Reality 36 (22 page)

  "What?" said Richards.

  Smith paused, waved his hand around, looking for words. He couldn't find the ones he wanted, "interrogate" sounded too strong. He settled on the prosaic explanation. "Well," he said. "We asked them."

  A short holo of the first Qifang machine active, bundles of cable strung from its head. It was screaming over the questions it was being asked; a terrible noise that did not stop.

  "I've seen enough," said Richards after half a minute.

  "Yes, yes," said Smith grimly. The holo froze. "Quite immoral, don't you think? The heiress and Qifang Two, I'll spare you the holos, were too badly damaged to reboot right away. There was no underlying programming in either Qifang copy like there was in the heiress, though much of the brain of the second is missing, so it's hard to be sure, but he seems to be a poor copy of Qifang, she a poor copy of an heiress with a murderous purpose."

  "Where the hell are they from?" muttered Richards. "And why was the heiress trying to kill the other cydroid? Are there any other differences?"

  "No. They are of identical manufacture in all other respects," said Flats.

  Richards looked at the machines. Their existence opened a lot of doors into a lot of nasty, dark little rooms. "Do you know where they were made?"

  "Negative," said Flats. "We have provided you with information. Utilising it is your role in this. We are coroners, you are the investigator!"

  "Perhaps this will help," said Smith. The hologram spun again, focusing in on the top of the heiress's damaged femur. "At the atomic level, there is a company logo. Twelve atoms by twelve atoms. We'd have no clue if it weren't for this. Why the criminal mind has a need to reveal itself in such ways is a mystery we'll never uncover in here, but there it is. Do you recognise it?"

  The logo was grainy, blocky like a very early computer graphic, single carbon atoms for single pixels. Richards raised his plastic eyebrows. "Yes, I do." And he wasn't surprised. "Tony Choi."

  "Who?"

  "Arms dealer out of Hong Kong. He and I go a ways back. Thanks. That gives me somewhere to start."

  "There is one last thing," said Smith. "Qifang Two was deliberately dismembered. There are tool cuts here, here and here. And there's this." He highlighted similar wounds on both corpses, pulling holo images until they overlaid each other. One hole was more ragged than the other, but both were in the same place. "See this? Identical puncture wounds to the base of the skull, and concomitant internal damage. In Qifang Two, the one from the boat, this has knocked out a precise part of his artificial cortex; the other's head was emptied afterwards, but I would say that they were after the same part. And that was this." A ragged holo came up, and began to play. "It's only a part of a message we found in the one from the boat. It was terribly degraded, I am afraid to say. The retrieved footage should be here… Now."

  The new holo jumped into life. Another Qifang, perhaps the real one, sat in a well-furnished room. The holo was badly corrupted, elements freezing and overpainting each other to create a messy collage, Qifang a monstrous patchwork in the middle. A dozen cut and paste lips jiggled, floating teeth smeared themselves across the air. The audio, however, was clear enough.

  "…at you are the only one I can trust. I am sure you know of me, and the work I have done for your kind, so I hope that you will trust me in return. Please, I must meet with you in person, I have…"

  The message stopped, the light of the holo died, leaving the theatre grim.

  "If I were a betting man…" said Smith.

  "Five to one! Five to one!" bawled Flats.

  "…I'd say someone was looking for that."

  "Was there any more to the message?"

  "That's it, there is no more that we could retrieve," Lincolnshire Flats twittered solemnly. "The dead have spoken, and that is all they are going to say today."

Chapter 13

Doppelganger

Places like this were why Chures wanted the machines on the side of man, why he didn't just try to get the whole lot of them blown to bits.

  Places like this were why he was a VIA agent.

  A shanty of huddled UN prefabbed shelters, thirty years old and falling apart at the seams. The air was thick and fuggy with smells of cooking, Brazilian spices, Mexican pastries. Dozens of dialects of Portuguese and Spanish came from faces of all colours, unfamiliar words tripping Chures' mind. The place reeked of sweat and shit. One hundred miles from the the Whitehouse, Jesu City, oldest of the northern shanties, feverish in the humid night with discordant music and despair.

