Then there are the three humans: two men, one woman.
The first man goes by the name Harris Nakashima, but he too has a false identity, one that might possibly make it past the security systems in Grand Junction and the neighboring states, but likely no farther—not, in any case, past el señor Metatron’s detectors. His real name is John Cheyenne Hawkwind. He is an American of Amerindian heritage, as both his real name and the photo on his universal ID indicate, though his mixed blood, a false ID, and probably a bit of cosmetic surgery allow him to pass easily for a Japanese American. He claims to have been born in San Francisco but is really from Montana, has lived in a dozen North American cities, both in Canada and in the Free American States—or at least those that are still members of the Union. He is forty years old. Like his alias, Nakashima.
El señor Metatron is firm: this guy is a dealer. A good one too. He sells prohibited metacortical drugs manufactured in zero gravity and therefore not in compliance with the bioethical laws promulgated by the UHU, which closely monitors the circulation of legal dope throughout the vast human territories it controls. The Governance Bureau has long since banned most orbital psychotropic drugs, citing them as “too dangerous” for the human psyche. The presence of a confirmed, experienced dealer near the cosmodrome, but in an area somewhat outside the city center and with a very reasonable crime rate for the region, suggests that a huge transaction—maybe several—is about to go down. The man has been to prison twice, but never for drug trafficking; he was arrested three times on drug charges, but released each time for lack of evidence. He must be really well protected by one of the mafias that share this territory. El señor Metatron thinks he might even be acting under the aegis of the Mohawk mafia—the one that you have to deal with if you want to deal anything around here.
For Plotkin, this one is immediately a PROBLEM. Not a potential one like the unemployed android. This guy has already had trouble with the cops. He’s been in the cooler. He is also using a false identity undoubtedly crafted by the local mafia. Probably the Mohawks themselves. That last point is the most disturbing one. Especially since he arrived four days ago and will be staying for a month. Just like Plotkin.
Cheyenne Hawkwind, Plotkin muses, contemplating the man’s face on the wall of images in front of him. Piss off, Cheyenne Hawkwind. He points his index finger at a virtual button and the Hawkwind problem disappears, to be instantly replaced by the next file. Somewhere over Plotkin’s head, the bright bulb of el señor Metatron flickers in its spectrum between the visible and the invisible.
The double case Plotkin is now facing raises some questions even stranger and more troubling than the possible problems posed by the presence of a fucking dealer. He feels like he is being confronted with an enigma analogous to the malfunctions his neurolinguistic recombination center has been experiencing since his arrival at the hotel. It is as enigmatic as the words he wrote on the window’s digital notepad.
Something.
Something unknown lives.
“What is it?” He asks the ball of light hovering between him and the various biomedical diagrams superimposed on the wall.
“That is the problem,” el señor Metatron replies. “I have no idea.”
This causes Plotkin no end of grief. For a specialized research agent like Metatron to be placed in a situation where it is forced to admit its incompetence is a kind of miracle. A reverse miracle, an antimiracle. Something completely out of character.
Though his still-limbic personality doesn’t yet really know itself, his current identity—that of a Russo-American mafia killer—knows immediately what to make of this realization.
This is no longer just a PROBLEM, like with the orbital drug dealer.
This is DANGER.
Like the edge of the unknown. Like at the edge of the abyss of death.
There is also a couple.
Capsule 081. One of the motel’s forty “double” rooms, corner suites on each of the ten floors. Jordan June McNellis and Vivian Velvet McNellis. Born in Auckland, New Zealand. Aged twenty-nine and twenty-seven years, respectively.
Legal papers? Yes, but part of their personal disks had been rewritten. Like with Nakashima, the work is shoddy; it seems temporary. The section of their file that has been rewritten covers a considerable part of their biomedical data. It seems that they suffer from a benign neurogenetic disease—these have become very common over the last half century—called retinitis pigmentosa, but Plotkin instinctively knows that this disease is more than just a trompe l’oeil.
