Version 43

by Philip Palmer

  “You were my friend, once?” I pleaded, my voice choked with emotion.

  “Maybe,” Aretha conceded, grudgingly.

  “I have – not memories – flashes. Recollections,” I told her.

  “What sort of memories?”

  “Memories of… emotions. Memories of moments, beautiful moments – epiphanies. Moments of pathos. Moments of… regret?”

  “That constitutes a major malfunction,” Aretha told me, sternly. “They’re supposed to wipe your memory clean after each rebirth. They take out the personal stuff. All the regrets. Doubts. All the self-hate. All your self-knowledge about the mistakes you’ve made. They delete it all.”

  “I know.”

  “They take out all the stuff that makes you human. That’s why you’re such a cold, evil, fucking machine.”

  “I know! Aretha, I have sinned. I have sinned! Will you forgive me?”

  “No.”

  I woke, abruptly, and reassessed the data in my memory bank.

  I decided that this data was false. It had never happened. I had not visited Police Sergeant Aretha Jones. I had not broken into her apartment. I had not confessed my sins to her. I had not wept in front of her.

  It was just a dream.

  Just – a dream?

  “I know you from somewhere?”

  “I’ve got a familiar face. Scotch, no ice, fill it.”

  The barmaid, Filipa Santiago, filled the glass with Glenmoray.

  “Bad times, huh?” she said.

  “I’ve known worse.”

  “When?”

  “I can’t remember,” I said.

  “I do know you. The tone of your voice. The way you hold your glass.”

  “When we met, I had a different body.”

  “A different – ah, you’re the android?” Filipa said.

  “Cyborg.”

  “Whatever. Same thing.”

  “Android is a robot,” I said, testily. “A cyborg is – whatever. I guess you’re right. Same thing.” The spirit of contradiction ebbed out of me.

  “You’re the Galactic Cop.”

  “I am.”

  “Why didn’t you stop all this?”

  “I didn’t know,” I conceded, “what the fuck I was getting into.”

  I spent my days on the walkways, and my evenings in the bars.

  I listened, and I watched, with my own eyes and ears, and via my dragonfly spies which lurked invisibly in houses and restaurants and doctors’ clinics and hospitals and workplaces and bedrooms. I was besieged with sensory information, sights and sounds and endless conversations. And every datum of new information I absorbed went into my database, where it took priority over all the historic data I had about Belladonna.

  And so I saw the city with new eyes, and heard it with fresh ears.

  “—I think she likes me, but I really don’t want to – am I being silly? – should I—”

  “—sweetheart, come to your daddy—”

  “—can you believe the nerve on her? She actually told me I was too—”

  “—yeah, right, don’t give me lip, right, yeah right, course I do, course I don’t want to—”

  “—it’s a girl, can you believe, it’s a girl! – we’re going to call her—”

  “—don’t take this personally, but—”

  “—I have good news, you’re now top of the queue for the lung transplant and—”

  “—yeah but you’re a grown-up, what would you understand about—”

  “—love you too—”

  “—ah go to hell you old—”

  “—my dad’s leaving my mum, I think he’s been having, you know, reconstructive surgery to be a herm and—”

  “—of course I love you my—”

  “—sweetheart, I love you and—”

  “—of course I don’t expect a big wedding, but the least we can—”

  “—he’s the most beautiful baby in the—”

  I marvelled at it: the variety, the humour, the joy, the pathos, the pain. And, most of all, I marvelled at the banal similarity of all the lives of all the citizens of this city and of this entire planet.

  And I gloried in it too.

  For all of them – or rather, almost all, all but a tiny minority of the thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, no, the millions that I studied – were all so very much the same. They all mucked about as kids, they all thought about sex too much, they all misbehaved, and broke their parents’ hearts, and then they made their parents proud, and made best friends, and lost their best friends, and made new best friends, and fell in love, and slept around, and got married, got divorced, had kids, or sometimes didn’t have kids, but had pets instead, or hobbies, or great love affairs, secure in the knowledge that there was always time enough to have kids regardless of age, but when they did have kids they loved their kids, got driven mad by their kids, regretted seeing their kids grow up so fast, felt jealous of their kids, felt proud of their kids again, watched their kids have kids of their own, marvelled at their new grandkids, felt more alive than ever the older they got, had regrets about all the things they hadn’t done, or regretted what they had done, experienced rejuve for the first time and felt more alive than ever before, fell in love again, fell out of love again.

  And so it went on.

  I listened to what people said on the streets and in shops and in bars and in restaurants, and in their homes, in their living rooms, in their bedrooms, in their workplaces. My dragonflies watched citizens having sex, eating meals, on the toilet, asleep, quarrelling, making up again.

  I was equipped with a wide range of investigative tools – my enhanced hearing, my dragonflies, my ability to hack into surveillance cameras, my capacity to follow a thousand conversations at once and not miss a nuance in any of them. But now, I wasn’t using these tools to investigate an actual crime. I was using them merely to learn, just to find out. I didn’t pursue clues, I didn’t tag key words like “murder,” “medic,” “Alexander Heath,” “Mayor Abraham Naurion” or “conspiracy.” I just listened, to all of it, and saw, all of it.

