by Jeff Edwards
I dug through my pocket and pulled out my cigarettes. “I’ve been investigating a series of murders. I must be starting to get close, because I’m making someone very uncomfortable. Whoever it is has put out a street-contract on me.”
“I heard,” Jackal said. “Fifty K.”
“I need you to sniff around on the net and find out who it is.”
Jackal shook her head again. “Uh-uh. I don’t want any part of this.”
I thumped a cigarette out of the pack and lit it. “I thought you jackers thrived on danger. Dancing through the net a micro-second ahead of death, and all that. I’ll make it worth your while.”
Jackal hesitated. “How much?”
This case was rapidly pricing itself over Sonja’s ability to pay, but it wasn’t about money anymore. It was about survival, and I couldn’t ask Jackal to risk her life for loose change. “Fifteen K.”
Jackal shook her head. “Thirty.”
I sighed. “Twenty.”
“Twenty-five.”
“Twenty,” I said again.
“Twenty-five,” Jackal repeated. “Somebody’s willing to pay fifty to get your head on a plate. It ought to be worth half that to keep it on your shoulders, don’t you think?”
“Okay,” I said. “Twenty-five thousand. Now, let’s get moving. We’ve been standing here too long already.”
Jackal fell into step on my left side. “Where are we going?”
“I need somewhere to hide for a few hours. I want to get some sleep and maybe make a couple of phone calls.”
I took a drag off the cigarette and coughed. “I’m thinking maybe a hotel. Some place with a phone in the room and no vid cameras in the halls. Oh, it has to have a rear entrance so you can rent the room, and I can slip in the back way. You know any places like that?”
Jackal stopped and began to scan the street. “No hotels. I’ve got a better idea, but we’ll have to catch a cab.”
“Where to?”
“Dome 16,” Jackal said. “Ever heard of R.U.R.?”
I shook my head.
“It’s sort of a robot cult,” she said. “A bunch of chipheads. They’re pretty whacked, but their little lair is a good place to hide. It’s also a great place to make a net run from.”
“I’d prefer a hotel,” I said. “I don’t know your chiphead buddies. With fifty thousand marks on my head, how can I be sure that they won’t try to collect?”
“They won’t,” Jackal said. “It’s kind of hard to explain, but that’s not what they’re into.”
“A couple of hours ago, two punks tried to murder me in my sleep.”
Jackal looked at me out of the corner of her eye. “You did them first?”
“No,” I said. “But they’re both going to be shopping for new legs. And I’m not feeling very trusting right now.”
Jackal leaned out into the street and waved at a passing taxi. “I said my friends were whacked. I didn’t say they were scum. Anyway, you don’t have to trust them. You just have to trust me.”
The hovercab slid up to the curb, the blowers swirling dirt and gum wrappers around our feet in an ankle-high maelstrom.
Jackal opened the rear door and got in. “Come on,” she said.
I slid in beside her and punched the button that closed the door.
Jackal tapped a fingertip on the bulletproof shield. “LAX.”
That took me by surprise. “LAX? Are we flying somewhere?”
“Keep it in your pants,” Jackal said. “You’ll find out soon enough.”
The driver stuck to the domes for as long as possible, cutting west on Santa Monica Boulevard through Beverly Hills and West Los Angeles, and south on the 405 into Dome 13 and the northern fringes of Culver City.
When we pulled into the vehicle lock at the southern end of Dome 13, he looked over his shoulder at us. “Make sure your windows is up all the way. The air’s gone get a little shitty, and the filters ain’t workin’ real good.”
“It’s only about eighteen kilometers to Dome 17,” Jackal said. “A few carcinogens every now and then are good for you. Keeps you from getting addicted to oxygen.”
The driver didn’t smile.
We checked our windows, and then sat in silence until the huge steel doors slid open at the far side of the lock.
Unlike the city streets outside the domes, the major highways hadn’t been allowed to atrophy. LA was, after all, a major city, and major cities require highways to connect them to other major cities; a maxim that has endured since the days of the Roman Empire.