Retinitis pigmentosa, version 2.0, to be exact, is a mutant strain that appeared shortly after the decryption of the gene responsible for the disease, the software agent tells him. The technical description provided by NeuroNet reads as follows:
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/001029.htm#Definition: Retinitis pigmentosa is a progressive degeneration of the retina that affects night vision and peripheral vision. Retinitis pigmentosa commonly runs in families. The disorder can be caused by defects in a number of different genes that have been identified. The cells controlling night vision, called rods, are most likely to be affected. However, in some cases, retinal cone cells are most damaged. The hallmark of the disease is the presence of dark pigmented spots in the retina. As the disease progresses, peripheral vision is gradually lost. The condition may eventually lead to blindness, but usually not complete blindness. Signs and symptoms often first appear in childhood, but severe visual problems do not usually develop until early adulthood. The main risk factor is a family history of retinitis pigmentosa. It is an uncommon condition affecting about 4,000 people in the U.S. Symptoms: Vision decreased at night or in reduced light. Loss of peripheral vision. Loss of central vision (in advanced cases).
A disease of the vision. A congenital deformation of the retina, sometimes leading to blindness. An alteration of neuroptic cells, the presence of dark spots, loss of peripheral and then central vision…
This disease is a sign. A signal. A code. It is there to hide something else. It is there to mask the existence of some other disease, some other anomaly. It is evidence.
However, el señor Metatron is firm: there is nothing in their genetic codes that indicates anything other than this defective gene, and Metatron can discern nothing suggesting that they are carrying highly sophisticated countermeasure systems. However, their biodisks were rewritten with the obvious goal of hiding something.
Now here is an enigma. Something is not normal, that’s for sure.
Here is a danger zone that needs to be contained, and fast.
Plotkin gets up, eats breakfast, showers, dresses, and decides it is time to go down into the city and conduct an initial reconnaissance of what will be his operating theater.
El señor Metatron has just brought up a detailed diagram of the hotel and its residents. “We have enough bandwidth on one of the Order satellites to be able to place the seventeen long-term residents under GPS surveillance,” it informs him. They will all be traceable almost to the millisecond and millimeter.
While the bathroom gently collapses and withdraws and he gulps a scorching cup of tea in front of the window, he watches the city beyond the glass stirring and going about its business at the cosmodrome. In fact this too is a city that never sleeps. A decayed H-4 rocket prepares to launch a Soyuz recovery capsule—quite a high-risk endeavor.
As he prepares to leave the capsule via its exit airlock, el señor Metatron generates a wide operating window for his eyes only, a neuroencrypted display of a three-dimensional plan of the hotel, with graphics showing its occupants and their exact locations. Of the 135 residents, 98 are in their rooms and, given their relative states of immobility, are probably still sleeping. This means that 37 people spent the night elsewhere, most likely in some brothel or bar somewhere.
The nacelle elevator takes him directly to the first floor; the lobby is deserted. There is no noise from the direction of the patio. Only the surveillance cameras whir softly above his hea
d. He knows that they don’t really matter, that something in the plan will make sure they don’t interfere. The only thing that counts is being seen by as few people as possible.
The patio is deserted—but, unluckily, the manager pokes his nose out from behind the counter.
“A little business trip, eh, Mr. Plotkin?” he smarms in an oily voice, a filthy smile crossing his visage.
Plotkin barely breaks his stride, throwing what he hopes is a friendly wave at the man, and tries to look like a Russo-American insurance agent. He only just manages to murmur a reply: “Just a little walk to stretch my legs, Mr. Drummond. Good morning to you.”
He is already on the median strip between the motel and the street, walking toward the scaffolding of metal pipes above which the words Hotel Laika are scripted in twentieth-century neon tubing; a few of the letters have obviously been changed or replaced. He sees an orange shape coming up the street from the south; it is the robotaxi he ordered while waiting for the elevator. Turning his head in the other direction, toward the autobridge spanning the North Junction road, Plotkin makes out a black shadow that glides toward him over the asphalt. It’s the dog, Balthazar. He has just come from the access ramp. By all indications, he is coming from the northwest—from Heavy Metal Valley.
