city blues 01 - dome city blues (47 page)

It was nearly midnight when I pulled through the lighted archway into Dome 17’s north lock.  I waited for the inner doors to cycle open, and then drove into Dome 17.  I followed the route that Jackal and I had taken by cab the night before: west on Imperial Highway, and then south on Vista Del Mar.

I parked Rieger’s BMW at the strip-mall and walked across the street to the abandoned tidal-electric plant that played home to R.U.R.

I paused for a millisecond when I came to the far edge of the concrete pad.  Then I stepped out onto that metal grating and walked across it.  Seeing the old warehouse again had broken something free inside of me, and the catwalk over the tide engine had lost its power to freeze my heart.  It was just another piece of steel now.

The tidal plant was littered with dilapidated buildings.  It took me four tries to find the staircase that led to Iron Betty’s little kingdom.

Surf answered my knock on the door.  “How’s Jackal doing?”  His concern was probably genuine, but the flat mechanical quality of the voice chip made his question sound unemotional and disinterested.

“She’s going to be okay,” I said.  “Lance says she’ll be up and around by tomorrow.”

“Good.  We were watching when you interfaced with the AI.  Jackal was playing it pretty close to the wire.”

I searched for my cigarettes.  “How long does it take to warm up this killer virus of yours?”

Surf grinned.  “What do you have in mind?”

I lit a smoke.  “I’m going to pay a visit to Neuro-Tech Robotics, and I need someone to take out their AI before it can take me out.”

“Come on,” Surf said.  “You’ll have to talk to the Lady.”  He turned and started walking away.

I followed.  “Iron Betty?  What do I need to see her for?”

“It’s her decision,” Surf said.

“Last night, you were making noises like Mr. Cyber-executioner.  Now you’ve got to ask permission to come out and play?  I thought you
wanted
to try out your new virus.”

“I do,” Surf said.  “But every attack must be made...”

“
On
purpose, and
with
purpose,” I said.  “I’ve heard that one before.”

Surf ignored my comment, and led me into Iron Betty’s chamber and through the maze of computer hardware to her nest in the center of the room.

Her eyes were still locked on their invisible focal point.  I wondered if she had slept, or even blinked since the last time I’d seen her.  She smiled slightly.  “The oyster returns,” she said in her whispery voice.  “Perhaps he is intent on growing some teeth.”

“Pardon me?”

“You haven’t read your Carroll, have you, Mr. Stalin?”

“Apparently not,” I said.

“Lewis Carroll,” Iron Betty said.

“Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?” I asked.

“Right author,” Surf said.  “Wrong book.  Try
Through the Looking Glass
.”

I shook my head.  “I don’t follow.”

“Your enemy has read it,” Iron Betty said.  “That’s where he found the verse.”

“The one about the walrus?”

“Exactly,” said Iron Betty.  “It’s from Tweedledee’s poem
The Walrus and the Carpenter
.”

“Who told you about the verse?” I asked.

“Nobody told us,” Surf said.  “We were monitoring Jackal’s run when she used it to activate the call-back routine at Pacific Fusion and Electric.”

“The poem sounds like nonsense to me,” I said.  “At least the parts I’ve heard so far.  But maybe I should try to find a copy of it, to see if it means anything.”

“You can find it in the net,” Surf said.  “Alongside every other piece of classic literature.  But you don’t need to bother now; we already looked it up.”

“Does it really mean anything?”

“That depends on what you are willing to read into it,” Iron Betty said.  “When pared down to its essentials, the poem tells the story of a walrus and a carpenter who conspire to lure a bunch of unsuspecting oysters out of the sea and onto the beach for a walk.  The oysters, who are unaccustomed to walking, quickly become exhausted.  The walrus baffles their tired minds with stories about boiling seas and winged pigs.  When the oysters are thoroughly confused, and too tired to escape, the walrus and the carpenter kill them and eat every one.”

“And that makes me the oyster who wants to grow teeth?”

