Metal Fatigue (4 page)

Roads was sitting on a stool in the middle of the room. The tension she had sensed in him earlier hadn't gone, but he had it under control. Opposite him, a tall black man leaned against one wall. The man was totally bald and, beneath a black skinsuit, economically muscled. His eyes glittered oddly in the torchlight, sparkling like jewels. As he raised a pair of dark glasses to cover them, Barney realised they were artificial.

"This is Raoul," said Roads. "Morrow sent him."

The man grinned a mouthful of gold teeth and offered his hand. Barney hesitated, then shook it, hoping her nervousness didn't show.

"I haven't touched anything," he said. "Just locked the door on my way in and waited."

"No-one else has been here?" asked Barney, forcing her clenched jaw muscles to move.

"Not a soul. I've confirmed that the Mole triggered the alarm deliberately when he left. The team sent in to investigate had only been in the area a few minutes when the Head ordered them to leave and contacted me."

"Why you?"

"Until a week ago, I ran this operation. I can tell you what's missing."

Barney walked across the room to peer at the debris — anything other than him. "But can we believe you?"

"Implicitly." Raoul grinned. "At least, as far as this room is concerned. On anything else, you'll have to take your chances."

"And why's that?"

"Why do you think?" Raoul's smile only widened. "When you work for the Head, you don't speak freely with RSD. Not without his permission, anyway."

"Thanks, Raoul," Roads broke in, standing. "Barney and I will go up and talk to the team while you get started. We need a complete inventory of everything in the room, plus a list of anything missing — although it looks like the usual story, so far. If you'd like some help, just ask."

"A couple of officers for the grunt work. That's all."

"I'll send them down."

As Roads and Barney climbed the narrow stairs, the black man seated himself before a terminal and began tapping into the system. When they had reached the kitchen, Barney let free the breath she had been holding.

While she and Roads had been busy, the footsquad had deployed itself throughout the streets and alleys around the house, sealing the area from what little traffic there was at that time of night. A request to Power Central had not yet been answered, and the night was still pitch black. Until the lights along Old North Street and its tributaries returned to life, the scene would remain shrouded with shadows, like the frieze of an empty tomb. Roads sent four officers down into the cellar: two to help Raoul, two more to go through the motions of fingerprinting and photographing. He obviously didn't expect any new evidence to emerge from the procedure, but they had to try regardless. Barney was already dreading the report she would have to file later that morning with Margaret Chappel, head of RSD.

"You know what I think?"

Roads was leaning up against the car, deep in his own thoughts. "That you'll be glad to catch this bastard and get back on day shift?"

"No. That we're in over our heads, and getting deeper by the second."

Roads looked up at her. "You mean Raoul?"

"Yes."

"Well, I can understand that. Unfortunately, if we want Morrow's help — "

"But
do
we?" Barney broke in. "I think he's hiding something."

"And I agree."

"Can we trust him, then?"

"What Keith said about himself was true, Barney. He's a modern version of the old junkyard men, collecting gadgets for the rainy day that may never come. Hence his position on the Most-Most Wanted list: the distributors in R&R don't know what he is, but they know what he's got, and they'd love to get their hands on it." Roads shrugged. "No-one's managed to get close because he'll fight when he has to."

Barney absorbed that in silence, until the question that nagged at her most finally broke free:

"That trick with the hologram ... is Morrow
really
dead?"

"He sure is." Roads's gaze wandered as he replied. "His mind was transferred to a neural net just before the War, shortly before his body died of a motor neurone disease. Now he fits into a crate about half the size of an ordinary coffin, and weighs twice as much."

"Doesn't that make him vulnerable?"

"Only if someone knows where that crate is — and he makes sure no-one does. It could be on the other side of the city, for all it matters."

"How?"

"Because he can use communication links to transmit data, just like a computer. All he needs is the right hardware and he can 'be' wherever he likes."

