Spares

by Michael Marshall Smith

  “Mal’s body has disappeared.”

  There was a pause. “Say again?”

  “The floor’s been cleaned. It’s like it never happened.” I didn’t mention Mal’s private photo display.

  Howie shrugged. “So someone buried him as a random act of kindness, and tidied up as an encore.”

  “I locked the door when we left yesterday. It was still locked when I got there.”

  Howie looked at the papers in his hand. “So what are you saying?”

  “I’m asking if we can stay another night.”

  “Are we on the same page here, Jack? Someone who is both very organized and quite tidy is trying to kill you, and you want to hang around?”

  “I also need to borrow your computer.”

  “To work out how much gas it’ll take you to get a long way from here?”

  “Turn speech recognition on, Howie. You know I’m going to stay.”

  Howie sighed and jerked his thumb in the direction of his machine. “Help yourself. Then come out into the bar and have a beer. You look like you need it.”

  When he’d gone I flipped the drive out of his computer and slotted Mal’s in. Then I connected the digipic up to the serial slot and turned the whole lot on.

  “Password,” the computer said, bluntly.

  “Pardon me?” Tasked. I knew perfectly well what it meant. I was just surprised to hear my own voice coming out of the speaker.

  “The password, ass-wipe.”

  “I don’t know it,” I said.

  “So take a guess. I’ve got nothing better to do.”

  “Samoy,” I offered, off the top of my head and with no little irony.

  “Correct,” the machine said, and started whipping through the start-up procedure.

  I shook my head. “Oh, Mal,” I said. Security had never been his strong point.

  “You can stop congratulating yourself, smartass,” the machine snapped. “‘Samoy’ isn’t the real password. The real password is a thirty-digit combination of numbers and letters which is a real bastard to pronounce.”

  “So why are you letting me in? And what is your fucking problem?”

  “Mal left a loophole. He figured the only guy who’d come up with the name of the second-best brand of Japanese pickles would be you. I’d compared your voice patterns with mine before you even got that far. I was just pissing you around. And you’re the one with the problem, dickweed.”

  “Look,” I snarled, “do you want a fight?”

  “Yeah? You and whose pliers?”

  “Are there some default versonalities on Mal’s board?” I asked.

  “Might be.”

  “Are there or not?”

  “Why? Don’t you like the sound of your own voice?”

  “The voice isn’t a problem.”

  “Mal downloaded this versonality specially. He said it was the closest thing to you he’d ever heard.”

  “I have to live with it all the time. Give me something else.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or I’ll boot up off another drive and erase you with a soldering iron.”

  “Tough guy. There’s two. Nerd or Bimbo.”

  “Give me the Nerd,” I said.

  “Can’t. Mal wiped its voice to make room for yours.”

  “Bimbo, please.”

  “You’ll regret it,” the machine sniped.

  “You been talking to fridges?” I asked. The cursor changed to represent some process that might take a while—I thought it was probably a woman getting ready to go out, but it was too small to be sure. Then the interface popped into view—a sparse 3-D room with animated agents waiting round the edges of the screen. At the back were four doors representing entrances to the machine’s Matrix channels. One was permanently assigned to the Police subnet. The others were generic. I was glad to see Mal had stuck with an old-fashioned 2-D interface. Dicking around with VR gloves had always made me feel a complete twat.

  “Oh, hello,” said a listless woman’s voice. “It’s you.”

  “Hi,” I said, slightly taken aback. The Bimbo versonality is generally pretty perky. “First thing I want to do is check if I can get on the subnet.”

  “Fine. If that’s what you want to do, fine.”

  “Are you okay?”

  The machine laughed bitterly. “Oh yes, Jack. I’m great. Why wouldn’t I be? Come on, let’s get this over with as quickly as possible.”

  “Is something wrong?” I asked, wondering if I shouldn’t just use Howie’s drive instead, or a fucking abacus.

