"Kiln People" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brin David)

15 Copycats

Fortunately, my greenie expense allowance was still active — Albert hadn’t disowned me yet — so I was able to hire a micro-cab from Odeon Square, weaving across Realtown on a single gyro-wheel with two cramped seats. Swift it may have been, but the trip was also excruciating as the driver kept going on and on about the war.

Apparently, the battle in the desert had begun going sour for our side. The cabbie blamed this on bad leadership, illustrating his point by calling up recent action highlights in a viewbubble that enveloped me, trapped on the rear saddle, amid scenes of violent carnage by bomb and shell, by cutter beam and hand-to-hand dismemberment, all lovingly collated by this avid aficionado.

Albert had learned plenty from Clara over the years, enough to know this armchair general’s opinions weren’t worth spit. The guy had a taxi franchise with eleven yellow and black — checkered duplicates driving hacks, presumably all yapping at cornered customers. How did he keep a high enough satisfaction index to merit so many cabs?

Speed was the answer. I had to give him that. Arrival offered me the day’s greatest surge of pleasure. I paid the cabbie and escaped into the cement maze of Fairfax Park.

Big Al doesn’t like the place. No greenery. Too much space was given over to concrete ramps, spirals, and jutting slabs, back when real kids might spend every spare moment of lifespan careening on stunt bikes, skateboards, and flare skooters, risking broken necks for sheer excitement. That is, till new pastimes lured them away, leaving behind a maze of metal-reinforced walls and towers like forsaken battlements, some of them three stories high, too costly to demolish.

Pallie loves the place. All that buried rebar acts like a partial Faraday Cage, blocking radio transmissions, thwarting spy-gnats and eavesbugs, while the hot concrete surface blinds visual and IR sensors. Nor is he above bouts of nostalgia, shooting the old slopes in his latest, souped-up wheelchair, popping rims and sliders, hollering and teetering while catheters and IV tubes whip around him like war pennants. Some kicks have to be experienced in flesh, I guess. Even flesh as harshly wounded as his.

Albert kind of puts up with Pal — partly out of guilt. Feels he might have tried harder to dissuade the guy from going out that night when ambushers jumped him, roasting half his body and leaving the rest for dead. But honestly, how do you “dissuade” a thrill-addict mercenary who’d stroll into a blatant trap, just asking to get his balls shot off? Hell, I’m more cautious in clay than Pal is in person.

I found him waiting under the shadow of “Mom’s Fright,” the biggest skooter ramp — with a swoop chute so sheer it makes you sick just looking at it. He had company. Two men. Real men, who eyed each other warily, separated by Pal’s biotronic wheelchair.

It felt awk being the sole ditto, and the feeling got worse when one of them — a brawny blond — gave me the look, staring through me like I wasn’t there.

The other one smiled, friendly. Tall and a bit skinny, he struck me as somehow familiar.

“Hey, green, where’s your soul?” Pal jibed, raising a burly fist.

I punched it. “Same place as your feet. Still, we both get around.”

“We do. How’d you like that message wasp I sent? Cool, eh?”

“Kind of cyber-retro, don’t you think? Lot of effort for a simple come-hither. Hurt like hell when it pierced my eye.”

“Omelettes,” he said, apologizing backhandedly. “So, I hear you cut yourself loose!”

“Shrug. How much good to Albert is an Albert who’s not Al?”

“Cute. I didn’t figure Sober Morris could make a frankie. Anyway, some of my best friends are mutants, real and otherwise.”

“Sign of a true pervert. Do you know if Al’s planning to disown me?”

“Nah. Too soft. He did post a credit limit, though. You can charge two hundred, no more.”

“That much? I didn’t clean a single toilet. Is he angry?”

“Can’t tell. He cut me off. Got other probs. Seems he lost both of this morning’s grays.”

“Ouch. I heard about the first, but … damn. Number two had the Turkomen. That was a good scooter.” I pondered this a second. No wonder my AWOL raised so little dust. “Two grays gone. Huh. Coincidence? Happenstance?”

Pallie scratched a scar, running from his shaggy black hair to a stubbled chin.

“Thinking no. Reason I sent the wasp.”

The big blond grunted. “Will you cut this useless chatter? Just ask the vile thing if it remembers us.”

Vile thing? I tried to meet the fellow’s eye. He refused contact.

Pal chuckled. “This is Mr. James Gadarene. He thinks you might recognize him. Do?”