As Plotkin steps into the car, the dog is several meters from the entryway, and pauses to note Plotkin’s choice of destination—“City Hall, please”—before the taxi takes off. Their eyes meet: the bionic animal and the rebuilt human. In that instant, Plotkin realizes that neither of them is being deceived by the other’s maneuvers.
Of all the hotel’s residents, the dirty informer Clovis Drummond included, Plotkin tells himself, the one he needs to be most careful of is this dog.
> STARDUST ALLEY
KOROLEV PLAZA—MUNICIPAL TERRITORIAL SECURITY ADMINISTRATION—YOU HAVE JUST ENTERED A YELLOW ZONE IN THE GRAND JUNCTION CITY HALL’S SECURITY PERIMETER—PLEASE GO IMMEDIATELY TO THE CLOSEST METROPOLITAN CONTROL OFFICE—FOLLOW THE YELLOW NEURO-ARROWS ON THE SIDEWALK.
This is what happens when you pass the first security perimeter that encircles Grand Junction’s City Hall. Up to that point, you have done nothing illegal. You can go into a “yellow” zone under the strict condition that you must follow the neuroencrypted arrows transmitted by the city’s UHU-approved system to the closest registration office, which will verify your ID and ask why and for how long you are here.
If you stray from the yellow neuro-arrows for more than thirty seconds, an imperious inscription will order you to return immediately to the “correct route” if you persist for fifteen more seconds, a final warning message will appear on your retina for five seconds. Then there will be a numeric countdown from 10 to the ominous 0, at which point the alarm will sound and the surveillance networks will pinpoint your location down to the centimeter within a microsecond, and dozens of territory or city police officers, human and android, will rush in to pounce on you.
El señor Metatron knows all this down to the smallest procedural detail; all it has to do is enter the yellow zone and its organic backer, Plotkin, receives a neuro-HTML page from the municipal department; the yakuza software agent detects it in an instant, this funny living flame, gamboling joyously in the air, invisible to everyone but Plotkin. It hovers above the city’s gray asphalt pavement, penetrating all obstacles that cross its path, human or otherwise, like a mass of neutrinos; playing with the neuroencrypted yellow line that marks—for the man named Plotkin, and for the crowd of thousands of humans that pass by the protected sector around City Hall—the shortest route to the closest metropolitan registration office.
For el señor Metatron, toreador of nanocomponents, sparkling keeper of the secret language of the pirate metacoders of the Unterbahn; for el señor Metatron, as powerful and invisible—or practically, at least—as the Word of God himself; for el señor Metatron, almost nothing is impossible when it comes to manipulating data, or the uninterrupted production of simulacrums meant to fool the simulacrum cops of the UHU network. All the immoderate pride of this clandestine intelligence agent passes through Plotkin’s brain in a sort of flamboyant spray of pure ego, while words written in blue on a yellow background appear in front of him, floating above the sidewalk at the next street corner: TAKE KOROLEV-5, THEN VIKING ALLEY. NUMBER 456 NORTH, METROPOLITAN CONTROL OFFICE, STATION 14.
At station 14, he gets in line at window 3 and is welcomed by Jennifer CK2564.
It is law in all territories managed by UniWorld—about four-fifths of the planet—that any civil officer of a UHU-approved corporation must be identifiable by any UniWorld citizen. At the same time, an individual’s right to his own “privacy” has led to a long legal battle that the Global Governance Bureau cut off by instigating the system of “registered first names.” You have the right to lodge a complaint against agent John XX2000, but his anonymity will be preserved and you will have no way of bringing his “private life” into the fray. Jennifer CK2564 is a fat Mohawk woman, surely half-blood, who looks fairly agreeable in her brown Metropolitan Control Office uniform. Her muddy yellow badge indicates that her operational jurisdiction includes all the yellow perimeters in the territory of Grand Junction.
After a few minutes of discussion, Plotkin has learned next to nothing; the same is true for Jennifer CK2564; but el señor Metatron, who has come along like a sparkling torch to hover in the middle of station 14’s ceiling; el señor Metatron, who glows insolently among the police station’s surveillance cameras; el señor Metatron now knows everything about the various procedures, methodologies, organizations, and plans of Grand Junction’s security forces. It—he—is undoubtedly the secret weapon Plotkin was told about in Siberia, the weapon that should let him—if his memory works correctly; how ironic to think of that!—override the enemy’s security systems.
