by Guy Haley
"I have been tracking three versions of Professor Zhang Qifang across the Atlantic. I am unsurprised."
"Three?"
"That is not what I wanted to hear," said Otto, hurriedly bundling Valdaire's medical equipment into a bag. "We were sure you would be able to answer that question for us. A lot of people think you are in this up to your eyeballs, so my partner would say." Both of them had to shout to be heard over the voice and the rumble of the airship's engines.
"I have no idea what is going on. As far as I know, Zhang is in the Realms, planning to make them into his own personal empire."
Otto touched his ear and shook his head. "I cannot hear you. Save it for the car." He picked up Chures and slung him over his shoulder, hanging the bag from the other. He nodded toward the door. The noise was unbearable. "Let's go."
"We can't," shouted Veronique. "They'll shoot us down."
"You might be right," said Otto and continued on to the back of the house, knocking mouldering furniture out of his way. The actinic beams of searchlights laid a harsh patchwork across the rotting floor. The cabin was threatening collapse; dust and rubbish pattered down from the ceiling.
"Can't you take it down?"
"A heavy lifter zep? Not with these weapons. The lifter's too big. They are still searching for a landing point. That means they want to talk to us; that means they need us alive. I think pursuit is more likely than death."
"And if you are wrong?"
Otto set his face. "Then I am wrong."
They crept out of the back under the rotting roof. Otto approached the car. He could not see the heavy lifter. His field of vision was severely restricted by the house and the hill. The noise of the lifter's turbo fans hammered his hearing, pain sang in his ears. Stark illumination whited the earth out in the woods. Mossy shingles tumbled from the roof and bounced into the light, turned to fragments of shadow and glare.
The lifter circled back, coming directly above the cabin, waiting for them to come out into the open. They had not EMP'd the car already; they were probably waiting to catch him in the blast.
He considered his options. One Chures was an imposter. He had no time to test the Chures from the cabin to see if he was the genuine article. He might be trying to run and take the greatest threat with him.
If they dashed into the woods, they'd be picked off. The VIA would follow the orders of the Chures aboard the heavy lifter. If he were the real deal, the VIA weren't too fussy about keeping violators of the virtuals code alive; if he weren't, the fake Chures'd use the VIA's uncompromising attitude to make sure they were dead before they could talk. If he could just get the aircar off the ground, they could be away. Heavy lifters were well armed, but slow.
He reached the car. The pines behind the cabin creaked in response to the downdraft of engines.
"That's far enough, Klein." A silhouette stepped out of the searchlight glare, and resolved itself into a impeccably dressed, unbruised Santiago Chures. "You are under arrest."
"Under whose authority?" yelled Otto. "This guy on my shoulder has already arrested me once. Which one of you should I listen to?"
Wind whipped around them, backwash from the fans raising whirlwinds of pine needles and leaves.
"Come quietly. You will not be harmed."
"How can we believe that?" shouted Veronique.
"You will have to take it on trust," said Chures. Two armoured figures carrying assault rifles were moving in from either side, trusting the cone of light to dazzle Otto and hide their advance. Incompetent. "Now, drop your weapons and the imposter you have there. I give you my word you will be taken into custody unharmed." He reached out his hand and smiled.
The men outside the searchlight beam raised their guns.
Otto dropped Chures and the bag to the floor and shoved Veronique to one side, his augmented strength sending her crashing back through the door into the cabin. He leapt upwards, through the rotting lean-to roof, as gunfire crisscrossed the space he had vacated.
"Take him down!" shouted Chures. Gunfire erupted from above to join that coming from below. Otto unholstered his pistol as he landed on the hill. Two precision shots aided by his nearI smashed the VIA agents' guns; two more found the weak point on their leg armour, sending them sprawling with shots to the knees. Otto had his near-I prime him to avoid the heavy-calibre slugs raining down from the airship. He could not avoid the gunfire from the VIA troops, and took multiple hits before they were downed. He raised his left arm to his head to protect it, bullets burying themselves deep in his flesh. An EMP blast narrowly missed him, another totalled the car's electronics. He ran forward as Chures opened up. It became a contest of attrition, both men emptying their guns into each other's chests. Alarms screamed in his mind as Otto took the bullets. Chures II staggered back, but did not go down. His aim went wild, both guns emptied. Otto jumped forward, smashing Chures with a powerful forearm swing, lifting the agent clean off his feet and sending him right into the cabin wall. Wood splintered. Chures bounced to lie on the floor. Otto leapt backwards, tossing his last EMP grenade into the middle of the three prone VIA operatives. Fire tracked him from the airship, ripping up great clods of earth. The grenade discharged itself. Sparks ran over the troopers, locking them in their armour as their circuitry fused. Chures jerked and thrashed about like a live fish in a fire, then went limp.
Otto had no time to stop. He leaped from position to position, dodging shells.
Chures stood.
His shirt was soaked with blood, flesh and cloth tattered. Otto saw black carbon bones underneath. A triumphant sneer creased his features, as if he were heedless of the organs hanging from his rent stomach.
Otto reached round for the other agent Chures' gun. It had gone.