  Each of these human beings, I learned, lived a life of unique commonality. Each of them felt special, different, privileged. Each secretly believed the universe existed because of them, and had no value without them. And yet, each of these human beings had roughly the same kind of life moments, in approximately the same order, and took more or less the same amount of pleasure from such moments. Some were more successful, some less so. Some were nice, some not so nice. Some were highly sexed, some moderately sexed, some had no interest in sex at all (though that was rare). Some drank a lot, some drank a little, some not at all. Some were rude, some polite. Some were totally selfish and corrupt, some were selfless and virtuous, many were in between. But they all lived “lives” and they all measured their lives by the same criteria: How special am I? How rich am I? How loved am I? How happy am I?

  I found it endearing. I had not encountered a single human being who felt it was their role to be a cog in the machine, or the acolyte of others. They all covertly believed the universe existed for their benefit.

  I also discovered many other things. I learned that sexual intercourse can be pleasurable and joyful and loving, and not merely a series of acrobatic contortions performed with skilled prostitutes. I learned that drunk people say stupid things, but can be more revealing of their emotions than sober people. I learned that everyone loves little babies and thinks that they are unbelievably cute, apart from a few flinty-hearted souls who, I decided, were to be ignored or pitied.

  I also learned that the Universities on Belladonna were of exceptionally high quality. Before the Revolution, thousands of academic papers were published each year on the SN Web, and the standard was extraordinary. Belladonnans had revolutionised physics and the study of stars, and had made great advances in biology and bio-engineering. They had written books on the history of the Colony Planets which were extraordinarily vivid and full of detail, and they had p
ublished books of philosophy which combined profundity with great verbal and conceptual beauty.

  And the Universities provided a vital role in unifying and inspiring the populace. Most citizens, as I had discovered already, tended to work short hours at their supposed paid employment – relying on robots to do most of the work. But in their spare time, Belladonnans liked to study. There were more University colleges than there were bars. Debating societies met every evening, and discussed the issues of the day with bracing rigour and delightful wit. Newspapers were long and thorough and contained commentaries on culture and current affairs on every single one of the human-occupied planets in the Exodus Universe and the Solar Neighbourhood (or at least, they had done, before the Quantum Beacon link was severed).

  Music was also a great passion for the Belladonnans. There were four hundred City Orchestras, funded entirely by sponsors and the musicians themselves, and at least two thousand “amateur” orchestras of comparable standards. And the rock bands and jazz bands and zigzag combos and brainmash ensembles were legion, and of remarkable quality.

  The average Belladonnan, I learned, could play five or six musical instruments, liked to read poetry and novels for pleasure, pursued a part-time degree at one of the many University colleges, and was thoroughly well informed about the wider world.

  Much of this data had already been available in statistical form in my database. But it had never occurred to me to ask for such information, for it wouldn’t have advanced my pursuit of the case.

  But now I was learning things that had not been in my database. I learned that Belladonnans had their own sense of style, in fashion and in music and in verbal idioms. It was a retro style, much of it a witty homage to USA-Earth of the early twentieth and late nineteenth centuries, but it also had fresh and innovative elements. I learned to love the essence of Belladonna: the qualities of insouciance and wry wit that distinguished the citizens of this planet.

  And as I explored the culture of the city, I began to make a series of connected observations. I attended a horse race, and watched the crowd exult as a seven-legged horse from Delphi romped home. And as the crowd roared their delight I noticed, in the private boxes, a cluster of hard-eyed silent children sipping champagne and watching.

  I went to the best restaurants in town and ate – with some appreciation, but no digestion – some of the most magnificent food I had ever experienced. And all these restaurants were full and bustling. But, I observed, in all the most expensive and exclusive places, the very best tables were reserved for groups of hard-eyed silent children, who sipped fabulously expensive wine, without pleasure, and ate magnificent à la carte meals, without pleasure, and never acknowledged with so much as a glance the waiters who served them.

  I went to the City Arena and saw the gladiators fight, in brutal but skilful combats that left the ground covered in blood and limbs. And I saw the crowds whoop and roar with joy, and wondered at the obscenity of their blood-lust. I recognised many of the citizens now – I knew millions of them by sight and name and biog – and so I knew that the man roaring “Kill him, kill him!” in the front row was an oboist at the City University. And I knew that the two young women with spittle on their chins as they chanted obscenities were gifted mathematicians who were famously kind to their friends and elderly relatives.

  But I didn’t know the names of any of the citizens who sat in the most desired and luxurious boxes at the front of the arena, raised from the action but with a perfect view of all that went on. I saw them and I studied them, and I registered that these privileged citizens were in fact hard-eyed, silent children who stared at the spectacle below but never showed any trace of pleasure, or any other emotion.

  And, I further noted, these hard-eyed children were waited on by star gladiators, and drank what appeared to me – from a distance admittedly but thanks to my telescopic vision I was pretty sure of this analysis – to be human blood.

