Reality 36 (7 page)

  Otto slammed a grenade hard onto the tank's legs, small traps breaking on the outside to reveal geckro plates, then another. The tank's governing intelligence belatedly worked out what was going on, and vainly tried to shake off the explosives. Four out of six legs thus adorned, Otto and Buchwald scrambled away. The grenades emitted a series of rapid beeps. The tank stopped moving, legs at full extension, torso rotating frantically as it tried to see underneath itself. As a last resort the tank electrified its hull to try and short out the grenades, detonating them prematurely. Shards of leg scythed through the air, hitting both Otto and Buchwald. Their armour and internal reinforcement took the damage, absorbing shrapnel, blunting a shockwave that would have turned the insides of an unenhanced man to jelly, though they took precious little of the pain.

  The two cyborgs found themselves behind the ruin of a car. Buchwald sighted over the bonnet, snapping off fire.

  The bodies of rebels littered the forest floor. The battlefield stank of propellant, shit, blood, smoke and sweat.

  The crawltank lolled ineffectually, turret face-down in the dirt, twisting back and forth as it tried to right itself, remaining two legs crippled. Enemy fire was becoming sporadic. Kaplinski was doing his work well, the insistent hiss of his flamethrower drawing nearer. The need for Lehmann's cannon became less pressing. Otto counted nine surviving rebels, then eight, then seven. The moans of the dying and the sputter of the fires in the dead wood were winning out over the report of weapons.

  "Why aren't they running?" asked Buchwald, cracking off another burst. "They always run. Shit, that fucking tank got me. God damn, that hurts!" He winced. "Is it bad?"

  Otto glanced at Buchwald's leg. His armour was shattered, uniform charred away. The meat of his leg was seared, a slow well of blood rising with each pulse of his heart round a shard of blackened metal buried in his thigh. "You'll live. It won't matter in a few minutes if they run or not. I want to see what's in those trucks. Do you think you can make it?"

  Buchwald wiped his hand over his face. He was pale. Sweat beaded his skin like tiny blisters. His feed told Otto that Buchwald's healthtech was damaged, his pain dampeners failing. "Yeah, yeah, I can."

  They moved to the back of one of the trucks. The container on the trailer was faded green, spotted with rust and adorned with Arabic script worn to illegibility, doors locked with heavy chain. Close up, Otto could see signs that its corrugated walls had been crudely reinforced.

  He signalled with his hands, the terse gestures of battle: this is it. Cover me. Buchwald raised his rifle. Otto cut through the chains with one blow of his machete, unclasped the door lever, threw it up and out. The doors creaked wide.

  Within were a dozen terrified women and children.

  Otto never found out who they were; the families of the rebels, wives and children of the commanders, perhaps.

  That shouldn't have mattered.

  For all the atrocities the rebels had perpetrated, they were still women and children. They could have been Hitler's own harem and a gaggle of bastards, they were still women and children.

  He'd wonder what they were doing there for the rest of his life.

  Kaplinski spoke over Otto's shoulder. "This is for Muller, you miserable fuckers."

  His flamethrower turned the trailer interior into an inferno. The people inside didn't have time to scream.

  The machete dropped from Otto's hand.

  Kaplinski laughed as they burned.

Otto screwed up his eyes, pressed upon them with his knuckles until spots swirled on the blackness. When he opened them the faces were gone.

  Nightmares, every night for months.

  Fragments of memory assailed him as his mentaug ended its sleep cycle. He took in a deep, shaking breath. The shitty tang of sleep-furred teeth competed with the lingering flavour of ash. He looked at the clock on the glass of his bedroom windows, because his internal chronometer was gaining time again. He squinted, fell back, rubbed his eyes. Past midday; he was late. Time to get up.

  He had to clear the memory of ash from his throat before he could speak. "Windows," he said, and sat up. The bank of black glass that filled two walls of his apartment bedroom cleared to reveal another grey New London day. The holo came on unbidden, rolling news flickering in the air, more diplomatic protests from the Chinese about USNA's Martian terraformation plans. They were playing the conservationist card again, and no one was buying it. Otto didn't listen. The dispute had been rumbling on for months.

