reMix

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  The box didn’t look much but it suited Fixx fine. Anonymous, unpretentious. He slipped a pair of ‘trodes from his pocket, licking one of the ends to fix it to his temple. The most basic neural link possible, slow and not too secure if someone was sitting nearby with an axon recorder.

  But the two girls kicking digital hell out of a kitten-sized dragon were so dusted out they didn’t look like they could cope with their own thought patterns, never mind grabbing his. And the little CloneZone jerk behind the bar was leching over some Roricon holoporn while pretending to skim that day’s Enquirer download. Fixx could probably strip naked in the middle of the room and they wouldn’t notice.

  Fixx tapped his way into an online editing demo and coded a quick burst of RaiTek, tying reds and purples to anything over 250bpm, leaving greens and golds for the rolling thud of anything that came in at a speed less than that of a frenzied heartbeat. Without even knowing what it was he was coding, he put in the shattered fragments he could remember of Shiori’s fight. The quiet double stamp of her feet, her slow circling and dangerous silences broken with moves that unrolled like a spring uncoiling, he slotted the lot over the top of the RaiTek backing. Not so much a wall of sound as a tsunami of noise. Then Fixx busted it through to LISA, crypt-tagging his signature onto the end as an afterthought. It wasn’t enough.

  “What the fuck do you think you’ve been doing?” The voice inside his head was loud, furious. Burning with all the irritating self-righteousness of a machine that knows she’s right. And it wasn’t even LISA: she was so cross she’d delegated the job of being angry to a subset. The avatar was a low-res 40Mb of polygonated, etiolated middle-aged woman in a tawdry brown uniform. He was being snubbed bigtime, patronized even. The woman was scowling, hands on hips. It was all Fixx could do not to scowl back.

  Instead, he spoke subvoc, relying on a throat mike he’d slicked to his neck. “There’s been some trouble...”

  “You’re telling me. LunaWorld called in the PSPD after you went missing. They turned over your suite looking for clues. And then some three-striped shithead on the make noticed that sure, you had landing clearance Planetside. But what didn’t you have? A record of clearance for leaving Earth. You any idea how fast we had to move to tidy that up?”

  “No,” said Fixx. “No idea.”

  The AI said nothing. Just made its avatar scowl some more. Which didn’t improve Fixx’s temper any. The only problem was he needed LISA and he wasn’t good with needing people. In fact, he had a nasty habit of cutting the ground from under them before they could chop the legs out from under him. It wasn’t sensible but it was instinct. Apologizing wasn’t, but he made himself try anyway.

  “Look,” said Fixx, taking a deep breath. “I screwed up, okay? LizAlec’s camped out on that fucking Arc, I’m hooked up with some ninja, I haven’t a fucking idea what the fuck’s going on here and as for at home...” Fixx sighed: as apologies went it wasn’t much, but it was better than he usually managed.

  “Home?” the woman in brown asked and then winked out, leaving a vague after-image behind his eyes, all edges and black space. In her place Fixx got a voice, LISA’s, sounding almost sympathetic. “You mean Paris?”

  Fixx nodded. Yeah, that was exactly what he meant. That first month when he’d landed from Chrysler he’d loathed the city and its arrogant, anal residents, its spindly trees and dead Sundays.

  Now the thought of the Reich and the Black Hundreds ripping through the narrow streets of the Marais, the old Jewish district, ate Fixx up inside, until his misery felt like a snake sliding through his intestines.

  “I don’t know,” said LISA, “not exactly. It’s hard to tell.” Both of them knew just what an admission that was for her. Knowledge didn’t just want to be free, it wanted to be known — scrambling its way through optic lines of information, spewing out in satellite sprays of information — and knowing it was what LISA was there for.

  Oh, the optic fibre was still in place, satellites still hung in low orbit, modems must still be gurgling to themselves somewhere, even if only in Alaska, but many of the links were gone, broken. Iron was such a basic element not even LISA had thought what might happen if someone took it away.

  For most of Europe there was no power. A horse was now worth more than the newest Seraphim four-track, a simple zydel blade worth more than any steel-barrelled Colt. The rains had come and so had the Reich. He was in the wrong place, at the wrong time. LizAlec was alive and probably safer where she was than in Paris. He, however... “I need to get back,” Fixx told LISA firmly. “Lady Clare’s had her pound of flesh. I need to get back now...”

