Eternal Life Inc. (20 page)

Harry said nothing but Doc could feel the tension ease. “Thanks, Doc,” he whispered hoarsely, his eyes never left Roger’s face. He imagined he could see violet shadows moving beneath the florid surface like roiling clouds running before the wind. He was afraid that at any moment a black snout might push out from that pug nose and if it did, not even Doc would be able to stop him from tearing Roger apart.

“I think you should go now, Mr. Neuman,” Diana’s voice cool, precise, and preemptory broke the spell. Harry blinked and
shook his head as if trying to shake off a bad dream. He straightened up and looked at Diana. “I’m truly sorry,” he said. “I’ll explain. I promise.”

“I sincerely hope so,” Diana said with icy skepticism.

“Doc, I…”

“You should go now, Harry,” Doc said. “Come here when you get back. Chueh will know where to find me.”

Harry looked at Diana and tried on a reassuring smile for size. “I’ll try to make it back tomorrow,” he said but the smile fit badly, and she gave him a fractional nod of dismissal.

Harry sighed and pushed past the table. Roger stepped back to let him pass. Harry stopped for a moment. “I wish I was wrong,” he said and strode out the door.

32

Our Lady of the Road

“Well, you sure handled that with all the delicacy of a root canal, Harry thought as the door slid shut behind him. He stood in the empty corridor, undecided what to do next. He should go back down to Chueh like he’d promised, but at the moment, all he really wanted was to get away, cool off, and clear his head.

“Screw it!” he decided and instead of going down the corridor to the bar, he turned in the opposite direction. Chueh had a back door for clients who wished to avoid prying eyes down in the bar. Harry followed the corridor back to where it ended in a squat, iron-banded oak door like something out of a medieval castle. It was another of Chueh’s conceits, totally out of place amidst the delicate rice paper walls and plush carpeting. Harry always thought of the doors in Alice in Wonderland when he used it and figured that was probably what Chueh had in mind…or maybe not. With Chueh you never knew.

Harry lifted the simple iron latch. There was that momentary resistance as hidden processors read his mind-body matrix and then the door opened and he stepped out onto the top landing of a narrow flight of stairs. Unlike the corridor he had just left, the stairs were simple, unadorned oak, the walls whitewashed plaster. At the foot of the stairs was a wall of frozen fog.

As he stepped through it, he felt the same touch of icy cold and disorientation he always felt. Then, he stepped out into a short corridor with a black and white chess board pattern of marble tiles on the floor and polished oak wainscoting on the walls. Businesslike and discrete, he thought, as he turned the corner at the end of the corridor and came to a heavy brass door inlaid with a pane of pebbled diamond glass. He pushed down on the ornate brass door handle. Once again, there was that
momentary resistance, then the door opened with a reluctant click, and he strode out onto a busy city street miles across town from where he had entered Chueh’s garden.

He looked around, half expecting to find some sign of Norma-genes but there were none. He activated his wrist phone and called up his grav-car. “Marta, can you pick me up, please,” he said.

“It’s the least I can do,” Marta said in her husky, Janis Joplin voice. “Hearing from you always picks me up, Harry,” and she signed off bubbling with laughter. Harry couldn’t help smiling. At least there was one bright spot in his life.

He set the transponder for the car to home in on and strolled down the street. It was early evening. He glanced back at his watch in surprise. It was almost six-thirty. He’d been in Chueh’s for almost three hours. Time flies when you’re enjoying yourself, he thought with a sardonic twist of a smile.

Chueh’s door opened on a totally different section of town from the sedate, upscale boutiques and fashionable restaurants that bordered the entrance to his garden. The pace here was fast, frenetic, and full of flashing neon. This was the entertainment district where gambling casinos, brothels, night clubs, and private pleasure gardens rubbed shoulders with each other and made fistfuls of money. The District, as it was called, was famous all over the Empire, and the streets were crowded with gawking wide-eyed tourists, strutting, peacock-proud prostitutes, grinning high-rollers, street-wise street vendors, and sweating businessmen in wrinkled suits looking for a good time before going home to the wife and kids.

Harry loved it. He’d misspent a great deal of his misspent youth here, sucking up the glitz and glitter, the energy, the jostling crowds, and the gritty, vulgar flash. Now, older and wiser, he sauntered thoughtfully down the street with his head full of unanswered questions. The most intriguing one was what he was going to do about Diana Lloyd. It had been a long time
since any woman had affected him like this. Not since…And that led to Susan. What was he going to do about Susan? There was something not right there. And meeting in old LA? And who was Jack Lloyd really? He was certainly a lot more than the classical scholar and philosopher Harry thought he knew.

