Ribofunk (16 page)

The kibe cores themselves looked identical to and had the same dimensions as the old Level Threes, allowing for easy retrofitting: shiny featureless platters about as thick as a stack of a dozen ancient CD’s. It was the newly evolved qubitic circuitry inside that raised their functioning to a higher level. As for the chassis that would carry the cores—well, the force’s own crada had come up with several new models specifically designed for law enforcement.

So my new partner became a synthetic, syncretic personality in a mini-frisbee, capable of swapping bodies at will.

On top of this unsettling switch, the Swellheads had insisted that all the humans on the force go in for a somatic upgrade. The mucky-mucks were tired of losing officers to various preventable assaults. Baseline bodies were now considered insufficent to counter the moddies of the baddies. We had to meet them head-on, match them in the arms (and legs and brains) race.

Like most people in all walks of life, I had my share of implants and add-ons and upgrades already: simple things that had helped me in my work, like sharper peripheral vision, stronger bones, voluntary pain shunts. But unlike some bodyartists and puzzlepluses, I had never gone in for radical modifications. What was good enough for grandpooh was good enough for me. Now I was being told that I had to change or be dropped from the force.

Swallowing my trepidations and instinctive dislike of being bossed around (after all, I wasn’t an independent contractor anymore), I went into the bodyshop.

I came out sheathed in flexible imbricated skin like a pangolin’s, its plates chamois-soft to the touch yet capable of turning aside sharp edges and low-velocity projectiles. Additionally, my new integument from Calypte Biomed would react to the beam of a flashlight by instantly altering its refractive index. (I had once read that the quickest basal reaction in nature was found in the jaws of a certain ant, which could snap closed in a third of a millisecond. Science had considerably bettered that.) I had a paralymphatic system from Olympus Biotech that would aggressively react to micro- and nano-invaders. My arteries were reinforced with CuraTech’s neo-goretex, my bones threaded with Innovir’s stonefiber. My heart had an onboard Hemazyne assist, as did my lungs. I had Agouron hyperflexure in my fingers, increased haptic and proprioceptive sensitivity, and certain wetware enhancements from BioCryst not available to the general public. Finally, I could on short notice generate several highly damaging antipersonnel cytokines expressible through strategically placed exocrine glands.

In short, I was now one mean and hyperefficient slagger for the forces of goodness and justice.

I was also on a half-dozen new tropes that allowed me to integrate my new body image and sensory inputs.

It was just after this makeover that the final big change in my life occurred.

I met Xuly Beth and fell in love.

Xuly Beth Vollbracht had been born in the Mercosur, grown up a gypsy waterbaby. Her parents, Rolf and Valentina, had managed a section of the Hidrovia, roving up and down that extensive artificial waterway, supervising commerce and maintenance, troubleshooting and policing. Educated and trained as a noah for the GEF, Xuly Beth had been stationed at various spots around the world (she had seen parts of APEC, CarriCom, and Scandibaltica), monitoring and remediating oceanic-atmospheric systems, before ending up in the Nova England bioregion.

We met at an official function hosted by the noahs to brief the Protein Police on the latest rogue organisms we could possibly expect to emerge from runaway marine co-evolution. (Safe as silicrobe technology was supposed to be, there were inevitable glitches.)

Luckily for me, Xuly Beth was far from repelled by my altered epidermis. It turned out that one of her first lovers had been a fishboy from the Hidrovia, and the experience had crystallized her taste for odd integuments.

Xuly Beth was the change in my life that tipped the scales toward gladness. It was the first time since my wife walked out on me that I had a functioning pair-bonding. It felt good.

And that feeling alone should have been enough to warn me that something bad was about to fall right on my head like one of Xuly Beth’s programmed heavyrains out of the seemingly clear sky.

* * *

The first notice I had of trouble was the urgent patterned pinging of my flimsy one morning as I sat at my desk. I was on scheduled fifteen-minute downtime, relaxing in a quasi-meditative state at the focus of which was a little token of her work Xuly Beth had given me. In a clear cylindrical container about as big as a pneumatic-tube message capsule, a self-sustaining miniature silicrobe twister ran its homeodynamic contortions, powered only by sunlight. Its infinite random permutations served as a Taoist exemplar of mind-wiping potency.