  “Flights to Europe are banned,” the AI replied from habit. “And even if they weren’t, not even Niponshi would hire you a shuttle so you could turn it to worthless oxide. Besides, you’re not really finished yet, are you...?”

  The voice in his head was soft, sympathetic. So sympathetic that Fixx was immediately suspicious. As he was right to be. Into his head came an image of LizAlec, looking brave but crying, tears leaving track marks down her cheeks as she chewed at one corner of her bottom lip.

  This was a picture Fixx hadn’t seen. He strongly suspected it was a Kodak from the Arrivals Hall, one she hadn’t sent. LizAlec would have hated it: brave but tired and tearful wasn’t how LizAlec thought of herself at all.

  “How did you...” Fixx started to ask, and then realized how stupid he sounded. LISA controlled all of Luna’s electronic data exchange. And what was a Kodak moment, if not data?

  “Someone’s busy trawling, started yesterday,” said LISA. “Another AI. It has a picture — two girls, a head shot — and it’s trying to match both girls against data from the Arrivals Hall. A subroutine woke me up when it eventually spotted what was happening...” LISA sounded cross but mildly impressed, which meant whoever it was must be very good indeed. Mind you, she had a whole other problem with Arrivals Hall data supposedly going missing but she wasn’t about to go into that with Fixx.

  “And you’re not the only one who’s come out here after that girl,” LISA added.

  “Two clones,” Fixx said.

  “Two...”

  “One now,” said Fixx, cutting LISA off before she could get started. “One got killed at a bar out in Fracture.” Fixx thought of Jude and smiled. “Give you good odds that one’s already been recycled. Last time I saw the other it was folded double, taped up and dumped in a left luggage depot at Planetside Departures. Probably pissed itself by now...”

  “Cut its throat and then get out of here,” said LISA. “Go get LizAlec and do it now, before the LDPD work out your sweet little butt hasn’t been murdered.”

  “I can’t just kill someone in cold blood,” Fixx said, sounding offended.

  LISA sighed heavily. Okay, so Fixx knew that sometime, way back when, an IBM coder had fed in two dozen human sighs and an emotional equation that allowed LISA to vary their use. But the sigh seemed real enough to him, probably because it sounded the way his old manager Bernie used to, every time Fixx announced that actually, no, he really wasn’t quite ready to do this leg of the tour... But it wasn’t Fixx she was sighing about, not really.

  “You know what we’ve had in here in the last week or so, apart from you?”

  Of course he didn’t.

  “Two clones aboard a shielded cargo carrier and before that a fourth-generation Xan fighter that vanished off the screen almost before it came in range.” So Shiori could pilot her own plane... Fixx nodded. He should have wondered how she was getting to Planetside.

  “Fifty-eight years without a single black landing and then I suddenly get three of the fuckers, including you...” LISA sounded almost aggrieved. “And you always were a shitload of trouble.”

  “But you love me anyway,” said Fixx. LISA didn’t even bother to answer that one, which was probably just as well. “Look,” Fixx added hurriedly, “it stands to reason. Put up a blockade and someone’s bound to run it. That’s inevitable...”

  “Yeah,” said LIS
A, “but when the Xan belongs to China’s most powerful industrialist and the two clones travel on cartes issued to the Napoleonic corps noblique. Then you’ve...”

  “The clones had cartes?” Fixx exclaimed, then bit back his words when one of the girls turned to stare at him. Clones were illegal on Planetside, and as for cartes... People with cartes didn’t holiday at LunaWorld, not even as refugees. They flew out to Elysian in private shuttles.

  “Cartes Nobliques? Fixx took care to speak softly, letting his throat mike pick up the startled question. He was shocked, really shocked, the kick-in-the-guts kind. That Lady Clare should mistrust him made sense — he sure as hell didn’t trust her — but that the bitch should sick clones on him...

  But then maybe it wasn’t Lady Clare. Fixx drummed his nails on the edge of the cheap plastic deck and thought about it. “You know who sent the clones?” he asked finally. There was silence as LISA vanished, leaving a low hiss like wind in his ears and behind his eyes the pop and crackle of neural feedback. Fixx surfaced to take a quick peek at himself in a nearby screen and went back inside his head. It was less depressing.

