Martinez swallowed and, like a good survivor, held his tongue from the remarks he wanted to make. “Yes, sir. I think it’s truly amazing. I have never seen the like of it, particularly in this short a time.”
“Yeah, I figured they would be the best test of this. I mean, hell, an older experienced cop and somebody raised as a religious fanatic? If I could get them, it would work with anybody. Not much fun, though. Not like Sonya and Veda and Sulliman, here. I do my personal servants, mistresses, and bodyguards myself. This—it kinda takes the creativity out of it.” He gave a chuckle. “Damn machines are taking over everything, aren’t they?”
“Um, yeah.”
“Well, I saved a little of it for me, anyway. I can make ’em do anything I want by just sayin’ the word and snappin’ my fingers, but I don’t just want ’em to do it, I want ’em to want to do it. To live just to do it. For me. An ex-cop and an ex-nun who exist only for me. And they’re only the first, Ari. I got a bunch of folks I can see doin’ this way.”
“I hope I’m not one of them, sir!” Ari responded a bit nervously.
Jules Wallinchky roared with laughter and slapped his back. “Not yet, boy! Not yet! I need smart folks who can think for themselves too much! Just remember who you work for and we’ll always get along fine.”
“You’re my uncle. I don’t believe in going after family.”
That got another big laugh. “All right, nephew!” He turned to his two companions. “You two go off and relax now. I don’t need bodyguards in here, and I got a couple here that I really want to play with.” He turned back to Ming and Angel. “Okay, you two! Come along! I want you with me for a while.”
Angel was in particular distress because she couldn’t bring herself to give in quite that easily but felt helpless and particularly forlorn without Ming’s reinforcement. Everything seemed to be slipping, and so fast…
They went into the big man’s study once more, and if Wallinchky noted that it had recently been used, he didn’t betray the knowledge, or perhaps just didn’t care. “You know, I got to think of something to call these two,” he said casually. “Ming—well, sounds too damned much like one of my antique Chinese vases. We need one that’s less personal, more like what she is.”
“You’re making them sound like prototypes,” Ari responded uneasily.
“Well, maybe they are. Trouble is, women make better art subjects than classical artists as far as I’m concerned, and if I use Venus and Madonna, I’ve already exhausted the naming pool. May as well go with the practical, then.” He suddenly brightened. “Yeah. Prototypes. I like that. At least it’ll sound pretty classy.” He turned and looked straight into Angel’s eyes. “Memory command Rembrandt. From this moment on, you are Alpha,” he told her. “You have no other names. Search and replace any and all names for yourself with ‘Alpha.’ ”
Ari just sighed. So he was even taking their names away from them, and the sense of identity they brought. If there was anything of them left, it would be a devastating blow to whatever sense of self was left.
Wallinchky turned to Ming. “And you—well, you’re shorter and smaller, so you got to be Beta. Memory command Rembrandt. From now on you are Beta. Search and replace any and all names for self with ‘Beta.’ Search and replace all alternate names for Alpha, replace with ’Alpha.’ Search and replace all alternate names for Beta. Replace with ’Beta.’ Execute all commands.” He turned back to his nephew. “Alpha and Beta. I kinda like it. What do you think, Ari?”
Ari didn’t like it, but he could only shrug. “You’re the boss.”
“You better believe it.”
The moment he’d given his commands, Angel found herself thinking of herself as Alpha. But she wasn’t Alpha. Alpha was—all she came up with was her. She could still recall much of her past, but not any other name. Worse, just trying gave her a series of tiny little shocks. Every time she just thought of herself and “Alpha” appeared as her identity, there was a tiny pleasure jolt. And what was Beta’s old name? Did she have a different name? It was impossible to remember, and Beta was mirroring her thoughts in reverse.
“Beta,” Wallinchky said, settling down in his padded chair, “go fetch me a fresh cigar. Alpha, you light it for me when it comes.”
The actions were instantaneous. It felt good, right, to do this and see his own satisfaction.
