by David Brin
“We gathered the supplies and information you require in order to penetrate Universal Kilns.”
“Not penetrate. I agreed to scout for you, in a strictly legal manner.”
“Forgive my poor choice of words. Please come this way.”
There’s no pain. Still, I limp a bit while following Irene and Collins out the rear of the Rainbow Building. A silent ocher driver waits in the sheltered alley, holding the door of a van with opaque windows. I pause, wanting to get a few matters clear before entering.
“You still haven’t explained exactly what I’ll be looking for.”
“We’ll brief you along the way. There are important matters we hope you’ll uncover with your renowned investigative prowess.”
“I’ll do my best” — then I reiterate for the spool recorder inside me — “within the law.”
“Naturally, ditMorris. We would not ask you to do anything illegal.”
Right, I think, trying to penetrate his gaze. But it’s futile. Eyes made of clay aren’t windows to the soul. It’s still a matter of debate whether there’s any “soul” inside of creatures like us at all.
Entering the van, I find the fourth member of our party, smiling with a celebrated mixture of distance and seductiveness, crossing snow white legs that glisten with their own luster beneath sheer, extravagant silk.
“Greetings, Mr. Morris,” murmurs the voluptuous pleasure-ditto.
“Maestra,” I reply, wondering.
Why would Gineen Wammaker dispatch a top-of-the-line pearl model to accompany us? A simple gray should suffice, to hear my report. Or why send a rox at all? Any useful information can be sent by Web.
My grays carry a good semblance of normal male reaction sets. So her art affects me — both attracting and repelling at once, beckoning some of the more sick-hostile corners of sexuality. Her famed, perversely alluring specialty.
Like any decent adult, I can quash such reactions. (Especially by thinking about honest, self-respecting Clara.) Surely Wammaker knows this, so the aim can’t be to influence me.
So why is she here? Especially as a pearl … a creature of profuse sensuality … unless this mission represents another chance for her to enjoy some depraved bliss?
My worries, already verging on paranoia, bloom anew.
“Let’s go,” she tells the driver. Gineen clearly doesn’t mind that I stare. Perhaps she even knows what I’m thinking.
I’m wishing that I had a better class of clientele.
14
Under False Colors
… or how realAlbert gets duped again …
What are you saying?” I asked the jetto. “That my web sightings may not be Maharal?”
With finger flicks and winked signals, my ebony duplicate fetched data and put moving pictures onscreen. I watched a collage of recordings made weeks ago as Yosil Maharal strolled down an avenue filled with pedestrians and gyrocyclists. One of those fashionable display arcades where you can sample a myriad products, select features you like, and have made-to-order items delivered by courier-ditto before you get home.
From a distance, Maharal appeared to enjoy a window-shopping stroll, sauntering through one boutique after another. A district like this one has more cameras than a typical street, letting Nell’s software avatar sew an almost gap-free retrospective mosaic as our target moved from one lens view to another, with time stamps glowing in a low corner.
“Did you notice anything happen, just now?” the ebony asked.
“What’s to notice?” I twitched, feeling awkward under that unblinking gaze, knowing what contempt I tend to feel toward my real self, whenever I’m black.
He clicked his tongue. The onscreen image froze and raster-scanned. Enhancing cells zoomed toward where Maharal had joined a small crowd, watching a street performer weave sculptures out of smoke-gel. The fragile artifacts grew and blossomed like delicate apparitions, lifted and shaped by the puffs of air exhaled from the virtuoso’s pursed lips. When a child clapped her hands, reverberations made the creation shudder and bow toward her, before rising again as the artist breathed new layers.
Working with similar skill, my golem specialist swiftly crafted a composite image from three cameras, scattered around the plaza. Maharal’s picture grew more grainy as we zoomed in on his face. The UK scientist was smiling. All seemed normal, till I felt a creepy suspicion.
“Zoom closer,” I said, with misgivings. “The skin texture … by God, it’s not real!”
