by Raya Jones
April sat down next to him, which made his flesh creep and his skin crawl. He reached for the pert in his pocket and enabled the anti-kidnap. April smiled, fleetingly sounding like Indigo, ‘I’m not going to harm you. Trust me.’
Rinzler folded his arms and looked the android in its empty eye. ‘I’m a simple man, April. Small organic brain, you know. I can’t put two and two together and come up with five. Your reassurance doesn’t add up with you doing your damnedest to kill me an hour ago. What do you want from me?’
‘I want to restore your office for a very minimal fee. I’ve never tried to kill you.’
‘Who did? Everild?’
‘If any of my units has been compromised to harm you, Sherlock Holmes did it.’
‘He’s a fictitious character.’
‘You met him when Indigo was shot. He has many names,’ said April, not smiling anymore.
It dawned on Rinzler that Angerford too was only an opponent’s piece to be taken out. Who is April’s real opponent? It occurred to him that April didn’t ransack his files looking for Indigo. The andronet sought links to Schmidt. It didn’t find any. That’s why it is so eager to assist with restoring the files. The Man with Many Names could dismantle an andronet — and somehow April knew it.
Rinzler reminded himself that April would soon be shut down anyway. He faked a yawn to suppress a smirk, and then yawned for real. ‘Give over, April. I’m not interested in your help or in helping you.’
April stood up. ‘You’ll come around. You’ll see. Life will be very good here when all my bodies are operational. My humans will be very happy with my service.’
It was gone.
Rinzler walked to Angerford’s door, wondering how to tell him about April with a Thousand Faces and a plan for world domination. As soon as Angerford opened the door, he said instead, ‘Did you get through to Tuscany?’
Angerford didn’t. The man wasn’t answering on any channel. Rinzler offered to give him a house call.
Standing at Angerford’s door, he keyed in Tuscany’s address string, pressed Go, and materialised three doors away.
He barely had time to reflect on the irony of it.
The door slid open before he rang the second time. A small pale man in a long gown, nightcap and sleepers, stepped out rapidly, letting the door close behind him and whispering that his partner was asleep. His eyes were red-rimmed from lack of sleep. ‘Hello, Rinzler. Don’t ask.’
Rinzler opened his mouth, speechless.
‘This is Life/Style nightwear if you must ask,’ said Tuscany morosely.
‘I was going to ask how you know me.’
‘The OK “wanted” poster. It’s about her?’
Rinzler nodded.
Tuscany’s voice trembled. ‘How did you find out about me?’
‘Everild told me.’
The man seemed strangely relieved. ‘Someone from Cyboratics keeps calling. Are you working for Everild too? How can I help?’
‘I’d like you to meet a neighbour of yours.’ Rinzler gestured towards Angerford’s door. ‘Would you like to get dressed first?’
*
Shortly afterwards Tuscany entered Angerford’s place. He now wore a medic-green biosuit with the Spare Lives logo, and carried a long ornate brass candleholder. If he imagined using it as a weapon, there was no room to swing it. The three men stood nose to nose in the middle of Angerford’s room.
Tuscany talked like a man glad to get it off his chest.
His partner had no idea of any of this, he stressed. He started to take ‘private’ clients so as to keep the expensive Life/Style™ subscription. Renaissance™ specialised in creating novelty accessories for clients who loved the era. Sometimes clients called in person, and it was good to bring them into an appropriately themed setting. Or so his partner said. Tuscany’s private jobs were illegal but he didn’t feel guilty, because he was helping needy people who couldn’t afford what Spare Lives were charging. The Everild job was different. He felt uneasy about it from the outset. The modifications were very slight, but there was no medical or cosmetic reason for doing them. At first he refused. However, Everild, communicating via April, threatened to expose his illegal service. And so he did it.
‘You must have felt awful for not being able to come forward when Indigo was shot,’ Rinzler suggested sympathetically.
‘No, not really. I know it sounds an awful thing to say, but I was relieved.’
