Version 43

by Philip Palmer

  The lift doors opened, and a different uniformed porter got out.

  “They’re ready for me?”

  There was no answer. I followed the porter into the lift.

  The porter pressed the large button marked Penthouse. The lift lurched again, and began moving upwards at the same crazy speed. My instruments told me I was moving at .05 lightspeed, which was fast, for a lift.

  But after a while it occurred to me the journey was taking a long time. Which floor was I on? I checked my satnav, and got a jumbled account of my location. I tried again, and realised – I was the wrong side of the satellite which I was using to locate myself.

  The lift doors opened, and I stepped out. And all around me was the blackness of space, lit by a universe of stars and galaxies.

  I stepped out into space, and stood on solid ground even though there was nothingness all around me. An invisible floor? Or a forcefield of some kind? I took a breath. Oxygen/nitrogen/carbon dioxide – yes, it was breathable air, the same blend as was found on Belladonna. I took another step forward, and my sensors confirmed I was experiencing false gravity, even though my eyes told me I was walking in outer space.

  I carried on walking. At the end of this invisible air-filled corridor was a bright light. I formed an hypothesis: the spires were also space elevators, connected to satellites in space. And the corridor was made up of a forcefield which was suspended in mid-space, and subject to some kind of artificial gravity effect.

  Nice trick.

  I stepped into the light, and was in the Penthouse Suite of the Barrington Hotel, which was contained in a medium-sized satellite in orbit around the planet of Belladonna.

  “Welcome,” said the ancien boy who was my host, and who had greeted me on my arrival at the Penthouse. His name was Vishaal, and he had the body of a beautiful child, with jet-black hair and brown skin and a face that never smiled. His rejuve had frozen him at his body’s original age, about sixteen – an adult, but barely.

  “This is a spaceship?” I asked.

  “It’s an orbiting living area. We have a hundred such space stations orbiting Belladonna, each of them linked by a space elevator cable to a spire.”

  “I never knew that.”

  “We don’t advertise.”

  There were of course thousands of satellites and space stations and solar panel arrays orbiting Belladonna. All the fabricator plants had been moved into orbit fifty years ago, and all the dirty industrial processes were conducted out here in space, or on one of the Industrial Zones on the nearest six of the twelve moons.

  From a distance, the multiple rings of Belladonna were a marvel. Close up, though, it was evident the rings were made up of space junk, space factories, and space stations. It was, I realised, not so very surprising that the anciens had managed to conceal their orbiting penthouses amongst all this jumble.

  “Are you augmented?” Vishaal asked.

  “Of course,” I said.

  Vishaal nodded acknowledgement.

  “How and when?”

  “I was a soldier,” I told him. “Then I became a mercenary and fought in the war against the Damnations, until the SN Government intervened. That’s when I had the major modifications.”

  “You are no longer human.”

  “Still human.”

  “No human being could—”

  “They put hardmetal in my bones. I have healing factor. I have a part-artificial heart, to speed my metabolism. My physique is genetically engineered as are the neurones in my brain.” A x-ray or tomograph scan would confirm all these biological facts, thanks to the pseudo-body layer that was wrapped around my metal and cybernetic core.

  “You were a fool,” Vishaal informed me, “to get yourself sentenced to death.”

  “Hey, I’m superhuman, don’t mean I’m smart,” I said.

  “Our theory is that you used the Games to draw yourself to our attention,” said Vishaal.

  “Now why the fuck would I want to do that?”

  “So we’d notice you.”

  “Because?”

  “Because we have the power to advance your career. You could be a gang boss.”

  “I’d rather be President.”

  Vishaal considered that sombrely. “That’s not out of the question either,” he said. “We need a leader. Someone who can unite the nation.”

  I nodded, then mimed incredulity.

  “Why?” I asked.

  And then Vishaal actually did smile. “Because these are our people, and we love them.”

  “I am Livia,” said a wide-eyed fourteen-year-old child.

  “I’m the gladiator,” I told her.

  “I know.”