  He reached for the glass by his bed. Whisky. He swilled it round his mouth; it was warm and stale. No matter, it washed away the flavour of night. It would have no other effect. A monumental amount of alcohol was required to get a cyborg drunk. That did not stop Otto from trying.

  Otto rubbed at the electoo circuitry on his head, raised lines running through close-cropped, greying hair. He traced them habitually, like lines of Braille. Like his dreams, they never told him anything new.

  He hadn't had the spider tank dream for a while, but he had plenty similar to keep him occupied.

  They'd said there'd be no spill over from the mental augmentation. They'd told him that when he'd been changed. They'd been wrong, or they were lying bastards. Otto inclined toward the latter opinion.

  He sat on the edge of the bed and waited as his mentaug quieted, running down from his nocturnal memory dump. The morning spill of recollections continued, some pleasant, others less so.

  The mentaug thought of Honour. Her face, her body, her scent flooded into his mind with perfect clarity. For a second it was as if she were there beside him. He gritted his teeth and tried not to look at the phantom. Mercifully, her face was washed away by others.

  Dead faces, all.

  Muller, dead in the jungle. Buchwald, dead from Bergstrom syndrome in the hospital. Otto had been to see him. He hadn't stayed long; the disease was so advanced Buchwald hadn't got a fucking clue who he was any more.

  He'd reminded Otto too much of Honour.

  So many. Some he'd killed, some he hadn't. Thanks to his altered mind he remembered every one.

  The worst part of it was, they seemed to remember him back.

  He moved to the centre of the room and sat on the carpet, shutting his eyes. He went through his breathing exercises until the magic lantern faded from his mind. Maybe next time it would take his sanity with it, like it had with Buchwald and Honour. Maybe not. He didn't want to think about it. Otto had always been a man of intense focus, and today he had things to do.

  He had his routine down to an hour and a half. First, diagnostics. He plugged himself into the Grid via the port at the back of his neck. Some machine somewhere checked his systems.

  There was a problem in his shoulder, the machine informed him, as it had informed him every morning of every day for the last eight weeks. His internal iron-lithium batteries were losing efficiency and needed replacing; a host of other minor cybernetic infirmities awaited him should he not receive maintenance soon. He felt older than his sixty-two years. Be a cyborg, live for ever. Yeah, right.

  Next, muscle building in his apartment's gym. If he did not aggressively work to keep his birth-given muscles in top condition they would wither, their functions usurped by his electroactive polymer implants, and he needed both sets or his skeletomuscular function would become unbalanced. He disengaged his artificial musculature and worked until his limbs burned and he was dripping with sweat. He sat for a moment while his phactory rebalanced his body chemistry, ensuring maximum muscle growth, another feature of his enhancement that could so easily be abused. Otto kept in mind the bloated, yellow faces of other cyborgs who'd overdone it. He refused to go down that road.

  Finally, five minutes' meditation, to blast the last residues of mentaug-called memory away.

  He showered, shaved, clipped his hair. He made a breakfast that could have fed four men, ate it, put on a crisp shirt and a petroleum-blue suit and tied a strip tie round his bull neck. His shoulder twinged as he dressed. He couldn't put off visiting that old son of a bitch Ekbaum any longer. He resolved to make an appointment. Later. He dosed himself with painkillers from his phactory, and waited for the pain in his shoulder to subside.

  He tidied his apartment's three rooms. This chore did not take long; Otto was fastidious. He examined his outfit in the mirror. Satisfied, he went to his wardrobe, opened the second door, flashed in the code via MT and picked out a couple of reliable guns from the armoury at the cabinet in the back: a short solid-shot carbine, and a machine pistol, good for inside work.

  He tried not to look at the memory cube standing on the velvet lining of the cabinet.

  Honour.

  Otto went out. After he'd shut the door the apartment cleaned itself and went to sleep, untroubled by dreams. Otto envied it.

