Version 43

by Philip Palmer

  “Not so,” I corrected her. “They subvocalise, the same as most humans do, though not so commonly on this planet, and the words emerge in your brainchip as if they are thoughts.”

  “Whatever. Telepathy, subvoc, it’s all the fucking—”

  “No, there’s a vital distinction to be—” I began to say.

  “Mickey?” said Aretha.

  “Yeah?”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  “You called me ‘Mickey,’ ” I marvelled.

  “He’s hard work, huh?” said Shania, looking at me, then at Aretha, and making the connection.

  “You wouldn’t believe it,” Aretha smiled.

  “We’re not—”

  “Shut up, please,”Aretha reminded me.

  “I’m just correcting—”

  “This is not a fucking court of law!” I was startled into silence by the Sheriff’s brusque tone.

  Shania turned on her smile, and looked at Sheriff Heath, in a way that acknowledged his authority. His clear blue eyes looked her over carefully. His walrus moustache almost concealed a sly smile. And she met his glance, and smiled back.

  And I realised, with astonishment, that this pretty young woman was actually attracted to the old relic.

  “What else can you tell us about the anciens?” said Sheriff Heath.

  “They’re like, you know, like I just said, oh fuck, so, weird, they don’t take pleasure. They do have – sex. They paid me, they used me. But no pleasure. I don’t know why they did it. They drink wine, they get drunk, they puke it up, it’s disgusting to watch. They mutilate each other. It’s SO disgusting. Two of my girlfriends are anciens, sweet girls; it disgusts, well it does! It really disgusts me!”

  “Huh?” said the Sheriff.

  “I said, it dis—”

  “Not that. You said, ‘Two of my girlfriends are anciens.’ How come?”

  “Yeah, well, they just are. Jane and Theresa. They used to work the streets with me. Beautiful girls. They really like, you see, beautiful girls, and beautiful boys, the younger the better, and that’s disgusting too, but not herms, they don’t go for—”

  “What are you saying, Shania?” I asked.

  Shania looked alarmed at my angry tone. “Nothing.”

  “Just tell us the truth,” Aretha said sweetly.

  “I have,” Shania said sulkily.

  “We’ll pay more money for more truth,” Aretha pointed out.

  “I guess.” Shania shrugged, and held out her wrist to me.

  I took her wrist in my teeth, and bit lightly, and recharged her credit chip via my jaw resonator. Shania grinned. “Tickles!”

  I forced a smile.

  Shania continued: “They pick the best, you see, like me. But I only did it with them that one time, not again, not ever! Not for all the money they gave me, or for ten times more. I was afraid, you see, that next time I wouldn’t come back.”

  “You’re saying they abduct whores?”

  “Not just us. They take from all castes over on the Dark Side. And they don’t just hunt wildflesh; they have farms. You know, where they grow kids? From birth? They house ’em and pay ’em and school ’em, then when they’re old enough, they slaughter ’em. Gouge out the brain, put an ancien brain in. That’s how the anciens live so long. They steal bodies.

  “Didn’t you know?”

  “I swear, I didn’t know, I had no—” Aretha said, incoherently.

  “This entire planet is founded on slavery,” I raged.

  “I didn’t, I—”

  “You suspected something?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Something evil.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But not this.”

  “I didn’t – you learn not to ask questions.”

  The Sheriff flinched at this; and said nothing, and was very very still.

  “What are we going to do?” Aretha asked, imploringly.

  “Hi,” said the receptionist, and I looked into her green eyes.

  “Hi Macawley,” I said. “Remember me?”

  She looked at me blankly. “No.”

  “Look at this,” I told her calmly, and stared, and a homunculus appeared in the air between us. A three-inch-high replica of a six-foot-five cyborg cop with plastic skin and a fixed stare.

  “Huh?” said Macawley.

  Then I made the little man move forward, his plasma pistols drawn. And beside the miniature figure appeared a petite green-eyed, clawed, snarling Macawley.

  “Cool trick,” she conceded. “Most people need a computer to do that.”

