by Al Robertson
‘Wait,’ his wife said. ‘We’re not fully offweave yet.’ Gerald groaned. ‘There’s still something.’ She rounded on Leila. ‘What are you trying to hide from us?’ Then she paused, eyes flicking backwards and forwards as she read a virtual display. ‘Oh,’ she said slowly. ‘You’re a fetch.’
Leila sighed to herself. ‘Yes,’ she replied.
‘Well, no wonder we’re getting lied to. You don’t know what truth is because you aren’t even real. I’ll be complaining about you, you shouldn’t be doing a job like this.’
Leila felt fury rise up. Be professional, she reminded herself. Then she spoke. ‘Under the terms of the post-rebirth settlement, I’m as human as you are. I have every right to earn a living.’
The woman snorted. ‘Nonsense. Gods!’ She turned to her husband, who now had fallen all the way to the floor. He was panting with stress. ‘Why am I even arguing with a piece of software? Oh, and do stop being so pathetic.’ She turned back to Leila and snapped: ‘Bring the weave back up.’
Leila did so, ripostes burning through her. She imagined how each would play out. They all ended in complaints to her boss, perhaps in dismissal. She was better off just ignoring it all.
She said nothing else as she led the buyers out of the building. She imagined setting up a fictional counter-buyer to bid against them. ‘Tell your manager we’ll call with an offer tomorrow,’ the woman said. ‘And a complaint.’
Leila barely heard her. There was a message, but it wasn’t from Ambrose or Fi. The hospital had called. ‘You’d better get over here as soon as you can,’ a nurse said, her voice taut with stress. ‘Your brother’s insurance pay-out has come through…’
What insurance? Leila wondered.
‘…but he’s totally lost it,’ continued the nurse. ‘He’s turned all his antivirals off and is refusing any medical help. The infection’s eating him alive.’
In the background, Dieter’s voice rose in a strange, croaking howl: ‘DON’T ANY OF YOU TOUCH ME! I’M A FUCKING LOADED NOW, THAT MEANS I GET MY FUCKING WAY. I HAVE TO DIE AS SOON AS POSSIBLE AND NONE OF YOU WILL STOP ME!’
Chapter 2
Leila decided to jump straight to the charity hospital, leaping several kilometres in an instant. It was something she hardly ever did, because it reminded her that she was only virtual. And the dislocation that came with jumping always sickened her.
She prepared herself as well as she could. She looked to her left and right, following the cluttered streets of Docklands as they rolled up and away, disappearing behind the Spine to meet far above her head. She glanced down the tube of Docklands and out into space. She looked behind her and saw the entrance to the Wart. She thought of the brilliant lights of Homelands beyond it. She imagined that she was looking at Station from outside, inspecting the twin battered skins of Docklands and Homelands, the Wart between them like a bulbous fist clenching a thick, round rod. Then she pulled her consciousness back to the little street she was in. Jumping to the hospital was such a short journey. Little more than a footstep. She closed her eyes, thought of Dieter, sent out the appropriate command codes and leapt to its atrium.
The sudden shift was as excruciating as ever – the leap from cold evening chill to lightly overheated hospital air, from fading spinelight to hard, clinical fluorescence. She rushed for the restroom, cutting through a small crowd. Camera nests hovered over it. It looked like some kind of media event. She retched when she was safely in a cubicle, vomit splashing into the water. Dieter had made sure that her fetchware precisely replicated a physical human’s experience of life.
‘Are you sure you want the bad stuff too?’ he’d asked.
‘Of course,’ she replied.
He told her she was nuts, but he did it anyway.
When she’d recovered herself, she started back towards her brother’s room, pushing through the media event. A minor pop star was holding forth on a small podium. He was running some of East’s more potent celebrityware. It snatched her attention. She shook her head, freeing herself, and kept moving. Moving through the crowd, she suddenly found herself standing next to a white, man-shaped silhouette. That did stop her.
She hadn’t seen an empty avatar for years. Its weave sigils must be completely out of date, linking to fashion and appearance content that no longer existed. A high, sweet smell assaulted her. A moment, then her weave systems registered the absence and sent out a call to generic open source image banks. Out-of-copyright content washed across the avatar.