“Amazing, ain’t it, Ari? Not long ago they were strong personalities. Now I’m the center of their universe and I still got all that they know. And later on today we’ll teach ’em how to anticipate my desires.” He paused, blowing a big cloud of smoke. “What’s the matter? You disapprove? You sure don’t mind those sex bombs who can’t remember breakfast.”
“I can’t say anything about it,” he managed diplomatically. “So why the clown getup?”
Wallinchky sighed. “Ari, Ari! Perhaps one day we will educate you. At least I will point you to the painting, which happens to be here. So, it is aesthetic, and it also identifies their form and function no matter where they are.” He paused a moment, then added, “That’s not what you were really wondering about, though, was it? Come, come! Speak your worries!”
“I just wondered how you can trust the local neural net not to simply decide to make us all pets, or units. Particularly since you have given it a taste of real life and feeling.”
“Well, don’t worry about that. I think you have seen one too many horror shows, eh? You know I got that angle covered. Let’s get to the matters at hand here, though. I want to have some fun with the girls here.”
“Okay. Well, they located some emergency records on the remains of the City of Modar. I thought we got it all, but apparently for some reason they had a lot of it covered. Maybe Kincaid’s doing. Anyway, they know who was on and who got off. They probably assume that we have them, since they don’t even know about the pickup ship or Hadun’s involvement, at least not as far as we know. But the Geldorians are screaming bloody murder over Nakitt, and the Organized Crime Force wants a look at some of your personnel. There’s a missing persons on the cleric, but not much more.”
“Yeah, I been gettin’ threats for a week now. What about Kincaid? He show up?”
“Not yet. He’s not in the wreckage, but he sure wasn’t with us. I can’t figure it.”
“He had to be in the mod with the gizmo. Had to be. There was no place else for him to have been.”
“Maybe,” Ari answered thoughtfully, “but so far I haven’t heard that he was removed—they’ve still got a series of contracts out on him—and I also haven’t heard of any attempts on Hadun. And he sure didn’t sneak in with us, since he’d have had to use cryo. Nope, he’s a mystery. At least he’s not our problem.”
“For now, anyway,” Wallinchky agreed. “Well, how long will it take to thaw out the little weasel, and how do we control him until he’s picked up?”
“Why thaw him out?” Ari asked him. “He’s as useful to them frozen as not.”
“It’s a point. I’ll think about it. But what if we need him thawed?”
“A day to be fully functional and thawed out, maybe another to recover sufficiently to be ‘normal,’ whatever that is. About the same as us. He may look like a critter, but biologically he’s pretty close to us, you know. As for control, we could keep him sedated, but he’s pretty pragmatic. If he knew he was going home in one piece if he behaved, I think he’d suddenly be on our team.”
Wallinchky chuckled. “Yeah, I think you’re right. Okay, the Geldorians are due in—five days, give or take a day. Thaw him out two days from now and make sure he’s on the team. We’ll give him a little help in that regard, too. I want his memory scrubbed from the moment we took him in his cabin until he wakes up here. I don’t want him to remember who was on our lifeboat, and particularly that these girls were forced to come along. I don’t want to have to arrange an accident for him just so he won’t betray something to the wrong folks later on. Okay?”
An nodded. “We have the means here. I don’t think that
’s a problem. Anything else?”
“Well, I don’t like this business from Hadun that we sold him an incomplete unit. I can’t help it if the damned thing is a crock of shit. I didn’t guarantee it was more than a pipe dream. Still, he’s a psycho of the first rank, right up there with the classics of history, and he’s still got quite a force in exile, so maybe we can work out something.” He gave a dry chuckle. “Now, where’s Kincaid when I really need him?”
“Okay, I can look over the messages and the options and prepare some proposals. How long will you be here?”
“I hope to leave when the Geldorians do. The Realm’s been turning up the heat lately, and I’m gonna have to talk to our people in the Senate and see how to cool it down. Then there’s the salvage job on the City of Modar train. A real mess, but nothing we can’t handle. Get along now. Bed with the bimbos for the next few nights if you want. I have my own company here.”
