Red Planet Blues

FIVE





Iwent by NewYou again. Cassandra wasn’t in, but that didn’t surprise me; she was a grieving widow now. But Horatio Fernandez—he of the massive arms—was on duty.

“I’d like a list of everyone who transferred the same day as Joshua Wilkins,” I said.

He frowned. “That’s confidential information.”

There were several potential customers milling about. I raised my voice so they could hear. “Interesting suicide note, wasn’t it?”

Fernandez grabbed my arm and led me quickly to the side of the room. “What the hell are you doing?” he whispered angrily.

“Just sharing the news,” I said, still speaking loudly, although not quite loud enough now, I thought, for the customers to hear. “People thinking of uploading should know that it’s not the same—at least, that’s what Joshua Wilkins said in that note.”

Fernandez knew when he was beaten. The claim in the putative suicide note was exactly the opposite of NewYou’s corporate position: transferring was supposed to be flawless, conferring nothing but benefits. “All right, all right,” he hissed. “I’ll pull the list for you.”

“Now that’s service. They should name you employee of the month.”

He led me into the back room and spoke to a little cubic computer. I happened to overhear the passphrase for accessing the customer database; it was just six words—hardly any security at all.

“Huh,” said Fernandez. “It was a busy day—we go days on end without anyone transferring, but seven people moved their consciousnesses into artificial bodies that day, and—oh, yeah. We were having our twice-a-mear sale. No wonder.” He held out a hand. “Give me your tab.”

I handed him the small tablet computer and he copied the files on each of the seven to it.

“Thanks,” I said, taking back the device and doing that tip-of-the-nonexistent-hat thing I do. Even when you’ve forced a man to do something, there’s no harm in being polite.



* * *



If I was right that Joshua Wilkins had appropriated the body of somebody else who had been scheduled to transfer the same day, it shouldn’t be too hard to determine whose body he’d taken; all I had to do, I figured, was interview each of the seven.

My first stop, purely because it happened to be the nearest, was the home of a guy named Stuart Berling, a full-time fossil hunter. He must have had some recent success, if he could afford to transfer.

On the way to his place, I walked past several panhandlers, one of whom had a sign that said, “Will work for air.” The cops didn’t kick those who were in arrears in their life-support tax payments out of the dome—Slapcoff Industries still had a reputation to maintain on Earth—but if you rented or had a mortgage, you’d be evicted onto the street.

Berling’s home was off Seventh Avenue, in the Fifth Circle. It was part of a row of crumbling townhouses, the kind we called redstones. I pushed his door buzzer and waited impatiently for a response. At last he appeared. If I wasn’t so famous for my poker face, I’d have done a double take. The man who greeted me was a dead ringer for Krikor Ajemian, the holovid star—the same gaunt features and intense brown eyes, the same mane of dark hair, the same tightly trimmed beard and mustache. I guess not everyone wanted to keep even a semblance of their original appearance.

“Hello. My name is Alexander Lomax. Are you Stuart Berling?”

The artificial face in front of me surely was capable of smiling but chose not to. “Yes. What do you want?”

“I understand you only recently transferred your consciousness into this body.”

A nod. “So?”

“So, I work for NewYou—the head office on Earth. I’m here to check up on the quality of the work done by our franchise here on Mars.”

Normally, this was a good technique. If Berling was who he said he was, the question wouldn’t faze him. Unfortunately, the usual technique of watching a suspect’s expression for signs that he was lying didn’t work with most transfers. I’d asked Juan Santos about that once. “It’s not that transfer faces are less flexible,” he’d said. “In fact, they can make them more flexible—let people do wild caricatures of smiles and frowns. But people don’t want that, especially here on the frontier. See, there are two kinds of facial expressions: the autonomic ones that happen spontaneously and the forced ones. From a software point of view, they’re very different; the mental commands sent to fake a smile and to make a spontaneous smile are utterly dissimilar. Most transfers here opt for their automatic expressions to be subdued—they value the privacy of their thoughts and don’t want their faces advertising them; they consider it one of the pluses of having transferred. The transferee may be grinning from ear to ear on the inside, but on the outside, he just shows a simple smile.”

