She sits straight up in bed, clutching the duvet. Maybe it’s a hardware error. She runs the implant’s diagnostic program—wafts of cinnamon, leather, vodka, ash, flickers of the canariest of yellows, fathomless crystal blue, absolute black, then a sequence of pure tones without context—but all the tests are nominal.
Unbelievable that there was a breach, but that it happened seems to be certain. There are, she realizes, practical issues—the security of her bank accounts and clients’ data, the irrefutable evidence of her sporadic contempt for the law and frequent breaches of contract—but for now she can only focus on the profundity of the violation and the fact that the inmost structures of her being have been dispersed out into the world.
Something cracks in her and she throws the remote at the TV as hard as she can, really putting her shoulder into it, but it bounces off harmlessly so she turns on her wireless and blasts through the TV’s security and overloads its power supply which starts sparking like a firework; it’s a childish gesture, she thinks, as the flash of rage fades, but at least the hotel probably won’t know it was her, and now the abstract geometrics spasming across the TV screen are settling into a deep crystalline blue, the same as the color from her implant’s diagnostics, which somehow seems natural, as though her history pervaded everything, and the world were the palace of her memory.
23
Finish Up
Lares’ room was about three hundred feet below the surface, which meant it had been there about five years.
Dark, down in the tunnels, and always cool, no matter how hot it is outside, something about the physics. Kern counts the turns, scrambles down decrepit ladders by phone light—there are no markers, as the people who live here know the way and want their privacy. He refuses to think of the time he found a body here by touch. It’s important not to make a mistake, as Lares has a thing for booby traps, the more complex, the better. The street sounds are distant. It’s a kind of peace.
The lightless narrow corridors all look the same, but when he thinks he’s at the right place he says, “It’s me, man. Open up,” into the dark. Waits. Lares’ disembodied, staticky voice: “Come on down. I unlocked the door.”
How many times has he come here with whatever wallet, watch or phone Lares had assigned him to fetch. Sometimes it was second-story work, but more often it was just a mugging, which he always found exhilarating, which was troubling, because it seemed more like a bully’s feeling than his. There was a time when he came by to ask Lares about his more difficult reading—the books on Zen, especially, often made no sense—for Lares had read everything, and liked to hold forth; they’ve never been friends, exactly, but Lares seemed to accept him, as he did almost no one else, perhaps seeing in Kern’s single-mindedness a mirror of his own. Lately, though, Lares has been getting more remote, as though slipping ever farther out of humanity’s orbit, and Kern reminds himself not to presume.
Five turns later he’s in Lares’ room, dark but for the light of all the monitors. From a corner comes the tapping of keys; eyes adjusting, he sees Lares there, engrossed in his laptop, at work on his game, like always, his eyes reflecting the code scrolling by.
The monitors are salvage, as is the bare, stained mattress, gleaming blue in the dull glow, but the laptop, Lares told him, was designed by an AI, and cost a fortune; the keyboard, which looks like the flattened vertebra of some gigantic Pleistocene mammal, lets you code for days without hurting your wrists. The air is stale; he tries not to show that he’s breathing through his mouth.
On the screens are empty caverns, unsettled water glittering in torchlight, an abandoned forge with scattered tools, and, there, motion, and it’s what has to be a vampire with his eyes like slits of fire, his deeply stained lips and his air of tragic, labored dignity; the vampire steps out of the shadows, scans his crypt wearily, goes to a window to stare out at the sky.
Lares tears his eyes from the monitors to stare at Kern, envoy from a world that doesn’t interest him. About twenty-five, Lares, already balding, getting fat, in need of a shave. What Kern can see of the floor is covered with drifts of sour clothes, burrito wrappers, random computer hardware. There’d been this little punk-rock girl named Gabriela who said she couldn’t afford boundaries who Lares used to pay to clean up and to blow him once in a while, but she’d disappeared years ago, and now Lares seems to have gone beyond the need for cleanliness or women. In the screens’ faint glow, in which the squalor is barely visible, there is a calm, almost a romance, as though time were in abeyance in the dark room, while in the game, behind the screens, it passes.
The vampire stretches hugely, and there’s something inhuman in the dimensions of his shoulders. Boredom, irritation, suppressed rage pass over his features, and then he’s stalking down a corridor, the camera following as he flexes and clenches his cruelly taloned hands. “I like the way he moves,” Kern says. “It’s better than last time. Like he’s looking for someone to hurt. It’s as good as a movie.”
“Funny you should say that,” says Lares, with something like tenderness, his voice rusty with disuse, watching his creation’s rage blooming. “I’ve been working on him for years, but body kinematics are hard. But Sony developed an emotional-movement library and, given their really incredible level of investment in it, their security was unimpressive.”
“Tell him you lost the phone,” the ghost whispers in his ear.
“So the last job was a problem,” Kern says, and gives him an edited version of the truth.
“Are you sure the phone’s gone?” Lares asks, weirdly pale in the screen light.
“Absolutely,” Kern says. “I chucked it by the Folsom checkpoint. It’s gone for good. No telling who found it.”
Lares slumps deeper into his chair. Kern says, “So what was it, anyway? Why all the fuss?”
“Something special,” Lares says, far away. “I needed it for the game. But it doesn’t matter.”
“Who did we steal it from?”
“Depends on your point of view. Some graffiti kid, proximally, but he got it from other thieves who are friends of his—they didn’t know what they had, but they thought he’d like the images. I knew about it because of these contractors who were going to steal it first. Dumb-asses,” he says tonelessly. “If they were really such bad news they’d know more about encryption.”
“Contractors?”
“Ex-cartel. Migrating north along with everything else. Bringing their special skill set to the unique challenges of today’s global business environment. Basically, they’re campesino shooters trying to build a brand on their violent surrealism.”
“The passport,” says the ghost.
“I need to get out of town. Can you get me a passport?”
“How soon?”
“Now.”
“Expensive.”
Kern takes a sheaf of bills from his pocket, holds it to the light to show denomination.