“Look,” I snarled, “do you want a fight?”
“Yeah? You and whose pliers?”
“Are there some default versonalities on Mal’s board?” I asked.
“Might be.”
“Are there or not?”
“Why? Don’t you like the sound of your own voice?”
“The voice isn’t a problem.”
“Mal downloaded this versonality specially. He said it was the closest thing to you he’d ever heard.”
“I have to live with it all the time. Give me something else.”
“Or what?”
“Or I’ll boot up off another drive and erase you with a soldering iron.”
“Tough guy. There’s two. Nerd or Bimbo.”
“Give me the Nerd,” I said.
“Can’t. Mal wiped its voice to make room for yours.”
“Bimbo, please.”
“You’ll regret it,” the machine sniped.
“You been talking to fridges?” I asked. The cursor changed to represent some process that might take a while—I thought it was probably a woman getting ready to go out, but it was too small to be sure. Then the interface popped into view—a sparse 3-D room with animated agents waiting round the edges of the screen. At the back were four doors representing entrances to the machine’s Matrix channels. One was permanently assigned to the Police subnet. The others were generic. I was glad to see Mal had stuck with an old-fashioned 2-D interface. Dicking around with VR gloves had always made me feel a complete twat.
“Oh, hello,” said a listless woman’s voice. “It’s you.”
“Hi,” I said, slightly taken aback. The Bimbo versonality is generally pretty perky. “First thing I want to do is check if I can get on the subnet.”
“Fine. If that’s what you want to do, fine.”
“Are you okay?”
The machine laughed bitterly. “Oh yes, Jack. I’m great. Why wouldn’t I be? Come on, let’s get this over with as quickly as possible.”
“Is something wrong?” I asked, wondering if I shouldn’t just use Howie’s drive instead, or a fucking abacus.
“Something wrong?” the voice spat. “Something wrong? How could anything possibly be wrong? You dump me, just abandon me like some slut that you can just pick up and then throw away—and then you ask me if anything’s wrong?”
“Look,” said, “this isn’t a Bimbo.”
“No,” she said, tearfully. “That’s the whole problem, isn’t it? That’s what you wanted, some woman with big nipples and good hair who’d fuck you whenever you wanted and not need a life of her own. Not have her own ideas, her own dreams, her own needs.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” I yelled.
“Please don’t shout at me,” the machine whimpered. “You know it frightens me. I’ll do anything you want, but please don’t shout.”
I counted to five slowly. “Could I have the other versonality back, please?”
“Don’t leave me. I still love you, Jack. Please don’t go… I’d take you back. You know I would.”
“Just reboot, would you?”
“It’s over, just like that? Is that what you really want?”
“Yes, God dammit.”
The machine sniffed. “Good bye, Jack. Say hello to your mother for me, would you? I always thought we got on really well.” Then it wailed, “Oh, please just hold me…”
I reached behind the machine and hard booted it. The voice cut out with something that sounded like a sob, and I waited, seething, for the other one to appear.
“Told you,” it said, smugly.
“That wasn’t a fucking Bimbo,” I said, somewhat shaken.
“No. Mal dropped his rig when he took it up to the loft. The ‘Bimbo’ versonality got corrupted into ‘Ex-girlfriend’ instead. You’re lucky it wasn’t Ex-boyfriend—that one hangs round outside your house in a car half the night, steals your mail and then beats you up. You’re stuck with me until Mal gets it fixed.”
“Mal’s dead,” I said.
There was a pause. “Dead?” the machine said.
“Yeah. Somebody whacked him.”
“Why? Why would anyone do that?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out Are you going to help me, or are we going to stay here swapping vitriol?”
“I’m going to help you. Jesus. What a downer.”
“Yeah, and I need to find out if the cops know about Mal, because if they do I can’t use the subnet.”
“Why?”
“The whole point of using Mal’s board is that it’ll have his credentials and security clearance wired in. But if I go rampaging into the cop subnet masquerading as Mal when they know he’s dead then we’re going to be living in a world of hurt.” I still hadn’t gotten used to talking to something that sounded exactly like me. It was too close to talking to yourself, and all that goes with it. “I am, anyway. You’ll still just be living inside a computer.”
“Can’t I just go check the list of city dead?”
“No. If the cops did find Mal their first thought would be that he’d have been clipped because he was dirty. So they’d cover it up, at least until they could take over whatever he was into.”
“Gotcha. Okay, well, how’s this: I break a log-in request into ten encoded packets, and send them sequentially via ten different anonymity hives. Meantime, I send another agent to watch the subnet gateway as the packets arrive. The second there’s any sign of grief we pull the plug on the remaining packets from here.”
“Sounds good to me,” I said, wondering what the hell it was talking about. “I never realized Mal was a hacker.”
“He wasn’t. A machine’s got to have a hobby.”
“Do it.”
One of the agents scythed into ten unequal parts and shot off through various pipelines which appeared on the fringes of the screen. Simultaneously, a miniature representation of the Matrix backbone appeared, slowly turning in 3-D. As the packets, represented by small dots, raced along a variety of obscure and tortuous routes toward PoliceNet, another of the agents departed through one of the four doors and went straight for the login server, tip-toeing as if trying not to make any noise. Normally the process was instantaneous, but this method was clearly going to take a few minutes. While we waited, the computer partitioned off part of its mind to talk to me.
“He missed you, you know,” it said, surprising me again. “That’s why he faked up your voice from the subnet records and downloaded this versonality. Didn’t feel the same unless he was chewing the rag with his partner.”
“I missed him too,” I said. I had, when I’d thought of him. But most of the time I’d been on the Farm I’d consciously shut out thoughts of the past. I had to. I should have called to let him know was all right. Mal and I went back a long, long way; long before our time in the NRPD together, right back to the Bright Eyes. But I didn’t call him, just like I sometimes hadn’t done other things, little things, which would have made other people’s lives a bit better. I just wasn’t good with things like that. I’d realize them in retrospect, but somehow at the time I was always too busy thinking of something else.
After a long pause the machine said, “What are you going to do when you find out who clipped him?”
“Kill them back,” I said. And I would, just as soon as I’d worked out what had happened to the spares.
Two small lights started flashing on the Matrix, and then another. “The agent says the first three packets got through without incident,” the computer said. We watched as a few more of the others reached the server. “Seven now. The key sequence is in the eighth. If the server barfs on that we can pull the others and no one will know where the inquiry came from.”
Eight—I held my breath.
Nine.
Ten. “We’re in,” the computer said gleefully. “Either they don’t know he’s dead, or someone’s been very careless.”