“Are you a policeman, young man?” one of the elderly women asked from across the compartment.
“Yes, ma’am, I am.”
She nodded at Jones. “Is that your prisoner?”
“Yes, ma’am, he is.”
“Is he a clone?”
“He’s a human disguised as a clone, ma’am.” I didn’t like discussing the case with civilians, but they’d all heard me talking to Lily a moment before.
“I don’t know why a human would want to disguise himself as one,” a man in a construction jumper said, “but that’s not a crime, I suppose…is it?”
It was a crime for a clone to pretend to be human but, no, a human could dress up as a clone. I looked at the unconscious Jones. A very short human.
“I think it’s better if I not discuss the case, sir,” I told him.
The older woman’s eyes grew large. “Is he dangerous, officer?”
I grinned at her, “Not any more.”
In fact, I wasn’t absolutely sure that Jones wasn’t a clone. There was the small matter of this Jones looking identical to the Jones I’d seen in the personnel office at Melange Mining, up at Sinus Medii…identical enough to be his twin. That was why I wanted to confirm my suspicions with a DNA test.
But I strongly suspected that this Mr. Jones was wearing a DNA mask.
Cosmetic shaping, it was called, a form of gene-mod therapy.
Suppose you want to look like someone else. You could create a mask out of latex and bioroid synthskin, but the results might be a little less than completely convincing. Masks are never wholly lifelike—there’s that Uncanny Valley effect once again—and someone who gets too close might see through the deception. It’s better to receive a series of DNA infusions beneath the skin of the face, using nanobot transport to saturate cells inside the face with DNA from the person you want to impersonate.
You see, the shape of your face is partly the result of the exact contours of the bone beneath it, but it’s also due to the layers of fat and muscle tissue overlaying the skull. DNA won’t do much to change the shape of the skull—that’s the end result of years of bone growth—but it will cause the soft tissue to fill in and mold itself into a new face.
In effect, my Mr. Jones was as much an artistic creation as a Jinteki clone. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble and expense to find a person of about the right size—around 150 to 155 centimeters high, with a mass of around 70 kilograms—and to give him DNA cosmetic treatments to reshape his face. A century or two ago, they used plastic surgery to the same end. Cosmetic shaping did the same thing without cutting, without weeks of healing, and it was easily reversible. It took three or four weeks for the tissues to regrow into the new shape, but if you wanted your old face back, you just re-injected yourself with samples of your own DNA.
There were Wyldside kids and bangers, the party set, who used cosmetic shaping to turn themselves into werewolves, vampires, faux aliens, dinosaurs, whatever the current fad of the fast set might be, by growing fatty tissue covered by skin and fur or scales or feathers from a designer-gene lab. You could use gene-mod to grow bright purple hair, or you could go all the way to giving yourself the face of a sensies star…or the head of a wolf, like wolf-boy over there.
Or, in this case, the face of a Jones-model clone.
And I was pretty sure I was right. When I’d talked with him last week, Jones had been entirely too personable, intelligent, and direct, not retiring and clone-like at all. He’d been interested in things well outside the range of his usual duties, and clone conditioning strongly discouraged extracurricular interests.
And he’d been, I was certain, the short, bearded man who’d taken the suitcase out of the High Frontier. Amazing what you can do with a fake beard and a wig.
I’d played around with the image I’d pulled from the security camera, trying to enhance it, but the angle was just too steep. My conviction that it was John Jones was based more on probabilities than anything else. Most people nowadays used genetic modification to take care of any physical trait that made them stand out.
That didn’t apply to everyone, of course. Some folks had morphallasophobia—a fear of changing the body. Others just didn’t care for the idea.
But there were damned few short people on the streets anymore. The average height of the average citizen ran around 177 centimeters—and maybe seven to ten centimeters less for the Mestizos, the native Ecuadorian peoples. People who were bothered by their personal height, or lack of it, could get it fixed as easily as myopia at any city clinic. I knew a few people on the Force who were shorter than 165 centimeters…but there weren’t many.
And those few had to put up with more than their share of clone jokes.
So we had someone only about 155 centimeters tall checking out of the High Frontier and carrying the suitcase that had been used to smuggle in the mining laser. On camera he looked like a clone disguised as a human…but that’s truly remarkable, both because clones are heavily conditioned against such deception, and because if a clone was caught imitating a human he would be retired.
More likely by far that it was a very short full-human, one pretending to be a clone who was pretending to be a human…an elaborate double-deception with a bad wig and beard for the sake of the watching security cameras.
And there simply weren’t that many full-humans who were that short. If I was right and this John Jones next to me was human, then he was also almost certainly the human I’d seen on the High Frontier’s lobby security cameras.
I was itching to run that DNA test.
Leaning over, I tugged down Jones’s collar, looking at the left side of his neck. The requisite bar code was there, containing his serial number and digitized name. I wondered if it was a real tattoo, or simply drawn on the skin with permanent ink. There are reversible tattoos, of course…or it might even be a type of animated tat—an intermittent capable of turning invisible whenever its owner wished.
Yeah, I had a lot of questions I wanted to ask our Mr. Jones.
