Realms of Light (22 page)

I wouldn’t have thought he’d want to ride
wire after what happened to his dream enhancer, but apparently he
wasn’t deterred as easily as I was. I assume he had massive
security on that line, the sort of watchdogs I had only ever seen
from the outside.

“You’re right, Mis’ Hsing,” he said, though I
hadn’t said anything to be right about. “Someone’s hacked into
medical and taken a very sharp interest in your father’s
condition.”

“Can you tell who?”

“I can limit the possibilities,” he said.
“There are about a dozen.”

“Is Chantilly Rhee one of them?”

“Yes. So is Kumiko.”

“I’d guess some of the others are dead.”

His eyes had drifted off, upward and to the
right, since I asked who had access, but now they snapped back and
focused directly on mine. “Oh?”

“I know there are at least eight uploads of
dead Nakadas running in this compound, and I’d be surprised if none
of them could get in there if they wanted to.”

“I am impressed, Mis’ Hsing. I am quite sure
I did not mention my uploaded siblings and descendants to you.”

“I told you I’d started my
investigation.”

“I will want to know more about this
eventually, but for now, let us keep our attention on more urgent
matters. You tell me that my daughter’s aide is involved in a
scheme to purchase Seventh Heaven Neurosurgery, a company that is,
by any rational standard, almost worthless. You seem convinced this
is linked to the attempt on my life. And I believe we have both
concluded that what the buyers are actually after is not any of the
company’s normal assets, but the people inside the dreamtanks.”

“I think they helped me get my father out of
there,” I said. I didn’t bother telling him any details about the
black floaters; they weren’t relevant.

“You think they wanted him to serve as a test
sample, so they could assess the condition of their intended
acquisitions. Helping you kidnap him was less likely to draw
unwelcome attention than extracting one of the dreamers
themselves.”

The old man was still sharp. “Yes,” I
said.

“It’s an interesting theory, Mis’ Hsing, but
it’s based on very little evidence and a great deal of supposition.
Further, there is one very basic question to which I do not see an
obvious answer: What do they
want
with the dreamers?”

When I walked into the office I couldn’t have
answered that question, but by this time I had figured it out.

“Bodies,” I said. “They want living bodies
that their original owners aren’t using.”

For a moment Grandfather Nakada sat silently in his
big chair, staring at me. Then he said, “You think one of my
uploaded relatives wants to be human again?”

“At
least
one,” I said. “For all I
know, all eight of them are conspiring in this.”

“I confess, Mis’ Hsing, I don’t even know
whether it’s technically possible to download a mind from a network
into a human body.”

“I don’t, either. And I wouldn’t be too sure
they
know. That doesn’t mean they won’t try it. If they buy
up Seventh Heaven they’ll have plenty of bodies to experiment on,
and if they wait until after sunrise there won’t be much of anyone
left in Nightside City to notice or care.”

The old man considered that for a few
seconds, then said, “Very little evidence and a great deal of
supposition, Mis’ Hsing. And it doesn’t explain the attempt on my
life, or the false reports of my death.”

“They wanted a copy of you,” I said. “To get
them into Seventh Heaven. They didn’t think you’d cooperate with
them in your present form, but if you died, and an upload of you
was booted up, they thought the upload would help them. In fact, it
apparently has—when you survived the assassination attempt, they
realized a false report of your death would release the ITEOD
files, and they could copy and activate the upload you had in
there.”

“They have a copy of me?” The old man looked
shocked. I hadn’t thought anything could shock someone who’d lived
through the last two centuries, but it seemed I was wrong. I
suppose this was a bit more personal than all that history.

And while I hadn’t originally intended to
bring this up, I wanted to see how he would react to another news
item.

“So do I,” I said. “Aboard
Ukiba
.”

“Hsing, you...”

He stopped in mid-sentence, staring at me,
speechless.