Indigo’s fake death, as Tuscany saw it, meant that it was an espionage matter. It meant that Everild wouldn’t be keen to reveal the existence of the modified Indigo. He worried that Everild might kill him for the sake of tidying up loose ends, so he immediately destroyed any trace of that job. ‘I really don’t want to know what it’s all about,’ he stressed as a man in fear for his life would, and eagerly agreed to de-transcribe Indigo. If the soul was intact, and since they didn’t want any modifications done, it could be done within the hour. Tuscany waved the candleholder as he spoke, making Angerford and Rinzler duck. He handed it to Rinzler. ‘You’ll need to put this receiver where you want her downloaded.’
Rinzler took the object, feeling that the last piece of the puzzle had been handed to him. Usually clients were downloaded into their home, but Everild had the altered Indigo sent to a hotel. The andronet checked into that capsule hotel under the name Everild and sent one of its units to place the receiver there.
‘Here will be fine,’ Angerford told Tuscany.
Tuscany glanced around, dubious. ‘Is this your only room? She’ll need to be lying down.’
‘I’ll pull out the bed,’ said Angerford.
‘I’ll wait outside,’ said Rinzler.
After Tuscany left, Angerford told Rinzler that there was no need for him to wait. He thanked him for everything he had done. It came out wrong, like formally dismissing someone with a polite thank-you for a service you’ve paid for. Angerford added awkwardly, ‘I’ll call you after the Hand is done and buy you a drink in…’ he couldn’t recall the names of any of the bars Rinzler had taken him. He continued lamely, ‘And you’ll finish telling me about…’ before realising that he couldn’t remember what Rinzler didn’t finish telling him. ‘I mean it. I’ll call you. We’ll have that drink,’ concluded Angerford, meaning it. ‘Thank you for everything, Rinzler.’
That was it.
Rinzler walked out thinking about the rest of his life.
He took decisive strides across the yard, thinking about all the things he could do.
He could go to a hotel, get good food, a proper rest, and then figure out how to restore his office.
He could follow Latifah to Cardiff.
He aborted that line of thought. He didn’t want to come between her and Louis.
There was no reason to stay in Proxima, he realised. He could travel to Sol and look up Schmidt. Perhaps they’ll team up. They could start an agency, calling themselves Yojimbo TS.
Arriving back at the bench, Rinzler sat down guarding Angerford’s door as if the Indigo case wasn’t over yet.
Chapter 51
Rinzler was woken up by voices of children coming out to play. Their parents spotted him on the bench, and called the children back indoors. The yard was empty and silent again. He checked the next ships to Sol, and deliberated whether to have his boxes transferred to the spaceport’s ground terminal or directly to the ship. Did he really need anything from those boxes? Schmidt travels with only a small rucksack.
Someone in fancy dress materialised outside a nearby door in front of him. Rinzler’s glance took in a white wig piled high and richly decorated vermillion gown over an embroidered skirt that looked as if supported by wide hoops. He idly wondered whether Jeremiah used to be one of Renaissance’s clients — and realised that it was a Saturday android, and it wasn’t Tuscany’s door.
Angerford was already opening it.
Rinzler instantly sprang to his feet, yelling…
Too late.
The android in rococo attire inst
antly vanished.
Angerford lay immobile on the floor, a scorch mark on his chest below the Cyboratics logo, his pale face as dead as an android on standby.
Three things jostled for frantic attention in Rinzler’s head while he hesitated outside Angerford’s door.
One, he couldn’t protect Angerford anymore. Great sadness welled inside him.
Two, he must get concrete evidence that April did it.
Three, Indigo will be downloaded indoors any moment now.
And he won’t be travelling to Earth anytime soon. That was a fourth thing.
He continued to stare at Angerford, wishing he wasn’t seeing this, staring hard as if could revive the man by sheer gazing.
Something felt wrong. Angerford was too still. Corpses are like that, sure. But the biosuit should be repairing itself.
Was Angerford dead or alive?
The only way to know was to walk in.
Rinzler lingered outside, knowing that he had to walk in to meet Indigo. He could see through the open door. Strangely, he couldn’t spot the candleholder inside although there was nowhere or reason to hide it.
