Altered Carbon (54 page)

I watched
the waves. “That’s the deal,” I agreed.

More
silence. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her look down at the body she was
wearing, as if she’d spilled something down herself. “Do you know
how I feel?” she asked.

“No.”

“I
slept with my husband, and I feel like he’s been unfaithful to me.”
A choked laugh. She smeared angrily at her eyes. “I feel like
I’ve
been unfaithful. To something. You know, when they put me away I left a body
and a family behind. Now I don’t have either.”

She looked
down at herself again. She lifted her hands and turned them, fingers spread.

“I
don’t know what I feel,” she said. “I don’t know what
to
feel.”

There was a
lot I could have said. A lot that has been said, written, researched and
disputed on the subject. Trite little magazine-length summings-up of the
problems inherent in re-sleeving—
How to make your partner love you
again, in any body—
trite, interminable psychological tracts—
Some
observations of secondary trauma in civil re-sleeving
—even the
sanctified manuals of the fucking Envoy Corps itself had something trite to say
on the matter. Quotes, informed opinion, the ravings of the religious and the
lunatic fringe. I could have thrown it all at her. I could have told her that
what she was going through was quite normal for an unconditioned human. I could
have told her that it would pass with time. That there were psychodynamic
disciplines for dealing with it. That millions of other people survived it. I
could even have told her that whichever God she owed nominal allegiance to was
watching over her. I could have lied, I could have reasoned. It all would have
meant about the same, because the reality was
pain
, and right now
there was nothing anyone could do to take it away.

I said
nothing.

The dawn
gained on us, light strengthening on the closed-up frontages behind us. I
glanced at the windows of Elliott’s Data Linkage.

“Victor?”
I asked.

“Sleeping.”
She wiped an arm across her face and snorted her tears back under control like
badly cut amphetamine. “You say this is going to hurt Bancroft?”

“Yeah.
In a subtle way, but yeah, it’ll hurt.”

“Installation
run on an AI,” said Irene Elliott to me. “Installing an erasure
penalty virus. Fucking over a known Meth. You know what the risks are? You know
what you’re asking me to do?”

I turned to
look her in the eye.

“Yes.
I know.”

Her mouth
clamped down on a tremor.

“Good. Then
let’s do it.”

The run took less than three days to set
up. Irene Elliott turned stone-cold pro and made it happen that way.

In the limo
back to Bay City, I laid it out for her. At first she was still crying inside,
but as the detail mounted she clicked in, nodding, grunting, stopping me and
backing me up on minor points I hadn’t made clear enough. I showed her
Reileen Kawahara’s suggested hardware list and she OK’d about two
thirds of it. The rest was just corporate padding and Kawahara’s advisors,
in her opinion, didn’t know shit.

By the end
of the journey she had it down. I could see the run already unfolding behind
her eyes. The tears had dried on her face, forgotten, and her expression was
clean purpose, locked-down hate for the man who had used her daughter, and an
embodied will to revenge.

Irene
Elliott was sold.

I rented an
apartment in Oakland on the JacSol account. Elliott moved in and I left her
there to catch up on some sleep. I stayed at the Hendrix, tried to do some
sleeping of my own without much success and went back six hours later to find
Elliott already prowling about the apartment.

I called
the names and numbers Kawahara had given me and ordered the staff Elliott had
ticked. The crates arrived in hours. Elliott cracked them open and laid out the
hardware across the floor of the apartment.

Together we
went through Ortega’s list of virtual forums and worked it down to a
shortlist of seven.

(Ortega had
not turned up, or called me at the Hendrix.)

Mid
afternoon on the second day, Elliott kicked on the primary modules and cruised
each of the shortlist options. The list fell to three, and Elliott gave me a
couple more items to go shopping for. Refinement software for the big kill.

By early
evening the list was down to two, with Elliott writing up preliminary intrusion
procedures for both. Whenever she hit a glitch, we backed up and compared
relative merits.

