by Jeff Edwards
I listened intently for any sounds from the other side of the fire door. Nothing.
I eased the fire door open. Emergency lanterns threw puddles of light at evenly spaced intervals down the length of the hallway. The corridor was empty, so was the foyer outside John’s apartment.
The carved wooden doors that led to John’s apartment were open.
John’s voice came through the open doors. “Come on in, Sarge. The party can’t start without you.”
CHAPTER 31
“Do you remember that furlough we took in Rio?” John’s unseen voice asked. “We picked up that pair of Filipino twins at the Fan Dancer Club? You swore that you could tell them apart, but I swapped girls on you halfway through the weekend, and you never knew it. I thought it was funny at the time; those girls were interchangeable. The girls didn’t care, either; one American soldier with a pocket full of money is about the same as any other. But the joke was on me. We were just as interchangeable as they were.”
John walked slowly out of his apartment and stood in the hall, his hands held open and empty, palms turned up in a casual imitation of the crucifixion posture.
“There’s a moral to that story, Sarge,” he said. “Sometimes, things aren’t what they look like. Come to think of it, maybe things aren’t ever what they look like.”
I sighted my Blackhart in on his sternum. “Where’s your back-up, John?”
“You don’t need your gun,” he said, “I’m not going to shoot it out with you.”
“Where’s your back-up, John? I don’t want to have to ask again.”
John smiled slightly. “I don’t have any snipers in the rafters. You may not believe it, Sarge, but I’m not out to get you. In fact, I’m doing everything in my power to protect you.”
I didn’t lower the pistol. “You’ve got half the punks on the street trying to kill me,” I said.
John shook his head. “If I’d wanted you dead, don’t you think I would have hired a professional? I never thought for a second that a bunch of street punks could take you down. I did it to keep your head down. You were bearing down on me like a freight train, and I needed some room to think.”
“What about Holtzclaw and Kurt Rieger? Did you kill them to keep me busy?”
“I didn’t have anything to do with them. That was...” His voice trailed off.
“That was who?”
“That was somebody else.”
I wanted to see John’s face. I flipped the Night-Stalker lenses up onto my forehead. Between the emergency lanterns, and the light coming from John’s apartment, I could see pretty well.
“I’m not in the mood for riddles, John.”
John lowered his hands. “Can we go into my apartment and sit down? I feel like an idiot standing in the hall.”
The skin around my eyes was sweaty from the Night-Stalkers. The air felt cool against it. “I like it out here just fine,” I said. “Put your hands back up.”
John sighed and raised his hands again.
“Look,” he said, “it’s not too late to walk away. I’ll put the word on the street that the hit is canceled. Just go home and let it go.”
“It’s too late for that,” I said. “I want to know what in the hell is going on.”
“No,” said John. “I don’t think you do.”
“Don’t jerk me around,” I said. “Where is she?”
“Who?”
“Sonja Winter,” I said. “Where is she?”
“What makes you think I know?”
“You’re starting to piss me off,” I said.
John raised his eyebrows. “Is that supposed to be a threat? You’re going to shoot me?”
“You think I won’t?”
A tired little smile danced across John’s lips. “No,” he said. “I don’t think you will. Maybe if I had a gun, but I can’t see you killing an unarmed man. It’s just not your style.”
“Bad call,” I said. “Remember that price you put on my head? A couple of street rats caught up with me in my hotel room the other night. I had to shoot both of them. Then there’s the fact that you framed me for a murder that I didn’t commit.”
I tilted my head to either side as though relieving kinks in my neck, and then made a show of sighting the Blackhart in on John’s forehead. “You see, old pal-o’-mine, my ass is wedged in a corner. You’ve played the game too well, John. I’ll blow your brains out in a heartbeat.”
We stood there for a few seconds while John tried to figure out whether or not I was bluffing. The weird thing was, even I didn’t know if I could pull the trigger. I decided to up the ante before John could read the indecision in my eyes.
“We’ve got sort of a logistics problem here,” I said. “The only way for you to be sure that I will shoot you, is if I actually do shoot you. Unfortunately, by the time you find out, it’ll be too late; your brains will be all over the floor. So I suggest a compromise. I’m going to count to three. If you don’t tell me where Sonja is by then, I’m going to shoot you in the right kneecap. That’ll solve both our problems. I’ll still be able to ask you a few questions, and you will know for absolute certain that I am not fucking around.”
I nodded toward him. “If I were you, I’d unbuckle my belt.”
“What for?”
“In about three seconds, you’re going to need a tourniquet.”
John swallowed visibly; his wistful smile seemed to desert him. “All right Sarge,” he said. “Maybe you would shoot me.”
“No maybe about it,” I said, with a bravado that I didn’t feel. “You’ve left me with nothing to lose.”
John sighed. “Your woman is safe.”
“You’d better hope so,” I said. “Where is she?”
“In the third-floor R&D lab.”
“Let’s go see,” I said.
John looked around and took a step toward the far end of the hall. “Okay,” he said. “This way.”
“No,” I said. “We’ll use these stairs.”
