city blues 01 - dome city blues (6 page)

I paged through the stack slowly.  A trid of a high school graduation, Michael and two other grinning teens in caps and gowns.  Michael in his early twenties, sprawled on a couch with a huge tabby cat sleeping on his chest.  The shot had probably been taken a year or two before North America had been hit by the genetic plague that made cats an endangered species.

I flipped to the next picture, another flat photo, Michael at four or five, in a bathtub full of bubbles.  An obviously staged trid of an adult Michael surrounded by electronic equipment and wrapped in a tangle of test sensors and wires.

The last trid in the stack caught my attention.  Michael as an adult, his arm around the shoulders of a pretty young woman dressed in orange surgical scrubs.  The woman carried a data pad and had a stethoscope strung around her neck; she was obviously a doctor or nurse.  It took me a couple of seconds to recognize the woman as Sonja Winter; the holo had been shot before she’d gotten the eye shadow and lipstick tattoos.

I wondered if the surgical getup was a Halloween costume.  If so, why wasn’t Michael in costume as well?

I dropped the pictures on the counter and opened the door to a cabinet.  The Cutty was around somewhere.  I closed the cabinet and opened another.

As I reached up to rummage through the shelves, I realized that my hand was trembling.

Maybe a drink wasn’t such a good idea.  I closed the cabinet and went to bed.

I had the dream again...

I am in a dark labyrinth of rusty steel walls and worn cement floors.  The tops of the walls and ceiling are lost in shadow.  Somewhere, I can hear water drip slowly into a stagnant pool.  The air is damp and has a weird echoing quality that makes me think of indoor swimming pools.  The darkness is interrupted by irregular patches of light.

I hear a series of muffled thumps.  Someone is pounding on a wall.  I don’t know how I know it, but I’m certain that it’s Maggie.  She’s in some sort of danger.  I have to find her!  I listen carefully to the pounding, trying to figure out where it’s coming from.  I can’t tell.  I touch first one wall, then another.  It’s no good; I can feel the vibration through all the walls.

The pounding becomes faster, more urgent.

I start to run through the maze, taking turns at random.  I’ve got to find her!  I will goddamn it, I will!

I run faster, my feet skidding through puddles of water, stumbling over unseen debris.  Sometimes I lose my balance and bounce a shoulder painfully off one of the walls or sprawl headlong on the floor.  When that happens, I scramble to my feet and take off again, rushing blindly on through the labyrinth.

The pounding grows weaker, less frequent.

Every time I turn a corner, I promise myself that Maggie is just around the next one.  At each new corner, the promise turns into a lie.

The pounding is very weak now.  I have to stop running to hear it over my own footsteps.  She hasn’t got much time left.  Oh God, don’t do this to me...  PLEASE God... I’ll do anything...

I found myself sitting up in bed whispering “Please God...” over and over as the tears streamed down my face.

I knew better than to try to stop it.  I just let it out in great wracking sobs that left me gasping like a fish on dry land.

When it was over, I felt wrung out.  I laid down and listened to the sound of my own breathing until I drifted off again.  If I dreamed, it wasn’t anything worth remembering.

The next morning, I was in the shower when House played that pleasant little chime he uses to get my attention.  I paused in mid-scrub.  “Yeah House, what have you got?”

“As you requested, David, I have downloaded the morning news feed.”

I resumed scrubbing.  “Great, check the Personals for any messages addressed to Igor.”

The
Igor
thing was Jackal’s idea.  I guess jackers have an obsession for code names.

“There is one message addressed to Igor,” House said.  “Shall I read it to you?”

“Please.”

House made a quiet throat clearing sound.  It was an obviously superfluous gesture, since he didn’t actually have a throat.  I guess something in his programming told him that it was an appropriate sound to make, prior to reading aloud.  “To Igor, From J — The job is done.  Come see me.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes.”

“Thanks, House.”

“Don’t mention it, David.”

Nine hours later, I walked to Dome 12 and caught the Lev to West Hollywood.

Nexus Dreams was every bit as crowded as it had been the night before.  One end of the room had been cordoned off into a makeshift stage.  The attraction was a computer performance artist who billed himself as “Insanity.”  The performer’s long black hair was slicked back and pulled into a point, giving his head a sort of teardrop shape.

He wore a white synthleather trench coat that hung to his knees.  His entire act appeared to consist of a table top full of computer equipment jacked into a hologram projector.  The rig generated an animated hologram of the artist’s own face.  The holo was enlarged to about five times its normal size, so it could be easily seen from all over the room.  It floated over the heads of the crowd, its features contorting themselves through a range of weird expressions as it alternately screamed and whispered bizarre epithets.