Out past the dome’s perimeter lights, the 405 stretched through the darkened remains of Culver City like a black river of plast-phalt carving its way through man-made cliffs of dilapidated buildings. Traffic was sparse, a few cars here and there, but mostly large unmanned cargo trucks shuttling back and forth from LAX.
True to the driver’s word, the car’s filtration system was not airtight. The smell of the outside air invaded the taxi almost immediately after we left the dome. It was a complex miasma, a strong bass-note of burned petrochemicals, overlaid by a spectrum of unwholesome odors from sulfurous ash to chlorine. The farther we got from Dome 13, the worse the stench became. By the time the perimeter lights of Dome 17 rose in the taxi’s windshield, my eyes were watering and the back of my throat was burning.
We drove through the lighted archway into Dome 17’s north lock. As the huge steel doors slid shut behind us, the driver spoke over his shoulder. “Keep them windows shut until we clear the lock.”
We waited, stewing in the rank chemical air that had filled the cab. When the inner doors cycled open, we drove into Dome 17. As soon as we were clear of the lock, we rolled down the windows and breathed clean, filtered air again.
Following Jackal’s directions, the cabby drove west on Imperial Highway. To our right, through the faceted skin of the dome, we could see passenger shuttles taking off from LAX, climbing into the night sky on columns of fire. Each launch was surrounded by a hundred silent ghost-images, reflections in the angled panes of the dome.
I found myself trying to guess which of the launches were sub-orbital shots bound for other cities, and which had destinations in orbit or beyond, outside of earth’s polluted atmosphere and out of reach of the clawing fingers of her gravity-well.
We stuck to Imperial Highway, skirting the southern edge of the airport all the way to Dome 16.
We stopped at a strip mall on Vista Del Mar.
Jackal thumbed the latch button on her door. It folded open with a pneumatic wheeze, and she climbed out. “This is the spot,” she said.
I paid the driver and got out. The cab drove away, the wail of its blowers fading into the distance well before its taillights dwindled to red pinpricks, and then to nothingness.
I looked around. Except for a coin-operated Laundromat, and a holo-arcade, the shops in the little mall were all closed for the night. “Where are we going?”
Jackal pointed across the street, to a sprawl of unlit buildings behind a rusting chain-link fence. “There.” She stepped into the street and began walking toward the fence.
I took a couple of quick steps to catch up to her. “Your friends live in there?”
“Some of them.”
The farther we got from the street lights, the darker it became, until the soft glow of moonlight filtering down through the dome was our only real illumination. I thought about digging around in my travel bag for my night goggles, but Jackal seemed to know where she was going.
I followed her through a ragged hole in the fence onto a concrete slab covered by shallow drifts of sand and a liberal sprinkling of broken glass, squashed plastic cans, and the occasional piece of twisted metal junk.
Jackal led me through a narrow lane between two dark cement buildings. Ten or fifteen meters on the other side of the alley, the cement gave way to some sort of latticed metal platform.
I stopped at the edge of it. I could hear the rush of water from somewhere in the darkness below. “What’s th
is?”
Jackal walked a couple of meters out onto the grating and stopped. “It’s a catwalk. What did you think it was?”
“What’s under it?”
“Who cares? It’s just a catwalk.”
“What’s under it?” I repeated.
Jackal’s voice sounded puzzled, “A sluiceway for a hydro-electric generator. A tide engine. This used to be the old tidal-electric plant, back before cold fusion put it out of business. Why? What’s the problem?”
“Is there a way to go around? Without using the catwalk?”
“The tide-engine isn’t going to hurt you,” Jackal said. “We’ll look at it tomorrow in daylight. You can see it through the grate, about ten meters down. It looks like a giant jet engine with the skin pulled off.”
“Let’s go around.”
“We can’t go around,” Jackal said. “Or rather, we could, but we’d just have to walk over a different catwalk.”
