Version 43

by Philip Palmer

  “What were they like?”

  “They were—” She cleared her throat again, vigorously, and continued: “They were like doctors, except the ones who were, duh! like nurses.” Her tone was snide, but I overlooked it.

  “Did they live extravagantly?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Did you see them socially?”

  “I knew, um, Dr Hooper – Fliss Hooper. She, um… I knew her pretty well.”

  I checked my database of Belladonnan hotel and restaurant receipts. “She was your girlfriend,” I asserted.

  Macawley wiped away a tear.

  “What makes you think that?” she said, in a terrified whisper.

  “You ate in nice restaurants with her, fairly often, on average two-point-five times a month. You went on holiday together, on quite a number of occasions, seven in all in the last six years. And you purchased good-quality champagne once a year on or around the same date, which I presume was the anniversary of you two becoming a sexually active couple.”

  Macawley stared at me. Then she spoke angrily, in what sounded to me very like a snarl: “You are such a fucking creepier-than-creepy fucking creep! She was my friend! Not my fucking—”

  “The data,” I pointed out, “is consistent with—”

  “Friend, get it? Not lover. Not even fuckbuddy. We were pals.” Macawley was becoming hysterical. I reminded myself that the brutal death and dismemberment of a close friend was liable, in many emotionally inclined humans, to lead to trauma and distress.

  “Very well,” I said mildly. “I concede that I may have interpreted the data wrongly. So let us postulate that you were indeed friends, not lovers. But would it be fair to say, ‘close friends’?”

  Macawley stared. “Yeah.”

  “So what else can you tell me about her?”

  “Nothing! Everything.” Macawley wiped away another tear. Then another. Then suddenly the tears had gone and her voice was cold. “How long have you got? She loved TV, we both did. We had our favourite shows, all the wild ones, Death Girls, Xandra, Witch World. We went to TV cons together. She liked red wine, so did I, especially Chateau Nova, the syrah and the pinot noir. We shared good times and bad. And we drank, not too much but we knew how to fucking—Look, I married an evil charming-bastard-that-dumb-girls-fall-for kind of guy, okay am I perfect? No! So – fuck – skip it, you wouldn’t – he was violent, the prick, I left him. And so – I’m sorry, I’m rambling – what I’m trying to say is – that’s why Fliss and I drank champagne. Every year, on the anniversary of the day I ditched the fucking jerk.”

  “Ah.”

  “Any other bits of my life you’d like to filthily dabble in?”

  “Who could have killed her?” I asked.

  “How the fuck should I know?”

  “Will you help me find her killers?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  She looked at me with contempt. “Because this is Belladonna,” she explained, with more scorn than I had ever encountered before in a human’s voice.

  “That’s a defeatist attitude,” I advised her, and she glared more contempt at me.

  I wondered if I could have handled this interview differently.

  I came to no conclusion.

  “This is what you will do,” I told her curtly.

  “I’m busy.”

  “This is not optional. Do you have a camera?”

  “What does ‘not optional’ mean, tin man?”

  “It means it’s a criminal offence to hinder a Galactic Police Officer in the performance of his duties. Also, your friend was just murdered and you ought to help me find the killer.”

  Macawley winced.

  “You just had to ask nicely,” she muttered sulkily.

  “No, I do not have to ask nicely,” I explained. “I do not even have to ask, I am authorised to order citizens to do what I need them to do, promptly and efficiently. Remember, there are sanctions for non-compliance, and the fines can really add up. Now: get your camera. Patrol the wards. Every single one. Send me the images. Look in my eyes.”

  “No.”

  “Look.”

  “No!”

  “Look.”

  She looked. Her green eyes flickered then fixed as she stared into my empty black pupils, and I downloaded my access codes into her mind.

  “Subvocalise GPC453, and the images will reach me. It’s a secure line.”

  “Did you just enter my brain?”

  “Your brainchip. Not your brain. I can’t read thoughts. Just brainchips.”

