Hardwired (4 page)

But still, the red room is nice. There are holograms, colors and helixes like modeled DNA, floating just above eye level, casting their variegated light through the crystal and sparkling liquor held in the patrons’ hands; there are sockets at every table for comp decks so that the patrons can keep up with their portfolios; and there are girls with reconstructed breasts and faces who come to each table in their tight plastic corsets, bring you your drink, and watch with identical and very white smiles as you put your credit needle into their tabulator and tap in a generous tip with your fingernail.

Sarah is ready for the meet with Cunningham, wearing a navy blue jacket guaranteed to protect her against kinetic violence of up to 900 foot-pounds per square inch, and trousers good for 750. She has invested some of the endorphins and bought the time of a pair of her peers. They are walking loose about the bar, ready to keep Cunningham or his friends off her back if she needs it. She knows she needs a clear head and has kept the endorphin dose down. Pain is making her edgy, and she still can’t sit. She stands at a small table and sips her rum and lime, waiting. And then Cunningham is there. Bland face, brown eyes, brown hair, brown suit. A whispery voice that speaks of clean places she has never been, places bright and soft against the black and pure diamond.

“Okay, Cunningham,” she says. “Business.”

Cunningham’s eyes flicker to the mirror behind her. “Friends?” he asks.

“I don’t know you.”

“You’ve called the Hetman?”

She nods. “He was complimentary,” she says, “but you’re not working for him; he’s repaying you a favor, maybe. So I’m cautious.”

“Understandable.” He takes a comp deck out of an inner pocket and plugs it into the table. A pale amber screen in the depths of the dark tabletop lights up, displaying a row of figures. “We’re offering you this in dollars,” he says.

Sarah feels a touch of metal on her nerves, on her tongue. The score, she thinks, the real thing. “Dollars?” she says. ”Get serious.”

“Gold?” Another set of figures appears.

She takes a sip of rum. “Too heavy. ”

“Stock. Or drugs. Take your pick.”

“What kind of stock? What kind of drugs?”

“Your choice.”

“Polymyxin-phenildorphin Nu. There’s a shortage right now.”

Cunningham frowns. “If you like. But there’ll be a lot of it coming onto the market in another three weeks or so.”

Her eyes challenge him. “Did you bring it down from orbit with you?” she asks.

His face fails so much as to twitch. “No,” he says. “But if I were you, I’d try chloramphenildorphin. Pfizer is arranging an artificial scarcity that will last several months. Here are the figures. Pharmacological quality, fresh from orbit.”

Sarah looks at the amber numbers and nods. “Satisfactory,” she says. “Half in advance.”

“Ten percent now,” Cunningham says. “Thirty on completion of training. The rest on completion of the contract, whether you succeed or not.”

She looks up at one of the bar’s moving holograms, the colors clean and bright, as pure as if seen through a vacuum. A vacuum, she thinks. The stock isn’t bad, but she can do more with the drugs. Cunningham is offering her the drugs at their orbital value, where they are made and where the cost is almost nothing. The street value is far more, and with it she can buy more stock than the amount they were offering. Ten percent of that figure is more than she’d made last night, when she’d gone after the snagboy.

To get into the Orbitals you have to have skills they need, skills she can never acquire.

There is another way: they can’t refuse someone who owns enough shares. They are sucking up all of Earth’s remaining wealth, and if you help them and buy up enough stock, they might free you from the mud forever. This is almost enough, she calculates. Almost enough for a pair of tickets to the top of the gravity well.

She brings her drink to her lips. “Let’s say a quarter now,” she says. “And then I’ll let you buy me a drink, and you can tell me just what you want me to do to earn it.”

Cunningham turns and signals to one of the smiling corset girls. “It’s very simple,” he says, and he looks at her with his ice-cold eyes. “We want you to make someone fall in love with you. Just for a night.”

IS YOUR LOVER LOOKING FOR SOMEONE YOUNGER? YOU CAN BE THAT SOMEONE!

“The Princess is about eighty years old,” Cunningham says. The holo he gives Sarah shows a pale blond girl of about twenty, dressed in a kind of ruffled blouse that exposes her rounded shoulders, the hollows of her clavicles. She has Daud’s watery blue eyes and freckles above her breasts. She projects an air of vulnerable innocence.