Chapter 4

Albert

Richards leaned against the balcony, champagne glass in hand, and nodded at the people passing him by on their way to the bar. Their returning smiles were uneasy.

Look at that one
, said Genie, peering out of the eyes of the sheath from behind Richards' sensing presence.
He really doesn't like you. Look at him scowl!

Shut up, Genie, just… just stop that, get out of my face! I can't concentrate.

Ooh, well, sorr-ee, I don't get to come out much, in case you hadn't noticed. This is
interesting.

Are you surprised? All this jabbering! Keep yourself in the closenet
system, Launcey's here somewhere.

Hmph,
said Genie.

We are on a job. We concentrate when we are on jobs. It's hard
enough passing myself off as a man in this plastic knock-off without
you jabbering away in my head. It might look good, but the devil's in
the detail. So, please shut up. There's a good girl.

  The android sheath Richards wore presented the outward appearance of a good-looking, well-groomed man of means. It fidgeted for him, passing its glass back and forth, glancing about, shifting its weight – tics Richards could never remember to do for himself.

Don't shout at me,
said Genie.

Keep quiet and then perhaps you will learn something, OK?

OK,
said Genie.
Keep your lovely plastic hair on.

  Richards tipped his glass at a couple as they walked past, oblivious to his and Genie's internal conversation. The man frowned and hurried the woman along.

Smell,
Richards sagely told Genie,
the last ridge in the uncanny valley. No matter how sophisticated olfaction units become
it'll never be crossed. That's why they're scowling. I don't carry
their animal pong.

Riii-ight…
said Genie.
Isn't it because you look like a smug EuGene catalogue model? You should be on a beach gazing at a distant
ship with your jumper round your neck.

I
look
right more or less,
insisted Richards.
But I don't
smell
right. Humans leak proteins, they give out airborne chemical signals
and a cocktail of trace gasses. They expect to smell the same on me.
Sure, meat people'll talk to me and not be aware they're conversing
with a replicant, but they'll feel uncomfortable, like there's something… off. It's a real issue, no one, meat or numbers, have cracked
it. Artificially duplicating human scent always fails. It's cheap rose
perfume that only manages to smell of synthetic roses. It makes 'em
agitated. In the worst cases, it makes the men aggressive.

You should stop hitting on them then.

I'm trying to teach you something here!

And I'm trying to be quiet and concentrate on my scan, like you said
, said Genie petulantly.

This is important, for when you go out in the field on your own.

  "You'll let me out in the field? Really? On my own?" Richards' sheath squeaked. His hand shot up to his mouth as a trio of men turned to look at him. "Sorry, phone call," he said.

Genie! Hands off!

Sorry.

  Richards shot the rest of his lecture into Genie's memory, although without the mediation of her higher functions this was nowhere near as effective. Normally, Richards wore a sheath that was identifiably artificial, because it made his clients more at ease. The human mind is happier knowing what something is for certain; it becomes perturbed when presented with something that is not what it purports to be. The more subtle the signifiers of falsehood, the proportionally greater its perturbation. Richards' usual sheath might as well have "I am a robot" printed on its forehead, and everyone was the happier for it. Masahiro Mori had been bang on the money about that.

Yeah, thanks,
said Genie
. I knew all that anyway, we did it in school.

  Undercover he felt as ill at ease with his sophisticated shell as his fellow concert goers did. He tried not to show it. He didn't want to stand there cursing his own involuntary movements like a lunatic.

  The crowd swelled. Richards scanned their faces, running over muscle structure, skull form and blood-vessel patterning, fed in by the sheath's wide-band vision system, his cunningly wrought nose teasing DNA fragments out of the air. Genie, projected remotely from the office like him, did the same through the building's security net. Hiving off duplicate minds was a big AI no-no, but Richards couldn't trust the task to some idiot subroutine. Not with Launcey, not since Salzburg. Genie needed the practice, anyway.

  He found these repetitive tasks soothing, but stayed alert. The man he was looking for was wise to his ways, which was why Richards was there pretending to be made of meat in the first place.