Version 43

by Philip Palmer

  I arrived at the Dante’s Dream nightclub and robot bouncers scanned me for weapons and found that I was carrying two pistols, a collapsible rifle and a bandolier of grenades, and had poison darts loaded into my leather wristbands. I gave them my Galactic Police authorisation and they allowed me in.

  The rhythm of the music changed. A singer was on stage, soulfully singing a ballad of grief and tenderness, accompanied by a soundtrack that she artfully controlled with fingertip clicks. The club was a baroque fantasy, with retro pillars and walls that slithered like snakes as you looked at them.

  “Welcome to my world,” said Fernando Gracias with a smile, and beckoned me to sit in a booth.

  Kim Ji was already there, dressed in a second skin made of soft black silicon with the texture of brushed leather. She was a Noir, with jet-black eyes, and black lips, and pale smooth skin.

  Billy Grogan sat next to her, a sulky freckled Irishman with yellow hair and hate in his eyes. I anticipated trouble; I had, after all, gunned Billy’s father down only a few days before.

  And Hari Gilles was there too. My database informed me that he had spoken with Version 43, and I swiftly reviewed their dialogue. Hari was beautiful and scarily thin and dapper, in a superbly cut classic suit. He was comprehensively face-tattooed, and wore a tie with an interactive hologram pattern of the stars on it.

  “You’ve arrested Mayor Naurion,” Kim said calmly.

  “I have.”

  “Is he guilty?”

  “Of course.”

  I smiled my eerie smile.

  “Then I’m appalled,” said Kim, in amused, relaxed tones. “I always thought Naurion was an honest man – but it seems you never can tell.”

  Billy grunted, scornfully, and gave me a killer stare. I glanced at him with disdain.

  “The Mayor is not the one I’m interested in,” I said softly. “I’m looking for the person who hired the assassins who killed me.” I paused, and waited until I had their undivided attention. “And I know who that is,” I added.

  “Who?”

  “It’s one of you,” I explained, calmly.

  “Fuck off!” said Billy.

  “Hush, hush, hush, Billy,” said Hari, like a snake hissing at a rat before eating it.

  “Let the man—” said Kim, but I interrupted her.

  “One of you around this table is guilty,” I said, in angry tones. “One of you – excuse my language – bastards butchered the medics and then paid to have me killed.”

  “More than likely,” agreed Fernando Gracias. “But it wasn’t me.”

  “Or me,” said Kim.

  “Not guilty,” said Hari Gilles.

  Billy Grogan raised a finger to me.

  I sighed.

  “I’m tired of this planet,” I said. “Just give me the killers. I’ll take them down. Whoever authorised the hits, for whatever reason, I don’t care. Just surrender your hired guns, and I’ll walk away.”

  The singer’s soulful voice caressed my heart, or would have done, if I’d had a heart.

  “That’s a fair offer,” said Fernando Gracias; “let us think about it.”

  Now, a soaring howling alto saxophone riff merged with the wail of the singer’s voice, like a spectral bird in flight through the darkness of space.

  “While Fernando is thinking about it,” Kim purred gently, “let me ask a question. Can you?”

  “Can I what?”

  “Can you ‘do’ it? By which I mean, are you capable of sex?”

  “No,” I lied.

  “And love? Can you feel love?”

  “Can you?”

  “Touché.”

  “You’re a whore.”

  “I know what I am. Do you disapprove?”

  “No.”

  “You do.”

  “I don’t,” I admitted, “get it. I mean. In this day and age, why would anyone pay for sexual intercourse?”

  Kim looked at me hauntingly, and beautifully, and I gleaned her subtext: what man would not want to have sex with her! But the question still worried away at me.

  “Very few humans are puritanical, these days,” I clarified. “All humans are attractive, more or less. And fit. And rejuve does wonders for the libido. So why pay?”

  Kim actually laughed.

  And I stared at her, this fierce, black-eyed, shockingly beautiful woman, who I knew to be the whoremonger-in-chief to the entire planet.

  “I’ll tell you why,” Kim said.