She bounced up and down several times, her boot heels ringing on the metal platform. “Come on. It won’t collapse. Trust me.”
I took a quick breath. “Fine,” I said, stepping onto the metal platform before I could change my mind. “Let’s go.”
I crossed the catwalk over the tide-engine as quickly as possible. The clang of my heels on the grating seemed to echo the pounding of my heart. I tried not to think about the dark water rushing beneath me, or the black concrete chasm under my feet.
Vertigo struck me like a club to the head, and suddenly I was falling, tumbling into darkness and death.
CHAPTER 25
I couldn’t tell whether I was actually screaming, or if the shriek I heard existed only in my mind.
A slab of cement came up and slammed into me, knocking the wind out of my lungs. I lay there, fighting for breath, and trying to get used to the idea that I had fallen—not into the abyss beneath the grating—but to the sandy, trash-littered pavement on the other side of the catwalk.
“You okay?” Jackal’s face hovered over mine; her voice seemed to come from a great distance.
I tried to say something, but it came out as a strangled gasp.
“You okay?” Jackal repeated. She grabbed my shoulder and shook it.
“Give... me... a second,” I said. “I’m alright.”
A few seconds later, she helped me to my feet. I brushed the sand off my clothes and tried to regain my composure.
“What in the hell was that?” Jackal asked.
I could feel my ears burning, not just with embarrassment over my little spectacle, but with the knowledge that the past could reach out and squeeze my heart like a grape. “I... don’t like catwalks,” I said.
“I guess not,” Jackal said. “Can you walk?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Jackal led me through the darkness to another building. She chose a dark vacant doorway that looked just like any one of a half-dozen others. The doorway led to a narrow staircase, lit at irregular intervals by strips of green bio-florescent tape.
Jackal stopped at the foot of the staircase. “The stairs are metal,” she said. “Are you okay with that?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Just not metal gratings—in the dark—when there’s water.”
“Good,” Jackal said. “Because the elevator’s a death trap.”
She started climbing. “I’ll say this for you, Stalin: your phobias are specific as hell.”
I followed her up three flights.
The walls all along the stairs were peppered with graffiti. At the head of the stairs, the scrawled slogans and crude drawings gave way to hand-painted murals that covered the walls and ceiling. The artist, whoever he or she was, was exceptionally talented. The paintings depicted a world of machines. Chrome-skinned robots walking, driving cars, picnicking, arguing, watching the vid.
Most of the robots were based on men, women, or children, but there were robot dogs and cats as well. An alley scene even showed robotic rats digging through trash from an overflowing dumpster.
The mural room was lit by a chandelier welded from lengths of strap-iron. Bolted to the iron framework were hundreds of red, amber, and white lights in a variety of shapes: apparently the headlamps, taillights, and running lights of cars. The entire collection was strung together with a rat’s nest of multicolored wire.
Jackal ignored the murals and the chandelier. She crossed to the far wall and knocked on a door that blended in with the paintings so well that I hadn’t noticed it. A blue LED came on to the left of the door, flashed twice, and went out.
It occurred to me that I still didn’t have a clear idea of who we were coming to visit.
“What does R.U.R. mean?” I asked.
“It stands for Rossum’s Universal Robots,” Jackal said. “A stage play from the early Twentieth Century. History credits the playwright, a Czechoslovakian guy, with inventing the entire concept of robotics.”
I was about to ask another question, but the door swung open.
Standing in the doorway was the teenage boy I’d seen hanging out with Jackal at Nexus Dreams, the one I’d come to think of as Cyber-kid.
His electro-mechanical hand, the circuit-run tattoos on his shaved scalp, and the twin electroptic lenses of his eyes teamed up to make him look like the hybrid stage between a seventeen year old kid and one of the chrome robots shown in the mural. His vid-camera eyes squealed softly as the lenses locked on us and spun us into focus.
He greeted Jackal with a nod.
