Bancroft had hammered it home less than an hour later when she said, While Laurens was staring at the stars, some of us kept our eyes on the ground. I'd thought of the telescope then, my mind had rebelled at the downloading-induced sluggishness and tried to tell me. Shaky and off balance, new to the planet and the flesh I was wearing, I had ignored it. The download dues had taken their toll.

  Below on the lawn, Miriam Bancroft was still watching me. I backed away from the telescope, composed my features and returned to my seat. Absorbed by the images I had faked into his head, Bancroft seemed scarcely to know that I had moved.

  But now my own mind was in overdrive, ripping along avenues of thought that had opened with Ortega's list and the Resolution 653 T-shirt. The quiet resignation I had felt in Ember two days ago, the impatience to sell my lies to Bancroft, get Sarah out and be finished were all gone. Everything tied in to Head in the Clouds, ultimately even Bancroft. It was almost axiomatic that he had gone there the night he died. Whatever had happened to him there was the key to his reasons for dying here at Suntouch House a few hours later. And to the truth that Reileen Kawahara was so desperate to hide.

  Which meant I had to go there myself.

  I picked up my glass and swallowed some of the drink, not tasting it. The sound it made seemed to wake Bancroft from his daze. He looked up, almost as if he was surprised to see me still there.

  'Please excuse me, Mr Kovacs. This is a lot to take in. After all the scenarios I had envisaged, this is one I had not even considered and it is so simple. So blindingly obvious.' His voice held a wealth of self-disgust. 'The truth is that I did not need an En
voy investigator, I simply needed a mirror to hold up to myself.'

  I set down my glass and got to my feet.

  'You're leaving?'

  'Well, unless you have any further questions. Personally, I think you still need some time. I'll be around. You can get me at the Hendrix.'

  On my way out along the main hall, I came face to face with Miriam Bancroft. She was dressed in the same cover­alls she'd been wearing in the garden, hair caught up in an expensive-looking static clip. In one hand she was carrying a trellised plant urn, held up like a lantern on a stormy night. Long strands of flowering martyrweed trailed from the trellis-work.

  'Have you — ' she started.

  I stepped closer to her, inside the range of the martyr-weed. 'I'm through,' I said. 'I've taken this as far as I can stomach. Your husband has an answer, but it isn't the truth. I hope that satisfies you, as well as Reileen Kawahara.'

  At the name, her mouth parted in shock. It was the only reaction that got through her control, but it was the con­firmation I needed. I felt the need to be cruel come bubbling insistently up from the dark, rarely visited caverns of anger that served me as emotional reserves.

  'I never figured Reileen for much of a lay, but maybe like attracts like. I hope she's better between the legs than she is on a tennis court.'

  Miriam Bancroft's face whitened and I readied myself for the slap. But instead, she offered me a strained smile.

  'You are mistaken, Mr Kovacs,' she said.

  'Yeah. I often am.' I stepped around her. 'Excuse me.' I walked away down the hall without looking back.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  The building was a stripped shell, an entire floor of warehouse conversion with perfectly identical arched win­dows along each wall and white painted support pillars every ten metres in each direction. The ceiling was drab grey, the original building blocks exposed and cross-laced with heavy ferrocrete load-bearers. The floor was raw concrete, perfectly poured. Hard light fell in through the windows, unsoftened by any drifting motes of dust. The air was crisp and cold.

  Roughly in the middle of the building, as near as I could judge, stood a simple steel table and two uncomfortable-looking chairs, arranged as if for a game of chess. On one of the chairs sat a tall man with a tanned, salon-handsome face. He was beating a rapid tattoo on the table top, as if listening to jazz on an internal receiver. Incongruously, he was dressed in a blue surgeon's smock and surgery slippers.

  I stepped out from behind one of the pillars and crossed the even concrete to the table. The man in the smock looked up at me and nodded, unsurprised.

  'Hello, Miller,' I said. 'Mind if I sit down?'

  'My lawyers are going to have me out of here an hour after you charge me,' Miller said matter-of-factly. 'If that. You've made a big mistake here, pal.'

  He went back to beating out the jazz rhythm on the table top. His gaze drifted out over my shoulder, as if he'd just seen something interesting through one of the arched windows. I smiled.

  'A big mistake,' he repeated to himself.

  Very gently, I reached out and flattened his hand onto the table top to stop the tapping. His gaze jerked back in as if caught on a hook.

  'The fuck do you think — '

  He pulled his hand free and surged to his feet, but shut up abruptly when I stiff-armed him back into his seat. For a moment, it looked as if he might try to charge me, but the table was in the way. He stayed seated, glaring murder­ously at me and no doubt remembering what his lawyers had told him about the laws of virtual holding.

  'You've never been arrested, have you Miller?' I asked conversationally. When he made no reply, I took the chair opposite him, turned it around and seated myself astride it. I took out my cigarettes and shook one free. 'Well, that statement is still grammatically valid. You're not under arrest now. The police don't have you.'

  I saw the first flicker of fear on his face.