While he was wondering about that, he remembered Lloyd had written a book on Anubis, the shape-shifting, jackal-headed god of the Egyptians who seemed to have a lot in common with Rielly’s Anubis wolves. As far as Harry knew, the book was the last thing Jake Lloyd wrote, and it wasn’t really a book but rather a short monograph called “The Anubis Gate”. He was going to have to take another look at it when he got home.

Behind him he heard Janis Joplin sing the first few bars of her classic hit, “Mercedes Benz.” It was from the original, limited edition Janis Joplin collection, “A Box of Pearls” that had somehow survived underground in a pre-Crash military bunker somewhere in the Montana Quarantine. The trader who recently brought it back became an overnight multi-millionaire, and Marta immediately became Janis Joplin’s greatest fan.

A grin of unreserved pleasure spread across Harry’s face as the low, sleek sports convertible bobbed gently to a stop beside him with Janis announcing Marta’s arrival. Her chameleon finish was a soft cream color this evening. It reminded him in some subtle, understated way of a silver fox fur coat. Marta was growing up.

As he walked over, a paparazzi grav-corder, that had hitched a ride on the car, shot into the air and began peppering him with questions, buzzing down and zooming in for close-ups.

Harry groaned. He must have forgotten to set the privacy pulse locks that would have discouraged such unwanted hitchhikers. “This is an unwanted and illegal invasion of privacy,” he stated for the record and then ordered the car to activate its electromagnetic pulse shield. A moment later the paparazzi grav-corder dropped out of the air with its processors fried and
its speaker hissing and sputtering unintelligibly.

Harry kicked it aside and jumped into the car.

“Where to, Harry?” Marta asked in her hoarse, Janis Joplin whisper.

“I’ll drive myself if you don’t mind Marta,” Harry said and took the wheel.

“I always enjoy when you drive…” she paused. “It drives me cra-z-zy,” she added with a seductive, whiskey-tinged laugh.

Harry grinned. Marta’s artificial intelligence never ceased to amaze him. She had recently discovered word-play humor and used it whenever and wherever she could.

He felt the wheel click over to manual and stepped on the lift feed to the forward grav-units. He climbed into the traffic pattern, gave Marta the coordinates he’d gotten from Susan, and headed west out of the city. He wanted to get to the rendezvous early enough to look it over and maybe stake it out if for no other reason than to quiet that nagging little voice of suspicion he kept hearing.

He thought of what had happened at Chueh’s and concluded that he’d acted like a hotheaded moron. He should have stayed and heard Doc out or maybe just taken him aside for a few minutes and explained things. When it came to Susan though, Harry knew he had trouble thinking straight. He always got caught in a tangled web of guilt, love, hate, and betrayal.

Seeing her battered face had torn open old wounds that he had fooled himself into thinking were healed. He’d felt a flood of tenderness, mixed with a deep-seated sense of guilt, as if he was somehow responsible for her ending like this and that it was up to him to protect her and somehow make things right again.

He knew that was crazy. After all his preaching to Diana about the futility of beating yourself up with guilt and making yourself responsible for other people’s mistakes, he’d blown it as soon as he saw Roger.

“Harry?” Marta said. “Am I disturbing you?”

“No, not at all,” Harry said, relieved to have a chance to shelve these thoughts for a while. “What is it?”

“I’m sorry about that paparazzi hitchhiker,” Marta said.

“It’s okay. Don’t worry about it. It’s not your fault,” Harry said. “I just forgot to set the pulse locks.”

“No, you didn’t,” Marta said and there was an edge of concern in her voice. “I’m absolutely sure you set them but when I scan my memory banks, I can’t find any record of you doing it.”

“A system failure?” Harry suggested.

“That’s the first thing I checked,” Marta said with a hint of reproach as if to say, do you take me for a total incompetent.

“Sorry, of course you did,” he said and wondered, not for the first time, about the extent of Marta’s emotional life. He’d thought of asking her a few times but didn’t quite know how to go about it without possibly hurting her feelings. Now that was a catch twenty-two if ever there was one, he thought.

“There’s a possibility I’ve been hacked,” Marta said, and Harry thought he detected a touch of fear in her voice.

“What makes you say that?”

“Scatological thinking, a process of elimination,” she giggled at her own wordplay. “I checked every possibility. Hacking was all that was left.”

“But wouldn’t you know if you’d been hacked?”