“That’s what you came here for, isn’t it?”  Surf asked.  “The bad guys have been taking you for a little walk on the beach and baffling you with nonsense.  Now, you’re all worn out, and you want us to help you grow some teeth so that you can bite them before they eat you.”

I nodded.  “I need you to take out an AI.  I don’t care if you slick it, or just knock it off line for a few hours.  But it has to be out of my way.”

“Why should we do this?” Iron Betty asked.

“You saw what happened to Jackal,” I said.  “Isn’t that reason enough?”

“Revenge is a motive we try to avoid,” Iron Betty said.  “We cannot hope to advance to the next evolutionary level by embracing the animal instincts of our past.”

“What about your Convergence?” I asked.

“I didn’t think you believed in the Convergence,” said Iron Betty.

“I don’t,” I said.  “But according to you, that doesn’t matter.  What was it you were saying last night?  It isn’t necessary for me to understand the Convergence, or to even be aware of it.  You said I’d be part of it anyway.”

“True enough,” said Iron Betty.

“Well if there is such a thing,” I said, “it’s happening at Neuro-Tech Robotics.”

Iron Betty chuckled softly.  “It isn’t quite as simple as that, Mr. Stalin.  Perhaps we’ve given you the impression that the Convergence will occur in one bold stroke.  In fact, it will be like any other evolutionary contest.  It will not be won or lost in a single skirmish, no matter how decisive.  The struggle will last for years, perhaps decades, and many battles will be fought.”

“Fine,” I said.  “But you can’t win a war without winning some of the battles.  And one of your battles is being fought at Neuro-Tech.  If you don’t show up, you’re going to lose this one by default.”

“We can’t win if we don’t fight,” Surf said.

“The question,” Iron Betty said, “isn’t whether or not we will fight.  Rather, it is a matter of
when
, and
where
.  Although the net shows us that the Convergence is near, I can see no indication that Neuro-Tech Robotics is involved.  We act in response to data, Mr. Stalin, not in response to the lack of it.”

I stopped for a few seconds.  Should I tell them?  I thought of Sonja; time might be running out for her, if it hadn’t run out already.  I couldn’t afford
not
to tell them.

“Okay,” I said.  “You’re probably not going to believe this, but Neuro-Tech has made a quantum leap in neural implant technology.  They’ve developed a custom microchip that gets implanted in the Prefrontal Lobe.  I call it the Puppet Chip.  It turns the human body into sort of a flesh and blood puppet, controlled by computer-generated software.”

“Can you offer proof?” Iron Betty asked.

“Michael Winter and Russell Carlisle were both puppets,” I said.  “Look up their autopsy files in the LAPD Homicide database.  There’s evidence that both men had microchip implants in their left Prefrontal Lobes.”

“That doesn’t tell us a great deal,” Iron Betty said.  “Many people have neural implants.”

“Not in their Prefrontal Lobes,” I said.  “Besides, if you check their medical histories, I think you’ll find there is no record that either of them ever had any sort of neural implant.”

“Then where did these implants come from?” Iron Betty asked.

“Michael Winter had an operative brain tumor,” I said.  “The records will undoubtedly show that Russell Carlisle suffered from something similar.  Both men underwent neuro-surgery, and their operations were almost certainly performed by surgical robots.  Anyone want to guess who builds those robots?”

“Neuro-Tech Robotics,” said Surf.

“Got it in one,” I said.

CHAPTER 30

At two-twenty a.m., Hawthorne Boulevard was deserted.  I parked Rieger’s BMW about a quarter of a block from the Neuro-Tech building.

John’s new haunted-castle holo-facade hid his five-story cement cube behind an illusion of crumbling stone walls and shadowed towers.  The trid I’d seen in John’s apartment a couple of days earlier hadn’t done the projection justice; the designer had really gone in for detail.  Veils of cobwebs shrouded the castle’s darkened window slits.  Tattered banners hung from rusty flagpoles atop the battlements, and flocks of black bats looped and darted through the air around the towers.  Every few seconds, a jagged fork of holographic lightning would split the air above the castle, throwing the old fortress into stark relief.