“I see it now,” Nell commented. “Note the subject’s forehead. The pellet dimple has been concealed under makeup.”
I slumped. We were looking at a ditto.
“Hm,” the ebony commented. “It appears that our good doctor committed a nine-point misdemeanor. Those flesh tones are human-brown. Shade ninety-four X, to be exact. Definitely illegal for duplicates to wear in public.”
This was unlike Kaolin’s weak ploy, when he phoned me earlier. His archetype guise had been amateurish and quasi-legal since he was at home at the time. But Maharal, in his developing paranoia, must have felt it worth risking a stiff fine in order to drop out of the city-village without a trace.
I glanced at the time stamp. Twelve minutes since the last time Maharal passed near a hi-res publicam, allowing a good reality check. He must have made the switch during that interval. But exactly when? The collage was awfully tight. “Please backtrack, Nell. Show the most biggest coverage gap since fourteen-thirty-six.”
From the plaza, Maharal’s ghost image began scurrying in reverse till he vanished into a shop offering fine utility coats for men. My avatar did a quick negotiation with the store’s internal security system … which refused to share any images because of a quaint privacy policy. Nothing would budge the stubborn program, not even Maharal’s death certificate and Ritu’s permission slip. I might have to go talk to the manager in person.
“How long was he in there?” I asked.
“A little over two minutes.”
More than enough time for Maharal to trade places with a waiting ditto. But it was a risky move. Despite the lens-detecting scanners they sell nowadays, you can never absolutely guarantee you’re not being watched. Even inside a buried oil drum. (I know, from personal experience.) Still, Maharal must have felt pretty confident.
Now I must assign a new software avatar to do a careful backscan and find out when the ditto entered the store. It must have come in disguise, then spent hours in there, crouched behind coatracks or something. After the switch, realMaharal would have waited a while, changing carefully into another disguise before reemerging, positive that his decoy had derailed any normal search routines.
I’ve pulled the same ruse myself, many times.
“He may have the shopowner’s complicity,” my ebony specialist pointed out. “The ditto could arrive in a shipping crate and realMaharal might depart the same way.”
I sighed over the drudgery ahead, inspecting and analyzing countless images.
“Don’t sweat it. I’ll handle the sift from my cubicle,” the specialist assured me. “I’ve already got our other cases under control. Besides, I think you’ll want to look at what your other search uncovered at the crash site.”
He got up and moved toward the little niche where I recall spending many happy hours — a cramped cubbyhole that I find comfortably cozy whenever I’m ebony, tuned to want nothing more than the pure joy of professional skill. Watching my copy go, I felt a little envious … and grateful to both Maharal and Kaolin for helping invent dittotech.
It’s a terrific boon, if you have a marketable skill.
The ebony was right. Investigation of the crash site had reached a new plateau.
Onscreen, my display depicted a vast swathe of desert southeast of town — a strange realm where trustworthy realtime images were as sparse as drinkable water and where it took sophisticated trickery to sift the trail of a moving car. Following my instructions, Nell had traced a ghostly spoor of whirling cyclones back through the night, moving
earlier and ever farther from Maharal’s death rendezvous. The overlay showed a dotted line weaving toward a range of low mountains near the Mexican border, not far from the International Combat Arena. Once inside those hills, I knew the trail of mini-tornados must vanish amid a whirl of canyon turbulence.
But I’d seen enough to feel an eerie chill. I knew this country.
“Urraca Mesa,” I whispered.
Nell spoke up.
“What did you say?”
I shook my head.
“Dial up Ritu Maharal,” I ordered. “We need to talk.”
15
Copycats
… in which a Frankenstein monster learns why he shouldn’t exist …
Fortunately, my greenie expense allowance was still active — Albert hadn’t disowned me yet — so I was able to hire a micro-cab from Odeon Square, weaving across Realtown on a single gyro-wheel with two cramped seats. Swift it may have been, but the trip was also excruciating as the driver kept going on and on about the war.