  Macawley shuddered, and the look she gave me would have curdled water.

  I leaned over the desk, and she flinched; our cheeks were so close I could smell her skin.

  Then I put out my arm and accessed the hospital’s computer system with a handtouch on her desk databox. I downloaded all its data, and transmitted an authorisation for a full audit of all the hospital’s medical and financial records. I then reviewed the hospital database of all Patient Admissions in the last five years. It took me almost ten minutes to process this information. During this time, I stared blankly into space, while Macawley fidgeted and twitched, clearly longing to leave her desk but afraid to do so.

  In those ten minutes, after accessing the personal emails and MI conversations of every member of hospital staff, I learned that Alexander Heath had been in love with Fliss Hooper. I also learned that she had become pregnant with his baby, and had opted to have the fertilised egg removed and placed in storage.

  The Sheriff would have a grandchild one day. I wondered if I should subvoc this information across to him, but decided that lay outside my remit.

  Fliss Hooper, I learned, had been a pretty, clever and entertaining young woman. I watched, in my mind’s eye, office-party footage of her dancing. Her eyes leaped out across at me, and impaled me with their energy. I, too, had once known—

  I refocused my thoughts, and assimilated social networking and other personal data about the life of Alexander Heath. I registered that this had been a young man of exceptional promise. He had loved Fliss very much indeed: this was recorded in detail in a large number of inter-office emails and subvocs, and several elegant and touching poems that I retrieved from his encrypted file vault. One of these poems dealt with—

  I had all the data I needed. I logged off.

  “You may go,” I told Macawley, and she twitched, and then fled.

  I made my way out of the administration block, and down into the basement of the hospital. At every level, I was stopped by security guards, and obliged to holo-project my warrant of authority. It was, I would have thought, fairly obvious I was a Galactic Cop since I am six foot five with plastic skin and dead eyes, and there were no other cyborgs on the entire planet.

  However, I had to admire these citizens’ devotion to mindless bureaucracy. It was one of the few encouraging signs of civilisation I had encountered here.

  Finally, I reached the lower depths of the hospital, where the organ banks for the entire city were housed. Microcameras tracked me, and I was aware of each and every one of them. A pair of sullen guards glared as I passed them, shrouded in my holo-warrant.

  I passed through the final security door, and closed it loudly behind me. I surveyed the scene:

  Kilometre upon kilometre of corridors ran beneath the hospital, in every direction. And each corridor was stacked high with hardglass vats containing limbs, hearts, livers, kidneys, eyes, intestines, oesophaguses, ovaries, penises, skeletons, and whole-body skins.

  I walked down one corridor and surveyed and counted and classified the body parts; then I counted the corridors, and was moderately impressed by the scale of this storage facility. There were enough organs and limbs and skins here to replace the bodies of at least thirty thousand people; all of them grown from foetal tissue and ready for transplant. For this was a dangerous planet, and rejuve was a slow healer.

  And yet, I mused, even this wasn’t enough. Dozens of citizens true-died eve
ry day because they’d had to wait too long for a heart or a liver or new lungs. And the death toll from duels and random murders was staggering.

  I checked the inventories I had downloaded into my database, and cross-collated them against the organs I was walking past. It took me two days in all to walk/hover the whole length and width of this underground labyrinth. I checked the contents of every vat in every corridor and every alcove; I even smashed through sheer rock walls with my fist to check for hidden organ vats, but found none. Then I transmitted a message to the works department to make the necessary repairs, citing the grid references to aid them.

  At the end of this long search, I had found no discrepancies or unexplained losses. There was therefore no prima facie evidence of organ or skin theft.

  I decided to explore the possibility that the hospital’s computer records had been falsified.

  However, after a detailed analysis of the records of Admissions and Surgical Procedures, I found no anomalies, or evidence of data-tampering. Furthermore, I determined that none of the dead medics had any recorded connections with organised crime figures. None of them had been receiving large money transfers from covert untraceable accounts; nor did any of them have expenditure patterns that were inconsistent with their income flows.