John shrugged and walked toward me. I backed against the wall and kept my Blackhart on him as he passed me. I fell into step behind him. “Slowly,” I said. “And keep your hands where I can see them.”
John slowed his pace. I grabbed a handful of the back of his collar, and shoved the barrel of my Blackhart against his spine. “Let’s go for a little walk.”
When we were safely through the fire door and onto the stairs I said, “I want to hear it, John. All of it.”
John sighed. “I don’t even know where to start.”
We moved slowly, my eyes scanning constantly for any sign of John’s backup. “How about the beginning?”
“The beginning?” John said. “I’d have to say it started at Iguazu Falls, when that laser chopped a hole in my spine.”
“Whoa,” I said, jerking his collar and bringing him to a halt. “I saved your life at Iguazu. You’ve got no reason to want revenge against me.”
“This is not about revenge,” John said. “It’s about getting my legs back. Or at least it was at first. Now it’s about a lot of things.”
I looked around. Standing here was a bad idea. I nudged John with the barrel of the Blackhart to get him moving again. “You were saying?”
“You remember what I was like after Iguazu,” he said. “All I could think about was getting out of that damned exoskeleton. That’s what I got into bio-medical R&D for in the first place. Nerve splicing, pyramidal pathway switching, I tried it all. None of it even came close to working. I finally decided to let my AI have a run at the problem. I fed it every file on neuro-cybernetics that I could find, whole bodies of data from hospitals, biotech clinics, and research labs all over the world. Sweden, Japan, Germany, China. After I had squeezed the legitimate sources for all they could produce, I hired jackers to go after scraps and rumors. When I had nothing left to feed the AI, I programmed it to design a custom chip: a neural bypass to route motor-control signals around the damage in my spine.”
The fourth-floor landing was cle
ar, but I watched the fire door out of the corner of my eye until we made the turn and started down the next flight of stairs. “I know all this,” I said. “Get to the part about the puppet chip.”
“The puppet chip?” John asked. “Is that what you call it?”
“Why not? It certainly fits. What do you call it?”
“I call it what I’ve always called it,” John said. “The neural shunt.”
“Wait a second,” I said. “Your neural shunt is the puppet chip? The same chip that you used to control Russell Carlisle, and Michael Winter?”
“It’s been modified a little,” John said. “But yes, the one you call the puppet chip is a later generation of the neural shunt.”
John stopped at the next landing. “Third-floor,” he said. “The R&D lab is through this door and down the hall.”
“Open it,” I said.
John opened the door. The corridor was empty. I nudged him with the Blackhart. “Keep moving.”
John started walking again. I jerked on his collar to slow him down. The hallway was lined with doors, any one of which might pop open to reveal a security robot or John’s lady gunslinger. The ones that really made me nervous were those we had already passed. I had no way to keep an eye on them without stopping every few meters to look over my shoulder.
“Okay,” I said. “Your AI designed the neural shunt. Then what happened?”
John walked for a few seconds without speaking, as if deciding how to continue. “Actually,” he said finally. “My AI designed six generations of chips before it came up with something that looked promising. We ran computer simulations, and laboratory trials using monkeys, but in the end, the only way to be sure was to go under the knife myself.”
“You’re walking,” I said, “so it obviously worked.”
“The surgical procedure itself was a success,” John said, “but the implants still had to be programmed. We had to recreate the neural patterns that my Supplementary Motor Cortex should have been using to talk to my legs.”
“What you’re saying is, you had to reprogram your brain to communicate with the muscles in your lower body via the chip and the fiber optic link.”
“That’s basically it,” John said. “We needed a piece of control code. We could have written it from scratch, but it was easier to record someone else’s synaptic patterns, and tailor the recording to my body. I used one of my lab assistants, a Vietnamese kid named Tran, and mapped his motor responses. When we imprinted them on the chip in my frontal lobe, we ran into something unforeseen.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It sent you into a seizure. You told me about that.”
“It wasn’t exactly a seizure,” John said. “It was more like cross-talk.”
“Cross-talk?”
“It’s an electronics term. When two improperly shielded wires or cables are run too close together, they cross-talk: the signal passing through one can interfere with the signal passing through the other. Usually, the stronger of the two signals will end up garbling, or dominating, the weaker signal.”
“And you had this cross-talk going on in your brain?”
“More or less,” John said. “The frontal lobes and motor cortex don’t just control voluntary muscle movement; they also integrate personality with emotion, and help translate thought into action. When we injected Tran’s motor control code into the chip, it was like having a bomb go off inside my head. A little slice of Tran’s mind was heterodyned into that signal: thoughts, emotions, force of will, and they all came out of that chip like water out of a fire hose. I found myself fighting to control my own mind.”
“Tran’s personality took over your brain?”
“Almost,” John said. “For a couple of seconds, anyway. I was struggling and thrashing around so much that the AI registered my response as a full-blown seizure, and erased the program code out of the chip.”
“Are you trying to tell me that this entire fucking mind-control thing was an accident?”
“It isn’t really mind-control,” John said. “It’s really more like personality-transfer.”
“But it was an accident?” I repeated.
