city blues 01 - dome city blues (43 page)

The microchip implant in Jackal’s head; the unidentified microchips implanted in the brains of Michael Winter and Russell Carlisle.  The precise movements of the surgical robot; the machine-like movements of Michael’s gun hand.

The pieces of the puzzle swam around in my brain, taunting me, daring me to fit them together in the one pattern that made sense.

I sat bolt upright in the little contoured chair.  “Holy shit!”

Lance jumped at my sudden outburst.  “What?”

I stared through the window into the surgical suite.  One of the robot’s slender manipulators was sliding a new chip into the hole in the back of Jackal’s head.

“That chip,” I said, “the Fuyagi whatever-it-is.  It feeds computer information code into Jackal’s brain, right?”

“Yes.”

“What’s the difference between information code, and
control
code?”

Lance leaned back in his chair.  “Well... let’s see.  Control code instructs a computer to perform a certain task.  Like running a file search, or finding the cube root of 357.  Information code is just... information.  Data that can be retrieved on demand.”

“Yeah, but what’s the difference?  Electronically, I mean.”

“I’m not sure what you’re getting at,” Lance said.  “From an electronic standpoint, I guess there isn’t any real difference.  They’re both made up of ones and zeros.”

“Could the chip in Jackal’s head tell the difference between control code and information code?”

“Probably not.  Where are you going with this?”

“Suppose I wrote a piece of control code, and injected it into Jackal’s brain implant.  Could I control her actions?”

“Like a puppet?” Lance asked.  “A mind-control chip?”

I could tell out of the corner of my eye that he was smiling.  He started to say something, and then caught himself when he realized that I wasn’t smiling with him.  “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Deadly,” I said.

“Why do you want to control Gwen’s mind?”

“I’m using her as an example,” I said.  “I just want to know if it’s possible.”

Lance paused for a few seconds.  “No,” he said finally.  “The Fuyagi isn’t designed for anything even remotely like that.”

“What if it were a different CPU?  A custom-designed chip?”

Lance shook his head.  “No good.  A corymbic implant just does sort of an end-run on short-term memory.  It doesn’t plug into any of the right parts of the brain.”

“Wait a minute.”  I pointed the index finger of my left hand to a spot forward of my left temple; I tried to duplicate the position and angle that Michael’s Glock had taken in his suicide recording.  “What if the custom designed chip was implanted here?”

Lance sat up in his chair with a strange look on his face.  “Of course,” he whispered.  “The Frontal Lobe.  If you were going to do it... if it could be done, that would be the spot.”

“Why?  What’s so special about the Frontal Lobe?”

“Its anterior divisions, the Prefrontal Lobe and the Supplementary Motor Cortex, help integrate personality with emotion.  Nobody really understands
how
, but we do know that those portions of the brain convert thought into action, and action into thought.”

He nodded slowly.  “The left Prefrontal Lobe would be the perfect spot for the sort of implant you’re talking about, if the subject were right-handed.”

“Why would being right-handed make a difference?”

“The left hemisphere of the brain is dominant in something like ninety-eight percent of all right-handed people,” Lance said.  “If you wanted to control a right-handed person, it would make sense to target your implant for the left side of the brain.”

He stopped and shook his head.  “No.  No.  No.  It
still
wouldn’t work.”

“Why not?”

“There wouldn’t be enough memory storage.”

“In the brain?”

“In the implant,” Lance said.  “If you’re going to control someone’s mind, you’ll have to sublimate their will, displace their own personality.  To do that, you’d have to have something to replace their personality
with
.  A puppet personality, if you want to call it that.  A piece of control code that big takes up a lot of memory chips.  Maybe as many as twenty or thirty dense-packs.  There isn’t enough room in the human brain to squeeze in an implant that large.”

“Could it be external?  Like Jackal’s External Memory Module?”

Lance smiled.  “And have an interface cable dangling out of the side of your head?  That would attract attention, don’t you think?”

