His learning, the discipline acquired, the spy-killer training are so strongly embedded in his psyche that he is rapidly able to detect something abnormal in Vega 2501’s maneuvering.
He is trying to determine whether or not someone is following him.
He is trying to spot a possible tail.
Have I already been found out? Plotkin wonders.
El señor Metatron suggests that he think about some information taken from the Moon River banking terminal. The identity of Vega 2501—the false identity—does not belong to anyone. More precisely, it is the identity of a person who died in the Ring, but for whom there is no registered death notice. This “person,” an android like him, died on the eve of his departure from the Orbring—the eve of the Flandro attack on the Zero-G Industries facility. Yet his death has still never been officially announced, and does not seem to be recorded anywhere. Only the internal report of a hospital station mentions it. Vega 2501 undoubtedly had something to do with the Ring attacks. He is on the lookout for a possible UHU cop or one from some orbital corporation. Only an authentic NeuroNet genius like himself, el señor Metatron claims, would have been able to ferret out that grain of information.
Plotkin smiles to himself at the outsize ego of the brazier flaming with contentment at his feet. The little guy is very talented, he must admit.
Our “man” is hiding something. Something related to the attacks and the suspicious death of another android.
Something that has some relation to his “inhumanity.”
It is clear now that at some point they must meet.
Past the 30000 block, around three or four kilometers from the hotel, the android goes into a bar. It is a place typical of this northern part of the strip, less noisy than Monolith South. There are the obligatory dancers executing their spins and outdated “sexy” poses around their everlasting aluminum bar at the far end of the large, dimly lit room. The tables are mainly occupied by middle-aged working-class men, probably punters from the nearby cosmodrome construction sites.
At the bar, there are one or two temptresses already at work. Calmly, the android heads for a free stool.
Plotkin knows that Grand Junction’s bars are among the rare establishments in North America—on the planet, in fact—that do not refuse to serve “andros.” That may explain why Vega 2501, after twenty-five years living in orbit and on the moon, in places where such segregation is not only useless but harmful, and is therefore banned, decided to come “find work” in Grand Junction. He is just another one of the pilgrims who come in the tens of thousands to populate the city, its strips and barrios, for a half portion of the dream, for a speck of freedom in its cellophane wrapper, for the more and more distant stars.
The best thing to do is be direct.
Plotkin sits at the bar and orders a beer; the barman hands him a sheet of memory cellulose listing alcohol of all kinds. Animated holographic advertisements pop up next to each choice. Plotkin glances distractedly at the menu, keeping his peripheral attention on the android, who orders a double scotch—perfectly legal in Grand Junction. When the barmaid, a nicely proportioned Anglo-Canadian redhead with green eyes that shine like phosphorescent lamps, comes to take his order, he again opts for a pale ale and gazes appreciatively at the young woman’s body for a moment as she moves to the other end of the bar.
Plotkin notices that the android’s attention is similarly focused; he likes women. Young ones—though this one is an adult at least, around twenty years old. He isn’t a pervert, just an android who prefers to go to bed with Homo sapiens. Fine. Time to approach him now.
“Hello. Excuse me, but aren’t you staying at the Hotel Laika?”
Plotkin doesn’t budge from his stool; there are two empty places between them. He smiles pleasantly at the android, who turns to him, surprised, his face almost human save for the perfectly balanced features, the unnaturally bright gray-blue eyes, the bland smile and digitalized expressions, the too-perfect smoothness of his skin. There can be no doubt of his origins.
“Yes,” he replies. “You too?”
It’s as simple as that.
The waitress is Chinese American, a little pudgy, but whose voluptuous curves, accentuated by her black leotard, seem to provoke a good deal of arousal in the android’s emotive sensors. She sets the two drinks down side by side on the corner of the table and takes their money, thanking them for the generous tip the faux human includes in the cosmopolitan Grand Junction currency. Plotkin and the android have moved to this isolated table in the corner of the room, lit only by an old neon Budweiser sign.
