Reality 36 (13 page)

  "Fuck… you…" hissed Tufa through clamped teeth.

  "That is the wrong answer," said Otto stolidly. "I am going to make an exception to my usual rules." Otto stood. If his speech hadn't had the required effect on the Albanian, the look on his face did.

  "Wait!" shouted Tufa, holding up his hand. It shook, hard.

  "No waiting," said Otto. He began methodically kicking Tufa's broken leg. "Now, we shall talk about my MT cipher, and we will talk about Launcey, and if we talk about Launcey, and you are good, then maybe I will remember my principles and you can go back to jail alive. More or less."

  Tufa screamed. "I don't know anything, I don't know anything."

  "Wrong" – Otto kicked again – "answer. Who is he?"

  Tufa screamed. "I never met him. I never seen him. We did it all through the Grid, I never seen him!"

  "Um, Otto?" said Richards. His voice slurred.

  Otto continued to swing his foot back and forth, one-two, one-two, driving it into Tufa's bent limb with robotic efficiency.

  "OTTO!"

  Otto stopped. "OK." It was Tufa's turn to vomit. He whimpered and dragged himself away across the floor.

  "I only have one minute of battery power left. Do you think you can reactivate your MT?"

  "Yes." Otto walked over to the table where Tufa's phone lay and smashed the device with the flat of his hand. "Done." He turned back to the sobbing Albanian.

  "Now that's more like it," said Richards in Otto's head. "That's much better". He left the loader, went back to his base unit. Its resident One free, the machine rolled back and forward in confusion, cab swivelling, its lights dying as the fuel cells ran dry. "Now," said Richards. "Where were we?"

  "He has passed out."

  "Looks like there's plenty of drugs here. You want I should identify them so you can bring him round?"

  "No," said Otto, dragging Tufa back toward the tables by his feet. "I prefer to work through trial and error." He picked up a pneumatic syringe and looked at it thoughtfully, put it down, picked up one with ten centimetres of needle on it instead.

  "I think the first one you had?" ventured Richards.

  "Ja, I know. This one will hurt more."

  "OK. Er, I am sure you won't mind if I don't watch. And don't kill him! I'm calling the cops. Let's do this by the book. For once."

Ten minutes later, they stood in the adjacent warehouse behind the groundtruck, an unmarked, unregistered monster with fake Gridsig and no Gridpipe, and that was as black as a vehicle got. Within, Launcey's payment stared back. Goods, not cash. Tufa had, Otto had found, no real idea who Launcey was, blank Grid accounts, that was all. Tufa had led them down a dead end lined with responsibilities.

  "We can't just leave them here," said Otto.

  "No," said Richards, "no, I suppose we can't." He looked through Otto's eyes at the trailer's contents – two dozen or so frightened children, all bound for… Richards didn't like to think about it, but it might just have been better than where they would end up now. Looking at their faces, all Arab or sub-Sarahan or Berber, he could see once they'd been processed they were all going back on the other side of the Med wall, carted off to the Caliphate or the dying South. Each and every one was an illegal, of that he was sure. "Question is, what do we do?"

  From outside sounded sirens and the thrum of turbofans as police cars settled onto the concrete apron. Shouting followed.

  "If we do nothing, they will be repatriated," said Otto. Above them, ranks of pigeons looked on, heads turned sideways, eyes bright with idiot curiosity.

  "Is that so bad?" said Richards, already knowing the answer.

  "You know the answer to that, Richards," said Otto. He traced the electoos on his scalp with one finger. Blood caked his hair, but the skin was scabbed over and the swelling on his face was subsiding as his healthtech got to work.

  "So what then? I am open to suggestions."

  Otto shrugged. "You have many important friends."

  "Well, yeah," said Richards reluctantly.

  "One I am thinking of in particular, he owes us big favours."

  "Who?"

  "You know who. Very important," said Otto meaningfully.

  "Oh, no, oh, no. You don't mean… What, oh, Otto, come on, man! You can't mean, you want me to go and see him?"

  "He can fix this for us." Otto gave him what would have been, had they been face to face rather than sharing the same head space, a level stare.