I felt a twinge of guilt about popping that
up on the old man. I didn’t want to kill off my client, after all,
and at his age any sort of shock carried a risk. “I didn’t know who
it was,” I said. “If there’s a proper catalog in the ITEOD files, I
missed it.”

He stared at me for a moment, then said, “So
you think—you think that someone in my own family tried to
kill
me, just to get control of a copy of my most recent
upload, as part of this scheme to use dreamers as a source of new
bodies?”

“Yes, I do,” I said, “if you consider uploads
to still be family members. Remember, to an upload, that copy may
be
you
. She wouldn’t really be killing you at all, just
switching you to her own form of life, and even that might only be
temporary.”

“An incarnationist? You think one of my
uploaded relatives is an incarnationist?”

I hadn’t heard the term “incarnationist”
before, but I understood right away what it meant, and what the
tone of voice Nakada was using meant, as well. I had never seen the
old man so flustered—in fact, until now I had never seen him
flustered at all. Now, though, he seemed thoroughly scrambled. He
clearly found the idea that a member of his own family could
believe in the transferability of identity repulsive.

“There might be other motives as well,” I
said.

“And there are
two
active copies of
me?”

“I don’t know whether theirs is still
active,” I said. A thought struck me at the mention of the copies.
“I’ll bet that... well, I didn’t find any record of any human
suspects visiting Epimetheus lately, but I’ll bet one of your
uploads transmitted a copy there, and that’s who’s been running the
Seventh Heaven negotiations.”

“You think there’s a duplicate of one of
them
, too?”

“And you can probably find out which by
checking transmission records.”

He blinked, and his jaw sagged slightly, and
I remembered that he was still jacked in. I could guess where in
the nets he was going.

Then he was back, his face hardening.
“Shinichiro,” he said. “My son Shinichiro.”

I knew the name from the family records; his
was the most recent of the three deaths among the old man’s
children, and he had been dead for about twenty Terran years. I
didn’t know much beyond that, so I didn’t say anything.

“A copy was transmitted, just as you
said.”

“Then I think he’s your assassin,” I said.
“Or at least the ringleader.”

“But you have no proof.”

“I have no proof,” I agreed.

“Then you have not completed the job to my
satisfaction.”

“I’ve identified the assassin.”

“You’ve named a likely suspect. That’s not
good enough. To accuse my own son, I need more than this web of
suppositions and guesswork.”

“It’s not your son,” I said. “It’s an upload
that thinks it’s your son.”

The old man’s face froze at that, and then
took on a new expression.

I don’t ever want to see anyone look at me
like that again. Usually the old man hid his emotions, kept
everything under strict control, but I’d cracked that reserve
earlier, and right then it broke completely. Despair and rage were
written in his eyes and on every feature.

Maybe it was an act. Maybe he was really
still as cold and controlled as ever, and pasted that look there
deliberately.

I don’t think so, though. I think I had
touched something he really cared about, said something he didn’t
want to hear—and something that he knew was true.

“I talked to the copy of you aboard
Ukiba
,” I said. “It knew what it was. It knew it wasn’t you.
It knew an upload isn’t human, no matter what it’s copied from, and
that means
you
know it. You
know
that’s the truth.
That upload isn’t your son. It’s an imitation, a software
emulation.”

“It’s all I have left of him,” the old man
said.

“But it’s not
him
,” I insisted. “It’s
software, not wetware.”

“It’s all that’s left,” he repeated, “and if
you’re going to accuse him of trying to murder me, I need more
proof than you’ve given me so far.”

I wasn’t really surprised. He had told me he
thought it was a member of the family, and he had seemed to accept
the idea, but that was when it was theoretical and non-specific.
Now that it was a particular individual, one who he apparently
loved, it was different.

“I need access to your family networks,
then,” I said. “And I’d like to interview Chantilly Rhee, and
Kumiko Nakada, and the upload you call Shinichiro, in that
order.”

“I’ll arrange it.” His voice was cold
again.

Something about the way he said it beeped for
me. “You
know
Shinichiro did it,” I said. “You just want
proof.”