But even the Tao could not ultimately contend against the earcon for a Class-One transmission. I resumed my mind and voiced the screen on. The face of my immediate superior appeared.

Jo Priestly looked nervous. Not an easy task for a woman who wore the ruff-bordered head and snouty-toothed face of an oversized fringed lizard. (I had seen perps faint during interrogation when she simply smiled.)

“The cat’s in town,” she said.

“The Xuma Puma?” I asked, recalling the petty posse-leader I had more than once tangled with in the old days. “What’ s to worry’

“I wish it was only the XP. No, I’m talking about the one and only cat that matters. Krazy Kat.”

Now I knew why she looked worried. “I assume there’s some java following for me to dethread. But maybe you could empeg it for me.…”

“You heard about Chicago? How the Kat nearly caused a Second Flood?”

“Sure. But I thought he screwed up. Didn’t he leave behind some cells for the first time? All the public sniffers should be programmed by now to respond as soon as he slinks by.”

“True, we’ve got his genome mapped, and that’s more than we’ve ever had before. But it’s not good enough. The Kat doesn’t have to go out in public to cause mischief. He’s got friends, allies, and sympathizers galore. And not just among the other splices either. There’re lots of pure-gens who support the CLF—or at least the nonviolent aspects of their platform. Groups such as the SPCC. The Kat could easily stay holed up and still cause us yotta-shit. And don’t forget private transportation. The sniffers would miss anyone in a car with positive pressure seals. No, we’re going to have to hit the streets if we hope to forestall whatever deviltry the Kat’s got in his hat. Bone up, plug. Then get out there and use your nose.”

“Kakkoii,” I said. “Cool as the socket who climbed into the Sack and made it with the Farside storage ring.”

The Chief was a member of the Shaker Revivalists and a doctrinaire gone-gonad. Her membranous veined ruff flushed an agitated crimson, then her face disappeared. Another earcon sounded, and down invisible lines came the petafits on the Kat.

There was so much data it overflowed the flimsy’s buffers. I released a couple of my customized speculative agents to work in background mode, setting them loose on what was known of the Kat’s MO. Then I settled down for a long raster, grateful that some of my new wetware allowed for dual-track processing.

Krazy Kat had been born some ten years ago in and into frustration. His sire was a mullis who went by the gnomic name of Doctor Radius. At the time, Doc Radius was a freelancer under temp-bond to Vivus-Neopath and had just been assigned to a highly secretive project. V-N had taken an anonymous encrypted contract off the net to develop a new breed of cultivar according to certain specs. The mosaic was to consist of 50 percent felidae of various germlines, 30 percent human, 10 percent viverrine, 10 percent miscellaneous useful nucleotides. Once the juvenile splices were out of the tanks, as yet unengrammed, they were to be shipped in partial stasis—without human accompaniment—to an address that turned out to belong to a dummy abe fronting for the city government of Paris.

It turned out that the mayor of that fine city had decided to secede from the EC, after his decision to make smoking mandatory within city limits had been quashed from on high. (Tourism was down, and the mayor felt that if he could reimpose the retro ambiance of the city, the crowds would flock back.…) These new splices from V-N, all tooth and nail and cunning, were to be trained and further bred as a corps of mercenary soldiers, the backbone of a Parisian self-defense force with which the mayor could enforce his secession.

Well, needless to say, both the EC and the WTO, among other power centers of the adminisphere, frowned on such a move and chose to express their displeasure most forcefully. (The ex-mayor was due out of stasis in another twenty years.) Upon discovering the plot, before the splices were even shipped, the authorities came down on V-N like a ton of strange matter. The firm was heavily fined, and all the special splices were ordered destroyed.

