Altered Carbon (2 page)

Don’t
worry, they’ll store it
. It
was a superbly double-edged piece of street wisdom. Bleak faith in the
efficiency of the penal system, and a clue to the elusive state of mind
required to steer you past the rocks of psychosis. Whatever you feel, whatever
you’re thinking, whatever you are when they store you, that’s what
you’ll be when you come out. With states of high anxiety, that can be a
problem. So you let go. Stick it in neutral. Disengage and float.

If you have
time.

I came
thrashing up out of the tank, one hand plastered across my chest searching for
the wounds, the other clutching at a non-existent weapon. The weight hit me
like a hammer and I collapsed back into the floatation gel. I flailed with my
arms, caught one elbow painfully on the side of the tank and gasped. Gobbets of
gel poured into my mouth and down my throat. I snapped my mouth shut and got a
hold on the hatch coaming, but the stuff was everywhere. In my eyes, burning my
nose and throat, and slippery under my fingers. The weight was forcing my grip
on the hatch loose, sitting on my chest like a high-g manoeuvre, pressing me
down into the gel. My body heaved violently in the confines of the tank.
Floatation gel? I was
drowning
.

Abruptly,
there was a strong grip on my arm and I was hauled coughing into an upright
position. At about the same time I was working out there were no wounds in my
chest, someone wiped a towel roughly across my face and I could see. I decided
to save that pleasure for later and concentrated on getting the contents of the
tank out of my nose and throat. For about half a minute I stayed sitting, head
down, coughing out the gel and trying to work out why everything weighed so
much.

“So
much for training.” It was a hard, male voice, the sort that habitually
hangs around justice facilities. “What did they teach you in the Envoys
anyway, Kovacs?”

That was
when I had it. On Harlan’s World, Kovacs is quite a common name. Everyone
knows how to pronounce it. This guy didn’t. He was speaking a stretched
form of the Amanglic they use on the World, but even allowing for that he was
mangling the name badly, and the ending came out with a hard ‘k’
instead of the slavic ‘ch’.

And everything
was too heavy.

The
realisation came through my fogged perceptions like a brick through frosted
plate glass.

Offworld.

Somewhere
along the line, they’d taken Takeshi Kovacs (d.h.), and they’d
freighted him. And since Harlan’s World was the only habitable biosphere
in the Glimmer system, that meant a stellar range needlecast to—

Where?

I looked
up. Harsh neon tubes set in a concrete roof. I was sitting in the opened hatch
of a dull metal cylinder, looking for all the world like an ancient aviator who’d
forgotten to dress before climbing aboard his biplane. The cylinder was one of
a row of about twenty backed up against the wall, opposite a heavy steel door
which was closed. The air was chilly and the walls unpainted. Give them their
due, on Harlan’s World at least the re-sleeving rooms are decked out in
pastel colours and the attendants are pretty. After all, you’re supposed
to have paid your debt to society. The least they can do is give you a sunny
start to your new life.

Sunny
wasn’t in the vocabulary of the figure before me. About two metres tall,
he looked as if he’d made his living wrestling swamp panthers before the
present career opportunity presented itself. Musculature bulged on his chest
and arms like body armour and the head above it was cropped close to the skull,
revealing a long scar like a lightning strike down to the left ear. He was
dressed in a loose black garment with epaulettes and a diskette logo on the
breast. His eyes matched the garment and watched me with hardened calm. Having
helped me sit up, he had stepped back out of arm’s reach, as per the
manual. He’d been doing this a long time.

I pressed
one nostril closed and snorted tank gel out of the other.

“Want
to tell me where I am? Itemise my rights, something like that?”

“Kovacs,
right now you don’t have any rights.”

I looked up
and saw that a grim smile had stitched itself across his face. I shrugged and
snorted the other nostril clean.

“Want
to tell me where I am?”

He
hesitated a moment, glanced up at the neon-barred roof as if to ascertain the
information for himself before he passed it on, and then mirrored my shrug.

“Sure.
Why not? You’re in Bay City, pal. Bay City, Earth.” The grimace of
a smile came back. “Home of the Human Race. Please enjoy your stay on
this most ancient of civilised worlds. Ta-dada-DAH.”

“Don’t
give up the day job,” I told him soberly.

The doctor
led me down a long white corridor whose floor bore the scuff marks of
rubber-wheeled gurneys. She was moving at quite a pace and I was hard pressed
to keep up, wrapped as I was in nothing but a plain grey towel and still
dripping tank gel. Her manner was superficially bedside, but there was a
harried undercurrent to it. She had a sheaf of curling hardcopy documentation
under her arm and other places to be. I wondered how many sleevings she got
through in a day.

“You
should get as much rest as you can in the next day or so,” she recited.
“There may be minor aches and pains, but this is normal. Sleep will solve
the problem. If you have any recurring comp—”

“I
know. I’ve done this before.”

I
wasn’t feeling much like human interaction. I’d just remembered
Sarah.

We stopped
at a side door with the word
shower
stencilled on frosted glass. The
doctor steered me inside and stood looking at me for a moment.

“I’ve
used showers before as well,” I assured her.

She nodded.
“When you’re finished, there’s an elevator at the end of the
corridor. Discharge is on the next floor. The, ah, the police are waiting to
talk to you.”

The manual
says you’re supposed to avoid strong adrenal shocks to the newly sleeved,
but then she’d probably read my file and didn’t consider meeting
the police much of an event in my lifestyle. I tried to feel the same.

“What
do they want?”

“They
didn’t choose to share that with me.” The words showed an edge of
frustration that she shouldn’t have been letting me see. “Perhaps
your reputation precedes you.”

“Perhaps
it does.” On an impulse, I flexed my new face into a smile.
“Doctor, I’ve never been here before. To Earth, I mean. I’ve
never dealt with your police before. Should I be worried?”