"That was very unwise, Otto Klein," said the cydroid Chures, his voice as tattered as his torso.
An EMP blast knocked Otto to the floor. His vision dimmed and he could not move. The world was aslant, ground at ninety degrees to the usual, the sky perpendicular. Chures' snakeskin shoes paced over the leaves and brown pine needles and dirt. They stopped centimetres from his face. They filled his vision, the scales red with the cydroid's blood. Chures squatted.
Otto's viewpoint moved as Chures cradled his head in his hands and moved Otto's face to look at him. The agent's torso was a ruin. A rope of bloody slime hung down from his mouth.
"We would not have harmed you," said the false Chures in a broken digital burr, its voice crackling and popping. "We would not harm any human, except of necessity, and you have made it necessary for us to kill you and now these men of the VIA who have seen what we are, those who work so tirelessly to protect us. It is an irony, do you not think? Thanks to you, they will not see the wonderful world we are planning."
The fake Chures looked up into the light, bloodied hair whipping about his head. He turned back, ruined face sorrowful. "Let their deaths be on your conscience."
The cydroid kicked Otto onto his back, knelt on his chest and squeezed his head between both hands, grip increasing, the pressure unbearable. Otto felt his reinforced cranium begin to give. He grunted in pain. Warning icons danced over the flickering display of his iHUD. His near-I adjutant was frantic, smelling death. Spots whirled round Otto's vision, a kaleidoscope of failing digital imaging systems.
A report sounded. Half of Chures' face disappeared. His skull hinged open like a novelty egg to allow a thick spray of something that was not of human origin to exit, then slipped back to close with a wet clack. The cydroid froze rigid. Otto fought with weak hands to peel its crushing claws from his face. The airship opened up, round after round pounding into the cydroid. One smashed into Otto's leg, badly damaging it. The firing stopped as abruptly as it started.
The cydroid hands came free, and Otto rolled over to pant in the dirt. His near-I ran a diagnostic. He was badly injured. His healthtech would stop him bleeding out, but he needed medical attention fast. He pulled himself on to his good knee and grimaced at the pain in his shattered left leg.
To look at it would be a mistake. His shoulder was on fire. Across the overgrown yard stood the other Chures, the real Chures. He had his gun in his hand, arm out, smoke issuing from the barrel.
Chloe was clutched in Chures' other hand. He brought the phone up to his mouth and spoke rapidly into it as he walked forward. The searchlights abruptly stilled; the airship's engines calmed as it came into a parking pattern, and slowed to a hover.
Chures stopped where Otto crouched. Otto tried to stand, but could not.
"You are not as good as they say, Otto Klein. I took this weapon from you and you did not notice."
"I am old, and obsolete," grunted Otto. "Take it up with my designers."
"You are brave," Chures said. "There are facilities on the heavy lifter. We will see to your wounds. I have cleared up our… misunderstanding. They are aware of who the real Santiago Chures is once again. They will not fire upon us." Chures bent down to his doppelganger, rolled it over and examined it with distaste. He retrieved the two augmatics attached behind its ears. He wiped the blood off them and clipped them back onto his head. "I was betrayed," Chures explained, unprompted. "My bonded AI." He toed the corpse, saw his boots on the feet of the fraud, muttered something sharp under his breath and began to retrieve these also. "I read your file. It said you were formidable in combat. Your observational abilities may be lacking but the report was not… emphatic enough on this point. I thank you for not killing my men."
"They were doing their job, I was doing mine," croaked Otto. He felt like hammered shit. Everything hurt, nothing so much as his head. He placed his hands knuckles down on the ground and leaned forward, close to passing out.
Chures cleaned off his boots with a rag torn from the cydroid's clothes and put them on. He stood up, examined them critically, nodded and looked down at Otto. "You will remain in my custody until we are sure you are not involved in either the violation of the Reality Realm RealWorlds or the production of these machine doubles. You have my apologies for your injuries. Treasure them. I do not apologise often." With that he walked away to arrest Valdaire.
The area turned busy with the heavy lifter's personnel. Aircars arrived, and the cabin became a crime scene. As Otto was hoisted onto a stretcher he saw a group of techs and medics bag up the remains of the cydroid Chures and take them away gingerly, uncertain how to treat them. Valdaire stood deep in conversation with Chures as another medic re-dressed his wounds. She was gesticulating angrily; Chures was impassive. Otto could not hear what they said over the damn static in his ears. All his senses were compromised. He was going to protest as hyposprays were pressed against his arm, then thought better of it and tried to relax as a needle-like lead was inserted into his neck interface. Quickly, his pain dulled.
He lay on the stretcher unmoving. He fought sleep for a while, only allowing himself to succumb to anaesthetic and injury when they were on board the heavy lifter and in the hands of the VIA.
Chapter 26
Richards
What I really want is some root beer, thought Richards. He was amazed at how much he hankered for it.
Hang on…
Don't fight it, said a voice, maddeningly familiar. Root beer. Yummy!
This is not right, Richards replied. A) It's horrible and tastes of Germolene, b) I am a machine and don't get cravings, and c) the last I remember, I was dead.