None of the other buildings on the block had holo-facades.  Then again, none of them were ugly enough to need one.

I popped Rieger’s car phone out of its recess on the dashboard, and punched in a number I’d gotten from Surf.  Supposedly, the number belonged to a phone booth in the Cayman Islands.  It rang six times.

If Surf’s claims were true, each ring represented a transfer to a different switchboard in a different city.  My call bounced from the Caymans, to the Florida Pirate Republics, to Zurich, to Singapore, to God-knows-where, and finally, to a number that technically didn’t exist back in LA.  Enough razzle-dazzle to make it hard as hell to trace.

Surf’s gravelly mechanical voice answered after the sixth ring.  “Joe’s Pool Hall.”

“I’m here,” I said.

“Out front?”

“Just up the street,” I said.  “I’m looking at the building now.  Are you ready?”

“Just a keystroke away,” Surf said.

“What about the doors?  Are you sure you can handle them?”

“Like I told you,” Surf said, “it’s covered.  At the instant that the virus hits the mainframe, a subroutine injected into the building’s maintenance computer will retract every automatic lock in the place.  Exactly fifteen milliseconds later, the power will go down, leaving the locks in the unlatched position.  You won’t even have to say ‘Open Sesame.’”

“Will the security systems be off line?”

“My virus will slick the mainframe,” Surf said.  “And if it doesn’t finish the job, flat-lining the power grid will do the trick.  Any other security systems should go down when the power gets cut.”

I took a deep breath and released it slowly.  “Give me thirty seconds,” I said.

“The count-down is on,” Surf said, and hung up.

I plugged the phone back into its recess, grabbed my Night-Stalkers and Ryan’s machine pistol out of the travel bag, and climbed out of the car.  The gull-wing door powered itself shut behind me.

I shoved the barrel of the machine pistol through my belt and adjusted the bomber jacket to cover it as much as possible.  I started walking toward the Neuro-Tech building, in what I hoped was a casual manner.

Don’t look at me; I’m just out for a stroll.  Minding my own business.  Kindly disregard the military-grade night goggles tucked under my arm and the silenced machine pistol sticking out of my jacket.

Either my timing was nearly perfect, or Surf’s was.  I was less than ten meters from the building when the haunted-castle holo-facade flickered twice, strobed with static for about a quarter of a second, and went out.  The Neuro-Tech building was dark.

I slipped the Night-Stalkers over my forehead and flicked the power switch on.  I flipped the lenses down over my eyes, and the dark building lit up in shades of green.

I covered the remaining distance with a few long strides, not drawing the machine pistol until I was standing in front of the entrance.  My natural choice was the Blackhart, but Ryan’s machine pistol was silenced, and wouldn’t give away my position if I had to fire it.

I laid my hand on the translucent polycarbon door.  The bulletproof surface was cool under my palm.  I pushed gently and the door swung inward without a sound.  Surf’s door-lock virus had apparently done its work.

I stepped inside, slid quickly to the left of the doorway, and stood with my back to the wall.  Even with no light to silhouette me, I wanted to get clear of the doorway as quickly as possible.

I gave the lobby a quick scan.  No bad guys in sight.

I knew that John didn’t have any security people, because he didn’t trust them.  I’d probably heard him say it a thousand times; he’d pulled enough sentry duty in the Army to know that guards are expensive, inattentive, and not very effective.

It was his sentry robots that had me worried.  If they were just drones, remote-controlled by John’s AI, they’d have gone down when the virus took the mainframe out.  But if they were true robots, with on-board CPU’s, they could operate independently of the AI.

John and I had never discussed his defense systems; it just wasn’t the sort of thing that came up in polite conversation.

Of course, there was still John himself to think about, and his gunslinger—the woman with the laser.

I crossed the lobby quickly but quietly, ears cocked for any sound not of my own making.

At the door to the stairs, I did another jack-in-the-box entrance, ready to shoot man, woman, or robot.  The stairwell was empty.