Black Man / Thirteen

by Richard K. Morgan

  “Yes,” said Norton sourly. “As opposed to being a dangerous sociopath who hasn’t actually done any work for us at all yet.”

  “Tom—”

  Marsalis grinned. It was like a muscle flexing. “Well, I did save your partner’s life for you. Does that count?”

  “As far as I can see you saved your own skin, with some collateral benefits. Sevgi, if this Williamson is going to raise a stink about our friend here, we need to get you both out of here.”

  “Now, there’s an idea.”

  Marsalis’s voice was amiable, but something at the bottom of it made Sevgi look at him. She recalled the way he’d stared after the escaped assassin, the flat sound his voice made then as he told her Right after the meat van gets here, I think you’d better take me in to COLIN so we can start work. There was a finality to the way he’d said it that was like the silence following a single gunshot. And now, suddenly, she was afraid for Tom Norton and his dismissive flippancy.

  “Sounds good to me, too,” she said hurriedly. “Tom, can we wire up the n-djinn from Horkan’s Pride at COLIN? Run a direct interface?”

  Norton looked at her curiously, let his gaze slip to the black man at her shoulder and then back again. He shrugged. “Yeah, I suppose we could. But what the hell for? MIT already handed down the transcripts.” He addressed himself directly to Marsalis. “They’re on file at the office. You can go over them if you want.”

  “But I don’t want.” Marsalis was smiling gently. A small chill blew down Sevgi’s spine at the sight. “What I want, Tom, is to talk to the Horkan’s Pride n-djinn.”

  Norton stiffened. “So now suddenly you’re an expert on the psychology of artificial intelligence?”

  “No, I’m an expert on the hunting and killing of variant thirteens. Which is why you hired me. Remember?”

  “Yeah, and don’t you think that precious expertise might be—”

  “Tom!”

  “—better deployed going over the scenes of the crimes we’re trying to bring an end to?”

  Still the black man smiled. Still he stood relaxed, at a distance that Sevgi abruptly realized was just outside Norton’s easy reach.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Tom, that’s enough. What the fuck is wrong with you this mor—”

  “What’s wrong with me Sev, is that—”

  Two-tone rasp—a throat being ostentatiously cleared. They both stopped, switched their gazes back to Marsalis.

  “You don’t understand,” he said quietly.

  They were silent. The call for attention hung off the end of his words like a spoken command.

  “You don’t understand what you’re up against.” The smile came back, fleeting, as if driven by memory. “You think because Merrin’s killed a couple of dozen people, he’s some kind of serial killer writ large? That’s not what this is about. Serial killers are damaged humans. You know this, Sevgi, even if Tom here doesn’t. They leave a trail, they leave clues, they get caught. And that’s because in the end, consciously or subconsciously, they want to be caught. Calculated murder is an antisocial act, it’s hard for humans to do, and it takes special circumstances at either a personal or a social level to enable the capacity. But that’s you people. It’s not me, and it’s not Merrin, and it’s not any variant thirteen. We’re not like you. We’re the witches. We’re the violent exiles, the lone-wolf nomads that you bred out of the race back when growing crops and living in one place got so popular. We don’t have, we don’t need a social context. You have to understand this: there is nothing wrong with Merrin. He’s not damaged. He’s not killing these people as an expression of some childhood psychosis, he’s not doing it because he’s identified them as some dehumanized, segregated extratribal group. He’s just carrying out a plan of action, and he is comfortable with it. And he won’t get caught doing it—unless you can put me next to him.”

  Norton shook his head. “You say Merrin’s not damaged? You weren’t there when they cracked the hull on Horkan’s Pride. You didn’t see the mess he left.”

  “I know he fed off the passengers.”

  “No. He didn’t just feed off them, Marsalis. He ripped them apart, gouged out their eyes and scattered the fucking pieces from one end of the crew section to the other. That’s what he did.” Norton took a steadying breath. “You want to call that a plan of action, go right ahead. To me, it sounds like good old-fashioned insanity.”

  It was a fractional pause, but Sevgi saw how the news stopped Marsalis dead.

