city blues 01 - dome city blues (25 page)

When the last of the champagne was gone, John dropped the empty bottle and glasses into the bucket and shooed the drone away.

“Okay,” I said.  “Give it up.  How did you do it?”

John looked at the retreating robot.  “Same way I always do it.  I said ‘go away,’ and it went away.”

I exhaled through my nose in mock exasperation.  “You know what I’m talking about.”

“Oh
that
,” John said.  “The neural shunt.  We finally got it to work right.”

“The neural shunt?”

John nodded.  “Yep.  I let them put a chip in my head and wires down my backbone.  You didn’t think I was going to allow all that hardware to go to waste, did you?”

“Wait a second,” I said.  “What about the seizures?”

John stared up toward the apex of the dome.  “Not a problem any more.”

I stood beside him and tried to follow his gaze.  A trio of radon-scavengers circled in the distance like robotic vultures, black mylar delta-wings gliding in looping spirals under the soaring arch of the dome.

John pointed up to them.  “Have you ever seen a radon-scavenger up close?”

I shook my head.

“There’s not much to one,” John said.  “It’s like a plastic bat-wing with a thousand tiny electrodes glued to it.  As it glides through the air, the electrodes generate some kind of electrostatic field that attracts radon particles.”

I waited for him to continue.  I had no idea where he was going with this.

After a few seconds, he sighed heavily.  “They’ve got little processors on board.  Computers that only know how to do two things: sniff out concentrations of radon, and find their way home to charging stations when their power runs low.”

“I don’t mean to be rude,” I said, “but is this a science lesson, or are you trying to tell me something?”

“I’m like those bats,” he said.  “Completely single-minded.  I’ve been trying to get my legs back for so long that I don’t know what else to do with my life.”

He continued staring up at the dome for a few seconds and then turned back to face me suddenly.  There was a strange look in his eyes.  He quickly covered it up with a grin.  “Enough about me.  How’s the case going, Sarge?”

“I’m still poking around,” I said.

“Be careful where you poke,” John said.  “You’ve got somebody’s attention.”

“What do you mean?”

“I watch the net pretty closely.”  He rubbed absently at his thigh.  “And lately, your name has been popping up all over the place.  Somebody is making some very oblique inquiries about you.”

“Any idea who that somebody might be?”

John shook his head.  “I chased down one of the
go-fetch
routines they’re using and tried to backtrack it to the source.  No luck.  It changed color maybe thirty times in ten microseconds.”

“Changed color?”

“Like a chameleon,” John said.  “A good piece of intruder-ware changes its appearance to match its environment.  Makes it harder for guard-dog routines to spot and kill it.  This one pretended to be everything from a bank credit check, to a police subpoena, to a random power surge.  Once it even changed into a call-back from one of those psychic advisor hot lines.  I managed to copy a little piece of it.  It was a really clean piece of code, cutting-edge.  My guess is, it was written by one monster of an AI.”

“Who would be likely to own an AI capable of writing something like that?”

“It could be the Yakuza,” he said.  “They could certainly field the software and the hardware.  Have you done anything to piss off the Sons of the Rising Sun lately?”

I shook my head.  “It’s probably not the Yak.  If they were unhappy with me, they wouldn’t keep it a secret; I’d just wake up one morning and find my head in the refrigerator between the leftover meat loaf and the bologna.”

“How about somebody corporate?”

I thought about it.  Somebody with corporate influence who might have cause to check me out.  Somebody with a lot of processing power at his disposal.  I could only think of one candidate: Kurt Rieger.

I shrugged.  “Maybe.”

“LAPD is interested in you too,” John said.  “They’ve got your name flagged in connection with a couple of murder cases.  You’re listed as a material witness in one case, and an ex-suspect in the other.  Their inquiries weren’t too hard to spot.  Their idea of camouflage is a rubber nose-and-glasses.”

“Thanks, John.  I appreciate you watching my back.”

He looked out over the city.  “No problem, Sarge.”

I was digging out another cigarette when I remembered something I’d been meaning to ask about.  “Hey partner, do you remember that Turing Scion that you made of Maggie?”

“Sure,” John said.  “I remember.”

“Do you still have it?”

John looked at me.  “Of course.  Do you want to talk to her?  I could go plug it in.”

I shook my head.  “I don’t want to talk to it,” I said.  “In fact, I’d appreciate it if you would erase that damned thing.”

John cocked his head to the side.  “Erase it?  I can’t erase it.  That Scion is all that’s left of her.  Everything that she ever
was
is in there.”

“She’s dead,” I said.  “It’s time we let her go.”

John shook his head.  “I can’t do that, Sarge.  It would be like … murder.”

“Bullshit,” I said.  “It’s just a recording.  One’s and zero’s.  It isn’t Maggie.”

“I plug her in sometimes,” John said.  “You should talk to her.  She misses you.”

“Maggie is dead,” I said.  My voice had an edge to it that I hadn’t intended.

“What if she had been in a Lev accident?” John asked.  “And she was still alive, but she had lost her legs.”

“It’s not the same thing,” I said.

