"Remember?" That's a new one on me.
"Oh. A memory fixative, that makes sense." He takes a final poke at the console. It dings and turns luminous green. "Where would dictators be without our compliant amnesia? Make the collective lose its memory, you can conceal anything. Who now remembers the Armenians?' " He takes a step back. "Listen, we'll have to break whatever conditioning she loaded your implant with."
My stomach churns for real this time. I feel sick. He's a monster, and he wants to drag me back down into the turmoil I was in before Hanta sorted me out. And I've been up the ladder now, I know there's no way out. We're stuck here. Resistance is futile. I really ought to run for it, call the Bishop and get the police to take him away. But that'd be like betraying myself, too, wouldn't it? "Did you kill Mick?" I whisper. "How did you get in that body?"
"Will you feel better if I say yes?" His voice is surprisingly gentle. "Or will you feel worse?"
"I'll" I take another gulp of air. "I want to know."
Fake-Fiore, Robin, blinks slowly, pudgy eyes closing: I tense but he opens them again before I can gather my wits to move. "It was after you killed Fiore," he says. "I got into the assembler and backed myself up, programmed in a body merge and neural splice, so I'd come out in Fiore's skin instead of like..." He nods at me. "I put a two-hour hold on it to give you time to get the mess sorted out, but you must have blanked in between. So I wake up inside the gate and find the basement has been partially cleaned, and you're missing, and I had to finish the job. Fiore's backed up in the gate, and I've got his biometrics, so I manage to get a dump of his implant, and when one of him showed up to check on you, I told him you'd just gone missing. He believed me. He's not very good at handling multiplicity.
"On Sunday morning I went to visit Cass in the hospital," he says quietly. "It turns out I wasn't her first visitor that morning. I haven't heard anything about it through the rumor net, but it was pretty bad: I think Hanta covered it up afterward but if you were wondering... I caught Mick. He'd been living in the basement of an empty house, stealing stuff from folks' kitchens while they were at workwe're a trusting bunch, have you noticed that? We leave our back doors unlocked. He'd gagged her and you saw the tissue scaffolds Hanta had her legs in. She couldn't do anything. I mean, she was trying to get away, but not getting very far. He was raping her again, Reeve, and you know what I think about third chances."
I nod, gulping for breath. The horror of it is that I can see everything in my mind's eye: me-in-Fiore's-flesh creeping up on Mick as he humps away, Cass thrashing around helplesslyMick's probably tied her arms out of the wayand me-in-Fiore's-flesh saps Mick at the base of the skull. He doesn't do it very carefully, because he's beyond fury at this point; beyond caring about inflicting subarachnoid hemorrhages. He doesn't care at all whether Mick wakes up again. In fact he thinks Mick's waking up would be a very bad idea, at least for Cass, and maybe come to think of it he can use Mick to send a message to any borderline sociopaths who are thinking about following his example
It's very me. Me as I used to be, not me as I was before (quiet, peaceful historian, devoted family man) or me as I am now (slightly squirrelly, evanescent with the joy of discovering what it's like to surrender after fighting for what seems like my entire life), but me as I was in the middle, the grim-faced killing machine. But then I meet his eyes, and I see an awful sadness in them, a sick sense of guilt that mirrors what I feel at the knowledge that I'm absolutely going to have to shop him to the Bishop because we can't afford to have a murderous doppelganger of one of our most respected citizens running around
I grab the first thing my fingers scrabble across: a heavy file of paper hardcopy, part of the dump of Curious Yellow from the closet upstairs. I take two brisk paces forward as I raise it and bring it down on top of his head as hard as I can. He sags and falls over, but I don't stick around to finish the job. Instead, I turn and run for the stairs. If I can make it to the top and slam the door, he'll be trapped down here for long enough to call
"Going somewhere?" drawls Janis, pointing a stungun at me from the top step. I can see her trigger finger whitening behind the guard.
I start to raise my hands. "Don't"
She does.
I groan and reach up to touch my head, which hurts like hell where Reeve thumped me. Someone grabs my wrist and tugs experimentally, and I open my eyes. It's Janis. She looks concerned. "What happened?" I ask.
"I caught her running up the stairs, in a real hurry to get somewhere." Janis peers at me. "What about you?"
I touch my head finally and wince at the sharp pain. "She thumped me with something, a box file I think. I fell over." Stupid, stupid. I feel a bit sick. Looking round brings a stab of pain to my neck. "Hit my head on the A-gate plinth."
"Then it was lucky I was in time."
"Huh. There's no such thing as luck where you're involved."
"That was in another life," she says pensively. "Are you going to be all right on your own? I need to close up shop."
"Get it closed, already." I wince and push myself upright, breathing heavily. This body has a lot of momentum, and a lot of insulation, but it's not built for bouncing around. "If anybody finds us"
"I'll sort them out."
Janis vanishes upstairs. I sit up and manage not to retch. Reeve almost ruined it for both of us, and I'm horrified at how close I came to blowing it. If I hadn't figured out who Janis was, I'd be on my own down here and Reeve would have killed me without blinking. Doctor's orders.
I'm going to have to do something about Reeve, and I'm not looking forward to this. Surely Hantalet's make that Colonel-Surgeon Vyshinski, to give her her real namegot to her, but losing a week isn't something that I take lightly, and besides, she knows stuff that might come in useful. Dilemmas, dilemmas. If there was some way to trivially reverse the brainwashing that Hanta's applied... shit . Hanta's an artist, isn't she? It'll be some sort of motivational/value abreactive hack, subtle as hell, leaves the personality intact but tweaking the gain on a couple of traits, just enough to turn Reeve into a good little score whore.
I sit with my legs apart, panting a trifle heavily over my enormous wobbling gut-bucket, and try to come to terms with the fact that I'm going to have to kill my better half. It's upsetting, however often you've done it before.
There's some clattering upstairs. I stand up, wheezing, and waddle over to see what's going on. I hate this body, but it's been useful for getting me into places none of us could otherwise gothey've been letting their internal security get sloppy, forgetting the authenticator rhyme: something shared, something do, something secret, something you? I suppose settling for something you is sufficient if you've got control over all the assemblers in a polity, but still. I wait at the bottom of the stairs. "Who is it?" I call quietly.
"Me," says Janis. "I need a hand with her."
"Humph." I haul myself up the steps. Janis is waiting at the top with Reeve, whose wrists and ankles she's trussed together with a roll of library tape. Reeve is twitching a little and showing signs of coming to. "What are you thinking we should do with her?" I ask.
"Can you get her downstairs?" Janis asks breathlessly.
"Yes." I lean forward and grasp Reeve by the ankles: For all that this body is grotesquely overweight, it's not weak. I lift and drag, and Janis holds Reeve's arms up enough to stop her head banging on the steps. At the bottom I pull her toward the A-gate. By this time her eyes are rolling, and she's turning red in the face. Hating myself, I lean forward. "What would you do?" I ask her.