Soulminder (18 page)

Sommer took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “Well. Not exactly unanimous, but I suppose it’s better than a five-four split.”

“It’s a shade better than losing entirely, too,” Sands countered. “Especially given that there are at least sixteen more states with Professional Witness statutes of their own in the pipeline who’ve been waiting to see how Arizona’s stood up.”

“No stopping them now, I suppose.”

He could sense Sands shrug. “The people want this, Adrian. I don’t know if you heard about it, but an NBC poll taken last week showed up to eighty-five percent positive in some parts of the country.”

“At least until the first case of fraud is proven,” Sommer reminded her sourly. “At which point the egg is likely to hit the fan at an extremely high rate of speed.”

“Luckily, that won’t be our responsibility,” Sands said. “It’s the legal establishment who’ll be in charge of screening their Pro-Witnesses for honesty, stability, and sanity.”

Sommer snorted a sudden laugh. “What?” Sands demanded suspiciously. “Come on, Adrian, let’s have it.”

Sommer sighed. “Sanity. A person
volunteers
to let us kill him and put his soul into storage, so that a bodiless murder victim can be transferred out of Soulminder into
his
body and testify at the person’s own murder trial. What part of that comes under the heading of
sanity
?”

“That’s not fair, and you know it,” Sands growled. “Just because it makes
you
cringe doesn’t mean everyone who joins a Pro-Witness program is a ghoul.”

“I still think there’s trouble ahead,” Sommer said. “But thanks for calling in the update. Sorry we were so late.”

“No problem—I was cleaning up some paperwork, anyway. I’ll go ahead and send copies of both the majority and minority opinions to the plane—you might want something to read on the flight home.”

“The way I feel right now, I’ll probably be sleeping most of the flight home.”

“Hint heard and understood,” Sands said dryly. “Go toddle off to bed. Let me know how it goes tomorrow.”

“I will. Good-night, Jessica.”

Sommer keyed off the phone and looked back up at the others. “Arizona v. White came in?” Everly ventured.

Sommer nodded. “Six to three in the People’s favor.”

Everly grunted. “Not exactly unexpected. Anything unusual in the opinions?”

“You can read them yourself later—she’s going to send them to the plane,” Sommer said. “If you get impatient, they can probably download it to you before we get back.”

“I’ll think about it,” Everly said.

Alverez drained the last of his glass and set it down on the coffee table. “And on that note, I think I’ll turn in.”

“Probably a good idea all around,” Sommer said, pulling himself vertical with an effort. “We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” Alverez said. “Good-night, sir.” With a nod to Everly, he disappeared into one of the bedrooms.

“I remember when I could be that enthusiastic after midnight,” Sommer commented to Everly.

“Quiet pride works as well as enthusiasm,” the other said. “It’s easier to maintain, too.”

“Good point.” Sommer gestured. “You might as well turn in, too. If anyone planted any bugs while we were out, they’re not going to learn anything tonight.”

“Yeah.” Everly paused. “You didn’t seem all that pleased that the Pro-Witness program’s gotten the green light.”

Sommer shrugged. “The whole idea of a person making a career of loaning out his body still bothers me. I’ll get used to it eventually.”

“Not all that different from surrogate mothers, really, if you want to be strictly technical about it.” Everly rubbed his cheek thoughtfully. “You know, sir, it occurs to me … I don’t know if the numbers have been made public yet, but during the time that the Arizona program’s been going there’s been a significant drop in violent crime rates. Especially against people wearing Soulminder ID bracelets.”

“I’m not surprised,” Sommer grimaced. “Knowing that even murder won’t cover your tracks probably makes the average armed robber stop to think a little.”

“As well as the average rapist, the average home breaker, and the average kidnapper,” Everly nodded. “The numbers are down in all those categories. But now”—he waved a hand, the gesture encompassing the city around them—“we have the Chilean government proposing to put everyone in Santiago on file with Soulminder in the next five years. If the Arizona pattern holds, we could get something here worth taking a close look at.”

Sommer pursed his lips. No premature deaths, a steady increase in lifespan, and now a drastic reduction in violent crime. Paradise restored to Earth, courtesy of Soulminder and the Chilean government. It sounded too good to be true.

