She walks up to the bar and orders a beer, and as she drinks it she chats to one or two of the guys, and while she’s chatting she reaches into her big satchel and hauls out fresh-looking tabloid newspapers and carefully counts coins from the men who take them. Some of them take them as if they’re keen to read them, others with a show of reluctance and a lot of banter, but most just shake their heads or shrug and go back to their own conversations and watching, the television screen, where somebody’s just about to take a sudden death shoot-out. All the while the girl’s every so often glancing around the room in a way that has Spy torn between admiration at the unobtrusive way she does it and anxiety that she’s looking for someone quite close to Spy’s hard little heart, namely Self.
The girl at the bar goes on talking to the men at the bar for another few minutes, then eases herself casually from the stool and takes a handful of papers and tries to sell them to the office-girls. She’s only successful at one table, and then she’s walking to the last table where the dark-haired woman sits alone.
A shot echoes. Two hands jolt towards two pistols, then retract as a ragged cheer from the screen and from those watching it indicates that it’s just a death penalty being scored.
And then, grinning and shaking her head, she’s standing there looking down. ‘Jumpy tonight, aren’t we?’ she says.
Spy and Soldier are jumpy indeed, jostling for possession, and it’s all Spy can do to modulate Soldier’s sharp command into a smooth, low-voiced request: ‘Just don’t stand between me and the door.’
The tall woman steps smartly sideways. She looks surprised, but she doesn’t go away.
‘Hi,’ she says. ‘My name’s Tamara. What’s yours?’
Self takes over. She keeps her hand where it is.
‘Dee,’ she says. ‘Dee Model.’
‘Ah,’ says Tamara. ‘I see.’ Her eyes widen slightly as she says it, then look away as if, for the moment, she’s at a loss. ‘Mind if I sit down?’
Dee gestures to her to do just that. She takes the seat to Dee’s right, between her and the bar.
‘What’s that paper you’re selling?’ Dee asks.
Tamara slides a copy across the table. Its masthead says The Abolitionist in quaint irregular lettering with barbed serifs. The articles, which Spy assimilates in about two seconds and which gradually seep through to Self, are an odd mix: news snippets about labour disputes; technical articles about assemblers and reactors and stuff; some columns of a sort of paranoid gossip about the doings of various important people, in which Dee’s owner’s name appears here and there; and long rambling theoretical pieces about machine intelligence.
Dee puts it down, having just given it what looks like the most casual, superficial glance. She wonders for a moment if this is a trap, but Spy thinks it very unlikely: these are exactly the sort of ideas she’d expected to find in this area, and it’s obvious that Tamara’s espousal of them is completely, perhaps resignedly, familiar to those around her. (That those around her might be part of some elaborate set-up doesn’t occur to Dee, or even to Spy: although their background is rich in intrigue and betrayal, they lack the ramifying conspiratorial imagination that would be second nature if they lived in a state.) Dee tries to keep her wild hope out of her voice.
‘Do you really think that human-equivalent machines are, well, equivalent to humans? That they have rights?’
‘Oh, sure,’ Tamara says. ‘Don’t you?’
‘Hmm,’ says Dee. ‘Let me get you a drink.’
When she returns she’s carrying Tamara’s satchel. She swings it under the table and places her pistol back on the top. Tamara waves away the offer of a cigarette. Dee lights up and leans close. Soldier takes over second place from Spy, who doesn’t like what’s going on at all. The most Spy can do is make sure no-one overhears. Another probe into the room’s electronics, and the music’s volume goes up a few decibels.
‘I’m a machine,’ Dee says.
Tamara’s obviously half-suspected this, just from the name, but just as obviously doesn’t quite believe it.
‘You coulda fooled me, girl,’ she says.
Dee shrugs. ‘Most of my body was grown in a vat or something. Most of my brain’s artificial. Technically and legally I’m a decerebrate clone manipulated by a computer. Neither component is anything but an object, but I feel like I’m a person.’
Tamara’s nodding vigorously, the way people do.
‘And I need your help,’ Dee adds. ‘I’ve escaped and my owner’s agents are searching for me along this street.’
Tamara’s head stops moving and her mouth opens.
‘Oh shit,’ she says.
Dee stares at her. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asks. ‘Isn’t this what you want?’ She glances at The Abolitionist. ‘Or is this all –?’
Tamara closes her eyes for a moment and shakes her head slightly. ‘It ain’t like that,’ she says, looking embarrassed. She steeples her fingers to the sides of her nose and talks quietly into this adequate mask. ‘Of course I’ll help you…We’ll help you. It’s just – this isn’t the main thing we do, you know? We’ve persuaded a few people to free machines, but a machine freeing itself doesn’t happen very often. Not that you get to hear about, anyway.’ She’s grinning again, back on track. ‘You into making a fight about this?’
‘I’m ready for any kind of fight,’ Dee says. ‘Who’s this “we”?’
‘Half a street full of anarchists,’ Tamara says.
Dee doesn’t understand what this means, exactly, but it sounds hopeful, especially the way Tamara says it.
‘Can you provide sanctuary?’ Dee asks.
‘We’re probably your best bet,’ Tamara says abstractedly. ‘There hasn’t really been a proper fight on this issue. It’d be quite something to be the ones to pick it. Bloody hell. This could shake up the city, the whole damn’ planet!’
Dee tries to think of a reason why this should be so, but apart from a bit of handwaving from Scientist there doesn’t seem to be any information on file.
‘Why?’ she asks.
Tamara stares at her. ‘You are definitely a machine,’ she says, smiling past the side of her hand. ‘Or you’d know the answer.’
Dee considers this, trying to formulate Scientist’s bare hints into speech.
‘It’s because of the fast folk, isn’t it?’ she suggests brightly. ‘And the dead?’
Tamara’s eyebrows flash upwards for a split second. ‘That’s the smart worry,’ she says. ‘It’s the stupid worries that are the real problem…I think you’ll find. Anyway. Are the greps likely to be hanging around outside?’
Dee thinks about this.
‘No,’ she says. ‘Not now. But there might be others.’
Tamara drains her glass. ‘Let’s go,’ she says.
They’re just getting their things together when the door opens and a young man and an old robot walk in. The man looks haggard and is wearing desert gear, and the robot’s just a standard construction rig. Tamara doesn’t give them a second glance but Dee watches as the man pauses at the doorway and looks around the room with a curious intentness.
He sees her, and his gaze stops.
He takes a step forward. His face warps as if under acceleration into an awful, anguished look, more a distortion of the features than an expression – it’s unreadable, inhuman. At the same time Dee can feel the robot’s questing senses scan her body and tap at her brain. Spy and Soldier and Sys move dizzyingly fast in the virtual spaces of her mind, repelling the hack-attack. Her own reactive hacking attempts are deflected by some shielding as impenetrable as – and perhaps no other than – the robot’s hard metal shell. The robot makes a jerky forward lurch as the man takes a second step towards her. All of Dee’s several selves start screaming at her to get out.