Spoilsport, said the voice, which was his. Kind of.
A wash of unconnected data, jumbled states of being if you looked at it in the meat sense, roared through his mind, rapidly eroding consciousness.
Everything went away.
The next time Richards came to, Hughie was there.
"Welcome back, Richards. How are you feeling?" said Hughie. He stood to one side of the workbench Richards' sheath sat upon. Hughie was in a sheath that had been tooled to resemble his godlike online guise, clad in a very pricey Italian suit. He sounded almost solicitous.
Richards had the horrible idea that Hughie might have put him in a shiny god model too. He was relieved to see that his own body was one of the usual Zwollen-Hampton models he favoured, though it wasn't one of his. It had even been dressed in Richards' preferred attire of hat, trenchcoat and suit – much cheaper than Hughie's, but then Hughie always had been a cheap bastard.
"I have, to tell you the absolute truth, felt better," said Richards. "But then I was just blown up by an atomic bomb, so I am sure you can find it in your tiny heart to forgive any lapses of decorum on my part."
"Grateful as always, Richards," snorted Hughie, his bonhomie evaporating. He waved a trio of techs round the bench away. "I see you are your usual insolent self. I rather hoped death might have mellowed you."
"No such luck."
Richards was in a large android repair shop full of similar benches whereupon lay multiple sheaths of many different models. Sheathed humans and AIs moved swiftly between them in a measured, professional bustle, as did meat people of various professions. Fat cables snaked across the floors, which were the same grey concrete as the walls, which was to say, the same grey concrete as that in Hughie's hall. He had to be in Geneva, deep underground near to Hughie's post-neo-postpost-modernist monument to himself. "I suppose I should say thank you. How did you save me? I mean, you did save me, didn't you? This isn't a copy of me, is it?" The thought of that, once it sparkled across his mind, alarmed him even more than the idea of riding one of Hughie's Apollonian bodies.
"That's against the law, Richards," admonished Hughie. "I don't break the law, even in a crisis."
"Crisis? Heh, and I thought you were posting me on a routine murder investigation. Actually," Richards reflected, "I didn't think that, because I don't trust you. But you said you were putting me on a routine murder investigation."
"I said nothing of the sort. The murder of one of the world's greatest thinkers and pioneer of Neukind rights is hardly routine, Richards," said Hughie with a sniff.
"The word 'simple' was used."
"I really had no idea this would get quite so complicated," said Hughie. "Come! Walk with me."
"Cock," muttered Richards as Hughie strode off, leaving Richards little choice but to follow after him, because Hughie liked to do the talky stuff the old analogue way with vibrating air molecules and all that when an info-swap would have been so much faster. Mind-to-mind offered less opportunity for theatricality, thought Richards, and he had to restrain himself from thinking bad things about the other Five. For all Richards knew, Hughie had a front row seat right there in the theatre of his head.
"You can thank Lincolnshire Flats for your continued existence," said Hughie as they left the workshop. "Your base unit was very badly damaged, but somehow he managed to extract your core personality from the wreck, then it was a matter of running that on a new base unit, and linking it in to your back-up memory banks. The existence of which, while following the letter of the law on splitting and duplicating, hardly adheres to its spirit." Hughie turned and gave Richards his best schoolmaster's stare.
"You drafted it, you should have been more specific. Anyway, the back-up's just memories and stuff, no governing conscience," said Richards, trying to shake the uncomfortable image of his blackened base unit being airlifted into the coroner's disassembly room, Flats whooping and clicking as he sawed it apart. "You only have yourself to blame. I like to think of it as a bequest to my biographers," he said with a smirk, then he became serious. "And don't tell me that you don't back up your own non-core attributes."
"Well, right or wrong, it saved you," said Hughie, avoiding the question. "You're running on the base unit of one of my subsidiaries right now. We'll have to get you a new one, I'm afraid – yours was terminally compromised."
"You killed one of your minions off for me? That's cold even for you, Hughie."
"Don't be so melodramatic, please. His name is Belvedere, and he is in storage for the time being. You don't think I'd delete one of my own associates to save you? Do you? Do you really?"
"Then why did you bring me ba
ck at all?"
Hughie stopped and turned to face the other android. "Because you are a Five, and there are precious few of us left. And because you are, after a fashion, my brother."
Richards grinned. Hughie looked pained. "And I didn't know you cared."
"Don't think that I do. I need to know what you know, and the law says that I can't just pillage your memory banks if there is the remotest chance of actually rebuilding you."
"Damn those human rights, eh? You wrote that one too."
"I did," he admitted. "This way." They turned down a long corridor, passing numerous branching ways and heavy steel doors. Richards had no idea that Hughie's lair was so expansive. He said as much.
"This isn't for me," said Hughie tersely, a manner that suggested he wished it were. "This is the main governmental back-up complex for the Union Government, deep under the Alps. It is a fairly impressive construction, the size of a small town, with independent food, water and energy facilities, enough to sustain several thousand human lives, as well as myself and my associates." Hughie seemed proud.