“We think he was originally from Russia,” Cunningham goes on, “but the Korolev Bureau has always been secretive and we don’t have a complete list of their senior staff and designers. When he rated the new body, he asked to be a woman. He’s important enough so that they gave it to him, but they gave him a demotion–– they rotate out all their old people to make way for the new. She’s doing courier duty now. ”

Not unusual, Sarah thinks. These days you can get pornography read straight into the brain, plenty of chances to sample whatever pleasures you like and then, if rich enough, get yourself a new body to suit your tastes. But the technology of personality transfer is imperfect--- sometimes bits get left behind: memories, abilities, traits that might be useful. A succession of bodies can mean successive senility. If you get a new body and aren’t so powerful you can’t be moved, you are often demoted until you can prove yourself.

“What’s her new name?” she asks.

“She’ll tell you, I’m sure. Let’s just call her Princess for now.”

Sarah shrugs. There are half a dozen imbecilic security rules in this operation, and she guesses that most of them are simply to test her capacity for obedience.

“Her new body doesn’t seem to have altered his sexual orientation, just his manner of expressing it,” Cunningham says. “Princess has exhibited some characteristic behaviors since she’s started her new job. When she’s on the ground, she likes to go slumming. Find herself a working girl--- sometimes a dirtgirl, most often a jock– and take her home for a night or two. She wants a pet, but a dangerous one. Not too clean. A little rough. Not too removed from the street. But civilized enough to know how to please. Not a thatch. ”

“That’s me?” Sarah asks, with no surprise. “Her new pet?”

“We’ve researched you. You were a licensed prostitute for five years. And rated highly by your employers. ”

“Five and a half,” she says. “And not with girls.”

“He’s a man, really. An old man. Why should it be hard for you?”

Sarah looks at the blond freckled girl in the holo, trying to find the old Russian in those eyes. The look that was always the same, wanting her to be some piece of private fantasy, real but not too real, orgasms genuine but never with genuine passion. The plastic girl, an object for things that grew hidden in their minds, something they could get rid of quickly and never have to take home. They were upset, somehow, if you didn’t understand their fantasy right away. After a while she had got so that she could.

No different from all the other old men, she thinks as she looks at the picture. Not really. They want power, over their own flesh and another’s. Pay not so much for sex, but for power over sex, over the thing that threatens to control them. And so they take their passion and use it to control others. She understands control all right.

She looks up at Cunningham. “Did they give you a new body as well?” she asks. “Guaranteed inconspicuous? Or did you have Firebud make you over, so that you had no style at all?”

He gazes at her steadily, the same calm gaze. She can’t seem to touch it, or him. “I can’t say,” he says.

“How long have you worked for them?” she asks. “You were a mudboy once– you don’t have the look that
they
do. But you work for them now. Is that what they promised you? A new body when you get old? And if you die on one of these jobs here in the mud, a nice funeral with the corporate anthem sung over your body?”

“Something like that,” he agrees.

“Got you heart and soul, have they?” she asks.

“That’s how they want it.” Dryly, accepting. He knows the price of his ticket.

“Control,” she says. “You understand that. You are owned by people who worship control, and so you control yourself well. But you’re a pressure cooker, and the steam is just under the surface. Do you go slumming in your off hours, like Princess? To the clubs, to the houses? Are you one of my old customers?” She gazes into his expressionless eyes. “You could be,” she says. “I never remembered faces.”

“As it happens, I’m not,” he says. “I never saw you before I was given this assignment.”

He is beginning to look a little out of patience.

Sarah grins. “Don’t worry,” she says, and throws the holo of Princess on the table. “I’ll do your owners proud.”

“I’m sure you will,” he says. “They won’t have it any other way.”

IN THE ZONE/YES

Like Times Square neon, the amber LED tracks across the upper limits of Sarah’s vision, just where the shadow of her brows would be.

PRINCESS MOVING PRINCESS MOVING PRINCESS MOVING...

The Aujourd’Oui is Princess’s favorite spot, but there are others. Sarah should be ready to move at need.

