Tears in Rain (4 page)

“No,” she said eventually.

“Well, if she’s not family and you don’t have a court order, then you can’t see her.”

“I don’t need to. I only wanted you to give me the results of the autopsy.”

An exaggerated look of outrage appeared on his surgically modified face.

“That’s even less likely! It’s highly confidential information. Moreover, if you’re not a family member, how were you able to get in here?”

Bruna took a deep breath and made an effort to appear friendly and reassuring—as friendly and reassuring as was possible given her shaved head, catlike pupils, and the tattooed line splitting her face. She felt it would be imprudent to reveal that old Gándara had provided her with a permanent entry pass to the institute, so she took out her private detective’s ID and showed it to him.

“Look, the woman was my neighbor...and my client. She’d hired me to protect her because she suspected that someone wanted to kill her.” Bruna was improvising on the spot. “I can’t tell you any more, as I’m sure you’ll understand; it’s a matter of professional confidentiality. I was the one who contacted Samaritans; she was with me when she yanked out her eye. If you’ve got the police report at hand, you’ll see my name there, Husky. Caín went berserk, and I’m afraid she may have poisoned herself somehow. What I mean is, I’m afraid she may have been poisoned. I need to know as soon as possible. You see, I shouldn’t be telling you this, but there might be more people who have been poisoned...and we might still be in time to save them. I’m not even asking you for the details; just give me the conclusions and we’re done. Nobody will find out.”

The doctor shook his head slowly and pompously. It was clear that he was making the most of his small degree of authority in order to be annoying.

Bruna furrowed her brow pensively. Then she hunted through her backpack and pulled out two one-hundred-gaia bills.

“Of course I’m more than happy to compensate you for your trouble.”

“What do you take me for? I don’t need your money.”

“Take it. It will be helpful when you get your broken nose fixed.”

The man touched his nasal appendage with a reflex reaction. He lovingly caressed the silicon nostrils, the bridge shaped by plastic cartilage. His emotions revealed themselves one by one in a clear succession on his face, like clouds scudding across a windy sky: first, relief upon realizing that his synthetic nose was still intact, then the gradual and overwhelming comprehension of the significance of her words. His eyes opened wide with concern.

“Is...is that a threat?”

Bruna leaned forward, placed her hands on the table, advanced her face toward that of the man until she was almost touching his forehead, and smiled.

“Of course not.”

The medical examiner swallowed and mulled things over for a few moments. Then he turned toward the screen and muttered, “Open final reports, open Caín.”

The computer obeyed and the screen began to fill with successive images of the one-eyed rep, an unfortunate naked, disemboweled corpse in various stages of dissection. In the last one, the laser scalpel cut the cranium as if it were slicing an orange in two, and a pair of robot tweezers delicately probed the gray matter, which was in fact quite pink. Bruna had never seen such a pink brain, and she had seen quite a few. The tweezers emerged from the greasy neuronal mass clutching a small item between
the pincers: a tiny blue disc.
An artificial memory
, thought Bruna with a shiver,
and I’m sure it’s not the original implant
. On the screen the voice of the medical examiner was running through the results: “Given that the technohuman subject was 3/28 years old and still some time off her TTT, we can rule out a natural death. On the other hand, the memory implant that was found lacks a registration number and undoubtedly comes from the black market. This medical examiner is working on the hypothesis that the aforementioned implant was tampered with and caused the edemas and cerebral hemorrhages, provoking symptoms of emotional instability, delusions, convulsions, loss of consciousness, paralysis, and ultimately the death of the subject due to the complete breakdown of all neuronal functions. The implant has been sent to the bioengineering lab of the Judicial Police for analysis.”