The silhouette vanished and a man stood in front of her. He had a sharp, intelligent face, framed by carefully styled, bushy hair. Two thick sideburns lanced down like inverted horns. A caustic aftershave reek replaced the strange, sweet smell. He wore a close-fitting pastel blue suit over a pale grey shirt. Wide lapels and flared trousers gave him a larger than life look. He raised a hand to adjust a white cravat. Jewellery glittered on his fingers. The cut of the suit and the style of the shirt were about a quarter of a century out of date. They sent Leila back into her earliest years, reminding her of the first grown-ups she’d known, vast, powerful entities whose authority over her world had always seemed so absolute. For an instant, she felt like a child.
The man smiled at Leila. ‘I’m very sorry for your loss,’ he said, but there was no empathy in his soft, buzzing voice.
‘What?’ she replied, pulling herself back to the present.
He loomed over her. ‘I am very sorry for your loss,’ he repeated. ‘But you have so much to remember him by.’
‘You’ve mistaken me for someone else.’ It took an effort of will to push past him. Weirdo, she thought, a little unsettled by the impact he’d had on her.
As she rushed down corridors, adsprites leapt out at her. The hospital was partially advertising funded, so her spam filters were barred from blocking them. She did her best to ignore their buzzing little sales pitches, letting her financial status flash up so they could see how little she had to spend. They gave up on her long before she reached Dieter’s room.
There was a nurse waiting outside it. ‘What’s going on?’ gasped Leila. ‘Is he all right?’
‘Much quieter now. But he still won’t let them touch him.’
‘Your doctors?’
‘No. The Twins sent specialists as soon as the insurance money reached his account. But they can’t force treatment on him without next of kin permission.’
‘They’ve got it,’ said Leila, rushing to the door. Then a thought hit her. She turned back to the nurse. ‘But his insurance crapped out on him,’
The nurse shrugged. ‘The money’s there. Otherwise the specialists wouldn’t be. They’ve been with him for a couple of hours, I dread to think how much that’s cost.’
‘Oh, hell…’ Leila’s heart sank. Dieter must have somehow cracked the isolation unit’s security and artificially inflated his bank balance.
‘Your brother’s very rich indeed. He could buy this place, if he wanted to.’
‘What? That’s impossible.’
‘The money’s real. The Twins did a deep dive on his finances before they sent in the pay-per-hour people.’ She nodded towards the door. ‘Those two aren’t cheap.’
Dieter was tied to the bed, held down with padded straps. The specialists chatted by the window, their isolation armour gleaming in the late afternoon spinelight. They didn’t notice Leila come in.
‘This dump is just a sodding fetch farm,’ grumbled the female one. ‘They haven’t even tried to crash the infection.’ Treatment engines hung beside them like a shoal of carbon-fibre jellyfish, medical weapons yearning for billable deployment, their real and virtual features impossible to tell apart. ‘No bonus on this one. He’s a goner.’
Leila moved to the side of the bed. Dieter’s eyes were closed. The infection had shrivelled him. He looked so fragile. The doctors still hadn’t noticed her, but her brother saw her straight away and t
urned his head towards her. His face had a starved sharpness to it. The artefact had sunk deeper into his chest and was now almost completely embedded. Only one square face was visible.
‘Hello, sis,’ he slurred. ‘I’m in the money! Pretty fucking cool, eh?’
‘Dieter,’ Leila replied. ‘What does this mean? Why didn’t you tell me about it? And – how?’
The doctors turned towards her, surprised. ‘Oh,’ the man said. ‘You’re the fetch. The nurse told us about you.’ He turned back to his colleague. ‘It can stay?’ he asked.
‘Yeah, no probs,’ the other doctor replied. ‘No flesh, no infection risk.’
‘Happened very quickly,’ Dieter wheezed. ‘Met some high pressure salesman. Pressure men. Did a deal with them. You wouldn’t believe who they represent! Hardly believe it myself.’ He coughed. ‘Proper old school. Too much cologne. Terrible dress sense.’
‘I think I met one. Creepy sod.’
‘Oh, they’re pukka.’ Dieter coughed again. A bloody spatter of nanogel and wires dribbled out of his mouth. ‘Turned out all right, eh?’