I looked the man up and down. “No recollection … sir.” Adding some formality might be a good idea.

Both strangers grunted, as if half-expecting this. I hurried on.

“Of course that’s no guarantee. Albert himself forgets faces. Even some guys he knew in college. Depends how long ago we met. Anyway, I’m a frank—”

“This memory would be less than twenty hours old,” Gadarene interrupted without actually looking at me. “Late last night, one of your grays rang my doorbell, flashed some private eye credentials and demanded an urgent meeting. The ruckus even woke some of my colleagues in our compound next door. I agreed — reluctantly — to meet the gray, alone. But in private the damned thing only paced around, blathering nonsense that I couldn’t even begin to comprehend. Finally, my assistant came in from the next room with news. The gray wore a static generator. It was deliberately jamming my interview recorder!”

“So you have no chronicle of the meeting?”

“Nothing useful. That’s when I got fed up and tossed the cursed thing out.”

“I … don’t recall anything remotely like that. Which means the real Albert Morris doesn’t either. Or he didn’t, as of ten this morn. Before that, all of our dittos have been accounted for, stretching back at least a month. Every one brought home a complete inload … though some were pretty banged up.” I winced, recalling last night’s awful trek under the river. “Heck, I don’t even know what ‘offices’ you’re talking about.”

“Mr. Gadarene heads an organization called Defenders of Life,” Pallie explained.

At once I grasped the fellow’s hostility. His group fiercely opposes dittotech on purely moral grounds — a stance requiring great tenacity nowadays, when realfolks live surrounded and outnumbered by countless creatures of servile clay. If one of Albert’s copies had behaved in the manner just described, it would be an act of towering rudeness and deliberate provocation.

From Gadarene’s bitter expression, I guessed a special ire toward me. As a frankie I had declared independence, professing to be a free, self-motivated life form … though a pseudobeing with few rights and fewer prospects. At least other dittos could be viewed as extensions or appendages of some real person. But I’d seem the worst kind of insult toward heavenly authority. A soul-less construct who dares to say I am.

At a best guess, I’d wager his people never donate to the Temple of the Ephemerals.

“Same thing happened to us, early this morning,” the other fellow said — the tall man who looked vaguely familiar.

“I think I do recognize you,” I mused. “Yes … the greenie I ran into, picketing at Moonlight Beach. Its face copied yours.”

From his wry smile, I could tell the man already knew about my encounter with his cheap demonstrator-ditto. The green may have already inloaded. Or perhaps it phoned home to report my resemblance to their wee-hours visitor.

“Mr. Farshid Lum,” said Pal, finishing introductions.

“Friends of the Unreal?” I guessed. The biggest organization of mancies I’d heard of.

“Tolerance Unlimited,” he corrected with a frown. “The FOTU manifesto doesn’t go far enough in demanding emancipation for synthetic beings. We think short-lived people are just as real as anyone else who thinks and feels.”

That drew a snort from the blond. And yet, despite a philosophical chasm that gaped between them, I sensed common purpose. For now.

“You say a Morris copy also barged into your place—”

“—ranted for a while and then left, yeah,” Pallie inserted. “Only this time we got some clear images through the static. It was one of your brodits, or sure looked like one.”

He handed me a flat pix. Though blurry, it resembled Albert, as close as any gray takes after its rig.

“Appearances can be faked. So can credentials. The static indicates that someone didn’t want too close an inspection—”

“I agree,” interrupted Gadarene. “Moreover, when we phoned Mr. Morris this morning for an explanation, his house computer—”

“—Nell—”

“—dismissed the whole event as impossible, since you didn’t have any duplicates active at the time we were being harassed. The house refused even to wake Albert Morris for comment.”

“Curious,” I comment.

“In fact, your rig has both of our groups listed as crank organizations,” said Lum, with a wry expression, as if he wore the moniker with pride. “Since the house filtered and refused my queries, I went to the public Albert Morris net profile, looking for one of his friends. Someone who would talk to us.”

“Me,” Pal said. “I’m not bothered by cranks. I like ’em!”

“Likes attract,” I muttered, winning brief but angry eye contact from Gadarene.

“Yeah, well, my cup ranneth over when I got two queries, from groups that normally despise each other. Smelling a rat, I tried calling Al, but he brushed me off. Too busy for an old Pal, today. So I went snooping for someone else who might shed light on the matter … and found you.”

