Version 43

by Philip Palmer

  The Sheriff didn’t flinch.

  “We’re kinda busy,” said the Sheriff at length.

  “It’s me again,” I told him.

  The Sheriff took me up to the roof, and together we surveyed the view.

  “If Hari Gilles is dead,” said the Sheriff, “which he is, because we found his true-dead body on a rooftop the night of the Revolution, then my work is done. My revenge is over.”

  “There’s more to be done.”

  “Not by me,” said Sheriff Heath, “And do you know why?”

  He paused. I waited.

  Heath cracked first: “Because I don’t give a fuck.”

  “Fair enough,” I conceded.

  “My son,” said Heath, “was the apple of his mother’s eye. Do you know what that means?”

  “It’s an idiom.”

  “It means, she thought his farts smelled like flowers. She spoiled that boy. She told him he had a destiny.”

  “Isn’t that what mothers—?”

  “This is the world I live in,” snapped the Sheriff. “It is the ‘real world’. In which there are no destinies.”

  “I don’t take your point.”

  “There are no fucking destinies. That’s my fucking point!”

  “I acknowledge you have repeated yourself, with expletives, but I still fail to comprehend your point.”

  The Sheriff sighed.

  I realised a datum; sometimes people found me exasperating.

  “Dreams, illusions,” explained the Sheriff. “Hope. That fucking shite’ll keep you going in a self-deluded bubble for a century or so. But to reach my age…” – the Sheriff spat, and his spittle flew through the air and fell two hundred storeys – “you gotta believe that life is crap, and people are shit. It’s the thing that gives you the edge.”

  “You hate your wife, for not teaching your son that life is crap and people shit?”

  “I hate her, ’cause when Alex hit fourteen he started disrespecting his mom and so she started beating him. Fuck that. So I threw her out. And then, well.” He paused. “You know, Alex once told me,” the Sheriff said, and almost laughed, but not quite. “He once told me – oh forget it. He was my fucking son. I’ll take a splash more revenge. Count me in.”

  I watched as Sergeant Aretha Jones approached the door of the disused fabricator building. She held her pistol close to her chest. Her forcefield was on. She had no backup, times were hard.

  “Door’s open,” I said from behind her, and she turned and she saw me and she fired and a pulsed plasma blast hit me in the chest. My clothes ignited; I had to pat the fire out. The shot would have incapacitated any human being; it merely scorched my metal frame, and burned off a little of my fake-flesh.

  “It’s not an ambush,” I explained.

  “You’re the one. Annie Grogan ID’d you. You’re a fucking murderer!” Aretha told me. “You killed—”

  “I killed Billy Grogan. Yes.”

  Aretha stared at me, with hate and horror and—

  Suddenly, I had a moment of blind panic. Was this really happening? Or was this another of my “Aretha” dreams?

  I forced myself to be calm. I considered my sensory input carefully, and made an assessment about the reality of this moment.

  Yes, I concluded, it was indeed—

  Aretha fired an explosive bullet straight at my head. And then she fired a second bullet, and a third, to either side.

  I effortlessly ducked the first bullet, rolled, dodged the second bullet, and took the third bullet in my right eye. It exploded inside my skull.

  “Good shot,” I said, and switched to “recuperate” mode.

  “Let’s talk,” said Sheriff Heath, and Aretha turned and saw that the Sheriff had his huge plasma rifle pointed at her.

  “Yeah, sure.” Aretha smiled, and holstered her gun.

  I rebooted. My electronic brain was in my chest, not my head, but the bullet had played havoc with my eye circuits. All my colours were screwed – red was blue and black was fluorescent. It would take me a while to get this back to normal.

  “Good to see you again, Aretha,” I said, and tried to smile.

  And it was evident that something in the way I spoke, and the way I stood, evoked a distant memory in her.

  And, too, the fact I didn’t flinch at a bullet in the skull must surely have alerted her to the fact I wasn’t human.

