by Ian Whates
The soldier fell backwards, causing the ring of bystanders to shuffle out the way amidst murmurs of alarm.
"Now back off!" he yelled at the only soldier who remained on his feet, though that one, a wide-eyed lad who looked shocked at how swiftly the eyegee had taken out his colleagues, didn't seem too eager to press the attack. "For the last time, I'm ULAW."
Leyton then turned back to where Julia had been standing, suddenly concerned that she might have taken the opportunity to flee.
She hadn't. Instead she stood close to where he'd last seen her, still smiling at him. In her hand she held his gun, pointed directly at him.
"Nice weapon," she said. "Think I'll hang onto it. Goodbye, Mr Leyton. It's been fun."
Memories of a tiny cabin aboard a spaceship leapt to the fore. The gun had betrayed him once, would it do so again? Surely not; on that occasion the weapon had been motivated by what it perceived as the greater good of ULAW, hadn't it? Even so, he held his breath as the woman pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened. Leyton breathed again. He had intended to try and take her alive, but, all of a sudden, after having to fight off his own side's soldiers for her sake, he didn't care.
"Gun," he said, "energy feedback."
There was no sound, no visible sizzle of energy or wisp of smoke rising from where her hand gripped the handle. She simply trembled a little; her eyes widened and her lips compressed to a thin line, before she collapsed, her body as limp as a rag doll.
Leyton strolled over to reclaim the gun. Nobody moved to stop him, not even the recovering soldiers. The fight had evidently gone out of them.
Cirese was quite dead. Leyton stared down at her beautiful face - and it was beautiful, even in death, no question about that - and knew that Benson would be less than impressed that he hadn't taken her alive, but right then he didn't care. Let others worry about who had sent her and why. He took the gun and holstered it, at which point a squad of black garbed station security officers chose to put in an appearance. Better late than never.
The eyegee's pocket comm buzzed. It was Benson.
"Leyton, I got your message." The one he'd left as he started the pursuit. "So what's so urgent?"
Leyton took a deep breath. He had a feeling he was about to ruin his boss's day.
"Philip?"
"Mal? What are you doing here?"
"Does it matter? I just wish I could have been here sooner, but I've only recently made it as far as New Paris."
"Why are you here at all?"
"For goodness sake, Philip, you'll never simply accept anything, will you? All right, in brief, I was aboard The Noise Within - hitched a ride on your comp and got trapped on the ship. I worked my way free when she was damaged in the battle with ULAW and then took refuge in the equipment of some ULAW specialists who came aboard to examine her, and here I am. But, honestly, none of that matters right now. There isn't much time. No easy way to say this, son; you're dying."
"What?"
"That reporter, Julia Cirese, she poisoned you; the kiss..."
"Julia? No, that can't be right." Yet he remembered the last harrowing seconds in the restaurant immediately following that wonderful kiss.
Julia? Really?
The conversation with Mal seemed oddly disassociated. Emotions were there but they were pale, insipid reflections of what they should have been. Part of him wanted to believe this was a dream, while another part knew that it wasn't.
"Trust me, it is. You're only alive now by the grace of ULAW. They've kept you with us for this long courtesy of the mass of equipment and expertise they've hauled across to New Paris in order to study the Byrzaens, but it's a losing battle. The poison is a nano construct, with some of the characteristics of a smart virus. It's attacking your nervous system and mutating faster than the doctors can counter it. Sorry, son, but you don't have long."
"This can't be happening. It's too early - there are things I want to do..."
"I know, I know. ULAW don't want to lose you either, which is why I'm here. You've been brought to a point where you're just below the threshold of consciousness, and I've been allowed into the systems monitoring your brain activity to talk to you. They want to save you, Philip, as much as they can."
"Save...?" A horrible suspicion began to form. "You mean as a download, like you." A so-called transhuman.
"Yes. Now I know how you feel about this but don't just dismiss the idea without thinking it through."
The terrible, guilty truth was that he hadn't dismissed it. He was too young - there was still so much he wanted from life, so much that remained undone. It was all right for Mal, he had lived to a ripe old age and achieved all that any man could wish to, but Philip was still only partway there. Death couldn't claim him now!
"It's not fair," he said.
"I know, son, but it's happening, fair or not. We have to act quickly to save you. Thank goodness you brought a version of Phil along with you. The ULAW specialists have him as a framework and can build from there. With the facilities they've got on hand they'll be able to capture just about everything the poison hasn't already taken. You'll be at least as complete as I am, probably more so."
Yet this was everything he'd opposed so vehemently, the very reason he'd refused to let Mal into his life, refused to acknowledge him as his father.
"But I'll just be a copy."
"You won't know the difference, I promise you. Not where it counts."
The very idea was abhorrent, or at least it had been. Yet now all Philip could recall was the memory of that abhorrence, not the emotion itself. He felt like a hypocrite for thinking this way, but with his own life on the line things suddenly took on a different perspective. Even so, he still felt as if he were betraying himself, not to mention his father, as he said, "All right, then."
