city blues 02 - angel city blues (11 page)

I waved my cigarette toward the thing on the table. “Is that who I think it is?”

Delaney nodded. “It’s Priz.”

And I suddenly understood his caution. The legalities surrounding Turing Scions are dicey at the best of times, but it was a class-three felony to record a Scion from the mind of a convicted criminal. Just having the thing in his possession could cost Delaney his badge. If he’d participated—even indirectly—in the creation of the Scion, he could be looking at time behind bars.

Of course, having it in
my
possession wouldn’t be particularly healthy either.

“Alright,” I said. “I assume you have some kind of reason for bringing this to me.”

“Priz needs your help,” Delaney said. He gestured toward the object, so I wouldn’t have any doubt about which Priz he was referring to.

I stubbed out the butt of my cigarette and resisted the temptation to roll my eyes. “Great. You’ve got a brain in a can, and it wants to hire me.”

“I wouldn’t put it quite that way,” Delaney said. “But that’s about the size of it.”

This time, not rolling my eyes took a supreme effort of will. “And what will the lovely Priscilla and I be
doing
together? Will we be clipping coupons and swapping recipes? Or shall we wear masks and skintight costumes, and fight crime from our secret fortress under the polar ice cap?”

When Delaney spoke, his voice had a steely edge that sliced cleanly through my sarcasm. “Priz was married. I know she didn’t seem like a family-kind of person, but she was married—
happily
married—to a very nice lady named Rhiarra. A technician in the LAPD Cybercrimes Division. Smart. Quiet. Friendly.”

I suddenly wanted this conversation to be over. I had no desire whatsoever to hear what Delaney was going to say next.

“There were three of them,” he said. “Three perpetrators, all male. When they were finished raping her, they broke her neck. By the time Priz got there and called the paramedics, it was too late. Rhiarra was brain dead. Her body died a few hours later, in a trauma tank at Jefferson Park Emergency.”

Delaney nudged the Turing Scion a few centimeters closer to my side of the table. “Priz tracked down two of the perps, and put slugs in their heads. She was on the trail of the third attacker when forensics linked her to the shootings of the first two perpetrators.”

“And that’s where
I
come in,” I said. “I’m supposed to help her hunt down the one that got away.”

Delaney nodded.

“And what
then
?”

Delaney gave me a puzzled look.

“If I find the third attacker, what am I supposed to do with him? Do I turn him over to the police? Or do I put a bullet between his eyes?”

“You’ll have to talk to Priz about that.”

“Forget it. I’m not plugging that damned thing in.”

Delaney stood up and straightened his jacket. “I’ve taken up enough of your time, Mr. Stalin. Thank you for agreeing to see me. I won’t be bothering you again.”

“I’m not kidding,” I said. “That thing is going down the garbage grinder, so you might as well take it with you.”

Delaney gave me a rueful smile. “No. I’ve done what Priz asked me to. What happens now is up to you.”

When he was gone, I gazed at the Turing Scion for a long minute. In its disconnected state, the internal memory matrix would be inert. The digital reconstruction of Dancer’s mind would be inactive, or perhaps asleep. But the instant it was interfaced with an active computer node, the simulated mind would wake up. It would start to think, and talk, and plan.

The very idea made my skin crawl.

Looking at the Scion dredged up thoughts of John, and Maggie, and other things better left forgotten. No need to wander down Memory Lane.

Let’s just say that I’d had experiences with Scions before, and I didn’t like them. Not at all. I didn’t particularly like Priscilla Dancer either.

There are rare situations, where two inherently unpleasant things can combine to create something positive, but my gut told me that this wasn’t going to be one of those paradoxical cases.

I didn’t owe Dancer anything. She’d never shown me any particular kindness, and she’d certainly never done me any favors.

No… That wasn’t quite true. She
had
done me a favor once. She’d given me access to the LAPD case files for a closed murder investigation. She hadn’t done it gracefully, and she’d subjected me to her usual torrent of curses and veiled threats. But she’d come through with the information I’d needed.

Then, there was the matter of her two phone messages from the previous evening. I’d blown them off, assuming that Dancer had been calling to muscle me a bit, on behalf of Bruhn. But she’d been calling from the police detention facility, where she’d been held until the brainlock procedure was carried out.

I didn’t know the protocol for granting phone access to condemned prisoners, but it couldn’t be very liberal. Somehow, Dancer had managed to wrangle two calls to me in the final hours of her conscious life, and I had ignored them both.

What had she been trying to ask me? (Or tell me?) Maybe she’d wanted to see me face-to-face, to share the story of her wife’s assault, and convince me to go after the third attacker. I didn’t know.

A low chime announced that House’s lockout period had expired. His housekeeping cameras and audio sensors were back on line.

I blinked, and tore my eyes away from the Turing Scion. Maybe I
did
owe Dancer something. Not a lot. But something…

CHAPTER 7

Tommy Mailo lowered the cranial rig onto my head and spent a half-minute or so fiddling with the placement of the three feedback pads. Two of the tiny ceramic disks were centered on my temples, and the third was positioned just above the knob of bone where my spinal column joined my skull.

