Manhattan in Reverse (18 page)

See, I made exactly the same mistake as poor old Toby Jenson: I underestimated Marcus. I didn’t think it through. My music made ripples, big ripples. Everyone knows me, I’m famous right across the globe as a one-off supertalent. There’s only one other person in this time who knows those songs aren’t original: Marcus. He knew I came after him. And he hasn’t quite cracked the rejuvenation treatment yet. It’s time for him to move on, to make his fresh start again in another parallel universe.

That’s why he framed me. Next time around he’s going to become our god. It’s not something he’s going to share with anyone else.

I looked round the interview room, which had an identical lay-out to the grubby cube just down the hall where I interviewed Toby Jenson last time around. Paul Mathews and Carmen Galloway were giving me blank-faced looks; buttoning back their anger at being dragged into the statement. I couldn’t quite get used to Paul with a full head of hair, but Orthogene’s follicle treatment is a big earner for the company, everyone in this universe uses it.

I tried to bring my hands up to them, an emphasis to the appeal I was making, but the handcuffs were chained to the table. I glanced down as the metal pulled at my wrists. After the samples had been taken, the forensics team had washed the blood off my hands, but I couldn’t forget it, there’d been so much; the image was actually stronger than the one I kept of Toby Jenson. Yet I’d never seen those girls until I woke up to find their bodies in the hotel bed with me. The paramedics didn’t even try to revive them.

‘Please,’ I implored. ‘Paul, Carmen, you have to believe me.’ And I couldn’t even say
for old time’s sake.

The Forever Kitten

The mansion’s garden was screened by lush trees. I never thought I’d be so entranced by anything as simple as horse chestnuts, but that’s what eighteen months in jail on remand will do for your appreciation of the simple things.

Joe Gordon was waiting for me. The venture capitalist and his wife Fiona were sitting on ornamental metal chairs in a sunken patio area. Their five-year-old daughter, Heloise, was sprawled on a pile of cushions, playing with a ginger kitten.

‘Thanks for paying my bail,’ I said.

‘Sorry it took so long, Doctor,’ he said. ‘The preparations weren’t easy, but we have a private plane waiting to take you to the Caribbean – an island the EU has no extradition treaty with.’

‘I see. Do you think it’s necessary?’

‘For the moment, yes. The Brussels Bioethics Commission is looking to make an example of you. They didn’t appreciate how many regulations you violated.’

‘They wouldn’t have minded if the treatment worked properly.’

‘Of course not, but that day isn’t yet here, is it? We can set you up with another lab out there.’

‘Ah well, there are worse places to be exiled. I appreciate it.’

‘Least we could do. My colleagues and I made a lot of money from the Viagra gland you developed.’

I looked at Heloise again. She was a beautiful child, and the smile on her face as she played with the kitten was angelic. The ball of ginger fluff was full of rascally high spirits, just like every two-month-old kitten. I kept staring, shocked by the familiar marbling pattern in its fluffy light fur.

‘Yes,’ Joe said with quiet pride. ‘I managed to save one before the court had the litter destroyed. A simple substitution; the police never knew.’

‘It’s three years old now,’ I whispered.

‘Indeed. Heloise is very fond of it.’

‘Do you understand what this means? The initial stasis-regeneration procedure is valid. If the kitten is still alive and maintaining itself at the same biological age after this long, then in theory it can live forever, just as it is. The procedure stabilized its cellular structure.’

‘I understand perfectly, thank you, Doctor. Which is why we intend to keep on funding your research. We believe human rejuvenation is possible.’

I recognized the greed in his eyes: it wasn’t pleasant. ‘It’s still a long way off. This procedure was just the first of a great many. It has no real practical application, we can’t use it on an adult. Once a mammal reaches sexual maturity its cells can’t accept such a radical modification.’

‘We have every confidence that in the end you’ll produce the result we all want.’