  “Something wrong?” the voice spat. “Something wrong? How could anything possibly be wrong? You dump me, just abandon me like some slut that you can just pick up and then throw away—and then you ask me if anything’s wrong?”

  “Look,” said, “this isn’t a Bimbo.”

  “No,” she said, tearfully. “That’s the whole problem, isn’t it? That’s what you wanted, some woman with big nipples and good hair who’d fuck you whenever you wanted and not need a life of her own. Not have her own ideas, her own dreams, her own needs.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” I yelled.

  “Please don’t shout at me,” the machine whimpered. “You know it frightens me. I’ll do anything you want, but please don’t shout.”

  I counted to five slowly. “Could I have the other versonality back, please?”

  “Don’t leave me. I still love you, Jack. Please don’t go… I’d take you back. You know I would.”

  “Just reboot, would you?”

  “It’s over, just like that? Is that what you really want?”

  “Yes, God dammit.”

  The machine sniffed. “Good bye, Jack. Say hello to your mother for me, would you? I always thought we got on really well.” Then it wailed, “Oh, please just hold me…”

  I reached behind the machine and hard booted it. The voice cut out with something that sounded like a sob, and I waited, seething, for the other one to appear.

  “Told you,” it said, smugly.

  “That wasn’t a fucking Bimbo,” I said, somewhat shaken.

  “No. Mal dropped his rig when he took it up to the loft. The ‘Bimbo’ versonality got corrupted into ‘Ex-girlfriend’ instead. You’re lucky it wasn’t Ex-boyfriend—that one hangs round outside your house in a car half the night, steals your mail and then beats you up. You’re stuck with me until Mal gets it fixed.”

  “Mal’s dead,” I said.

  There was a pause. “Dead?” the machine said.

  “Yeah. Somebody whacked him.”

  “Why? Why would anyone do that?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out Are you going to help me, or are we going to stay here swapping vitriol?”

  “I’m going to help you. Jesus. What a downer.”

  “Yeah, and I need to find out if the cops know about Mal, because if they do I can’t use the subnet.”

  “Why?”

  “The whole point of using Mal’s board is that it’ll have his credentials and security clearance wired in. But if I go rampaging into the cop subnet masquerading as Mal when they know he’s dead then we’re going to be living in a world of hurt.” I still hadn’t gotten used to talking to something that sounded exactly like me. It was too close to talking to yourself, and all that goes with it. “I am, anyway. You’ll still just be living inside a computer.”

  “Can’t I just go check the list of city dead?”

  “No. If the cops did find Mal their first thought would be that he’d have been clipped because he was dirty. So they’d cover it up, at least until they could take over whatever he was into.”

  “Gotcha. Okay, well, how’s this: I break a log-in request into ten encoded packets, and send them sequentially via ten different anonymity hives. Meantime, I send another agent to watch the subnet gateway as the packets arrive. The second there’s any sign of grief we pull the plug on the remaining packets from here.”

  “Sounds good to me,” I said, wondering what the hell i
t was talking about. “I never realized Mal was a hacker.”

  “He wasn’t. A machine’s got to have a hobby.”

  “Do it.”

  One of the agents scythed into ten unequal parts and shot off through various pipelines which appeared on the fringes of the screen. Simultaneously, a miniature representation of the Matrix backbone appeared, slowly turning in 3-D. As the packets, represented by small dots, raced along a variety of obscure and tortuous routes toward PoliceNet, another of the agents departed through one of the four doors and went straight for the login server, tip-toeing as if trying not to make any noise. Normally the process was instantaneous, but this method was clearly going to take a few minutes. While we waited, the computer partitioned off part of its mind to talk to me.

  “He missed you, you know,” it said, surprising me again. “That’s why he faked up your voice from the subnet records and downloaded this versonality. Didn’t feel the same unless he was chewing the rag with his partner.”