It was this that bothered Barney most of all. "You talk like he's a machine, and yet he reckons he's human. Surely he can't have it both ways?"

"Unfortunately, he can." Roads looked sympathetic. "He explained how he works, once, but I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense."

"Try me."

"Serious?"

"Why not? You said you would back at the bar."

He shrugged. "All right then. Have you ever heard of something called 'syncritical path analysis'?"

"No."

"How about the Boss Voice theory?"

"Never," Barney said.

"Well, neither had I until Keith explained them to me." He smiled. "It helps if you imagine the brain to be a collection of many parts working in concert rather than a coherent whole; more like the organs in a body or the species of an ecosystem than the components of a machine. Some parts keep you breathing, others monitor your use of language or memory recall; there might be thousands of individual parts in your head, each evolved to perform a particular function, and they all interact: a portion of one will play a role in the function of another, and vice versa. With me so far?"

Barney nodded. "I think so." She had taken a term of basic psychology back in high school, and the general principle rang a bell. "The whole thing is moving, right? Even when we're asleep?"

"As I understand it, yes. Everything in the brain is cyclic and chaotic. You have oscillations that appear regular, but arise purely by chance; if the parts — the pattern generators — were rearranged in even a slightly different way, the end result would be quite different. So the closest you get to stillness is when you meditate and reveal the standing wave, the holding pattern, beneath the mess. But the sum of this 'mess', not the holding pattern, is what we call consciousness; if you add all the processes together, in other words, what you get is 'I', the Boss Voice in our heads."

Roads glanced at Barney to confirm she was still keeping up. She nodded, although less certainly than before.

He went on: "Researchers back in Morrow's day apparently knew how the brain uses chaos to encode and transmit information along neurons; that's how they built the implants used in berserkers. Decoding the parts of the brain and the way they interact involved similar principles. It was the sum of the interactions between the parts — the syncritical path, as they called it — that Morrow's pet scientists set out to measure."

"Like brainwaves?"

"No, although there is a relation. Electrical and magnetic activity of the individual parts could be measured, and their relation to the whole could be approximated. Apparently."

"So..." Barney prompted. "They copied the parts?"

"They copied the chaotic way Keith's parts
behaved
— the functions governing their behaviour, at least — onto an enormous neural net, an electrical analog of a human brain. This was much easier than building a virtual model of his entire brain, neuron for neuron. Even though they often didn't know what the individual parts did, they in effect made a copy of his consciousness in the process. As long as the parts were there, with their strange attractors and their links to each other, the whole thing worked. And is still working today."

"But what about his memory?" Barney broke in. "That's not a process, is it?"

"Some memories were, mainly the ones that related to sensory perception. Those that didn't were supplemented by notes he made before he died. Otherwise, he's exactly the same as he ever was — except that he's potentially immortal, and far better off than he ever was. Or so he says."

Barney shook her head. "I think I'm going to have to take your word for it."

"Don't. Look it up one day. I may not have it right myself, or Keith might've been bullshitting me." Roads half-smiled. "But whatever they did, I'm betting not many people tried it. It was an expensive and revolutionary experiment, and only someone rich and desperate would have tried it. Keith may be the first and last of his kind, anywhere in the world — a unique relic from the old days."

Barney understood what Roads was saying there, at least, but didn't think that was a good enough reason to let a known criminal remain free. Relics had proved to be highly dangerous before.

Although she was too young by twenty years to remember the Dissolution, Kennedy's schooling system had made certain she knew the reasons why it had occurred. In individual conflicts, the reasons for going to war had been territorial, but overall the cause was people: eight billion of them by 2040, and only a minority satisfied with their lot.

A burgeoning population may have caused the War, but it was a new minority that contributed to the severity of the Dissolution. Although the nuclear phase of the War had lasted only a few days, it set a dangerous precedent of mass-murder that overshadowed less visible and more efficient means of killing. One of the greatest threats was to be found on the ground, where soldiers armed with the latest mechanical and biological weapons created havoc on the battlefields.