The cranial set was light, made from some sort of extruded carbon fiber, with enough flexibility to adapt to the contours of my lumpy and oversized noggin.

“You don’t want to know what this thing costs,” Tommy said.

I shrugged. “My client’s footing the bill, and she can certainly afford it.”

Tommy lifted an eyebrow. “
She
?”

“Yes,” I said. “
She
. But don’t overload your motherboard. This is strictly a professional relationship.”

Tommy eyed the final position of the head rig and then turned his attention to the SCAPE deck. “Yeah, well there are professional relationships, and then there are
professional
relationships.”

“You may find this hard to believe,” I said, “but not everything in the world is about sex.”

Tommy waved in the general direction of the odd triangular chip lying on his workbench. “Maybe not,” he said. “But from what I understand, something like seventy-percent of the street market for SCAPE technology is geared toward porn. When we plug that chip in, you might find yourself piloting a suborbital shuttle through the ionosphere, or crossing blades with a world class fencing master. No way to find out until we hit the
play
button. I’m just saying there’s a better than even chance that you’re going to find yourself humping some B-grade porn starlet in a bathtub full of microlube. Assuming, of course, that you’re
male
.”

“What does that mean?”

“Just what it sounds like,” Tommy said. “SCAPE is about capturing and reliving sensory experiences—either your own, or someone else’s. For the duration of the recording, you’re basically going to inhabit the body of the POV subject.”

“P-O-V? As in point of view?” I was familiar with the term, but I had never heard it used in this particular context.

Tommy tapped a series of soft keys on the faceplate of the SCAPE deck. “Right. Point of view. The person who made the recording. Whose experiences are encoded on the chip.”

“So, I could be about to relive something that was originally experienced by a woman?”

Tommy shrugged without looking up. “Given the gender distribution of the human species, the odds are about fifty-fifty that you’re going to find out how it feels to own a vagina.”

I tried to wrap my head around the idea. “I think this is getting way too weird for me.”

“I’m with you on that,” Tommy said. “This is exactly what I don’t like about SCAPE. Nearly everything you can do with it tends to up the freaky quotient by a factor of ten.”

I eyed the triangular chip. “I’m not sure I’m ready to know what’s on that thing.”

Tommy rummaged around in the laminated plastic box that the SCAPE deck had been packed in, and retrieved a second triangular chip, emblazoned with the iridescent green logo of the unit’s manufacturer. “Here we have your basic marketing demo. Three minutes of carefully polished experiential recordings, designed to give consumers a preview of what this technology can deliver. And if it makes you feel any better, I deliberately selected a demo with only male POVs, so you won’t have to deal with gender displacement issues your first time out of the box.”

“I appreciate that,” I said.

Tommy held up the demo chip and looked me in the eye. “Are you ready to do this?”

I swallowed. I wasn’t ready. The more I heard about SCAPE, the less I liked about the whole damned thing. But I needed to know what was on the chip that LAPD had found in Leanda Forsyth’s apartment. Maybe it was related to her disappearance, and maybe not. Short of asking (or paying) someone else to check it out for me—which struck me as a cowardly way to do business—there was really only one way to find out.

My eyes were drawn to the demo chip in Tommy’s hand. That one should be easy enough. It was designed to attract customers, not to scare them off, so the content had to be fairly innocuous.

I swallowed again. “Go.”

Tommy fed the chip into the loading slot on the side of the SCAPE unit. A couple of seconds later, the background of the touch panel winked from blue to green.

I gave Tommy a final nod, and he reached for the
play
tab.

There is no sense of transition at all.

In a fraction of a heartbeat, Tommy Mailo’s workshop is gone.

I am several hundred meters above a moonlit ocean, strapped into the skeletal framework of a microlight glider, cruising through a star-filled sky. The gossamer wings of my craft ripple delicately in the thermal currents rising from the sea.

The night breeze is warm against my cheeks, and it still carries a faint tang of salt as my inhalations draw air past the membranes of my nose filters. I’ve never piloted any kind of glider before. Never even seen one up close, but it’s clear that I am an expert, utterly in my element. The body I inhabit is unfamiliar in its shape and dimensions, but somehow it is unmistakably mine. Every flex of muscle and stretch of tendon is mine. I own this strange flesh.

My outstretched arms pull back to my sides, decreasing the lift surfaces of my wings, and sending me into a steepening dive toward the pounding waves below. The gentle whisper of air past my ears grows to a whistle, and then a roar.

I drop like an express elevator, my stomach fluttering with the kinesthetic disorientation that accompanies a prolonged fall. Adrenaline flooding my bloodstream, I plummet toward the roiling darkness of the ocean.

The waves rush toward me with incredible speed. There is no time to avert the crash that is coming. No time… No time…

I am only fractional seconds from impact when my arms shoot out, spreading the wings of the microlight. The carbon laminate skeleton groans under the sudden increase in tension, and the muscles of my back and shoulders strain against the inexorable force of gravity.

I pull level less than two meters above the waves, and then inertia and increased lift send me spiraling back into the air.