“That,” comes Honey’s voice, “is a very interesting question.”
“Meaning one you ain’t got no answer for?” Sugar presses.
“I don’t think they’ve installed a Collar in you, despite what I was saying earlier. Not as part of your basic headware.”
“How would you know?” Sugar asks her.
“Because I basically have access to absolutely everything in Jimmy’s head,” she says, like it’s a good thing. “If it was there I could turn it on and off. I can’t find anything like a Collaring system. So I can only assume it was something they were planning to upload to you all at a later date. I mean, you have all this headspace free. Except… you’re right, the tech certainly existed when Braintree designed your headware, so why not just…?”
And it’s like Honey shuts down. I swear I feel her get smaller in my head. For a moment I think her shelf life or half-life or whateverthehell is over, and I’m actually rid of her. But it’s not that. She’s still sitting rent-free in my goddamn head. It’s just that she caught some more news from Earth.
I tune in and see what’s changed. Seems to be the same legal clusterfuck as before, far as I can see. Then I spot the new secret ingredient. Bodies.
Pictures of an old Middle East-looking gent who obviously did very well for himself. Picture of a dead woman, meaning I guess they never snapped her when she was alive. Ditto with a dog-Bioform. Three bodies found at the offices of some swanky law firm, except the name of the firm’s familiar ’cos of Honey going on about it. Unknown female, unknown male Bioform, but Mr groomed-beard-and-expensive-suit has a name: Aslan.
“Ah,” I clock. “He was your pal.”
“Yes,” Honey agrees quietly. “And I just got him killed. This was what Bees meant. How things might get worse.”
“He let out the data, though,” Sugar puts in. “Bees got it to him, he let it out. It’s like you told the Bees. It was his choice.”
Honey makes a sound. It isn’t a convinced sound. I sit on the newsfeed a bit, see what’s what, in case anyone’s started talking Mars. You’d be amazed the number of people who reckon Braintree has some God-given international right to privacy, that nobody should be able to kick in the doors and see the crematoria and the operating theatres. That everyone should just forget they ever saw this illegally obtained evidence, basically, and stuff it all back in the box. Politicians and lawyers and businessmen mopping their brows and complaining about what a mess the world’s got into if a prison can’t perform illegal brain ops on its inmates without everyone making a fuss about it. But I reckon there aren’t so many of those voices, not with more and more of those videos coming out, each one worse than the last. I don’t reckon Braintree will keep its doors closed for long.
And I try to work out how I feel about all that. I mean, the stuff they’re talking about now, it’s all after I got on the rocket. But they must have been doing something similar before. When they designed this headware we all got given, after that other lab had done the body mods, they must have tested it on someone first. So how do I feel that part of me has that blood on it, and if Braintree had played by the rules, I wouldn’t be the man I am today.
I want to say I’m still pretty damn fine with it all, but the thought’s like a hook in me. That they ruined someone so they could get me right. Or else that they ruined someone so they could fuck me up properly when the time came.
“If they do download a Collar…” I say, just quiet like, for Honey, “you can switch it off, right?”
“I think I probably could, yes,” she says. So maybe there’s a silver lining to that particular cloud.
We kick our heels for another few hours while the news-dog on Earth chases its tail. Mars hasn’t come up, and Sugar isn’t able to get anything out of Admin. In fact whole sections of the Hell City system aren’t returning her calls right now. I figure everyone’s gone into disaster mode, waiting for the fallout. Anyway, all this waiting’s doing nobody any good, most especially not my stash, and so I get on my feet and announce I’m going scouting, see how things are, see if any shit’s coming down anywhere near us. Sugar doesn’t care, and Honey’s too busy following the news or mourning her dead friend, so I get out without anyone stopping me.
“The system traffic is very curious,” Honey says as I step out of Sugar’s dust-choked hideout, but being me I don’t pay a whole lot of notice.
