Altered Carbon

Chapter THIRTY-THREE
The building was a stripped shell, an entire floor of warehouse conversion with perfectly identical arched windows along each wall and white painted support pillars every ten metres in each direction. The ceiling was drab grey, the original building blocks exposed and cross-laced with heavy ferrocrete load-bearers. The floor was raw concrete, perfectly poured. Hard light fell in through the windows, unsoftened by any drifting motes of dust. The air was crisp and cold.
Roughly in the middle of the building, as near as I could judge, stood a simple steel table and two uncomfortable-looking chairs, arranged as if for a game of chess. On one of the chairs sat a tall man with a tanned, salon-handsome face. He was beating a rapid tattoo on the table top, as if listening to jazz on an internal receiver. Incongruously, he was dressed in a blue surgeon’s smock and surgery slippers.
I stepped out from behind one of the pillars and crossed the even concrete to the table. The man in the smock looked up at me and nodded, unsurprised.
“Hello, Miller,” I said. “Mind if I sit down?”
“My lawyers are going to have me out of here an hour after you charge me,” Miller said matter-of-factly. “If that. You’ve made a big mistake here, pal.”
He went back to beating out the jazz rhythm on the table top. His gaze drifted out over my shoulder, as if he’d just seen something interesting through one of the arched windows. I smiled.
“A big mistake,” he repeated to himself.
Very gently, I reached out and flattened his hand onto the table top to stop the tapping. His gaze jerked back in as if caught on a hook.
“The f*ck do you think—”
He pulled his hand free and surged to his feet, but shut up abruptly when I stiff-armed him back into his seat. For a moment, it looked as if he might try to charge me, but the table was in the way. He stayed seated, glaring murderously at me and no doubt remembering what his lawyers had told him about the laws of virtual holding.
“You’ve never been arrested, have you Miller?” I asked conversationally. When he made no reply, I took the chair opposite him, turned it around and seated myself astride it. I took out my cigarettes and shook one free. “Well, that statement is still grammatically valid. You’re not under arrest now. The police don’t have you.”
I saw the first flicker of fear on his face.
“Let’s recap events a little, shall we? You probably think that after you got shot, I lit out and the police came to pick up the pieces. That they found enough to rack the clinic up on, and now you’re waiting on due process. Well, it’s partially true. I did leave, and the police did come to pick up the pieces. Unfortunately there’s one piece that was no longer there to pick up, because I took it with me. Your head.” I lifted one hand to demonstrate graphically. “Burned off at the neck and carried out, stack intact, under my jacket.”
Miller swallowed. I bent my head and inhaled the cigarette to life.
“Now the police think that your head was disintegrated by an overcharged blaster on wide beam.” I blew smoke across the table at him. “I charred the neck and chest deliberately to give that impression. With a bit of time and a good forensic expert they might have decided otherwise, but unfortunately your still intact colleagues at the clinic threw them out before they could start a proper investigation. It’s understandable, given what they were likely to find. I’m sure you would have done the same. However, what this means is that not only are you not under arrest, you are in fact presumed Really Dead. The police aren’t looking for you and nor is anybody else.”
“What do you want?” Miller sounded abruptly hoarse.
“Good. I can see you appreciate the implications of your situation. Only natural for a man of your … Profession, I suppose. What I want is detailed information about Head in the Clouds.”
“What?”
My voice hardened. “You heard.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I sighed. This was to be expected. I’d encountered it before, wherever Reileen Kawahara appeared in the equation. The terrified loyalty she inspired would have humbled her old yakuza bosses in Fission City.
“Miller, I don’t have time to f*ck about with you. The Wei Clinic has ties to an airborne whorehouse called Head in the Clouds. You probably liaised mostly through an enforcer called Trepp, out of New York. The woman you’re dealing with ultimately is Reileen Kawahara. You will have been to Head in the Clouds, because I know Kawahara and she always invites her associates into the lair, first to demonstrate an attitude of invulnerability, and second to offer some messy object lesson in the value of loyalty. You ever see something like that?”
From his eyes, I could see that he had.
“OK, that’s what I know. Your cue. I want you to draw me a rough blueprint of Head in the Clouds. Include as much detail as you can remember. A surgeon like you ought to have a good eye for detail. I also want to know what the procedures are for visiting the place. Security coding, minimum reasons to justify you visiting, stuff like that. Plus some idea of what the security’s like inside the place.”
“You think I’ll just tell you.”
I shook my head. “No, I think I’m going to have to torture you first. But I’ll get it out of you, one way or the other. Your decision.”
“You won’t do it.”