By midnight
we had our target. Elliott went to bed and slept eight solid hours. I went back
to the Hendrix and brooded.

(Nothing
from Ortega.)

I bought
breakfast in the street and took it back to the apartment. Neither of us felt
much like eating.

10.15 local
time. Irene Elliott calibrated her equipment for the last time.

We did it.

Twenty-seven-and-a-half
minutes.

A piece of piss,
said Elliott.

I left her dismantling
equipment and flew out to see Bancroft that afternoon.

I find this exceptionally difficult to believe,”
said Bancroft sharply. “Are you quite sure I went to this
establishment?”

Below the
balcony on the lawns of Suntouch House, Miriam Bancroft appeared to be
constructing an enormous paper glider from instructions in a moving
holoprojection. The white of the wings was so bright it hurt to look directly
at them. As I leaned on the balcony rail, she shaded her eyes from the sun and
looked up at me.

“The
mall has security monitors.” I said, affecting disinterest.
“Automated system, still operational after all these years. They’ve
got footage of you walking right up to the door. You do know the name,
don’t you?”

“Jack
It Up? Of course, I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never actually
used
the place.”

I looked
round without leaving the rail. “Really. You have something against
virtual sex, then? You’re a reality purist?”

“No.”
I could hear the smile in his voice. “I have no problem with virtual
formats, and as I believe I’ve told you already, I have used them on
occasion. But this place Jack It Up is, how can I put it, hardly the elegant
end of the market.”

“No,”
I agreed. “And how would you classify Jerry’s Closed Quarters? An
elegant whorehouse?”

“Hardly.”

“But
that didn’t stop you going there to play cabin games with Elizabeth
Elliott, did it? Or has it gone downhill recently, because—”

“All
right.” The smile in the voice had turned to a grimace.
“You’ve made your point. Don’t labour it.”

I stopped
watching Miriam Bancroft and came back to my seat. My iced cocktail was still
standing on the little table between us. I picked it up.

“I’m
glad you take the point,” I said, stirring the drink. “Because
it’s taken a lot of pain to sort through this mess. I’ve been
abducted, tortured and nearly killed in the process. A woman called Louise, not
much older than your precious daughter Naomi,
was
killed because she
got in the way. So if you don’t like my conclusions, you can go fuck
yourself.”

I raised my
glass to him across the table.

“Spare
me the melodrama, Kovacs, and sit down for God’s sake. I’m not
rejecting what you say, I’m just questioning it.”

I sat and
levelled a finger at him. “No. You’re squirming. This thing’s
pointing up a part of your character you despise for its appetites. You’d
rather not know what kind of software you were accessing that night over at Jack
It Up, in case it’s even more grubby than you already imagine.
You’re being forced to confront the part of yourself that wants to come
in your wife’s face, and you don’t like it.”

“There
will be no need to revisit that particular conversation,” said Bancroft
stiffly. He steepled his fingers. “You are aware, I suppose, that the
security camera footage you base your assumptions on could be faked very easily
by anyone with access to newstape images of me.”

“Yes,
I am.” I’d watched Irene Elliott do exactly that only forty-eight
hours previously. Easy wasn’t the word. After the virus run, it had been
like asking a concert total body dancer to encore with stretching exercises.
I’d barely had time to smoke a cigarette while she did it. “But why
would anyone bother? A distractor, to tinsel me off course, assuming of course
that some wrong turn would have me sniffing around the ruins of a derelict
Richmond mall in the first place. Come on, Bancroft, get real. The fact I was
out there in the first place proves the validity of that footage. And in any
case, those images aren’t the basis for anything. They just confirm what
I’d already worked out, which is that you killed yourself to avoid viral
contamination of your remote stack.”

“That
is a quite remarkable leap of intuition to make after only a six-day
investigation.”