It was all starting to click now.  “Not if your EMM was wireless,” I said.  “All you’d have to do is connect it to a wireless transceiver.”

“That might work,” Lance said.  “But your transceiver would have to be very low-power, and very short range.  Otherwise, the transmission might interfere with sensitive electronics.”

“A transceiver with that short a range would have to be kept close to the subject’s body—the
puppet’s
body, wouldn’t it?”

“Of course,” Lance said.

I sat there, my eyes staring at the final stages of Jackal’s surgery, but seeing nothing.  I was stunned.

Tommy Mailo had been right all along.  Michael Winter
had
been a robot, a flesh and blood
puppet
following a piece of control code like a machine.

“It’s a beautiful setup,” Lance said.  “If you want to change your puppet’s programming, all you have to do is walk up to him, and swap his EMM.”

I nodded dumbly.  I had been assuming that the woman in Michael’s room had been there to fake his suicide.  But she’d actually been there to recover an EMM-transmitter hidden in the pack of cigarettes that Michael had carried in his pocket.

The EMM, coupled with the chip in Michael’s brain, would have given the cops enough evidence to start a witch-hunt.  With the chip destroyed by the bullet, and the EMM removed, there was no evidence to point to the real killer.  The woman had just been tidying up loose ends.

In Russell Carlisle’s case, cleanup had been even simpler; the bomb had destroyed the EMM and the chip in his head at the same time.

Both cases were perfect wrap-ups: opportunity, forensic trace evidence, murder weapons, detailed confessions, and with one easily dismissible exception, no alibis.  There was certainly no reason for anyone to suspect anything as unlikely as mind-control.

A lot of things were starting to make sense, but I still had a ton of unanswered questions.

Had Michael Winter and Russell Carlisle been nothing more than scapegoats, programmed to take the fall for somebody else’s crimes?  Or, had they actually been programmed to murder all those little girls?  And if so, why?

How did the owner of the AI, the man who hid behind the phony name of Henry Clerval, factor into this?  Why had he taken out a contract on me?  Could he be the Puppeteer?

Lance cleared his throat.  “This is all... hypothetical, right?”  There was a wild look in his eyes.  This wasn’t a game of ‘what-if’ to him anymore.  “You’re not saying that somebody has actually
done
this, are you?”

“Take it easy,” I said.  “It’s just idle speculation.  Watching Jackal’s surgery stirred up a few crazy ideas; I wanted to see where they went.”

My lie sounded anemic, even to me.

Lance showed no sign of relaxing; he wasn’t buying it.  “Good,” he said slowly.  “Because—if anybody actually
does
build this mind-control chip of yours—it will mean technological slavery on a scale that even Orwell never dreamed of.”

CHAPTER 28

The hours after Jackal’s surgery passed slowly.  It would have been safer to wait inside the boutique where no one could see me, but I couldn’t smoke in there.  I spent most of my time in the alley, chain-smoking cigarettes and trying to work things out.

I didn’t have a suspect any more, but that sure as hell wasn’t stopping the
Puppeteer
.  He was out there somewhere.  Watching me.  Making moves.  Playing with me.  It
was
playing, too; there was no doubt about that.  Why else would he bother to frame me for Kurt Rieger’s murder?  It would have been easier to kill me.

I was about to light another cigarette when Lance opened the back door of the boutique.  “Jackal’s coming around,” he said.

I pushed the unlit cigarette back into my pack and followed him inside.

The lights in the recovery room were low, presumably so that Jackal could rest.

She lay in a powered bed, the upper half elevated about forty-five degrees, raising her to a position mid-way between reclining and sitting.  Five slender cables ran from the back of her head to a bank of dermal stimulator units in a wheeled equipment rack.  The flickering green LEDs on the face of the dermal units cast animated shadows on the walls.

Jackal’s head was swathed in elastic bandage wraps, probably to hold the stimulator electrodes in place more than anything else; the incision hadn’t been very large.

