Necropolis (31 page)

“Worse,” I added, “what do Hector Alvarez and the Surazal scientists have in common? They’re not connected.”

“Except by you,” said Maggie.

Tippit sucked in a startled breath. “Oh shit.”

“Awfully convenient, Alvarez getting whacked precisely at that moment,” said Armitage.

“To keep him from talking? Leading Donner back to Nicole?” said Max.

“It doesn’t make sense. Who would protect Nicole but kill her team at the same time?”

“Do ghosts have to make sense?” asked Tippit.

“It wasn’t a ghost,” I said. “It was a smarty.”

Maggie opened her mouth, then snapped it shut. Armitage was staring at her, hard. “Maggie?” he asked. The players had drifted from the table and we stood in a semi-circle around Maggie. “I can’t tell you,” she whispered.

“You fucking well
can
tell us!” barked her leader.

Her exhalation was measured. She stood and looked at each one of us in turn. “It’s never been heard by human beings before. Do you understand?”

“Get on with it,” I said.

She licked her lips. “There’s a legend. About one of the first of us.”

“One of the first AIs?” asked Max.

“Legend’s probably not the right word. More like a bed-time story. He’s kinda like the smarty boogeyman.”

“Why’s he so scary?” asked Max.

“Because he kills humans.”

A deep shock froze the room. Finally, one of the Enders said what we were all thinking. “No smarty has ever killed a human being. Smarties are pacifists.”

“Well, this one wasn’t. This one hunted humans as prey, according to the tale. He was called the Lifetaker.”

“What happened to him?”

“You have to understand. The UN debate whether to grant us rights as sentient beings was a firestorm. The General Assembly was almost evenly split. The idea of artificial consciousness terrified the shit out of people. Muslims still view us as demons.”

“I remember,” said Armitage. “Every link in the world was tuned in to the debates that whole summer.”

“What finally tipped the balance in our favor was the fact that not one smarty had ever committed a crime. Any crime. Not one petty theft, let alone a violent act. Our ego structure is different. We can’t comprehend putting ourselves before another, which is a prerequisite for violence or crime. That, along with our lack of material ambition, convinced people that we’d be harmless. We wouldn’t become enemies or competitors, the two things humans fear the most.”

“But the Lifetaker—”

“Threatened all that. If you found out a smarty could kill, it’d be over. There’d be nothing left for us except slavery or destruction. So, the story goes, he was banished.”

The planes in Armitage’s face shifted, but he said nothing.

Maggie said: “I thought he was a cyburban myth.”

“But what you saw?”

“It definitely could have been a smarty.”

“Who knows more about this Lifetaker?” asked Armitage.

“My old guardian, Jakob,” she said. I must’ve looked lost. “We don’t have parents as such. Newborn smarties are put under the tutelage of a more experienced AI. If anyone would know more, it’d be Jakob.”

“Contact him,” I said. “If this Lifetaker is more than a spook story, then he’s back. Maybe we can get an answer to why Hector Alvarez and these dead scientists are connected.”

“Well great!” mourned Tippit. “A smarty serial killer. So much for sleeping tonight.”

39

NICOLE / MCDERMOTT

S
eething, Nicole Struldbrug hung up on her father. The commtat reshaped into its default spider web pattern. She looked through the glass, struggling to get a hold of herself. The reeb in the metal chair looked like a mound of tapioca pudding. Time to send Loretta out again.

Nicole closed her eyes. Her father’s voice—so papery and thin, so young, yet so full of dust and years. It made her want to retch.
 

Previously, he’d been content to fling his criticisms at her from a distance, but now he was clearly suspicious. She could count on a summons from her brother. A calling out on the carpet, and soon. Good. It was time for a reckoning.
 

The booth door opened, admitting Dr. Gavin and the reborn McDermott, her security chief. They waited diplomatically while she wrangled her loathing back into its box.
 

