“Downloading me into the machine?”
“Crudely, I suppose.”
“But it doesn’t affect me, right? I’m not losing my memories, my skills, nothing like that?”
“No, it’s like making a recording. A copy.” He resisted saying clone. People still get very tetchy when words like that are bandied about, and given what happened to us in Akachi, we didn’t want to overplay our hand. We wanted him to put two and two together and realize—wrongly—where this money was coming from. “That copy will be used to overwrite their guinea pig, giving her all of your memories and unique skills, right down to ingrained muscle memory. In a matter of hours, she will go from a woman they dragged in off the streets into a copy of you, one of the most lethal fighters of the modern age.” And to sell the illusion that what we were peddling was real, Tenebrae would put on one hell of a demonstration. I’d feed her with some juicy facts only someone who was there would know, including moves Fate had pulled, and con him into believing he was looking at a living, breathing female version of himself.
What could possibly go wrong?
“And then what?”
“And then, with the concept proved, we create an army of you.”
“Twenty mil isn’t enough,” Fate said, as I knew he would. “I’d be putting myself out of work.”
“With twenty million dollars you would never need to work again,” the broker countered.
“I don’t do it for the money,” Fate lied. “But if a corp like Akachi or GenX gets their hands on this, then I’m done. They’d make a thousand me’s, all of them every bit as good as I am. There’s only one of me. I can’t compete. I’d be obsolete. The payoff isn’t enough, sorry.”
“What would be enough?”
The question hung between them.
Gant put his towel down on the counter and the well-worn tumbler beside it. He needed to make it look like he wasn’t listening. Fate would balk if he realized what was going on, and he was suspicious enough as it was. We didn’t want to tip him over the edge.
He looked down at his knuckles, then up at St Jude.
“What would be enough?” he repeated.
The broker waited him out, knowing that he was going to produce some astronomical figure out of his arse and expect to be bartered down. That was all part of the game. Give in too easily to his demands, and again, he’d know something was up.
“An island,” he said. “Somewhere warm away from the world. Somewhere I can retire to be king.”
Our man laughed. “Well that shouldn’t be too difficult,” he said, his voice laced with sarcasm. “How about an indigenous tribe to worship you as a god, as well?”
“Now you’re talking my language,” Fate said.
“Thirty million, anything beyond that is a stretch. How you choose to spend it, however, totally down to you. It might pay for a small garbage island out in the Pacific Rim.”
“Fifty.” Again, the broker laughed. “You want me that badly, you’ll pay for what’s up here,” Fate tapped his temple. “After all, no one else can give you what I can, right? You said it yourself. I’d be a fool to price myself too low. Seventy-five.”
“Bargaining doesn’t generally work like that, Mister Fate, you reach a compromise, not continue to drive the price up.”
“Eighty,” Fate said, quite reasonably.
“That is a lot of money,” the broker said.
“Hell, let’s make it a round one hundred. Call it factoring in inflation for the rest of my life, and I do intend to live for a long time, after all.”
“I’m not sure my clients will go to that, but I could, perhaps, convince them to offer various incentives and stagger payments based upon relative success. After all, one hundred million for one derivative of you is extortionate, but perhaps there could be incremental bonuses based upon how many versions of your brain pattern they release into the world?”
“I’m listening.”
“Thirty million regardless of success or failure of the procedure, twenty more if and when my clients build their first army of you—an army in this case amounting to one thousand Bleeders.”
I could see Fate thinking about it. He could live a pretty rich life on thirty mil, even if they never built a single Bleeder off his template, but that extra twenty would mean he could live like a king. But it wasn’t obscene. It wasn’t beyond what clever living could bring him in as a Bleeder over the same span of years, if he stayed at the top of the game. Of course, Fate was smart enough to know he couldn’t expect to stay at the top of the game for that long. That was the lure. It was like offering him the chance to cash out on a winning bet twenty years early and keep his winnings.
“I’ll need to see your operation, of course,” Fate said, and I knew the broker had done his job.
The broker made arrangements for Fate’s visit to the Dubai super tower and its faux Gene Sculpt Clinic, no expense spared. And again, to plant the seed, the plane’s manifest tracked back to Ayako-Mizuki, making it two-for-two with the ownership of the tower. I knew Fate would do his research. He was careful. He wouldn’t walk blindly into the place. He’d want to know exactly who he was dealing with on the other side of the broker, even if he was too polite to ask.
I flew the plane from Old Tokyo. I even enjoyed doing the whole buckle-up announcement and wishing him a pleasant flight. I deepened my voice an octave, daring him to recognize me and force his way through the door into the cockpit. He didn’t. Or if he did, he didn’t act on it, which was the same thing. It was a smooth flight, only a few bumps along the way. We made Dubai in good time. I watched Fate whisked away from the tarmac in a ridiculously expensive limo driven by Rowel Gant, all customs clearances pre-arranged thanks to a few greased palms. Again, that helped serve the illusion that this was all semi-legit corporation business. That was the kind thing the big boys did with their cash to impress people they wanted to own a piece of.