This did not sit well with Doc Radius. Like any devoted, obsessive, manifestly brain-warped artist, he had come to regard the new splices not as mere work-for-hire, but as his personal, beloved magnum opus. When the destruct order came down, Doc Radius managed to make off with a single fetus. A secret fetus not on the original workorder, but one he had been tinkering with as a side-project, tweaking its parameters to his liking and esthetic sense.

This was the seed that was to blossom into Krazy Kat.

Raised in eccentric isolation with only Doc R. for a parental unit, freed of the mandated dietary leashes or proprietary tattoons, Krazy Kat had turned into a dangerous monomaniac. As soon as the Kat was mature enough to reason, after about a year of accelerated and highly illegal trope dosing, he had fixated on the admittedly high-handed and wanton destruction of his fellow fetuses. Only surviving member of his aborted kind, the young Kat had gone on to study the conditions under which splices of all types served and lived amidst human society. What the Kat found apparently sent him over the edge. (And although I myself was certainly no cocktail-sucker, I had to admit that some of the excesses and abuses documented here and elsewhere were nauseating.)

At the age of five, Krazy Kat adopted the name by which the whole world would soon know him and took a vow. He would devote his life to liberating splices everywhere, waging a no-holds-barred campaign to make their “slavery” obsolete, too costly for human society to sustain.

Thus was born the Cultivar Liberation Front.

All this information had come to light shortly after Krazy Kat’s first unexpected and initially inexplicable terrorist excursion, the slaughter of the board of directors of Hedonics Plus at their yearly meeting in Geneva. In the ensuing worldwide hunt for clues, the Tijuana branch of the Protein Police found Doc Radius’s trashed lab, as well as the Doc himself, similarly lifelessly trashed. (At the time I had still been a loner PI, without access to this hush-hush information.) Seemingly, Radius had made the mistake of objecting to all or some of his progeny’s plans and had gotten just what all humans deserved in the Kat’s eyes. And although the Kat had thoroughly lysed all biomatter samples connected to his person, he had not been able or concerned enough to wipe all the audiovideo material the Doc had lovingly accumulated over the years.

I studied a still shot of the mature Kat: over two meters tall, tailed, one hundred kilos of rippling muscles under a tawny, nonbasal-striped pelt. His face was a sexy, oddly alluring, highly intelligent mix of panther, civet, and human features, marred only by what I intuited was a permanent sneer calculated to reveal a glint of sharp ivory teeth.

My speculative agents popped to the surface, shattering the Kat’s image with their signature metagrafix swirls. They had no insights into what Boston could expect from the Kat, if he were indeed in town. He seemed never to repeat himself, had no favored tactics or, ahem, catspaws, being willing to strike anywhere, anytime, through or at anyone.

I dismissed the snippets and summoned my partner, knowing the kibe would already have assimilated the same data, in a fraction of the time. Waiting for it to arrive, I studied the swirling, captured tornado in its tube. The microweather’s patternless patterns seemed to mock the chaos around me. But paradoxically, the border of chaos and stasis was where life flourished.…

My partner arrived.

(The Turing Level Four kibes came with a curious legal codicil. Just as any fully enfranchised individual was legally responsible for the actions of his or her immaterial agents and demons, shards and partials, so was any owner of a TL4 ultimately accountable for its words and deeds. Mostly, corporations bore the legal brunt; but among the Protein Police, the burden had devolved to the cops themselves, as a cost- cutting measure. If my TL4 did anything contrasocial, it was my ass on the line. It was a big responsibility, almost like having a prodge. So I called my partner “Sonny.”)

Today Sonny was wearing a Hexcel Enforcer chassis: a body with an armature of stonefiber bones, buckytube circulatory system, muscles crafted of imipolex and resilin, hide of super-sharkskin, distributed co-ganglia. Looking like a lumbering grey rubbery giant, the chassis boasted a neckless human-like head with mock sensory inputs designed to draw the deadly fire of any perp stupid enough to attempt an assault on such a monster. The real audiovisual-chemo sensors were concealed at various points around the body, as was assorted weaponry. Slotted safely behind a tough protective abdominal panel was the kibe platter itself.

Sonny spoke in a pleasant tenor voice that seemed to emerge from its armpit.