Apparently, the battle in the desert had begun going sour for our side. The cabbie blamed this on bad leadership, illustrating his point by calling up recent action highlights in a viewbubble that enveloped me, trapped on the rear saddle, amid scenes of violent carnage by bomb and shell, by cutter beam and hand-to-hand dismemberment, all lovingly collated by this avid aficionado.
Albert had learned plenty from Clara over the years, enough to know this armchair general’s opinions weren’t worth spit. The guy had a taxi franchise with eleven yellow and black — checkered duplicates driving hacks, presumably all yapping at cornered customers. How did he keep a high enough satisfaction index to merit so many cabs?
Speed was the answer. I had to give him that. Arrival offered me the day’s greatest surge of pleasure. I paid the cabbie and escaped into the cement maze of Fairfax Park.
Big Al doesn’t like the place. No greenery. Too much space was given over to concrete ramps, spirals, and jutting slabs, back when real kids might spend every spare moment of lifespan careening on stunt bikes, skateboards, and flare skooters, risking broken necks for sheer excitement. That is, till new pastimes lured them away, leaving behind a maze of metal-reinforced walls and towers like forsaken battlements, some of them three stories high, too costly to demolish.
Pallie loves the place. All that buried rebar acts like a partial Faraday Cage, blocking radio transmissions, thwarting spy-gnats and eavesbugs, while the hot concrete surface blinds visual and IR sensors. Nor is he above bouts of nostalgia, shooting the old slopes in his latest, souped-up wheelchair, popping rims and sliders, hollering and teetering while catheters and IV tubes whip around him like war pennants. Some kicks have to be experienced in flesh, I guess. Even flesh as harshly wounded as his.
Albert kind of puts up with Pal — partly out of guilt. Feels he might have tried harder to dissuade the guy from going out that night when ambushers jumped him, roasting half his body and leaving the rest for dead. But honestly, how do you “dissuade” a thrill-addict mercenary who’d stroll into a blatant trap, just asking to get his balls shot off? Hell, I’m more cautious in clay than Pal is in person.
I found him waiting under the shadow of “Mom’s Fright,” the biggest skooter ramp — with a swoop chute so sheer it makes you sick just looking at it. He had company. Two men. Real men, who eyed each other warily, separated by Pal’s biotronic wheelchair.
It felt awk being the sole ditto, and the feeling got worse when one of them — a brawny blond — gave me the look, staring through me like I wasn’t there.
The other one smiled, friendly. Tall and a bit skinny, he struck me as somehow familiar.
“Hey, green, where’s your soul?” Pal jibed, raising a burly fist.
I punched it. “Same place as your feet. Still, we both get around.”
“We do. How’d you like that message wasp I sent? Cool, eh?”
“Kind of cyber-retro, don’t you think? Lot of effort for a simple come-hither. Hurt like hell when it pierced my eye.”
“Omelettes,” he said, apologizing backhandedly. “So, I hear you cut yourself loose!”
“Shrug. How much good to Albert is an Albert who’s not Al?”
“Cute. I didn’t figure Sober Morris could make a frankie. Anyway, some of my best friends are mutants, real and otherwise.”
“Sign of a true pervert. Do you know if Al’s planning to disown me?”
“Nah. Too soft. He did post a credit limit, though. You can charge two hundred, no more.”
“That much? I didn’t clean a single toilet. Is he angry?”
“Can’t tell. He cut me off. Got other probs. Seems he lost both of this morning’s grays.”
“Ouch. I heard about the first, but … damn. Number two had the Turkomen. That was a good scooter.” I pondered this a second. No wonder my AWOL raised so little dust. “Two grays gone. Huh. Coincidence? Happenstance?”
Pallie scratched a scar, running from his shaggy black hair to a stubbled chin.
“Thinking no. Reason I sent the wasp.”
The big blond grunted. “Will you cut this useless chatter? Just ask the vile thing if it remembers us.”
Vile thing? I tried to meet the fellow’s eye. He refused contact.
Pal chuckled. “This is Mr. James Gadarene. He thinks you might recognize him. Do?”
