Altered Carbon (62 page)

The Ryker
copy dug into his pockets and came up with Ortega’s cigarettes. The
packet was crushed almost flat. He extracted a cigarette, looked ruefully at it
and fitted it into his mouth. I tried not to look disapproving.

“Last
one,” he said, touching the ignition patch to it.

“The
hotel probably has more.”

“Yeah.”
He plumed out smoke, and I found myself almost envying him the addiction.
“You know, there is one thing we should be discussing right now.”

“What’s
that?”

But I knew
already. We both knew.

“You
want me to spell it out? All right.” He drew on the cigarette again and
shrugged, not easily. “We have to decide which of us gets obliterated
when this is all over. And since our individual instinct for survival is
getting stronger by the minute, we need to decide soon.”

“How?”

“I
don’t know. Which would you prefer to remember? Taking down Kawahara? Or
going down on Miriam Bancroft?” He smiled sourly. “No competition,
I suppose.”

“Hey,
this isn’t just a roll on the beach you’re talking about. This is
multiple copy sex. It’s about the only genuinely illicit pleasure left.
Anyway, Irene Elliott said we could do a memory graft and keep both sets of
experience.”

“Probably.
She said we could
probably
do a memory graft. And that still leaves
one of us to be cancelled out. It’s not a meld, it’s a graft, from
one of us to the other. Editing. You want to do that to yourself? To the one
that survives. We couldn’t even face editing that construct the Hendrix
built. How are we going to live with this? No way, it’s got to be a clean
cut. One or the other. And we’ve got to decide which.”

“Yeah.”
I picked up the whisky bottle and stared gloomily at the label. “So what
do we do? Gamble for it? Paper, scissors, stone, say the best of five?”

“I
was thinking along slightly more rational lines. We tell each other our
memories from this point on and then decide which we want to keep. Which ones
are worth more.”

“How
the hell are we going to measure something like that?”

“We’ll
know. You know we will.”

“What
if one of us lies. Embroiders the truth to make it sound like a more appealing
memory. Or lies about which one they like better.”

His eyes
narrowed. “Are you serious?”

“A
lot can happen in a few days. Like you said, we’re both going to want to
survive.”

“Ortega
can polygraph us if it comes to that.”

“I
think I’d rather gamble.”

“Give
me that fucking bottle. If you’re not going to take this seriously, nor
am I. Fuck it, you might even get torched out there and solve the problem for
us.”

“Thanks.”

I passed
him the bottle and watched as he decanted two careful fingers. Jimmy de Soto
had always said it was sacrilege to sink more than five fingers of single malt
on any one occasion. After that, he maintained, you might as well be drinking
blended. I had a feeling that we were going to profane that particular article
of faith tonight.

I raised my
glass.

“To
unity of purpose.”

“Yeah,
and an end to drinking alone.”

The
hangover was still with me nearly a full day later as I watched him leave on
one of the hotel monitors. He stepped out onto the pavement and waited while
the long, polished limousine settled to the kerb. As the kerbside door hinged
up, I caught a brief glimpse of Miriam Bancroft’s profile within. Then he
was climbing in and the door swung smoothly back down to cover them both. The
limousine trembled along its length and lifted away.

I
dry-swallowed more painkillers, gave it ten minutes and then went up to the
roof to wait for Ortega.

It was cold.

Ortega had a variety of news.

Irene
Elliott had called in a location and said she was willing to talk about another
run. The call had come in on one of the tightest needlecasts Fell Street had
ever seen and Elliott said she would only deal directly with me.

Meanwhile,
the
Panama Rose
patch-up was holding water, and Ortega still had the
Hendrix memory tapes. Kadmin’s death had rendered Fell Street’s
original case pretty much an administrative formality, and no one was in any
hurry to tackle it any more. An Internal Affairs inquiry into how exactly the
assassin had been pulled out of holding in the first place was just getting
started. In view of the assumed AI involvement, the Hendrix would come under
scrutiny at some point, but it wasn’t in the pipeline yet. There were
some interdepartmental procedures to be gone through and Ortega had sold Murawa
a story about loose ends. The Fell Street captain gave her a couple of weeks
open-ended, to tidy up; the tacit assumption was that Ortega had no liking for
Internal Affairs and wasn’t going to make life easy for them.

A couple of
IA detectives were sniffing around the
Panama Rose
, but Organic Damage
had closed ranks around Ortega and Bautista like a stack shutdown. IA were
getting nothing so far.

We had a
couple of weeks.

Ortega flew
north-east. Elliott’s instructions vectored us in on a small huddle of
bubblefabs clustered around the western end of a tree-fringed lake hundreds of
kilometres from anywhere. Ortega grunted in recognition as we banked above the
encampment.

“You
know this place?”

“Places
like it. Grifter town. See that dish in the centre? They’ve got it webbed
into some old geosynch weather platform, gives them free access to anything in
the hemisphere. This place probably accounts for a single figure percentage of
all the data crime on the West Coast.”

“They
never get busted?”

“Depends.”
Ortega put the cruiser down on the lake shore a short distance from the nearest
bubblefabs. “The way it stands, these people keep the old orbitals
ticking over. Without them, someone’d have to pay for decommissioning and
that’s kind of pricey. So long as the stuff they turn over is
small-scale, no one bothers. Transmission Felony Division have got bigger discs
to spin, and no one else is interested. You coming?”

I climbed
out and we walked along the shoreline to the encampment. From the air, the place
had had a certain structural uniformity, but now I could see that the
bubblefabs were all painted with brightly coloured pictures or abstract
patterns. No two designs were alike, although I could discern the same artistic
hand at work in several of the examples we passed. In addition, a lot of the
‘fabs were fitted out with porch canopies, secondary extension bulges and
in some cases even more permanent log cabin annexes. Clothing hung on lines
between the buildings and small children ran about, getting cheerfully filthy.

