"You forget your father, Richards."
Richards frowned, his softgel face crinkling awkwardly. "Yeah, yeah, maybe I do."
The bartender put another glass in front of Richards on the uplit bar, a paper coaster underneath. Richards saluted the man's scowl, pushed back his hat and downed the drink, ice cubes and all. "I've got to get back, someone to see. I'd just go from here, but I've wasted too many sheaths recently. I don't want to leave this one lying around; losing these things is costing us serious money."
"Hughie?" said Otto, and sipped at his whisky.
"Hughie," confirmed Richards. " Gehst du nach Hause, oder bleibst du hier?"
Otto held up his glass in salute and smiled a rare smile. Funny, he thought, how Richards could coax that out of him, for all that he annoyed the shit out of him. " Ich mochte eine weitere." He took a sip. " Guten Nacht, Herr Richards," he said.
Richards stood and set his hat on his head, turned up the collar of his trenchcoat, ran a robot finger round the peak and gave a little smile. " Bitte, mein Freund, es ist einfach Richards."
And he left Otto to it.
Otto rattled his ice round his empty glass. " Er geht mir auf den Sack," he said, and shook his head.
"What was that, sir?" said the bartender.
"Nothing," said Otto. "Get me another, would you?"
Richards took his sheath back to their garage, thankfully one hundred floors below the radioactive sphere of nothing where their office had once been. He shunted himself back into the Grid, popped over to his virtual office to see how the regrowth of his facsimile of ancient Chicago was going, and went over the plans for their reconstructed office. Then he put in a request to see Hughie.
For once, he was piped right into Hughie's garden. Hughie sat at his wirework table, his arms crossed and face grumpy.
There was no cake. It was going to be one of those meetings.
"I suppose you feel oh-so-pleased with yourself," said Hughie.
"Hiya, Hughie, nice to see you too," said Richards, and plonked his saggy-faced avatar down in front of Hughie. "Don't mention me saving your shiny arse, no problem at all. Nothing's too good for my old friend Hughie."
Hughie gave a dismissive little grunt. "Don't irritate me today, Richards, I've a hundred bureaucrats the world over badgering me about, one — " he ticked the points off on his fingers "- the complete destruction of the RealWorld Reality Realms, two, the detonation of three atomic bombs, three, the destruction of 13 per cent of Nevada's energy disruption, four, the loss of three Class Five AIs, five, a violent incursion into the Sinosiberian demilitarised zone that culminated in another atomic detonation, six, a UN-led review on AI policy…" He stopped. "Have you seen the news, by the way? They're calling this the biggest catastrophe since the Five crisis. This is not going to go away. Things are bad enough for us as it is, we don't need more enemies. Need I go on?"
"Jeez," said Richards sarcastically, "it's a good job that I thwarted k52's plans to rule the human race until the end of time, or people might be really pissed off. Don't be a cock, Hughie."
"Hmmm, well, yes," grumbled Hughie, his electric eyes shining ovals of light onto the table. "I suppose we should be grateful k52's plans did not come to fruition."
Richards gaped and slumped back. "'Did not come to fruition?'" he parroted. "Sheesh, you really are a cock."
"Stop calling me a cock, Richards."
"Wanker."
Hughie threw up his hands. "You are exceptionally juvenile and frustrating to deal with," he said.
"And you're a cock. We all have our crosses to bear."
"Stop it now, stop it now! Oh, I am trying to be thankful, I'm, alright, damn you, I'm not very good at it. Thanks to you we've avoided some kind of artificial Singularity."
Richards shrugged. "What? Another? There's no such thing as the Singularity, Hughie. Things change all the time. And people live through them. Things change, people don't. Why put a name on it?"
"We will have to disagree on that. I thought you might like to know that all charges against Valdaire have been dropped. Swan has been impounded, and the Chinese aren't going to start a war over your partner's gung-ho shenanigans in their territory."
"Jolly good."
"We've also been invited to a memorial service for Chures. I expect you to attend."
"Since when were you the boss of me?"
"Richards," warned Hughie.
"We'll be there," he said, serious for a moment. "What about Launcey?"
"Later," said Hughie. "We'll get to him later." Hughie stood and clapped his hands. "Now, I am extremely busy," said Hughie.
The garden began its slow dissolve, and Richards was before a titanic Hughie in the VR replica of his underground home.
"And what's this?"
"A little reminder," said the giant Hughie. "Don't forget where you stand on the foodchain, Richards. These are challenging times. We could do without incidents like this. Do try not to overstep the mark, or there will be consequences."
Hughie faded away and Richards was left in the cavernous space of Hughie's virtual representation of his equally cavernous home, the sinister rustling of his choir at work again, free now once more, parsing trillions of bits of information as they ran the lives of a billion European citizens.
"Yeah, and who gets to decide what kind of incidents we do get, Hughie?" shouted Richards. His voice echoed back at him. "You?"
The lights went out.
"There's more to this than you and I will ever understand," he muttered. He dug into his pocket, pulled something out. "Cock."
Richards winked out of the hall, leaving something small hanging in the air. A tinkle as bright as a dropped penny sounded as it hit the foamcrete, an impudent noise in Hughie's cavern. Hughie zoomed his perception down to the source of the noise.
There, upon the drab grey representation of drab grey concrete, glittered a tiny skull, perfectly carved from quartz.
"What your wife is suffering from, Mr Klein, is unusual." Ms Dinez was tall and dark, an exotic mix of races from dried-up Brazil. She must have had a mass of immigration credits to get in through the Atlantic Wall, thought Otto. Lucky her.
Otto could see Honour through the one-way glass. He stared at her pale face. Uncalled-for data hopped into his mind off the Grid, broadening his understanding of what the surgeon had said. Honour looked so fragile. Tubes snaked out of her arm; her cerebral implant had been cracked wide and a dozen delicate carbon-sheathed cables wriggled into it. The same in her chest, where more leads plugged into her governor, monitoring her healthtech. He pressed his hands, palms flat, against the glass.
Ms Dinez looked to the side. Readouts of skin temperature and icons guessing her emotional state flickered in his mind. This can't be easy, thought Otto. He felt sympathy for her.
"You are in the army?" A fair assumption. The sheer amount of hardware embedded in his body made that obvious.
"Not any more. I was done killing innocent people a long time ago. There's enough room here, no matter what the government says." He hadn't meant that as a remark on her status; he hoped she did not take it as such. Diplomacy was never his strong suit.
"Then you are obviously a man who does not like to be kept waiting, Mr Klein. So I will be brief. She is going to die." She seemed unconcerned, cold even. Was this her professional manner, wondered Otto, or had she had her emotions capped? Some of the refugees did that. It helped them cope. Those that had mentaugs could, of course, wipe the records of their experiences if they chose, but they could do little more than inhibit the natural memory, and that was often not enough.
"I have known that for some time," he said. "What is killing her?"
"She has Bergstrom's Syndrome."
Otto's mouth went dry. He'd suspected as much. He'd heard rumours, about other cyborgs getting sick, about mismatches between machine and man.