“Blame
Ortega,” I said lightly, though Bancroft’s enduring suspicion in
the face of unpleasant facts was beginning to worry me. I hadn’t realised
he would take so much wearing down. “She’s the one who put me onto
the right track. She wouldn’t wear the murder theory from the start. She
kept telling me you were too tough and smart a Meth motherfucker to let anyone
kill you. Quote, unquote. And that brought me back to the conversation we had
here a week ago. You told me
I am not the kind of man to take my own life,
and even if I was, I would not have bungled it in this fashion. If it had been
my intention to die, you would not be talking to me now
. Envoys have total
recall, those were your exact words.”

I paused
and set down my glass, searching for the fine edge of deceit that always lies
right up against the truth.

“All
this time, I’ve been working on the assumption you didn’t pull the
trigger because you weren’t the type to commit suicide. I ignored all the
evidence to the contrary because of that single assumption. The electron-tight
security you’ve got here, the lack of any traces of intrusion, the
handprint lock on the safe.”

“And
Kadmin. And Ortega.”

“Yeah,
that didn’t help. But we straightened out the Ortega angle, and Kadmin,
well, I’m coming to Kadmin in a moment. The point is, as long as I
equated pulling that trigger with suicide, I was jammed. But then, what if
those two acts were not synonymous. What if you’d torched your own stack,
not because you wanted to die but for some other reason. Once I let myself
think that, the rest was easy. What were the possible reasons that you’d
do it? It’s not an easy thing to put a gun to your own head, even if you
do want to die. To do it when you want to live must take the will of a demon.
No matter how much you might know intellectually that you’ll be
re-sleeved with the bulk of your mind intact, the person you are at that moment
is going to die. You had to have been desperate to pull that trigger. It had to
have been something,” I smiled faintly, “life-threatening. Given
that assumption, it didn’t take long to come up with the virus scenario.
Then all I had to do was work out how and where you’d been
infected.”

Bancroft
shifted uncomfortably at the word, and I felt a stab of elation run through me.
Virus! Even Meths were afraid of the invisible corroder, because even they,
with their remote storage and their clones on ice, were not immune. Viral
Strike! Stack down! Bancroft was off balance.

“Now,
it’s virtually impossible to snug something as complex as a virus into a
disconnected target, so you had to have been jacked in somewhere along the
line. I thought of the PsychaSec facility, but they’re sewed up too
tight. And it couldn’t have been before you went to Osaka for the same
reasons; even dormant, the virus would have tripped every alarm at PsychaSec
when they set up the ‘cast. It had to have been some time in the last
forty-eight hours, because your remote stack was uncontaminated. I knew from
talking to your wife that the likelihood was you’d been out on the town
when you got back from Osaka, and on your own admission that could quite
possibly include some kind of virtual whorehouse. After that, it was just a
matter of doing the rounds. I tried a half dozen places before I hit Jack It
Up, and when I punched up their inquiries the viral contam siren nearly blew my
phone out. That’s the thing about AIs—they write their own security
and it’s second to none. Jack It Up is sealed off so tight it’ll
take the police months to tunnel in and see what’s left of the core
processors.”

I felt a
vague pang of guilt as I thought of the AI thrashing like a man in an acid vat
as its systems dissolved around it, consciousness shrivelling down a tunnel of
closing perspectives into nothing. The feeling passed rapidly. We’d
chosen Jack It Up for a variety of reasons: it was in a roofed-over area that
meant there would be no satellite coverage to dispute the lies we’d
planted in the mall surveillance system, it operated in a criminal environment
so that no one would have a problem believing an illicit virus had somehow got
loose inside it, but most of all it ran a series of software options so
distasteful that it was unlikely the police would ever bother to investigate
the wreckage of the murdered machine more than cursorily. Under its heading on
Ortega’s list, there were at least a dozen copycat sex crimes which the
Organic Damage department had traced to software packages available from Jack
It Up. I could imagine the curl of Ortega’s lip as she read the software
listings, the studied indifference with which she would handle the case.