And there were some other questions I wanted to ask, as well, of other suspects. I called Floyd, putting up a sound suppression field to allow me to converse with reasonable privacy. Despite that, I felt as though I had a lot of people staring at me.
I also coded the call for Blue-one security, high enough to give Floyd and myself reasonable electronic privacy.
Floyd’s stolid face appeared on the folding screen. “Yes, Captain.”
“Just checking in. Everything okay up there?” I glanced at Lily, watching me from outside the SS field. “No riots?”
“No riots, Captain.”
“Good. How are the prisoners?”
“Well. Eve 5VA3TC has had the necessary repairs made to her body. And Mark Henry has repeatedly told me that he does not feel safe on the Moon, and that he wishes to be brought to Earth, as you promised.”
“Okay. But not by Beanstalk. Get a dropship and make the flight direct. Bring her damaged parts along, too. Evidence. Have Detective Flint and a couple of badges you trust help you with security.”
“Dropship transport is expensive, Captain.”
“I’ll authorize it.” Damn, Dawn was going to skin me for that one. “I don’t care about the cost right now. It’ll be safer than bringing them down-Stalk.”
“Indeed. Is there a problem?”
“Hodgkins and Coleman tried to kill me this morning at my hotel,” I told him. “My guess is that they or the people behind them are desperate now, and want to terminate everyone and everything that can tie them to murder-one.”
Floyd looked as alarmed as is possible for a bioroid, though, as usual, there was no way to read emotion in those blank, silver eyes. “Are you unharmed, Rick?”
I felt the throb in my leg. The nanobots were still doing their job, though I’d need to have something more permanent done about the leg after I reached Earth.
“Yes,” I lied. “The bad news is that they’re still at large. I tracked them down to Midway. The
y still may be there, or they may have continued on down-Stalk to Earth.”
I’d already checked passenger lists, of course, but there was no way to tell whether they’d taken passage on the final leg of the journey under new assumed names or not.
“So there is the possibility of an attempt to get at the prisoners either here or on Earth,” Floyd said. “I understand.”
“Right. I also have a missing piece of the puzzle.” I told him about my capture of John Jones.
“I am concerned, Captain,” Floyd said when I finished. “This conspiracy is widespread and extensive, with considerable resources behind it.”
“Oh, you think?”
I was speaking sarcastically, but Floyd took me literally.
“I do, sir. Four men in skyhoppers operating across hundreds of kilometers on the lunar surface represents a considerable investment in operating costs and materiel. The multiple e-ID identities alone would have cost a great deal of money to create and program. We are not looking at two individuals, here, but at a large and well-funded corporate or government entity.”
“I agree. That’s why I want you and Flint to get all three suspects on Earth, to NAPD HQ and under lock and key.” I hesitated, then added, “I believe that somewhere along the line the intersec software has been compromised.”
Intersecurity software took in an enormous area, including thousands of separate programs from dedicated management AIs to tiny subroutines operating inside individual security cameras, drones, and scanners. It was an absolute necessity for modern civic management, since it allowed dozens of separate law enforcement and security processors and programs to recognize and interact with one another.
Intersec software was particularly vital for law enforcement. It interconnected data storage and communications between the NAPD, the FBI up at the Fed level, the district constabularies within the city, as well as the security forces of large organizations, corporations, and agencies, like the SEA, Humanity Labor, and Jinteki. It linked together thousands of separate surveillance and security cameras, police drones, backscatter scanners, and e-ID readers. It allowed electronic communications between the police and the city’s myriad private security departments, from the Melange Mining Security Force down to Fred, the bouncer at Tommy’s Diner. Intersec software was what allowed me to tap into a specific seccam operated by the High Frontier’s internal security, to peek into peek-a-boo records for the SEA’s backscatter units, and to look up credaccount records at Eliza’s Toybox.
The problem was that the entire system, program upon program nested within one another like Russian dolls, was unimaginably complex, far too labyrinthine for any one human mind to comprehend.
But someone who knew what he was doing, a good hacker who understood certain key parts of the system, could penetrate the layers of external security and turn parts of the intersec software against other parts.
In this case, I suspected that someone with intermediate-level system access—someone within Humanity Labor’s security network, specifically—was working through that network to penetrate the NAPD’s system. At security level Blue-one, my conversation with Floyd was probably secure…but I couldn’t be absolutely certain even of that.
Humanity Labor had an excellent internal security force, though some of the individuals—like Frank Hodgkins—didn’t impress me as being all that bright. They could afford the best hackers, though, that money could buy. They also used the services of Globalsec, which amounted to a small, private army and which had a fairly good intelligence arm.
With assets like that, Humanity Labor could follow an NAPD cop if he had a bug planted on him, follow him anywhere there were scanners and the appropriate software—like Melange Mining. They could learn which beanpods the cop was riding on, and follow him through security checkpoints. They could find out where the security cameras were at the Challenger Planetoid, and avoid them…
In short, they could do just about anything I had done electronically, using the vast, far-flung complex of official electronic surveillance gear to track me…or my prisoners.