  If the machines had more say, places like this would be gone faster. The machines had more say every year, and things were getting better. But Chures had no illusions. Underneath their fake personalities the machines were supremely logical beings. They looked at a place like Jesu, one day they might come to the supremely logical conclusion that things would run far more smoothly without people.

  It had happened once before. More than seventy-six Fives had come through the crisis of '04 mentally sound. There were two dozen or so others, completely rational, entirely inimical to human life. They'd been destroyed by the VIA along with those deemed insane. The rush to get them all deleted before the UN untangled the mess surrounding the crisis had been exhilarating. Some of his colleagues had objected, things had got unpleasant, those who believed the VIA's actions immoral pitted against the realists. He'd been fresh out of the academy when the crisis hit, a baptism of fire, but he'd stayed in service. He'd spent his own childhood in a camp much like this. If the machines were kept in check, they could deliver a better world.

  If they were kept in check.

  Chures would have liked to have had Qifang on his team. Men who had empathy for mankind's children were rare; humanity did not understand its offspring well. A condition of parenthood, he supposed.

  He walked through the sucking ooze that passed for a street, banging bass lines and calls of drugged prostitutes half-deafening him. He cursed the mud's effect on his expensive boots. A big man jostled him, looking for a fight. Chures flicked open his coat, showing badge and gun. The man curled a lip, and walked on.

  This was typical of Karlsson, pick some godforsaken hellhole to meet in. He'd done it on purpose, put him ill at ease, remind him of his past. Karlsson was a bastard for that kind of mind game.

  At the heart of the camp were three huge hangars, decaying structures of cement board and steel from when the place had been an aerodrome. For a while they'd been used for camp administration; UN blue coloured the walls, mildewed prefab offices with smashed-in windows clustered about the sides. The hangars were falling down, warning signs all over their exteriors, a couple of beat-up survdrones patrolling the perimeter. Why hadn't they been demolished? His badge let him through the cordon. He ducked inside a hole in the wall into the centremost hangar. Here Karlsson should be waiting.

  Flocks of pigeons scared up on clattering wings as he walked across a floor slick with rainwater and human waste. There were signs that the drones had been beaten, people had been in here recently, makeshift braziers of blackened drums, discarded bottles, packets and torn sleeping bags, a hobos' dross, visible in patches of garish light from the pleasure joints outside.

  The building was empty, the sounds of life from the shanty muted.

Bartolomeo, scan
. The AI blend looked down through a winged drone above the camp, searching for human traces in the hangar, feeding highlights directly to Chures through his twin uplinks, right into his mentaug and the mind's eye it parasited.

  "Negative, agent Chures. I see nothing."

  "Karlsson!" Chures shouted. His voice bounced from concrete walls. There was a noise, the scuff of shoe on concrete, magnified and sinister in the hangar's emptiness.

  "You're not getting anything?"

  "I am sure," said Bartolomeo.

  "Puta Karlsson," spat Chures. The man had more tech and more brains than half the VIA, but he was as crazy as a shithouse rat, a liability. "Come out, Karlsson!" He walked over to the source of the noise. He pulled his gun. "Get out into the light where I can see you."

  A shadow of a man resolved itself from the deeper shadows in the curve of the walls. "Chures!" hissed Karlsson's voice. "Keep your voice down."

  Chures kept his gun out, adjusted his grip. He checked over his shoulder. Coming here alone was a bad idea, Karlsson's insistence be damned.

  "Come out."

  "As you wish."

  The man stepped out into a puddle of flickering LED reflections. Chures squinted, couldn't believe what he was seeing.

  "Karlsson couldn't make it."

  The man had his face. He stood insouciantly, one hand in the pocket of a suit identical to one Chures owned, the other twirling a cocktail stick idly in his teeth.

  "Put the gun down, Chures," said his double, his voice.

  Chures wasn't one to ask dumb questions. He pulled the trigger; at least he intended to. In the milliseconds between the neurons firing to twitch his finger muscles and his brain retrospectively deciding it had consciously made the decision to do so, something cut in and stopped him. His body locked rigid.

  "I am sorry, Agent Chures," said Bartolomeo.

  This wasn't supposed to happen. He was in control.