Ari nodded, understanding that he was dismissed, and left quickly.
Jules Wallinchky looked at Alpha. “Go to the doorway and just watch him until he’s gone. Don’t follow, just see.”
“Yes, Master.”
He leaned over to the computer console and activated it. “Put visual from Alpha on the screen.”
Instantly, he was seeing on his screen exactly what she was seeing, the figure of Ari Martinez walking slowly down the long hallway. She did a magnification and added adjusted infrared when he was lost in the far shadows, and he appeared, a bit ghostly but otherwise perfectly well, in front of the boss. He was delighted. “Do both of you have this capability?” he asked.
“No, Master. Alpha has magnification as well as full spectrum capabilities,” the one now known as Beta responded. “I have the full spectrum abilities but no magnification, but can show true color and true three dimensions.”
He was like a kid with a new toy, but he wasn’t forgetting business. “Alpha, you can come back now and stand beside Beta. Can I address Core and get answers from it through you?”
“Yes, Master,” they both chimed.
“Okay, so as long as you are close to me, one of you, no preference, will speak for Core. This is Code Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.”
“Sweeping, Master,” Beta responded. “Done. The room is free of unauthorized devices. Give command.”
“Change Code Rembrandt. Code Rembrandt invalid. New Code for function is Code Degas. Execute.”
“Done.”
When it was Core, there was no “Master,” and the response sounded more mechanical. That would do.
“Run sequence from point at which subject Ari Martinez first entered this room on arrival and accessed either Core or these units.”
He sat and watched as Ari’s image went over the programming of the girls and also as he interrogated them. He sat without much expression, but when it was done he said, “Code Degas. Beta and Alpha are to volunteer no knowledge whatsoever from data they have from experiences before becoming part of this system to anyone but me. This data is to be encrypted and coded so that it cannot be accessed by anyone other than myself, and then only with the Code Hypatia. This knowledge may be accessed and used to carry out orders, but cannot be revealed or accessed to others. Execute.”
“Done,” came the response.
“Okay, girls,” he said with a child’s cruel glee. “Now we’re gonna have some educational fun here.”
Tann Nakitt was delighted to be where he was even though he would have preferred to be anywhere else. The fact was, the moment the Mallegestor had burst through the door and fired at him, striking him and knocking him cold, his last frantic thought had been that this was the end of all things.
He had also had little problem cooperating with the probe that basically had excised a very tiny and totally unpleasant portion of his captivity from his memories. He understood that he’d never be allowed out alive unless he did, and there wasn’t much he could do anyway. So now he was in the position of knowing, or at least suspecting, that something was missing, but not troubled about it. He’d had this sort of thing done before, and when it was something that really mattered, he’d always had this gut emotional reaction, the feeling that something that was a part of him had been wiped out. Since he didn’t feel that way, and since he had good narrative memory up to being shot and then from getting out of the scrubber case, as he thought of it, he didn’t let it worry him anymore.
“You didn’t, by any chance, bring my pipe and herbs with me, did you?” he asked Ari, as casual as if they were still in the lounge of the City of Modar.
“Sorry, no. And the passenger module was pretty well blown to bits, so there’s little chance we’ll recover them. You’ll live.”
“The pipe’s pretty important to us,” Nakitt explained. “It is something partially made by your family and partly by yourself and is a symbol of adulthood. The hell with some incriminating memories; the loss of the pipe feels like I lost an arm!”
“Well, you’re whole, hale, and as irritating as ever. For the next day or two you have fairly free run of the place, since you’ll be examined when you leave anyway. Don’t try swallowing any precious gems, don’t attempt to access the computer system, and stay out of the way of the folks who should be here, and we’ll all get along fine.”
“Don’t worry! As far as I’m concerned, let me eat, sleep, and just melt around here until it’s time to leave. Nothing personal, you understand, but just what I’ve seen of this mausoleum gives me the creeps.”