  “Nice place.” Vishaal had brought me to the top of the space station, to an observation area with the red and yellow and veined-blue globe of Belladonna visible through the hardglass. We had been joined there by Livia, who, I suspected, was the more senior of the two.

  The architecture of the room was entirely virtual, with invisible forcefields acting as tables, chairs, bunks and staircases. When I had first entered, I found it disorientating: how was I supposed to know where the floor was? But then I took a step forward and met solid ground. And I took a second step, raising my foot higher as if mounting a set of stairs, and my foot met solid ground again.

  Now, as I spoke to the serious-faced Livia, there were sleeping children floating in mid-air all around me. Elsewhere in the room, other children walked through air to reach mid-air virtual work stations. Computer screens flickered, and flew across the room at a subvocalised command. I deduced that the forcefields were smart, and sensitive to human motion: so if I wanted to walk upwards and took a part-step, the air would “know” and would support me. Or if I wanted to lie down, the air would become a hard bunk.

  “Champagne?” said Vishaal, who stood near but not too near to Livia.

  “Beer,” I said, and a beer bottle arose from nowhere and floated towards my hand.

  I glanced and saw that Vishaal and Livia were now each holding a glass of champagne.

  “How do you do that?” I asked, and they did not answer.

  I figured it out, with the help of a swift tomograph of the room: floating mirrors concealed the presence of floors, bulkheads, and cupboards. All the “real” furniture must be subvocally controlled, and once the cupboard containing the drinks opened up, tractor beams had conveyed my beer across to me, as if from nowhere.

  It was a magnificent trompe l’oeil, but it was not, by any means, magic.

  I started to relax.

  “Who the fuck are you guys?” I asked belligerently.

  “We are the masters and mistresses of Belladonna,” Livia told me.

  “You’re just a bunch of fucking kids,” I said.

  “We want you to come and work for us,” Vishaal said.

  “Doing what?”

  Suddenly the ghost of Billy Grogan appeared in front of me. He stared at me with puzzled eyes. Then his head exploded and his brains splashed in my face.

  I felt an urge to flinch, but did not.

  “Yeah, that was down to me,” I conceded.

  “This man worked for us,” Livia said. “He was killed by you. You have to answer for that. Furthermore, as a result of a battle in which you took part, our three other gang leaders were killed. We now have no one we trust working for us on Belladonna.”

  “You ran the gangs?”

  “We run everything. This is our planet. But we need underlings to represent us to the masses,” Livia told him.

  “You’re asking me to be an underling?”

  “We are,” Livia said.

  “You want me to run Billy’s rackets for you?”

  “All the rackets. All the gangs. You are an impressive man, Mr Dunnigan.”

  “Not really. I fucked up.”

  “Why did you kill Billy Grogan?” Vishaal asked.

  “That’s why I fucked up,” I conceded. “I thought I’d take over his gang. But I judged it wrong. All Billy’s
men were dead, we were alone on the roof, so I put my gun to his head, and BOOM. But then I realised the sister was there, she’d seen the whole damned thing. I didn’t have the guts to kill her – yeah, I know, that was pathetic of me – so I had to go on the run. Then the fucking sister turned me in! That’s how I ended up as a gladiator.”

  “You should have killed the sister,” Livia chided.

  “She was only a kid. I had a daughter, same age as that, when they first sent me for brain-frying. You have to draw the line somewhere; I drew it there.”

  “We don’t approve of such weakness,” said Livia.

  “Hell, you’re only a kid yourself,” I sneered.

  “Only in body. I have lived, in all, twelve hundred years.”

  I shrugged; acknowledging the point. Livia was a millenarian, and for most of her years alive, she had been steeped in evil. So her soft blonde hair and cute blue eyes and faintly lisping child-voice gave no measure of the darkness of her soul.

  “And getting caught,” added Vishaal. “That was highly unintelligent too.”

  “Yeah, I know, fucking dumb.”

  “But you knew, didn’t you?” Vishaal said. “You knew that Billy worked for us, and that we’d be needing a replacement for him. And you knew we would be at the Games. And you wanted us to notice you.”

