Counting Heads (13 page)

“Cabinet?” Fred Londenstane said. He seemed to recall a valet by that name.

“Yes,” Inspector Costa said, “one of the highest-value mentars in the solar system. Its sponsor, Eleanor Starke, has just been declared irretrievable, so it’s probate time for the pastehead.”

Oh,
that
Cabinet, Fred thought. It had been—what?—half a century since he had pulled duty for the Starke household. That was before valets had evolved into today’s mentars, but Cabinet had been an impressive AI even back then. And Starke was dead?

“Are you sure? Something that big I think I would’ve been briefed.”

“It’s classified for another hour or so. Someone way over my head is keeping a lid on it for who knows what political advantage.”

“Anyone else hurt?” Fred asked.

“There were no russies involved, if that’s what you mean,” Inspector Costa said with a smirk. Smirking made her look a bit like a lulu.

Fred sat in a scape booth at the Chicago headquarters of the Beneficent Brotherhood of Russ on North Wabash. He was finishing up a week of duty as acting commander of the watch for the regional branch of the HomCom, and Costa’s scape was only one of about a dozen he was juggling. There were four more live meetings in which he appeared in different uniforms, depending upon the venue and nature of his involvement, and he was feeling stretched a little thin.

“Why me?” he said. “I’m doing commander of the watch today.”

“Exactly,” said Inspector Costa. “A big fugitive requires a big cop.”

“Cabinet is resisting probate?”

“Let’s just say it’s not being very cooperative.”

Nevertheless, it was Fred’s option to pass the assignment on to another officer of equal rank, and he felt inclined to do so.

“I say, Myr Russ,” said a voice from another scape. “Hello?” It was Myr Pacfin, chair of the 57th World Charter Rendezvous Organizing Committee for which Fred was chief of security. “I would rather expect your full attention for a matter of this magnitude.” Pacfin crossed the arms of his lime-brick-avocado-colored jumpsuit.

Pacfin had summoned Fred to an unscheduled meeting to reconsider organizational decisions that he, himself, had finalized three months ago. To make matters worse, Rendezvous, a gathering of over fifty-thousand chartists from all corners of the United Democracies, was to take place
this Wednesday
, the day after tomorrow.

Marcus, the BB of R’s own mentar, prompted Fred,
Myr Pacfin is concerned about the makeup of the security staff at McCormick Place. He would like its composition to be entirely russ
.

Fred intensified the Rondy scape in which Pacfin stared reproachfully at him from across the teletable. Next to Pacfin sat a woman from the TUG charter, who wore that charter’s olive-mustard-olive jumpsuit uniform. Members of Charter TUG maintained a clonelike physical uniformity—they were all big, solid people with square heads, even their women—but they were not clones.

Also present in this scape were MC, the McCormick Place mentar, and a jerome named Gilles, Fred’s operational officer.

Fred said, “I sympathize with your concerns, Myr Pacfin, but you signed the standard McCormick Place security contract.”

“Which is?”

“Uh, MC?”

The McCormick Place mentar replied, “Forty-two percent russ, thirty percent jerry, twenty-four percent belinda, and four percent pike.”

Pacfin fell back in his seat and threw up his hands. “Come on!” he cried. “Aren’t jerrys bad enough, but
pikes?
You want to foist pikes on us?”

The large TUG woman, Veronica according to her name patch, rolled her eyes, like tiny beads in a slab of dough.

Fred was out of patience. “Again I apologize,” he said, “but a matter of national security has arisen and calls me away. I will dispatch a proxy to continue this meeting.” He muted the scape and said, “Marcus, proxy me. Inspector Costa, I’m all yours.”

Fred shrank the booth controls and pushed them away. He sat back in his chair and closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. He thought about the multiplex convention center, with a main hall with five tiers, two more halls with three tiers, and twenty-three satellite venues, and all of them packed solid for twenty-four hours with over fifty thousand yahoos—no, scratch that—fifty thousand chartists from everywhere. He thought about maintaining order of this gathering with a security force of 420 russes, 300 jerrys, 240 belindas, and 40 troublesome pikes.

There was a ding, and when Fred opened his eyes, his proxy floated before him in the booth. For his proxy style, Fred, like most russes, chose a head, a keystone-shaped section of shoulders and chest, and a detached right hand in a white glove.