  'Let's recap events a little, shall we? You probably think that after you got shot, I lit out and the police came to pick up the pieces. That they found enough to rack the clinic up on, and now you're waiting on due process. Well, it's partially true. I did leave, and the police did come to pick up the pieces. Unfortunately there's one piece that was no longer there to pick up, because I took it with me. Your head.' I lifted one hand to demonstrate graphically. 'Burned off at the neck and carried out, stack intact, under my jacket.'

  Miller swallowed. I bent my head and inhaled the cigarette to life.

  'Now the police think that your head was disintegrated by an overcharged blaster on wide beam.' I blew smoke across the table at him. 'I charred the neck and chest delib­erately to give that impression. With a bit of time and a good forensic expert they might have decided otherwise, but unfortunately your still intact colleagues at the clinic threw them out before they could start a proper investiga­tion. It's understandable, given what they were likely to find. I'm sure you would have done the same. However, what this means is that not only are you not under arrest, you are in fact presumed Really Dead. The police aren't looking for you and nor is anybody else.'

  'What do you want?' Miller sounded abruptly hoarse.

  'Good. I can see you appreciate the implications of your situation. Only natural for a man of your . . . Profession, I suppose. What I want is detailed information about Head in the Clouds.'

  'What?'

  My voice hardened. 'You heard.'

  'I don't know what you're talking about.'

  I sighed. This was to be expected. I'd encountered it before, wherever Reileen Kawahara appeared in the equation. The terrified loyalty she inspired would have humbled her old yakuza bosses in Fission City.

  'Miller, I don't have time to fuck about with you. The Wei Clinic has ties to an airborne whorehouse called Head in the Clouds. You probably liaised mostly through an enforcer called Trepp, out of New York, The woman you're dealing with ultimately is Reileen Kawahara. You will have been to Head in the Clouds, because I know Kawahara and she always invites her associates into the lair, first to demonstrate an attitude of invulnerability, and second to offer some messy object lesson in the value of loyalty. You ever see something like that?'

  From his eyes, I could see that he had.

  'OK, that's what I know. Your cue. I want you to draw me a rough blueprint of Head in the Clouds. Include as much detail as you can remember. A surgeon like you ought to have a good eye for detail. I also want to know what the procedures are for visiting the place. Security coding, minimum reasons to justify you visiting, stuff like that. Plus some idea of what the security's like inside the place.'

  'You think I'll just tell you.'

  I shook my head. 'No, I think I'm going to have to torture you first. But I'll get it out of you, one way or the other. Your decision.'

  'You won't do it.'

  'I will do it,' I said mildly. 'You don't know me. You don't know who I am, or why we're having this conversa­tion. You see, the night before I turned up and blew your face open, your clinic put me through two days of virtual interrogation. Sharyan religious police routine. You've probably vetted the software, you know what it's like. As far as I'm concerned, we're still in payback time.'

  There was a long pause in which I saw the belief creeping into his face. He looked away.

  'If Kawahara found out that — '

  'Forget Kawahara. By the time I'm finished with Kawahara, she'll be a street memory. Kawahara is going down.'

  He hesitated, brought to the brink, then shook his head. He looked up at me and I knew I was going to have to do it. I lowered my head and forced myself to remember Louise's body, opened from throat to groin on the auto-surgeon's table with her internal organs arranged in dishes around her head like appetisers. I remembered the copper-skinned woman I had been in the stifling loft space, the grip of the tape as they pinned me to the naked wooden floor, the shrill dinning of agony behind my temples as they mutilated my flesh. The screaming and the two men who had drunk it in like perfume.

 
; 'Miller.' I found I had to clear my throat and start again. 'You want to know something about Sharya?'

  Miller said nothing. He was going into some kind of controlled breathing pattern. Steeling himself for the upcoming unpleasantness. This was no Warden Sullivan that could be punched around in a seedy corner and scared into spilling what he knew. Miller was tough, and probably conditioned too. You don't work directorship in a place like Wei and not option some of the available tech for yourself.

  'I was there, Miller. Winter of 217, Zihicce. Hundred and twenty years ago. You probably weren't around then, but I reckon you've read about it in history books. After the bombardments, we went in as regime engineers.' As I talked, the tension began to ease out of my throat. I gestured with my cigarette. 'That's a Protectorate euphe­mism for crush all resistance and install a puppet govern­ment. Of course, to do that, you've got to do some interrogating, and we didn't have much in the way of fancy software to do it with. So, we had to get inventive.'

  I stubbed out my cigarette on the table and stood up.

  'Someone I want you to meet,' I said, looking past him.

  Miller turned to follow my gaze and froze. Coalescing in the shadow of the nearest support pillar was a tall figure in a blue surgical smock. As we both watched, the features became clear enough to recognise, though Miller must have guessed what was coming as soon as he saw the predominant colour of the clothing. He wheeled back to me, mouth open to say something, but instead his eyes fixed on something behind me and his face turned pale. I glanced over my shoulder to where the other figures were materialising, all with the same tall build and tanned complexion, all in blue surgical smocks. When I looked back again, Miller's expression seemed to have collapsed.