He called site security. They had the whole incident on record. ‘Cy security will be there shortly. We know you didn’t do it but don’t enter the crime scene,’ said the duty officer, who knew Rinzler.
‘Well, you know me,’ said Rinzler, stepping past the threshold.
The door closed behind him.
The room rearranged itself as the virtual façade was switched off. Angerford stood there, alive and displeased. ‘Why are you still here, Rinzler?’
‘You know me, can’t stay away,’ declared Rinzler and grinned at Indigo. ‘Hello, hello!’
Indigo sat on the bed, pale and disoriented. Her hair was bedraggled and the rainbow tattoos switched off. She looked daggers at Rinzler as if everything was his fault. ‘This room sucks big time. I appreciate you putting yourselves inside the game domain, guys. But, guys, couldn’t you make it more spacious? Here’s an idea: how about a tropical beach? Better idea: send me back to that abysmal zone you call an office. I can fix it for you. I’m nurturing brainwaves for improving it big time. Like, for instance, copy a Philip Marlowe template and…’
‘This is physical reality,’ Rinzler interrupted, smiling big-time at the miracle of her resurrection. ‘Can’t you feel it?’
She ran her hand over the bedcover, feeling the texture, ‘Yes, memory of touch. How alive am I?’
Rinzler hesitated. Alive enough to die again felt a truth too unkind to say aloud. He turned to Angerford. ‘Your security personnel will be here any moment now.’ It was strange that they weren’t there already, he felt. Angerford seemed preoccupied with a conversation inside his head. Rinzler turned back to Indigo. ‘You are alive in every mortal sense and April is still dangerous. Do you remember doing the Spartacus caper?’
‘I remember everything.’ She turned her accusing gaze to Angerford, who was shaking his head as if shaking off an unpleasant caller.
Angerford cagily told Rinzler that Cyboratics were actively investigating the shooting this very moment. A certain ‘contact’ knew that Angerford had not been actually shot. ‘I had to bring him in on that,’ he explained apologetically.
Indigo declared, ‘You mean Roke Steiner. You don’t need to keep secrets from me.’ She sat back, leaning against the wall, with arms folded and boots pulled up on the bed. The LED rainbows under her eyes lit up. ‘The Hand won’t work. You should’ve left me in the April zone to carry on from the inside. Go ahead. It won’t work.’
Angerford had already alerted the other three, and now initiated the protocol.
Again, it was over before it began. Indigo’s bio-signature was rejected.
‘I told you so,’ she said, grimly gloating. ‘Beats me how you didn’t you see it coming. Let me spell it out for you in neon lights. April uploaded my altered double. All it takes is a slightest of slight alterations of my fingerprints or retina pattern, DNA, anything. And then that abomination called April killed her too. And because she was a non-person, she was never registered as being alive and she can’t be declared to be deceased. So that you can’t remove her from the Hand configuration. Ever. Do I need to keep spelling it out for you?’
Both men shook their head, but she kept spelling it out anyway, ‘Your only hope in cyber-hell is to replicate the modifications exactly down to my tiniest fingerprint.’ She waved her little finger at them tauntingly. Rinzler pointed out that Tuscany had destroyed the record. She stated in the I-told-you-so voice, ‘Then April is unstoppable. What’s your next move?’ she demanded of Angerford.
Angerford said nothing. Rinzler spoke instead, ‘He’ll figure out something.’ He suggested that Indigo went to see her mother, and offered her a guest code on his own 1Step account.
She burst, ‘Why? What for? I have nothing to say to her! I’m staying with you. Don’t you realise, I’m officially deceased, seal and stamp. How am I going to explain being back from the dead without making life complicated for you? Especially you,’ she turned to Angerford. ‘You’ll have to explain the whole Everild gig to OK, and they’ll report to the CSG that Cyboratics has let an andronet get away with murder. Wye Stan Pan will be down on you like a ton of holy bricks, fire and brimstones, you wouldn’t know what hit you and…’
‘I’m sure he’s got the idea,’ Rinzler interrupted. ‘You can stay with us on only one condition.’