  Thus, Aretha stared, aghast, recognising me.

  “Shit,” said Aretha at last. “Is it really you?”

  “I am a Galactic Cop, assigned to this City,” I said, slurringly.

  “Which Cop? Any Cop? Or—”

  “I am he, who you already know,” I explained.

  “You didn’t die.”

  “I didn’t die.”

  “I thought—”

  “They blew me up. They destroyed every bit of me. But the ‘I,’ my memory base, my consciousness, that has survived,” I said.

  “You really are,” said Aretha, “the same annoying fuck.”

  “How’s the jaw, by the way?”

  “Don’t push your luck, robot head.”

  “Your skin. It feels real,” said Aretha, as my vision started to return to normal. She stroked my cheek with her hand, gently.

  “Yes.”

  “You can feel my hand, on your face?”

  “Yes.”

  “How does it feel? When I stroke you like this?”

  “It feels like a hand. On my face.”

  Aretha sighed.

  “So,” said Sheriff Heath. “Tell her what you told me. Tell her who really killed my son.”

  We were inside the old fabricator building now. The machines were stilled, for new machines in space orbit had replaced these original models. Large vats loomed above us, where the materials to furnish a city had once been manufactured. The ceilings were high; this felt more like a cathedral than a factory.

  “The anciens,” I told her, and my words echoed in the vast empty space of the room.

  “The ancien régimers?”

  “Yeah,” I confirmed. “Those guys.”

  “Those fucking freaks?”

  “The gangs never ruled this planet,” I explained. “They were allowed to operate their rackets, and kill and maim and rape; they were allowed to get out of line. But they were just chaff. The Mayor too, he’s not the power behind the throne. He’s just the front man. The patsy.”

  “Yeah, but I thought the anciens were just, you know, old fucks. Retired, past it, old brains trapped in young bodies.”

  “Not so,” I said.

  I had told her everything I had observed and deduced, and all that I had been told by Filipa – that wise, bitter, heartbroken woman who saw the world go past as she served in her bar, and who knew its darkest secrets.

  “They’re refugees, not transportees,” I explained.

  That night, in the back bar of the Black Saloon, Filipa had stared at me, with tired eyes, and she had said: “You don’t know who they are. How bad they are. They are evil. Pure evil. And no one sees it. Just as no one sees them. They look like children, but they are monsters.”

  I could hear Filipa’s words and see her face in my data recall, whilst also seeing and hearing Aretha and the Sheriff in my present-tense conversation. I could see, too, the faces of all the anciens I had observed over the last few months – those hard-eyed children who ran this world. I could see the spittle-soaked jaws of the women in the amphitheatre, cheering as a gladiator’s head was lopped off. I could see Billy Grogan’s brains splashing on to me. I could see the wards of the phantom hospital, the rows and rows of beds, the plundered corpses. I could see the dead bodies of the medics, impossibly distorted – the hearts, the ripped-off limbs, the erect cock, the strewn entrails of the multiple corpses. I could see day turning to night that day in the City Square, I could see the – whatever it was – the thing – the “like nothing” – approach like a nightmare and be there, and I could see Jaynie Hooper’s head fly off and blood spurt in a red
torrent into the black sky.

  My mind allowed me to see many things all at the same time: and I saw them all now, as I carefully explained the true nature of her world to Aretha.

  “All the other settlers of Belladonna,” I said, “were convicted felons sentenced by the court.”

  She nodded.

  “However,” I explained, “the one hundred members of the ancien régime have never been convicted of a criminal offence. They were never tried in any court. I checked.” Once Filipa had given me this lead, it had taken me twelve hours of non-stop database work to confirm it: cross-referencing every single ancien with every court ruling ever made in the history of the Solar Neighbourhood Government.

  “So what are they doing here?”

  “Fleeing.”

  I thought about what I now knew, and ached with pain at my folly at not learning it sooner.

