city blues 02 - angel city blues (39 page)

I did my best to force the memory out of my mind. “You heard the lady,” I said. “Gotta do the eyes. What are the options?”

The man looked thoughtful. “We can do a viral intervention in chromosome 15. A minor adjustment to a gene called OCA2, to stimulate production of tyrosine. We have expert software that calculates the precise codons needed to achieve the desired shade. Or, if you’d like a less permanent solution, you can use colored contact lenses.”

His tone of voice made it clear that this last option was vastly inferior, which probably meant that his sales commission would be significantly lower.

I was tempted to go with the contacts anyway, just to keep these people from monkeying with my chromosomes. But contacts give me a splitting headache after about five minutes, and it would be embarrassing to lose a lens somewhere in the bowels of Akimura Nanodyne.

“No contacts,” I said. “Let’s go with the viral thing.”

The sales rep’s expression brightened visibly.

“How long to do it all?” Vivien asked.

The rep gave her a measured look, as if we had reached the difficult part of the pitch, and he had to proceed with caution to keep us from slipping off the hook. “Fees are determined by specialized software, based on the difficulty of the procedures, the per-minute charge for the robot surgeon, bio materials expended, and recovery time in the dermal stimulation unit.”

“I’m not asking how
much
,” Vivien said. “I’m asking how
long
.”

The sales rep seemed to find this question much more to his liking. “About two hours for the prep work and surgery. Then six to eight hours of dermal stim, depending on how the gentleman’s metabolism responds to accelerated tissue regeneration protocols.

Vivien looked at me. “Does that work for you?”

In point of fact, I was having second thoughts. I’d managed to get through my entire life wearing the face that nature had given me, and I was reluctant to change it now. It wasn’t vanity. As far as I knew, no one with good eyesight had ever called me handsome, but it was
my
face. The one I had inherited from my genes. The face I was used to seeing in the mirror.

I swallowed my hesitation and nodded. “Yeah. Sounds good.”

The sales rep launched into a recitation of financing options, which Vivien silenced by pulling out a bank chip with a platinum stripe.

The rep accepted the chip and zipped it through his reader. Whatever he saw on the screen brought about a profound change in his demeanor. He went from friendly and solicitous to utterly obsequious in the space of about one heartbeat. As though he had suddenly discovered that he was in the presence of royalty.

He bowed low when he passed the chip back to Vivien, using both hands in a palms-up gesture of formal presentation.

Vivien gave my hand a quick squeeze, and then I followed the sales rep behind the counter and into the pre-op area.

Fifteen minutes later, I was scrubbed, gowned, and laid out in a powered contour chair, waiting for the row of dermal anesthesia patches on my wrist to do their magic. I was out before the orderlies wheeled me into operating suite, and that was probably not an accident.

Taken as an abstract concept, a lot of people prefer surgical robots to human doctors. And I wouldn’t argue with them. Robots don’t get tired; they don’t get distracted, and they’re supposedly immune to the kinds of errors that human surgeons are known to make. But there’s a world of difference between watching a surgical robot from the perspective of an observer, and actually laying helpless under the blades of the machine.

It doesn’t have one laser scalpel, or even ten. It’s got fifty. Plus radial bone saws, suction hoses, pressure syringes, intravenous tubes, cauterizing electrodes, and a forest of manipulators ranging from nearly microscopic fingers, to articulated claws large enough to rip your leg off. And oh my God do those things have eyes. Vid cameras, IR cameras, multispectral cameras, micro lenses, macro lenses, and clusters of multifaceted lenses that look like the compound eyes of insects.

Seen up close, a surgical robot ceases to be an abstract concept. It’s a ceiling-sized mechanical monster, with more arms and eyes than you can count.

Which presumably explained why the Face Replace medical staff was so careful about making sure that patients never saw the machine. It wouldn’t do to have clients jump off the operating table and start screaming bloody murder. That kind of thing couldn’t possibly be good for business.

The staff certainly followed protocol with me. I never laid eyes on the robot. I was gone from the world long before its blades ever touched me.

I dreamed about the endless beach and the imperfectly perfect moon. Wandering aimlessly along the shore line while the rushing waves whispered dire secrets into the heavy salt air. I couldn’t quite make out the words buried in the low hiss of the surf, and I knew that I didn’t want to. The half-heard whispers spoke of dark things. Cruel things. Deception. Treachery. Betrayal.

I was following in the footsteps of a man with no face. His silhouette was a deeper shade of shadow against the night, always on the verge of disappearing into the deepening gloom.

I lengthened my stride, but I didn’t gain on him. My increased pace was barely enough to maintain position on the retreating stranger.

I tried putting on another burst of speed, picking up to a half trot. No good. The faceless man never seemed to alter his gait, but he always remained at the far edge of my vision.

His joints made odd mechanical noises as he strode through the darkness. Low gronks and whines that reminded me of overloaded servomotors, shot through with metallic scissoring, like the gnashing of steel teeth, or the stropping of a hundred scalpel blades.

At some point, I noticed that his feet were not leaving prints in the sand. I drew up short, and turned to examine my own footprints. A trail of them led off into the gloom.