“Put together a security team,” I told Floyd, “just people you and Flint personally trust. I recommend four badges, with full tactical gear.” I pushed aside the immediate questions: Who would a bioroid trust? Was a bioroid even capable of trust?
No matter, I trusted both Flint and Floyd, and I trusted their judgment.
“Yes, sir.”
I thought a moment. “I’m going to recommend that you stay as far under Intersec radar as you can manage. Don’t log your prisoners on the dropship. Don’t keep them under electronic surveillance—I want either you or Flint with them at all times instead. If you must discuss them by vid or PAD, use Blue-one security or higher.”
“I already had that in mind, actually,” Floyd told me.
Damn, he was quick. I signed off and killed the silence field.
Jones groaned, his eyes fluttering. I hadn’t expected him to wake up this soon.
“It’s okay,” I told him. “You’re safe, it’s okay.” Unbuckling, I made myself stand in the G-and-a-half acceleration and walk over to the dispenser wall. A swelling in the hull cut into the otherwise smooth circle of the deck held a rest room, and on the outside the controls to get water or other non-alcoholic drinks. I got him a disposable cup of water and returned to my seat. “Here you go.”
I held the cup for him and he took several swallows of water. “Thank you,” he said. “Where…where are we?”
“On the beanpod, on our way to Earth.”
Again, his eyes flew wide open. “¡Diablo!”
Another confirmation. I’d never heard a clone swear, and never heard one use Spanish. But what worried me more was his agitation. This was more than fear of arrest.
“What’s the problem, Jones?” I asked. “Why don’t you want to go to Earth?”
For answer, he struggled wildly against the straps and the zip-strip. “We’ve got to go back!” he yelled. “We’ve got to go back!”
“Why? Tell me.”
“We’re all gonna die!”
The other passengers were whispering among themselves, and some were looking panicky. This I did not need—a beanpod full of panicked civilians.
And an instant later I realized why he must be so frightened. “What is it? Did your friends plant a bomb on-board?”
“A bomb!” a man cried, fumbling with his seatbelt.
“Everyone sit down and be quiet!” I ordered. I turned back to Jones. “How about it? What do you know?”
He turned glazed eyes on me, the fight suddenly gone. “What time is it?”
I glanced at my wrist. “Ten after.”
But before he could reply, a savage, ringing bang sounded through the beanpod, and acceleration ceased.
The lights went out, along with the external display, then both flickered back on.
It took a moment to realize that Earth was no longer directly above us, but drifting slowly past one side.
We’d just been blown clear of the Beanstalk, and were now in free fall, hurtling toward the Earth.
Chapter Nineteen
Day 9
Pandemonium broke out on the beanpod deck, people screaming, people clawing at their seatbelts, people crying or swearing or shouting or all three. Lily seemed calm enough—the cool, collected reporter—but everyone else had just voted to stage a small riot.
“Everyone…be still!” I bellowed in my best parade ground voice.
The shout startled the others into silence.
“All right,” I continued. “We can get through this if we keep our heads. Everyone stay in your seats. That means you!” I added, pointing at wolf-boy, who was still trying to unfasten his belt.
“We need to get to the lifeboats!” he cried.
“No, we don’t,” I said. “Beanpods don’t have lifeboats. Beanpods are lifeboats in an emergency, however. So stay seated and stay quiet, and we’ll all be just fine. Understand me?”
I got several shaky
nods from around the compartment, which wasn’t too bad, considering. There weren’t any pressure loss alarms going off and I couldn’t hear any telltale hissing, so our hull integrity was okay. We had lights and an external display, so our temperature control would be good. We might even be high enough that they could send a work pod out to snag us before we hit atmosphere.
“Nothing to worry about!” one of the businessmen said with a self-important sneer. “We’re in orbit, right? We’re falling around the Earth! We’re perfectly safe until they come out and get us!”
I didn’t reply because now was definitely not the time for a discussion on physics, but the fact was that the guy was dead wrong. We’d been in orbit up in Midway, yes, but not any more. At any point below the Midway station we simply wouldn’t have the lateral velocity to maintain orbit. We would have some speed sideways due to Coriolis force, and we would also have some fraction of orbital speed left over from Midway—orbital speed for geosynch was 3.07 kilometers per second…but we actually would have bled a lot of that off already, coming down the rail…
How much? What was our lateral vector right now, away from the Beanstalk? As the beanpod descended, it actually tugged the entire Beanstalk slightly to the east; when it went up-Stalk, it tugged to the west. The overall effect was pretty small, but it would have bled off a lot of our eastward momentum.
I didn’t know the friction coefficient of a beanpod’s railguides, so I couldn’t come up with a good figure. But let’s say two kilometers per second above and beyond the elevator’s speed as it swung, with the Earth’s rotation, from west to east.
Which all meant: step outside the door, and it was one hell of a long drop almost straight down, with a 2 kps drift to the east. From this altitude, that meant an impact roughly 120 kilometers east of Cayambe.
They still tell the story of a construction worker on the Beanstalk, back in the early days. He neglected to attach a safety tether, lost his grip, and dug a crater somewhere out in the Orellana District.
Android: Free Fall Page 26