I resisted the urge to take hold of her hand, and it was a powerful urge. “So what happened?” “He went back to being an android.”
“He did?”
She nodded. “He did the procedure in reverse—had another android body made, too, since he’d destroyed the original just to be safe. He made a big speech to the press, saying he’d planned to do it all along, that he wanted to test the laws that limited his rights, but I knew the truth. He was doing it to make me happy.”
“So what’s the problem?”
She looked up at me, eyes misty. “The problem,” she said, “is that he’s gone.”
“Gone? As in, dead?”
She shook her head. “I hope he’s not dead. Right after he did the procedure and gave a press conference, he vanished. He told his attendants he was going to use the restroom, and they went to look for him, he was gone. It’s been almost six weeks.”
“An android using the restroom?” I said.
“Yes, the attendants realized later how stupid they were. They’d just gotten used to him being human and forgot.”
“Have you hired other investigators?”
“No,” she said, “I’m afraid to.”
“Why? With your money, you could hire droves of them. That would increase your odds of finding him.”
She shook her head. “You don’t understand. I told you his company is going downhill. It’s even worse. There’s this other corporation, Granger Holdings, that’s trying to take it over. Because the stock price is down, they’re making a run at it. Without Vergon around to steady some nerves, the stockholders are starting to sell out. The thing is, Granger does exactly what Vergon does—make stepdocks. They just want to eliminate the competition. So if they get control of it, they’ll just sell off all the equipment to recoup their loses and then fire all the employees.”
“What does this have to do with hiring some private investigators?”
“Because I can’t trust anyone!” she insisted. “Already, I’m pretty sure I’m being followed.” She glanced over her shoulder, peering into the hordes of people passing along the concourse.
I didn’t see anyone but tourists. “Why?”
“Why! Because they don’t want me to find Vergon, that’s why. They want to keep the stock price low, and if he shows up, it will probably jump. The shareholders would wait to see what the brilliant Vergon Daughn is going to do. No, I’m afraid whoever I hire will really be working for them. I need somebody I can trust.”
“And you trust me?”
She nodded. “Iconic, isn’t it?”
“Ironic is the world you’re looking for, I think. And yes, it’s very ironic.”
“Iconic, ironic, whatever is it is, I need your help, Duff. I can’t do this without you. I want to find my husband.”
I said nothing.
“And if you won’t do it for me,” she said, “do it for the million employees of Vergon Enterprises that will lose their jobs. Do it for them. That’s why even if he’s dead…” She hesitated, closing her eyes and steadying herself before continuing. “Even if he’s dead, I need to know. At least the company could appoint a new CEO, which the board doesn’t want to do until they know for sure he’s gone. Maybe then we could still save the company.”
It was quite a tale. It would be easy enough to check, so I assumed it was true, but that didn’t mean I trusted her motives. But I was curious why a man—correction, an android—like Vergon Daughn would up and disappear, putting in jeopardy all his years of hard work. If nothing else, I could find Vergon just to satisfy that curiosity, and maybe, just maybe, I could end up doing some good while I was at it.
And, of course, get paid really well.
“All right,” I said, “I’ll find him for you.”
“Oh, good!”
“But I want the money up front.”
In the end, it was she who clasped my hand, giving it a reassuring squeeze. “Of course, Duff. Whatever you want.”
Looking at her, her eyes wide and her lips parting slightly, I remembered her whispering those very words to me late at night between satin sheets. I remembered and tried to put it out of my mind.
Money.
I was doing this for money.
The credit showed up in my account within ten minutes of Ginger passing through the stepdock back to the Vergon Enterprises headquarters on Palfacia Prime. It was twice even the outrageous amount I’d quoted to her, with so many zeroes in the number that I actually brought up the bank on nexlink to verify it wasn’t a mistake. Ever after the holorep assured me that the deposit was, indeed, accurate, I still procrastinated for the rest of the day before finally calling up my hotel client and asking him if I could take a hiatus for a couple of weeks for personal reasons, assuring him I’d come back and finish the job. I somewhat hoped he’d say no, but he didn’t.
Finally out of excuses, I set to work finding Mr. Vergon Daughn, the android who became a human who became an android.
The first thing I did was get in touch with the biomechanical engineer who performed the human-to-android transference, who, it turned out, was the same one who’d performed the BIP and made Vergon human in the first place—a tall and spindly Dulnari named Bwer Fwer. I tried him on the vid first and was told by a pert blond—so bubbly she had to be an android—that he’d see me that afternoon if I could come to his office.
His clinic, Mind-Body Technologies, was located on one of the oldest and richest planets in the Unity Worlds. It was a gas giant named Jellon with a trillion inhabitants and well over a hundred stepdocks, so there was no need to take a ship or shuttle at any point. But I’d been poor too long to take a direct step, so it still took two hours of hopping across the galaxy and fighting through crowded immigration controls to get to the gleaming black tower that contained his office.
After waiting in his lobby for another two hours, being asked by three different blond android secretaries why I was there, I wasn’t in the best of moods when a fourth bubbly blond finally showed me to his office. He was rising from his desk, a dark and wolfish figure with skin like elephant hide. Even in a sharp blue suit and red tie, he still came across as more than a little menacing, but I let loose with all of my built-up irritation anyway.
“If this is how you treat people who have appointments,” I said, “how do you treat everyone else?”
His beady eyes flared briefly, but it was the only outward sign of emotion. Right away I knew he was no ordinary Dulnari, because an ordinary Dulnari would have leapt across the table and gone for my throat at the slightest provocation.
A decade earlier, the Dulnari had been a major threat to the Unity Worlds, in a bloody war that lasted nearly thirty years, and even now there still weren’t many of them who held anything but the most mundane jobs. This was partly due to how much the war had set them back as a race, but it was mostly because of the nature of the Dulnari themselves. Because of their telepathic connections to one another, in concert they were incredibly intelligent, but individually they weren’t much smarter than low-grade AI floor sweepers. How one could ascend by himself to become a brilliant engineer—one Vergon was willing to risk his life with—was hard to believe.
“Mister Duff,” he said, extending his hand, “I’m sorry to keep you waiting. I was conferencing with several senators and they were being quite stubborn about some of my requests.”
It was the first time I’d shaken hands with a Dulnari. His four-fingered hand was smaller than my own, but his skin was tougher and thicker. There were lots of folks who still wouldn’t shake hands with a Dulnari, veterans of the war or victims of their atrocities, but I didn’t fall into either of those camps. The need had simply never arisen.