‘I don’t like this, Dieter.’
He ignored her. ‘It’s just an advance payment. Proof of concept. The rest is coming directly to you.’ He had to force each word out. ‘You’ll be rich enough to keep the flat. Live wherever you want. All taken care of.’ He nodded towards the doctors. ‘We don’t need those guys. Waste of cash. I have to die.’ A weak smile. ‘The pressure men’ll take me away. Part of the deal. But I’ll be back.’ He winked. ‘Shouldn’t even tell you this much. But you’ve got to know. Don’t want you worrying.’
The female doctor noticed the nanogel, reached for a tissue to wipe it up, examined it closely then showed it to her colleague.
‘Shit.’
‘Yeah, faster than we thought,’ she replied. ‘No wonder he’s raving. No next of kin, no one to authorise treatment, nothing we can do.’
‘I’m next of kin,’ said Leila.
‘You’re a fetch. I don’t know if you count.’
‘He’s dying,’ said Leila. ‘Pretty soon there won’t be anything left of him to work on.’ The doctor nodded. ‘And you want your bonus?’ She nodded again. ‘Then assume I can authorise it. Do whatever you need to. Looks like we can afford it.’
‘No!’ coughed Dieter weakly. ‘Let me die! Let the pressure men have me!’
The doctor thought for a moment, then leapt into action, suddenly all professionalism. ‘Take him right down,’ she told her colleague. He nodded at one of the machines. It drifted over towards Dieter, dropping a tendril which wrapped itself around his mouth and became a dark mask. Gas hissed.
Dieter sighed, then spoke. ‘I’m going with the pressure men,’ he gasped, the mask muffling his voice. ‘These idiots won’t stop it. Such wonderful things to see…’
Then the anaesthetic took him and his eyes closed.
‘Earn that money,’ Leila said. ‘Bring him back.’
Leila watched, feeling increasingly useless. When the Blood and Flesh plague shattered the deep structures of her memory, completely disordering her sense of herself, Dieter had helped her rebuild. He’d taken her out of the Coffin Drives’ convalescence unit and back to his weavespace. Then he’d opened up his own memories of her life to her. They became a template, guiding her as she remade the structures of her past. He’d helped her heal when even the Fetch Counsellor had given up on her.
Now he needed her just as much as she’d needed him. And she could only watch. She moved to the window and tried to let the world distract her. Flies buzzed within broken double glazing, spinelight reflecting off them in metallic glints. Beyond, there was Docklands, curving up into the sky. And above it all, the five gods of Station and the soft purple orb of the Totality looked down, careless of the affairs of humanity. Habit had her checking her messages again. Miwa had called. There was nothing else.
Hours passed. As it turned out, Dieter was right. The doctors could do nothing. In fact, they did worse than that. The Twins’ medical technologies triggered a defence reaction.
‘Remind you of anything?’ asked the female doctor as Dieter’s flesh melted away, his body reducing itself to skin, sinew and bone. Her colleague shook his head. ‘It’s mimicking Sweat addiction impacts. Only very highly accelerated.’
‘Fuck…’
Pain and anger snapped at Leila. ‘What have you done to him?’
‘This kind of infection is always unpredictable,’ said the doctor. ‘There’s always a risk of adverse reaction. It’s covered in the terms and conditions.’
‘Nobody ever reads the bloody things,’ her colleague complained.
That was only the start of it. The artefact started to convert living flesh into dead clots of metal and plastic, wrapping them tight around his internal organs. Black decay wrote itself like code across his skin. The doctors wanted to stop fighting at three in the morning, but Leila forced them to continue.
‘If he’s paying,’ she told them, ‘you want him to live. And if he dies and I am, you want me to see you doing every single fucking thing you can for him.’
They kept him alive until just before dawn. The infection expired a few minutes after he did, having left itself with nothing to feed off. The artefact’s dark empty face stared up at the ceiling like a broken window. A sweet, rotten smell drifted up from it. Dieter’s bones tented his pale skin. An ear and a couple of fingers had dropped off. The right shoulder had fallen in. The sheets beneath him were a reeking mess, darkly sodden with nano-waste.