Camp
security met us inside the first ring of ‘fabs. He stood over two metres
tall in flat workboots and probably weighed as much as both my current selves
put together. Beneath loose grey coveralls, I could see the stance of a fighter.
His eyes were a startling red and short horns sprouted from his temples.
Beneath the horns, his face was scarred and old. The effect was startlingly
offset by the small child he was cradling in his left arm.

He nodded
at me.

“You
Anderson?”

“Yes.
This is Kristin Ortega.” I was surprised how flat the name suddenly
sounded to me. Without Ryker’s pheromonal interface, I was left with
little more than a vague appreciation that the woman beside me was very
attractive in a lean, self-sufficient way that recalled Virginia Vidaura.

That, and
my memories.

I wondered
if she was feeling the same.

“Cop,
huh?” The ex-freak fighter’s tone was not overflowing with warmth,
but it didn’t sound too hostile either.

“Not
at the moment,” I said firmly. “Is Irene here?”

“Yeah.”
He shifted the child to his other arm and pointed. “The ‘fab with
the stars on it. Been expecting you.”

As he
spoke, Irene Elliott emerged from the structure in question. The horned man
grunted and led us across, picking up a small train of additional children on
the way. Elliott watched us approach with her hands in her pockets. Like the
ex-fighter, she was dressed in boots and coveralls whose grey was startlingly
offset by a violently-coloured rainbow headband.

“Your
visitors,” said the horned man. “You OK with this?”

Elliott
nodded evenly, and he hesitated a moment longer, then shrugged and wandered off
with the children in tow. Elliott watched him go, then turned back to us.

“You’d
better come inside,” she said.

Inside the
bubblefab, the utilitarian space had been sectioned off with wooden partitions
and woven rugs hung from wires set in the plastic dome. Walls were covered in
more artwork, most of which looked as if it had been contributed by the
children of the camp. Elliott took us to a softly lit space set with lounging
bags and a battered-looking access terminal on a hinged arm epoxied to the wall
of the bubble. She seemed to have adjusted well to the sleeve, and her
movements were smoothly unselfconscious. I’d noticed the improvement on
board the
Panama Rose
in the early hours of the morning, but here it
was clearer. She lowered herself easily into one of the loungers and looked
speculatively up at me.

“That’s
you inside there, Anderson, I presume?”

I inclined
my head.

“You
going to tell me why?”

I seated
myself opposite her. “That depends on you, Irene. Are you in or
out?”

“You
guarantee I get my own body back.” She was trying hard to sound casual,
but there was no disguising the hunger in her voice. “That’s the
deal?”

I glanced
up at Ortega, who nodded. “That’s correct. If this comes off
successfully, we’ll be able to requisition it under a federal mandate.
But it has to be successful. If we fuck up, we’ll probably all go down
the double barrel.”

“You
are operating under a federal brief, lieutenant?”

Ortega
smiled tightly. “Not exactly. But under the UN charter, we’ll be
able to apply the brief retrospectively. If, as I said, we are
successful.”

“A
retrospective
federal brief.” Elliott looked back to me, brows raised.
“That’s about as common as whalemeat. This must be something
gigantic.”

“It
is,” I said.

Elliott’s
eyes narrowed. “And you’re not with JacSol any more, are you? Who
the fuck are you, Anderson?”

“I’m
your fairy godmother, Elliott. Because if the lieutenant’s requisition
doesn’t work out, I’ll buy your sleeve back. That’s a
guarantee. Now are you in, or are you out?”

Irene
Elliott hung on to her detachment for a moment longer, a moment in which I felt
my technical respect for her take on a more personal tone. Then she nodded.

“Tell
me,” she said.

I told her.

It took
about half an hour to lay it out, while Ortega stood about or paced restlessly
in and out of the bubblefab. I couldn’t blame her. Over the past ten days
she’d had to face the breakdown of practically every professional tenet
she owned, and she was now committed to a project that, if it went wrong,
offered a bristling array of hundred-year or better storage offences for all
concerned. I think, without Bautista and the others behind her, she might not
have risked it, even with her cordial hatred of the Meths, even for Ryker.

Or maybe I
just tell myself that.

Irene
Elliott sat and listened in silence broken only by three technical queries to
which I had no answers. When I was finished, she said nothing for a long time.
Ortega stopped her pacing and came to stand behind me, waiting.

“You’re
insane,” said Elliott finally.

“Can
you do it?”

She opened
her mouth, then shut it again. Her face went dreamy, and I guessed she was
reviewing a previous Dipping episode from memory. After a few moments she
snapped back and nodded as if she might be trying to convince herself.

“Yes,”
she said slowly. “It can be done, but not in real time. This isn’t
like rewriting your fightdrome friends’ security system, or even
downloading into that AI core. This makes what we did to the AI look like a
systems check. To do this, to even attempt this, I’ve got to have a
virtual forum.”

“That’s
not a problem. Anything else?”

“That
depends on what counter-intrusion systems Head in the Clouds is running.”
Disgust, and an edge of tears coloured her tone for a couple of instants.
“You say this is a high-class whorehouse?”

“Very,”
said Ortega.

Elliott’s
feelings went back underground. “Then I’ll have to run some checks.
That’ll take time.”

“How
much time?” Ortega wanted to know.

“Well,
I can do it two ways.” Professional scorn surfaced in her voice, scarring
over the emotion that had been there before. “I can do a fast scan and
maybe ring every alarm aboard this prick in the sky. Or I can do it right,
which’ll take a couple of days. Your choice. We’re running on your
clock.”