Deus X (2 page)

I’m what you might call a private detective of sorts, ears and eyes, and a sleazehound nose for hire, and back in New York where I worked in the meatware, it was eyes to keyholes, stakeouts of hotel rooms with the meter running, bimboids and sleazoids, and cheating husbands with antique straight razors on the nightstand.

These days my turf’s the Other Side. Some might say it’s not exactly better for your mental health, but believe me, man, it’s safer for your tender black ass.

The transcorporeal boundary line is a mother-lode of bounty for the legal profession, and hence for what few P.I.s have what it takes to weasel for same with the entities on the Other Side.

Been a legal plankton bloom ever since the well-heeled started cloning themselves meatware successor entities way back before silicon became the upscale way not to go.

Even now, with your uniclones legally recognized as continuous with their original meatware templates in most jurisdictions, there’s still plenty of legal action in sorting out the status of dupes. Guy’s meatware expires holding a mountain of debt and the hand of a wife he’s waited ten years to ditch and he’s got a bought-up policy for a fiver. So they bring up five genotype clones and dump his software in all of them.

Which one’s him? None of them? All of them? Who does the bank holding his paper go after? Who’s his wife legally married to? Who has custody of the kids? Who gets the house? And the stock?

And that’s only the meatware tip of the iceberg. Your meatware duplicants are at least generally recognized as civil humans, but the software successor entities on the Other Side are the legal Big Rock Candy Mountain.

They’ll
never
get it all sorted out legally. Nothing outside of a meatware matrix has ever been recognized as legally human, but I’ve been involved in plenty of cases where the heirs have yet to collect on the terms of a will abrogated in realtime by the transcorporial successor entities. In less savory jurisdictions, the denizens of the Other Side have no more legal rights than a spreadsheet program, and the heirs have been known to peddle subroutines or even complete copies as expert system slaves for the corporate bits and bytes.

Sometimes the meatware template presells expert system reproduction rights to his own transcorporial successor. Sometimes the heirs contest it and peddle their own dupes and they all sue each other for copyright infringement. I worked a case where a successor entity sued his own deceased meatware template to break one of these contracts and won.

So I get all kinds. Sharks from the corporate feeding frenzy. Lawyers for meatware and lawyers trying to represent the successor entities themselves. Government spooks and spookier creatures still.

After all, everybody plugs into the Big Board all the time, you do it when you consult a phone-operator program, or call up a lecture from Einstein, or dump some stock, or find yourself confronting Ugly Tony or the Taxman. The world’s phone systems, data banks, communication nets, corporate
and government systems, traffic control, satellite grids, eco-monitors, all pop their bits and bytes at us up on the shiny surface of the Big Board.

You 2-D it on a flat screen, it mutters in your ear, you can talk to it and it can talk to you, you can put on the dreadcap and gloves and step inside, or you can just type on a keyboard and get back answers in letters and numbers.

The surface of the Board is all that most people care to see, and the official surface is a nice clean workspace with predictable function keys and certifiable interface entities a mother could love.

But there’s a vasty deep beneath the surface of our official electronic reality, and hey, boys, there’s sharks in those waters, or anyway there are expert system simulations of same, and that’s where they pay me to go.

You might call me a private eye, but your great-great-granddaddy might call me a shaman. From a certain point of view, I
do
conjure up the dead, though there are times when I find myself believing that the spirits are conjuring
me
.

But my job precludes me from taking such positions. Like all private eyes, I’m available for a price. And like all shamans, I am an interface between this side of the Line and the Other, a communication medium, not an active agent. Or so I keep telling myself every time deeper destinies than my balance sheet sink the spear of their reality into a soft spot in my soul.

Even the first time I did business with the Roman Catholic Church.

You remember the Roman Catholic Church? Time was, all of Christendom was ruled from the Vatican. Even as late as the early twenty-first century, the Roman Catholic Church was a major transnational player, more adherents than any nation state.