  The silence stretched out until Fixx thought LISA was gone entirely and then she was back. “They came in ready-cleared. Apparently I didn’t register the fact because I already knew.” She sounded irritated, even troubled, not that Fixx had time to notice. He was too busy fretting, unable to shake the feeling he’d been set up; that maybe he had never been meant to find LizAlec in the first place, that maybe he was the distraction, Lady Clare’s sleight of hand... Either that, or he was just some sad fuck on the wrong side of crystalMeth comedown.

  “Was it Lady Clare?” Fixx demanded.

  “I don’t know,” said LISA apologetically. “There’s no record of their landing, only echoes. Though given time I could collect the echoes, reconstruct the code sequences.”

  “Then do it,” Fixx suggested crossly.

  Inside his head, LISA shook hers. “Not even for you, gorgeous. It’s too dangerous.”

  Fixx looked puzzled. Actually, he looked like shit. His eyes were as empty as some burnt-out tenement block, his cheekbones jutting out of grey skin, but he tried not to mind about that. “Dangerous?” Fixx asked finally, turning his head sideways as he tried to work out if he looked any better in profile. The tall musician had a nasty feeling the answer was probably a big fat no.

  “Who do you think keeps Planetside’s Sabatier3 cells functioning?” LISA said, sounding resigned. “You think CO2 just combines with hydrogen by itself? That water just electrolyses for the hell of it?”

  Fixx continued to look puzzled. He was getting good at that.

  “We’re crowded out with refugees,” said LISA. “Or haven’t you noticed? The whole Planetside system’s going to implode if I don’t come up with something soon.”

  “You?” Fixx asked.

  “Me, gorgeous... Who do you think fills the tunnels with oxygen? Those Sabatier3s had a ninety-nine-year working life. You know how old they are?”

  Fixx shook his head.

  “186 years. Half the time I don’t know why I don’t just pack up and let you all die. Life would be so much more peaceful.” The AI was beginning to sound seriously pissed.

  “You’d get bored,” said Fixx, with absolute certainty. “You’d get bored out of your skull. If you had one, that is.”

  He was right, too. Urban myths of big AIs committing suicide did the rounds but Fixx was pretty sure they were only myths. He’d never come across an actual case and he’d bet LISA hadn’t either. BioAIs, now they were different, but then Fixx wasn’t too sure he’d have wanted to be condemned to eternity as the galactic equivalent of a fridge door either.

  “You know what I think, gorgeous? I think you should ditch Shiori and get out of here. Take a hike. Go get LizAlec and if you won’t do that go back to Chrysler. I’ll square it. You know, take the locks off your door, wire you back into a feed... But get out of Planetside before the PSPD catch up with you, and ditch Shiori while you’re at it.”

  “I’ll think about it,” said Fixx. But they both knew he wouldn’t. No way was Fixx going to walk away from a woman with a body like that.

  “You know what you are?” LISA said sadly.

  Fixx didn’t, but he knew she was going to tell him. She always did.

  “You’re a dumb fuck,” said LISA and then she was gone.

  And he was, too, such a dumb fuck he didn’t see the spike-haired boy in the black T-shirt and combat trousers who started following him the moment he left the bar. But Leon saw Fixx which was all that mattered. Well, it was to Leon. Help the tetsuo — but don’t get into trouble. Jude’s instructions had been clear. And for once Leon was trying to do what he was told.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  You must be out of your tiny mind

  Fixx couldn’t be bothered to wait for Shiori to find him, so he found her instead, holed up in a polyfoamed pod she’d hired in the RunNowFun hotel. It was as much a Ripongi fuck joint as LunaWorld’s 49er was a real pioneer bar. For a start Fixx could almost stand up in the pod, which he never could have managed in a real love hotel.

  But it did have a traditional grey Togo slab and a time-locked minibar stuffed with vacuum-packed wasabe crackers and tubes of iced Sapporo. It even featured torn strips of rustling paper taped round the air vent to sound like breeze-fingered leaves. Not to mention an assortment of foil-wrapped vibrators and an evil-looking surgical steel speculum in a pink fur-lined box.