  “Well, you’ll need to show me footage of that,” he said finally. “But my guess is there was a reason for whatever he did.”

  Norton grinned mirthlessly. “Sure there was a reason. Seven months alone in deep space, and a diet of human flesh. I’d be feeling pretty edgy myself under the circumstances.”

  “It’s not enough.”

  “So you say. Ever consider you might be wrong about this? Maybe Merrin did crack. Maybe variant thirteen just isn’t as beyond human as everybody thinks.”

  That got a sour smile out of Marsalis. “Thanks for the solidarity, Tom. It’s a nice thought, but I’m in no hurry to be assimilated. Variant thirteen is not human the way you are, and this guy Merrin isn’t going to be an exception. You judge what he does by normal human yardsticks, you’ll be making a big mistake. Meanwhile, you hired me to echo-profile the guy, so how about we get on and do that, starting with the last living thing to see him alive. You going to let me talk to the Horkan’s Pride n-djinn, or not?”

  CHAPTER 20

  The night sky lay at his feet.

  Not a night sky you could see from Earth or Mars, or anywhere else this far out on a galactic arm. Instead the black floor was densely splattered with incandescence. Stars crowded one another’s brilliance or studded the multicolored marble veins of nebulae. It might have been an accurately generated view from some hypothetical world at the core of the Milky Way; it might just have been a thousand different local night skies, overlaid one on top of the other and amped up to blazing. He took a couple of steps and stars crunched into white powder underfoot, smeared across the inky black. Over his head, the sky was a claustrophobic steel gray, daubed with ugly blob riveting in wide spiral runs.

  Fucking ghosts in the machine.

  No one knew why the shipboard djinns ran their virtual environments like this. Queries on the subject from human interface engineers met with vague responses that made no linguistic sense. Flown from it-will, cannot the heavy, there-at, through-at, slopeless and ripe was one of the famous ones. Carl had known an IF engineer on Mars who had it typed out and pasted above his bunk as a koan. The accompanying mathematics apparently made even less sense, though the guy insisted they had a certain insane elegance, whatever that was supposed to mean. He was planning a book, a collection of n-djinn haiku printed very small on expensive paper, with illustrations of the virtual formats on the facing pages.

  It was Carl’s opinion, admittedly not founded on any actual evidence, that the n-djinns were making elaborate jokes at humanity’s dull-witted expense. He supposed that the book, if it ever saw print, could be seen as a punch line delivered.

  In his darker moments, he wondered what might come after that. The joke over, the gloves off.

  “Marsalis.”

  The voice came first, then the ’face, almost as if the n-djinn had forgotten it should manifest a focus the human could address. Like someone asking for a contact number, and then groping about for a pen to write it down. The ’face shaded in. A blued, confetti-shredded androgynous body that stood as if being continually blown away in a wind tunnel. Long ragged hair, streaming back. Flesh like a million tiny fluttering wings, stirring on the bone. It was impossible to make out male or female features. Under the voice, there was a tiny rustling, crackling sound, like paper burning up.

  It was a little like talking to an angel. Carl grimaced.

  “That’s me. Been looking me up?”

  “You feature in the flow.” The ’face lifted one a
rm, and a curtain of images cascaded from it to the star-strewn floor. He spotted induction photos from Osprey, media footage following the Felipe Souza rescue, other stuff that lit odd corners of memory in him and made them newly familiar. Somewhere in among it all he thought he saw Marisol’s face, but it was hard to tell. A defensive twinge went through him.

  “Didn’t know they were letting you hook up so soon.”

  It was a lie. Ertekin had shown him the release documentation from MIT—he knew to the hour when the n-djinn had been recalibrated and allowed back into the flow.

  “It is potentially damaging for my systems to run without access to plentiful data,” the blue figure said gravely. “Re-enabling a nanolevel artificial consciousness engine necessitates reconnection to local dataflows.”

  Unhumanly, the djinn had left the upheld arm where it was, and the downpour of images ran on.