  The children were beginning to cry, first one, then another, until nearly the whole damn lot of them were wailing like the dead, all those bar the ones with eyes like empty windows. Otto purposefully stared at these damaged few, his internal countenance doleful. Richards held out for as long as he could before he caved in, which was, to his credit, only about two seconds.

  "OK! OK! Just quit looking at me like that. I hate it when you look at me like that."

  The police swarmed in. Their guns came down when they recognised Otto. He gave the cops what was left of Tufa, cuffed, bloodied and groaning but otherwise alive, and bummed a cigarette. By the time he'd lit it and sucked down the first of the smoke of the carcinogen-free tobacco, Richards had gone from his head off down the electric highway to see the EuPol Five, head of European internal security.

  Or Hughie, as Richards called him.

  He was, according to Richards, the world's most pompous ass.

Chapter 6

Qifang

The message clamoured in Qifang's mind, drowning out the world. He gripped his head and screwed his eyes shut. It would not be silent.

  The alleyway stank. His feet skidded on things he didn't want to think about. His breath laboured; he was dismayed at his own feebleness. He'd taken the vitalics and anti-gerontics, used them since they were first available. A longer healthspan, that's what they promised. They'd done their job – only months ago he'd been as nimble at one hundred and twenty seven as he had been at fifty – but Zhifang cursed them just the same. Who else could he blame for his frailty? Time paid no heed to the complaints of old men.

  His blood pounded hard, his heart and joints ached. A metallic tang filled his mouth.

  He stumbled on. His mind was cloudy, words and thoughts hard to formulate, his memories hazy and broken. His mind was a mosaic of itself, put together by a well-meaning fool who'd smashed the original to pieces in error.

  One of the last things he recalled clearly was heading down to the RealWorld Reality Realm House in the desert, driving down the ramp into its subterranean fastnesses, parking. Then, what? Detroit? Karlsson? He couldn't remember if that came before or afterwards. There'd been a flash, a fleeting image of himself over and over, then a tilting sensation as the floor fell from under his feet. No impact. Next he knew, there was some snakehead bellowing at him in Hakka to get out of the truck, get out, get out! He wasn't sure which city he was in, which country. He'd walked through weed-wracked farmland and young forest, until this dire warren, full of people from everywhere. They were driving on the left. Was he in Japan? His vision was too blurred, too jumpy to furnish him with more than the broadest detail, the world indistinct, soft. All except his message, bright and hard in his mind as a diamond, demanding that it be delivered.

  The men in their anonymous suits of charcoal grey found him, and chased him. He'd given one the slip, a frantic tumble into an alleyway, a lucky blow with an elbow. His assailant had been a man, nothing more than that, and he'd gone down. Something sharp had found his guts by way of return.

  Their struggle and the pursuit raised not so much as an eyebrow as he floundered through the crowds. English, they were speaking English, but what dialect he could not tell. He'd been in exile for so long, and yet he still could not tell English variants apart. If he got out of this, the third thing he resolved to do after taking a tub of vitalics and a hot bath was improve his English. He'd download it if he had to.

  A shudder passed through some organ within, and its presence consciously felt for the first instance in a lifetime as it reached the point of failure. Something tore. He coughed and doubled over, sinking to his knees in the unspeakable rubbish. One hand pressed up against the wall, his lungs burned. Thick slime dripped from his lips. His breath hiccoughed in his throat, he couldn't draw enough in to sustain himself.
This is the end
, he thought.
Now I am going to die.
This dismayed the message more than him. His last thought was that he could not remember what the message was about. It amused him, and he died with a smile on his lips.

  As he sank into the muck, shouts came from the alley mouth over the traffic noise, echoing off the prefabbed foamcrete walls either side.

  By the time they got to him, he had already gone.

  They stripped the body, cut it open, cracked the brainpan and scoured the inside. When they were finished, they dumped what was left in the deepest tidal part of the Thames marsh, then resumed their hunt for Zhang Qifang.

