Weight of the Heart (Bruna Husky Book 2) (23 page)

32

F
ive hours later Bruna was stationed opposite Number 27, Doctora Amalia Gayo Street. The street was in the Columnata district, one of Madrid’s new commercial precincts. Number 27 was a beehive of a building, with its twelve-meter-square microapartments that reminded you of the tiny living areas in space modules. Thanks to clever technology, everything fitted together, although the apartment looked more like one of Bruna’s jigsaw puzzles than a real dwelling. Normally, these beehive buildings catered to people more or less on the fringes of society, impoverished and without any resources. But this block was in a good part of the city and was recently and solidly built, with a certain aspiration toward quality. The tenants seemed to be a heterogeneous mix of students, transients, young entrepreneurs with ambition, and even adulterous lovers wanting a discreet retreat. Or at least that was the impression Bruna had gained after watching the main entrance for a few hours. There was a lot of activity in the building because it encompassed twelve hundred microapartments—twelve floors, one hundred per floor. People never stopped going in and out. The rep in fact didn’t really know what she was doing there. She didn’t know what she should be looking for. Professional caution had suggested that she study the lay of the land first, that was all. But at some point she’d have to abandon her surveillance spot, cross the street, go up to the ninth floor, and knock on the door of Number 930. Maybe nobody would be in.

Bruna sighed and shifted her weight from one foot to the other, feeling her small plasma gun brush against her hip. The rep rarely carried her weapon, but since her return from Labari she always had it with her. The ghostly presence of the Black Widow, and the trail of bodies she was leaving behind, worried Bruna. Nichu Nichu was circling in the dark with silent footsteps; Nichu Nichu coming ever closer, as lethal and inevitable as Death herself.

The rep frowned. She was very tense, partly because of the Black Widow’s latent threat and partly because of Carnal’s posthumous request, which almost frightened and unsettled her more than the assassin.
Actually,
Bruna thought to herself,
I could just go home right now and erase the words of that nutcase from my memory.
Husky shook herself to get rid of the adrenaline, which was making her back stiff. What rubbish: How could she forget those words? There was only one option: she had to go up to the apartment.

“Let’s get this over and done with once and for all,” she muttered in a low voice.

The rep walked through the main entrance and into a huge lobby filled by a row of thirty elevators. Even with so many, people were still waiting in front of most of them. She ran to get into one of the elevators as the doors were closing, pushing her way in to make space. The ten or so humans who were occupying the car looked at her angrily. Yes, they were angry, but not frightened, Bruna noted mentally, somewhat surprised. She was the only person who got out on the ninth floor, and she stood there surveying the long corridor with dismay. It extended to the left and right of the elevators and was full of doors, with little space between them. The doors were armor-plated metal, compensating for the constant bustle of people coming in and out of the building and the lack of any security control in the lobby. They could have been bank vault doors, though the corridor looked more like a morgue.

“What a horrible place.”

An elevator opened nearby, and two technohumans got out.

“Hi,” they said before disappearing down the corridor.

Bruna looked at the numbers flashing green above the doors. The middle of the corridor coincided with 999, and to her right was 900. No doubt the corridor turned a corner and 930 was to the right, the opposite direction to the one taken by the reps who’d just gotten off the elevator. She turned the corner at 913; 930 was about halfway down the next section. Bruna planted herself in front of the door. The metal plate was dull and a little lackluster. It had a few scuffs, like the ones on old fridges.
I’ve come this far,
she told herself.
I’ve come this far.
Carnal had spoken about someone female.
A human, a replicant?
She took a deep breath and rang the bell. The door was opened instantly with a furious tug; the tenant had obviously seen her image through the virtual peephole.

On the threshold, contemplating her with a look of astonishment, was—Bruna.

Bruna Husky.

“By the great Morlay,” they exclaimed at the same time in identical voices.

The mirror-image effect was comic, but neither of them was amused. Stunned, they examined each other minutely without saying a word. The new-version Bruna also had her hair shaved and also had her head, and probably the rest of her body, traversed by a tattoo, although in her case it was a bit thicker and reproduced the drawing of a closed zipper. But it ran down in exactly the same location: through the middle of her left eyelid. The stranger stretched out her hand and tried to touch Bruna’s cheek just where the line was. The detective reacted instinctively, moving to give the other rep a hard slap, but she in turn responded just as quickly and grabbed Bruna’s arm with her left hand. The result was that in a matter of seconds the two technohumans had become fastened to each other, with Bruna holding the rep’s right wrist and the rep holding Bruna with her other hand, and the two of them grunting and shaking, as bellicose and charged with adrenaline as fighting dogs. They looked at each other in this way, face-to-face, for a few seconds. Then the profound understanding of what they were seeing reflected in their tiger eyes and caused their aggression to evaporate as quickly as a drop of water in the desert. They released each other, shrugged their shoulders, shuffled their feet, and cleared their throats. The two of them doing the same thing. A small smile appeared on the new rep’s lips, and Bruna imitated her.

“It’s amazing,” said Bruna.

“Yes.”

“My name’s Bruna Husky.”

“I’m Clara Husky.”

They were silent for a moment, weighing up the information.

“Come in,” said Clara.

There wasn’t much to come in to, but Bruna did so. The rep pushed a button, and the bed, which was occupying most of the available space, folded up ingeniously, converting into a narrow table with a small bench right up against the wall. They sat down on the bench. It was ergonomic and much more comfortable than it looked.

“Do you want something to drink?”

