Altered Carbon (23 page)

They
marched me through another set of doors into a commercial capacity elevator
which, according to the flashing LED display on the wall, sank two dozen levels
before we stopped. Throughout the ride, Deck and the woman stood in opposite corners
of the car, guns levelled. I ignored them and watched the digit counter.

When the doors opened there
was a medical team waiting for us with a strap-equipped gurney. My instincts
screamed at me to try and jump them, but I held myself immobile while the two
pale-blue-clad men came forward to hold my arms and the female medic shot me in
the neck with a hypodermic spray. There was an icy sting, a brief rush of cold
and then the corners of my vision disappeared in webbings of grey. The last
thing I saw clearly was the incurious face of the medic as she watched me lose
consciousness.

I awoke to the sound of the ezan being
called somewhere nearby, poetry turned querulous and metallic in the multiple
throats of a mosque’s loudspeakers. It was a sound I’d last heard
in the skies over Zihicce on Sharya, and it had been shortly followed by the
shrill aerial scream of marauder bombs. Above my head, light streamed down
through the latticed bars of an ornate window. There was a dull, bloated
feeling in my guts that told me my period was due.

I sat up on
the wooden floor and looked down at myself. They’d sleeved me in a
woman’s body, young, no more than twenty years old with copper-sheened
skin and a heavy bell of black hair that, when I put my hands to it, felt lank
and dirty with the onset of the period. My skin was faintly greasy and from
somewhere I got the idea that I had not bathed in a while. I was clothed in a
rough khaki shirt several sizes too big for my sleeve and nothing else. Beneath
it, my breasts felt swollen and tender. I was barefoot.

I got up
and went to the window. There was no glass but it was well above my new head
height, so I hauled myself up on the bars and peered out. A sun-drenched
landscape of poorly tiled roofs stretched away as far as I could see, forested
with listing receptor aerials and ancient satellite dishes. A cluster of
minarets speared the horizon off to the left and an ascending aircraft trailed
a line of white vapour somewhere beyond. The air that blew through was hot and
humid.

My arms
were beginning to ache, so I lowered myself back down to the floor and padded
across the room to the door. Predictably, it was locked.

The ezan
stopped.

Virtuality.
They’d tapped into my memories and come up with this. I’d seen some
of the most unpleasant things in a long career of human pain on Sharya. And the
Sharyan religious police were as popular in interrogation software as Angin
Chandra had been in pilot porn. And now, on this harsh virtual Sharya,
they’d sleeved me in a woman.

Drunk one
night, Sarah had told me
Women are the race, Tak. No two ways about it.
Male is just a mutation with more muscle and half the nerves. Fighting, fucking
machines
. My own cross-sleevings had borne that theory out. To be a woman
was a sensory experience beyond the male. Touch and texture ran deeper, an
interface with environment that male flesh seemed to seal out instinctively. To
a man, skin was a barrier, a protection. To a woman it was an organ of contact.

That had
its disadvantages.

In general,
and maybe because of this, female pain thresholds ran higher than male, but the
menstrual cycle dragged them down to an all-time low once a month.

No neurachem.
I checked.

No combat
conditioning, no reflex of aggression.

Nothing.

Not even
calluses on the young flesh.

The door
banged open, and I jumped. Fresh sweat sprang out on my skin. Two bearded men
with eyes of hot jet came into the room. They were both dressed in loose linen
for the heat. One held a role of adhesive tape in his hands, the other a small
blowtorch. I flung myself at them, just to unlock the freezing panic reflex and
gain some measure of control over the built-in helplessness.

The one with
the tape fended off my slim arms and backhanded me across the face. It floored
me. I lay there, face numb, tasting blood. One of them yanked me back to my
feet by an arm. Distantly, I saw the face of the other, the one who had hit me,
and tried to focus on him.

“So,”
he said. “We begin.”

I lunged
for his eyes with the nails of my free arm. The Envoy training gave me the
speed to get there but I had no control and I missed. Two of my nails drew
blood on his cheek. He flinched and jumped back.

“Bitch
cunt,” he said, lifting a hand to the claw mark and examining the blood
on his fingers.

“Oh,
please,” I managed, out of the unnumbed side of my mouth. “Do we
have to have the script too? Just because I’m
wearing
this—”

I jammed to
a halt. He looked pleased. “
Not
Irene Elliott, then,” he
said. “We progress.”

This time
he hit me just under the ribcage, driving all the breath out of my body and
paralysing my lungs. I folded over his arm like a coat and slid off onto the
floor, trying to draw breath. All that came out was a faint creaking sound. I
twisted on the floorboards while, somewhere high above me, he retrieved the
adhesive tape from the other man and unsnapped a quarter-metre length. It made
an obscene tearing sound, like skin coming off. Shredding it free with his
teeth, he squatted beside me and taped my right wrist to the floor above my
head. I thrashed as if galvanised and it took him a moment to immobilise my
other arm long enough to repeat the process. An urge to scream that
wasn’t mine surfaced and I fought it down. Pointless. Conserve your
strength.

The floor
was hard and uncomfortable against the soft skin of my elbows. I heard a
grating sound and turned my head. The second man was drawing up a pair of
stools from the side of the room. While the one who had beaten me taped my legs
apart, the spectator sat down on one of the stools, produced a packet of
cigarettes and shook one out. Grinning broadly at me, he put it in his mouth
and reached down for the blowtorch. When his companion stepped back to admire
his handiwork, he offered him the packet. It was declined. The smoker shrugged,
ignited the blowtorch and tilted his head to light up from it.