“I will do it,” I said mildly. “You don’t know me. You don’t know who I am, or why we’re having this conversation. You see, the night before I turned up and blew your face open, your clinic put me through two days of virtual interrogation. Sharyan religious police routine. You’ve probably vetted the software, you know what it’s like. As far as I’m concerned, we’re still in payback time.”
There was a long pause in which I saw the belief creeping into his face. He looked away.
“If Kawahara found out that—”
“Forget Kawahara. By the time I’m finished with Kawahara, she’ll be a street memory. Kawahara is going down.”
He hesitated, brought to the brink, then shook his head. He looked up at me and I knew I was going to have to do it. I lowered my head and forced myself to remember Louise’s body, opened from throat to groin on the auto-surgeon’s table with her internal organs arranged in dishes around her head like appetisers. I remembered the copper-skinned woman I had been in the stifling loft space, the grip of the tape as they pinned me to the naked wooden floor, the shrill dinning of agony behind my temples as they mutilated my flesh. The screaming and the two men who had drunk it in like perfume.
“Miller.” I found I had to clear my throat and start again. “You want to know something about Sharya?”
Miller said nothing. He was going into some kind of controlled breathing pattern. Steeling himself for the upcoming unpleasantness. This was no Warden Sullivan that could be punched around in a seedy corner and scared into spilling what he knew. Miller was tough, and probably conditioned too. You don’t work directorship in a place like Wei and not option some of the available tech for yourself.
“I was there, Miller. Winter of 217, Zihicce. Hundred and twenty years ago. You probably weren’t around then, but I reckon you’ve read about it in history books. After the bombardments, we went in as regime engineers.” As I talked, the tension began to ease out of my throat. I gestured with my cigarette. “That’s a Protectorate euphemism for crush all resistance and install a puppet government. Of course, to do that, you’ve got to do some interrogating, and we didn’t have much in the way of fancy software to do it with. So, we had to get inventive.”
I stubbed out my cigarette on the table and stood up.
“Someone I want you to meet,” I said, looking past him.
Miller turned to follow my gaze and froze. Coalescing in the shadow of the nearest support pillar was a tall figure in a blue surgical smock. As we both watched, the features became clear enough to recognise, though Miller must have guessed what was coming as soon as he saw the predominant colour of the clothing. He wheeled back to me, mouth open to say something, but instead his eyes fixed on something behind me and his face turned pale. I glanced over my shoulder to where the other figures were materialising, all with the same tall build and tanned complexion, all in blue surgical smocks. When I looked back again, Miller’s expression seemed to have collapsed.
“File overprint,” I confirmed. “Most places in the Protectorate this isn’t even illegal. Course, when it’s a Machine Error, it’s not usually so extreme, just a double-up probably, and the retrieval systems yank you out in a few hours anyway. Makes a good story. How I met myself, and what I learned. Good dating conversation, maybe something to tell your kids. You got kids, Miller?”
“Yes.” His throat worked. “Yes, I have.”
“Yeah? They know what you do for a living?”
He said nothing. I took a phone from my pocket and dumped it on the table. “When you’ve had enough, let me know. It’s a direct line. Just press send, and start talking into it. Head in the Clouds. Relevant detail.”
Miller looked at the phone and then back at me. Around us the doppelg?ngers had almost assumed full substance. I lifted a hand in farewell.
“Enjoy yourself.”

I surfaced in the Hendrix’s virtual recreation studio, cradled in one of the spacious participant racks. A digital time display on the far wall said I had been under less than a full minute, of which my real time in virtual probably only accounted for a couple of seconds. It was the processing in and out that took the time. I lay still for a while, thinking about what I had just done. Sharya was a long time ago, and a part of me I liked to think I’d left behind. Miller wasn’t the only person meeting himself today.
Personal, I reminded myself, but I knew it wasn’t this time. This time I wanted something. The grudge was just a convenience.
“The subject is showing signs of psychological stress,” said the Hendrix. “A preliminary model suggests the condition will extend into personality breakdown in less than six virtual days. At current ratios, this equates to approximately thirty-seven minutes real time.”
“Good.” Unpinning the trodes and snapping back the hypnophones, I climbed out of the angled rack. “Call me if he cracks. Did you lift that monitor footage I asked you for?”
“Yes. Do you wish to view it?”
I glanced at the clock again. “Not now. I’ll wait for Miller. Any problems with the security systems?”
“None. The data was not secured.”
“How very careless of Director Nyman. How much is there?”
“The relevant clinic footage is twenty-eight minutes, fifty-one seconds. To track the employee from departure as you suggested will take considerably longer.”
“How much longer?”
“It is impossible to give an estimate at this time. Sheryl Bostock departed the PsychaSec facility in a twenty-year-old military surplus microcopter. I do not believe that ancillary staff at the facility are well paid.”
