Looking glass, p.15
Looking Glass, page 15
That really only leaves one choice and I take it. It's an unlisted number, but I know it by memory. I dial. The phone rings. And is picked up.
“Hello?”
“Hello … is this Brian?”
“Who is this?”
“This is Catherine Farro … I um … I called you night before last?”
There's a long silence. Please don't hang up. Please don't hang up.
“I told you people to contact me in writing through my lawyer, and I have nothing further to say on this case. Don't call here again, Dr. Farro.” I know that script. OmniMart's dicked him over and he's suing them. To him I'm just a minion of the nameless, faceless bureaucracy I serve. I squeeze my eyes shut, vowing not to start crying again. I need my head clear. It's not obliging.
“Brian, wait! Please!” I don't know why he waits. Maybe … maybe he hears something in my voice. Something like panic. Or maybe humanity.
“What?”
“I'm screwed, Brian. I was coming out here to talk to you … I'm trying to find out what really happened, but all they want to do is sweep the whole thing under the rug. These were my people, Brian. My responsibility and…” It comes out in a rush before I manage to shut it down. People are starting to stare. There's a long pause.
“What are you doing at the San Mateo courthouse?” His voice is incredulous. Mine is quivering, the words flowing in a rush again. Unprofessional, but I don't have any professionalism left. If Brian hangs up, any chance at finding out what's going on evaporates. I go to prison for twenty years, and Tika goes to her grave unavenged. “Someone's reported my identity as stolen, I think the company found out what I'm up to. Please help me, Brian, you're the only person I know in Caltech who I don't think is in on it. Please help me … please … I can't … I can't go to prison.” You knew you'd say those words eventually. Just like Mom did.
There's another, even longer pause. I know what he's thinking. If he's got any sense, he's thinking that this is a sucker play. He's thinking that OmniMart is playing mind games with him now, that I'm to be good cop to their bad cop. I don't blame him for thinking that one bit. If I'd been as proactive I wouldn't be where I am now. Never trust a corpie. Didn't I say that somewhere? I trusted Lance, and look where it got me. Corpies. Well, I am one. And he has no reason in the world to trust me.
“If I help you, will you help me find out what really happened to Tika? And will you testify in court about it?”
It's my turn to hesitate. Someone else is looking for a piece of my metaphorical ass, and it's still pretty tender from yesterday's screwing. If I testify against OmniMart in a lawsuit, I'll never work in the industry again. If I get caught investigating something they want covered up and make them liable, they might even have me killed. But I'm no better off in prison, and the only way I can prove they tampered with my identity — also a form of identity theft, nicely giving me grounds for a lawsuit of my own — is to get out of here, to get online. It's personal. It always was, but now OmniMart's on my payback list too. And payback is a bitch. “Yes.” So much for non-disclosure, hmm? So much for it. So be it.
“All right, I'll come get you.”
“Will you know me to see me?”
“Are you anything like your virtual self?”
“More or less. A little older. Less ultra-violet. More in a wheelchair.”
“Okay. Tik showed me a log. I think I'll recognize you. I'll be down there in about ten minutes. Don't wander off.” Does he think that's funny?
5:30 p.m. Sunday.
Brian is here. I'm wheeled out to meet him in my own chair. They hand me a provisional ID with just a case number and my picture on it. Legally I'm nobody now. Not a citizen. No qualifications for anything. A human organism. Beyond that nothing can be trusted about me. In some circles this is called being free. I don't live in any of those circles.
Brian's younger than I pictured — as young as Jay was, maybe younger. He barely looks legal. His hair is no more than a centimeter long anywhere on his head, dyed black with red tips and waxed into little spikes, giving him a punk porcupine look, which his black leather jacket festooned with spikes, leather pants, and honest-to-God paratrooper boots do nothing to change.