  Carl gestured toward the display. “Right. So what does the local dataflow have to say about me lately?”

  “Many things. UNGLA currently defines you as a genetic licensing agent. The Miami Herald calls you a murderer. The Reverend Jessie Marshall of the Church of Human Purity calls you an abomination, but this is a generalized reference. News feeds abstracted from the Mars dataflow and currently held locally refer to you as this year’s luckiest man on Mars, though the year in question is of course 2099. The Frankfurter Allgemeine called y—”

  “Yeah, fine. You can stop there.” Shipboard n-djinns were famously literal-minded. It was in the nature of the job they did. Minimal requirement for interface. Humans were deep-frozen freight. The djinns sat alone, sunk in black silence laced with star static, talking occasionally with other machines on Mars and Earth when docking or other logistics required it. “I came to ask you a couple of questions.”

  The ’face waited.

  “Do you recall Allen Merrin?”

  “Yes.” Merrin’s gaunt, Christ-like features evolved in the air at the ’face’s shoulder. Standard ID likeness. “Occupant of crew section beta capsule, redesignated for human freight under COLIN interplanetary traffic directive c93-ep4652-21. Cryo-certified Bradbury November 5, 2106, protocol code 55528187.”

  “Yeah, except he didn’t really occupy the beta capsule much, did he?”

  “No. The system revived him at four hundred fourteen hours of trajectory time.”

  “You’ve told the debriefing crew that you shut down voluntarily at three hundred seventy-eight hours, on suspicion of corruptive material in a navigational module.”

  “Yes. I was concerned to prevent a possible viral agent from passing into the secondary navigational core. Quarantine measures were appropriate.”

  “And Merrin wakes up thirty-six hours later. Is that a coincidence?”

  The blue shredded figure hesitated, face expressionless, eyes fixed on him. Carl guessed it was trying to calibrate his perceptions of relatedness and event, gleaning it from a million tiny shreds of evidence laid down in the details the dataflow held about him. Was he superstitious, was he religious? What feelings did he have about the role of chance in human affairs? The n-djinn was running his specifications, the way a machine would check the interface topography on a new piece of software.

  It took about twenty seconds.

  “There is no systems evidence to indicate a relation between the two events. The revival appears to have been a capsule malfunction.”

  “Were you aware of Merrin once he was awake?”

  “To a limited extent, yes. As I said, it is potentially damaging for my systems to run without access to plentiful data. In a quarantine lockdown, the ship’s secondary systems continue to feed into my cores, though it is impossible for me to actively respond to them in any way. The traffic is one-way; an interrupt protocol prevents feedback. You might consider this similar to the data processed by a human mind during REM sleep.”

  “So you dreamed Merrin.”

  “That is one way of describing it, yes.”

  “And in these dreams, did Merrin talk?”

  The confetti-streaming figure shifted slightly in the grip of its invisible gale. There was an expression on its face that might have been curiosity. Might equally well have been mild pain, or restrained sexual ecstasy. It hadn’t really gotten the hang of human features.

  “Talk to whom?”

  Carl shrugged, but it felt anything but casual. He was too freighted with the cold memories. “To the machines. To the people in the cryocaps. Did he talk to himself? To the stars, maybe? He was out there a long time.”

  “If you consider this talking, then yes. He talked.”

  “Often?”

  “I am not calibrated to judge what would be considered often in human terms. Merrin was silent for eighty-seven point twenty-two percent of the trajectory, including time spent in sleep. Forty-three point nine percent of his speech was apparently directed—”

  “All right, never mind. Are you equipped for Yaroshanko intuitive function?”

  “Yaroshanko’s underlying constants are present in my operating systems, yes.”

  “Good, then I’d like to run a Tjaden/Wasson honorific for links between myself and Merrin, making inference along a Yaroshanko curve. No more than two degrees of separation.”

  “What referents do you wish employed for the curve?”