I looked the man up and down. “No recollection … sir.” Adding some formality might be a good idea.
Both strangers grunted, as if half-expecting this. I hurried on.
“Of course that’s no guarantee. Albert himself forgets faces. Even some guys he knew in college. Depends how long ago we met. Anyway, I’m a frank—”
“This memory would be less than twenty hours old,” Gadarene interrupted without actually looking at me. “Late last night, one of your grays rang my doorbell, flashed some private eye credentials and demanded an urgent meeting. The ruckus even woke some of my colleagues in our compound next door. I agreed — reluctantly — to meet the gray, alone. But in private the damned thing only paced around, blathering nonsense that I couldn’t even begin to comprehend. Finally, my assistant came in from the next room with news. The gray wore a static generator. It was deliberately jamming my interview recorder!”
“So you have no chronicle of the meeting?”
“Nothing useful. That’s when I got fed up and tossed the cursed thing out.”
“I … don’t recall anything remotely like that. Which means the real Albert Morris doesn’t either. Or he didn’t, as of ten this morn. Before that, all of our dittos have been accounted for, stretching back at least a month. Every one brought home a complete inload … though some were pretty banged up.” I winced, recalling last night’s awful trek under the river. “Heck, I don’t even know what ‘offices’ you’re talking about.”
“Mr. Gadarene heads an organization called Defenders of Life,” Pallie explained.
At once I grasped the fellow’s hostility. His group fiercely opposes dittotech on purely moral grounds — a stance requiring great tenacity nowadays, when realfolks live surrounded and outnumbered by countless creatures of servile clay. If one of Albert’s copies had behaved in the manner just described, it would be an act of towering rudeness and deliberate provocation.
From Gadarene’s bitter expression, I guessed a special ire toward me. As a frankie I had declared independence, professing to be a free, self-motivated life form … though a pseudobeing with few rights and fewer prospects. At least other dittos could be viewed as extensions or appendages of some real person. But I’d seem the worst kind of insult toward heavenly authority. A soul-less construct who dares to say I am.
At a best guess, I’d wager his people never donate to the Temple of the Ephemerals.
“Same thing happened to us, early this morning,” the other fellow said — the tall man who looked vaguely familiar.
“I think I do recognize you,” I mused. “Yes … the greenie I ran into, picketing at Moonlight Beach. Its face copied you
rs.”
From his wry smile, I could tell the man already knew about my encounter with his cheap demonstrator-ditto. The green may have already inloaded. Or perhaps it phoned home to report my resemblance to their wee-hours visitor.
“Mr. Farshid Lum,” said Pal, finishing introductions.
“Friends of the Unreal?” I guessed. The biggest organization of mancies I’d heard of.
“Tolerance Unlimited,” he corrected with a frown. “The FOTU manifesto doesn’t go far enough in demanding emancipation for synthetic beings. We think short-lived people are just as real as anyone else who thinks and feels.”
That drew a snort from the blond. And yet, despite a philosophical chasm that gaped between them, I sensed common purpose. For now.
“You say a Morris copy also barged into your place—”
“—ranted for a while and then left, yeah,” Pallie inserted. “Only this time we got some clear images through the static. It was one of your brodits, or sure looked like one.”
He handed me a flat pix. Though blurry, it resembled Albert, as close as any gray takes after its rig.
“Appearances can be faked. So can credentials. The static indicates that someone didn’t want too close an inspection—”
“I agree,” interrupted Gadarene. “Moreover, when we phoned Mr. Morris this morning for an explanation, his house computer—”
“—Nell—”
“—dismissed the whole event as impossible, since you didn’t have any duplicates active at the time we were being harassed. The house refused even to wake Albert Morris for comment.”
“Curious,” I comment.
“In fact, your rig has both of our groups listed as crank organizations,” said Lum, with a wry expression, as if he wore the moniker with pride. “Since the house filtered and refused my queries, I went to the public Albert Morris net profile, looking for one of his friends. Someone who would talk to us.”