Bruna was going to say no but then had an idea. “Maybe some white wine.”

“Of course!” replied Clara, bursting out laughing.

She opened a small fridge set into the wall that seemed to contain nothing but bottles of white wine. She took out a half-empty one and divided its contents between two glasses, ugly glasses that must have come with the microapartment. Bruna preferred to drink from a wineglass, but the wine was good. Clara was wearing military fatigues; she’d probably recently been discharged and so was living in this beehive as an interim measure. She was identical to Bruna in every other way: same height, same weight, similar physical condition. She had an ugly and recent scar on her neck, which Bruna didn’t have. The rep took a good swig of her wine and looked at Bruna expectantly.

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m not sure. Carnal, an RRM techno, sent me a hologram telling me to come to this address, and that you’d know . . . I had no idea you’d be another me.”

“Oh yes, of course, that weird character,” said Clara, relieved, as if she now understood everything. “She contacted me about ten days ago. She told me she was leaving Madrid and that I had to hand over a message to a friend. She sent me a hologram ball and said that sooner or later a rep would come to get it. And that I shouldn’t look at the message it contained until then. She paid me a thousand Gs for doing it.”

“It didn’t strike you as an odd request?”

“Sure it did. But I’ve just been discharged, I’m broke, and I’m looking for work. The money is really helpful, and it seemed very straightforward.”

“You didn’t look at the hologram?”

“I would have liked to of course,” said the rep, half closing her eyes and smiling. “But it has a digital double password—your fingerprint and mine. When she sent me the holo, she made me put in my imprint.”

They both looked thoughtfully at their hands.

“Won’t they be the same?” asked Bruna.

“Probably,” answered Clara with excitement. “But it didn’t occur to me to check.”

She got up and opened another little door hidden in the wall, revealing a cupboard with shelves. From one of the shelves she brought down the hologram ball and placed it on the table.

“This is it. Let’s try.”

The ball’s two poles were each marked with a red circle. Clara applied her right thumb to one of them and held it there until there was a beep; then she turned the little sphere and put her thumb on the other circle. The hologram unfolded with a hiss, and Carnal appeared in front of them. Too many people for such a small room.

“If everything has worked as I anticipated, the two of you should be together now, Husky B and Husky C,” said Carnal, unleashing a malicious ringing guffaw.

Bruna shivered. On this hologram the activist was still healthy, still well, with no apparent signs of TTT.

“Well, don’t you think this is a great start to a message? It sounds like an adventure series on the public screen,” Carnal continued sarcastically. “But time to get serious. Hmm . . . Let’s start again. If everything has worked as I anticipated, the two of you should be there together, Husky B and Husky C. Did you get a surprise? I’m sure you did. Were you perhaps a bit bothered to find out you weren’t unique? What if I were to tell you that there are many more? They make twelve versions of each model. From Husky A to Husky L. So there are ten others.”

Carnal had become very serious.

“As you’ll be able to understand, it’s much more cost-efficient for the manufacturers to repeat a product. That’s all we are: a damned product. They pay the genetic engineers and the memorists only once, and they get twelve copies. A profitable business. And it’s not even illegal, because they take advantage of an administrative loophole. But they know of course that what they are doing is neither acceptable nor ethical, and that’s why they are at pains to hide it. They make the engineers, the workers, and the memorists sign nondisclosure agreements. Moreover, they have the product-activation sequence programmed in such a way that the copies never coincide. The next copy can only be activated when the previous one dies. On top of that they insert them into sites that are geographically very far apart in order to minimize the risk that a third party will recognize them.”

“But then,” Clara said, so stunned by the news that she seemed to have forgotten that Carnal was not an interactive hologram.

The rep’s message superimposed itself over her words: “So now you’ll be asking yourselves, if that’s the case, how is it possible that the two of us are here now?”

Carnal stopped talking and gave another smug, happy smile, like a child taking delight in the expectations she was sure she was creating.

“I sabotaged the production program at TriTon, the largest replicant business in the world. Your company. Unfortunately, not mine. I would have liked to meet myself. We could have caused quite a stir. Anyway, as far as I know TriTon still hasn’t realized, because no two identical technos have met. Until now. You two are the first. It was very complicated work, I can assure you. Apart from altering the activation dates so that the current model and the next one would coincide chronologically, I canceled the geographic scattering of the combat reps. I would have liked to cancel this for all the reps, but TriTon was closing in on me, and I had to get the hell out of the program. It was pure chance that I started with combat reps. But it was fucking disastrous for me. Being sent to the outer reaches of the Earth to carry out their two years of compulsory military service, none of them have coincided. Until now. Because those two years have now passed. Now dozens of combat reps are turning up in those same destinations as their previous selves. It’s going to be a disaster for TriTon.”

Carnal’s savage peals of laughter were interrupted by a long coughing fit. When she recovered her breath, the little computation rep lifted her head and stared into the camera, looking worried, defenseless, and frightened.

“But I suspect that the party has come too late for me. I’m not invited anymore. Fuck humans. I hope they burst.”

And with those words full of resentment and pain, Carnal switched off and disappeared forever.

“What’s the matter with her?” said Clara.

Bruna looked at her incredulously. But then Clara was younger, and she’d just finished her military service, surrounded by other recently born reps. She hadn’t seen anyone die of TTT yet.

“When she coughed, she realized that her TTT had just fired up,” Bruna said. “In fact she sent me another hologram, not a ball but a call message, and she was dying. Ravaged. She must have recorded it three or four days after this one.”