She looked
at me, and I saw it welling up in her eyes; the mingled fear and wonder and
contempt of the failed human reformer.

“With
a man like you,” she managed finally, “I would have thought they
would be the worried ones.”

“Yeah,
right,” I said quietly.

She
hesitated, then gestured. “There is a mirror in the changing room,”
she said, and left. I glanced towards the room she had indicated, not sure I
was ready for the mirror yet.

In the
shower I whistled away my disquiet tunelessly and ran soap and hands over the
new body. My sleeve was in his early forties, Protectorate standard, with a
swimmer’s build and what felt like some military custom carved onto his
nervous system. Neurachemical upgrade, most likely. I’d had it myself,
once. There was a tightness in the lungs that suggested a nicotine habit and
some gorgeous scarring on the forearm, but apart from that I couldn’t
find anything worth complaining about. The little twinges and snags catch up
with you later on and if you’re wise, you just live with them. Every
sleeve has a history. If that kind of thing bothers you, you line up over at
Syntheta’s or Fabrikon. I’ve worn my fair share of synthetic
sleeves; they use them for parole hearings quite often. Cheap, but it’s
too much like living alone in a draughty house, and they never seem to get the
flavour circuits right. Everything you eat ends up tasting like curried
sawdust.

In the
changing cubicle I found a neatly folded summer suit on the bench, and the
mirror set in the wall. On top of the pile of clothes was a simple steel watch,
and weighted beneath the watch was a plain white envelope with my name written
neatly across it. I took a deep breath and went to face the mirror.

This is
always the toughest part. Nearly two decades I’ve been doing this, and it
still jars me to look into the glass and see a total stranger staring back.
It’s like pulling an image out of the depths of an autostereogram. For
the first couple of moments all you can see is someone else looking at you
through a window frame. Then, like a shift in focus, you feel yourself float
rapidly up behind the mask and adhere to its inside with a shock that’s
almost tactile. It’s as if someone’s cut an umbilical cord, only
instead of separating the two of you, it’s the otherness that has been
severed and now you’re just looking at your reflection in a mirror.

I stood
there and towelled myself dry, getting used to the face. It was basically
Caucasian, which was a change for me, and the overwhelming impression I got was
that if there was a line of least resistance in life, this face had never been
along it. Even with the characteristic pallor of a long stay in the tank, the
features in the mirror managed to look weather-beaten. There were lines
everywhere. The thick cropped hair was black shot through with grey. The eyes
were a speculative shade of blue, and there was a faint jagged scar under the
left one. I raised my left forearm and looked at the story written there,
wondering if the two were connected.

The envelope
beneath the watch contained a single sheet of printed paper. Hardcopy.
Handwritten signature. Very quaint.

Well,
you’re on Earth now. Most ancient of civilised worlds
. I shrugged and scanned the letter, then got dressed
and folded it away in the jacket of my new suit. With a final glance in the
mirror, I strapped on the new watch and went out to meet the police.

It was
four-fifteen, local time.

The doctor
was waiting for me, seated behind a long curve of reception counter and filling
out forms on a monitor. A thin, severe-looking man suited in black stood at her
shoulder. There was no one else in the room.

I glanced
around, then back at the suit.

“You
the police?”

“Outside.”
He gestured at the door. “This isn’t their jurisdiction. They need
a special brief to get in here. We have our own security. ”

“And
you are?”

He looked
at me with the same mixture of emotions the doctor had hit me with downstairs.
“Warden Sullivan, chief executive for Bay City Central, the facility you
are now leaving.”

“You
don’t sound delighted to be losing me.”

Sullivan
pinned me with a stare. “You’re a recidivist, Kovacs. I never saw
the case for wasting good flesh and blood on people like you.”

I touched
the letter in my breast pocket. “Lucky for me Mr.Bancroft disagrees with
you. He’s supposed to be sending a limousine for me. Is that outside as
well?”

“I
haven’t looked.”

Somewhere
on the counter, a protocol chime sounded. The doctor had finished her
inputting. She tore the curling edge of the hardcopy free, initialled it in a
couple of places and passed it to Sullivan. The warden bent over the paper,
scanning it with narrowed eyes before he scribbled his own signature and handed
the copy to me.

“Takeshi
Lev Kovacs,” he said, mispronouncing my name with the same skill as his minion
in the tank room. “By the powers vested in me by the UN Justice Accord, I
discharge you on lease to Laurens J. Bancroft, for a period not to exceed six
weeks, at the end of which time your parole status will be reconsidered. Please
sign here.”

I took the
pen and wrote my name in someone else’s handwriting next to the
warden’s finger. Sullivan separated the top and bottom copies, and handed
me the pink one. The doctor held up a second sheet and Sullivan took it.

“This
is a doctor’s statement certifying that Takeshi Kovacs (d.h.) was
received intact from the Harlan’s World Justice Administration, and
subsequently sleeved in this body. Witnessed by myself, and closed circuit
monitor. A disc copy of the transmission details and tank data are enclosed.
Please sign the declaration.”

I glanced
up and searched in vain for any sign of the cameras. Not worth fighting about.
I scribbled my new signature a second time.

“This
is a copy of the leasing agreement by which you are bound. Please read it
carefully. Failure to comply with any of its articles may result in you being
returned to storage immediately to complete the full term of your sentence
either here, or at another facility of the Administration’s choice. Do
you understand these terms and agree to be bound by them?”

I took the
paperwork and scanned rapidly through it. It was standard stuff. A modified
version of the parole agreement I’d signed half a dozen times before on
Harlan’s World. The language was a bit stiffer, but the content was the
same. Bullshit by any other name. I signed it without a blink.