He's wearing Utanium wrap-around HUD shades, I notice. Shatterproof. 360 degree vision, radar sense. Physiological stress analysis. They're street fighter shades, designed to make you nearly impossible to sneak up on, give you that little edge when someone pulls a knife or a gun on you, to give you a hint, telegraph their motion a little. We see a lot of that in Canada, despite the ban on handguns. I'm surprised the shades are even legal here. Caltech likes to ban anything that could be used as a lethal weapon, except for military and police use. Been that way since the days of the old U.S. Even the corpies can only carry stun guns. Theoretically. Yeah, right. And people call the SCP conservative.
“Doc?”
“Brian?”
“Yeah.”
I breathe a sigh of relief. “Thanks for coming. And for bailing me out.” My words sound heartfelt, even to me. And they are. Brian's being here doesn't solve any of my problems, but it buys me some time. He doesn't react at all.
“Let's go.” Expressionless. Frosty. Like a real world version of my online self, I realize. They come like sacrifices in their trim, And to the fire-eyed maid of smoky war All hot and bleeding will we offer them… Eyah. Henry IV Part 1. I saw that play once. On Betamax video tape. It was recorded in 1981, four years before I was fucking born.
Brian doesn't offer to push. I go down the hard way — use the stairs and my forty years of experience. Balance on the rear wheels and just go, because I want it that way.
We sit in traffic a while, even on the surface streets, but it gives me time to recover my own cool. To get frosty. To clear my head. Neither of us has anything to say. I watch the city go by through the window. Strip malls are like islands in a sea of traffic. The sun is already hot on the roof of the car, even this early in the year. There is, I notice, no middle ground in the buildings. They are either brand new and sparkling clean, or they are faded, mildew-flecked, and slowly being engulfed by vines and overgrown landscaping. As though the climate is so fast moving and corrosive — or the buildings so poorly made — that the passage of only a few years requires their replacement. It's a city built of toilet paper. No past. No real future. Disposable. My name is Ozymandias… It makes Denver look positively antique.
Eventually he parks by a curb on a small street in a suburb. A row of small, practically identical older honest-to-God houses, surrounded by huge, mature trees. I stare a moment. This kind of standalone structure is slowly going extinct in modern cities. They take too much room. They're too inefficient. They reap no economies of scale. Above all, they're too damn expensive for the workers — like me — who live in a city to own one. “We're here. 508.” That's all he says. A little blue one story house. Brick facade, blue siding on the fascia. Low, flat roof. Somewhat overgrown, patchy lawn. It's obvious that the trees are fighting the grass for water. And winning.
It's a struggle getting out of the car. There are tree branches in the way. It's a struggle getting up the stairs to his porch, too. I have to go backwards, using the back wheels of my chair again. He holds the door for me. I stare at him, meeting his gaze through those dark shades. A slight smile quirks his lip at that and he hands me the door and goes in first. He seems to understand. Respect me when I earn it — not because of my chair or my pussy, or anything else I had no say in.
Chapter 19
7:30 p.m. Sunday.
We're sitting in the living room. The sunlight filters in through dirty windows, past a curtain made from a U.N. flag. That quality of light makes the room seem more yellow, the house more full of stuff, the air closer. Collectors live here, and the things in the house tend to run in families. Dolls, lovingly dressed in club wear, their glass eyes everywhere looking out into the living room, unseeing. Sculpture welded up from junked technology. Animation cels, some from series I even remember. Art is plastered to all the walls. There are toys. Board games. Video games. Half a dozen game consoles from the antique models of my own childhood through the present. A whole shelf of game ice from Epimetheus Games. My old company. They're displayed prominently, and some of them I even remember having a hand in. Too much of that, time to look at other things.
I look around at the board games — Operation. Trivial Pursuit. CandyLand. CandyLand? Hell, I've played that. It's one of the earliest things I can remember. I'm lying on my belly on the scratchy carpeting of mom's apartment and playing CandyLand with her. I'm too young not to think she is the best person in the world. Monopoly. I'm older. Same living room. The carpeting is more threadbare. The game is more cutthroat. “Money doesn't grow on trees, Catherine. It's serious business.” Mom says that, as I land on Park Place for the third time and her hotel bankrupts me. “That's how this world is. Get used to it. No pity. No mercy.”
* * *
These are not my things, I remind myself. They are someone else's memories. Someone gone.