It started losing followers fast when Pope John Paul IV issued his bull against clonal immortality, and though Roberto I managed to weasel them out of it a few Popes later, by that time software successors were already the postmortem vogue, and even he couldn’t bring himself to bless Transcorporial Immortality in electronic disneyworld heaven, and the membership list has been going south ever since.

After all, unlike the Herb, the Catholic sacraments delivered no realtime communion with the godhead, the only payoff they were offering for the walking of their straight and narrow was pie in their sky in the great by-and-by.

Which, of course, would not be forthcoming until after you died. Nor had anyone ever sent back picture postcards from the Catholic version of immortality on the Other Side. You took it on faith, or not at all.

Descartes’s gamble, they called it. Might as well believe. If you’re right, they give you a harp to play and wings to fly. If you’re wrong, you’ve lost
nothing because nothing is all any of us is gonna get in a godless void anyway.

But once you could dump your consciousness hologram in silicon, in gallium arsenide, in superconductive buckyball chips, once you could be guaranteed your software’s persistence beyond the expiration of the original meatware matrix and select your own version of electronic afterlife from the media menu of the Big Board, the odds shifted hard.

The Roman Catholic Church sure didn’t improve them by forbidding Transcorporial Immortality to its believers on pain of eternal damnation, and these days, there’s maybe sixty or seventy million Catholics left, not exactly impressive even in this latter-day depopulated world.

But they
are
well heeled, and they’ve got more than two thousand years of costumes and choreography and music and mystique, and in these last days of our planet, there’s still a resonance to a mission from the Vatican, even to a boy like me.

It was December, and I was lying off the Mediterranean coast of Italy, maybe 300K from Rome. It was a bearably sunny winter day in the Med, and I was lying back in the open cockpit with a beer and a spliff pretending to fish in the dead waters when the console piped me the opening bar of Beethoven’s Fifth, which was my call-cue at the time.

It came through on speaker and flat screen.
Just a head and shoulders shot of a white man in a black suit, make him a corporate legal type, only there’s something strange about the collar, and a gold chain dangling something off-camera, and he’s wearing some kind of little red cap, it all seems like it should be familiar, but I don’t make the connection until he does, and then I find it right hard to believe.

“Mr. Philippe?”

“The one, my man, the only.”

“John Cardinal Silver,” he says, “I need to meet with you on a matter of great urgency.”

He’s got thinning black hair and a black spade beard streaked with white looks like they’ve been trimmed with a laser five minutes ago, urbane like they say, with hard brown eyes and a mouth that looks like it’s used to sniggering at sophisticated jokes, and the smooth powerful voice of a corporate dreadnought. Looks like the type who never sweats, oils his way through it all like a diplomat’s Siamese cat.

Only he don’t seem so supercooled now, and he’s not trying to hide it, and there’s something so strange about his persona, that I
still
don’t realize that I’m talking to a Prince of the Church.

“Your place or mine, Mr. Silver?” I tell him, reaching for my dreadcap.

“No, no, no!” he says. “This much is risky enough! I have to meet with you in person.”

“In person? You mean like in the flesh?”

“I mean here in Rome, Mr. Philippe, and I mean as soon as possible. The Church urgently needs your services immediately on a matter of extreme importance and delicacy and we are prepared to pay quite handsomely for speed and priority.”

“Who did you say you represent, Mr. Silver?”

“Cardinal Silver
, or Your Eminence if you prefer,” he snaps back with a hauteur like a backhand slap to a peasant’s face. “I represent the Roman Catholic Church, Mr. Philippe, and in this matter I am speaking with the authority of the Pope. You must come to Rome at once!”

“Well, if I decide to take your contract, and if it calls for double my standard rate, and if the meter starts running right now, I could reach the closest port in about a week—”

“We’ll send a helicopter.”

“You’ll send a
what
?”

“We’ll have a helicopter overhead within three hours to pick you up.”

A helicopter! Sets your teeth on edge just to think about it! The big bad overseer chariot of the last century and the petrol-guzzling vampire bat of our Greenhouse Fall, a flying brick puffing and groaning just to stay aloft and farting out carbon dioxide and nitrides like the Devil’s own asshole!