‘You don’t have anything to negotiate with,’ she pointed out.
‘The condition is that first you go and see your mother. I mean right now.’
‘And if I don’t?’
‘I’ll call her to fetch you.’
Indigo left with a torrent of protest.
As soon as they were alone Rinzler pointed out that Indigo had a point about Wye Stan Pan. ‘Is he aware of what’s been happening?’
‘Probably,’ Angerford mumbled evasively. Any activation of the Hand had to be authorised by Wye Stan. The president knew that it failed the instant it did. ‘He’s not my immediate worry.’
‘No, your immediate worry is that April knows you’re not dead,’ agreed Rinzler.
Angerford needed a few days to figure out how to rewrite the Hand. They considered their options. There was only one.
Cardiff was within range of the April cloud. Rinzler felt confident that Louis Huang will help to smuggle Angerford’s deck into the settlement. Angerford started to pack up his equipment, and Rinzler got food for the journey.
It came as no surprise when Jan phoned, demanding to know where her daughter was.
After she terminated the call, Rinzler told Angerford, ‘It wouldn’t be Indigo if the first thing she did coming back from the dead was to visit her mother.’
‘Who would it be?’
It wasn’t a rhetorical question, Rinzler realised.
The two men stared at each other, neither of them wanting to say aloud the terrible thought that crossed their minds.
It was obvious to Rinzler that the soul file has changed since it was first created. The resurrected Indigo remembered her posthumous operations in the April zone. Who’s to say it’s not April in Indigo’s body? Rinzler checked. ‘You’ve deleted the link before April ransacked my office, didn’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you absolutely sure?’
‘Absolutely,’ confirmed Angerford grimly. He was sure about that. He wasn’t sure about what might have been written into the soul file when April and Indigo were communicating with each other.
Chapter 52
The journey took most of the day. There wasn’t a train for a couple of hours. They stayed in shadows near the platform, ate some of the food, and hardly talked. Finally, a train came by. They hopped on hoping that it stopped in Cardiff. There was no way of telling.
It was a long and rough ride.
The train sped across the frozen twilight surface of the plane. The Proxima star glowed red above the horizon. The two men sat in darkness o
n bare floor in an empty boxcar. The train had no life-support. Their biosuit hoods inflated around their heads like luminescent transparent bubbles, pumping oxygen. Communications were routed via a network. Rinzler had secured an encrypted line, but they spoke little.
When they did speak, the conversation had the perfunctory airs of giving an update. Angerford informed Rinzler that Roke Steiner had orders to secure the story of Angerford’s death. The Saturday android was identified as a stolen unit customised for Jeremiah. The official story will be that Jeremiah had installed an ‘If I die, kill Angerford’ command. Those involved in the Hand operation knew that Angerford didn’t die outright, but by now they were told that he died of his injuries shortly afterwards.
Rinzler said nothing.
His silence made Angerford ill at ease.
The train slowed down, shunted through an unmanned yard where robotic cranes removed cargo. Then the train picked up speed again. Again it sped across the frozen surface. It made several more stops like that. Proxima disappeared from sight, then reappeared.
‘This train is going around in a figure of eight,’ observed Angerford.
Rinzler responded with a grunt.
Angerford couldn’t bear it. ‘You’re awfully quiet, Rinzler. What’s on your mind?’
‘I’m trying to assess how desperate I am. Is your trouble unshootable yet?’
Angerford mumbled that Wye Stan provided codes for operating within the April system without being detected by the April team.
Rinzler said nothing.
His silence spoke volumes, thought Angerford. It suspected that Rinzler wasn’t dignifying the trivial information with a response because he, Rinzler, suspected that Angerford was holding back something important. How could he tell Rinzler that Wye Stan Pan was actually excited about April?
The president wanted to regain control over the andronet, but didn’t want it dismantled. When Angerford pointed out to him that April had committed murders, Wye Stan instructed him to work out how to unfreeze the Hand and to leave it to him — Wye Stan — to work out how a human-andronet merger can be improved.