Red Planet Blues

THREE





My next stop was the NewYou building. I took Third Avenue, one of the radial streets of the city, out the five blocks to it. The NewYou building was two stories tall and was made, like most structures here, of red laser-fused Martian sand bricks. Flanking the main doors were a pair of wide alloquartz display windows, showing dusty artificial bodies dressed in fashions from about five mears ago; it was high time somebody updated things.

The lower floor was divided into a showroom and a workshop, separated by a door that was currently open. The workroom had spare components scattered about: here, a white-skinned artificial hand; there, a black lower leg; on shelves, synthetic eyes and spools of colored monofilament that I guessed were used to simulate hair. And there were all sorts of internal parts on the two worktables: motors and hydraulic pumps and joint hinges.

The adjacent showroom displayed complete artificial bodies. Across its width, I spotted Cassandra Wilkins, wearing a beige suit. She was talking with a man and a woman who were biological; potential customers, presumably. “Hello, Cassandra,” I said, after I’d closed the distance between us.

“Mr. Lomax!” she gushed, excusing herself from the couple. “I’m so glad you’re here—so very glad! What news do you have?”

“Not much. I’ve been to visit the cops, and I thought I should start my investigation here. After all, you and your husband own this franchise, right?”

Cassandra nodded enthusiastically. “I knew I was doing the right thing hiring you. I just knew it! Why, do you know that lazy detective McCrae never stopped by here—not even once!”

I smiled. “Mac’s not the outdoorsy type. And, well, you get what you pay for.”

“Isn’t that the truth?” said Cassandra. “Isn’t that just the God’s honest truth!”

“You said your husband moved his mind recently?”

“Yes. All of that goes on upstairs, though. This is just sales and service down here.”

“Do you have security-camera footage of Joshua actually transferring?”

“No. NewYou doesn’t allow cameras up there; they don’t like footage of the process getting out. Trade secrets, and all that.”

“Ah, okay. Can you show me how it’s done, though?”

She nodded again. “Of course. Anything you want to see, Mr. Lomax.” What I wanted to see was under that beige suit—nothing beat the perfection of a high-end transfer’s body—but I kept that thought to myself. Cassandra looked around the room, then motioned for another staff member to come over: a gorgeous little biological female wearing tasteful makeup and jewelry. “I’m sorry,” Cassandra said to the two customers she’d abandoned a few moments ago. “Miss Takahashi here will look after you.” She then turned to me. “This way.”

We went through a curtained doorway and up a set of stairs, coming to a landing in front of two doors. “Here’s our scanning room,” said Cassandra, indicating the left-hand one; both doors had little windows in them. She stood on tiptoe to look in the scanning-room window and nodded, apparently satisfied by what she saw, then opened the door. Two people were inside: a balding man of about forty, who was seated, and a standing woman who looked twenty-five; the woman was a transfer herself, though, so there was no way of knowing her real age. “So sorry to interrupt,” Cassandra said. She smiled at the man in the chair, while gesturing at me. “This is Alexander Lomax. He’s providing some, ah, consulting services for us.”

The man looked up at me, surprised, then said, “Klaus Hansen,” by way of introduction.

“Would you mind ever so much if Mr. Lomax watched while the scan was being done?” asked Cassandra.

Hansen considered this for a moment, frowning his long, thin face. But then he nodded. “Sure. Why not?”

“Thanks,” I said, stepping into the room. “I’ll just stand over here.” I moved to the far wall and leaned against it.

The chair Hansen was sitting in looked a lot like a barber’s chair. The female transfer who wasn’t Cassandra reached up above the chair and pulled down a translucent hemisphere that was attached by an articulated arm to the ceiling. She kept lowering it until all of Hansen’s head was covered, and then she turned to a control console.

The hemisphere shimmered slightly, as though a film of oil was washing over its surface; the scanning field, I supposed.

Cassandra was standing next to me, arms crossed in front of her chest. “How long does the scanning take?” I asked.

“Not long,” she replied. “It’s a quantum-mechanical process, so the scanning is rapid. After that, we just need a couple of minutes to move the data into the artificial brain. And then . . .”

“And then?” I said.

She lifted her shoulders, as if the rest didn’t need to be spelled out. “Why, and then Mr. Hansen will be able to live forever.”

