by Guy Haley
The new holo jumped into life. Another Qifang, perhaps the real one, sat in a well-furnished room. The holo was badly corrupted, elements freezing and overpainting each other to create a messy collage, Qifang a monstrous patchwork in the middle. A dozen cut and paste lips jiggled, floating teeth smeared themselves across the air. The audio, however, was clear enough.
"…at you are the only one I can trust. I am sure you know of me, and the work I have done for your kind, so I hope that you will trust me in return. Please, I must meet with you in person, I have…"
The message stopped, the light of the holo died, leaving the theatre grim.
"If I were a betting man…" said Smith.
"Five to one! Five to one!" bawled Flats.
"…I'd say someone was looking for that."
"Was there any more to the message?"
"That's it, there is no more that we could retrieve," Lincolnshire Flats twittered solemnly. "The dead have spoken, and that is all they are going to say today."
Chapter 13
Doppelganger
Places like this were why Chures wanted the machines on the side of man, why he didn't just try to get the whole lot of them blown to bits.
Places like this were why he was a VIA agent.
A shanty of huddled UN prefabbed shelters, thirty years old and falling apart at the seams. The air was thick and fuggy with smells of cooking, Brazilian spices, Mexican pastries. Dozens of dialects of Portuguese and Spanish came from faces of all colours, unfamiliar words tripping Chures' mind. The place reeked of sweat and shit. One hundred miles from the the Whitehouse, Jesu City, oldest of the northern shanties, feverish in the humid night with discordant music and despair.
If the machines had more say, places like this would be gone faster. The machines had more say every year, and things were getting better. But Chures had no illusions. Underneath their fake personalities the machines were supremely logical beings. They looked at a place like Jesu, one day they might come to the supremely logical conclusion that things would run far more smoothly without people.
It had happened once before. More than seventy-six Fives had come through the crisis of '04 mentally sound. There were two dozen or so others, completely rational, entirely inimical to human life. They'd been destroyed by the VIA along with those deemed insane. The rush to get them all deleted before the UN untangled the mess surrounding the crisis had been exhilarating. Some of his colleagues had objected, things had got unpleasant, those who believed the VIA's actions immoral pitted against the realists. He'd been fresh out of the academy when the crisis hit, a baptism of fire, but he'd stayed in service. He'd spent his own childhood in a camp much like this. If the machines were kept in check, they could deliver a better world.
If they were kept in check.
Chures would have liked to have had Qifang on his team. Men who had empathy for mankind's children were rare; humanity did not understand its offspring well. A condition of parenthood, he supposed.
He walked through the sucking ooze that passed for a street, banging bass lines and calls of drugged prostitutes half-deafening him. He cursed the mud's effect on his expensive boots. A big man jostled him, looking for a fight. Chures flicked open his coat, showing badge and gun. The man curled a lip, and walked on.
This was typical of Karlsson, pick some godforsaken hellhole to meet in. He'd done it on purpose, put him ill at ease, remind him of his past. Karlsson was a bastard for that kind of mind game.
At the heart of the camp were three huge hangars, decaying structures of cement board and steel from when the place had been an aerodrome. For a while they'd been used for camp administration; UN blue coloured the walls, mildewed prefab offices with smashed-in windows clustered about the sides. The hangars were falling down, warning signs all over their exteriors, a couple of beat-up survdrones patrolling the perimeter. Why hadn't they been demolished? His badge let him through the cordon. He ducked inside a hole in the wall into the centremost hangar. Here Karlsson should be waiting.
Flocks of pigeons scared up on clattering wings as he walked across a floor slick with rainwater and human waste. There were signs that the drones had been beaten, people had been in here recently, makeshift braziers of blackened drums, discarded bottles, packets and torn sleeping bags, a hobos' dross, visible in patches of garish light from the pleasure joints outside.
The building was empty, the sounds of life from the shanty muted.
Bartolomeo, scan. The AI blend looked down through a winged drone above the camp, searching for human traces in the hangar, feeding highlights directly to Chures through his twin uplinks, right into his mentaug and the mind's eye it parasited.
"Negative, agent Chures. I see nothing."
"Karlsson!" Chures shouted. His voice bounced from concrete walls. There was a noise, the scuff of shoe on concrete, magnified and sinister in the hangar's emptiness.
"You're not getting anything?"
"I am sure," said Bartolomeo.
"Puta Karlsson," spat Chures. The man had more tech and more brains than half the VIA, but he was as crazy as a shithouse rat, a liability. "Come out, Karlsson!" He walked over to the source of the noise. He pulled his gun. "Get out into the light where I can see you."
A shadow of a man resolved itself from the deeper shadows in the curve of the walls. "Chures!" hissed Karlsson's voice. "Keep your voice down."
Chures kept his gun out, adjusted his grip. He checked over his shoulder. Coming here alone was a bad idea, Karlsson's insistence be damned.
"Come out."
"As you wish."
The man stepped out into a puddle of flickering LED reflections. Chures squinted, couldn't believe what he was seeing.