  And she told me, as the saxophone sang and the singer wailed, as the darkness of the club cast shadows over our faces. “Because I sell dreams,” Kim whispered. “Not just sex.”

  I shrugged. She clarified.

  “My girls and boys,” she continued, in the same soft whisper that seemed to syncopate with the music, “are dream-weavers and artists. They conjure magic out of sensual experience. They take you to a place you’ve never been. Well, perhaps they wouldn’t do that to you, but with my punters, we offer a journey to another realm. I’m not talking bondage and sadomasochism or dressing up as a baby, though we offer all those services too. I’m talking about taking you on a journey to the inner depths of your soul. If you had a soul.”

  “Stop goading me,” I snarled.

  “An orgasm can be as intense as a religious experience,” she whispered, and her face was as radiant as any madonna. “We offer that. We offer rebirth of the soul. We are more of a religion than a whorehouse.”

  “Be that as it may,” I said stiffly. “Did you kill the medics?”

  The mood shattered. The song changed.

  “No I didn’t,” Kim said.

  “You’re lying.”

  “Usually I am. Today, I’m not.”

  And she smiled, arrogantly, and nastily.

  “If we give you the killers,” asked Hari Gilles. “Do you pledge to leave us alone?”

  “You can’t trust this dogfucka,” muttered Billy.

  “If he makes a deal, he’ll honour it,” Fernando said authoritatively. “Robots are like that.”

  He was correct; robots must always speak the truth. I, however, am a cyborg and can quite easily lie like a human.

  “Do you so pledge?” insisted Hari.

  I knew, from my database, that Hari Gilles was the pre-eminent employer of contract killers in the city. His dark-suited soft-spoken assassins were known as Gill’s Killers, and they enforced gambling debts, enacted vengeance, and sometimes even settled disputes between neighbours through acts of bloody vengeance.

  “Of course,” I said.

  Hari smiled, charmingly, and the lines of his face-tattoo twitched, like ants dancing on his cheeks and eyelids.

  “So tell me the truth,” I said. “Who ordered the hit on the medics?”

  “I did,” admitted Hari Gilles.

  “And what was the motive?”

  Hari continued, fluently:

  “The Sheriff’s son owed me money. He was a junkie. He welshed. His friends were in the wrong place at the wrong time.” And Hari beamed at his own barely coherent lie.

  “And who were your assassins?” I asked.

  “They were from out of town,” said Hari Gilles. “Space pirates. We paid them big time, and they left via the fifty-fifty.”

  “They’re off-planet?”

  “You’ll never see them again.”

  “That’s no use to me.”

  “In that case,” said Hari carefully, “they’re still in Lawless City. Just tell us where you want ’em, we’ll deliver the bodies.”

  I was silent.

  “Yes?” said Hari Gilles, “or no?”

  I reviewed my data on the other three gangsters:

  Fernando Gracias was a likeable and cultured man, and a patron of the arts – the legendary muse to many generations of rock and jazz musicians. He also, however, ran most of the robbery gangs in Belladonna. His fierce and ruthless armed robbers knocked over trucks and shops and restaurants and stole from banks and his street thugs mugged shoppers on a daily basis. His e
mployees murdered, on average, 12,000 people a year.

  I looked at Kim Ji, still smiling, still enchanting. Kim was less murderous than Fernando – counting the whore-deaths, her thugs generally killed no more than 100–200 citizens a year, at a best estimate. But, my database told me, she also ran slave farms where tens of thousands of citizens lived like hogs, making hand-crafted consumer items for the rich people on Third and Seventh Boulevard. And she enforced discipline by flaying her enemies and hosing them down with salted water. It was possible, just about, to survive such treatment, but few retained their sanity after experiencing such extremities of pain and degradation.

  Meanwhile, Billy Grogan was glaring at me, unable to get over his hatred for the monster who had killed his father. Billy was young – he would be thirty on his next birthday – and, by all accounts, full of passion and family loyalty, and I almost felt sorry for him.