I turned back to the child with her pet, feeling more optimistic than I had in three years. ‘I can do it,’ I said through clenched teeth. ‘I can.’ Revenge, it is said, is best served cold. I could see myself looking down on the gravestones of those fools in the Bioethics Commission; in say . . . oh, about five hundred years’ time. They’d be very cold indeed by then.

Joe’s affable smile suddenly hardened. I turned, fearing the police had arrived. I’m still very twitchy about raids.

It wasn’t the police. The teenage girl coming out from the house was dressed in a black leather micro-skirt and very tight scarlet T-shirt. She would have been attractive if it wasn’t for the permanent expression of belligerence on her face; the tattoos weren’t nice either. The short sleeves on the T-shirt revealed track marks on her arms. ‘Is that . . .’

‘Saskia,’ Joe said with extreme distaste.

I really wouldn’t have recognized his older daughter. Saskia used to be a lovely girl; but this creature was the kind of horror story that belonged on the front page of a tabloid.

‘Whatcha starin’ at?’ she demanded.

‘Nothing,’ I promised quickly.

‘I need money,’ she told her father.

‘Get a job.’

Her face screwed up in rage. I really believed she was going to hit him. I could see Heloise behind her on the verge of tears, arms curling protectively around the kitten.

‘You know what I’ll do to get it if you don’t,’ Saskia said.

‘Fine,’ Joe snapped. ‘We no longer care.’

She made an obscene gesture and hurried back through the mansion. For a moment I thought Joe was going to run after her. I’d never seen him so angry. Instead he turned to his wife who was frozen in her chair, shaking slightly. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked tenderly.

She nodded bravely, her eyes slowly becoming unfocused.

‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Joe said bitterly. ‘We didn’t spoil her, we were very careful about that. Then about a year ago she started hanging out with the wrong sort: we’ve been living in a nightmare ever since. She’s quit school; she’s got a drug habit, she steals from us constantly, I can’t remember how many times she’s been arrested for joyriding and shoplifting.’

‘I’m sorry. Kids huh!’

‘Teenagers,’ he said wretchedly. ‘Fiona needed two Prozac gland implants to cope.’

I smiled over at Heloise who’d started playing with the kitten again. ‘At least you’ve got her.’

‘Yes.’ Joe seemed to make some kind of decision. ‘Before you leave, I’d like you to perform the cellular stasis-regeneration procedure for me.’

‘I don’t understand. I explained before, it’s simply the first stage of verifying the overwrite sequence we developed.’

His smile hardened. ‘Nevertheless, you will do it again. Without my help you will be going back to prison for a long time.’

‘It’s of no use to adults,’ I said helplessly. ‘You won’t become young, or even maintain your current age.’

‘It’s not for me,’ he said.

‘Then who . . .’ I followed his gaze to Heloise. ‘Oh.’

‘She’s perfect just the way she is,’ he said with a gentle smile. ‘And that, Doctor, is the way she’s going to stay.’

Blessed by an Angel

Imelda leaves her modest family home as the evening shade washes over the front garden, a coy smile lifting her maroon-glossed lips. She’s off to see her lover, a prospect which lifts her heart and enhances her buoyant nature. The sun is slowly sinking behind the gigantic seven-hundred-year-old arcology that dominates the centre of her home town, Kuhmo, casting a shadow which methodically stretches out to darken the town’s outlying districts. It is a sharp eclipse which she has witnessed every evening of her seventeen years. Yet the gloaming it brings does nothing to stifle her mood; she’s a happy, beautiful girl with an enchantingly flat face and pert nose, her auburn hair flowing below her shoulders. Tonight she’s chosen a sleeveless blue and white dress to wear, its semiorganic fabric swirling jauntily around her long legs. Wherever she goes she attracts wistful glances from the boys who linger along Kuhmo’s boring streets as they search for something to do before the night is out.