Far too good to be true.

“Agreed,” he said grimly. “Let’s just make sure it’s a
very
close look.”

There were, by prior arrangement, two cars waiting for them when they came down the next morning. One, with Alverez inside, headed off to the Interior Ministry, where he’d been assured by General Diaz that he would have carte blanche to examine any records relating even remotely to Soulminder’s fiscal operations. Sommer and Everly, riding in the second car, headed the opposite direction, arriving ten minutes later at the modern building housing Soulminder itself.

General Diaz was waiting in the medical section anteroom as they entered. “Ah—Dr. Sommer, Señor Everly,” he greeted them. “I trust you both slept well?”

“Very well indeed, General,” Sommer assured him. “I didn’t expect to see you here today.”

Diaz shrugged, smiling almost shyly. “And let someone else show off my Soulminder facility to you? Pride is, I’m afraid, one of my many weaknesses. Come—we can start with the tracing rooms.”

Sommer had visited dozens of Soulminder facilities throughout the world, and was always fascinated at the myriad of ways variations could be played on what was, essentially, a common theme. The tracing rooms, where clients underwent the recording of their Mullner soul-traces, were here little more than narrow booths, an efficiency of space that had enabled the Chileans to squeeze eighteen tracing stations into a space that would normally have been occupied by ten. “As I recall, General,” Sommer commented, looking down the rows of doors, “your proposal included the expansion of this facility to first thirty and then fifty Mullner tracers. Where on earth do you intend to put them?”

Diaz gestured toward the window at the end of the hallway. “We would need to expand, of course. Our plan would be to purchase the building across the street and move all the tracing facilities there, leaving the transfer operations and Core in this building.”

Sommer nodded, wondering if the reference to purchasing had been solely for his benefit. There were certain elements of the regime, he’d heard, who believed that private property was merely state property that the government hadn’t yet found a use for. He made a mental note to have the local Soulminder staff confirm that a fair price was paid when the purchase went through.

Or rather,
if
it went through. Shaking thoughts of local politics from his mind, he paused outside one of the tracing booths, peering through the window and getting his mind back on the subject at hand.

The tracing procedure had been greatly improved since the first crude Mullner device he and Sands had first started recording soul-traces with, but there were some limits that further research had failed to budge. Even as he watched, the operator finished the final adjustments to the client’s headband and touched the recording switch—

And the client’s eyes closed, his face stiffening in a look of sheer terror.

“Bad dreams,” Diaz murmured at Sommer’s side. “They affect perhaps half of those who undergo the procedure.”

“I know,” Sommer nodded, stomach tightening. His own first-hand experience with the tracer hadn’t been very pleasant, either. He watched as the man’s face smoothed out and he drifted into a deep sleep.

Two minutes later, it was all over. The operator touched another button and began unstrapping the headband. By the time he’d finished, two orderly-types with a wheelchair had arrived, brushing past Sommer with muttered apologies to enter the booth and manhandle the client out of the recording chair and into the wheelchair. “Recovery room?” Sommer asked.

“This way,” Diaz pointed. “If you’d like, we can simply follow this client there.”

“That would—”

“Hold it,” Everly cut him off, the other’s eyes drifting with concentration. “Listen.”

Sommer held his breath … and then he heard it, too: the thin wail of an ambulance.

Getting louder.

He looked at Diaz, but the other had already guessed the question. “Yes,” he nodded, “it sounds like someone on his way here. Come—we’ll find out which transfer room has been prepared to receive him.”

They were waiting when the man was brought in—a younger man, wearing middle-class clothing. “What happened to him?” he asked.

One of the ambulance men rattled off something too fast for Sommer’s limited Spanish to follow. “Frank?” he murmured.

“He was murdered by a terrorist gang,” Everly translated.

Sommer looked at him sharply. “He was
what
?”

“Señor Everly is correct,” Diaz said, his voice dark and angry. “Radical terrorists are once again becoming active throughout Chile.”

Sommer frowned across the room, trying to see the patient around the physician and transfer techs moving between him and the table. “I don’t see any sign of bleeding.”

“Oh, they don’t use firearms for this sort of thing,” Diaz snorted. “They seem to find it more amusing to use a more local form of death: curare-tipped airgun darts.”