  “I’m not that devious.”

  “You’re exactly that devious.”

  I grinned. Then I decided it was time to switch my mood.

  “I don’t want to run your fucking rackets.” I said fiercely, “I want my own planet. I want to be immortal. I want to be a god.”

  Livia and Vishaal made no visible response. But the long pause that followed was an indication of how startled they were by my words.

  “You want to be like us?” Livia said, mockingly.

  “Yeah, I do. I’m no fucking patsy. I found you, I put you on my hook. I know who you are, and what you’ve done. And I want to join you.”

  “Who are you really, Mr Dunnigan?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We have evidence,” said Livia, in a sweet voice, “that Tom Dunnigan was killed during the fifty-fifty. You are an impostor.”

  I laughed. “Bullshit!”

  “Take a look.” Livia conjured up a virtual screen, and found a file. She opened the file.

  In front of us, hovering in air, was the face of a man who I recognised: it was myself. Handsome, cruel, powerful. I was wearing a quantum teleportation suit. My features were sober, anxious.

  Then suddenly the features began to melt. The eyeballs ran down my cheeks like butter on a hot day. My flesh began to peel off. Tom Dunnigan disintegrated, and tears merged on his cheeks with his melted eyeballs, and he screamed but the scream died and became a strangled croak. And then he was dead, puddled on the floor like the skin shed by a snake.

  “How the fuck did you get hold of this?” I asked.

  “This image was deleted from the database,” said Vishaal, “by an expert hacker. It was replaced by an image of Tom Dunnigan surviving.”

  “Yeah, I did that.”

  “You faked your own survival?”

  “Fuck no,” I said. “I faked Dunnigan surviving, then I stole his identity. This body I’m wearing,” I shrugged with the body, “is a clone replica of Tom Dunnigan. The real guy died, just like you saw.” I waited a moment for this to sink in, then added, tauntingly, “You got that? Or am I going too fast for you?”

  “Who are you really?” Livia asked, with a hint of respect in her tone.

  “Does it matter?”

  “We would like to know.”

  “You’re aiming to kill me, I take it?”

  “Of course. You lied to us, as well as inconveniencing us by killing Billy Grogan. That’s why we brought you here. To interrogate you, then execute you.”

  “You’ll have a fight on your hands.”

  “You are powerless,” said Vishaal, with an amused catch in his voice.

  I leaped, and karate-struck him in the throat. I missed. Vishaal was elsewhere.

  “Fuck,” I said.

  Livia smiled and disappeared and reappeared behind me and slashed my face with her nails. Blood trickled down my cheeks. I back-punched her, and threw a dazzling series of powerful punches and kicks, all of which missed. Livia reappeared a few feet away from me. There were now two of her.

  “How do you do that?”

  “Tell us who you are,” said Livia, “before we kill you.”

  “You don’t want to kill me,” I said, and a wolfish smile crept to my lips. “We can do business together.”

  “You are an impostor.”

  “Of course I’m a fucking impostor. I’m on the run, same as you. I am one of you.”

  I was relaxed now, as if quietly triumphant.

  “Explain.”

  “I was a general,” I said, and my tone had changed now. I assumed an easy authority, of the kind that came from centuries of experience as a leader of Soldiers, “in the Cheo’s army. I was sentenced to death for my war crimes, and I went on the run. I had a face transplant, and new eyes and new fingerprints. And then I had my brain transplanted into a clone’s body and came here with Tom Dunnigan. It was fifty-fifty that one of us would die in the jump, and luckily for me, it was him. If we’d both lived, well, that’s another story. But he died, and here I am.”

  I had their attention now.

  “I go way back,” I continued, “just as you do. I fought in the Last Battle, on the losing side, and I can prove it. Ask me anything. Anything at all about the Cheo, and his army, and what colour uniform I wore, and where we did our basic training, and how we ran the Doppelganger Robots, and which planets we destroyed, and which humans I massacred. I’m one of you.”