Jackal jerked a thumb in my direction. “This is Mr. Client,” she said. She pointed at the kid. “Mr. Client, this is Surf.”
Surf treated me to a sarcastic smile. “Welcome to Prime Time, Mr. Client,” he said in his gravelly, synthetic voice.
He ushered us through the door into a much larger room. Here, the robot motif on the walls continued, but these robots weren’t going about their own business; they were kneeling, heads bowed, as if paying homage to royalty.
The floor was an obstacle course of computer hardware that spanned at least three decades of technology. The entire mess was connected, cross-connected, and re-connected by a baffling spider web of cabling. LEDs and plasma displays danced while cooling fans whispered to themselves in the gloom.
At intervals of four or five meters, the cables and equipment seemed to converge to form nexuses so dense with hardware that they reminded me of cocoons. These cocoons were apparently computer operating-stations, and most of them appeared to be occupied. Men and women, many of them not much older than Surf, rode the net in the semi-darkness, their fingers drumming on unseen keyboards. Every one that I could see had at least one or two cranial sockets, slender cables jacking their brains into their equipment, and no doubt, the DataNet construct. Most of them had one or more visible cybernetic enhancements: eyes, ears, arms, legs, or some combination thereof.
Every piece of cable and conduit seemed to lead to an even larger cocoon at the center of the room. There, surrounded by a chest-high wall of hodgepodge computer equipment, sat the oldest woman that I had ever seen.
Jackal leaned close to my ear. “That’s Iron Betty, queen-mother of this little kingdom. We have to pay our respects.”
I glanced around at the mural. Every one of the chrome-skinned robots in the painting was bowing toward the old woman’s operating station, as though it were a kind of throne.
Surf made his way toward the old woman, hopping over cable runs and darting past electronics modules with an ease that spoke of youth, familiarity, and boosted reflexes. Jackal and I followed at a slower pace, picking our way around the obstacles.
By the time we got close enough to the woman to speak, I saw that her entire scalp was encased in a steel skullcap, a curved metal prosthesis dulled to the matte gray of old iron. There were several cranial sockets built into the skullcap, and the woman was hardwired into her network of computer gear by about ten bundles of ribbon cable.
Surf waved toward us with his real hand. “Jackal and her friend, Mr. Client.”
> The woman didn’t even glance at me. Her right hand twitched, but whether it was reflex, or some minimalist acknowledgment of my existence, I couldn’t say.
“Welcome Jackal. What brings you to our door?”
Iron Betty’s voice was normal, human sounding. Not at all the machine voice that I’d expected after meeting Surf. She spoke in a near-whisper, with a detached quality that seemed to suggest that her conversation with us was occupying only a fraction of her mind.
“Mr. Client needs a safe place to log some down-time,” Jackal said. “And we need to make a net run.”
Iron Betty still did not look at us. In fact, her gaze never seemed to shift from whatever unseen focal point that it was fixed on. I began to wonder if she was blind. “Your run... it involves an Artificial Intelligence?”
“Maybe,” Jackal said. “We won’t really know until we have a look-see.”
Iron Betty sat without speaking for nearly a minute. I was beginning to wonder if she’d forgotten us, when she finally spoke again. “Your Mr. Client... he is a catalyst. He brings us closer to the Convergence. Either Man or Machine will profit by his hand, but I cannot yet see which. There are patterns—within patterns—within patterns.” Her whispered voice reduced her words to something approaching a hiss.
“I don’t understand,” Jackal said. “Are you saying that he can stay? Or that he has to leave?”
“He is welcome,” the old woman said. “Mr. Stalin... we can use his correct name here, can we not? ...will hasten the Convergence. Turning him from my door will not stop that from happening.”
“How do you know my name?” I asked.
“We listen to every whisper on the net,” Surf said. “And your name is whispered in a lot of places.”
“What in the hell does that mean? And what is this Convergence that I’m supposed to be affecting?”
“It’s like a race,” Jackal said, “to the next level of evolution.”
“A race? Between whom?”