“I sure as hell wasn’t looking for it,” John said. “You want to know the real bitch about it? The chip didn’t really work, not for what it had been designed for, anyway. We ran into all sorts of neural feedback problems from the lower part of my spinal cord. It’s taken nearly two years to work the kinks out. Personality-transfer fell into my lap almost from the beginning, but I’ve only had my own legs back for a few weeks.”
I still couldn’t believe it. “How can something like mind-control just fall into your lap?”
“A quirk of fate,” John said. “The apple fell on Newton’s head, and he brought the world the concept of gravity. I injected Tran’s synaptic patterns into my frontal lobe, and I discovered the secret of personality-transfer.”
John stopped in front of a door. “This is the lab. Your woman is in there.”
“Open it slowly,” I said. “And I hate to sound cliché, but—no sudden moves.”
John pushed the door, and it swung slowly open, spilling a bright wedge of light into the hall. John stood blinking under the light.
“The surgical labs have back-up power,” he said. “Thirty two phased-plasma cadmium tetra-cores down on the second-floor. It’s expensive as hell, but we actually do a little surgery in here once in a while, and it keeps us from losing a patient if the power drops off line.”
I looked over his shoulder into the lab; the unaccustomed light was bright, but not enough to dazzle me. The room was huge; it probably took up half of the third-floor. Rows of workbenches and electronics racks stretched away in all directions.
The surgical robot built into the ceiling was huge, three or four times as large as the model I’d seen at Second Looks. And if Lance’s robot had reminded me of a spider, then this one was the queen, the birth mother of an entire species of spider-machines.
A black carbon-plastic nacelle, probably a protective housing for sensitive components, hung at the center of the machine’s cluster of multi-jointed legs like the underside of a fat carapace. I could easily picture the bloated body distending to squeeze out glistening sacs of spider eggs. The mental image made my skin crawl.
Clear tubing dangled from the carapace in loops, some of which wrapped around the robot’s arms to connect with manipulator attachments. A greenish-amber liquid filled the tubing. It was probably some sort of hydraulic fluid, but its coloring was disgustingly organic.
The unit was obviously a prototype, lacking the miniaturization and economy-of-form designed into the production models that followed. Its arms were much longer and some were nearly as thick as one of my wrists. Each of the couplings in its hundred arms was over-sized, probably to make it easier to work on, but the bulbous joints created a hideous effect of biological mutation.
The huge queen-spider was motionless. Unless someone cycled her power on line and loaded her software, she would remain that way: asleep. That was fine with me; I had no desire to see her awaken. Ever.
I tore my eyes away from the dormant robot and scanned the rest of the room for threats. No bad guys. No sentry robots. But the rows of equipment had to provide a few hundred hiding places.
Sonja lay strapped to a powered contour chair, directly under the queen-spider. Her eyes were closed; a trio of manipulator arms dangled a few centimeters above her forehead. Her mouth was covered by a strip of surgical tape.
I shoved John into the room, and then followed him, my Blackhart still trained between his shoulder blades.
Sonja’s eyes drifted open. She tried to turn her head, but the surgical chair’s forehead strap held her fast. She caught sight of me out of the corner of her eye, and tears immediately began leaking down her cheeks.
John presented her with a wave of his hand. “See? I told you she wasn’t hurt.”
I backed across the room toward Sonja, keeping the Blackhart pointed in John’s direction. I didn’t like t
he idea of standing under the arms of the queen-spider, but I didn’t seem to have much choice.
When I got to Sonja, I started fumbling at the strip of tape that covered her mouth. It was a difficult job; not only was I trying to work left-handed, but I had to do it without looking. I couldn’t afford to take my eyes off John.
I managed to get my fingernails under one corner of the tape. I tugged it gently away from her mouth.
Sonja started trying to talk as soon as the tape came off. Her voice was thick and slurred, as though she’d been drugged. I couldn’t understand a word.
“What’s wrong with her, John?”
Sonja tried again. “Rrrrrroooo... Rrrroooo... booottt...”
I touched the side of her face. “It’s okay,” I said. “I know about the robot.”
“It’s just a little dermal anesthetic,” John said. “To keep her quiet. It won’t hurt her.”
I flicked my eyes down at Sonja and then back up to John. Four circular patches of silver foil were stuck to the right side of her neck.
I started feeling for them and trying to peel them off with my left hand, my eyes on John the entire time.
“I’m proud of you, John,” I said. “Kidnapping is so much more civilized than murder. You really are making progress.”
John crossed his arms and leaned against a rack of electronic modules. “I admit that we’ve done some pretty outrageous things,” he said. “But we’ve done some extraordinary things too. Try to see the big picture here. I’ve discovered the secret to immortality!”
I got a fingernail under the edge of one of the foil patches. I peeled it away and dropped it on the floor.
“Think about it,” John said. “We can record the human mind, capture a person’s personality and thought patterns, and imprint them on a Turing Scion. Inside a Turing Scion, a human mind can live forever. But what about the body? We can replace damaged organs, and tinker with genetic codes and hormone balances, but sooner or later, accident or age catches up with us and the body fails.”