  “That was me then.” I pointed at the virtual image. “I am he. He is I. I reincarnated.”

  “I get it. In fact, I got it, seconds ago. You do that a lot, don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “Patronise people, by telling ’em stuff they’d already, like, you know, guessed?”

  “I don’t do that,” I said fiercely.

  “Duh.” She stuck out her forked tongue at me.

  “I need your help again,” I explained. “I have a mission—”

  She snarled, and her teeth were sharp, and her eyes glittered green. Her claws extended from her hands, and her brow furrowed with rage. And then she said, once more: “Duh!”

  “Sorry.” I tried again: “Clearly, you have already surmised that I have a mission, or else I would not be here. To clarify further, however: I am working with Sheriff Heath, and another police colleague, Sergeant Aretha Jones, against the evil conspiracy of war criminals which run this planet. Will you once again lend us your aid?”

  Macawley held her clawed hands in front of her snarling face and crossed the claws, and spat.

  “I will take that to indicate,” I said, “a yes.”

  “Hey, you again! Alex’s dad!” Macawley beamed at the Sheriff.

  “Hello sweetheart.” Sheriff Heath took Macawley’s hand, and pressed it to his lips. The oddly gallant gesture pleased her.

  We were back in the old fabricator building, which was now our base and, for me, a home.

  “Like old times, huh?” said Macawley.

  “A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then,” said Aretha, looking pointedly at me.

  “Oh, yeah, okay, I get that,” said Macawley, defensively. “Rebellion against Earth, gang war, a third of the city’s gangsters dead. I do keep up you know. I mean, I’m not dumb, you know – did anyone, like, think I was?” All heads present were shaken. She smiled, and a fast flicker of expressions registered: relief, annoyance, happiness, doubt, and fascination.

  Then her default “thinking-frown face with a whisper of a smile” returned, as she tried to impress us with her fundamental seriousness. “Okay then! Here, look, I’ll show you what I know. Then you can tell me the rest.”

  She conjured up on her virtual screen a holo image of the House of Pain that she, Sheriff Heath and Version 44 had attacked, and which had proved to be the location of the phantom hospital. “After the fucking cyborg – no offence – was killed that night, I ran away. Me and the Sheriff both. And later, I watched the news reports, I saw the survivors at the hospital being treated, I saw Hari Gilles get arrested. Then a month later he was out on bail and charges were dropped. Quelle surprise, it’s a wicked world, right? But I carried on investigating.”

  I was looking at her with renewed respect, and something that felt a little bit like pride.

  “The phantom hospital, see,” said Macawley, using gestures to illustrate complex facts in a way that served no purpose whatsoever, “was owned by Hari Gilles, but Hari didn’t really own it. There was a shell company. Owned by – you’ll never guess it—”

  “The anciens,” said the Sheriff, spoiling it.

  “Okay, you guessed it.”

  “They control everything,” I explained. “But we don’t know how.”

  “It’s all in the database,” Macawley told us.

  “It’s not. I’ve looked. I have direct access to the Belladonna database. The an
ciens own nothing, except their spires.”

  “But the spires, you see, this is the joy of it,” she explained, “are legal entities. They own the city and all the people in it.”

  “Not possible,” I said dogmatically.

  Macawley stared at me, with ostentatious patience. I felt as if she were waiting for the seed of a thought to land in my brain, and grow into a plant with a vegetable root, before being pulled out and cooked for lunch.

  “Clearly,” I conceded after enduring a few long moments of this stare, “it is possible.” Then, still poker-faced despite the scuff marks on my pride, I checked my database. I established that the one hundred anciens owned the spires jointly via a legal partnership. Then I cross-referenced the title deeds for every other major building in the city, and found they belonged to diverse corporations, all of which were owned by registered owners, and then checked the registered owners, who all proved to consist of grid-referenced addresses, rather than named people. And those grid-references corresponded to the addresses of the spires owned by the anciens.

  The spires owned the city!

  “How could such a thing be possible, or legal?” I said huffily.