Plotkin plays his role perfectly, leading with his knowledge of the space industry. My office is one of the best insurance companies in Russia, et cetera, et cetera.
Later, it will be almost impossible for him to remember the exact chronology of events—or nonevents. It will be impossible to remember how long they talked, or what they talked about. He will, however, remember the waitresses.
And a few bits of important information gleaned randomly from a few sentences exchanged with the android.
Vega 2501, or whatever his real series number might be, worked his twenty-five years of orbital service for the Brazilian army, mainly on the moon. He then worked in several Ring factories as a security guard, among them Venux Corp, which manufactures—like all the companies in the field—orbital androids.
Plotkin remembers that Sydia Nova 280 was manufactured by Venux Corp. It was quite a coincidence. On the moon, during his contractual service, Vega 2501 had had high-responsibility jobs such as chief mission operator; he surveyed thousands of kilometers on the Hidden Face with the Wilcot-Volkov expedition. The Dark Side of the Moon was the Pink Floyd album that had marked the band’s apogee and thus the beginning of its end, Plotkin is sure of it; he knows the group and its history by heart. It is part of the cobbled-together personality he is hanging on to as fiercely as if it were really his own.
It doesn’t matter anymore what is true and what is false. It doesn’t matter, he says to Vega 2501, smiling, who at his request is explaining the sexual customs of androids in orbit. It doesn’t really matter whether he is an insurance agent or a professional killer, or whether he spent his childhood in Novosibirsk, or London, or Buenos Aires. None of these details really matter, do they? What counts is the fact that something totally unplanned is beginning, delicately, to take hold of him.
What counts is that he is beginning to live.
Later, when the bar closes, around 3:30 in the morning, they walk back up the strip together to the hotel. Plotkin decides to take a chance.
“Have you met the other android staying in the hotel?”
Vega 2501 seems genuinely surprised. “What other android?”
Plotkin knows he is treading on quicksand here. Yes, he has been drinking, but his reflexes and intuition are unaffected. All throughout the night, an antialcoholic filter has been dissolving and transforming the harmful sugars. He had half a dozen beers, but he feels as if he’s barely had a pint. It wasn’t even voluntary; this is part of his “organic” kit; as a good professional killer for the Order, it is out of the question to let himself be abused by any legal or illegal narcotic. The android probably has a similar device; he is walking quite as straight as Plotkin.
“A female android. I passed her once in the hall,” he lies.
Vega 2501 seems frankly disturbed.
“A female android, did you say? So she’s sexed? One of the new androids?”
“Yes; like you, but female.”
They walk slowly but steadily, crossing Telstar Bridge, a simple twenty-four-meter expanse of steel and concrete spanning a millennia-old ravine carved into the hills. They can see the hotel on the horizon, with its holographic dog on the sign turning above the carbon dome, glowing eerily in pastel blue and pink.
“I’ve never seen her. A female android—you’re sure? And you passed right by her?”
“Yes,” Plotkin says, still hovering somewhere between a lie an
d the truth. “Definitely a female.”
The words plunge Vega 2501 into renewed depths of confusion. He does not speak again until they reach the hotel. They part quickly.
“Well, good night, Mr. Plotkin. Thank you for the enjoyable evening,” says the humanoid machine with a synthetic smile, before walking quickly toward the hotel’s southern wing, where his capsule is located.
It’s as simple as that.
Open and shut in the same way.
Plotkin crosses the lobby toward the west elevator. He passes the counter, and notices that the light is on in the manager’s office. The counter and a good part of the space behind it, as well as a sort of attached cubicle separated from the main office by a partition and a little glass door, are full of all kinds of objects.
No. Only three kinds.
Exactly three kinds.
There is a pile of Recyclo™ particleboard boxes filled with packs of cigarettes.
There are translucent plastic Tupperware containers in which Plotkin can discern the distinctive color, shape, and smell of thousands of marijuana buds.