  "There's no need for you to die, Chures. My intention is to save lives, not waste them." The man with his face walked forward and took his gun, slid the slider back, dissembled the weapon without looking at it and strewed its parts upon the floor. "I need to borrow your life for a while. When this is all over, you will thank me."

  Through teeth clamped shut, Chures choked out a rasping gargle: "What the fuck are you?"

  The other Chures gave a slow smile to no one in particular. "You are as tenacious as they say. I am glad I pursued this course of action; making a puppet of you would never have worked for long." He locked eyes with him, his eyes. "A better question would be 'who?', Chures. And perhaps 'why?'" He cocked his head to one side, the neck accommodating several degrees more tilt than would have been comfortable for a human. "Tell me, what do you know of the Class Five AI Richards and Otto Klein's involvement in this affair of the departed professor?"

  Chures said nothing.

  "Suit yourself," said his double. Chures felt a sharp pain in his mind as Bartolomeo let something in. His life flickered before him with sickening speed. When it was done, he was on his knees, filth soaking the knees of his trousers.

  "It is surprising how little you know," said his double. "That should make things easier." The double squatted beside him. "I'll be going now. I'll have Bartolomeo take you somewhere safe, don't worry. He is fond of you. I'll be in touch." He pointed at Chures' gear. "I'll be needing these." He bent down and tugged Chures' coat, badge and all, over his stiff shoulders. He reached out and unclipped his twin mentaugs from their external mounts underneath each of his ears. "I apologise for the pain," the double said as monofilament wires tugged from his flesh. The fake Chures took the drop-pearl earring Chures wore in his left ear. "I have to look the part," explained the double, then took his boots.

  Chures grunted with rage, saliva streaming between lips frozen in a painful snarl, his muscles burning with cramp.

  He couldn't see the stranger leave.

  Some time later, Bartolomeo spoke. "That should be long enough, Agent Chures. I have taken control of your somatic functions. We will now leave. Please do not fight. I am truly sorry." Bartolomeo walked Chures, reduced to a meat puppet, jerkily over to the gash in the wall they'd entered through. They bent as one as they approached. Chures marshalled himself and waited until they were going under.

  With one last effort of will, he jerked his head back, slamming the silvered aux-mind casing into a rusting beam.

  "Stop!" said Bartolomeo. "Chures!"

  With the first blow, Chures felt the AI's influence lessen briefly. He seized his chance and threw his head back again, gashing his own scalp, smashing the casing again, sending its Gridpipe receivers offline.

  "Chures, stop, Chures!" Bartolomeo's voice was panicked. Half his personality imprint was in the unit. Chures had made sure of that, in case he ever needed to deactivate him. "Chures! You do not understand. Stop! Something terrible isssss..." Bartolomeo's voice slurred and faded to a hiss. Somewhere, the base unit that made up the rest of the AI blended with Chures slipped into lobotomised imbecility.

  Chures fell forward, his muscles limp, head ringing like a bell. Holy Christ alone knew what damage he'd done to his own brain. What the hell now? If he went back to the VIA, he'd be dead. The fake Chures and whoever was behind him would know right away that Bartolomeo was gone. They'd be waiting for him.

  Valdaire. Get to her first, hold her as a bargaining chip.

  A lousy plan, but the best he had.

  His senses reeled. He grabbed at the wall. His feet slipped into the muck of the street. People avoided him, stepping away as he bounced off them, just another luckless victim on Jesu City's pleasure way.

  He stumbled on, eyes hunting for drones against the stars.

Chapter 14

Los Angeles

"What kind of shit are those fucking electrical bastards trying to pull now? A German, a fucking German? This ain't Hamburg or Schnitzelville or wherever the fuck you are from, pal, not your jurisdiction." The small detective seethed and his round, unfashionably fat face glowered into Otto's, the badge slung about his neck jerking with his rage as he jabbed his pudgy forefinger at Otto in time with his words. Otto stared placidly down at him. The top of the detective's head stopped short of the top of his chest. The detective's eyes were small and black, face lined by unspent anger, deep creases round his mouth.

  "Cool it, Flores, this guy's got documentation like you've never seen," said the woman. Detective Mulholland, his nearI told him, and plenty more besides.