  Macawley grinned. It was clear that she was about to get another one over on me. She knew it, I knew it, the other two both knew it. It was a sweet prospect for her and she savoured it, in my view, rather too much.

  Then she hit us: “It’s legal, ’cause the spires are sentient. They are AIs, and that’s what gives them the right to own property. The Belladonnan Quantum Computer is pretty damn powerful, no one can deny that. But the real fuck-off kick-ass computer-super-brain on this planet is the network that lives between the spires.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  “Oh,” said Aretha.

  “Fuck,” said the Sheriff.

  And Macawley grinned hugely at how smart she was, and how dumb, by contrast, were we.

  “I’m a Cop,” I said. “I investigate. I find clues. I infer, I induce, I deduce, I report on seen facts. This feels like, I don’t know, cheating.”

  “Just fucking do it,” snarled Aretha.

  I punched the wall of the spire and my hand sank into the brickwork, and my fingerspikes flew out.

  And all the data in the AI-spire flowed into my cybernetic circuits.

  “What do you have?”

  “Too much,” I said. “Too much… data.”

  Eventually, my thoughts recoalesced into something resembling sanity.

  “I think I have a way. A strategy,” I said.

  The Sheriff nodded. “A good strategy?”

  “It,” I said, making a detailed risk assessment and scenario analysis of the plan that I had just thought of, “is a reckless, dangerous and utterly foolhardy strategy.”

  The Sheriff grinned at that.

  “Then let’s do it,” he said.

  And so it began.

  I inspected my own naked body.

  The skin around my chest and abdomen was pale and puckered, where I’d had to regrow my flesh after being set on fire by Aretha. But the new skin still looked credibly human. And I’d now reverted entirely to the face and body I had used while working for Grogan. So I was tall, with an impressively ripped abdomen, and my biceps, triceps and pectorals were, frankly, awesome.

  The effect, I decided, was somewhat cartoonish: bulging muscles, rippling tattoos, and a totally hairless body. I would have preferred a leaner and more natural physique. But this, my “mercenary soldier” body, was perfect for our present purposes.

  “Eugh, gross,” said Aretha as she entered the apartment. “Clothes on, please!”

  “What have you got for me?”

  “Box, loincloth, body chains, cool armoured tunic, boots. The boots are the highest quality – there’ve been gladiators who developed foot mange from treading in so much blood.”

  “Equipment?”

  “Sword, daggers, bolas.”

  “I’ve never used a bolas.”

  “Like this.” She swung the balls around her head then threw them across the room and smashed a vase of flowers off a table. I walked across, hefted the bolas, swung it around in the air a few times. It was, my database informed me, a boleadoras – with three connected weights – and it had vicious spikes in each weight. And it was, so Aretha assured me, the perfect weapon for cutting the legs off a charging rhinoceros.

  I threw it through the air. It hurtled towards Aretha with a whistling noise. She flinched. But then the bolas changed direction in mid-air, flew back across the room, took the blooms off the flowers in a second vase, whirled around again in the air, and returned to my hand where I caught it.

  “Nice work,” said Aretha cheerfully.

  I was now, I confidently concluded, an expert in the use of this arcane weapon.

  The Sheriff staggered in, carrying a huge bag.

  “Pigs’ blood?” I asked.

  “Can’t take the risk,” the Sheriff said. “They might DNA-test. So I’ve been to the morgue, drained twelve bodies. That should do you.” The Sheriff opened up the suitcase. It contained scores of balloons of human blood.

  I, still naked, raised my arms in the air, accentuating my powerful torso muscles. And I willed my chest to crack open, and it did. The silent hydraulics split my body in half, revealing a smooth sealed cylinder inside. I did the same with my thighs and back and arse, until I was peeled like a fruit.

  “Fill me up,” I said.

  “How?” Aretha asked.

  I indicated the blood wells on the underside of my flesh. “Hook them up here. Any blade that penetrates my skin will burst a bag, and my skin will allow the blood to flow out to the surface, ideally in huge gobbets. We can put some extra blood bags in my thigh cavities, in case I run out.”