Plotkin’s memory may not be the best, but el señor Metatron simply brushes that off as rotten luck. This bit of incandescent plasma would make child’s play of security networks and countermeasures; he is sandwiched between two worlds, strolling on Plotkin’s retina and neurons with no indication, even to the most modern scanners, that there is even the tiniest bit of suspicious cerebral activity. He is more false than all the false worlds that make up this one. More false than false—does that even mean anything?
That is why el señor Metatron was designed for the Red Star Order. To be clandestine now requires the ability to appear to a single brain, without even the Global Megabrain questioning what is happening. To be true is to be more false than the world itself.
In any case, this seems to be one of the surest ways to reach some kind of truth. It is perhaps Metatron—who else?—who is sending coded messages to Plotkin’s brain; he might not even be aware that he is doing it. El señor Metatron is not just a simple program. He may not have a body to speak of, but he has a voice and a mind, things that he cannot understand in himself. It is undoubtedly Metatron—it must be—who sent him those unconscious messages about fire and its presence in the Bible…and in the rock music of the twentieth century.
Plotkin receives a temporary visitor’s permit for the City Hall’s yellow zone. Jennifer CK2564, the fat mixed-blood at the registration office, will only allow him three hours. You came here what for? she had asked him, in barely comprehensible English. He had explained that he was trying to contact a manager in the Municipal Consortium’s financial department and that an introductory e-mail would be sent as soon as possible, but as a paid commission inspector, he had been sent to clear the way, et cetera, et cetera.
Jennifer CK2564 had cut him off short by handing him a dirty-beige token chip with the number 3 written in black in its center. Three hours, she had said, already signaling for the next person in line.
He had left station 14 well pleased, and begun to walk through the downtown streets.
Once he passes the barrier, he has full access to all the departments. He can go everywhere except the “orange” and “red” zones. He starts by taking Korolev-4, o
ne of the large boulevards that divides Korolev Plaza into a star (it is modeled on the plaza with the same name in Paris); a venerable Korolev R-5, more than a hundred years old now and bought cheaply from the Russians forty years earlier, sits enthroned atop a grassy butte in the middle of the plaza, and large numbered streets form a vast eight-pointed star around it. At the corners of each arterial street, facing the antique rocket, tall buildings house various departments of the Municipal Consortium, linked by elegant circular walkways designed and built by a famous Indonesian architect in the 2020s when Grand Junction was at the peak of its power and could play with it as it wished.
Here, the crowd is very different from the one at the Enterprise aerostation. This is the administrative heart of the city; body-tuning-operation recipients have none of the brassy, cheap showiness of the trans-Gs at the aerostation or on the strip; with body tuning, the majority of modifications are internal and duly masked by nanosurgery. Here, people look more human than natural humans—this has been the new trend for a good dozen years now. High-quality Versace-Motorola suits seem to be the norm for men, long Prada-Sony dresses for the women. Here, the crowd moves in lines cleaner and more fluid than the chaos that reigns at the city’s gateway. Here, people work—or at least they work very hard at appearing to do so.
He turns off at the second circular avenue, called Mariner Street. It is a downtown typical of the short-lived 2010–2020 boom. The prevailing style is neo-Gothic with, toward the end of the period, the characteristic emergence of neoclassical styles that are still all the rage today. High crenellated towers overlook arches and naves in translucent composite or molded concrete in which statues representing pop stars, Gothic martyrs from the Middle Ages, famous Amerindian gods, and mythical figures from the space race are arranged in bas-relief or even built into the structure like gargoyles from an ageless age. These buildings are most often painted dark red, violet, mauve, or blue, cold and old-fashioned, while the more recent buildings—the ones from after the 2020s—duplicate the vivid colors of the palaces in Knossos or Babylon, complete with hanging gardens filled with lush, genetically modified bonsai jungles.
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