  I had been utterly duped.

  “All the anciens,” I explained, “were once senior members of the Cheo’s Galactic Corporation. Most of them Board members, some of them senior military leaders in the Galactic Corporation military – and they’re all still alive and dwelling in Lawless City. They came to Belladonna on a ratline, an escape trail, to avoid trial for their many, appalling, unforgivable war crimes.”

  A stunned silence wrapped around us, as a corpse finds itself embraced by death.

  “Why has it taken you,” Aretha asked, “so long to figure all this out?”

  “I don’t really, truly, know,” I admitted. “But I do have a working hypothesis.”

  Imagine a conspiracy so vast and so calculating, it spans a thousand years.

  A conspiracy that corrupts the well-spring of civilisation. That bends to its will all the honourable citizens who try to do their best, and turns them into pawns of evil.

  Such a conspiracy came into being when Earth was first invaded and conquered by the man who history called the Cheo. And in the years after his victory, a hundred of his most fanatical followers created a secret society and vowed to protect each other, no matter what.

  They called their society the ancien régime, though at that time, they were all young men and women.

  These conspirators knew that empires come and go; but that, with developments in rejuve technology, people can live forever. So the anciens fought loyally and bravely and ruthlessly for the Cheo.

  But when his empire fell, they all, without a qualm, without a backward glance, escaped using secret ratlines that they had created half a millennium before.

  And they covered their tracks perfectly. False identities were created. False death reports were generated for each and every one of them, so that any war crimes investigators would look no further.

  And they programmed Earth’s remote computer to protect them, and shield them, and lie on their behalf. And, as I now realised, this same computer still, to this day, controls the entire Solar Neighbourhood. It is an AI of unsurpassed power, and it is responsible for security, data storage, and all elements of homespace security, as well as every aspect of the SN’s laissez-faire government of the Exodus Universe – including the maintenance and programming of the SN Government’s army of Galactic Cyborg Cops.

  Thus, as a result of the ancien régime’s careful hacking, each Cop had been subverted at design stage. The corruption was cunning, and subtle: it didn’t affect the operation of the Cops’ databases, or the primacy of our moral and legal prime imperatives. But the hackers had amended the way the Cops processed information.

  For we Cops have robot brains that are able to analyse vast amounts of information almost instantly. And our unique blend of computer and human intellect allows each of us to make extraordinarily accurate deductions and lateral logical leaps, and to apply the fundamental principles of investigative theory with considerable brilliance to every case.

  But at the same time, our Cop minds are loaded, like crooked dice. We are biased towards seeing only the obvious. And we are predisposed to act decisively and ruthlessly, without thought of the emotional and social consequences of our actions.

  This bias made very little difference in the ordinary course of things. Cops were designed by their human masters to serve as detectives of exceptional calibre. We possess every skill, every intellectual faculty, every talent necessary for the fulfilment of our investigative role.

  None of us, however, are programmed to look for conspiracies, secret societies, or dark deep buried secrets. And none of us were programmed to care about the emotional and moral consequences of our actions.

  And so, for all these years, I had served the law as best I could, according to the limits of my programming.

  But my programming was wrong.

  Which meant that I myself was wrong. Everything I had done was wrong, on Belladonna and on other planets. I had punished evildoers but allowed the evil to thrive. I had personally killed Dooley Grogan and Billy Grogan and caused the deaths of Hari Gilles and Kim Ji and Fernando Gracias, but I had allowed their ancien régime puppetmasters to live.

  The corollary of the hypothesis was this: I, too, am just a puppet.

  And each time I am reborn and my memories are wiped, my programming reasserts itself, and it shapes me and controls me utterly. And so I have no chance to mature emotionally, or grow up.

  One time, my database informed me, when I was Version 12, I had lived for twenty years before being killed. And, for reasons unknown to my database, soon after the death of Version 12 the SN Government passed a ruling that all Cops who weren’t killed on a mission within a five-year period had to be brainwiped anyway. Why would they do such a thing?