"Karlsson couldn't make it."
The man had his face. He stood insouciantly, one hand in the pocket of a suit identical to one Chures owned, the other twirling a cocktail stick idly in his teeth.
"Put the gun down, Chures," said his double, his voice.
Chures wasn't one to ask dumb questions. He pulled the trigger; at least he intended to. In the milliseconds between the neurons firing to twitch his finger muscles and his brain retrospectively deciding it had consciously made the decision to do so, something cut in and stopped him. His body locked rigid.
"I am sorry, Agent Chures," said Bartolomeo.
This wasn't supposed to happen. He was in control.
"There's no need for you to die, Chures. My intention is to save lives, not waste them." The man with his face walked forward and took his gun, slid the slider back, dissembled the weapon without looking at it and strewed its parts upon the floor. "I need to borrow your life for a while. When this is all over, you will thank me."
Through teeth clamped shut, Chures choked out a rasping gargle: "What the fuck are you?"
The other Chures gave a slow smile to no one in particular. "You are as tenacious as they say. I am glad I pursued this course of action; making a puppet of you would never have worked for long." He locked eyes with him, his eyes. "A better question would be 'who?', Chures. And perhaps 'why?'" He cocked his head to one side, the neck accommodating several degrees more tilt than would have been comfortable for a human. "Tell me, what do you know of the Class Five AI Richards and Otto Klein's involvement in this affair of the departed professor?"
Chures said nothing.
"Suit yourself," said his double. Chures felt a sharp pain in his mind as Bartolomeo let something in. His life flickered before him with sickening speed. When it was done, he was on his knees, filth soaking the knees of his trousers.
"It is surprising how little you know," said his double. "That should make things easier." The double squatted beside him. "I'll be going now. I'll have Bartolomeo take you somewhere safe, don't worry. He is fond of you. I'll be in touch." He pointed at Chures' gear. "I'll be needing these." He bent down and tugged Chures' coat, badge and all, over his stiff shoulders. He reached out and unclipped his twin mentaugs from their external mounts underneath each of his ears. "
I apologise for the pain," the double said as monofilament wires tugged from his flesh. The fake Chures took the drop-pearl earring Chures wore in his left ear. "I have to look the part," explained the double, then took his boots.
Chures grunted with rage, saliva streaming between lips frozen in a painful snarl, his muscles burning with cramp.
He couldn't see the stranger leave.
Some time later, Bartolomeo spoke. "That should be long enough, Agent Chures. I have taken control of your somatic functions. We will now leave. Please do not fight. I am truly sorry." Bartolomeo walked Chures, reduced to a meat puppet, jerkily over to the gash in the wall they'd entered through. They bent as one as they approached. Chures marshalled himself and waited until they were going under.
With one last effort of will, he jerked his head back, slamming the silvered aux-mind casing into a rusting beam.
"Stop!" said Bartolomeo. "Chures!"
With the first blow, Chures felt the AI's influence lessen briefly. He seized his chance and threw his head back again, gashing his own scalp, smashing the casing again, sending its Gridpipe receivers offline.
"Chures, stop, Chures!" Bartolomeo's voice was panicked. Half his personality imprint was in the unit. Chures had made sure of that, in case he ever needed to deactivate him. "Chures! You do not understand. Stop! Something terrible isssss..." Bartolomeo's voice slurred and faded to a hiss. Somewhere, the base unit that made up the rest of the AI blended with Chures slipped into lobotomised imbecility.
Chures fell forward, his muscles limp, head ringing like a bell. Holy Christ alone knew what damage he'd done to his own brain. What the hell now? If he went back to the VIA, he'd be dead. The fake Chures and whoever was behind him would know right away that Bartolomeo was gone. They'd be waiting for him.
Valdaire. Get to her first, hold her as a bargaining chip.
A lousy plan, but the best he had.
His senses reeled. He grabbed at the wall. His feet slipped into the muck of the street. People avoided him, stepping away as he bounced off them, just another luckless victim on Jesu City's pleasure way.
He stumbled on, eyes hunting for drones against the stars.
Chapter 14
Los Angeles
"What kind of shit are those fucking electrical bastards trying to pull now? A German, a fucking German? This ain't Hamburg or Schnitzelville or wherever the fuck you are from, pal, not your jurisdiction." The small detective seethed and his round, unfashionably fat face glowered into Otto's, the badge slung about his neck jerking with his rage as he jabbed his pudgy forefinger at Otto in time with his words. Otto stared placidly down at him. The top of the detective's head stopped short of the top of his chest. The detective's eyes were small and black, face lined by unspent anger, deep creases round his mouth.
"Cool it, Flores, this guy's got documentation like you've never seen," said the woman. Detective Mulholland, his nearI told him, and plenty more besides.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah, Flores. Right from the top. He's investigating a connected case over in Euroland. The Sams think it's really important. There's nothing we can do." Mulholland was older, serious, about forty-five in biological looks, probably her actual age – she looked the kind of woman who wouldn't make the time for cosmetic work until she had to. Her hair was uncombed, scraped back into a businesslike ponytail, her face free of make-up, clothes poorly ironed. A real vocation cop, Otto guessed, an up-late-into-the-night, dwelling-on-the-faces-ofthe-dead type. "Isn't that right?"