She must have reloaded the chip that remembered me, because she tried to smile when she saw me come in.  “Stalin...” she whispered.  “You stuck around.”

“I had to make sure you were okay,” I said.

She swallowed with visible effort.  “Still pushing a pulse,” she said.  “But don’t ask me to dance.”

I smiled.  “There go
my
plans for the evening.”

Jackal grimaced and then closed her eyes.  “Did we get whatever it was we were after?”

“No,” I said.  “But you gave it a hell of a shot.  You dove right into the heart of a hostile AI.  I don’t know if that was genius, or stupidity, but it certainly was impressive.”

“I’d be willing to hazard a guess on that,” Lance said.

“I’m sorry,” Jackal said.  “I remember setting up for the run.  I remember...”

She smiled weakly.  “I bought you breakfast, didn’t I?”

“Yes,” I said.  “Top-shelf, gourmet stuff.”  I ran my hand through my blonde buzz-cut.  “You gave me a kickin’ hair cut too.”

Jackal squinted her eyes as though she were straining to see something.

“Take it easy, Gwen,” Lance said.  “I had to slick the data chips in your implant.  I’m afraid that there are going to be some gaps in your memories.”

Jackal’s face held its tension for a few seconds, her concentration written clearly in her eyes, and then she relaxed back into the pillow.  “I’m sorry,” she said.  Her voice was tired and breathy.  “I guess I lost a lot.  I can’t really remember the run at all.  It’s just... gone.”

My heart sank like a stone in my chest.  I realized that I’d been harboring a secret hope that she could give me the name of the AI’s real owner.  The name of the Puppeteer.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.  “I’ll just fall back on Plan
B
.”

“What’s that?” Lance asked.

“I don’t know yet,” I said.

“You should have downloaded the data from my implant before you slicked it,” Jackal said.

“I tried,” Lance said.  “Most of what I got was gibberish.  That AI hit you pretty hard.”

Jackal closed her eyes for a few seconds.  When she opened them again, she said, “let’s try it anyway.”

“Try what?” I asked.

“I want to have a go at reprocessing the data files Lance downloaded from my CPU.  I know the data is corrupted, but we might get lucky and catch a little piece of something.”

Lance shook his head.  “You’re not in any shape for it.  And you don’t upload known-bad software into your brain.  It doesn’t make sense.”

“It can’t hurt me,” Jackal said.

Lance crossed his arms.  “You don’t know that for sure.  What if that code has a virus and it screws up your CPU again?  Or it kicks you into a neural-feedback loop that spikes your central nervous system?”

“It won’t” Jackal said.  “You said yourself that the code was corrupted.  If it had a virus, it’s dead already.”

“I have to side with Lance,” I said.  “It doesn’t sound like a good idea to me.”

“It’s my brain,” Jackal said in a voice that was part croak, part whisper.

“It’s
my
implant, and even the code that Lance downloaded from my CPU belongs to me.”  She breathed heavily for a couple of seconds.  “Do it.”

Lance looked at me.  “What do you think?”

“Don’t ask him,” Jackal said.  “It’s not his decision.”

Lance continued to stare at me.

“Do it!” Jackal hissed again.

Lanced sighed, and rubbed his eyes.  “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

As soon as he was gone, Jackal relaxed back into her pillow and closed her eyes.

“If you’re set on doing this,” I said, “at least wait until you’re in better shape.”

“What about the price on your head?” Jackal whispered.  “I remember
that
much.  If we don’t do this now, you may not
have
a later.  And I put too much work into that kickin’ new hair-job of yours to let it go to waste.”

“Why are you doing this?” I asked.  “Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful, but why are you taking such a risk?”

Jackal lay for a moment without speaking, then she sighed.  “Every time a jacker punches into the net, he’s taking a chance with his life.  It’s the nature of the beast.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “But they do it for the money.  You don’t have to worry about that.  You made the run.  Your money is already earned, whether you do this or not.”