“That’s why it was easier to hack the nurses. Because their failsafe was a little different already, and it wasn’t finished, yet.”
“That’s about the size of it.” Holberton polished off the last of his new drink. He winced. “What else were you going to ask me?”
Javier looked up at the image of Susie, the murderous gynoid. “I need to know where you put Dan Sarton’s file cache.”
Holberton remained silent for a long time. So silent, Javier had to turn around to make sure he was still there. He was. He was just saying nothing, and staring at the floor. “It couldn’t last,” Holberton said finally. “Humans and vN, coexisting. It was always going to go this way, eventually.”
“And you want to protect me from it.”
“Yes, I do. For as long as I can.” He looked up. “Stay with me. I like you. I really do.”
This was how it always started. With men, anyway. Being straight had nothing to do with being straightforward. Javier simulated a future stretching away from him, as flat and monochromatic as the desert that surrounded them: Holberton undressing him, fucking him, feeding him, keeping him like a pet, and then Holberton tiring of him, finding a way to turn him out. It would happen. It always did. And although Javier could see it happening, he always let it. He was a machine, running a program. He knew how to do a few things. One of them was staying with humans. Except lately, he wasn’t so good at it.
He could have stayed with Alice, too. This was just another version of the brass ring she’d offered him. The relationship every vN dreamed of. Some human who was actually humane, who wanted to make slow, sweet love all the time and didn’t ask for weird shit and had lots of money and wanted to spend it all on keeping you in a very pretty box to be looked at and touched occasionally. In his FEMA capacity, Holberton probably really could protect him. Javier had consulted for them, before, in his own way, in Redmond. He could just start that up again. He could tell them everything he’d learned about Amy since his last interrogation session. And he could watch from the sidelines as Portia tore the world apart and humanity eliminated the single species designed to love it without condition.
“No.” Javier watched Holberton’s face. “Tell me where the cache is.”
“Why would you need to know that?” he asked.
“You know why.”
Holberton shut his eyes. “She’s not in there. Not really. Not like you think. And even if she were, you’d need a quantum de-crypter to decode her.”
“Quantum?”
“She’s in a diamond. On a diamond, actually. A qubit-friendly, nitrogen-enhanced diamond. That’s what Dan did with all his important files.”
“Tell me where the diamond is.”
Holberton sighed deeply. He looked broken. Javier would have been sad, if he weren’t so close to what he wanted. “It’s in Walla Walla. My cousin’s cache is in the state penitentiary in Walla Walla, Washington. Where my father is.”
Javier straightened. “You sent it to your dad? To LeMarque?”
“I sent it to the safest place I could think to keep it,” Holberton said. “A solitary confinement cell, in a maximum security prison.”
13: Faith in Fakes
Holberton had set this diamond in a Josten’s class ring with his father’s high school mascot and graduating year on it. It was a genuine antique setting that Holberton spared no expense in locating and obtaining.
“I wanted it to look like something my father might really have owned,” he explained. “I couldn’t ask my mother about it, but I looked into it. He wore a ring just like it in his graduation photo.”
“Aren’t you worried somebody’s gonna steal it?”
Holberton shrugged. “I almost hope someone does. If they do, I doubt they’ll run it past a diamond test, much less a quantum exam. They’ll sell it to a collector.”
“Wouldn’t the collector do a test?”
“Maybe. If they did, the setting would pass as genuine. But they’d still need a key to decrypt the information on the diamond.”
“And you have that key.”
“Yes,” Holberton said.
They had this conversation in Holberton’s garage. The other man clutched the edge of a tarp draped over something that sat beside the Impala. He looked bad: red eyes, wrinkled clothes, dusty wingtips. Javier suspected he didn’t look much better, himself.
“I can’t leave town,” Holberton told him. “But I can send you with a fob that’ll get you into the Walls.”
“The Walls” was what people called the prison in Walla Walla. Holberton professed to have never visited. The package containing the ring was the sole act of communication that he had shared with his father in over twenty years.
“There’s no guarantee he even kept it,” Holberton said, as he began to pull the tarp free. “For all I know, he traded it for a blowjob.”