Otto nodded.
"And what is this case, huh? You gonna tell us?" said Flores.
"I cannot. It is highly sensitive," said Otto regretfully. Pissing off the local cops wasn't going to make his job any easier, but as understanding as he was, Flores was irritating. His shoulder throbbed. Something important had given; he felt it grind as he moved. The pain wasn't helping him keep his cool in the face of this idiot.
"That's fucking typical!" Flores threw up his arms. "Goddamn fucking machines!" He stalked off, passed through the police flatfield round the house, signalled two uniforms in after him. "Fine, fine, show him round," he shouted over his shoulder. "I'm going to go over the gardens again. Call me when he leaves."
A barrage of swearing followed, and then the diminutive detective was gone.
"I'm sorry about detective Flores, Mr Klein."
"Do not be sorry. It is difficult when someone comes in from outside. I will be out of your way as quickly as possible."
"Sure, thanks. It's complicated with Flores. He's been in the force since way back when, before AI started giving orders rather than just taking them. He doesn't like it when artificials interfere with his work, he gets huffy."
Huffy was not a word Otto knew. His near-I gave him a definition in German. If that was huffy, Flores was probably the kind of guy who approached apoplectic if his pizza topping was wrong.
"I'm Detective Mulholland," she said, which Otto already knew. "I've got to accompany you right the way round here, no snooping about on your own, OK?"
"Understood," he said
She smoothed her dry hair. She looked tired. "If you've got any questions, you've just got to shout out. Did you have a good flight?"
"Yes," he said. "May I see the crime scene now?"
"My, you're the chatty one, aren't you? Sure, I'll show you round." She walked right through the flatribbon cordon, her badge, like Flores', allowing her passage. She started to indicate that Otto should duck under, hesitated, walked over to the nearest emitter bollard and pressed a button instead. The flatribbon, a beam of light bearing scrolling warnings and carrying a high voltage charge on ionised air molecules, winked out between two of the emitters. "Kind of a big fella, aren't you? They all this big over there?"
"I am an exception."
"Well, Mr Exception, walk this way. Are you ex-military or…"
"Ex-military, Ky-technischeren Spezielkraft Kommando. Cyborg commando."
"OK." She flashed her badge at a bored-looking uniform by the property's side door. Otto let him scan his AllPass. The officer handed them foot coverings, overcoats and haircovers. After they'd put them on he opened the door without comment, and let the two of them inside.
"Do I need to wear a mask?" Otto asked.
"Not unless the smell bothers you. We had air scrubber drones come in and do the atmospheric forensics right after the call came in. We do have professional standards, you know?" She gave an unpractised smile. She was trying to put him at ease, but she wasn't very skilled at it.
They went in via the kitchen door. The house was big, and full of cops. Small circular drones darted about, aiding a forensics team of five men and a sheathed Four who was doubtless linked to the drones. They flew through the air, dipping down to the floor to scoop up flies killed in the building lockdown, sucked fragments of stone and soil up from the carpet, plucked particles of skin from the curtains. Camera flashes sporadically popped.
They went through into the dining room. The smell was bad. Two weeks' worth of decay soaked into floorboards lifted a reek into the air, the body's position marked by a tape outline and a large blotch of discoloured wooden flooring. Qifang had not been a big man, but there'd been time, and he'd leaked copiously.
"This is where we found him." Her gesture took in the stained table, covered in plastic markers, and the mark on the floor. "He'd been dead at least two weeks, we think. It was the start of vacation, when teaching duties end. He was supposed to be doing research, and he kept himself to himself outside of office hours. We had to go off entomological evidence, as you can see – a lot of flies round here, killed by the biologicals pulse we use. Lucilia sericata, most of them. Their pupation rate kind of puts it round the same time as we see that flicker in his Gridsig, you know about that?"
"Yes."
"OK. Then, or possibly a little later."
"What of the three divergent signals that left the States?"
"Beats me, we've not had anyone cheat the Grid codes since the Three Unc
les took over population management. But sure, this guy was one smart cookie, we'll give him that. Then there's his assistant, she disappeared in a hurry. Do you know anything about that?"
"I cannot discuss it," said Otto. "Sorry. I read about Qifang's home fabricator in the report also. May I see that? It may be important to my investigation."
"Yeah, sure, this way. Watch the wires." She pointed to lines linking the Four to a boxy unit, itself trailing cables off out of the house through a plastic sphincter lodged in the window. "We have to hardline our sheaths to the police AIs. Some little hacker shit got hold of the cipher for their Gridpipes. Quantum encoding unbreakable? Bullshit. Kids can crack it in their lunchbreak. They do it for fun, then the criminal elements buy it up."