Gant drove fast, seemingly sweeping through the Downtown city with its oil-rich denizens, but actually taking a detour that allowed me to get into place at the super tower before Fate arrived. When he finally delivered Fate to the foot of the enormous skyscraper, I was at my seat in the office directly below what we’d be passing off as the surgery, watching as the broker met him at the door and guided him up to show off our grand illusion.
And I have to admit, it was good, right down to the sluggish performance Tenebrae offered when introduced to him as the body his brain would re-pattern. She seemed smaller. I don’t know how she did it, but all of that natural grace I’d grown so used to over the last couple of weeks deserted her as she put on her act, coming over as timid and slightly lost in this expensive world she suddenly found herself in.
Fate bought it.
He had that smug look on his face and even cracked a lame joke about how, soon enough, he’d be inside her.
I expected her to break his neck. She was more than capable of snapping him like a twig. But instead, she just offered a girlish titter, playing the coquette.
He was more gullible than I’d expected.
They took him through to the surgery area, which looked more like a high-tech lab than a chop shop. Mel Kamahi had been busy in here, creating the visuals that would ultimately sell the illusion and talking our doctor through what the screens pretended. Fate listened to it all, nodding. Then they showed him the Crown of Thorns, which would dig just deep enough into his skull to hurt, and draw a trickle of blood in the process, whilst mapping his brain. There were two crowns, but no wires. Everything, our doc explained, was wireless, with the patterned data being stored as a huge single image on the immense servers that had been developed purely for the purpose of storing a human mind in all of its infinite computations and permutations.
Fate drank it all in.
The broker then put a case on the table between them. Inside was a data terminal, which, as he woke it, showed the details of the funds waiting to be transferred. “All it needs is the account for where the deposit is
to be made, and it’s all yours.”
Thirty million is a lot of money, even on a computer screen where it’s essentially abstract, just a string of numbers. Fate’s face lit up. I could see the minute muscle spasms in his right hand as he wrestled with the idea of just reaching up and keying in the short sequence that would make him rich. We’d laid the foundation, this was the convincer. A very expensive convincer, but it needed to be.
I couldn’t watch.
We’d done everything we could. It was down to Fate’s inherent greed and vanity from here. How much did he want the money? How desperately did he need to believe he was the only man worth patterning our super soldiers on?
Enough was the answer.
He reached up to key in the account details.
“Excellent,” the broker said, smoothly, triggering the transaction. “You are now a very wealthy man, Mister Fate.”
Fate inhaled deeply, holding it, as though savoring the smell of the greenbacks that had just landed in his sweaty hands.
“So when do we do this?”
“As soon as possible,” Imsen said.
Fate nodded. “Might as well get it over with. I’m here, the doc’s here. Let’s do this thing.”
The broker looked at the doctor, pretending to seek permission and deliberately making it seem like Fate was asking a lot. The doc met his gaze. Looked around. Then called Tenebrae.
We’d got ourselves a con.
The doc told Fate to make himself comfortable as he put the crown of thorns on his head, then tightened the screws and continued to turn them until they’d broken through the skin and were biting into the bone. And then he turned them some more.
Fate cried out like a bitch.
I enjoyed that.
Fate being in pain was exactly what I wanted, and the more pain, the better.
Tenebrae reclined in the leather lounger beside him, her own crown resting lightly on her head. To sell the illusion we had to hurt her, too, but the doc would apply local anesthetic to numb the skin where the crown would pierce it.
Of course, nothing was going to happen. There was no miracle brain patterning software. Mel had created a video loop that would play on the big screen, making it look as though our tech was probing deeply into Fate’s mind. The assassin was wearing a tiny earpiece that would allow me to feed her all the information she needed about Fate to sell the illusion that she knew him better than he knew himself.
Now, all we had to do was wait for the loop to play out.
After that, it was down to Mel to launch the hurrah and set the cat amongst the pigeons.
Fate was going to freak out.
Absolutely 100% guaranteed.
I must admit, being a conman was a step up from being a run of the mill Bleeder. I could get used to fucking with people’s minds instead of just shooting at them.
I’m not sure what that said about me, if anything?
Tenebrae really sold it. She convulsed in the chair, her eyes rolling up into her skull to reveal the milky whites as she clutched at the leather lounger, bucking furiously. Sweat broke out on her brow, from beneath the thorns where the crown dug into her skin. Her mouth parted in a slight oh, breathless.
Behind her, the visuals Mel had put together continued to play, representing jags of data seemingly flowing from one mind into the other.
“I…” she said, the only word since she’d come in here. “Am not…” Fate stared at her. The doc stared at her. I stared at her. Captivated. “Me.”
There was silence.
No one up there moved. Through the window I could see the dizzying neon lights of the cityscape that didn’t reach all the way up to our make-believe clinic, it was like an ocean of color rippling away beneath us.
I didn’t know what she was about to do.
We’d talked about how to sell the illusion, but in the end, it had to be something she was comfortable with. Something she could carry off for prolonged periods of time. She couldn’t do the accent or the mannerisms, she hadn’t been around him long enough to pick them up, so she needed to improvise. This was exactly what she was doing.