‘Well, that’s next month’s rent paid,’ one of the doctors said, as he stripped off his gloves. ‘Think I’ll hit Bahariya Hub for a bit of a break.’
Leila hoped he wasn’t as off-hand with his living clients. Exhaustion and a kind of sad resignation trumped rage. ‘What happens now?’ she asked wearily.
‘The crematorium,’ the female doctor replied. ‘You’ll get the ashes once they’ve been declared clear of infection. And if he chooses rebirth, he’ll be back in six months’ time. Just like you were.’
The other doctor squatted down and opened up a matt black briefcase. The medical equipment drifted towards it. One by one each instrument dropped down to nestle into the case’s dark lining. ‘You’ll be getting a fairly hefty bill in a day or so,’ he said. ‘Prompt payment appreciated. If you think it’s too much, remember you ignored us when we advised ceasing treatment.’
Then they were gone. Leila was left alone in the room with the shell of skin, bone and broken matter that had once been her brother. Sadness filled her. At least his weaveself’s still out there, she reassured herself. She barely noticed when more containment workers came to take the body away. When the room was empty, she moved to the window. The gods were still out there. The flies were too. A couple had drifted into the room. Awful hygiene. She made a mental note to mention them to the nurse. Habit grabbed her and, without thinking, she slapped at one. It dodged her hand, lifting itself up beyond her reach, its metallic chitin glittering in the room’s harsh light. It saw me coming, she thought, surprised.
It must be fetch aware; must have picked up her virtual action, read it as something real and acted accordingly. She wondered who’d bother putting insects onweave. Some Docklands hacker, throwing their energies into a project at once totally futile and deeply personally satisfying. Someone a bit like Dieter.
Loss turned in her heart like a blade. He’ll be back soon. But tears still pricked at her. She nerved herself. An empty flat had to be faced. Six months suddenly seemed a very long time.
She walked home very slowly and stood outside the flat for quarter of an hour before letting herself in.
When she woke up next morning, there were three new messages waiting for her. The first was from her boss, offering a few days off. He seemed awkward. She wondered how many others would find it difficult to empathise with a fetch about a death.
The next was from a Totality lawyer, calling ‘with regards to the matter of your brother’s estate’. His smooth, purple, featureless face glowed out at her, giving nothing away. The final message was from another Totality mind. She identified herself as Cassiel. She, too, requested a meeting, without saying what it would be about.
Leila ran a weave search. Dieter had fine-tuned her search engines, merging them with some discreetly powerful hacking tools. It only took a minute or so to uncover her true background. She seemed to be a highly experienced fraud investigator, working across the Totality on a freelance basis.
‘Oh, Dieter,’ she said again. She’d been expecting a call like that, but not so quickly. She thought about the pressure men, wondering who they represented and what they’d want in return for their money. ‘What have you done?’
Chapter 3
Leila finally managed to reach Ambrose that afternoon. ‘I’m so sorry I’ve been out of touch,’ he told Leila. ‘You know how things are. Business.’ He sounded embarrassed. He probably hadn’t wanted to relive the agony of Cormac’s fall. Perhaps he’d been moving through a series of ever more broken Docklands dives, trying and failing to drink away the problem of his life. ‘You must come and see me as soon as possible.’ Now that he was calling, there was so much concern in his voice.
Leila went straight to his office. Out of the window, the streets of Docklands rolled upwards until they were lost behind the Spine. Ambrose leaned back in his chair.
‘So Dieter’s definitely going to choose rebirth?’ he asked.
His accent was purest Homelands, his suit was impeccably tailored, his chair and desk were overlaid with tasteful, detailed simulations of mahogany and leather and his walls were lined with a virtual library that presented as a dense array of traditionally bound legal textbooks. And yet there was still something ever-so-slightly skewed about him. Perhaps, Leila speculated, it was the contrast between the clubbable splendour of his workspace and the tiny Docklands backstreet he’d squeezed his legal practice into. It felt like he was living in a memory. He smiled his sad, apologetic smile. If she was meeting him for the first time, she wasn’t sure how impressed she’d be – but she’d seen him go into action on behalf of her boss, and knew just how sharp his mind was. When, of course, he was sober.