As I watched, each of the foot-shaped depressions began filling with dark fluid. At first, I thought it might be blood, but when I knelt to get a closer look, I realized that it wasn’t liquid at all. Thousands (or millions) of speck-sized particles crawling over each other in a hideously biological parody of Brownian motion.

I reached out a finger to touch the seething surface of the not-liquid. Before I made contact, the world changed, and I was somewhere else, doing something that involved plastic shipping crates packed to overflowing with pieces of broken musical instruments.

Perhaps there were other dreams, but none of the rest made impressions on my memory. Just the shadow man, who left no footprints on the beach that never ends.

I woke to find a young Japanese woman leaning over me, brushing a strand of hair from my forehead. She was dressed in the disposable paper robe of a patient, rather than the green surgical scrubs of the medical staff.

As my eyes regained enough focus to see her features more clearly, it dawned on me that there was something familiar about her.

She spotted the flicker of semi-recognition in my eyes, and gave me a smile. The expression vanished instantly, replaced by something closer to a grimace. “Damn it, that hurts!”

Her voice wasn’t just familiar. I knew it well.

“Vivien?”

This triggered another round of the smile-to-grimace cycle. “You were expecting someone else?”

I must have furrowed my brow or shown some other expression of surprise, because suddenly my face hurt like hell. Not the sharply immediate pain of an open wound, but the deep ache of muscles that haven’t quite recovered from some non-trivial injury.

“I forgot about the Zen face,” Vivien said.

“The what?” The second word came out with an odd intonation, because it also hurt to talk.

“Zen face,” Vivien said. “They’ve got us pumped full of analgesics and anti-inflammatories, but you can’t go poking sharp instruments into human tissue without causing some discomfort. So we try to keep facial expressions to a minimum for a day or two until the worst of it is past. Zen face. Or poker face, if you prefer.”

I was still thrown off by the sight of Vivien’s voice coming out of a Japanese woman’s face. But I could actually see some of Vivien’s facial structure beneath the modifications. Her gray eyes were now brown and almond shaped, with the suggestion of epicanthic folds, but they had lost none of their playful intensity. Her chin was more pointed, but her cheekbones were apparently unchanged. They had done something subtle to the shape of her mouth, and her nose seemed smaller and more turned up at the end.

“Two questions,” I said. “Why? And how?”

“The ‘why’ part should be kind of obvious,” Vivien said. “You didn’t want me to get the mega-boobs, so I had to pick something else off the menu. The ‘how’ is easy. I was a lot closer to my target configuration than you were, so my procedure didn’t take nearly as long. Also, I told the staff to keep you in sleepy land until I was up and around.”

This brought another one of her quick-vanishing smiles. “I’m the one with the platinum bank chip, so they were extremely eager to follow my suggestions.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll buy off on the ‘how’ part. After they got a look at your credit rating, they probably would have given me gills if you had asked them to. But let’s get back to the ‘why.’ And let’s try for a straight answer this time.”

She restrained herself from giving me what I’m sure would have been a very interesting expression. “The ‘why’ part really should be obvious. I’m going with you.”

I shook my head, and regretted it immediately. It turns out that the muscles and tendons in your neck are attached to all kinds of things in your face, and every one of them went into near spasms at this unexpected abuse.

When I was certain that my face wasn’t actually going to fall off, I tried again, without the head shake this time. “You are not going with me.”

“That’s what you think,” Vivien said. “I’m going. With or without you.”

I kept my expression placid, the pain of the head-shaking fiasco still fresh in my mind. “What exactly is that supposed to mean?”

“You’ve done a fantastic job,” Vivien said. “You’ve broken a lot of ground in places that no one else even thought to look. But you’re not the only Private Detective, David. If you force me to, I’ll hire someone else and go in without you.”

“And what will you do when you get there? Without me, you won’t even know what to look for.”

Vivien nodded almost imperceptibly. “True. But you know what? I don’t think you know what to look for either. I think your big plan is to infiltrate Akimura Nanodyne, and then improvise. Nose around behind enemy lines, and see what you can come up with.”

I couldn’t argue, because she was right. That
was
my big plan, although it sounded a lot more clever inside my head than it did when Vivien was saying it.

I gave her my best penetrating look. “You’d fire me? Just like that?”

“Not unless you make it absolutely necessary,” she said. “I
want
you on this case. I want you to climb up Akimura Nanodyne’s ass with an electron microscope. But I’m going to be there when it happens. If you can’t deal with that, let me know now. I’ll put you on the first shuttle going Earth-side, and I’ll give you a referral to a superb surgical boutique in Bel Air. You’ll have your own face back by the end of the week, all expenses paid.”

“You don’t know what you’re asking,” I said.

“I’m not asking anything. I’m telling you how it’s going to be. I’m going in. If you can get that through your head, then we can do it together. Otherwise, I’ll do it with someone else.”

“You don’t know what these people are like, Vivien. You have no idea how ruthless they are.”

She did another smile-grimace. “I think you’ve given me a pretty good feel for that. If they’re involved in the FANTASCAPE thing, then we know they’re guilty of rape, murder, extortion, racketeering, and—for all I know—income tax evasion and cheating at solitaire. And even if they’re
not
tied to FANTASCAPE, we know that they kidnapped you and threatened you with torture. I know all of this, and I’m determined to go anyway. So I think we can take it as given that I’ve been sufficiently forewarned.”