  “Don’t bleed too much, you’ll draw attention to yourself.”

  I laughed. “The human gladiators do this too. They have blood bags surgically inserted in their stomachs and under the skin. So you cut ’em, and they bleed, and bleed, and bleed.”

  “I didn’t know that,” conceded the Sheriff.

  “It’s fucking barbaric,” muttered Aretha.

  “It’s your national sport,” I told her. “The Belladonnan Gladiatorial Games.”

  The old district looked quite different now. Grogan’s Saloon and Casino had been demolished after the battle, and the site had been cleared. Vast craters in the ground marked the sites where missiles sent by Billy Grogan’s men against Gill’s Killers had overshot.

  My eyes, I knew, were bloodshot, and my gait, I was well aware, had the steadily straight and remorseless quality of a man who is high on drugs and alcohol, but who is covering it well. I stood looking at the wreckage of the Saloon for ten minutes, then laughed, and made the sign of the cross, and walked on.

  From an upstairs window, I saw a face looking down at me. I’d been spotted.

  I spent two days drinking my way through the bars of Lawless City, offering my services as a bodyguard and enforcer. No one was buying. The Gang Wars had been bloody and costly. Tent cities had grown up amidst the wreckage of the old city. Many of the men and women I saw wore black, in homage to their true-dead loved ones. Street vendors were selling cooked meat of dubious provenance. Holos of the new President of Belladonna could be seen on every street corner, promoting his new vision of the world without ever saying what that vision was.

  On the third day a girl sat on the bar stool next to me and patted me on the arm.

  “Long time no see,” purred Annie Grogan.

  “Sweetheart,” I said.

  “Where’ve you been, Tom?”

  “Around.”

  “We missed you.”

  “I missed you too darling.” I leered happily at Annie’s young, lean, tattooed body.

  “The old days are gone.”

  “I saw. The Saloon—”

  “Burned. We’re building a new one. My mother and I, we have some money left.”

  “Money from the rackets?”

  “There
are no rackets. No one has the will any more. Most of the gamblers died when they bombed the casinos. They’re calling it the Vice Wars, ’cause mainly sinful people died.”

  “I’m a sinner, I’m still alive.”

  “That’s ’cause you ran away, you gutless coward.”

  “True.”

  “And you killed my brother Billy. I saw you, remember? I was this far away when you shot him.”

  I thought hard on that one. “Nah, it wasn’t me,” I said slyly. “Must have been a ricochet. It’s easy to get confused in the heat of battle you know.”

  “I wasn’t confused. I know what I saw.”

  “Yeah, right, whatever.”

  “So what are you doing back here?”

  “Nowhere else to go, darling.”

  Annie smiled, and slid off the bar stool.

  I drew a pistol swiftly and held it to her face.

  “Don’t think about revenge, darling. I could kill you as easy as—”

  She stared at me with contempt. “I know that,” she said.

  “You and your whole fucking gang!” I snarled.

  “I know that too.”

  “I could fucking kill the whole fucking lot of you!”

  “One day,” said Annie, calmly, “one day, I’ll be Mayor of this town. And then I’ll be President of this country. And I’ll run it the way it ought to be run. So decent people can live decently, and sinners can whore and drink and take drugs and get up the next morning and go to work. That’s my vision of Belladonna. No more gangsters, because I’ll legalise vice. No more crooked politicians, because I’ll hire people who actually give a shit. No more Solar Neighbourhood dictatorship, no more Galactic Cops, no more lying cheating deceiving motherfucking traitors like you.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “Go to hell, Tom. It’s where you belong.”

  I laughed, and I slapped her on the face. My fingers left red marks on her cheeks. But Anne was uncowed. She spat in my eye and turned away and walked off.

  “Same again,” I said to the bartender, and then something hit me and I started to spasm. “Fuck,” I muttered, and got to my feet. I found something in my side, and plucked it out. An electric harpoon. I could feel my eyes were bulging; I was in the throes of electrocution. I patted my body down, looking to see if there was another harpoon in me somewhere.