  But my database told me that the Grogans’ drug traffickers held the city in a grip of evil, spreading addiction like cancer. The drugs the Grogans sold included hallucinogens that turned users into werewolf-like beasts who raped and ate innocent victims by the score. Thousands of citizens of Lawless City died each year, either from the ravages of drugs, or because they had been eaten alive by addicts.

  And these four monsters – Hari Gilles, Kim Ji, Fernando Gracias, Billy Grogan – were now seeking my corrupt benediction, my seal of approval for their crimes.

  “Sure,” I said.

  Sheriff Heath stared at me. His grey walrus moustache twitched.

  “I thought you were dead,” he said, drily.

  “I was, but now I’m alive again,” I told him, with equal dryness.

  “I get it. You’re a replica, of the previous cyborg?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re gonna find the people who killed my boy?”

  “Yes.”

  “How can I help?”

  And I explained.

  Barumi’s home was a palazzo with decor of staggering crassness.

  The walls were salmon pink. The chandeliers had real candles. The servants wore formal suits in a twenty-second-century baroque style, and bowed or curtsied often and pointlessly.

  Sergeant Aretha Jones and I walked through, awestruck at the staggering absence of taste made manifest on every side.

  “You know this guy?” I subvoced.

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s he like?”

  Sandro Barumi appeared. He was a tall, good-looking man of Earth-Asian-Italian genetic origin with four arms and three eyes.

  “Like that,” Aretha murmured.

  Barumi smiled at me and held out his lower front hand. I shook the hand.

  “Greetings,” said Barumi.

  “You’re a Vishnu,” I observed. “There’s nothing about that on my database.”

  “A recent modification,” admitted Barumi. “It helps with, well, let’s not get into that. How can I help you?”

  I winked.

  Barumi stared at me with surprise.

  “The fix,” I clarified, “is in.”

  “I don’t understand,” Barumi said primly. He beckoned us to follow him. And so we followed him through three doorways, until we emerged into a formal sitting room, where a chaise longue hovered in the air, and the sofas were made of ancient brocade decorated with 3D holograms. I perched on one of the chaises. Barumi sat on a cushion, balanced in a yoga stance. Aretha stood.

  “You can trust her,” I said, nodding at Aretha. “She’s one of us.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about!” Barumi said cheerfully. His front arms were calm, but his rear arms were starting to twitch. His middle eye blinked, independently of the other two. I wondered what kind of vision the three eyes gave him, and the answer promptly arose from my database. Third eyes were a new fad on Belladonna, and they were attuned to perceive the personal noetic matrix around a human being – the energy field which mystics once referred to as the “aura.”

  I had no aura so I was, I realised, invisible to Barumi’s third eye.

  “This is how it is,” I said, as Barumi poured tea and milk into a cup with three of his hands, while scratching an itch with his fourth. He passed the tea to Aretha, who sat down on the edge of the eye-dazzling sofa. Barumi poured a second cup for me.

  “I don’t take tea,” I said.

  “Biscuits?” smiled Barumi.

  “I’m a cybernetic organism,” I pointed out. Barumi was both fey and charming, not the cold-hearted pimp I had been expecting.

  “Whatever. What can I do for you?”

  “I want to make you Mayor.”

  Barumi smiled. His third eye blinked. He turned to look at Aretha. His third eye blinked again.

  “Why is she afraid?” Barumi whispered.

  “She’s afraid of me,” I said. “She’s a crooked cop, I could have her badge.”

  Barumi stared at me. His third eye blinked.

  “Why the devil do you want me to be Mayor? I mean, really, do I look like Mayor material?” And Barumi beamed camply, like a cat splashing around in a bath full of cream. If I’d had a sense of humour, I would have laughed out loud.

  “I want to clean up this planet,” I explained. “I’ve framed the Mayor for the rape and mutilation of Jaynie Hooper. I finished the job you started. Now I want someone to take his place.”

  “The Mayor’s a powerful man.”

  “The Mayor’s going to be brainwiped. We need a successor.”

  Barumi smiled. “But why me? Your logic eludes me.”

  “Because you’re smart,” said Aretha, with a heart-melting smile, and I observed how Barumi loved the compliment. She was, I conceded, good at this.