  I wondered if it was something to do with me – or rather, with 12. Did Version 12 challenge his programming? After killing all the gang bosses on Belladonna, did he repent? Defy his masters?

  I could surmise, but I could not know: for the knowledge in my database was irretrievably partial. I knew all the data there was to know about 12’s career; but I knew nothing of his feelings, his thoughts, his angst, or his guilt.

  It dawned on me: except with regard to military and political strategy and technical problems, I am incapable of learning from my mistakes.

  And when I realised all this, deducing and inducing the ghastly truths about the way things really were, I was overwhelmed with a powerful emotion. I recognised it; I despised it; I succumbed to it.

  Self Pity.

  “I was a rookie cop,” confessed Aretha. “Assigned to the Twenty-Fourth Canton. There’d been a double homicide. Not a mass serial killing, we didn’t need to call in you guys. But they were pretty brutal murders all the same. The suspect was an ancien. But I didn’t know that then. I just thought he was some kid. Seventeen years old, clear skin. Dead eyes. He never made eye contact. And he was seventeen, but he didn’t once look at me or my… you know.”

  “Tits,” clarified Sheriff Heath.

  “He showed,” Aretha specified, “no emotional response to my overt femininity. Even gay guys notice that stuff. We all do it. We check each other out.”

  “Not me,” chuckled Sheriff Heath, admiring Aretha’s arse.

  “Nor I,” I affirmed, though of course, I notice everything.

  “Yeah right,” Aretha laughed. “I was young, I expected some attention. But this kid was like a fucking cyborg, no offence.”

  “None taken,” I said.

  “It turned out the two victims owed him money, and he had simply slaughtered them. So I arrested the kid. We charged him. He was tried and sentenced to death. That’s the last I ever heard about it.

  “Ten years later I was doing a case in the Eighth Canton and I met an ancien. Same kid. Ten years older, but he looked exactly the same. He recognised me immediately. I took him into custody but the Mayor’s people intervened. The kid vanished, I never saw him again.”

  Her voice was calm; but her rage and resentment were written in her eyes.

  “I thought they were, you know, just rich people,” the Sheriff admitted. “Above the law. I never gave t
hem a second thought.”

  “No one ever did,” I explained. “That’s how their system operated. They hid in clear view, they lived in the tallest spires in the city. They ate in the best restaurants. They’re just part of the background furniture.”

  Aretha nodded, seeing it. “No one actually knows the anciens,” she said. “No one has an ancien friend. We don’t go to school with them. They don’t exist for us.”

  “This is what we do: we start from scratch. We reinvestigate,” I said.

  “Why?” asked Aretha.

  “We know who the fucking killers are, we know where they live,” the Sheriff reasoned.

  “Not so,” I conceded, scornfully. “We know who; but we need to know why, and how, and exactly what they have and haven’t done. We need, in short, to know the complete and unambiguous truth about the situation here,” I said. “Otherwise—” I was consumed with blind panic; but my facial muscles registered none of it: “otherwise all is chaos.”

  We walked through the streets of Lawless City – the old man, the young woman, the ancient cyborg.

  “You okay?” asked Aretha.

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “You’ve been through a lot,” she said.

  “I’ve been posing as a human for several months. It’s a strain.”

  “You killed Billy.”

  “Yes.”

  “I loved Billy. He had his faults. But—”

  “He was a criminal.”

  “He was my cousin. Well, kind of. And I loved him,” she insisted.

  “He was,” I said, with a candour that shocked myself, “my friend.”

  “They’re so so SO fucking spooky,” said the whore.

  Her name was Shania. She grinned wildly at us. She’d rejuved to be a seventeen-year-old, but there was age and wisdom in those eyes. I liked her.

  “Spooky how?”

  “Spooky how not?”

  “They don’t speak, right?”

  “They’re telepaths,” she told me confidently.