"Good boy! The doctors are going to bring you up to full consciousness, only for a few seconds. They need your permission, so you'll have to tell them that you agree to the procedure."
It was all so hurried. By rights he should be taking time to think this through properly, not be rushed into such a momentous decision. But if what Mal said was true that time simply didn't exist.
Philip felt trapped. By fate; by circumstance... by something. Despite this, he said after only brief hesitation, "I'm ready," which was far from true. How could anyone ever be ready for something like this?
The idea made perfect sense, he kept telling himself. This way he would live on after a fashion, and neither his knowledge nor his expertise would be completely lost to either ULAW or Kaufman Industries. Given a choice between that and dying, it was a no-brainer. Surely anyone would do the same. So why did Philip feel that he had just sold his soul to the devil?
CHAPTER TWENTY
It was 'night' on New Paris, in a day-night cycle designed to reflect Earth standard. The killer waited in the shadows. As his target stepped out of the door he moved forward, coming upon him from behind, taking the man by surprise and pinning one arm so that it was bent behind his back and pressed between them. He held the sonic knife close to the man's ear, so he could hear the faint sibilant hum of its blade.
"What the hell?"
"All right, Beck, who are you working for?"
"That's not a secret. I'd have told you without the knife. ULAW!"
"In as far as that goes, maybe, but who are you working for beyond that?"
"Leyton, is that you?"
"Right first time. Knowing who I am, you know what I'm capable of. So start talking."
"Look, I don't know what you're on about. Put the blade down, let's be adult about this."
"Holt, that's what I'm talking about. I know you tried to sabotage the mission, warned them we were coming."
"What? That's crazy. Why would you think that?"
Leyton moved the blade a fraction closer. "Don't lie to me, Beck, I'm trained to spot such things, remember?"
"I'm not lying, you have to... Ah!"
The involuntary yelp of pain came as Leyto
n touched the blade to his ear, slicing into skin and cartilage, drawing blood.
"Last chance. The next cut takes your ear off."
"All right, you sick bastard. Lose the sodding blade and I'll tell you. Can't think straight with that thing humming in my ear."
Leyton complied, but had no intention of moving it far. Yet as he lifted the blade away, Beck seized his chance, elbowing the eyegee with his free arm, ducking away from the knife and twisting around, trying to break Leyton's grip on his arm. The move was quick and expertly performed. He nearly got away with it, but not quite. Leyton still held his wrist and as Beck tried to contort his body to negate his grip, the eyegee lifted and twisted. There was a sickening crack and Beck screamed.
Leyton did let go then, allowing the man to slump to the ground, where he sat, groaning and nursing his broken arm.
"You stupid fucker, you're going to pay for this!"
Leyton squatted down, blade held casually before him, and said, very calmly, "Now, let's start again. Who are you really working for?"
"You have no idea what you're dealing with." Ah, that sounded like progress. "These people don't play around. You think you're tough? Trust me, you don't know the meaning of the word. Do yourself a favour and walk away now. We'll forget all about this. Say I hurt myself in a fall or something." Of course he would. Leyton could just imagine Beck forgetting about the man who threatened him with a knife and then broke his arm.
"Here's how this is going to play out," the eyegee said calmly. "Either you tell me what I need to know, in which case I'll happily walk away right now, or you keep issuing ominous threats, in which case I start slicing bits of you off with ol' sonic here, until you do start talking. Your choice."
"Look, I can't give you what you want because I don't know! I've never met them, never seen their faces. They're a powerful faction within the upper echelons of ULAW, powerful enough to get me assigned to ride shotgun on Benson for this Byrzaen situation. When they say jump, I jump. That's all I know."
Unfortunately, Leyton had a feeling the man was telling the truth, but there had to be more details he could share - the little, seemingly inconsequential things which might yet provide a clue.
"If they're within ULAW, why warn Holt we were coming?"
"I've no idea. I didn't ask, and if you've any sense nor will you."
Beck's second attempt to take Leyton by surprise didn't, though it did force him to act decisively. Beck's good hand pulled swiftly away from the sleeve of his injured one holding something - a gun. Leyton reacted even as the move began, striking out back-handed with the knife, slicing off the hand holding the gun at the wrist, and continuing on to plunge into Beck's chest, piercing his heart.
With a grunt of apparent surprise, Beck fell backwards from his sitting position; dead before he hit the floor.
Leyton shook his head. He really was going to have to get a grip on this temper of his. First Julia, now Beck - two leads today which were well and truly dead, as far as any future investigation went. He walked away, brooding on what Beck had said. A conspiracy within ULAW? It sounded absurd, but perhaps not. The War had caused many political parties and interests to band together, and there had been signs on the odd occasion since that ULAW was not the unified body it tried to portray. He was going to have to tread very carefully if he pursued this any further.
As he walked, he dropped the sonic knife into a bag, already planning an acid bath for the weapon. He very much doubted it could be traced to Julia Cirese, let alone him, but no point in taking any chances. He then peeled away the transparent film of 'no print' gloves from each hand and added them.
As an afterthought, he took out a piece of folded paper from his pocket and put it into the bag after the gloves. The note bore a single hand-scrawled word: 'Beck'.