  “Because you’re smart,” I repeated. “Very smart. You’re a bio-engineer. A people moulder. You’re not a gangster, you’re an artist.”

  “Flatterer.”

  “And I know you tried to frame the Mayor once already. I’m just finishing the job.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I’m serious.”

  “But you’re a Galactic Cop. You’re incorruptible!” Barumi said, sweetly.

  “Do you really believe that?” I laughed a hollow laugh. “Don’t be so naïve.”

  “It’s such a while since anyone called me naïve.” Barumi grinned.

  “I’m not a hero,” I explained. “I’m just a machine. I have no morality. I have a mission; once I achieve it, I can go back home. So if I can frame the Mayor, make a friend of you, leave a puppet administration in place, my mission objectives will all have been achieved. The Mayor will go down for the murder of the medics. You’ll take his job. I’ll depart swiftly, to avoid being killed by those godawful assassins again.”

  “I don’t believe you,” said Barumi. “Why should I trust you?”

  “You’ll trust him for the same reason that I trust him,” said Aretha harshly. “Because this piece of crap machine is nothing but a piece of fucking… crap. He has no loyalty. He has no friends. But his plan is a good one. Someone’s head has to roll, and the easiest choice is Abraham Naurion.”

  “That’s no more than that evil bastard deserves,” Barumi said, amused.

  “These Galactic Cops are real pros; the Mayor has been comprehensively fitted up,” Aretha said. “This guy faked the forensics. He’s done a deal with the gang bosses. He’s as crooked as he claims. You can trust him.”

  “But how do I know I can trust you?” said Sandro Barumi.

  “You can,” Aretha said. And Barumi stared at her.

  I changed my vision filters to noetic, and I saw what Barumi saw: the swirling coloured cloud around Aretha that was her personal aura. My database allowed me to interpret the meaning of the colours and patterns. And I could see, as Barumi could see, that this was the aura of a woman who was telling the truth.

  “The Galactic Cop has bribed you?” said Barumi.

  “He’s bribed me.”

  “He’s faked the forensics on the Mayor?”

 
; “I saw him do it with my own eyes.”

  “You’re in this for the money; this is not an agent provocateur police action?”

  “I’m it in for the money,” said Aretha. “I’m no fucking agent provocateur. I want one and a half million scudos, and a ranch, and this is how I’ll get it.”

  Her aura didn’t change: it gleamed with black and gold spikes. She was telling the truth.

  Barumi’s third eye blinked, and he smiled. “Damn, it’s true,” he marvelled. “I’ve got my very own crooked Galactic Cop.”

  “What just happened between you two then?” I said, feigning irritability.

  “I looked into this bitch’s soul,” said Barumi, “and she’s as evil and twisted as I am.”

  “So tell us what really happened,” said Aretha, with savage cynicism. “And then we’ll finish the frame.”

  And Sandro Barumi told his tale.

  I recorded it all in my eye cameras, and transmitted the data to the Belladonna computer. It was a full and long confession. And it revealed Sandro Barumi to be a bold and a brilliant, and also a sad and a vain, and an utterly pathetic man.

  The Mayor, Barumi revealed, was not in fact in the pay of the gang bosses: he was their boss. The gang leader of all Lawless City. He was the don, the gang bosses were his capi. And soldiers like Sandro Barumi owed a double allegiance – to their gang boss, and to the Mayor.

  “Kim always treated me like shit,” Barumi whined. “As if I wasn’t worthy to be her, you know, evil pimp. I did wonders for her. I engineered her boys and her girls to be sexually insatiable. I created four-armed courtesans, gigolos with two cocks. I was a sculptor of flesh. And the whores all love me. I understand them. In many cases, I created them. I bred them from embryos. I sent them to school. I own them.

  “And all I wanted was my just deserts. I wanted to be the gang boss. I wanted the Mayor to kill Kim and appoint me in her place.

  “And the bastard refused! And he threatened me. He told me I was getting ideas above my station. He told me that we needed a balance of power, to keep the citizens free. Free! No one is free in this city. The gangs own everything, including the people.”