“It
is
the same thing,” he said.  “Did I stop being
me
when I was strapped into that damned exoskeleton?”

“Don’t do this, John.  Please.”

“What if it were her arms
and
her legs?  Would she still be Maggie?”

“Yes,” I said quietly.  “She would still be Maggie.”

John said, “It’s the same principle.  She’s lost her body, but her soul is alive.”

“Don’t,” I said.

“She’s
still
Maggie,” he insisted.

I stared at him for a couple of seconds, but I couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t have made it worse.  I turned toward the sliding glass door.  “I think I’d better go.”

As I rode the elevator down, I tried not to think about Maggie.  The Turing Scion was a hideous thing to me, but it wasn’t the worst.  Her body was out there.  Pieces of her were walking around as spare parts grafted onto other people’s bodies.

Every minute of every day, I carried around the secret fear that I might someday meet the organ recipient who’d bought Maggie’s eyes.  I’d just be walking down the street, and I’d suddenly find Maggie’s beautiful animal eyes staring at me from out of someone else’s face.

It was almost enough to keep me off the streets.

CHAPTER 15

When I got home, there was a message waiting for me.  Tommy Mailo had finished his analysis of Michael Winter’s suicide recording.

I looked at my watch.  It was a little after five.  I called to let Tommy know that I was on my way.

I walked into Alphatronics just as Henry was letting himself out the front door.  He jerked a thumb toward the curtain.  “Tommy’s in the back,” he said.  “He’ll let you out when you’re done.”

I walked into the shop and Henry locked the door behind me.  He waved at me through the window and walked away.

I parted the curtain and stepped into the back of the store.  Three-quarters of the room was dedicated to shelves stacked with stock.  The remaining space contained a steel workbench crammed with electronic test equipment, cabling, and boxes full of repair parts.  On the far end sat two holo-decks and a flat-screen video monitor.

Tommy was perched on a high stool, eating a take-out burger and drinking a Coke from a plastic squeeze bulb.  He looked up when I walked in.  “Mr. Stalin, come on back.”

I smiled as I covered the distance to his workbench.  “It’s David.”

He grinned back at me.  “Okay, David.”

I pulled up another stool and sat down.  “What have you got?”

Tommy turned back to his equipment.  “I started out with a vectorscan,” he said.  “It told me that my recording was a copy, but we already knew that.”

I nodded.  “What did you find out?  Has the recording been altered?”

Tommy shook his head.  “No way.  The Hitachi 1250 has a scan rate of seventy-five frames per second.  That’s Industry Standard.  I used my computer to tally the number of frames in that recording.  There are exactly 112,500 frames recorded on that chip.  Twenty minutes worth of video data.  Every frame is in sequential order.  There are none missing, and there aren’t any extras.  No way has that recording been edited.”

“Okay,” I said.  “So the recording is clean.  What else did you find out?”

Tommy took a bite from his burger and chewed vigorously.  He started talking again before he swallowed.  “I started looking for evidence that someone else was in the room, like you told me.”

“Did you come up with anything?”

He flipped a switch and a still frame of Michael and the hotel room sizzled into view above one of the decks.  “I used a 3-D raytracing routine,” Tommy said.  “I told my system where the light sources in the room were, including reflective surfaces like those mirrors on the wall, and the chrome chassis on that blood test machine.”  He pointed to various images in the scene.  “Once the software knows where the light is coming from, it knows what size and shape the shadows are going to be.  I set up a routine to cancel any shadow caused by the guy who killed himself.  Any shadow not accounted for by the furniture or the guy would have to be from someone else.”

“Did you find any?”

He squirted a shot of Coke into his mouth to wash down the burger.  “Nope.  Every shadow in that recording came from a known source.”

I sighed.  “So there couldn’t have possibly been another person in that room?”

Tommy shook his head rapidly.  “I didn’t say that.  I just said I couldn’t find any proof of it using shadow mapping.  If our mystery person stayed well behind the camera and didn’t have any light sources behind him, I wouldn’t really expect to see any extra shadows.”

He took another bite of the burger.  This time he chewed and swallowed before continuing.  “Next, I checked for reflections covering the area behind the camera.  I went over the mirrored walls and the blood machine again.  I came up dry.  Whoever positioned that camera knew exactly what they were doing.  It’s like it was planned down to the millimeter.”

“So there were no reflections?”

“Not at first,” Tommy said.  “I had the system check every frame, and then I checked them myself.  The computer didn’t get a fix on anything, but on
my
pass, I found this.”

He punched a couple of keys, and the image of Michael jumped to life and fast forwarded to the part where he pulled the kitchen knife out of his pocket.  Tommy slowed the recording to a crawl, and then stopped it.  He watched a time code readout on his deck, and advanced the video frame-by-frame.

“Here.”  He used his keyboard to drag a wireframe box around the knife and enlarge it.  The image of Michael’s hand and the knife grew until it eclipsed the rest of the picture.  By the time it stopped growing, the image was so grainy that it looked like abstract art.  Tommy stroked the keyboard and the computer began enhancing the image.