  There was a tiny toilet cubicle, too. But the clone occupied all of that, its black suit trousers rucked in a heap around its feet. Its ankles were strapped together with the missing belt from the trousers and its hands were fastened tightly behind its neck with a red silk tie. From the blood dripping from a split lower lip and the flowering bruises that covered the clone’s ribs, Shiori and the clone had been in mid-conversation. One that had been about to get much more serious if the short ceramic blade in Shiori’s hand meant anything.

  The Japanese girl swung round from where she crouched in the lavatory door. Grey eyes raked over Fixx, giving less than nothing away. But the reptilian part of Fixx didn’t need to look into her eyes to know what was going on or how much Shiori was enjoying it. Mixed in with the stale air of the tiny pod and the sickly-sweet smell of the clone’s blood was something darker, muskier. It wasn’t so much conversation he’d interrupted, Fixx realized, as Shiori’s own private version of foreplay.

  Hot though the pod was, the Japanese woman’s nipples stood proud beneath her sweat-stained cotton vest and his mind finally caught up with what his body already knew. He’d got into trouble the last time that happened.

  Lady Elizabeth Alexandra Fabio. Fixx hadn’t believed Lady Clare at first Hadn’t believed that the kid with the kohl-rimmed eyes, wearing a crushed purple coat really was corps noblique. He should have known, of course, even back when he first met LizAlec. Her arrogant self-confidence was clue enough. But people assume artists are observers, when most are just self-reflective, self-obsessed...

  Fixx had drained his glass of marc, feeling the cheap grape-pip brandy burn in his throat. Fifty people in a filthy bar in Bastille and, because of who he’d once been, all of them respected the cerebral exclusion zone he’d erected around himself. Except her.

  There was blood on the ballerina’s blade and this time when he looked Shiori was smiling, her eyes bright with expectation. Punching the button that shut the toilet door, Shiori crossed her hands over her front and in the same elegant move Fixx had watched earlier, stripped off her black vest in a single movement to bare small elegant breasts.

  It was the opposite of a striptease, quick and clean, but all the raunchier for its bald matter-of-factness. Unclicking the wall cupboard marked lovedrugs, Fixx grabbed an ampoule of amylNite8 and snapped it under his nose, inhaling its sour chemical stink. Without waiting to be asked, Fixx broke another glass straw under the nostrils of the bare-breasted woman standing opposite him — and watched as her eyes exp
loded, pupils widening into black holes.

  He wanted to suggest Shiori put down her knife, then decided not. The last thing Fixx wanted to do was ruin her mood. Instead he kicked off his boots and scrabbled at his buttons. Getting out of a jumpsuit wasn’t elegant but at least it was fast.

  She had the inner stillness of a predator, with eyes to match. And as the Japanese woman watched him, Fixx got the feeling she was putting a value on him. It wasn’t a sensation he liked.

  “You’re not really here to find LizAlec, are you?” Fixx kept his voice steady, his eyes on her wide face.

  Shiori shook her head, then shrugged. “Maybe it’s LizAlec, maybe it’s someone else. I need to check.”

  For a moment, Fixx wanted to take LISA’s advice and walk out of there, do what he should have done instead of coming to find her. Taken a hike, got sensible. But his wasn’t that kind of life and this wasn’t that kind of sex. The twisted smile on her hungry face told him that. Most people needed ice to get that wired, but all Shiori needed was...

  Fixx glanced at the ceramic blade still balanced in her narrow fingers and knew exactly what Shiori needed. Hell, just looking at the blade put him on edge. So instead of walking, Fixx reached for her belt and slowly undid the heavy buckle. Unpopping the waist button to her Levis, Fixx ran his fingers down her fly, releasing it.

  The kid had been watching him all evening, again. Not out of the corner of her eye, but openly — until he frowned at her and she glanced away or pretended to be looking over his shoulder at one of the faded holoposters on the sand-blasted brick wall behind. As if anyone would be interested in bands that had folded, circuses that had never been more than virtual, in the whole tired Nouveau Bastille theatre of cruelty. Fixx doubted if she even knew Artonin Artaud had existed, never mind which century he’d lived in. But, in the end, he’d sent a drink over, telling the sad-eyed little rent boy behind the bar to take her a bottle of marc.