Poor Caín. It was as if Bruna were again seeing her neighbor gouging out her eye with that horrible squishy sound like a suction cup being removed. As if she were hearing again her deluded words and experiencing her anguish. By the time the Samaritans arrived, Caín was already rigid, which was why Bruna wasn’t surprised when they called her four hours later to tell her that Caín was dead. In the interim, Bruna had stopped by the caretaker’s office and then gone into the woman’s apartment with one of the janitors. That was how she found out that the woman’s name was Cata Caín, that she was a clerk, and that this apartment was her first domicile after receiving the settlement allowance, since she was only three rep years—or twenty-eight virtual ones—old. Too young to die. According to the rental contract, she had been in the apartment eleven months, but the place looked empty and impersonal, as if no one was living there. Indeed, not one of those all-too-common, small, artificial mementos was to be seen: the customary photo of the parents; the childhood hologram; the grubby little candle from an old cake; the electronic poster with the dedications from university friends; the ring
adolescents bought for themselves when they lost their virginity. There wasn’t a replicant alive who didn’t have such a collection of rubbishy trinkets; even though the reps knew that the objects were false, they continued to hold a sort of magic, to offer solace and companionship. Just as paraplegics dreamed about walking when they wore virtual eyeglasses, so reps dreamed about having roots when they looked at the artificially aged pieces in their glory box. And in both cases, despite knowing the truth, they were happy. Or less
unhappy
. Even Bruna herself, so resistant to emotional outbursts, had been incapable of ridding herself of all her prefabricated mementos. Yes, she had destroyed the family photos and the hologram of her grandmother’s birthday party (she was turning 101, and she died a short time later; that is, she had supposedly died), but she couldn’t throw out the collar belonging to her childhood dog Zarco, with the animal’s name engraved on it, nor a photo of herself taken when she was about five years old—already perfectly recognizable, and with the same tired, sad eyes as she had now.

But Caín had not one single personal item in her apartment. What a profound level of despair and desolation she must have reached! Bruna pictured her walking through the night with an addict’s anxiety, prying into the darkest corners of the city in search of relief, of a memory she could believe in, mementos that would allow her to rest for a time. She thought she could understand Caín, because she herself had felt like that often enough; she, too, had abandoned her home on occasion, as if to escape. She had burned up the night searching for the impossible. And on more than one occasion, as dawn was breaking, she had been tempted to inhale a shot of memory, a fake fix of artificial life. She hadn’t done it, and she was glad that was the case. Cata Caín had exploded her brain with a dose of fictitious memories. Perhaps a batch of adulterated memories had arrived in the city. It had happened before, though never with such a lethal outcome. If that were the case, there would be more rep deaths over the next few
days. But that wasn’t Bruna’s problem. The only thing she was after was to find out what had happened to her neighbor, and that had now been resolved.

She turned to look at the young medical examiner. He was sweating and very upset, probably because of the emotional conflict arising from being forced to obey someone out of fear—a situation that, in young men in particular, usually provoked a burst of repressed anger and humiliation, a hormonal jumble of testosterone and adrenalin. Right now he hated himself for having been a coward, and that would prevent him from reporting her. Anyway, what could he report? She hadn’t done anything to him. Bruna shoved the two bills across the table and smiled.

“Thanks a lot; you’re very kind. That’s all I wanted to know. Give my regards to Gándara.”

The doctor’s flushed face accentuated the off-white color of the silicone implants. Bruna almost felt a twinge of compassion for him, a momentary weakness that was immediately overcome. She would never have broken his nose, of course, but the poor guy didn’t need to know that. That was one of the few advantages of being different: she was despised because of it, but she was feared as well.

T
hree days later, another rep died in similar circumstances, which were further complicated by the fact that he took two other technos with him. The assault took place on a sky-tram, so the incident was filmed by the transport company’s security cameras. Bruna saw the video on the news. He was an exploration android, with a small, bony physique, but he easily overpowered the two more heavily built technos. The assailant was sitting in the rear of the tram; suddenly, he got up and walked quickly toward the front, grabbing the first rep by the hair. He pulled the head backward with one hand as he slit the throat cleanly with the other. The weapon he used had such a fine, narrow blade that it was almost invisible. So the effect was disconcerting, incomprehensible rather than violent: a stream of blood was suddenly spurting, and you couldn’t understand why. The victim’s body was still sitting upright in the seat, and the passengers next to him were still opening their mouths to scream when the murderer grabbed a woman on the other side of the aisle in the same manner and slit her throat, too. After which the little techno drove the point of the knife into one of his own eyes and collapsed.