Berserkers — the most ruthless caste of the many biomodified combat soldiers created by the US Army — killed at random for decades after the War. Just one could decimate a small city in a matter of weeks. They were unstoppable, implacable and utterly unwilling to negotiate. Their motives were hard to fathom; although some were genuinely insane, it appeared that others had been given explicit orders to kill civilians — which they did with all their genetically-honed combat skills. This parting gesture from the military lingered for forty years until the last known survivor was hunted down and killed in Kennedy.

The United States might have pulled itself together after the War, had it not been for the berserkers and other creatures like them. That was the lesson Barney had learned — both in high school and from her father's death — and the reasoning behind the city's Humanity Laws: biomodification had resulted in the suffering of millions, and would no longer be tolerated at any level of a sane society.

It was no wonder, then, that Keith Morrow made her nervous. He was obviously different from the berserkers, but that didn't stop him being
more than human
— and if he had broken the Humanity Laws, then it was her duty to turn him in. That they needed his help to gain information about the Mole only made her more uneasy.

And then there was Raoul, with his artificial eyes — tangible, clear evidence of biomodification. Who knew how deep his inhumanity ran, or what dark motives his appearance concealed?

"I don't think Keith felt threatened by us, so we can probably take everything he said to be the truth."

Barney looked up at Roads. "But what about what he
didn't
say?"

"Yeah, I don't know."

She tapped the heel of one boot to the toes of the other. She hated that she had no choice but to go along with the situation. It was wrong in principle, if not in the details as well. Maybe later, when things were back to normal, she could reconsider and take appropriate action.

"What are you going to tell Margaret?" she eventually asked.

"I'm not sure yet." Roads grimaced. "An anonymous tip-off, probably."

"Well, let me know so our stories'll match."

"I will."

The radio crackled and Roads pulled his receiver from his pocket.

"Roads."

"Sir?" It was Komalski. "Something just went by us, but we're not sure what. It looked like it was heading your way."

Roads was instantly alert. "Where was it?"

"Corner of North-East and Murdoch Lane. Barker and Stilson saw something pass over their heads. They think it might have been someone on the rooftops."

"Okay, we'll keep an eye out. Thanks for the warning."

Giving the receiver to Barney, Roads signalled to the three officers in the van and relayed the information. The five of them spread out in an expanding circle from the car.

Barney touched the reassuring weight of her side-arm and studied the darkened street. Windows stared blindly back at her; narrow alleyways gaped like open pits.

Behind her and to her left, Roads turned slowly in a full circle, peering into every shadow. The seconds ticked by, until Roads suddenly froze.

"There!" he hissed, pointing.

Barney caught a flicker of movement in an alley twenty metres away. Roads took off toward it, and she followed him, the other officers not far behind. Fumbling for the radio, Barney shouted orders while she ran.

Roads was halfway up the alley before she even reached it.

"Shit." Nuggets of fallen concrete threatened to trip her. "Phil — wait!"

But Roads had already turned left at the end of the alley and disappeared.

When she reached the intersection, he was gone altogether. Even the sound of his footsteps had faded.

The three officers burst from the alley behind her.

"Split up," she told them, and picked a side street at random. She could see no-one, nor anything to suggest that Roads had been that way recently. The streets, still damp after the rain, were empty.

Reinforcement arrived, in the form of Komalski and two other men, and the search widened. Barney chose another side street and followed it to its end. Apart from a feral cat looking for food scraps in the gutters, she found nothing. Stony-faced houses stared solemnly back at her, any one of them potential harbour for a fugitive. The clicking of her soles echoed on cracked pavement as she followed another lane back to Old North Street. The flashing light of a second RSD van strobed the area in blue: more back-up had arrived. She thought of Raoul's cold eyes reflecting the blue from the safety of 114, and repressed a shiver.