Fred’s new proxy saluted him with that white glove and said, “Oh, sure, you take the blacksuit job and stick me with Pacfin.”

“You’ll do,” Fred said and swiped the proxy on its way. Then he got up and stretched and left the booth only to find someone else’s proxy waiting for him in the hallway. It was the TUG woman’s proxy, which she must have cast while he was casting his.

“May I help you?” he asked it. The TUG proxy was as imposing as the TUGs were themselves: a brick head on a barrel torso, two mighty arms and hands.

“I know you’re in a hurry, Myr Londenstane,” it said in an incongruously sweet voice. “I just wanted to ask you to overlook Myr Pacfin’s regrettable racism. He doesn’t represent all of charterdom. There are many of us who would like to remove the artificial wedge that certain sectors of society have used to divide chartists from iterants such as yourself.”

Fred wasn’t sure how to respond to the woman’s remarks. In any case, this was neither the time nor place for a discussion of class warfare.

“No offense taken,” he said. “And I’m sure we’ll iron out the Rondy arrangements. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

“THIS IS WHAT a regional landline opticom hub looks like,” said Inspector Costa. A ball appeared on the windshield HUD in front of Fred. He was riding in a HomCom General Ops Vehicle, a GOV, to the Bell Opticom switching station on 407th Street, where the inspector awaited him. The opticom hub she was showing him was about the size and color of a cue ball and had a slowly revolving, shimmering, pearlescent surface. “What you see modeled here is packet flow,” the inspector continued. “The more traffic, the larger the sphere. This sphere represents about three trillion tetrapackets per picosecond, a fairly normal flow rate for a hub like Chicago. What’s important to remember is that for every packet that goes into a hub, a packet must emerge. Likewise, no more packets can emerge than went in. It’s just a switch, after all, not a generator or accumulator. What goes in must come out, right?”

“I guess,” Fred said. His GOV left the local grid and descended into the vehicle well of the Sharane Building. “But you said the Chicagoland hub is wobbling?”

“Yes, it is. Compare this model to the opticom hub we will be visiting.” A second ball appeared beside the first. Fred scrutinized it and compared it to the first. If it was wobbling, it was doing so too subtly for him to discern. “See it?” asked the inspector.

“Well, ah, no, Inspector,” he said.

“No need to be so formal with me, Londenstane. Call me Costa. Back away from the models a little and kinda squint your eyes at them.”

Fred did so and noticed a slight difference. The horizontal lines of the shimmering sheen on the surface of the second ball seemed slightly off-kilter. They meandered slowly above and below the equatorial guide. “Got it,” he said. “What’s causing that?”

“The switch is sending more packets than it’s receiving. That means there’s a packet generator tapped into the hub. People who keep mentars like to hide secret backups inside opticom hubs. That way the backups can act as passive conduits for their mentar prime, keeping constantly updated while staying invisible. If the mentar prime goes down, however, and a covert backup takes its place, it’s suddenly not
passing
data through but
creating
it. And since a mentar is a gushing geyser of packets, the hub—”

“Starts to wobble,” Fred said, mesmerized by the shiny orb. He shook his head and looked away. “You think it’s our fugitive?”

“No one’s swept this hub facility in years. By now, there are probably dozens of covert backups down here belonging to a host of different sponsors. One of them has gone active. The only mentar we’re aware of in need of activating a backup at this time is our fugitive. Yes, we believe it’s Cabinet. In fact, we believe this is its last backup.”

“By the way,” Fred said, “how did Eleanor Starke die?” Although it was thirty-nine years since he’d left her service—Marcus had refreshed his memory of the details of that duty—he had continued to follow her career in the media. She was the last person he would expect to fall victim to an accident, or to foul play, for that matter.

“Couldn’t say,” said the probate inspector. “Really, I couldn’t,” she added when he frowned. “It’s not my beat and I don’t know.”

Fred’s car settled onto a docking platform in a priority area. Another GOV, probably the inspector’s, was already parked there. He decarred and took a lift seven stories down to the foundation of the Sharane gigatower. “Last backup? What makes you think so?”

Gut feeling
, the inspector said in Fred’s ear.
It’s a good bet that Cabinet would reserve its hub taps for last
.