I get far enough away that I won’t bring heat down on Sugar, and then I put in some calls, keeping on the move between them so Sheriff Rufus doesn’t turn up to tap me on the shoulder. I mean, not like he couldn’t track me down, but I ain’t making it easy for him and I hope he’s glued to the news same as everyone else must be. And it does seem to be most everyone else. I put in calls to Lucas Noel and Joey Venker and neither of them want to hear from me, not even so’s they can tell me to go to hell in person. Then I try Girda Bosrovi and she’s not picking up either, and I am now feeling decidedly hard done by, as though all this Braintree Thompson business is aimed at pushing Yours Truly into involuntary cold turkey. I mean, OK, something’s kicking off back on the homeworld, but that shouldn’t spike the wheels of illegal commerce, should it? I mean there could be a war on and you should be able to score some Stringer if you had the scrip.
At last I get through to Fergil Maldoun, who is not my dealer of choice on account of the 10 per cent hike he puts on everything in return for the pleasure of dealing with Fergil Maldoun. It looks like a seller’s market, though, and while I’m not quite a beggar, it surely doesn’t look like I’m a chooser. So I go some way out of my way through the tunnels beneath Hell City, the crap ones where half the lights don’t work, until I get to Maldoun’s turf. And it’s quiet. So fine, there’ll be a shift outside, and maybe everyone else is in the bars and the clubs, or maybe they’re all hunched in their nooks. Maybe there was a company picnic and nobody told me. Quiet, though. Quiet enough to freak me out. I check in with Sugar, just in case it’s that special quiet of Rufus and the posse trailing me once they cleaned out our home base.
“Jimbles, I think something’s up,” she said. Reception’s very bad. I troubleshoot and it says it’s an external issue. The network’s overloaded. We’re getting hardly any of the bandwidth.
“I’m hearing a lot of chatter,” she tells me, which is news to me as I’m not hearing crap. “Nobody can check in with Admin,” she says. “And now Central Data Services is bouncing queries like it’s a citywide denial of service. It’s like Hell City’s getting hacked. Whole neighbourhoods going dark.” I can barely hear her now, signal turning to noise as whatever it is spreads out.
I get to Maldoun’s. He’s got another client there, I think. Some guy I don’t know whose overalls are blue and who’s less heavily modded than us working Joes. Some Admin maintenance type slumming it down here with the rest of us so’s he can get his fix. Bastard better not get the last strip of Stringer or I will goddamn mug him for it.
And he’s got a weird look on his face as he greets Fergil. Weird smile, very wide, thin lipped, eyes half closed. Looks real pleased with himself, but then if I worked in Admin maybe I would too. And he wants to shake Fergil’s hand real bad, and Fergil doesn’t know what to do with him. He sees me out of the corner of his eye and is suddenly all Hey-there-good-pal-Jimmy, which is sure as hell not something I get often. He’s telling Admin guy that I’m a good friend, a good client, got deals to do, biz to whiz. And that’s fine with me ’cos it means I can maybe score a little extra for a little less, and I’m thinking maybe he owes Admin guy some scrip and I’m saving his ass, so I can hold that ass to the fire a bit for a better price.
Except when I get close to my man Fergil Maldoun, a change comes over him. He starts staring at me, and his mouth stops moving, no more words from Fergil all of a sudden. He’s stood right still, and I’m trying to tell him what I want and can he just hurry it along, and Admin guy is right there with that damnable smile…
And Fergil smiles. His eyes screw up and he beams
at me, real big smile, real pleased with himself. And not like he normally is, which would be bad enough. This isn’t any expression I ever saw on the face of Fergil Maldoun. It makes him look constipated. It should be funny, except it’s the exact smile of Admin guy, as though Fergil’s just put on his face.
They both smile at me, and then they shake hands, the two of them. Like a little gang thing, a little series of clutches and touches, and then Fergil ducks his head, real unctuous-like. And Admin guy is sticking out his hand to me, still smiling, waiting.
Honey says, “Go now, Jimmy. Just go. Something very bad is happening.”
“No shit,” I say, and leg it, pelting back the way I came. I almost run straight into someone come straight off the works on the surface, white and green overalls covered with fresh dust. They smile at me, that same goddamn smile. They want to shake hands.