Chapter 7

Valdaire

Chloe had gone. Veronique's life companion needed the informational cloud for memory storage, hierarchical organisations of informational relationships, and heuristics. The core of Chloe's persona existed within the phone, but even that had multiple back-ups spread around the Grid. Only the higher AIs could truly separate themselves from the Grid, and then only sometimes, and then only just. The machines on the System Wide Grid were as inseparable from it as fungal mycelia under a forest floor, and that tangle included Chloe's mind, a direct link to Valdaire.

  Of course, it was also this interconnectedness that would allow Veronique into the Reality Realms.

  Veronique had considered severing Chloe's connection fully, but she'd had to do this twice in the past, and Chloe was never the same. Once Veronique'd got away from the city, when she neared the shack, she'd hidden Chloe instead.

  Chloe was the closest thing she had to a sister; she was worth the risk.

  Veronique had had to look hard for the old pirate hideout. It was well hidden, the cabin blending into the trees, the road to it choked with the gengineered weed barrier they'd sown round the perimeter – an act of ecological folly, looking at the way it had spread. She'd been shocked to see how much of a wreck it had become. It looked like no one had been there for a decade, when the place was a clubhouse for the Salt Lake U Radicals, putting out unlicensed software and media broadcasts on to the Grid. Once it had been a pretty clapboard mountain cabin, beaten up when they'd taken it over, a legacy from Jaffy's great aunt, but they'd fixed it up.

  That was a long time ago. The paint had flaked away, and rot had set in. A determined renovation would save it, but that would never happen. She was on restoration land, human habitation forbidden, a part of the Three Uncle Sams' efforts to salvage the biosphere. She was surprised it hadn't been torn down.

  She landed and concealed the aircar as best she could, tucking it behind the house under the portico, where trees would keep it out of sight of overhead surveillance. She covered over the hood with pine branches, poor camouflage, but if someone were close enough to see it, they'd have already found her.

  She went round the front, stepping carefully over the veranda's rotten boards, and approached the door. She'd always kept the key on her keyring. She never asked herself why, too painful to admit.

  The door was unlocked, sticking and wobbling when she pushed. She wondered who had been here last, and why they'd not locked the door. There were five of them with keys, the core of an ever-shifting larger group. It could have been Jaffy.

  She did a quick scout round. The cabin's five rooms were musty, one bedroom had a fearsome patch of mould spreading out to engulf it from one corner, water stains marked the floor where shingles had slipped, and the stairs to the big mezzanine in the den grumbled under her weight. Dust lay thick, leaves had blown under the front door, creating drifts in the corners. There were signs that animals had sheltered there. True decrepitude was a few winters away.

  When she'd last been here the house had been full of life. She'd left in a hurry when she found Jaffy with the other girl. She never thought she'd come back.

  She found coffee in a jar in the kitchen, way past its best. She smiled when she saw that, thought of Jaffy's insistence that there always be coffee on hand. He was absolutely dependent on it, and became unpleasant if denied it, in a funny, spiky way that made her laugh. She wondered where he was now. She could find out, if she wanted to, but discovering he was some corporate sell-out with two kids and an over-mortgaged house would diminish him; she didn't think that would feel right.

  She put the coffee back, blew cobwebs out of the old kettle and rinsed it clean with water from the jerrycan she had brought with her in the aircar. Then she made herself some tea with the supplies she'd bought in an out-of-the-way charge station. She had work to do.

  She unloaded the car, acquired fraudulently, like everything else she had. She unpacked four home aerial security drones, semi-adaptable chameleonics that could ape the appearance of tree limbs, the kind of thing rich suburbanites had patrolling their gardens. She assembled them, set them to a mid-level of aggression and let them loose in the woods to find their own positions. The man in the store had assured her that they were intelligent enough to do that. They were sliver guns, air weapons armed with water-soluble darts of a powerful tranquilliser. She didn't want to add murder to her crimes.

  Next came the dangerous part, making the nutrient feed that would keep her alive while she was in the Realms. She mixed salt and sugar together, adding to it a bundle of nutrient cubes used by Iron Man runners and other extreme endurance athletes. It was a poor approximation of the fluid Realms questers had once used to keep them alive, but the real deal needed a medical licence these days.