There are home decks wired together, a Devuzhka and a Zhang. Newer than my OSDeck, faster. They're connected to a wireless switch, connecting them to the NFWN. Brian is sitting on a lumpy looking couch, toying with a battered looking pillow and afghan there, lost in his own memories, perhaps.
“So you're Dr. Catherine Anne Farro.” He says, enunciating with excruciating precision. Even my first name gets the three syllables to which it's technically entitled.
I look over at him and nod. “Yeah. Not what you were expecting, huh?”
“Not too far off, actually.” He shrugs a little. “I know the type.”
“I'm of a type now?” He nods. Small talk is awkward. We're both having that hippopotamus in the corner problem. The one thing, the only thing we have in common is… “Listen, I'm really sorry about what happened to Tika…”
“Really?” The face is neutral under those shades, the body language carefully guarded.
“Yeah. Why do you think I'm here?”
“I think you're chasing a ghost. To be honest.” He's watching me behind those shades. Taking my measure. Sizing me up.
I wonder what kind of impression I must be making. But I'm tired. I've had what you'd call a bad day. So now I don't actually give a shit about making a good impression. This is me, Brian, warts and all. “It's about paying my respects. By finding who killed her.”
He's still impassive. Maddeningly so. Barely moving at all, even to speak. “Then what?”
“Then they'll die.” No reaction. None. He could be playing video games in those glasses for all I know.
“Then what?”
I look at him. Until this afternoon, I'd assumed I was going back to Denver. To OmniMart. Probably quietly inject the results of my investigation where they'd do some good. Or back to get fired, go find another job. Either way, I'd expected to go back to something. To my life, such as it is. “Don't know. My plans have gotten changed out from under me.”
“Yeah. So why are you here?”
He's starting to annoy me, but I can feel my old skills clamping it down. A lifetime on the line, swallowing my emotions, keeping myself in check. Staying frosty. “I just told you.”
He stares at me a long time. Long enough that I'm sure he's looking at his HUD instead of me again. So be it. Finally he leans forward, raises a hand in a lazy gesture, pointing toward me. “So of all the people she knew, why are you the only one who's here now, digging at this?”
“Because I cared about her. That doesn't happen much to me.”
He shakes his head. “You never knew her.”
“I knew the parts she liked well enough for people to see. The parts she thought were worth sharing.”
“Yeah?” He stares at me again.
“Yeah.”
I meet the plastic covered gaze, staring back at him. He finally looks away, and a humorless chuckle escapes him. “I can see why she liked you, Doc. You're a hardass, and … Tik liked that. But there's something human about you. I didn't think so at first. I don't know what to think anymore. I was thinking this was all some kind of a corporate con, about the lawsuit I filed yesterday. But if they were going to throw an assassin my way…”
“It wouldn't be one in a wheelchair.”
“Probably not.”
“They can't just make you disappear. It makes your local authorities ask a lot of difficult questions. The corp is nailed down; they can't pick up and move the assets they've got here. Plus you have a lawsuit on file. Vanishing plaintiffs are the kind of things that make Interpol curious. The last thing any big corp wants is to have Interpol sifting through their records to find every little misdeed they've ever done. It's the kind of thing that gets executives killed.”
Brian looks down. “I'm not a lawyer. I'm just a hired-muscle kind of guy, you know? I get a phone call, I show up, they jack me in, I do what I'm told for a while.”
I look at him curiously. “You're a tech-ninja for hire then?” He laughs a little, the first almost living expression I've seen on his face.
“No no, I'm not like that. Guys in my biz call those guys jack whores. And it actually takes a lot of conditioning to be able to lie back and let someone else jack in and do the driving. I know guys like that. They tend to be really really psycho. Nah. What I do is more plug the receiver in, let them give me the walk through. I'm still driving, and I'm still responsible.”