Then there’s a message in my head, no voice, just text.
MARMALADE HERE. SOMETHING WRONG WITH SUGAR. COME NOW.
20
SPRINGER
Thompson was In Process, as Felorian called it, when the doctor burst in. In Process was something they’d had dummy runs at before, to provide data for the Braintree brains to chew over, but this was the real thing, the final live upload, not to be interrupted. Carole and Boyo were in a waiting room off Processing, waiting for their master’s return, when the chief scientist hurtled in through the door hard enough that she thought he’d been pushed. His immaculate façade was ruffled and his eyes kept darting to the door through to Processing, where Thompson lay hooked up to the machines.
Springer shrank from him when he turned that anaemic gaze on her. His hair was out of place. Literally, the whole body of it shifted to one side, peeling up at a corner.
“What’s going on?” And she shifted closer to Boyo, in case the man was just deranged now, his all-too-thin veneer of respectability worn through entirely.
“There’s,” Felorian said, as though it was a sentence. He was unsteady on his feet. She wondered if he’d been poisoned, had a stroke, come down with some brain fever as karmic retribution for all the other brains he’d trashed.
“Doctor Felorian?” In contrast she was still one hundred per cent polished professional, for all she was standing right in Boyo’s shadow.
“A breach,” Felorian croaked, eyes sliding away to where Thompson had gone. “There’s. A breach. Data. We’ve been. Hacked, we’ve been hacked. I need. When he comes out. Need you to handle. Him. You have to handle him. You’re the only one who. We’re trying to stop it but. But it keeps circumventing. Everything we do.” As though the man was a pane of glass cracked through, and no two shards of him quite meeting edge to edge.
“Doctor Felorian, please calm down,” she said. “What sort of breach are we talking about? Personal data? Commercially sensitive material? How does it touch on my employer?” Because it wasn’t just inmate records or the loss of a patent, from the way it had impacted on him.
“The recordings,” Felorian moaned.
“What did you record? You mean, with the inmates? After Processing?” That would be problematic, potentially incriminating, but Carole was already running through possible ways to beat it if it went public. Ways that would dump Felorian right in it but preserve her employer, because she had her priorities. And who would believe Felorian over Thompson? Nobody believed anyone over Thompson, not in the end. Not even when they knew he was lying. Not even when the lies were tissue-thin. That was his genius.
But Felorian was saying something, looking as dismayed as a man handed his own warrant of execution. He was saying, “Everything.”
Too many questions, and she obviously had a rare window of honesty with the man, but he’d pull himself together in a moment and start hiding things. So she just said, “Show me. Show me what they have, whoever they are. No, wait. Are you tracing them?”
“Yes, trying to, yes, but—”
She called the campaign team, linked to their electronic operations, the dirty tricks boys who screwed with anyone who was getting in the way. Their usual job was to dig up something they could use to get people to shut up and go away, but poachers made the best gamekeepers. In minutes she had them working with Felorian’s inadequate people, tracing just where this flood of ruptured data was going to. She had them work on stemming the tide, too, but like Felorian said, it wasn’t that easy. They stuck a thumb in and a fresh torrent sprang up, like the whole Braintree system had become a sieve.
And by then she knew what ‘everything’ meant. It meant everything. It meant that Felorian had been recording not just his own experiments – not unreasonable for a man whose job it was to learn from his many mistakes until he got it right – but every conversation he had with every client. Every meeting, every deal, every incriminating instruction. Every time he and Thompson had got together to advance the grand plan that had come to dominate Braintree’s research. The plan that was the outward manifestation of Thompson’s own deepest desire. The machinery of money and minds that Carole had helped him build around himself, so he could realise his dreams.
All of it on record, and the implication was clear. Felorian hadn’t trusted Thompson not to sell him down the river in the end, walk away and let the boffin take the blame. As he might well have done, because Thompson wasn’t about being loyal to underlings, he was about taking their loyalty and wringing every last drop of use from it before discarding them. And so Felorian, no fool he, had recorded a very complete train of instructions, ensuring that he could show how Thompson had told him to do everything, that he had only been obeying orders. And now it was all crawling out of the holes in the sieve and wriggling off into the ether.