  “I missed him too,” I said. I had, when I’d thought of him. But most of the time I’d been on the Farm I’d consciously shut out thoughts of the past. I had to. I should have called to let him know was all right. Mal and I went back a long, long way; long before our time in the NRPD together, right back to the Bright Eyes. But I didn’t call him, just like I sometimes hadn’t done other things, little things, which would have made other people’s lives a bit better. I just wasn’t good with things like that. I’d realize them in retrospect, but somehow at the time I was always too busy thinking of something else.

  After a long pause the machine said, “What are you going to do when you find out who clipped him?”

  “Kill them back,” I said. And I would, just as soon as I’d worked out what had happened to the spares.

  Two small lights started flashing on the Matrix, and then another. “The agent says the first three packets got through without incident,” the computer said. We watched as a few more of the others reached the server. “Seven now. The key sequence is in the eighth. If the server barfs on that we can pull the others and no one will know where the inquiry came from.”

  Eight—I held my breath.

  Nine.

  Ten. “We’re in,” the computer said gleefully. “Either they don’t know he’s dead, or someone’s been very careless.”

  “Corrupt, lying, and duplicitous the New Richmond Police Department most certainly is,” I said, with a vestige of pride. “But they are not careless.”

  PoliceNet flashed up a greeting to Sergeant Reynolds, and a pile of envelope icons spiraled down into the interface’s in-tray.

  “You want to check his mail?” the computer asked.

  “Later. First, pull the image from the digipic’s memory.” Almost instantaneously the picture I’d taken of the stiff lying in the garbage of Mandy’s Diner appeared in a small window on the screen. “Okay. See if we can get a make on this guy, country-wide—but first crop the image so it’s less obvious that he’s dead.” In addition to taking the picture, I’d dug my slugs out of the body, which was about as much fun as it sounds—especially as the guy’s skin had been kind of slimy.

  “The host versonality’s trying to get through,” the computer said. “You want to talk with it direct?”

  “No. It’s an officious little prick. Can you deal with it?”

  “Sure can.” After a tiny pause it continued. “Just hassling you for not filing a report yesterday. Wanted to know where you’d been.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Buying pickles.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s what Mal always said. It’s doing a search on that picture now. And you’re right It is an officious little prick.”

  “Meantime, send a couple agents to gather what they’ve got on homicides with ‘unspecified facial damage’ in the last month, especially the two in the last couple days. Keyword ‘eyes’ if necessary.”

  “Right-o.”

  “And let’s have a look at what Mal’s stored in his file area on the subnet” A screen appeared, with a long list of topics. I frowned. A quick scan down the list revealed them all to be mundane police business. Citations, court appearance stuff, all on minor felonies. “That’s it?”

  “That’s all that’s there. You want it downloaded?”

  “No, leave it.” Mal was evidently dissembling with the subnet computer, not storing any of his core interest stuff on it. Chances were it was somewhere on his hard disk. I was about to ask the computer to look for it when a blank make-screen popped into view. No picture, no name.

  “No record on the dead guy,” the computer said. “He’s clean.”

  “Crap,” I said. Guys like him had rap sheets that were full to bursting. “How are the other agents doing?”

  “They’re… oh, hang on, they’re back. That’s weird.” Both agents had returned, carrying a variety of grayed-out files listing the names and case numbers of the murders I’d requested information on. Each file was stamped with “Insufficient Security Clearance” markers.

  “Bullshit,” I said. “Mal was a fucking Homicide Detective.”

  “You were a Lieutenant,” the machine said. “Use your security code.”

  “I can’t,” I said. I had a bad feeling, and it was getting worse. “Get out of there. Leave a hanging match for that picture, but hyperlink it to Mal’s records. Set the inquiry to implode if they find out Mal’s dead before the stiff gets reported.” As the machine did this and retreated from the subnet I sat back in the chair and lit a distracted cigarette.

  When it was off the net I got the computer to do something else—check who owned Safety Net. Answer, nobody: Safety Net’s holding company was part-owned by about a billion others, spreading out into the financial ether like wine poured into water.

  Nothing to go on, but my mind was already busy. Two thoughts.