She turns into Rustwith Street, one of the broad thoroughfares which radiate out from the hexagonal base of the tapering arcology. Tall novik trees line this street as they do all the major routes cutting through the civic centre, their woolly blue-green foliage a deliberate counterpoint to the bleak mountainous walls of the arcology. There are vehicles driving down the wide road, primitive vehicles with wheels powered by electric motors. This world of Anagaska has never really benefited from the bountiful wealth flowing among the Greater Commonwealth planets, its citizens seemingly content to bumble along their own slow cautious development route, decades if not centuries behind the more dynamic worlds. And this provincial town is very set in its ways, manacled to the past by the arcology which dominates the local mindset much as it does the landscape.

There are some modern regrav capsules in the air above the roads: shiny colourful ovoids as big as the cars below, skimming silently along at their regulation fifteen-metres altitude which puts them level with the upper branches of the trees.

Imelda pays the traffic no attention as she hurries along to the café where she has arranged to meet her lover; like the arcology the buzz of vehicles is a mere background fixture. So she is completely unaware of the chrome green capsule gliding along at walking pace several hundred metres behind her, maintaining a steady distance. The two Advancer Protectorate members inside are observing her through sensors meshed with the capsule’s metal skin, and a deluge of scrutineer programs they have scattered across the local net. Their organization might not be official, but they have access to police codes, allowing them to pursue their clandestine business undetected within the town’s electronic and physical architecture.

As Imelda turns into the Urwan Plaza with its throng of pedestrians several wolf-whistles and raunchy pings are thrown in her direction. The scrutineers examine the pings for hidden code, but the boys and young men who sent them are intent only on compliments and hopeful for a smile. Imelda does smile breezily, but keeps on walking. She is using virtually none of her Advancer functions, the macrocellular clusters supplementing her nervous system are barely interfaced with the planetary cybersphere. Exoimages and mental icons are folded back into her peripheral vision, untouched by her neural hands. Secondary thought routines operating inside her macrocellular clusters monitor several relevant events. She is pleased to see Sabine, her younger sister, has finally reached their aunt’s house in New Helsinki: there was a long delay at Inubo station while she waited for the delayed regrav bus connection. Imelda is quietly relieved, she loves her sister dearly, but Sabine is quite a ditzy girl; that kind of foul-up was likely to panic her. Imelda’s other interest is Erik Horovi, who is not merely on time, but well ahead of schedule, waiting for her in the Pathfinder café. An exoimage from the café’s net reveals him to be sitting at a booth table ordering the stewardbot to stand by. Her neural hands grip the exoimage and expand it, sliding the focus in towards his face. His own clusters must be alerting him to the observation for he grins round at the camera. She sends him a tactile ping, hand-squeezing-thigh, and says: ‘I’ll be there soon, order for me.’

His grin broadens at the ping, and he calls the stewardbot over.

It is all manufactured. Erik, his location, his responses, are in fact all being cooked up by a simulacrum program running in a large processor kube on the arcology’s seventy-fifth floor. The same suite of abandoned rooms where Erik’s unconscious body is lying, fastened to a field-medical cot. But the program has fooled Imelda and she hurries on through the plaza.

Her route takes her out through one of the side paths before turning into a narrow opening between two buildings. The alleys here form a small maze as they link up to the rear of a dozen commercial buildings. But she’s perfectly safe. The walls might be high, and old, and dark; there may be rubbish scattered over the concrete, and there may not be any people about, but this is Kuhmo, and she remains linked to the cybersphere. Imelda is a thoroughly modern child of the Commonwealth, she knows that safety and the police are only the speed of a thought away.

A lustrous green regrav capsule descends into the alley ahead of her. It’s unusual, but she doesn’t hesitate. She’s mildly puzzled, because it’s a large capsule, and she sees it’s going to be difficult for her to squeeze round. Just how stupid and inconsiderate is the pilot program?

Her link to the cybersphere falls away. Imelda comes to an uncertain halt, frowning suspiciously at the capsule. She’s never been disconnected since the macrocellular clusters became active the year she reached sexual maturity. The cybersphere and beyond that the all-embracing Commonwealth unisphere are her eternal companions; they are her
right
, she thinks crossly. Even now, fear is alien to her. This is the Commonwealth.