I don’t like leaving my boat, except for occasional moorings in quiet little coastal towns, and I certainly have no desire to tour the behavioral
sinks of the crumbling inland cities, and you don’t have to be a Flaming Green Warrior to cringe at the thought of flying in something that burns fossil fuel.

On the other hand, any organization capable of procuring such a piece of Space Age hardware, restoring it to working order, protecting it one way or another from authorities and lynch mobs, getting its hands on the petrol to fly the thing, and putting it in the air without apparent fear of terminal sanctions, was clearly an organization of resources, financial and otherwise.

“My rates just doubled again,” I told the Cardinal, in whose reality as an authentic Prince of the well-heeled Church I now found it expedient to believe. “But you’re not getting me on any helicopter, and I’m not leaving my boat. You want to talk business with me, you’d best do it now.”

“If you insist, I’ll fly out to you.”

“You’re serious?”

“Mohammed to the Mountain, Mr. Philippe….”

“Come on, Your Eminence, can’t you tell me what this deal is all about before you trot out your chopper? That’s a lot of carbon dioxide to add to your karma just to have a little chat. Truth be told, I find it immoral.”

“No more than I! But if you knew my reasons you too would accept the necessity. Suffice it to say that the nature of our problem itself makes it highly
inadvisable to discuss it over channels or in media that might be accessed by …”

He paused, almost seemed to be looking over his shoulder to see if anything was gaining on him, a sure sign according to the wise man that something probably is.

“… hostile entities presently unknown.”

“I’m not so sure that I want to do any conjuring with entities so hostile they’ve got you reaching for your holy water even though you’re not supposed to believe in them….”

“The Church has never contended that electronic successor entities do not exist. Far from it, Church doctrine condemns them as satanic golems, the ultimate machineries of the Prince of Liars himself, and believe me, Mr. Philippe, the current situation does nothing to dissuade us from the belief that the Other Side of the Line, as you would call it, is in the hands of the Adversary.”

“There are demons in these vasty deeps….”

“And your file shows they come when you summon them, Mr. Philippe.”

“Sometimes they do, Your Eminence, which is a real good reason not to conjure up something you don’t want to meet….”

“Fear not on that account, Mr. Philippe. The … successor entity we wish you to … retrieve is that of a man who may one day be a saint.”

Death comes to all men, and soon enough it was going
to come for me.

That was the short of what the doctor told me. At the age of ninety-one, a generation beyond my biblically allotted span as such things were once measured, my body had reached the end of its ability to endure gravity, free radicals, solar bombardment, the folly of my fellow man, and well within the year would be rendered unto dust. My immune system had simply worn out, and I, who had faithfully fulfilled my lifelong vow of chastity, would expire in a clinical condition indistinguishable from that of a twentieth-century libertine.

You would have to be an old dying priest to appreciate the humor.

The long of what the doctor told me, and it seemed very long indeed as he insinuated and squirmed around the subject, was what in this benighted age they call my “Choice of a Successor.”

Old-fashioned cloning techniques, I was given to believe, were
not
to be advised in cases where the cause of death would be an excess of noise in the genetic control mechanisms. There were, however, numerous possible solid-state matrices for my immortal software.

It took so long for him to make his satanic suggestion because he knew full well he could not broach it openly to the likes of Father Pierre De Leone, yet in these last days the Hippocratic oath had been reinterpreted to constrain him to proffer “Transcorporeal Immortality,” the latest boon from the laboratory of kindly old Dr. Faust.

Surely a dying old man should not be subjected to such tormentuous temptation, or at least it should be spit out rapidly in words of one syllable and be done with. Or so was my rationalization for my rudeness when at length, and I do mean at length, I concluded that such arch crypticism could render this conversation itself eternal.

“You may consider your duty fulfilled, Doctor,” I told him finally. “You see before you a man who quite understands the many ways in which a model of his consciousness may run forever in silicon fields, and who rejects all of them as, to be quite frank and precise about it, instrumentalities of Satan.”