“I believe that’s what I said, Mis’
Hsing.”

He had obviously recovered from his moment of
shock.

“Fine. I’ll get you your proof. Maybe not
enough for the law, but enough for you to be sure.”

“That is all I ask.”

“How soon can I see Mis’ Rhee?”

“I believe she should be at her desk; would
you prefer to speak to her in private?”

“I’d prefer to speak to her somewhere I know
the Shinichiro upload isn’t listening.”

Even as I said it, though, I realized it was
probably too late to keep it from learning what was going on. While
I was sure the old man had a dozen layers of security on the office
we were in, Yoshio-
sempai
had checked on the medicals and on
the transmission logs, and there were probably a dozen other beeps
as well—the upload might not know we had narrowed it down to a
single entity, but it must know we were getting close. It had
already tried to kill the old man once, and just as I said, it
wouldn’t even see it as murder—as far as Shinichiro was concerned
his father was safely backed up in a couple of places, and shutting
down his original meatware was just a maintenance issue; he’d be
rebooted as soon as possible.

As for me, I wasn’t family, I wasn’t
important, I wasn’t anyone. Killing me was just debugging the
situation. If I was lucky it might try to buy me off instead, but
if it really had access to a running copy of the Yoshio upload a
simple question would tell it that wasn’t going to work.

At least, I certainly hoped the old man’s
back-up would have that much respect for me; Grandfather Nakada had
certainly claimed to when he hired me.

That brought up an interesting question,
though—
was
Shinichiro’s copy of Yoshio-
kun
cooperating? Did it agree with what Shinichiro was trying to do?
From what I knew of the old man’s character, I didn’t think it
would, but it might play along until it had control of its
situation.

It didn’t really matter, though; that copy of
Yoshio-
kun
was back on Epimetheus, and I was here in the
Nakada compound in American City.

A lot of things were fitting together. It
must have been a copy of Shinichiro that sent those black floaters
after me in the Trap; the copy here on Prometheus probably had
floaters, too. It must have access to a
lot
of things. I
didn’t know how much control it might have over the household’s
environment—could it override the normal protocols? It had gotten
at the old man’s dream enhancer, so it had obviously hacked at
least some of the systems beyond what it was supposed to be capable
of using. There was no way to be sure
anywhere
in American
City was entirely safe—or anywhere on the entire planet, really.
This office
might
be secure, but if the old man had been
assuming a human saboteur he might have missed a way in. Ordinarily
software was written so that it couldn’t harm people and didn’t
want
to, but uploads—well, that was part of why they were
illegal most places. Uploads could do things artificials couldn’t,
could go places humans couldn’t. They didn’t need to eat or sleep,
and could be invisible and silent. Most of them didn’t go hacking
into secure systems, but if they wanted to, they’d be hard to
stop.

If Grandfather Nakada got through this alive,
he was going to need to run some serious purges.

For now, though, I was supposed to be
interviewing suspects, to demonstrate to the old man that
Shinichiro was responsible for the attempted murder.

“Could we talk in here?” I suggested. This
room was probably as safe as I was going to get. “I don’t think I’d
be comfortable questioning her in her own office.”

“Would you prefer me to be present or
absent?”

“I don’t think it matters. You’ll be
recording it, I’m sure.”

“Of course.”

“Then it doesn’t matter.”

He nodded. “I’ve notified her to come
immediately.”

I nodded, and settled back in my chair to
wait. The old man turned to his desktop and started working on
something, ignoring me for the moment.

It was a good chair, very comfortable, and
the cloudscapes on the walls were soothing. I found myself starting
to relax.

“Mis’ Hsing,” Yoshio said, startling me back
to full alertness.

“Yeah?”

“I thought you would like to know that your
brother has come through surgery well; the implant has been
removed, and I have convinced IRC to accept a payment in lieu of
his services. Do you know whether he has any employment prospects
on Prometheus?”