“Quieter and harder to trace,” Everly said. He glanced meaningfully at Sommer. With a quiet sigh, Sommer nodded back.

So much for the elimination of crime.

At the table one of the techs inserted a needle into the victim’s arm and hung the attached IV bottle to a hook. “What’s the IV for?” Sommer asked.

“It’s a glucose drip,” Diaz answered. “It’s standard procedure for all transfers here.”

“I see,” Sommer murmured, trying to remember if he’d seen any references to that in the Chilean reports. It seemed a totally superfluous addition to usual Soulminder procedure. The doctor had a hypo now, and was injecting it into the patient’s neck. “I presume he was given neuropreservatives in the ambulance?”

“I would presume so,” Diaz said. “That, too, is standard procedure.”

Sommer nodded. The doctor’s hypo, then, would be flushing solution, designed to remove the remnants of the neuropreservative from the patient’s system. That, at least,
was
standard Soulminder procedure. The other finished the injection, stepped back to the control board— “Wait a minute—he can’t start the transfer yet,” Sommer said, starting forward.

Diaz’s hand caught his arm, bringing him to a halt. “I’m sure he knows what he’s doing, Doctor,” the general said soothingly.

Sommer wasn’t nearly so sure. He’d seen first-hand what would happen if a soul transfer was tried before the neuropreservative was completely flushed. Namely, nothing at all. The soul wouldn’t remeld with the body under such conditions, and trying to force it would do nothing but put added strain on the brain chemistry. If the attending physician was inexperienced enough to try it anyway …

He wasn’t. His interest in the Soulminder control board was apparently merely a double-check of the equipment’s readiness, and after a careful inspection he turned back to the table and settled in to wait.

Sommer clenched his teeth, feeling rather foolish. “I didn’t realize the insurgency problem had started again,” he said, more to change the subject than anything else.

“It was never entirely gone,” Diaz said. “We’ve made great strides toward reform, but for some people nothing is enough.”

“Odd that they’d pick on a man clearly wearing a Soulminder bracelet,” Everly commented.

Diaz shrugged. “We think it’s their way of harassing the government. Forcing us to go through the trouble and expense of reviving one of our citizens; perhaps hoping to prove we don’t really care for the common people at all.”

“So how many of Soulminder’s clients
have
they picked on?” Everly persisted.

“A fair number, I know,” Diaz said. “I’d have to look up the exact figures.”

“If they were all attacked with the same curare darts, the numbers will be trivial to retrieve from the main Soulminder records,” Sommer pointed out. “As soon as we’ve finished with the perimeter facilities, Mr. Everly and I will be going into the Core. I can dig out the stats then.”

Diaz’s snort was just barely audible, but Sommer knew what it meant. “I’m sorry, General,” Sommer continued, “but my hands really
are
tied on this. I’m sure you can understand the reasoning behind it.”

“I understand,” Diaz said, his voice under careful control. “You will understand, in turn, if I find it insulting that you refuse to allow Chilean nationals into the Soulminder inner sanctum.”

“It’s not just you,” Everly put in before Sommer could reply. “Every country’s treated the same. Security considerations dictate that
only
specially chosen people be allowed access to the main Soulminder equipment.”

Diaz locked eyes with him. “To you, perhaps, it is security,” he said softly. “To many of us, it is little less than a form of economic imperialism.”

“It’s protection of a trade secret,” Everly countered, his quiet voice a match for Diaz’s.

For a split second there was genuine hatred in the general’s eyes … but even as Sommer braced himself for an explosion the general took a careful breath and relaxed fractionally. “Call it what you will,” he said stiffly. “It’s still in many ways a slave’s collar around our nation’s neck.”

Across the room, the man on the table twitched abruptly and gasped something. Sommer spun back, relieved that the awkward confrontation had been interrupted but simultaneously annoyed that he’d missed the crucial parts of the transfer procedure. Unlike the Soulminder people behind the Core’s security wall, all the personnel out here
were
Chilean, most of them trained locally along Soulminder guidelines, and nothing could replace first-hand observation as a method of evaluating how closely those guidelines were being followed. “I’d like to watch another transfer,” he told Diaz.