I nod slowly. He looks at me a while, and it's my turn to look away, but there's no safe place to look in this room. He's quiet, then reaches into his pocket with a quick movement. A very quick movement. Very, very quick. I've seen this kind of thing before. It's from neuro-wiring. Take a jack's neurofibers. Connect them from the motor synapses of the brain to the neuromuscular junction synapses. Congratulations, now you can send stimuli to muscle nodes directly, and neurofibers conduct their signals at electronic speed instead of the rather pokey seventy meters per second of the average neuron's propagation speed. You get very, very fast reflexes. For a price, naturally.
I looked into it once, with the idea that it might bypass the sciatic nerve buds in my spine. That maybe it could fix me. It was the first time I'd ever been to a Pro Clinic. I've never been rich, so I had to save for over a year to get even the evaluation done. The doctor who gave me the results was young, sharp, professional, a little cold, but you want that in a Pro Shop doc. She was disappointed, she said, to tell me that while my nervous and histamine systems were more than tolerant of the implants, there was very little point in doing them. The leg muscles I can't already control, she explained, are so atrophied that being able to send them control signals wouldn't buy me much without years of physical therapy. Which both of us knew wasn't going to earn me the kind of money it would take to pay a mortgage on my implants. I went back to that clinic two years later to get my high-speed jack done after I got laid off from my first job.
I'm woolgathering while Brian is showing off his wired nerves. I don't worry about it, if he intends to shoot me there is bugger-all I can do about it now. He hands his PocketPDA 2020 to me after a moment, a picture displayed on its little, hi-res screen. “This is Tika. It's from last winter.”
I'm looking at the picture, like the long-lost friend that it is, drinking it in. Tik was shorter than online, fleshier. Spending twelve hours a day nearly sleeping in a tank of water doesn't give you a tone, trim body unless you eat practically nothing and Tik was no more immune than I am. She had a tummy, and the beginnings of an abdominal roll. Her hair was different too, which I'd expected. Online she'd had long, flowing locks of shiny, straight black hair. Her real hair was the same color, but much shorter, and in this picture tied up in braids, one on each side. But she's not so different. Older than online, probably early thirties. The face is the same, except that in the real world she wore glasses. I remember her mentioning that once. The eyes are the same. And the smile. And the white teeth, contrasting with her skin.
“Eternally tan.”
“Hmm?”
“Tika told me that once online. That her skin is … was…” I have to stop, I can feel my lip starting to quiver a little. I clamp it tight against my upper lip and force myself to breathe slowly and evenly. “May … I copy this?”
Brian watches me through his shades the whole while, as though studying. As though this was a test. “Sure. Copy the whole directory, they're all of her. Some of them are nudes. She ran around naked a lot. But I figure…” And then just a flicker from him, a swallow. He looks down a moment. No test then. This is someone he loved. A tiny flicker of humanity from him. As though his frostiness until now has been something of a lie, but one designed to protect him. “I figure she'd have wanted you to have them. She … wanted to get you out here this weekend. I guess…”
I look down at the pictures, flipping through them as dispassionately as I can. When he says that, I don't even look up. “She wanted to get us all in bed. Yeah. I know.” I wipe my eyes roughly. Because I've cried enough today. Because I have a job to do here. Because I have to stay frosty. Because I don't want his emotions on top of my own, there has to be distance between us. I have to give him back his own frost. Brian's head snaps up as though hit with a stun gun. He stares at me through the shades and takes a slow breath as well, letting it out. “Okay, Doc. Your call. What's our next move?”
Better. Professional. Problem solving; something I'm good at. “Find Kim Anderson.”
“What for?”
“You know any other survivors of the attacks?”
“Attacks?”
I look up at Brian a moment. “Yeah. The night shift got hit the night I called you. No survivors at all.” I look back toward the Visor.
“Jesus.”
“Unlikely.” My attention is still occupied with his Visor, shutting it down, unslotting its ice. It's little more than a frame and a display without it, fundamentally the same as a Quå-Chuôi GamePet, only its ice comes with office tools instead of tools for school and games. And ice is ice. As usual it's copy-protected with some lame hardware encryption. My icebreaker — another Gibsonism — makes short work of it, and I copy the whole thing. It's easier that way. The software won't run on Penguin ice, of course, but the data formats are standard.
