The Best of Electric Velocipede (30 page)

It was almost better than sex. Almost.

“I have the RPC.” Before I could read the coordinates she sent, I felt the ’tubebus change direction. “Routing you there now.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Look, I’m sorry about what I said earlier.”

My mail icon bounced. An R & U from her with a subject line of “Apology.” Read and Understood, but not Accepted. She was still mad at me.

“I’m not very good at this,” I tried again. “So I guess I’ll just say it and . . . well, anyway . . . I don’t really know the proper protocols for . . .” When she didn’t say anything, I lumbered on, “. . . this sort of relationship. I mean, how am I supposed to treat all your personalities? The same? Differently? It’s confusing to us single-core guys.”

“It always is,” she said.

I bristled slightly. “That’s not fair. You’re baselining statistics on me.”

“And you aren’t?”

“What? How so?”

“My personalities? You think I’m splitcore?”

I paused, and my theory-brain shuffled through a couple scenarios and couldn’t find one that didn’t end badly. “Aren’t you?” I tried, cringing slightly as I said it.

The only answer I received was a weird sensation of having a black hole in my brain, an emptiness that came from an open link that carried no data. It was the weirdest sensation of loss I had ever felt.

*

Half a winding later, as I wandered around an Emporium 31 looking at jewelry, I tried again.

I had found a holostat of Hammurabi Kip Sandeesh, the grandson, and I had loaded it into the surveillance mod of my iView. While my idle flops was doing facial recog on everyone within visual range, I had nothing else to do but wander around the RPC Sophie had sent me and try not to look too conspicuous.

B-R had a nasty habit of enforcing their Minimum Transaction Requirement. I couldn’t keep buying ice cream if I was going to stay on-site; I’d have to upgrade to something a little pricier if I was going to be here long.

“Do you have a favorite color?” I asked the void in my head, hoping—contrary to what it felt like—that she was still listening. I looked at a row of earrings, most of which were single-stone settings and astronomically priced. “Orange, perhaps,” I tried.

“Vermilion,” she corrected, her voice rising out of the vacuum.

“Okay, vermilion. That’s a start.” I cast about for something that matched the color shard I summoned in my internal display. “Like your shoes,” I remembered. “From when we met at Starbucks.”

“I’m not wearing them right now,” she said, using the other voice, the one I liked.

“No, I don’t suppose—”

“I’m not wearing anything.”

“Oh,” I said. I wet my lips. “I’d like objective verification of that data point, please.” I wasn’t quite sure where she was going with this, so I thought I’d proceed cautiously.

My mail icon chimed, and then irised into an image. We were fuzzy, but the pair of octopi getting it on the background was digitally sharp.

I sighed and blinked the image away. She was gone again, leaving me with just the fuzzy suggestion of the two of us together.

Still mad
, I figured.

I was spared further attempts to get her attention as well as getting squeezed by the Emporium 31 MTR by a different tone in my iView.

Facial recog had a hit.

*

Hammurabi Kip Sandeesh waited for me at the uprise to his domicile. We rode up silently, both staring out at the cluttered landscape. The surface of the planet above us was still dark, the weak light of cycleflip just starting to crease the distant curve.

“Tea?” he asked as we entered the austere family chamber. Unlike Sophie’s place (or mine, for that matter), Hammurabi had two rooms, and I didn’t disguise my interest in the second room.

“Sure,” I said as I wandered over to the portal and glanced inside. Worktable with a few exploded tools on it. Couple of antique-looking terminals and a few holograms of exotic plant life projected into the corners. I didn’t have a chance to look at the terminals more closely before he returned from the iToaster station.

“Soy?” he asked. He was carrying a tray with two small cups—also antiques—and a conDispenser.

“Black is fine,” I said.

He set the tray down on the low table between the two lacquered chairs and indicated I should sit. I did so, and watched him as he modded his tea. Pure-looking kid, no outward signs of plugs or rips. Kind face too, with quick and restless eyes. Not like he was chemical, but rather that he found everything interesting.