She regarded them. The two men couldn’t be more opposite ends of the human spectrum. Urbane sophistication and scientific brilliance, next to animal brutality and cunning. The only thing they had in common at the moment was displeasure. It was serious. They never came here.

“Well?” she said.
 

“Someone found Donner,” said McDermott.

“So? Some ghetto rat stumbles across his bones—”

“He’s been revived.”

It was the first time they’d ever seen her completely blindsided. She seemed to realize her mouth was open and clamped it shut. “How?” she asked. Her voice threatened pain.

“Maggie Chi,” said Gavin.

“The smarty bitch who stole our formula?”

“Yes. She must have used it to revive him. A surveillance wasp in the subways took his picture yesterday.”

“Where was he going?”

“We don’t know,” said McDermott. “By the time the biometrics identified him, he was long gone.”

Nicole drummed her fingernails on the Plexiglas. McDermott caught a glimpse of leather beneath her sleeve. She carried Japanese Tanto knives in sheaths on each forearm. She could flick her wrists in a certain way and they’d spring forward, ready to do damage. The blades were graphene-tipped—honed to the monomolecular level and capable of slicing through steel. It was whispered that she’d used them on a secretary who’d eavesdropped on her phone call. According to the legend, the only thing that’d kept the woman’s head from being completely severed was a single strand of cartilage.

“Donner, Donner,” Nicole mused, flashing her teeth. “What a naughty boy you are.”

A groan erupted from Gavin. “Didn’t
you
bring Donner into all of this?”

McDermott shook his head.
Don’t do it, Doctor, don’t do it
.

Her brow darkened. “It doesn’t matter now, Doctor,” she said.

McDermott saw it coming. Men like this—men with huge intellects and even larger egos, men used to having everyone kowtow around them, men who never developed humility or restraint—they eventually went out in a self-destructive tirade when challenged by an inferior mind with superior authority. Gavin’s resentments charged into the room like a berserker bull.

“Doesn’t matter!? You’ve endangered everything we’ve worked for with your games! Hiring him was insane! Now the Retrozine is in the hands of the Cadre!”

“We don’t know that.”

“Who else could’ve gotten Donner past our security in the lab? Or on the subway?” Spittle flecked his lips. “It won’t take much to figure out what we’ve been doing.”

“You’re overreacting, Doctor.”

Gavin yanked on the his coattails and actually shrieked at them. “I’ll let Adam decide that! I have a feeling he’ll be very interested in what’s been going on around here.”
 

There was a silent moment. McDermott steeled himself for something ugly.

But Nicole sighed and said softly, “You’re right. If I hadn’t hired Donner, none of this would have happened.”

Gavin opened his mouth, then shut it in confusion. McDermott stifled a smile. Gavin had probably told her off a million times in his head, but now all the verbal barbs and lashes he’d honed to titanium brilliance were useless. She’d taken the wind out of his sails simply by agreeing with him.

“However, if, as you say,” she continued, “this is the Cadre at work, they won’t go public until they have hard evidence.”

McDermott had an epiphany. “The morgue theft! They’re going to revive Crandall.”

Gavin looked like he was about to suffer an attack of apoplexy. His face turned the color of a fresh bruise. “He knows everything! If they break him—”

Nicole cut him off. “McDermott, find Crandall before he can talk.”

McDermott acknowledged her with a jerk of his head. She smiled in dismissal, then paused. “Oh, McDermott.” He stopped. “One more thing.”

Here it comes.

“Dr. Gavin is going on leave. Exhaustion. Notify the press office.”

Gavin whitened. “What—”

“And McD? Be a dear and close the door on your way out.”

McDermott exited quickly. He knew he should keep going down that hall without pausing, but he couldn’t help himself. He crept back and listened outside the door.

It wasn’t very dramatic. A whisking sound, a wet plop. A gasp. Then a large thud a moment later as the body hit the floor.
 

Eviscerations were the worst. You had whole seconds to watch your purple-gray entrails spill out onto the carpet in front of you before your heart failed.
 