Ari was beginning to think the same way himself. Jules was—what? Over a century old, certainly, and through one rejuve treatment. He looked okay, but it was middle-aged distinguished, not Mister Adonis. Still, the guy had started as a street punk in a jerkwater town on a backward world where pig farming was still a major activity, and he’d become, by guts, smarts, guile, and ruthlessness, one of the richest and most influential men in all the Realm. How many bodies that represented, nobody knew, probably not even Jules. The old boy was fond of commenting that keeping score was the first step to getting caught.
Such a man, over such a length of time, had to feel as if he were somehow possessed or guided by something supernatural. Not that he hadn’t made some mistakes and lost a few rounds, but very few, and nothing fatal either in the business or the climbing up through it. He’d been hurt a number of times, but never spent more than a few nights in custody anywhere.
He had no heirs and had never even considered marriage, most likely because, other than his mother and his sister— Ari’s mother—no women counted. Ari often thought that Jules really didn’t like women much; that his relations with them were less getting pleasure than getting even for something. Men who crossed him, he liked to take down, to reduce them to terror and make them bleed and bruise; women he enjoyed torturing or recreating as slaves in some twisted fantasy of his that he now had the power to realize.
Still, Jules may have been a gangster and a business genius all in one, but he was no scientist or engineer. He believed what machines told him, and he had a lot of faith in technology. He wasn’t infallible, and he was becoming convinced that he was, and that was dangerous. He, Ari, knew the potential lurking in this kind of setup. Isolated, so insulated that even Realm law enforcement needed permission to land, with a very small set of personnel—until the two girls, no permanent residents—and lots of experimental state of the art stuff that still wasn’t approved in the Realm. Wallinchky might think he had the computer under control, but who could say for sure?
Ari knew there wasn’t much he could do about it if anything did happen, though. Unlike Jules, he had neither the self-confidence nor the ability to put those things out of his mind that couldn’t be dealt with, and so he hadn’t been sleeping all that well.
It also didn’t help that, on the morning Tann Nakitt was to be awakened, Beta, the former Ming, had appeared and informed him, “The Master has assigned me to you for whatever you may require, sir.” He could tell it was what had been Ming without even trying to mak
e out the facial features under all that makeup, or whatever it was. Angel had been and remained a head taller than Ming.
He didn’t like that at all. “I do not require you for anything. You do not have to be here.”
“My sole function is to execute the wishes of the Master,” she informed him. “The Master wishes me here.” And that, of course, was that. But she added, “Sir, the Master has designated me as your personal computer station. You may ask anything of me and I can retrieve it from Core. Also, I can relay commands to and from any other unit or Core. You are to use me for that purpose exclusively, sir.”
He had no illusions that his uncle was sending her as a favor. She was here to make certain he did everything just right. That irritated him as well, but he knew he again had little choice in the matter. Up until the Modar business, he and Jules had mostly operated in separate spheres, he working for a variety of Jules’s companies, mostly legitimate ones, and Jules, well, being the octopus. It was clear now that neither he nor his uncle were comfortable being in such close proximity to one another.
She had simply stood there, impassive, as he brought Nakitt out of suspended animation, consisting on his part of observing what the medlab computer did and bringing the Geldorian to mental alertness. And she’d observed as he himself had guided the interrogation in the mind box that allowed just a bit of inconvenient stuff to be excised. She followed him everywhere, got out of his way at all times, and responded briskly if he asked her to hand him something. She said nothing unless asked something that required a response, and she gave the response as tersely as possible. Still, she didn’t move like an automaton; she moved like a normal person, even a normal Terran-type female. She ate and drank some really godawful crap she got from the nearest computer station once a day, and if she crapped or took a leak, he never saw it.
She could stand for hours on those artificial legs and apparently never get tired, but she would sit if told to do so. There were flashes of the old Ming in the way she walked and the way she sat, but very few. He knew he was being taunted.
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