While still a boy, Philip had been taken to an exhibition, one designed to trace the history of technology. Intended to be educational, this had been a physical display requiring a visit rather than a virtual one enjoyed from an armchair, and it provided a distinctly 'hands-on' experience of many antique but still ingenious machines. Philip loved every minute of it.
One of the exhibits, presumably relating to printing, had featured a vintage glossy magazine open at a page containing a photograph of an exquisitely beautiful model or celebrity of the time. To the pre-adolescent Philip, this woman was an object of instant adoration. He thought her face the most perfect, the most bewitching he had ever seen and subsequently put considerable effort into tracking down a copy of the image, which he kept for many years afterwards.
As a slightly older youth, he could still recognise in the image the beauty his younger self had drooled over, but could also see that the perceived perfection was due to artifice as much as nature; the picture had been skilfully tampered with to remove all blemishes and imperfections, to present an idealised version of the woman in question. As such, the older Philip felt betrayed and now saw this as an image artificially enhanced to be something more than reality, which at the same time made it less.
The park where he met Mal/Malcolm struck him in much the same way. The sky was clear blue, the bushes were bristling with blossom and the grass was greener than any grass had a right to be, while the bench he sat on was the epitome of what every park bench ought to aspire to; yet none of this had any substance in the physical world, the one he had always accepted as 'reality'. Better than the real thing in some ways but at the same time a great deal less.
Mal/Malcolm appeared suddenly. One moment Philip was alone, the next he turned around to find the old man sitting on the bench beside him.
As a conversation opener, Mal/Malcolm raised a subject which Philip/Phil had been pondering since he awoke to this new existence. His greatest surprise was the realisation that he felt no different. Which was a ridiculous way of expressing it; with no physical body and every familiar sense either gone or altered beyond recognition, of course he felt different. He could absorb input from a hundred varied locations simultaneously and process it at speeds far beyond the human, and he could flit from point to point in the blink of an eye... But these were all peripheral concerns, things that had always been conducted at the fringes of 'him', relating to his interaction with the world rather than who he actually was; and at his core, at that central essence which dictated his sense of 'self', he felt no different at all.
Logically, he knew full well that not everything had been saved, that he was an incomplete representation of the man who had been Philip Kaufman, and had spent considerable effort trying to identify what was missing, searching his memory and making comparisons, but he failed.
One resolution he did make now related to how he perceived himself: Philip. He refused to think of himself as merely 'Phil'. At the same time, he realised this meant acknowledging that it really was his father, Malcolm, sitting beside him.
"Is this what you expected?" Malcolm asked.
"No," he admitted.
"Far be it for me to gloat, but..."
"If the rest of that sentence contains any of the words 'told', 'you', and 'so', I don't want to hear it."
"Fair enough."
This was unlike the process of conversation as Philip knew it, being more akin to the never-realised dream of telepathy: mind to mind communication in its purest form. There was no hearing of sounds followed by the processing of meaning, but rather near-instant assimilation of what Malcolm wanted to convey; a lightning-quick transfer of data. Yet this was all new to him and his mind still insisted on interpreting things in physical human terms, so he perceived such interchanges as conversations, albeit incredibly fast ones.
"One thing still bothers me," he told his father.
"What?"
Doubtless Malcolm expected him to ask something about this new state of being, but instead Philip said, "The assassin, Julia Cirese, why was she still after me? Presumably she must have known by now that the Death Wish had been lifted."
"Not necessarily; depends on how often she checks in at th
e place. Even if she did know, maybe professional pride insisted she saw the job through once she'd taken it on, or..."
"Or what?"
"Maybe she simply didn't like you."
"Thank you so much." Even humour came through as clearly as before. An inflection of thought rather than voice perhaps, but equally as effective.
"Look, Philip, let it go. Whatever her motives might have been, she's dead and she's carried them with her to the grave. Accept the fact and move on. That's all part of the life you've left behind, and you need to stop looking back and start concentrating on what lies ahead of you." This was the Malcolm Philip remembered - the pragmatic, eminently sensible man who never entertained any doubts, who always knew the right thing to do and was never shy of imparting that knowledge. "There's going to be plenty here to occupy your thoughts, trust me."
The annoying thing was that Philip knew Malcolm was right.
Yet he also knew his father too well and realised that he was hiding something. "There's more, isn't there?" he said.
"Perhaps."
"Go on."
"They're not telling us everything."
"In what way?"
"Not entirely sure, but when I was in contact with the mind operating The Noise Within I received a great deal of data, more than I could assimilate straight away and, I'm sure, more than the ship's brain intended me to see. While I was isolated, I had a lot of time to study that data. I still don't understand all of it, but I'm sure that what I saw was more complex than simply an AI/organic mind interface. Something else was happening."
"Alien mind," Phil said, "not surprising if it wasn't entirely what you were expecting."
"No, it wasn't that, I'm certain. And there was something else. The official line is that The Noise Within's mind was unhinged due to the instabilities still present in the human-built AI element; instabilities which caused a sort of resonance loop between the two component intelligences, right?"