“Me? I already said, these stories don’t fit anything I remember.”

“And I believe you. But do you have any ideas? What comes to mind?”

“Why ask me? I’m just a green, not exactly equipped for analytical thought.”

“Oh, but you won’t let that stop you!” Pallie laughed.

I frowned at him, knowing he was right. I couldn’t refuse to poke away at this, even if I’m made of the cheap stuff.

I turned to Gadarene and Lum.

“Looking at it from your point of view, several possibilities arise.”

I held up one finger. “First, I might be standing here lying. Al could have some valid reason for wanting to poke two irate public advocacy groups in the eye, stir them up, then claim it wasn’t him that done it.”

“Please,” Pallie shook his head. “It’s the sort of thing I might try. But Albert’s about as much fun as a judge.”

For some reason, the insult made me smile. Yeah, poor Sober Albert.

“Well, then, maybe someone’s trying to set him up.”

Once upon a time, crime and prosecution revolved around establishing or demolishing alibis. If you could prove that you were somewhere else at the time of a crime, it meant you didn’t do it. Simple as that.

The alibi excuse started vanishing back in the cyber age, a time when countless big and little heists redistributed cash by the billions while perpetrators hunched over remote computer screens slurping caffeine, dispatching electronic minions to rob in supposed anonymity. For a while, it looked as if society would bleed a death of a myriad cuts … till accountability was restored and most of the surviving cyberfarts either went to jail or grew up.

Today, the whereabouts of your protoplasmic self hardly matters. Culpability is a matter of opportunity and will. Effective alibis are hard to come by.

“Interesting you should come up with that idea,” Pallie commented. “The same thing occurred to me as I watched this morning’s raid on Beta’s hideout — that was good work, by the way. I saw Albert meet Ritu Maharal … and later heard about her father’s death. But what really got me going is the maestra.”

“Gineen Wammaker? What about her?”

“Well, for one thing, I know that Al’s second gray dropped out to do a closed-cognito job for her.”

I hesitated. It wouldn’t be kosher for me to confirm that such a contract existed. I owed Albert some loyalty, since he hadn’t made me an outlaw. The sap.

“All right, both women asked Al to send a gray over. And both grays vanished. So? It’s probably a coincidence. Anyway, those grays were baked and imprinted hours after mystery dittos barged in to bother you two gentlemen. What’s the connection?”

“That puzzled me, too. So I called Wammaker.”

“How I envy you. And what did the Ice Princess say?”

“That she never asked for a Morris-ditto! At least, not since the Beta job was finished. In fact, she told me that Detective Morris is far too rude to be a suitable retainer in future, and furthermore that—”

“Can we get on with this?”

James Gadarene evidently didn’t like discussing the maestra of Studio Neo, whose perverse specialties went out of their way to tweak oldtime morality. The blond shifted his bulk irritably, and a bit ominously. He struck me as the sort who sometimes dismembers dittos — willingly paying fines — for the sheer pleasure of punishing evil with his bare hands.

“All right,” Pal continued cheerfully. “So I figured I’d find out what I could about your second gray. See if Wammaker’s lying. It meant accessing the camera-web and doing some path tracing.”

“You?” I chuckled at the idea of Pallie carefully assigning search-avatars and sifting a gazillion intermeshed images. “You never had the patience.”

He shook his head ruefully.

“Naw, I’m just an old-fashioned action figure. Still, I know a few graying digital mavens who owe me favors. All they had to do was track a series of sub-myob traffic infractions when the gray drove from your house to the mall. Once inside, the ditto was in view by publicams, much of the time. It parked its scooter and took the escalator … but never actually reached Wammaker’s.”

“No?”

“Instead, it got waylaid by the maestra’s assistant — at least that’s who it looked like, barely visible under a skulkhood. Together they went two floors down to a rented storefront … and disappeared.”

“So? Maybe Gineen wanted to meet some distance from her regular clients. Especially if the matter’s sensitive.”

“Could be. Or … what if someone else wants to use Albert’s gray, while making everyone think Gineen hired it?”

I tried to wrap my head around the idea.

“You mean someone faked Gineen’s initial call to Albert this morning, then arranged it so lots of cams would see the gray approach Wammaker’s … But then” — I shook my head — “it’d take lots of skilled fakery. A false Gineen to make the call. Then a fake assistant.”