When Fred’s elevator car arrived at S7, he passed through a series of automated scanways. There were plenty of maintenance arbeitors wheeling around, but no humans. Except for one—USNA Justice Department Inspector Heloise Costa. Fred found her waiting outside the switching room vault with an entourage of four large tank carts. He did a double take when he saw her in the flesh. She did, indeed, resemble a lulu, which was ridiculous. Lulus were never hired for cop work. He had to get pretty close before he could tell for sure that she was a hink, not a cloned woman.

Her attire was unusual for anyone on a potentially hazardous assignment. While he wore a standard HomCom blacksuit, she wore JD service boots and what from the waist up was a maroon jumpsuit uniform. But instead of trousers, she wore culottes. For a suit designed to seal against NNBC attack, there seemed to be a lot of exposed skin.

Nice skin too. The luluesque legs. Fred tried not to stare.

Inspector Costa got right down to business, swiping her left hand at him. “Here’s the warrant, from Division Three Circuit.”

The warrant passed from the Justice Department’s mentar, Libby, through Fred’s palm array and cap subem to all the concerned agencies riding piggyback on him: the Applied People mentar, Nicholas; the nameless HomCom mentar; the Bell Systems mentar; the Chicago prosecutor’s office mentar; various UD and nonaligned human and mentar rights watchdog agencies; and—the only mentar with Fred’s best interest in mind—the BB of R’s Marcus. Inspector Costa, no doubt, was likewise burdened by her own officious peanut gallery.

Warrant acknowledged and confirmed. You may proceed
, said the Bell System mentar, Ringer, who controlled the facility.

Fred placed his hand against the vault’s palmplate. A pressure barrier blocking entry to the tunnel powered down, opening the way for them. The four tank carts preceded them through the tunnel, then Costa, then Fred. Still wondering about her suit, Fred tried and failed to catch the glint of some tough but sheer material that might be covering her legs. From behind, he was impressed again by her body’s curvy, generous form. A bit heavier in the hips than a lulu, perhaps, and a tad taller, but she might pass for a sister on the fringe of the germline. In his long life, Fred had familiarized himself with the bodies of most cloned women. It wasn’t difficult—when you undressed one of them, you pretty much undressed all of her sisters. Only the arrangement of moles, pimples, and freckles set them apart. That was probably the enduring lure of free-range women like Costa. They were each of them unique, a mystery, a surprise. Not that he’d ever gotten intimate with a hink. The very idea was unsavory.

Fred sighed.

“Bored already, Londenstane?” Costa said, glancing back at him. “You should have joined the hunt earlier. I’ve already taken into custody twenty-five full backups and mirrors.”

Fred was astonished. “So many?”

“Yes, I think it’s a record. It’s certainly
my
record. It just shows you how rich and paranoid this Starke woman was. She must have spent millions securing her mentar. We started with Cabinet’s licensed paste units, on-planet and off. Then the licensed loopvaults. Then the unlicensed units, the linked datacubes, crystal chips, and thousands of peerless ghosts. Starke employed all known means of storing artificial sentience, and a few I’d only read about. I’m not at liberty to go into too much detail, but we’ve dug up an entire emu ranch in British Columbia this morning to seize one of them. Owner had no idea what was buried under her browse pen. We’ve destroyed a science labplat orbiting Mars. We’ve lassoed an asteroid.

“And every time we close in on an active unit, before we can take it into custody, it scrambles its own brains beyond retrieval. I don’t know what this mentar is trying to hide, but it won’t let us near it.

“That, by the way, is how we know to look for the next one. A mentar will not destroy its last backup. You can count on that. Mentars are incapable of committing suicide. That’s an area where we humans still surpass them. So, if a unit soufflés itself, you can bet there’s another backup out there somewhere.”

They entered the cavernous switching facility. Spokes of electronic hardware radiated from a central control bay. Costa’s four carts stopped and waited for her. She told the lead cart to drop its load of scouts. The cart lowered a shovel-shaped nozzle to the floor. A valve shot open and thousands of carbon-fiber marbles spilled out in all directions, making a roaring din as they bounced on the concrete. The marbles rolled and uncurled into cockroach-sized mechs that bristled with sensory probes, digging arms, and cutting tools. They skittered everywhere in the vault, crawling behind consoles and cowlings, squeezing into ducts, slithering up walls and along cables. Everywhere, even inside Fred’s clothing. He knew better than to try to move, and they quickly vetted him and departed. Their whispery touch against his skin was unnerving.