He lifted his teacup in a tiny salute. “I’m glad you found me, Person Semper Dimialos,” he said.

“It wasn’t terribly hard once I thought about it,” I said. “Please, Max.”

Hammurabi nodded. “My grandfather said that the best way to get a Theorist’s attention was to make him think. He would have liked you, I think, had things been different.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.” With nothing else to add, I sipped from my tea. It was real leaf, and I savored the flavor for a few fractions, waiting for Hammurabi to tell me why I was here.

He got to it eventually. “How many boxes did you receive?” he asked.

“Three, but I know there are more coming.”

“A dozen more,” he said. “The rest are to distract your Enforcement Directorate and to confound your CEO.”

“I’m sure they will,” I said. “But to what end?”

He picked up a small plate that had a tiny dark square on it. “Try the sweetmeat.”

“No, thank you,” I said. “The tea is plenty.”

“Please.” He gave me a look that was so earnest it almost broke my heart, and would have if theory-brain hadn’t latched onto the intensity of his gaze. Something familiar there.

I picked up the small piece of candy and popped it in my mouth. Its data payload was enormous, and I gasped as the upload threatened to overwhelm my buffers. After a few fractions, I could crest the data stream and skim the header waves.

“Oh, my,” I said as an overview started to synthesize. Hammurabi had just given me a digital copy of everything in the blackmail packages—cross-referenced and indexed for quick assimilation.

“My grandfather invented it,” he said. “Giselle gave it its street name: the Gripee.”

“Autonomous Microphalengeal Retrieval,” I whispered. “The term paper. Prescott Four stole the whole idea.”

Sandeesh shook his head. “It was supposed to be a joint paper. The three of them.”

“But, what—” I closed my mouth and scanned more of the documentation in my buffers. The Las Vegas School of International Business. Giselle Akkwild Haussingterre. The paternity test. The CAPR from Las Vegas SecD. The LegD report to Prescott Three. The internal doc trail between Prescott Four and Hammurabi’s grandfather. Giselle’s name mentioned more than once.

The last document threw me for a fraction. The menu list of Chromosomic Therapy options in the iReset. I didn’t understand why the man dump had been included, until I read the details of the Chrome23 options.

Suddenly the doc thread between Prescott Four and Prime Doctor made sense.

I flinched, and some of the tea in my tiny cup spilled out onto my hand. “What am I supposed to do with this?” I asked, suddenly not wanting this data in my head. Not wanting to have anything to do with this whole affair.

“We were hoping you could talk to your CEO on our behalf.”

“Our? Wait a fraction. You want me to become the blackmailer?”

“He’ll listen to you.”

“No he won’t—” The denial died in my throat.
Actually
, theory-brain pointed out,
he would. Because you can spin a thousand variations on what will happen if the data spills into the medianet.

It’s all about control, I had told Prescott Four, and I had never had it. I had been set up from the beginning.

*

On the long ride back to ICE, I pulled up the image of Sophie and I (fuzzy) and the octopi (not as) and left it there in my field of vision. Eventually, she filled the void in my head.

“Hello, Max.”

“Hello, Sophie.” I had been thinking, going back over the course of events during this crisis, trying to find a hole in theory-brain’s assessment. I hadn’t had any luck. “I’d like you to do something for me.”

“What is it?”

“The last package. The one being delivered in the ICErack. Can you expedite it to Prescott Four’s ofice? Can it get there before I do?”

“Yes, Max, I can do that.”

“I thought you might.”

She was quiet for a fraction.

“Are you mad at me?”

“No,” I said. “I’m just tired. This whole thing is—I’ll . . . I’ll be glad when it is done.”

“Yes, Max, I will be too.”

I felt the ’tubebus shift. Apogee. Back down to the surface now. Time to finish this. “Sophie,” I said, and the words were hard to say, but I had to get them out. “Please stop watching me. It’s an invasion of my bubble.”

“I understand, Max. I’m sorry.”

