Tears in Rain (25 page)

“And you were here for—?” Mirari asked again, for she was one of those people who get right to the point, who hate to waste time.

“I need a new identity. Papers and a past that will stand up to investigation.”

“A thorough investigation or a routine one?”

“Let’s say fairly thorough.”

“We’re talking about it being valid short-term, of course.”

“Of course. A week will suffice.”

“Class A, then.”

“It has to be a human identity. And living a few hundred miles from Madrid. My age. Of high social standing. With money in the bank. And if you can add a touch of supremacism to the biography, fantastic. Nothing too serious, just an ideological sympathy rather than militancy. But so it’s clear that racist ideas are a passion, though up till now, she’s somehow managed to keep them private.”

“Done. When do you want all this?”

“As soon as possible.”

“I think I can have it ready by tomorrow. Two thousand gaias.”

“I also want an untraceable mobile.”

“That will be another thousand Gs.”

“Fine. I don’t have that much in cash.”

“Transfer it to me electronically. I use a program that erases all signs of the transaction. Although there’ll still be a record of the withdrawal of the funds on your mobile.”

“That doesn’t worry me. But my computer is switched off because I think the police are tracking me. I don’t want to switch it on here. I’ll do the transfer shortly, from the street, if that’s okay with you. And if you trust me.”

“I don’t need to trust you. I’ll just delay placing the order until I get the money.”

Bruna smiled sourly. Of course. It had been an astonishingly stupid comment.

“But in case it makes any difference to you, let me tell you that yes, I do trust you,” Mirari added.

Bruna’s smile widened. The human’s small kindness felt especially pleasing on a day marked by such bitterness among the species. Mirari had bent over to pick up the hammer from the floor. She had been opening and closing her bionic hand for a while. The fingers weren’t moving in sync, and the ring and middle fingers weren’t closing completely. The violinist gave them a few tentative taps with the rubber tool.

“How much does a new prosthesis like the one you need cost?” asked Bruna.

Mirari looked up.

“Half a million Gs. More than my violin. And that’s a Stainer.”

“A what?”

“One of the best violins in the world. By Stainer, the seventeenth-century Austrian instrument maker. I have a marvelous violin, but I don’t have the arm to play it,” she said with unexpected and genuine anguish.

“But the money can be raised?”

“Yes. Or stolen,” Mirari replied dryly, with yet another closed and impenetrable expression on her face. “I’ll call you when I have everything.”

Bruna left the circus and decided to walk home. She hadn’t exercised for days, and her body felt stiff and her muscles were keen for activity. It was already dark and drizzling. The wet sidewalks shone under the streetlights, and the sky-trams thundered by, lit up as if for a party, but empty. When she reached Tres de Mayo Square, where she’d disconnected her mobile, she reinserted the energy cell and switched on the machine. She sent Mirari the money and then, after ruling out the option of going to Oli’s bar for dinner, continued on her way in the direction
of her apartment. She was so absorbed in going over the details of the case that she didn’t see the attack coming until the last minute, when she heard the whirring and sensed a movement behind her. She jumped sideways, turning in the air, but she couldn’t avoid the impact altogether. The chain hit her right forearm, which she’d instinctively raised to protect herself. The blow hurt, but the pain didn’t prevent her from grabbing the chain and pulling. The guy on the other end of it fell to the ground. But he wasn’t alone. Bruna glanced around and assessed her situation. Seven assailants counting the one she’d just knocked down and who was now getting up. Five men and two women. Big, strong, in good shape. Armed with chains and metal bars. And worst of all, deployed in a star formation around her—three closer to her, four one step farther back—carefully placed so as to leave no gaps. A professional attack formation. They weren’t going to be easy opponents. She decided she’d try to break the circle by charging the blond male with the hoop earrings; he was sweating and seemed to be the most nervous. And wearing earrings while fighting was a sign of inexperience: the first thing the detective would do would be to rip them out of his ears. Bruna had the chain at her disposal as a weapon and thought she had a chance of escaping, but even so, she would undoubtedly take a few hits. It was a most unpleasant encounter.

The entire analysis only took the rep a few seconds. The whole group still hadn’t moved, motionless in that perfect, tense stillness that precedes an outburst of violence. And then a voice cut through the tense atmosphere like a hot knife through butter.

“Police. Throw down your weapons.”

It was Paul Lizard, and his thick, calm voice emerged from behind a large plasma gun.

“I won’t say it again. Drop those iron bars right now.”

The surprised assailants let go of their bars and chains, producing a formidable din.

“You too, Husky.”

Bruna snorted and opened her hand.

“So now what are you going to do, tough guy? Shoot us in the back?” asked one of the women, perhaps the leader of the group.

And as if that were a signal, they all took off, each in a different direction.

Lizard watched them go and put away his gun. He looked at Bruna with his sleepy eyes.

“You had a narrow escape.”

“I could have handled them.”

“Really?”

Lizard’s tone made the rep feel ridiculous and a braggart.

“Yes, I could. What I mean is, I could have gotten away...though I would have ended up with a few bruises.”

“No question.”

“Hmmm, okay, thanks,” said Bruna, and the troublesome word erupted from her mouth like a belch.

“You’re welcome. Did you recognize them?”

“No. But they were professionals.”