  My organ-fraud hypothesis was accordingly downgraded.

  Was there some other reason for the killings?

  I could think of none.

  Which meant, I concluded, that I had no notion whatsoever about the motive behind the murders.

  I took to the streets again. I programmed my flybike to return to my hotel without me, and walked across town to the Black Saloon. It was a vast bar, with tables on the sidewalks and oval keyhole windows that made it resemble a castle abandoned by its defending bowmen.

  A chef was cooking burgers on the outdoor griddle, and some of the regulars looked as if they had been there for days on end. It was, after all, a pleasant spot. It rarely rained, and there were no cold winds on Belladonna, just warm summer zephyrs bearing the scent of flowers.

  I walked inside and sat at a bar stool. I glanced around and admired the mosaic floors and the garishly nude statue-pillars, and smelled the booze and the bodies of the drinkers, and remembered the taste of beer.

  “What can I get you?” asked the woman at the bar. She was a black-haired, dark-skinned, stunningly beautiful woman with a single brow and lips that hinted at a smile.

  “Information.”

  “You’re a Galactic Cop?”

  “Do I look like a Cop?”

  “Six foot five? No manners? Plastic skin?”

  “I’m a Cop,” I sighed.

  “How’s that feel?”

  “I’m old. And very smart. And I will never ever die. It feels – I have no view on how it feels.”

  “Yeah? You know, tin man, you are one sorry son of a fucking bitch,” said the barmaid, and grinned. It was, I noted, a superior kind of a grin. I was being patronised once again.

  “So,” the barmaid added, in more friendly tones, “what’s your poison?”

  Suddenly, I found myself overwhelmed by waves of melancholia.

  It alarmed me severely. In the usual course of things, my emotions were carefully calibrated to assist the functioning of my cybernetic intellect. My slowly shifting moods enhanced ratiocination, allowed me to access “gut instinct,” and enabled me to make lateral leaps of deductive brilliance. And hence, I valued my emotions, for I knew they served a useful function and made me more than just a machine.

  But this – this! This – black, dark, void, empty – no word for it! – this ghastly self-loathing feeling – what function could it possibly serve? What did it mean? What did it—

  Swiftly, I erased Melancholy from my emotional repertoire.

  “I don’t drink,” I said, aware that I had skipped a beat in my conversation with the barmaid, but hoping it would pass unnoticed.

  It passed unnoticed.

  “Don’t, or can’t?” said the barmaid.

  I thought about it. “Don’t.”

  The barmaid drew me a beer, and passed it across. White foam stood proud on golden bubbled lager. “Drink this,” she said. “You look like you need it.”

  I drank three pints, then cleansed my fluid-system of all traces of alcohol, and transpired the toxins through my pores. “I’m looking for Filipa Santiago,” I said.

  “That’s me.”

  “I know.”

  “There are kids who were born on this planet; they don’t know what it was like, in the old days, you know?”

  “Yeah, I know,” I murmured.

  “We came in on the fifty-fifty. We risked—”

  “I know. I know what you risked.”

  “—everything. Fifty-fifty. A flip of a coin.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “No? No?” I stared at her, coldly. “I should inform you that you don’t know anything about me, or what I can comprehend, or the depth and detail of my experience. So do not presume to say what—”

  “You’re a fucking cyborg.”

  “Even so. I understand. Plenty. Tell me about this city, please. Tell me—”

  “My boyfriend died in hyperspace.”

  “Ah.”

  “Scrambled. It turned him into – I don’t know what.”

  “I comprehend.”

  “I loved him.”

  “It’s the luck of the draw.”

  “He was facing a murder charge. I was his accomplice.”

  “Were you guilty?”

  “Hell yes. We were wildcats in those days. Then they gave us the choice. Death, indoctrination, or the fifty-fifty.”