  “Initially, both our footprints in the total dataflow. Or as much of it as they’re letting you have access to. You’re going to get a lot of standard Bacon links, they’re not what I’m after.” Carl wished suddenly that Matthew were here to handle this for him, to reach quicksilver-swift and cool down the wires and engage the machine at something like its own levels of consciousness. Matthew would have been at ease in here—Carl felt clumsy by contrast. The terminology of complexity math tasted awkward on his tongue. “Cross-reference to everything Merrin said or did while he was aboard Horkan’s Pride. Bring me anything that shows up there.”

  The blue shredded figure shifted slightly, rippling in the gale that Carl could not feel.

  “This will take time,” it said.

  Carl looked around at the unending sky-floored desolation of the construct. He shrugged.

  “Better get me a chair then.”

  He could, he supposed, have left the virtuality and killed the time somehow in the vaulted neo-Nordic halls of COLIN’s Jefferson Park complex. He could have talked to Sevgi Ertekin some more, maybe even tried to massage Tom Norton back into a more compliant attitude with some male-on-male platitudes. He could have eaten something—his stomach was a blotched ache from lack of anything but coffee since Florida the previous night; he ignored it with trained stoicism—or just gone for a walk among the jutting riverside terraces of the complex. He had the run of the place, Sevgi said.

  Instead he sat under the rivet-scarred metal sky and watched Merrin walk through the n-djinn’s dreams.

  The ’face had left him to his chair—a colliding geometry of comet trail lines and nebula gas upholstery, spun up out of the night sky as if flung at him—and disappeared into the dwindling perspectives of the wind that blew continually through its body. Something else blew back in its place—at first a tiny rectangular panel like an antique holographic postage stamp Carl had once seen in a London museum, fluttering stiff-cornered and growing in size as it approached until it slammed to a silent halt, three meters tall, two broad, and angled slightly backward at the base a handful of paces in front of where he sat. It was a cascade of images like the curtain where he’d seen his own face fall from the djinn’s upheld arm. Silent and discoherent with the n-djinn’s unhuman associative processes.

  He saw Merrin wake from the beta capsule in the crew section, groggy from the revival but already moving with a recognizable focused economy. Saw him pacing the dorsal corridor of Horkan’s Pride, face unreadable.

  Saw him clean Helena Larsen’s meat from between his teeth with a micro-gauge manual screwdriver from the maintenance lockers.

  Saw him request a lateral vision port unshuttered, the ship
s’ interior lighting killed. Saw him brace his arms on either side of the glass and stare out like a sick man into a mirror.

  Saw him scream, jaw yawning wide, but silent, silent.

  Saw him cut the throat of a limbless body as it revived, splayed palm held to block the arterial spray. Saw him gouge out the eyes, carefully, thoughtfully, one at a time, and smear them off his fingers against the matte-textured metal of a bulkhead.

  Saw him talking to someone who wasn’t there.

  Saw him turn, once, in the corridor and look up at the camera, as if he knew Carl was watching him. He smiled, then, and Carl felt how it chilled him as his own facial muscles responded.

  There was more, a lot more, even in the scant time it took the n-djinn to run the Tjaden/Wasson. The images juddered and flashed and were eaten over by other screen effects. He wasn’t sure why the machine was showing it to him or what criteria it was using to select. It was the same sensation he knew from his time aboard Felipe Souza, the irritable feeling of trying to second-guess a capricious god he’d been assured—no really, it’s true, it’s in the programming—was watching over him. The feeling of sense just out of reach.

  Maybe the djinn read something in him he wasn’t aware of letting show, a need he didn’t know he had. Maybe it thought this was what he wanted.

  Maybe it was what he wanted. He wasn’t sure.

  He wasn’t sure why he stayed there watching. But he was glad when it was over.

  The floating blue shredded figure returned.

  “There is this,” it told him, and raised one restless, rippling arm like a wing. On the screen beneath, Merrin walked behind the automated gurney as it took Helena Larsen on her short journey from the cryocap chamber to the autosurgeon. The second trip for her—just below the line of her leotard, her right thigh already ended in a neatly bandaged stump. She was mumbling to herself in postrevival semi-wakefulness, barely audible, but the n-djinn compensated and dragged in the sound.