The washroom at the Aujourd’Oui is a conglomeration of mirrors and soft white lights, red flock on the gold wallpaper, bronze waterspouts above the sinks, chromed tissue dispensers. Sarah shoulders through the door, and a pair of dirtgirls standing in front of the mirrors glance at her. There is envy in their glance, and a kind of desperate awe, and then the eyes turn self-consciously back to the mirrors. The satin jacket represents something they want and will most likely never have, the freedom of the white crane to climb into the sky amid the silver glitter of stars. Sarah is suddenly aware of the sound of sobbing, magnified by the low ceiling, the hard edges of the room. The dirtgirl’s eyes stay fixed in their own reflections as she passes and steps into a stall.

It is the girl in the next stall who is weeping, pausing only to draw massive shuddering breaths before bringing the air out again through the tortured muscles of the throat. It hurts to cry that hard, Sarah knows. The ribs feel as if they are breaking. The stall shudders to the impact as the girl drives her head against its wall, and Sarah knows that it is pain the girl is seeking, perhaps to drive out pain of another kind.

Sarah makes it a policy not to get between people and what they need.

To the sound of the impacts Sarah takes her inhaler from her belt, puts it to her nose, and triggers it. There is a brief hiss of compressed gas. Sarah throws her head back, feeling the rush of hardfire racing along her nerve paths. The stall quakes. Sarah inhales again, using the other nostril, and she feels her body go warm and then cold, the hair on her forearms prickling. Her lips peel back from her teeth, and she feels at once abnormally sensitive and abnormally hard, as if her skin is made of razor blades that can feel every mote of dust. She needs the bite of the drug, needs it to give herself that extra piece of conviction. She hadn’t mentioned it to Cunningham. The hell with him-she’ll play it her own way...

PRINCESS MOVING PRINCESS MOVING...

The other girl’s weeping is a whining, grating sound, like a saw on bone, syncopated with the hysterical crashing as she smashes again and again into the divider. Sarah can see flecks of blood daubing the floor of the next stall. She opens her door and sweeps through the room, past the dirtgirls, whose eyes stand out pale amid their rimming of kohl as they gaze at each other and wonder what to do about the sobbing casualty.

PRINCESS AUJOURD’OUI REPEAT AUJOURD’OUI

AM SWITCHING POLICE TRANSMISSIONS

GOOD HUNTING CUNNINGHAM.

Sarah blinks as she steps into the darkness of the club, feeling the hardfire impelling her limbs to motion, and she rides the drug like a jock on the flaming roman candle of a booster, climbing for the edge of the sky and still in control. The corners of the room, the dancers and fixtures, flare like liquid-crystal kaleidoscopes.

And then Princess comes, and Sarah’s motion freezes. Princess is surrounded by dirtboy muscle, but she stands out clearly in the dark---there is an aura about her, a glow. She has the Look as none of them have, a soft radiance that speaks of luxury, soft and carefree joys, freedom even from gravity. A life even the jocks can’t share. It seems as if there is a pause in the music, as the room inhales in mutual awe. Two hundred eyes can see the glow and a hundred mouths, hungry for it, begin to salivate. Sarah feels her body tingle, flares of nerve warmth at her fingertips. She is ready.

Sarah gives a soft private laugh, as if her triumph were already a fact, and walks long-legged across the darkened bar as Firebud has taught her, swinging her broad shoulders in counterpoint to her hips, insinuant animal style. She gives a grin to the muscle and holds her hands palms out to show them she carries no weapons, and then Princess stands before her. She is a good four inches shorter and Sarah looks down at her, hands cocked on her hips, challenging. Princess’s soft blond hair is worn long, ringlets playing with her cheeks, her ears. Her eyes are circled with vast blooms of purple and yellow makeup, to look like bruises, making public the secret wish of a translucent white face that has never known pain. Her mouth is a deep violet, another laceration. Sarah cocks her head back and laughs low, baring her teeth, and thinks of the sounds hyenas make on the hunt.

“Dance with me, Princess,” she says to the wide cornflower eyes. “I am your wildest dreams.”

PRACTICE CREATES PERFECTION

PERFECTION CREATES POWER

POWER CONQUERS LAW

LAW CREATES HEAVEN

–– A helpful reminder from Toshiba

Nicole has a cigarette in the corner of her mouth and wears a jacket of cracked brown leather. She has dark blond hair that reaches down her back in tawny strands, and long deep gray eyes that look up at Sarah without a flicker.

Cunningham stands behind her with his two assistants. One is huge, a muscleman with no neck. The other is small, blond, and has even less to say than Cunningham. Sarah thinks the smaller is the more dangerous of the two.