It was probably truer than she thought, but he didn’t see any need to be ashamed of it. The whole point about the world inside a VR hood, backed up by the full panoply of suit-induced tactile sensation, was that it was better than the real world: brighter, cleaner and more controllable. Earth wasn’t hell any more, thanks to the New Reproductive System and the wonders of internal technology, but it wasn’t heaven either. Heaven was something a man could only hope to find on the other side of experience, in the virtuous world of virtual imagery.
The brutal truth of the matter, Damon thought, was that everything of Diana Caisson that he actually needed really was programmed into her template. The absence from his life of her changeable, complaining, untrustworthy, knife-throwing self wouldn’t leave a yawning gap.
“You’re right,” he told her. “I’ve changed. So have you. That’s OK. We’re authentically young; we’re supposed to change. We’re supposed to become different people, to try out all the personalities of which we’re capable. The time for constancy is a long way ahead of us yet.” He wondered, as he said it, whether it was true. Was this really just a phase in an evolutionary process, or was it a permanent capitulation? Was he taking a rest from the kind of hyped-up sensation-seeking existence he’d led while running with Madoc Tamlin’s gang, or was he turning into one of the meek whose alleged destiny was to inherit the Earth?
“I want the template back,” Diana said, sharply. “When I go, I’m taking my virtual shadow with me.”
“You can’t do that,” Damon retorted, knowing that he had to put on the appearance of a fight before he eventually gave in, lest it be too obvious that all he had to do was remold her simulacrum from the modified echoes which he had built into half a dozen different commercial tapes of various kinds. While he only required her image, he could always get her back, no matter how comprehensively and how ostentatiously he purged his systems of her likeness.
“I’m doing it,” she told him, firmly. “You’re going to have to start that slimy sideshow from scratch, whether you pay for a ready-made template or pay for some whore who’ll let you build a new one on your own.”
“If I’d known,” he said, with calculated provocativeness, “I wouldn’t have had to struggle upstairs with three boxes of groceries.”
From there it was only a few more steps to a renewal of the armed struggle, but he kept the knife out of it, and his aim—as always—was to win with the minimum of fuss. He made her work hard to dispel her bad feeling in pain and physical stress, but she got there in the end, without having to scream too much abuse.
Afterwards, he helped her pack.
There wasn’t that much to collect. It only filled four boxes—and because there were two of them to do the work, they didn’t pose that much of a logistical problem.
When he got back to the apartment, the cops were waiting for him. Damon knew that it couldn’t be a trivial matter if they had taken the trouble to call in person. Even the cops conducted their interviews by video, unless they had some special reason for appearing in the flesh.
“Whatever it is,” Damon was quick to say, as a smartcard identifying the senior man as Inspector Hiru Yamanaka of Interpol was held out for his inspection, “I’m not involved. I don’t run with the gang any more and I don’t have any idea what they’re up to. These days, I only go out to fetch the groceries.”
The men from Interpol preceded Damon into the apartment, ignoring the stream of protestations. Yamanaka showed not a flicker of interest as his heavy-lidded gaze took in the knife stuck into the door-jamb, but his unnamed sidekick took silent but ostentatious offence at the untidy state of the room. As soon as the door shut Yamanaka said: “What do you know about the Eliminators, Mr. Hart?”
“I was never that kind of crazy,” Damon told him, affrontedly. “I was a serious street fighter, not a hobbyist assassin.”
“No one’s accusing you of anything,” the second cop said, in the unreliably casual way cops had.
Damon knew no more about the Eliminators than anyone else—perhaps less, given that he was no passionate follower of the kind of newstape which followed their activities with avid fascination. He was not entirely unsympathetic to those who thought it direly unjust that longevity, the pain-control, immunity to disease and resistance to injury were simply commodities to be bought off the nanotech shelf, possessed in the fullest measure only by the rich, but he certainly wasn’t sufficiently hung up about it to become a terrorist crusader. The Eliminators were on the lunatic fringe of the many disparate and disorganised communities of interest fostered by the Web; they were devoted to the business of giving earnest consideration to the question of who might actually deserve to live forever. Some of their so-called Operators were into the habit of naming those whom they considered “unworthy of eternity,” via messages dispatched to netboards from illicit temporary linkpoints, usually accompanied by downloadable packages of “evidence” which put the case for elimination. The first few freelance executions had unleashed a tide of media alarm—which had, of course, served to glamourize the whole enterprise and conjure into being a veritable legion of amateur assassins. Being named by a well-known operator was not yet a guarantee that one would be attacked and perhaps killed, but it was something that had to be taken seriously.
It didn’t take much imagination to understand that Interpol must be keen to nail a few guilty parties and impose some severe punitive sanctions, pour encourager les autres, but Damon couldn’t begin to figure out why their suspicions might have turned in his direction.
“May I?” Yamanaka asked. His neatly-manicured finger was pointing to the windowscreen.
“Be my guest,” Damon said, sourly.
Yamanaka’s fingers did a brief dance on the windowscreen’s keyboard. The resting display gave way to a pattern of words etched blue on black:
CONRAD HELIER IS NAMED AN ENEMY OF MANKIND CONRAD HELIER IS NOT DEAD FIND AND IDENTIFY THE MAN WHO WAS CONRAD HELIER PROOFS WILL FOLLOW
Damon felt a sinking sensation in his belly. He knew that he ought to have been able to regard the message with complete indifference, but the simple fact was that he couldn’t.
“What has that to do with me?” he asked, combatively.
“According to our records,” Yamanaka said, smoothly, “you didn’t adopt your present name until ten years ago, when you were in your teens. Before that, you were known as Damon Helier. You’re Conrad Helier’s natural son.”
“So what? He died twenty years before I was bom, no matter what that crazy says. We’re about to begin the twenty-third century—it doesn’t matter any more who anybody’s natural father was.”
“To most people,” Yamanaka agreed, “it’s a complete irrelevance—but not to you, Mr. Hart. You were given your father’s surname. Your four foster-parents were all close colleagues of your father. Your father even left money in trust for you, which you inherited a couple of years after changing your name. I know that you’ve never touched the money, and that you don’t see your foster-parents any longer, and that you’ve done your utmost to distance yourself from the destiny which your father apparently planned out for you—but that doesn’t signify irrelevance, Mr. Hart. It suggests that you took a strong dislike to your father and everything he stood for.”
“So you think I might do something like this? I’m not that stupid, and I’m certainly not that crazy. Who put you on to me? Who pointed the finger at me? Was it Karol Kachellek?”