“And fake Alberts, sent earlier to bother these good citizens.” Pallie nodded toward both Gadarene and Lum.

The bigger man groaned. “None of this made any sense when you explained it to me an hour ago, and it sure hasn’t gotten any better. Some of us have just one life, you know. You’d better put all this together soon.”

“I’ve been trying,” Pal answered, a bit miffed. “Actually, this kind of deductive stuff is more Albert’s kind of thing. What d’you think, Greenie?”

I scratched my head. Purely out of habit, since there are no follicles or parasites on my porcelain pate.

“All right. Let’s say all these charades were meant for different audiences. Take those dittos who invaded your premises last night … they didn’t talk about anything significant, you say?”

“Just blather, as far as I could tell.”

“But they took pains to keep the blather from being recorded. So you can’t prove it was nonsense, can you?”

“What d’you mean? What else could it have been?”

“It might look as if you were conspiring together.”

“Con … conspiring?”

“Look at it from an outsider’s point of view, Mr. Gadarene. They see a gray enter your establishment, then leave — hastily and furtively — an hour or so later. One might conclude that you discussed matters of substance. This could all have been arranged in order to establish a plausible link between your group and Albert Morris.”

“Then the same thing happens at my place,” said Lum.

“And at Studio Neo. Only this time the gray is real but the visit is faked,” Pal prompted. “Was that also for public consumption?”

“Partly,” I nodded. “But I’ll bet chief audience for that bit of theater was the gray itself. Recall that it went on detached mode right after the meeting, yes? It must be convinced, even now, that it’s working for the real maestra. She’s not the most likable person—”

Gadarene snorted loudly.

“—but she’s a businesswoman of substance, with high credibility at fulfilling contracts and staying in the letter of the law. The gray might despise and distrust her. But he’d take an interesting case for a good fee.”

“Let me get this straight,” offered Farshid Lum. “You think someone pretended to be Wammaker in order to sign your gray up for a task—”

“A task that might be a cover for something Al would never agree to,” Pal suggested.

“—and that bit of theater earlier, at Tolerance Unlimited—”

“—and the Defenders,” Gadarene cut in, “was designed to make it seem we are involved in whatever diabolical …” He groaned. “I’m still confused. We’re not getting any closer!”

“Oh yes we are.” Pal looked at me. “You have an idea, don’t you, my green friend?”

Unfortunately, I did.

“Look, I’m not designed for this. I’m not a brainy ebony or a high-class gray. Anything I offer will just be conjecture.”

Lum waved away my demurral. “I’ve looked up your profile, Mr. Morris. Your reputation for creating fine analytic selves can’t be matched. Please, continue.”

I might have complained right then that I’m not one of Albert’s “selves.” But it would be moot.

“Look, we still don’t have much data,” I began. “But if this chain of wild deductions can stand, I’ll guess a few things.

“One: the person or group behind it all has sophisticated dittoing abilities, especially the art of giving a golem a face it’s not supposed to have. Since that’s illegal, we’re already in dangerous territory.

“Two: there’s apparently some need to enlist willing participation by one of Albert’s grays. Appearances won’t do. The gray must be convinced to give genuine effort — providing some skill that Al’s known to be good at. The mission has to appear legal … or at least worthwhile and not too heinous … for the gray to cooperate.”

“Yes, go on,” Pal prompted.

“Three: there’s a multipronged effort to assign blame for whatever’s going to happen. Guilt-by-association. Fake calls from the maestra. An apparent meeting at Studio Neo …”

“And us,” Lum commented, abruptly serious. “The charade of waking me at night was meant to look like a sneaky conference of conspirators. But why me? And why pull the same stunt on Mr. Gadarene’s group of misguided spirits?”

Pal chuckled loud enough to drown out the blond’s growl. “But that’s the beauty of it! On the surface, it seems your two groups could never get together. You seem at opposite poles. Ironically, that makes a conspiracy seem almost workable.”

When they stared at him, Pal spread his burly hands wide, making the wheelchair roll.

“Think! Is there somebody you both hate? Some person, group, or organization that both groups despise. So deeply, you might plausibly join forces?”

I watched both men struggle with the concept. Accustomed to demonizing each other, they clearly found it hard to conceive that they shared any common interest.

I knew the answer already, and felt chilled down to my clay substrate. But I didn’t prompt them.

They’d get it in a minute or two.