  Vishaal glanced at Livia. For the first time so far, there was a whisper of expression in their faces, the tiniest hint of confusion.

  Vishaal turned his eerie gaze back to me.

  “You’re a war criminal?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What is your name?”

  “General Argobast Durer.”

  “You’re General Durer?” said Livia, astonished.

  “Yes.”

  “I slept with you once,” Livia said primly.

  “I thought so. You’re Dr Livia Randall?”

  “Yes.”

  “We drank champagne. Brut, 87. We were staying on a Dyson Jewel, the Koh-i-Noor. I was a redhead then, a big burly son of a bitch. You were a blonde. I ate steak, you ate oysters, and lobster straight from the pan. You gave me the finger gesture and I went back to your cabin and we fucked till dawn. Then we put on our body armour and flew through space for a couple of hours.”

  “All of that is correct.”

  “I’m telling the truth. I’m Argobast Durer.”

  “Hello Argo, it’s nice to see you again,” said Livia, and smiled, and raised a finger, and beckoned, the time-honoured “shall we fuck?” signal.

  And I felt my moral code being assailed, and undermined. I had to remind myself that Livia was a woman of more than a thousand years of age, who just happened to be wearing the shell of a fourteen-year-old girl.

  I grinned. “You got it,” I said, leeringly, and triumphantly.

  Afterwards, Livia and I flew through space, and reminisced via our MIs about the old days.

  I was a past master at staying in character. And of course, I knew everything there was to be known about General Argobast Durer. Durer had been captured, after a hundred years on the run, by a Galactic Cop. And, after being sentenced to death, his memories had been recorded and transferred to the Earth Computer, and, from there, into the databases of all the Galactic Cops.

  And then Durer had been sent out into space in a leaking spacesuit. Once the suit achieved a state of vacuum, he died. But it was a deliberately slow process.

  Three cyborg Cops flew beside him for a month, until his vital signs ceased. Then they hurled his body into the nearest sun. Thus Argobast Durer had died, after
a fair but brief trial; a death that was cruel yet much deserved. But the memories of his life lived on in the cybernetic memories of each and every Galactic Cop, stored in our databases with tens of thousands of other alternate identities.

  And now, armed with those memories, I could count myself as a trusted associate of the anciens. For, after all, I could justifiably claim to be an ancien myself.

  It was, I mused, all going according to plan.

  “It’s so great out here,” trilled Livia, and I could not but remember the shy beauty of this young woman who I had caressed and fucked earlier, and the softness of her young skin, and the sweetness of her young eyes and the sleekness of her young hair, and the warmth of her young mouth. And I could not stop myself wondering about the young, beautiful, warm teenage girl who had once owned and inhabited this body.

  Who was she?

  What had she been like?

  And how much joy had she managed to squeeze out of her brief life, until the moment when the aged and evil Livia had kidnapped her, and gouged out her brain, and stolen the beauty of this body for herself?

  “What are they like?”

  “Scary.”

  “How many of them?”

  “I saw about ten. They live like gods.”

  I had briefed Aretha, Macawley and the Sheriff on my discoveries. They were now looking at me warily, as if I’d been away for a long long time.

  The Sheriff gave me an admiring glance. “You did well, in the arena.”

  “You saw me fight?”

  “I wouldn’t’ve missed it for the world.”

  “It was necessary,” I said, in a dead neutral tone.

  “It was magnificent,” the Sheriff assured me.

  I risked a grin. “I guess so,” I admitted.

  Macawley shared my grin, then resumed her seriously-intent-and-listening-hard look.

  After arriving back from my trip to the anciens, I had slept solidly for about twelve hours, even though in theory I didn’t need to sleep. And during that sleep, I’d had another dream: a nightmare in which I was nailed to a cross and was being flayed by the acid tongues of rats. My database had briefed me on dream imagery but I saw no conceivable interpretation that could make sense of the dream. I was no Messiah, Earth-Rats did not have acid on their tongues, and I had no fear of being flayed. And I cursed the robotic designers who had chosen to make me capable of feeling pain even in my dreams.