  “Brainwiping is not so bad.”

  “How would you know?”

  “I’m a cyborg. It’s what they do to us.”

  “Ah.”

  Filipa was silent, waiting, and I felt impelled to talk.

  “I was born from a human brain,” I explained to her, and Filipa sipped her drink, and looked at me. Her dark eyes were intrigued, and her brow furrowed as she listened. “And, because it is beneficial to the working of my intellect, I retain trace elements of that human personality,” I continued, aware I was interrupting my own interrogation, but doing so anyway. “My human was dead, of course, true-dead, of natural causes I am assured. But after death, my human mind was preserved and then merged with the self-aware consciousness of a cybernetic intellect and attendant hard drive.” I paused, and wondered why I was explaining myself to a witness who had no reason to know this data. “But to create me, as a chimaerical man-machine entity, they had to wipe my human memories. They turned me into a new-born. That’s when Version 1 was created.”

  “Who were you? The human you, I mean?”

  “They never told me that,” I admitted, for the second time that day.

  “You could find out.”

  “Why? What would that achieve? I am who I am. I do what I do.”

  “Yeah, but without memories,” said Filipa, “I wouldn’t know how to… hell, I have so many memories… I have… oh, fuck it.”

  “Tell me about the Mayor, please, Filipa,” I said. “Your expertise, my database assures me, is second to none.”

  I was aware that, as well as working at the bar, Filipa was the planet’s Archivist, the official chronicler of politics and crimes. It made her a first-rate information resource; hence my visit.

  “So many fucking memories,” she said, forlornly.

  “Is he involved in gangland activities?” I insisted.

  Filipa grinned: “Hell, of course not,” she said, in a tone which implied she was jesting.

  I waited.

  Filipa shrugged.

  “Yeah,” she said eventually, “the Mayor takes bribes. I should know, I pay him – to protect this bar. I also know that he overturned a major police investigation into extortion rackets. He gave a Dark Side gangster immunity from prosecution, after he slaughtered his own family. He pret
ty much turns a blind eye to all that the gangs do. The old Mayor, he never mixed with the gangs, never took money, never received favours. He was incorruptible. He lasted two days.”

  “According to your Archives,” I said, “he’s never lost an election. Why is that? Voter intimidation?”

  “Voter apathy. Only the criminals vote.”

  “Is he popular?”

  “Hell yeah. He’s a larger than life figure. He tells us we’re a great city, and the citizens of Earth aren’t fit to wipe our arses. What more do you want from an elected representative?”

  “Who are his closest associates, amongst the gang bosses?”

  “He’s thick with Dooley Grogan. He knows Kim Ji too, he used to work for her as an enforcer. Beyond that, I don’t know.”

  “Does he drink here?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Will he be here tonight?”

  “Yeah, he’ll be here tonight. Can we stop this now?” Filipa was looking weary. “You see, tin man, I really don’t give a shit any more. I’ve done so much, I’m drowning in fucking memories. Sometimes I feel my head will explode.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Not your problem.”

  “You can tell me, if you like, about the memories,” I said, in a tone laden with kindness.

  “What do you care?”

  “I care. Tell me.”

  And so Filipa Santiago told her story.

  Born in the shantytown slums of a brutal planet. Enslaved. Brutalised. Raped. Pimped out. Abused by friends and family. Sold to a drug gang. Forced to work as a mule. Till the day that she and José stole the drugs and killed a gang leader and ended up in a shootout with the crooked police.

  They were lucky not be assassinated in the local jail. Luckier still to be tried in front of a Star Court, with cyborg judges teleported from Earth. Luckier still to be offered the fifty-fifty – with a chance of escape, freedom, a new world, a new start.

  It turned out, though, that José wasn’t so lucky after all. For Filipa knew, as all transportees knew, that quantum teleportation is an inexact science. It makes it possible to travel trillions of miles in less time than this. But it has one drawback: quantum travellers only survive fifty per cent of the time.