The whole scene lasted barely a minute; it was an astonishingly rapid massacre, a spectacular slaughter, so much blood in so little time.
It’s very hard to cut a throat with such speed and dexterity
, thought Bruna. Flesh is surprisingly tough, the muscles tense, the
windpipe presents a tenacious obstacle. And yet, the two necks had almost been severed and the heads tipped backward grotesquely, displaying the obscene smile of the enormous cut. It wasn’t easy to do, not even with a surgeon’s scalpel; maybe with a laser knife, but the blade used seemed to be a normal blade. Her next thought was,
He wouldn’t have been able to grab me by my hair
. That was why so many combat reps shaved their heads—they didn’t want to give the enemy any advantage. The difference was that, unlike other combat reps, Bruna had continued to shave her head after she’d been granted her license from the military. After all, she was still doing risky work. Work that wasn’t paying enough.

She had finished her last job almost two weeks earlier and had few savings to draw on. The USE had been in permanent financial crisis since Unification, but in recent times there seemed to be a crisis within the crisis and business everywhere was at a standstill. She desperately needed to find a client, so she decided to head out and do what she called an “information patrol”: do a few circuits and try to catch up with her regulars, to find out what was going on out there and see if she could offer her services to anyone. She looked at her watch: 23:10. She could stop by Oli Oliar’s joint and grab a bite to eat on her way through. Despite the frenzy of blood and killing, she was hungry. Or maybe she was hungry precisely for that reason. Nothing whet the appetite more than the sight of other people dying.
Four years, three months, and twenty-four days.

It was January, the chilliest month of the short, mild winter, and it was a perfect night for walking. Using travelators in some stretches, Bruna took twenty minutes to get to Oli’s bar. It was a small, rectangular space, occupied almost entirely by the huge counter, which in turn was almost fully occupied by Oli’s massive bulk. Because of her vast body and her equally enormous hospitality, Oli never turned up her nose at anyone: techno, alien—usually referred to as a
bicho
—or mutant. It was for this reason that her clientele was varied.

“Hi Husky, what brings you to this neck of the woods?”

“Hunger, Oli. Give me a beer and one of those algae and pine nut sandwiches you do so well.”

The woman smiled at the compliment with the placidity of a whale and began preparing the order. Her movements were always astonishingly slow, but she organized things in such a way that she served all the customers efficiently on her own. Of course, it was a small space, with ten stools along the counter and another eight flush against the opposite wall, together with a small shelf for leaning on, which ran the length of the end wall, but the place was a hit, and at peak times up to thirty customers would squeeze themselves in. Now, however, it was half-empty. Bruna looked around; there was only one person she recognized, and she was seated at the other end of the counter. She was a billboard-lady for Texaco-Repsol and was wearing a horrible uniform in the corporate colors, crowned by a silly little hat. The screens on her chest and back played the company’s damned commercials on a perpetual loop. Normally, because they were so irritating, billboard-people weren’t allowed into bars, but Oli’s heart was as big as her enormous breasts, so she allowed these walking electronic ads to hang out in the back of the bar as long as they turned the volume of the commercials down as low as possible. Which, unfortunately, wasn’t usually all that low, as you couldn’t mute the screens or turn them off. You either had to be a poor wretch or very unlucky in life to end up in that line of work: billboard-people were only allowed to take off their outfits for nine hours a day; the rest of the time they had to walk around public places, which meant that since they weren’t allowed into most establishments, they would spend their day wandering the streets like lost souls, with the publicity slogans blaring in their ears nonstop. In return for such torture they were paid a scant few hundred gaias, although in this case, being Texaco-Repsol, the woman would undoubtedly get free air as well. And that was important, because each day there were more and more people
unable to pay the cost of breathable air who would then have to move to one of the planet’s contaminated zones. If truth be told, many would kill to have such a lousy job. Bruna remembered her meager bank account and turned to the owner of the bar.