“I am too, Sophie.” I wiped in the image from my iView. “Goodbye, Sophie.”

“Good-bye, Max.”

It had been the eyes. Hammurabi’s and Sophie’s. Too similar to be a coincidence. And to be sure, I had queried a reverse lookup to B-R HumResD, which came back null. They didn’t have a Visual Monitor tagged with “Sophie.”

*

I was killnining all the files on my office terminal when the door opened and Yullg squeezed his gigantic bulk into my tiny three square. He glared at me for a moment, and eventually realized there wasn’t going to be enough room for him, me, and Prescott Four. He popped his jaw menacingly and stepped back, allowing the InterCore CEO to enter.

I tapped the button on my desk that engaged the security screens. “Grimester signed for the package,” he said. “The one you had routed to my office.”

“Did he open it?” I asked. “Of course he did.”

I didn’t say anything. Nor did Prescott Four, and we stared at each other for a few fractions before he shrugged and looked away. “Well, I was due for another XA anyway. He was starting to get a little annoying with that . . .” He waved his hand at his face. “That nasally thing he did.”

I kept wiping my files.

He giggled, and then caught himself. “You should have seen it,” he sighed.

“I did.” I tapped my desk’s v-mon to life and showed him the feed. Grimester opening the large ICErack and discovering the desiccated corpse inside, and his ensuing panic that resulted in a minor explosion of bone and dust and other noisome particulates that come off mummified bodies.

“How did it make you feel?” he asked. “Angry?”

“At who?” I replied.

“Me.”

“Why?”

“Because I . . .” he paused, reluctant to put it into words.

“The Sandeesh family has tagged me as the executor of their . . . vengeance, I guess,” I said. “I’m supposed to convince you that the best thing to do is to provide restitution for what you stole from them. In return for which, they’ll vanish. They have shipped you every piece of physical evidence they ever had. What you do with it is your business.”

“What about you, Max?”

“I don’t know. I’ll EOE when we’re done here. That’ll make things easier—”

“Max,” he interrupted. “What am I supposed to give you?”

He seemed just as confused as I was about my role. What did I want? I certainly couldn’t keep working here, not with the knowledge that I had. I couldn’t get theory-brain to stop enumerating the ways in which I could be EOLed in industrial accidents.

I sat back in my chair. It was a hard and uncomfortable surface, one I had been molding my body to for a long time. Too long, in fact, but what else could I have done? Entropy was easy.

“I want to be needed, I think.” I glanced around my tiny—and despairingly empty—office. “ICE is an efficient machine. Like everything else. No one needs a theorist to think ‘what if?’ anymore.”

He gave me a fraction to add to that, and when I didn’t, he nodded. “I’ll have FinD retro-state you to Director, and then stamp you out with a full 590(t).”

Theory-brain made a suggestion, and I concurred. I raised an eyebrow to Prescott Four, and he held up his hands in mock surrender. “Plus vestments.”

“I think that’ll help me find a way to be useful somewhere else, sir.”

He started to offer his hand, and then withdrew it, realizing he didn’t really want to shake on this deal.

Nor did I. We’d let the rest of the machine take care of it.

He left without another word, and I caught sight of a dark cloud of disappointment on Yullg’s face as he was called away by Prescott Four.

And just like that, it was over.

I hadn’t had to tell Prescott Four that I knew iReset could do a sex change; that I knew whose DNA tags would come up for the mummified body that had exploded all over his XA’s ofice; and I didn’t have to tell him that I knew his birth mother had called him “Giselle.”

Nor did I tell him that Hammurabi and Sophie were his grandchildren. That was their secret to keep.

Regardless of what her tattoo said.

*

When I got home, there was a package waiting. Inside was a tiny hypercube key and a Instaprint of a woman’s body. A close-up of her naked torso, draped with octopi tentacles. Scrawled on her belly, above her tattoo, was the phrase “I miss you.”

The hypercube key was coded for domicile access. She had given me root privileges.

It was, in the end, all I really wanted.