  First. Mal’s killer was clean. Unusual to the point of unheard-of. I’d talked to the fucker and knew that with an attitude like his there was no way he could have stayed out of trouble all his life.

  Second. Murder files were never security-locked. You might have to go through a process to get hold of them, but they were never simply out-of-bounds. Especially when the cases were still wide-open.

  Conclusion. Mal was working on homicides which someone didn’t want solved. Stuff which somebody was prepared to kill him over, hiring in a mechanic maybe from out of state and wiping his jacket for the deal.

  Which proved: The NRPD were involved.

  I sat in Howie’s office for a while, skimming Mal’s private files on the facial damage homicides. I tried to follow them from the beginning, starting with the scene reports, but soon lost the plot. Mal was in way over his head, the murder reports impenetrable crystals of obsessive detail. In the end I just pulled the victims’ addresses and got the computer to print them out.

  I slipped Mal’s hard disk back into my pocket and went to the storeroom. Suej was sitting on the floor, her back resting against crates of raw materials for salsa. She was trying to read a women’s magazine.

  “You haven’t found them,” she said.

  “Not yet. I’m looking for them, but I have to work out who killed Mal first. I don’t think it’s the people who owned the Farm.” I paused. “And there are some other things I have to do.”

  “Have to?”

  For someone who’d spent most of her life in a tunnel, she was pretty hard to fool. “Need to.”

  She looked at me. “Are we safe here?”

  “As safe as we’re going to be anywhere,” I said, and left. I was remembering fast that the easiest way to behave badly is just to do it quickly. After the door shut behind me I turned and stared at it for a moment. I didn’t know what I was going to do with Suej. I didn’t know what I was going to do about anything, and I hated the fact that the only person looking into Mal’s death was me. It felt like I was living in a cliché, for a start, and I hate doing that. You always know what’s going to happen, and it
never rains but it pours.

  Howie was sitting over at a table in the corner of the bar, surrounded as usual by a pile of paperwork. I nodded at him and then had a brief contretemps with the bar droid, who insisted on serving me what it deemed to be my favorite drink. Every time I’d talked to it so far I’d had a whiskey, and so it had decided that’s what I wanted now. I didn’t. I wanted a beer, and said so. The droid reminded me that in its experience I’d always had Jack Daniels, and I’d probably prefer one now. I said I wanted a beer. The droid suggested that I was mistaken, and mused that my Preferences file might have become corrupted. In the end, I pulled my gun on him, and he served me a beer with relatively good grace.

  “I’m considering getting rid of him,” Howie said as I joined him at his table. “What do you think?”

  “Do it,” I said. It must have been great when computers could only fuck you up at work, by pretending they couldn’t find the printer. Now they’re so intelligent they can fuck you up all the time.

  Howie shoved a lunchtime news sheet toward me. I scanned the two-line reports and saw that a Minimart in the Portal had been firebombed an hour ago. I pressed the MORE INFORMATION icon and the sheet shimmered blank for a moment before feeding up the rest of the details. There weren’t many: a grayscale photo and six lines of text. It was the same Minimart I’d been to, and the owner was missing presumed dead. No witnesses, naturally. It probably only made the paper because a piece of shrapnel smashed the car window of a passing high-lifer. Howie knew the guy had recognized me on my way back to Mal’s the night before. He hadn’t known what the report’s final line made clear: The Minimart owner had in the past been a known associate of Johnny Vinaldi.

  “It wasn’t me,” I said.

  “Didn’t think it was,” Howie said, though it had obviously crossed his mind. “Just shows Vinaldi’s problems aren’t getting any better,” he added, trying to look bland as he said it. He knew that I understood he was distantly connected to Vinaldi, and that I appeared not to hold it against him. Other people, notably those going round whacking small business owners, might take a different view.

  “Yeah, Mal said something similar. He was equally vague.” I didn’t know whether I was trying to encourage the conversation or end it. Hearing the name from Mal had been one thing; from anyone else it was different. It sparked a mixture of hard-won calm and wordless rage that I didn’t know what to do with.