Berling was staring at me with an expression that didn’t tell me anything. But his voice was annoyed. “So?” he said again.

“So I’m wondering if you were satisfied by the work we did for you?”

“It cost a lot.”

I smiled. “It’s actually come down a great deal recently. May I come in?”

He considered this for a few moments then shrugged. “Sure, why not?” He stepped aside.

His living room was full of worktables covered with reddish rocks from outside the dome. A giant lens on an articulated arm was attached to one of the tables, and various mineralogist’s tools were scattered about.

“Finding anything interesting?” I asked, gesturing at the rocks.

“If I was, I certainly wouldn’t tell you,” said Berling, looking at me sideways in the typical paranoid-prospector way.

“Right,” I said. “Of course. So, are you satisfied with the NewYou process?”

“Sure, yeah. It’s everything they said it would be. All the parts work.”

“Thanks for your help,” I said, pulling out my tab to make a few notes, and then frowning at its blank screen. “Oh, damn. The silly thing has a loose excimer pack. I’ve got to open it up and reseat it.” I showed him the back of the unit’s case. “Do you have a little screwdriver that will fit that?”

Everybody owned some screwdrivers, even though most people rarely needed them, and they were the sort of thing that had no standard storage location. Some people kept them in kitchen drawers, others kept them in tool chests, still others kept them under the sink. Only a person who had lived in this home for a while would know where they were.

Berling peered at the slot-headed screw, then nodded. “Sure. Hang on.”

He made a beeline for the far side of the living room, going to a cabinet that had glass doors on its top half but solid metal ones on its bottom. He bent over, opened one of the metal doors, reached in, rummaged for a bit, and emerged with the appropriate screwdriver.

“Thanks,” I said, opening the case in such a way that he couldn’t see inside. I then surreptitiously removed the bit of plastic I’d used to insulate the excimer battery from the contact it was supposed to touch. Without looking up, I said, “Are you married, Mr. Berling?” Of course, I already knew the answer was yes; that fact was in his NewYou file.

He nodded.

“Is your wife home?”

His artificial eyelids closed a bit. “Why?”

I told him the honest truth since it fit well with my cover story: “I’d like to ask her whether she can perceive any differences between the new you and the old.”

Again, I watched his expression, but it didn’t change. “Sure, I guess that’d be okay.” He turned and called over his shoulder, “Lacie!”

A few moments later, a homely flesh-and-blood woman of about sixty appeared. “This is Mr. Lomax from the head office of NewYou,” said Berling, indicating me with a pointed finger. “He’d like to talk to you.”

“About what?” asked Lacie. She had a deep, not-unpleasant voice.

“Might we speak in private?” I asked.

Berling’s gaze shifted from Lacie to me, then back to Lacie. “Hrmpph,” he said, but then a moment later added, “I guess that’d be all right.” He turned around and walked away.

I looked at Lacie. “I’m just doing a routine follow-up,” I said. “Making sure people are happy with the work we do. Have you noticed any changes in your husband since he transferred?”

“Not really.”

“Oh? If there’s anything at all . . .” I smiled reassuringly. “We want to make the process as perfect as possible. Has he said anything that’s surprised you, say?”

Lacie crinkled her face even more than it normally was. “How do you mean?”

“I mean, has he used any expressions or turns of phrase you’re not used to hearing from him?”

A shake of the head. “No.”

“Sometimes the process plays tricks with memory. Has he failed to know something he should know?”

“Not that I’ve noticed.”

“What about the reverse? Has he known anything that you wouldn’t expect him to know?”

Lacie lifted her eyebrows. “No. He’s just Stu.”

I frowned. “No changes at all?”

“No, none . . . well, almost none.”

I waited for her to go on, but she didn’t, so I prodded her. “What is it? We really would like to know about any difference, any flaw in our transference process.”

“Oh, it’s not a flaw,” said Lacie, not meeting my eyes.

“No? Then what?”

“It’s just that . . .”

“Yes?”

“Well, just that he’s a demon in the sack now. He stays hard forever.”

I frowned, disappointed not to have found what I was looking for on the first try. But I decided to end the masquerade on a positive note. “We aim to please, ma’am. We aim to please.”