“Now why doesn’t that surprise me?”
“Possibly because—”
“Skip it. It was a figure of speech. What about the microcopter?”
“The navigation system has no traffic net access, and so is invisible in traffic control data. I shall have to rely on the vehicle’s appearance on visual monitors in its flight path.”
“You’re talking about satellite tracking?”
“As a last resort, yes. I’d would prefer to begin with lower level and ground-based systems. They are likely to be more accessible. Satellite security is usually of high resilience and breaching such systems is often both difficult and dangerous.”
“Whatever. Let me know when you’ve got something.”
I wandered around the studio, brooding. The place was deserted, most of the racks and other machines shrouded in protective plastic. In the dim light provided by the illuminum tiles on the walls, their ambiguous bulk could equally have belonged to a fitness centre or a torture chamber.
“Can we have some real lights in here?”
Brightness sprang out across the studio from high-intensity bulbs recessed into the low ceiling. I saw that the walls were postered with images drawn from some of the virtual environments on offer. Dizzying mountain-scapes seen through racing goggles, impossibly beautiful men and women in smoky bars, huge savage animals leaping directly at sniperscope sights. The images had been cut directly from format into hologlass and when you stared at them they seemed to come alive. I found a low bench and sat on it, remembering wistfully the bite of smoke in my lungs from the format I had just left.
“Although the program I am running is not technically illegal,” said the Hendrix tentatively, “it is an offence to hold a digitised human personality against that person’s will.”
I glanced bleakly at the ceiling. “What’s the matter, you getting cold feet?”
“The police have already subpoenaed my memory once, and they may charge me with compliance at your request to freeze Felipe Miller’s head. They will also want to know what has happened to his stack.”
“Yeah, and there’s got to be some hotel charter somewhere says you don’t let people into your guests’ rooms without authorisation, but you did that, didn’t you?”
“It is not a criminal offence, unless criminality results from the breach of security. What resulted from Miriam Bancroft’s visit was not criminality.”
I jerked another glance upwards. “You trying to be funny?”
“Humour is not within the parameters I currently operate, though I can install it at request:.”
“No, thanks. Listen, why can’t you just blank the areas of memory you don’t want anyone looking up later? Delete them?”
“I have a series of inbuilt blocks that prevent me from taking such action.”
“That’s too bad. I thought you were an independent entity.”
“Any synthetic intelligence can only be independent within the boundaries of the UN regulatory charter. The charter is hardwired into my systems, so in effect I have as much to fear from the police as a human.”
“You let me worry about the police,” I said, affecting a confidence that had been ebbing steadily since Ortega disappeared. “With a little luck, that evidence won’t even be presented. And if it is, well, you’re already in to the depth of compliance, so what have you got to lose?”
“What have I got to gain?” asked the machine soberly.
“Continued guest status. I’m staying here until this thing is finished, and depending on what data I get out of Miller, that could be quite a while.”
There was a quiet broken only by the humming of air conditioning systems before the Hendrix spoke again.
“If sufficiently serious charges accrue against me,” it said, “the UN regulatory charter may be invoked directly. Under section 143a, I can be punished with either Capacity Reduction or, in extreme cases, Shutdown.” There was another, briefer hesitation. “Once shut down, it is unlikely that I would be re-enabled by anybody.”
Machine idiolect. It doesn’t matter how sophisticated they get, they still end up sounding like a playgroup learning box. I sighed and looked directly ahead at the slice-of-virtual-life holos on the wall. “You want out, now’d be a good time to tell me.”
“I do not want out, Takeshi Kovacs. I merely wished to acquaint you with the considerations involved in this course of action.”
“OK. I’m acquainted.”
I glanced up at the digital display and watched the next full minute turn over. Another four hours for Miller. In the routine the Hendrix was running, he would not get hungry or thirsty, or have to attend to any other bodily functions. Sleep was possible, although the machine would not allow it to become a withdrawal coma. All Miller had to contend with, apart from the discomfort of his surroundings, was himself. In the end it was that which would drive him insane.
I hoped.
None of the Right Hand of God martyrs we put through the routine had lasted more than fifteen minutes real time, but they had been flesh and blood warriors, fanatically brave in their own arena but totally unversed in virtual techniques. They had also been endowed with a strong religious dogma that permitted them to commit numerous atrocities so long as it held, but when it went, it went like a dam wall and their own resultant self-loathing had eaten them alive. Miller’s mind would be nowhere near as simplistic, nor as initially self-righteous, and his conditioning would be good.
Outside, it would be getting dark. I watched the clock, and forced myself not to smoke. Tried, with less success, not to think about Ortega.
Ryker’s sleeve was getting to be a pain in the balls.