“Ah.”

“Come along,” said Cassandra. “Let’s go see the other side.” We left that room, closing its door behind us, and entered the one next door. This room was a mirror image of the previous one, which I guess was appropriate. Lying on a table-bed in the middle of the room was Hansen’s new body, dressed in a fashionable blue suit; its eyes were closed. Also in the room was a male NewYou technician, who was biological.

I walked around, looking at the artificial body from all angles. The replacement Hansen still had a bald spot, although its diameter had been reduced by half. And, interestingly, Hansen had opted for a sort of permanent designer-stubble look; the biological him was clean-shaven at the moment.

Suddenly the simulacrum’s eyes opened. “Wow,” said a voice that was the same as the one I’d heard from the man next door. “That’s incredible.”

“How do you feel, Mr. Hansen?” asked the male technician.

“Fine. Just fine.”

“Good,” the technician said. “There’ll be some settling-in adjustments, of course. Let’s just check to make sure all your parts are working . . .”

“And there it is,” Cassandra said to me. “Simple as that.” She led me out of the room, back into the corridor, and closed the door behind us.

“Fascinating.” I pointed at the left-hand door. “When do you take care of the original?”

“That’s already been done. We do it in the chair.”

I stared at the closed door and I like to think I suppressed my shudder enough so that Cassandra was unaware of it. “All right. I guess I’ve seen enough.”

Cassandra looked disappointed. “Are you sure you don’t want to look around some more?”

“Why? Is there anything else worth seeing?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Cassandra. “It’s a big place. Everything on this floor, everything downstairs . . . everything in the basement.”

I blinked. “You’ve got a basement?” Almost no Martian buildings had basements; the permafrost layer was very hard to dig through.

“Yes,” she said. She paused, then looked away. “Of course, no one ever goes down there; it’s just storage.”

“I’ll have a look,” I said.

And that’s where I found him.

He was lying behind some large storage crates, face down, a sticky pool of machine oil surrounding his head. Next to him was a stubby excimer-powered jackhammer, the kind many fossil hunters had for removing surface material. And next to the jackhammer was a piece of good old-fashioned paper. On it, in block letters, was written, “I’m so sorry, Cassie. It’s just not the same.”

It’s hard to commit suicide, I guess, when you’re a transfer. Slitting your wrists does nothing significant. Poison doesn’t work and neither does drowning. But Joshua-never-anything-else-at-all-anymore Wilkins had apparently found a way. From the looks of it, he’d leaned back against the rough cement wall and, with his strong artificial arms, had held up the jackhammer, placing its bit against the center of his forehead. And then he’d pressed down on the jackhammer’s twin triggers, letting the unit run until it had managed to pierce through his titanium skull and scramble the material of his artificial brain. When his brain died, his thumbs let up on the triggers, and he dropped the jackhammer, then tumbled over himself. His head had twisted sideways when it hit the concrete floor. Everything below his eyebrows was intact; it was clearly the same reptilian face Cassandra Wilkins had shown me.

I headed up the stairs and found Cassandra, who was chatting in her animated style with another customer.

“Cassandra,” I said, pulling her aside. “Cassandra, I’m very sorry, but . . .”

She looked at me, her green eyes wide. “What?”

“I’ve found your husband. And he’s dead.”

She opened her pretty mouth, closed it, then opened it again. She looked like she might fall over, even with gyroscopes stabilizing her. “My . . . God,” she said at last. “Are you . . . are you positive?”

“Sure looks like him.”

“My God,” she said again. “What . . . what happened?”

No nice way to say it. “Looks like he killed himself.”

A couple of Cassandra’s coworkers had come over, wondering what all the commotion was about. “What’s wrong?” asked one of them—the same Miss Takahashi I’d seen earlier.

“Oh, Reiko,” said Cassandra. “Joshua is dead!”

Customers were noticing what was going on, too. A burly flesh-and-blood man, with short black hair, a gold stud in one ear, and arms as thick around as most men’s legs, came across the room; he clearly worked here. Reiko Takahashi had already drawn Cassandra into her arms—or vice versa; I’d been looking away when it had happened—and was stroking Cassandra’s artificial hair. I let the burly man do what he could to calm the crowd, while I used my wrist phone to call Mac and inform him of Joshua Wilkins’s suicide.