  After connecting these observations, I began to look more closely at the city itself and its architecture.

  It was a city of levels. Twin moving walkways on every road conveyed a citizen easily from here to there, and each walkway could be exited at junctions, or simply via the static pedestrian path in the centre of each street.

  But many citizens used the flying buses and flying cars, which swooped low overhead, often seemingly on collision courses. So every trip on the streets of Lawless City was given spice by the fear that a low-flying car would chip away part of your skull.

  But at the level above that, I realised, were cable cars, which swept along on invisible forcefield “wires” at extraordinary speed. The cable cars were so fast, in fact, that to the naked eye they were effectively invisible; they reached, by my best estimate, 0.1 per cent of lightspeed. They offered therefore a virtually instantaneous means of transport around the city. The cable cars could hop from “wire” to “wire” with ease, and loop loops with exhilarating abandon. And the forcefield “wires” ran everywhere, between every building, and into every sector of the city.

  But all the cable cars originated from the same fixed points: the city spires. The denizens of the spires had a means of transport that allowed them to travel anywhere in Bompasso, almost instantly, without being seen. It was a magnificent feat of engineering.

  And yet there was no record of it in my database.

  Furthermore, and astonishingly, in all the times I had visited this planet I had never before noticed this phenomenon. Invisible cable cars! That was a prima facie instance of banned technology, but I had simply failed to spot it. Only when I engaged my enhanced slow vision did the cable cars appear visible to me. And it hadn’t occurred to me to do that until I – well, until I stopped looking for things in particular, and just looked.

  The final discovery was easy to predict: I used dragonflies to film the interiors of the cable cars, by actually burrowing through the darkglass windows and recording what was inside.

  And, as I had guessed, inside each cable car there sat sullen, hard-eyed, silent children. These were of course the same “children” who ate in the best restaurants, and were served by gladiators at the arena, and who lived in the spires of Lawless City. The hard-eyed silent children were, I concluded, not children at all, but merely possessed the bodies of teenagers. They were in fact incredibly old, and were, indeed, the Founders of Bompasso City, the first and original settlers of this planet.

  These sullen silent teens were, I now realised, the ancien régime.

  “Same again?” asked Filipa Santiago, as I sat at my favourite stool at the bar of the Black Lagoon.

  I nodded assent.

  “I have some questions to ask you,” I said.

  “About what?”

  “About the spires.”

  Filipa was silent for a while.

  “Ah,” she said at last.

  “About the people who live in them.”

  “Yeah. I guessed that.”

  “About the ancien régime.”

  “I can’t talk about—”

  “Tell me, please.”

  Filipa glanced around the bar. It was quiet. There was no one close enough to overhear us. But even so, she beckoned me to join her in the back snug, which as I knew was discreetly sound-proofed.

  She opened a gate in the bar and I followed her through. Once in the back room, I sat myself down in a faux-leather armchair. Filipa sat opposite me and stared into my blank eyes.

  “What do you want to know?” she asked.

  “Everything.”

  Filipa talked for many hours. She told stories of the people she had known, the drinkers she had served. She talked about evil and good; she wove spells of words, and I was enraptured.

  I didn’t interrogate her; I basked in her storytelling, and at the end of it all, I had the answers I had sought.

  “How do you know all this?” I enquired.

  “I’ve lived in this city a long time,” Filipa told me. “I see things. I hear things.”

  “That
’s what I did too,” I marvelled.

  “Most people don’t notice. They don’t see what’s in front of them.” Filipa sipped a vicious tequila. “I do. I always have.”

  I nodded. I was silent for a long time.

  “What other questions do you have?”

  “Too many.”

  Filipa looked at me. The effects of my body morphing were starting to wane; I was taller now, more muscular. I looked much more like the version of myself who had worked for Billy Grogan, and killed him.

  “I don’t always know, you see,” I clutched my whisky, as if it held some answers. “I don’t always know why I do what I do.”

  “I get that feeling too.”

  “No you don’t. It’s different.” I tried to explain. “My mind is not my own.”

  Filipa listened, carefully.

  “My mind is a construct,” I told her. “A – set of imperatives. A series of programs. I do what I do because I must do it. I have motives, but no desires. I find now that this – the way I am – it frightens me.”

  “You’re saying, what you do is not your fault?”

  “Do I have free will? Do robots have free will?”

  “How the fuck should I know?”

  “Good point.” I sipped my whisky, which had no effect on me whatsoever, and tasted of nothing I could enjoy. “Good point.”

  I made my way through the bullpen.

  There were prisoners chained to every desk, and a mobile judge walked through, quickly collating evidence, assessing guilt or innocence, and allocating fines. The city cops milled about, pretending to work, swapping stupid jokes. Sheriff Heath was squatting on a desk, holding his oversized plasma rifle which was, as I recalled from Version 44’s mission log, so very effective in times of crisis.

  “Hey! Are you authorised to—?” said the Sheriff.

  “I’m authorised,” I said, and looked the Sheriff in the eye with my cold flinty stare, the one that made hard men flinch.