And there are boxes of children’s neuroelectronic games made in India. One of the boxes is open, ripped partway across its width, near an ashtray made of a large crockery plate, in which several Camel and Marlboro butts glow orange in a pile of gray ashes emitting wisps of carbon smoke that fill the entire reception area.
Someone has been smoking cigarettes. Someone has piled boxes haphazardly. Someone has been very busy doing who knows what in the service office, and not for very long, by the looks of it. The delivery is dated earlier that night. Plotkin guesses that by dawn all of it will have vanished.
He obviously stumbled on this at a very bad time, but it is really a stroke of luck for him. The manager is probably in the middle of stowing the most compromising boxes somewhere in the office.
He shouldn’t stay.
He makes a beeline for the west corridor and its elevator.
> NEXUS ROAD
He has chosen a moment just after daybreak. The eastern sky is pale pink; the air is already full of the warmth of the day to come. Violet cirrus clouds float high in the atmosphere. Above him, the sky is deepest blue, indigo really, full of the ghostly phantoms of stars, but already it is blurring little by little into the rosy edge of the sunrise.
During the night, Plotkin rented a car from his room, a ten-year-old Ford with a hydrocell motor, all in accordance with current standards.
After his expedition on the strip with the android, he slept all day. Then, at night, he started to think of his plan. His plan to Kill the Mayor of This City.
The android’s presence might prove useful. He seems destined to serve as a scapegoat, a pigeon, a patsy, a pawn—the perfect Lee Harvey Oswald for this business. Plotkin’s plan is a sweeping one: an attack on October 4, the day of the Sputnik Centennial, claimed by a phony abbreviation of the radical Flandro dissident sort. He will operate secretly from the android’s room, leaving DNA traces there that will strengthen the theory of a conspiracy with local human ramifications. He will leave a few clues on Vega 2501’s console—compromising documents here and there, and probably the weapon used in the crime, or maybe the portable organizer he will have used in developing his plan. Vega 2501, he thinks. Vega 2501, the android with the false identity. A lovely career as a political assassin is opening up for you.
At that moment, a sudden impulse moves him to write something on the desk’s digital notepad.
IPSE
VOS
BAPTIZABIT
IN
SPIRITU
SANCTO
ET
IGNI
He stares at the words, written in all capital letters.
Another unconscious impulse, like when he wrote the phrase from the apostle Saint Luke on the wall near the window. What does it mean? Is it a code?
It is Latin, el señor Metatron explains, taken from a text by Origens, a third-century Christian writer. Again, the words are from Saint Luke.
“Baptism by fire?” Plotkin asks the software agent, intrigued.
“An old apocryphal tradition in both Judaism and Christianity. When you are reborn after death, you cross a river of fire that purifies the evil in you.”
Why did he write these words on the desk’s notepad? He knows no Latin whatsoever, and surely isn’t familiar with any third-century Christian writers.
Something.
Something is interfering with his mind.
El señor Metatron detects nothing abnormal in the neurocircuits of the room’s console. Plotkin asked the intelligence agent—who is, in the words of secret-network habitués, an “angel”—to proceed with a complete checkup of his own biocellular implants, with the very latest antivirus protection. Down to the tiniest immune-system nanomachine. It will take hours.
El señor Metatron doesn’t find a thing.
If someone is trying to pirate his neuroinstruction program, or someone—or something—is trying to implant messages encrypted in Latin into his brain, they are doing it in a way completely unknown to him, or to one of the best personal security agents in existence anywhere.
A group of Catholic resistance fighters? Or Evangelicals? Hard to believe. There is no way they would possess technology so secret that it leaves no trace detectable by el señor Metatron’s elite sensors. If they did try something, did attempt—for one mysterious reason or another—to control his mind, taking advantage of a moment of weakness in the program during his postamnesiac reconstruction, his guardian angel would have detected their maneuver, at least indirectly, after the fact if not at the time.
Plotkin goes to the window.