“Yes, maybe mercenaries paid by someone to whip up the disturbances.”

Bruna looked at him, intrigued.

“Why do you think that?”

The policeman shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t know. I’m seeing too many strange things in this sudden antitechno rage.”

The detective looked at him attentively. Under their heavy eyelids, his sparkling green eyes were very sharp.

“Seven people have died today, thanks to Nabokov’s bomb,” Bruna said.

“Eight. One of the gravely wounded has died.”

“Eight victims then. Don’t you hate reps, Lizard? Be honest. Not even a little?”

“No.”

“And you’re not afraid of us?”

“No.”

And Bruna believed him.

“Go home, Husky. It’s not the best night to be out walking.”

“I thought I’d shaken off your plump girl. You can’t be a good tail with that much flesh.”

“You certainly lost her. But her visibility was my camouflage. You’ve fallen for a beginner’s trick, Husky.”

The rep bit her lip, mortified.

“Why haven’t you taken Nabokov’s body to the Forensic Anatomy Institute?”

“It was deemed a terrorist attack, and antiterrorist investigations are classified top secret. And the Forensic Institute, as you know better than anyone, leaks like a sieve.”

Bruna smiled.

“You mean that you’ve hidden the body so that I can’t find out anything?”

The inspector also smiled.

“How conceited you are, Husky. You’re not the only person capable of stealing information. Moreover, how suspicious you are! I don’t deserve it. I offered to collaborate with you, and you didn’t believe me.”

“Give me the results from Nabokov’s autopsy and I’ll believe you.”

Lizard stood watching her. Those sleepy, sardonic eyes.

“Very well. I’ll have the results tomorrow. If you like, we’ll talk then. And now, once and for all, go!”

“Are you going to follow me again?”

“Lucky for you that I did.”

“Seriously, are you going to do it again?”

“No.”

Bruna didn’t believe him.

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Submerged Lands

Keywords: global warming, Robot Wars, Plagues, Ultra-Darwinism, Demographic Laws, wet tourism.

#002-327

Entry being edited

Although
global warming
had already begun to melt the polar icecaps in the twentieth century and the sea level had been rising progressively for several centuries, it is clear that its devastating impact on society seemed to explode suddenly around 2040. “Just as a frog placed in water that is gradually being heated is unaware of the problem until it boils to death, so humanity was unaware of the catastrophe until the massive number of deaths became evident,” said Gorka Marlaska, Nobel Laureate in Medicine, in 2046.

In reality, serious disturbances had already occurred much earlier, but they were seen as isolated incidents and passed by more or less inadvertently because, typically, they took place in overpopulated, economically depressed, and traditionally unstable regions, such as the no-longer-existent Bangladesh, a country whose territory was completely covered by water, except for a narrow strip of mountains in the east, and which was absorbed by India after the period of the
Plagues
. Toward the end of 2039, however, when between 13 and 14 percent of the Earth’s surface was already submerged, a stampede of sorts began in the Irrawaddy Delta region (formerly Burma). In contrast to what had happened in other cases, the unrest did not remain confined to one region. Rather, it took
off and multiplied rapidly in other geographical zones throughout 2040, turning into a planetary phenomenon. One must keep in mind that huge urban centers were located in the coastal strips, and that these were usually densely populated. As the sea advanced, cities like Venice, Amsterdam, and Manhattan disappeared completely, while others—Lisbon, Barcelona, Mumbai—were partially flooded. Even more damaging was the inundation of the most fertile deltas and the densely populated coastal farming strips. Hundreds of millions of desperate, hungry people who had lost everything climbed to ever higher places as they were pursued by the waters. But those high lands were already inhabited, and often the inhabitants were also suffering from hunger, given the terrible loss of the best arable land. Confrontations among these groups swept the globe. A blind violence overtook the whole world, and one massacre followed another for several years. It could be said that this was the first planetary civil war although it
must have been so traumatic that, oddly, it
lacks a formal name as such. Historians refer to this period as that of the Plagues, comparing the ferocious, massive, displaced hordes to the calamitous biblical plague of locusts.

It was a time of chaos, and reliable data are not available, but it is
estimated that by 2050, after a decade of conflicts, two billion people had died through famine, disease, and direct violence. There were, moreover, other lethal factors to consider, such as the appearance of the Ultra-Darwinists.
Ultra-Darwinism
was a racist terrorist movement supposedly based on the theories of Charles Darwin
, although a huge majority of the scientific community has always rejected the notion that the Ultras had anything to do with evolutionism
. The Ultras believed that Earth could not sustain a human population of such magnitude—a fact that in one sense was self-evident. They maintained that the Submerged Worlds and subsequent Plagues were a process of natural selection of benefit to Earth, given that the highest mortality rates were occurring in the overpopulated, economically disadvantaged zones that, on the whole, were inhabited by individuals whose racial origins were non-Caucasian, and whom the Ultras viewed as defective and dispensable human material. In order to speed up this supposed process of “ethnic cleansing,” the Ultra-Darwinists carried out countless attacks with conventional explosives, missiles, and even short-range nuclear warheads, until the organization was finally dismantled successfully in 2052.
That said, it has been demonstrated that the replicants
took advantage of the Plagues to murder humans with impunity.