No, not into the ether, not distributed across the globe. It was going to one place. A single pinpoint in the great constellation of human virtual activity. And she knew it before the team came back with their confirmation. She didn’t know how the man had done it, but it made sense. And this wasn’t the worst result in the world, because at least it meant they had someone they could confront, bully, bribe. They could stem the tide with application of threats and money, just like before, just like always.
Scout was still in the area, awaiting instructions. She sent word to the Trigger Dogs. Move in.
Then it was time for Thompson to come out of Processing, and like Felorian said, who else could break the news to him save her?
Even as he shouldered into the room she was trying to condense what had happened in her head: a summary, and then a summary of a summary, until the pieces were small enough for Thompson to digest without becoming impatient. Without becoming angry. And she didn’t want him angry, but at the same time there was no way he wasn’t going to be angry, and so she stuttered a little and fought over the words and he was instantly keyed up, clever in his own way, enough to see things had gone wrong.
And she got it out, rattled through it like a machine, the breach, the videos, the lawyer. Short sentences, to the point, an admirable communicator with skills honed for an audience of one. He stared. His face went flat, sagging but purpled as the blood flushed to it. He stared past it at her, out of that place he lived in, behind his eyes.
“Ch!” he said. And “Ff!” Nonsense syllables, spittle dashing across her face as he stood quite still and expressionless. Not restraint but momentary rage overload at the enormity of what had gone on. And then he hit her, bony fist deflecting awkwardly from her cheekbone, and she reeled back: no art to the blow, but the meaty weight of his arm behind it. He slapped her across the side of her head, rammed the lever of his knee into her stomach, punched at her back, blazing flowers of pain down her ribs. Then he was hauling her upright and his face was on fire with blank fury. “No no no no,” was coming from his throat, barely seeming to interact with tongue and lips, not even loud, not even angry-sounding, just an idiot monologue that was right out of the id that made up most of Warner S. Thompson. He gripped her by the throat and shook her, and she thought that would be it, that he’d clench those fi
ngers hard enough that it would, at least, be over. And she was trying to fight; she was trying to fight but she couldn’t, because in her head was the knowledge, He wants this. And she did what he wanted. She was a good, obedient employee. If he wanted to beat her then she was there to be beaten.
She could hear Boyo whining, sense him twitching, wanting to move, perhaps even to intervene; no more able to than she was to hold her hands up to ward him off.
Thompson landed one more blow on her, knuckles straight into her face, so that she was on the floor a moment after without memory of the transition, the room swimming, nausea marching up her throat. His expensive shoes swam in her vision and she waited for their impact, trying to shield her face or her stomach, but her hands betraying her, leaving him all the targets she possessed because he wanted it. Because she was just the girl who couldn’t ever say no. The Collar in her mind – call it what it was now, no more nor less than the thing that kept Boyo and Scout in line – a tight band of pain behind her eyes, throbbing and pulsing in time with her bloodied face, her rebelling stomach.
But those shoes didn’t move, and when the vomit came she jack-knifed away so that it went somewhere away from him. She mustn’t soil that Italian leather. That would make her a bad employee.
“Stand up!” Thompson grunted, and a kind of whole-body twitch went through her as she tried to obey even as she kept on retching. Wiping at her mouth, she tried to haul herself to her feet, but the room swooped vertiginously around her and she fell back down. He shouted at her again, and she felt a fresh wave of violence cresting in him. Whimpering, desperately, she pulled herself upright and sagged against the wall, trying not to cry because he hated women crying.
“Get me Fellatio!” he snarled and she automatically opened a channel to the doctor, whom she knew had heard. Whom she knew had watched, through the cameras, through the mirror that was a window.
“Doctor Felorian, will you come in here please,” she said, and in her rattled mind she was booking the appointment. See Felorian. Braintree. Now. But Felorian didn’t come in, didn’t respond, and she tried to brace herself when she told Thompson, but couldn’t even do that.
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