The cosmodrome’s launchpads are empty. The stormy sky seems to be moving toward a monstrous abyss, with huge squadrons of altocumulus clouds lumbering like violet zeppelins whose black edges are edged with the city’s lights as they float and whirl in the gusty night sky. On the console’s weather channel, Plotkin reads that winds of at least eighty kilometers an hour will be blowing in from the west for the next forty-eight hours. WorldWeather explains in a communiqué that it was able to deflect part of the winds and the energy of these “super–jet streams” away toward the Great Lakes, but that the weather will still be unstable for the next couple of days.
There are forces at work here. Natural forces, social forces, forces of unknown origin. Forces that just may help him carry out his plan.
His plan to Kill the Mayor of This City.
He decides to leave the hotel.
The car is waiting for him as planned on the North Junction road, at the bottom of the autobridge staircase, facing east toward Vostok and Heavy Metal Valley. A map of the area is affixed to the car’s computer, but Plotkin has no need of it. It is firmly etched on his mind: its graphics, its grid lines, its creases, its holes. The map is an integral part of him now, thanks to el señor Metatron, who appears periodically in a flash of wispy magnetic fire on the passenger seat before disappearing a moment later, as if breathed out and in again by the onboard computer.
The map is part of the land. The drawing seems to hang in front of his eyes at the same time as the actual streets flash past and the obscure network of all his electromagnetic systems—obvious and hidden—work in tandem to generate the changing images. The road is abandoned, but it is still part of the network. It is still part of the Municipal Metropolitan Consortium of Grand Junction, and part of the county.
They drive east through the hills for about ten kilometers. The road stops abruptly at the bottom of a hill wooded with tall tropical trees whose luxuriant, heavy masses and bunches of wildflowers with large, almost fluorescent green petals are familiar to him, as is the high, silver-tinted grass that undulates gently in the breeze like a vast carpet of velvet.
The road crosses a simple slope, or, rather, a semislope where the asphalt is laid in dashes several hundred meters long on the dusty, ochre-colored ground, then forks to the northeast and south. The sun blazes on bushes of pink and
red-orange roses just behind the rocky butte directly in front of him. The sky is painted in slashes of gold, ruby, and flame.
HEAVY METAL VALLEY, XENON RIDGE: NEXUS ROAD NORTH.
NOVA EXPRESS CROSSROAD, NEON PARK, OMEGA BLOCKS, JUNKVILLE: NEXUS ROAD SOUTH.
He turns north automatically, part robot, part human.
In front of him, the map spreads its wings of diagrams, its linear filigree. Xenon Ridge is eight kilometers high and overlooks the valley. It is an ideal observation point.
To reach it, he must leave the main slope of Nexus Road and take a lateral road—something that hardly even deserves to be called a path, actually—pompously named Xenon Road, which veers to the northwest and climbs sharply toward the summit of a mesa half denuded by the erosion of winds coming from the steppes of the Midwest, one of these southern Canadian maple-treed and wooded hills that are rapidly succumbing to global climatic chaos. From there, one overlooks the valley and Nexus Road leading from it. He notes the linguistic change; he must be just on the American-Canadian border, or very near it. “Rows” have changed to “rangs” and the signage is now bilingual, as is the onboard computer.
Historical diagram: This area has been around for twenty-five years, emerging when underground private astrobusiness was still booming despite—or perhaps because of—the Grand Jihad. The city of Grand Junction had grown considerably and already covered the equivalent, or nearly, of the entire county. The Municipal Metropolitan Consortium, which included the city proper of Grand Junction and all its emerging or fully developed peripheries, like the Leonov Alley strip and even Junkville, was thus created. They had decided to open a road from Gemini Drive toward the north of Monolith Hills, intending to go even beyond that to the eastern limits of the autonomous Mohawk territory near Lake Champlain. That was how North Junction came to be. Then Nexus Road, and then the access road with its autobridge to the strip.
Cosmos Incorporated Page 13