“It wasn’t my fault,” she said, turning to look at Fate in the chair beside her, his own pain forgotten about. The blood streamed down the side of his face. He looked like he wanted to bolt. But then, he thought he was looking at himself in a stranger’s body. Who wouldn’t want to run from that?
Tenebrae tore the crown from her skull, breaking more than just the supposed contact between their brains. Gasping for each breath, sweat glistening across her breastbone, she pushed herself out of the chair and crouched low. “It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t… It shouldn’t have happened…”
Jesus fucking Christ, what was she doing?
I was up out of my seat ready to run up there and put a bullet in Fate’s head on the spot. This was out of control. I shouldn’t have tried to be clever. Keep it simple. I cursed.
On the screen, Tenebrae tore at her head—her hair had been shaved close to her scalp for the crown to nestle in place—as if trying to rip the demons out of it. It was a compelling image. She looked absolutely haunted. If I didn’t know better, I’d have believed our psychic surgery had worked.
I looked at Fate.
It took me a second to see the track of tears on his cheeks. Because of the shadows, I’d thought it was blood, it wasn’t.
He rubbed at his eyes.
I don’t know how she’d done it, how she’d guessed, but she’d just taken one fuck of a gamble, and it looked as though it had paid off. Shadows moved across the screen. I tried to think. He obviously felt guilty about what had happened on some level, and she’d read it in him. How could I have missed it? Was I letting my own anger at what had happened cloud my judgment?
Could he be a victim in this, too?
I thought about it for a split second.
No.
There was no doubt in it, either. I was absolutely certain.
He was walking around, talking, breathing, taking money and acting the big man. He wasn’t a victim. He certainly didn’t think of himself as one. If he had, he’d have kept his head down. He wouldn’t be taking these kinds of risks if he thought there was even the slightest chance that Swann and Martagan’s killers would come back for him. So whatever guilt it was, it was post-traumatic, more like regret. Maybe his co-conspirators had promised him it wouldn’t go down the way it had? That didn’t change anything as far as I was concerned. What happened in that cemetery was absolutely his fault, no matter how he tried to wriggle out of responsibility.
“Has it worked?” Fate asked, crouching down over her, taking Tenebrae’s head in his hands and tilting it so that she looked up at him, as though he hoped to see more of himself in her eyes than his glassy reflection. “I need to know… am I in there? Is that me? Is it?”
She looked up at him.
For a moment all I could think was that she was adoring him.
And then she spoke.
“I… I… feel… wrong.” She told him, seeming to struggle as she looked for the words to explain what was going on inside her head. “It is loud… so… much… noise… So much going on. How do you live with it all? How do you cope?”
“Am I in there? Talk to me. Tell me something only I would know.”
“I can feel you in here… like… like a parasite… I’m losing myself… aren’t I?”
He didn’t answer her.
Fate turned to the doc and the broker, looking for answers. “This isn’t what you told me would happen. It was supposed to be a straight forward procedure. You’d simply overwrite her brain, re-pattern it so it was mine… but look at her. That’s not what’s happening. She’s going out of her mind. You haven’t overwritten her mind, you’ve just put another one in there with her,” he said, sickened, “and it’s slowly chewing through whatever is left of her… it’s barbaric.”
He was right, of course, if that was what was going on it would have been barbaric.
The doc lo
oked at him. “That was always a risk,” he said, not missing a beat. I needed to remember to pay him his bonus because she’d gone off script. “But the degradation should be a relatively swift process as your brain patterns consume hers. Humor me,” the doc said, helping Tenebrae stand. “I’d be fascinated to see if her automotive skills have already been overwritten. Hit her.”
I expected to Fate to refuse.
He didn’t.
Without missing a beat he lashed out with his left hand, aiming a stinging slap at the side of the assassin’s head. Tenebrae brought her right hand up to block it, catching his wrist and twisting hard to bring him down to his knees. Fate went down, but not because he was beaten. It was a ploy. He kept his weight on one supporting leg, then swept out the other, looking to cut her legs out from under her. She skipped the blow, bringing her leading foot down hard to stamp down on Fate’s ankle. He punched upwards, driving his fist into her kidneys. Tenebrae rolled with the punch, again reacting with a staggering economy of movement, and had Fate’s wrist in her grasp, arm extended, twisted to bare his elbow to her, and her knee resting against the joint so that the slightest increase in pressure would rip it apart.
“Excellent,” the doc said, admiring his handiwork. “As I suspected, the subconscious, the muscle memory if you would, is the first to take root. She fights like a killer now.”
“Yes, she does,” Fate agreed, looking up at the black woman as she stared coldly back down at him. “I’d say that counts as a success, doctor.”
“What do you remember?”
It was a good question. It was one I would have asked.
Fate waited for an answer.
When you lie your eyes betray you. They flicker up toward the left when you’re lying—visually constructing an image. They flicker up to the right when you’re accessing a memory. Everyone knows this. It’s an easy tell. Of course, she wasn’t making up anything, she was remembering the stories I’d told her over and over, so her eyes didn’t betray her. I hoped it would be enough to reinforce the physical display she’d just put on. But a lot of it still hinged on Fate wanting to be fooled, meaning it came down to the same three things it had done from the start, greed, vanity, and gullibility.
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