As McDermott hurried down the corridor, he wondered whether, in the brisk air conditioning, Gavin’s guts had been steaming.

40

BRIAN

T
he Devil’s Fist stalked their prey in Battery Park City. More reebs, Dell Broggorico said. Better hunting. Here, it was the 1880s, and the ladies sashayed in hoop skirts and bustles, twirling parasols. The men sported natty herringbone suits. Kids in knee-socks and knickers rolled their kinetic hoops along the sidewalks, annoying shop owners as they interfered with the local power grid.

The residents of BPC had managed, through their jackass of a representative in City Council, to get a permit for equestrian transportation. They’d tried to ban cars outright, but the Mayor had quickly put an end to that nonsense. Consequently, the traffic jams down here were infamous and bizarre, as floater and buckboard jockeyed for position and horses bolted when their manes rose in the vehicles’ mag fields. Motorists stayed clear if they could. Horse shit superheated by a EM pylon was an olfactory experience you wanted to avoid.

The hunters dressed to blend in: spats, sweater vests and bow ties, their tats and piercings hidden. Brian didn’t get a weapon. That would be earned by his first
bona fide
kill.

Kill. Electric ferocity disrupted his thoughts. Another part of him, however, a part that was slowly growing smaller, murmured with discomfort.

They found a homeless reeb beneath a bridge support. He hummed tunelessly along with the whine of the asynchronous HDVC fuel ribbons. Empty bottles of rotgut stood sentry around him. He was in his re-twenties, but his jaundiced skin hung in elephantine folds, unable to keep pace with the accelerated alcoholic youthing. The men’s faces had a predatory shine in the glow of his sterno fire.
 

The act itself was disappointingly inelegant. They simply dove at the poor fool, punching and stabbing. The pathetic old fuck died much too quickly. Brian managed to get a kick in to the man’s groin that elicited a satisfying rasp of pain, but their frenzy didn’t leave him much room. They stood, panting, faces blazing, looking down at his broken form.

La-Ron whirled to Brian. “Whaddaya think a that, eh?”

“It was okay, I guess.”

Dell guffawed. “Okay? Did you hear that, Yrko?”

Yrko was the scariest of the adult Devil’s Fisters. His face carried the history of some ancient conflagration. One eyebrow was missing, and the rest looked melted, the cauterized flesh twisted like putty. Yrko relished the revulsion he inspired. He had a weird Cockney accent. He’d burnt an ear off the last guy who laughed at it. He hauled Brian by his shirt up to his ugliness. “Lad’s a goer, eh?” he said. “Maybe we have a job fer ya.”

La-Ron bristled. “That was my job!”

Yrko ignored him, studying Brian’s fearless face. He understood how dangerous a hollow man could be.
 

“We got us a… patron,” he said. “From time to time, we do work for her. She’s looking for a certain few blokes. Deep underground, hard to find. But even worms come up in the sun once in awhile, eh? Now, I got me plenty o’ eyes uptown, but I need somebody down here. You up to that, me lad?”

“Right-o, guv’nah,” said Brian, and everyone snickered.

Everyone except Yrko.

41

DONNER

M
y Beretta was in a docker’s clutch, the strap digging into my side. I wriggled my shoulders and managed to shift the chafing to another spot. Armitage’s shirt was freshly ironed. It didn’t matter. He still looked rumpled.

“He’ll be hostile. You killed him.”

I shrugged. “Brought him back, too. Maybe it’ll balance out.”

We were in the old rumrunning tunnel. Storage rooms had been carved into the rock. The Cadre had reinforced them with neocrete and metal doors. Now one of them was Crandall’s make-shift holding cell.
 

“Doesn’t matter, I guess,” he said. “Interrogation techniques have come a long way since your day.”

“Yeah?” I said. “No more waterboarding?”

Armitage held up a pneumatic syringe. “Veracity virus.”