“You
will tell us,” he said, gesturing with the cigarette and pluming smoke
into the air above me, “everything you know about Jerry’s Closed
Quarters and Elizabeth Elliott.”

The
blowtorch hissed and chuckled softly to itself in the quiet room. Sunlight
poured in through the high window and brought with it, infinitely faintly, the
sounds of a city full of people.

They
started with my feet.

The
screaming runs on and on, higher and louder than I ever believed a human throat
could render, shredding my hearing. Traceries of red streak across my vision
.

Innenininennininennin
…

Jimmy
de Soto staggers into view, Sunjet gone, gory hands plastered to his face. The
shrieks peel out from his stumbling figure, and for a moment I can almost
believe it’s his contamination alarm that’s making the noise. I
check my own shoulder meter reflexively, then the half-submerged edge of an
intelligible word rises through the agony and I know it’s him
.

He is
standing almost upright, a clearcut sniper target even in the chaos of the
bombardment. I throw myself across the open ground and knock him into the cover
of a ruined wall. When I roll him onto his back to see what’s happened to
his face, he’s still screaming. I pull his hands away from his face by
main force and the raw socket of his left eye gapes up at me in the murk. I can
still see fragments of the eye’s mucous casing on his fingers
.

“
Jimmy,
JIMMY, what the fuck
…”

The
screaming sandpapers on and on. It’s taking all my strength to prevent
him going back for the other undamaged eye as it wallows in its socket. My
spine goes cold as I realise what’s happening
.

Viral
strike
.

I stop
yelling at Jimmy and bawl down the line
.

“
Medic
!
Medic
!
Stack down
!
Viral strike
!”

And the
world caves in as I hear my own cries echoed up and dawn the Innenin beachhead
.

After a
while, they leave you alone, curled around your wounds. They always do. It
gives you time to think about what they have done to you, more importantly
about what else they have not yet done. The fevered imagining of what is still
to come is almost as potent a tool in their hands as the heated irons and
blades themselves.

When you
hear them returning, the echo of footsteps induces such fear that you vomit up
what little bile you have left in your stomach.

Imagine a
satellite blow-up of a city on mosaic, 1:10,000 scale. It’ll take up most
of a decent interior wall, so stand well back. There are certain obvious things
you can tell at a glance. Is it a planned development or did it grow
organically, responding to centuries of differing demand? Is it or was it ever
fortified? Does it have a seaboard? Look closer, and you can learn more. Where
the major thoroughfares are likely to be, if there is an IP shuttle port, if
the city has parks. You can maybe, if you’re a trained cartographer, even
tell a little about the movements of the inhabitants. Where the desirable areas
of town are, what the traffic problems are likely to be and if the city has
suffered any serious bomb damage or riots recently.

But there
are some things you will never know from that picture. However much you magnify
and reel in detail, it can’t tell you if crime is generally on the
increase, or what time the citizens go to bed. It can’t tell you if the
mayor is planning to tear down the old quarter, if the police are corrupt, or
what strange things have been happening at Number Fifty-One, Angel Wharf. And
the fact that you can break down the mosaic into boxes, move it around and
reassemble it elsewhere makes no difference. Some things you will only ever
learn by going into that city and talking to the inhabitants.

Digital
Human Storage hasn’t made interrogation obsolescent, it’s just
brought back the basics. A digitised mind is only a snapshot. You don’t
capture individual thoughts any more than a satellite image captures an
individual life. A psychosurgeon can pick out major traumas on an Ellis model,
and make a few basic guesses about what needs to be done, but in the end
she’s still going to have to generate a virtual environment in which to
counsel her patient, and go in there and do it. Interrogators, whose
requirements are so much more specific, have an even worse time.

What d.h.
storage
has
done is make it possible to torture a human being to
death, and then start again. With that option available, hypnotic and
drug-based questioning went out the window long ago. It was too easy to provide
the necessary chemical or mental counterconditioning in those for whom this
sort of thing was a hazard of their trade.

There’s
no kind of conditioning in the known universe that can prepare you for having
your feet burnt off. Or your nails torn out.

Cigarettes
stubbed out on your breasts.

A heated
iron inserted into your vagina.

The pain.
The humiliation.

The damage.

Psychodynamics/Integrity
training.

Introduction.

The mind
does interesting things under extreme stress. Hallucination, displacement,
retreat. Here in the Corps, you will learn to use them all, not as blind
reactions to adversity, but as moves in a game.

The red hot
metal sinks into flesh, parting the skin like polythene. The pain consumes, but
worse is seeing it happen. Your scream, once disbelief, is by now gruesomely familiar
in your ears. You know it won’t stop them, but you still scream,
begging—

“
Some
fucking game, eh pal
?”

Jimmy
grinning up at me from his death. Innenin is still around us, but that
can’t be. He was still screaming when they took him away. In reality
—

His
face changes abruptly, turns sombre
.

“
You
keep reality out of this, there’s nothing for you there. Stay removed.
Have they done her any structural harm
?”

I wince
. “
Her feet. She can’t walk
.”

“
Motherfuckers
,”
he says matter of factly
. “
Why don’t we just tell them
what they want to know
?”

“
We
don’t know what they want to know. They’re after this guy Ryker
.”

“
Ryker,
who the fuck’s he
?”

“
I
don’t know
.”