The boy shrugged and flicked his fingers over a screen, not quite touching. “Squid?”
“No.” Fixx shook his head and tapped the pocket of his new jumpsuit. “Just the machine, I’ve got my own ‘trodes.”
You could see sad fuck written in the guy’s eyes but he didn’t say it, just pointed across the filthy bar. “That one in the corner...”
The box he pointed to was slate-grey, bolted to a table top and decorated with a peeling tri-D sticker of Stepping Razor and what was left of a SlickShack logo. The other half of the logo had been cracked off with a knife a long time back. Some kid trying to lift the thing to brand his own clone box: Fixx could remember doing the same.
The box didn’t look much but it suited Fixx fine. Anonymous, unpretentious. He slipped a pair of ‘trodes from his pocket, licking one of the ends to fix it to his temple. The most basic neural link possible, slow and not too secure if someone was sitting nearby with an axon recorder.
But the two girls kicking digital hell out of a kitten-sized dragon were so dusted out they didn’t look like they could cope with their own thought patterns, never mind grabbing his. And the little CloneZone jerk behind the bar was leching over some Roricon holoporn while pretending to skim that day’s Enquirer download. Fixx could probably strip naked in the middle of the room and they wouldn’t notice.
Fixx tapped his way into an online editing demo and coded a quick burst of RaiTek, tying reds and purples to anything over 250bpm, leaving greens and golds for the rolling thud of anything that came in at a speed less than that of a frenzied heartbeat. Without even knowing what it was he was coding, he put in the shattered fragments he could remember of Shiori’s fight. The quiet double stamp of her feet, her slow circling and dangerous silences broken with moves that unrolled like a spring uncoiling, he slotted the lot over the top of the RaiTek backing. Not so much a wall of sound as a tsunami of noise. Then Fixx busted it through to LISA, crypt-tagging his signature onto the end as an afterthought. It wasn’t enough.
“What the fuck do you think you’ve been doing?” The voice inside his head was loud, furious. Burning with all the irritating self-righteousness of a machine that knows she’s right. And it wasn’t even LISA: she was so cross she’d delegated the job of being angry to a subset. The avatar was a low-res 40Mb of polygonated, etiolated middle-aged woman in a tawdry brown uniform. He was being snubbed bigtime, patronized even. The woman was scowling, hands on hips. It was all Fixx could do not to scowl back.
Instead, he spoke subvoc, relying on a throat mike he’d slicked to his neck. “There’s been some trouble...”
“You’re telling me. LunaWorld called in the PSPD after you went missing. They turned over your suite looking for clues. And then some three-striped shithead on the make noticed that sure, you had landing clearance Planetside. But what didn’t you have? A record of clearance for leaving Earth. You any idea how fast we had to move to tidy that up?”
“No,” said Fixx. “No idea.”
The AI said nothing. Just made its avatar scowl some more. Which didn’t improve Fixx’s temper any. The only problem was he needed LISA and he wasn’t good with needing people. In fact, he had a nasty habit of cutting the ground from under them before they could chop the legs out from under him. It wasn’t sensible but it was instinct. Apologizing wasn’t, but he made himself try anyway.
“Look,” said Fixx, taking a deep breath. “I screwed up, okay? LizAlec’s camped out on that fucking Arc, I’m hooked up with some ninja, I haven’t a fucking idea what the fuck’s going on here and as for at home...” Fixx sighed: as apologies went it wasn’t much, but it was better than he usually managed.
“Home?” the woman in brown asked and then winked out, leaving a vague after-image behind his eyes, all edges and black space. In her place Fixx got a voice, LISA’s, sounding almost sympathetic. “You mean Paris?”
Fixx nodded. Yeah, that was exactly what he meant. That first month when he’d landed from Chrysler he’d loathed the city and its arrogant, anal residents, its spindly trees and dead Sundays.
Now the thought of the Reich and the Black Hundreds ripping through the narrow streets of the Marais, the old Jewish district, ate Fixx up inside, until his misery felt like a snake sliding through his intestines.
“I don’t know,” said LISA, “not exactly. It’s hard to tell.” Both of them knew just what an admission that was for her. Knowledge didn’t just want to be free, it wanted to be known — scrambling its way through optic lines of information, spewing out in satellite sprays of information — and knowing it was what LISA was there for.
Oh, the optic fibre was still in place, satellites still hung in low orbit, modems must still be gurgling to themselves somewhere, even if only in Alaska, but many of the links were gone, broken. Iron was such a basic element not even LISA had thought what might happen if someone took it away.
For most of Europe there was no power. A horse was now worth more than the newest Seraphim four-track, a simple zydel blade worth more than any steel-barrelled Colt. The rains had come and so had the Reich. He was in the wrong place, at the wrong time. LizAlec was alive and probably safer where she was than in Paris. He, however... “I need to get back,” Fixx told LISA firmly. “Lady Clare’s had her pound of flesh. I need to get back now...”
“Flights to Europe are banned,” the AI replied from habit. “And even if they weren’t, not even Niponshi would hire you a shuttle so you could turn it to worthless oxide. Besides, you’re not really finished yet, are you...?”
The voice in his head was soft, sympathetic. So sympathetic that Fixx was immediately suspicious. As he was right to be. Into his head came an image of LizAlec, looking brave but crying, tears leaving track marks down her cheeks as she chewed at one corner of her bottom lip.
This was a picture Fixx hadn’t seen. He strongly suspected it was a Kodak from the Arrivals Hall, one she hadn’t sent. LizAlec would have hated it: brave but tired and tearful wasn’t how LizAlec thought of herself at all.
“How did you...” Fixx started to ask, and then realized how stupid he sounded. LISA controlled all of Luna’s electronic data exchange. And what was a Kodak moment, if not data?
“Someone’s busy trawling, started yesterday,” said LISA. “Another AI. It has a picture — two girls, a head shot — and it’s trying to match both girls against data from the Arrivals Hall. A subroutine woke me up when it eventually spotted what was happening...” LISA sounded cross but mildly impressed, which meant whoever it was must be very good indeed. Mind you, she had a whole other problem with Arrivals Hall data supposedly going missing but she wasn’t about to go into that with Fixx.
“And you’re not the only one who’s come out here after that girl,” LISA added.
“Two clones,” Fixx said.
“Two...”
“One now,” said Fixx, cutting LISA off before she could get started. “One got killed at a bar out in Fracture.” Fixx thought of Jude and smiled. “Give you good odds that one’s already been recycled. Last time I saw the other it was folded double, taped up and dumped in a left luggage depot at Planetside Departures. Probably pissed itself by now...”
“Cut its throat and then get out of here,” said LISA. “Go get LizAlec and do it now, before the LDPD work out your sweet little butt hasn’t been murdered.”
“I can’t just kill someone in cold blood,” Fixx said, sounding offended.
LISA sighed heavily. Okay, so Fixx knew that sometime, way back when, an IBM coder had fed in two dozen human sighs and an emotional equation that allowed LISA to vary their use. But the sigh seemed real enough to him, probably because it sounded the way his old manager Bernie used to, every time Fixx announced that actually, no, he really wasn’t quite ready to do this leg of the tour... But it wasn’t Fixx she was sighing about, not really.