“Night is the contrivance of solidified truth!” it shouted.  “I am the crystal blood-mist of hyperbolic fuel that mummifies the secret organs of the gods...”

The holographic face ranted ceaselessly, never making an iota of sense.

I watched the thing whimper and rave.  At first, I thought it was just a simulation, a vid recording of the artist’s face that had been doctored by video morphing software to create bizarre facial expressions.  But I began to realize that it was more than that.  There was something hypnotic about it, as though the hologram were a living thing instead of a weirdly distorted digital recording.

Somehow, from across the crowded bar, the hologram’s gaze met mine.  I found myself staring into its eyes, and I saw an agony reflected there that nearly staggered me.

“I can’t stop them,” the hologram said.  “Leaves of corruption are falling on my face, burrowing their way like insects down into the empty chasm of my heart, and I CAN...
NOT
... STOP... THEM...”

It suddenly seemed possible that I might stand there forever, crucified by the power of the holo’s gaze.  Then the tortured eyes flicked away from me, and began wandering the room again.  The spell of pain was broken.

I tore my eyes away and stared at the floor.  It took me a couple of seconds to remember why I’d come here.  Finally, I lifted my head and started scanning the crowd for Jackal.

I found her sitting at a table at the end of the room opposite
Insanity
.  Seated next to her was a kid I’d never seen before.  He was augmented cybernetically,
heavily
augmented.  Enough of him was hidden behind hardware implants to make it difficult to read his age, but my best guess was about seventeen.  He was definitely too young for the bar scene, but no one seemed to be interested in scanning his ID-chip.

Where the kid’s eyes should have been, cylindrical electroptic lenses protruded from his eye sockets like the barrels of twin video cameras.  His camera eyes whirred softly as the lenses spun to bring me into focus.  His right hand looked normal, but his left was cybernetic, an articulated alloy skeleton that made me think of robotic bones.  His head was shaved, his scalp tattooed with intricate patterns of circuit runs.  The servomotors in his cybernetic hand emitted sporadic electro-mechanical whimpers whenever he moved his fingers.  He stared at me for a second and then shifted his electroptic eyes back to Insanity’s performance art.

I turned to Jackal.  If anything, she looked thinner than she had the night before.  In place of the jump suit, she wore blue stretch-pants and a white sweatshirt with the sleeves ripped off.  The front of the shirt was a photo-active trid depicting a famous cartoon mouse sodomizing his cutesy mouse girlfriend in lurid 3-D.  The mouse appeared to move in and out when Jackal turned her body.

Jackal motioned me to a seat.

I sat down without ordering.  I didn’t intend to be there very long.

Jackal started to say something, but Cyber-kid interrupted her.  “They think that shit is funny,” he said.

His voice was gravelly, obviously generated by a speech synthesis chip.  I was struck by the certainty that he’d had his own larynx removed, just so he could speak with the voice of a machine.

“They’re too stupid to know what they’re doing,” he said.  “Either that, or they’re too stupid to care.”

Jackal took a swallow of her bright green drink.  “It’s no big deal,” she said.

“That asshole is torturing it,” the kid said in his metallic voice.  His camera-eyes were locked on the performance artist’s floating hologram.  “And everybody thinks it’s funny.”

I forced myself to look down the length of the bar room at the hologram, ready to jerk my eyes away the instant I felt the touch of its electric gaze.  From this distance, the face’s jabbering voice was hard to hear over the murmurings of the customers.

“It’s like it’s alive,” I said.  “At first, I thought it was just a vid recording, but it’s more than that, isn’t it?”

“It’s a Scion,” Jackal said.

“A Turing Scion?” I asked.

“Yeah,” the kid said.  “A digital image of a human mind.  And Asshole over there is driving it crazy, on
purpose
.”

I knew a little something about Turing Scions.  The concept had been around since the nineteen forties, the brainchild of Alan Turing, the British mathematician who’d invented digital computer logic, Artificial Intelligence, and the so-called
Machine Mind
.

Turing had predicted that technology would eventually permit a human mind to be recorded in digital form.  Thought, personality, idiosyncrasies, prejudices, the whole ball of wax.  Turing had been right; technology had caught up with his ideas in less than a hundred years.

“How can you drive a Turing Scion crazy?” I asked.

The kid turned his electroptic eyes toward me.  “Leave it plugged in,” he said.