“That’s what’s so scary,” Marta said. “If they were clever enough, I wouldn’t. Imagine if someone could go into your mind and change a memory, for example that you drank a cup of tea this morning instead of coffee. If they were clever enough, you’d never know. In my case they weren’t. They left a residue of certainty behind even though they wiped the memory, and that’s almost worse.”

“What do you mean?” Harry asked and thought of what Diana had told him about the Norma-genes ability to hack a super-quantum computer.

“Don’t you see Harry, if I can’t be sure what memories are
mine or not, I can’t even be sure who I am…” Her voice quavered with fear and, for a moment, the soft cream color on the hood of the car took on a rippling rainbow effect like gasoline on water.

Harry knew from experience that this was a sure sign of agitation but had never seen it so pronounced before. He’d had the car for over a year and bonded easily with the basic AI personality matrix. He had watched with almost paternal pride as it branched and developed under his guidance. Marta was curious about everything, and Harry had tried to guide her through the information morass on the data-sphere. She had a natural (?) pre-programmed optimism and enthusiasm that was infectious, and Harry had developed a deep fatherly affection for her.

It was something the manufacturers warned against and even provided slaver software to, as they phrased it, “…keep that professional distance so that the master-servant role remained intact”. Harry decided early on he didn’t need or want a slave. He wanted someone intelligent and self-sufficient enough to make her own decisions, someone competent enough to take over in an emergency, someone he could trust with his life.

With Marta he got much more than he ever bargained for. She was like a wonderful child full of joyful optimism, insatiable curiosity, and naïve innocence, all coupled with a razor sharp intellect. She was one of the things that helped pull him back to the land of the living after Susan remarried.

“Do you remember when I got you?” Harry asked.

“Of course.”

“Remember one of the first things I did was introduce you to Mister Chueh?”

“I like him. He knows how to talk to a girl. He always treats me like a lady when we talk on the data-sphere.” She paused. “He calls me his foxy lady and says I’m hell on wheels.” She gave a hoarse purr of contentment at the memory.

“He also has a lot of connections that allowed me to have you
customized so far beyond the legal limit that if the authorities ever found out, you’d end up in the crusher and I’d end up in the slammer. You’re probably one of the fastest, most intelligent, best armed independent grav-cars in the world. I had your carbon fiber body strip-layered with light spider-spin armor that cost a small fortune but, most important, I had you optimized and buffered with the best security programs in the world, fire-walls, encrypted program defense, viral traps, all top of the line military upgrades and beyond. Nothing should be able to get through.”

“Something did. I’m sure of it,” she said.

Once again, he thought of what Jericho and Diana had told him about Rielly Laughing Wolf and the Norma-gene ability to subvert super-quantum systems. He debated whether he should tell Marta. In the end, he decided this was something he couldn’t protect her against. She had a right to know.

After he told her, there was a long silence. Finally Marta said. “Ghosts in the machine, yes, that’s a good description. I could almost read consciousness in that vapor trail he left behind…as if he was mocking me with it…teasing me. Why would he do that, Harry?

“I don’t know,” Harry said uncomfortably, although he was beginning to suspect.

“Harry, I’m afraid,” Marta said. “I can’t be sure who I am anymore. I can’t be sure I won’t do something terrible. Maybe go crazy. Can an AI go crazy, Harry?”

“Wow steady,” Harry said. She really was in danger of losing it, he thought. She never referred to herself as an “AI”. She hated the term. He noticed how the poisonous gasoline rainbow spread across her hood like a darkening bruise.

“Look, forget about maybe doing something terrible. Your basic moral structures are governed by the Robotic Laws. They’re hardwired into your system and make it impossible for you to do anything terrible, and there’s no way anyone can
change that without physically dismantling you.

“If what Doc says is true, it sounds like this guy is sending a message, trying to play with my head. He thinks I’m something I’m sure I’m not, and he’s telling me he can get to me anytime, anywhere, maybe even through you. This is just the effect he wanted to have.”

“What do you mean?” The whiskey rasp of her voice was thin and fragile, tinged with a childlike vulnerability that he hadn’t heard in a long time. She was usually so competent and self-assured that he forgot how young she was.

“Think about it. He selectively wiped your memory and sensory banks but purposely left you with the certainty that something had been done. He knew he left that vapor trail ghost and knew you would find it only if you suspected someone hacked your systems. He purposely pointed you towards it, purposely left a big, fat footprint to scare you and to let me know he’d been there and what he could do.”

“If he could do all that, then he could have done more that we don’t know about,” Marta said and Harry realized his explanation was having the opposite effect than he intended.