Post by Aedh on Nov 24, 2011 20:00:31 GMT -5
001
Tuesday, 6 October 2116
It was blowing hard that afternoon, grey clouds scudding across the sky bringing rain gusts in from the south, and the big man standing looking out the little office's window at the building opposite didn’t need an executive view to show him the whitecaps on Elliott Bay. The weather in Queen City was notorious at this season. A slow day, he thought. Slow seemed to pervade everything nowadays. The faster machines got, the slower people became. As a former medical scientist and inventor, he knew something about both.
He picked up his cup of bux, as most people called it, which wasn't coffee exactly, but it had coffee in it. He could afford the real thing, and indulged at home--but not here, where the scent would drift down the hall and remind the other minor City bureaucrats that he only acted like one of them. He stood well over six feet, built like a football linebacker, with grey starting to show in his hair; and his suit, open now at the front, was a study in designer modesty. Nothing but its perfect fit and its slightly old-fashioned cuffs distinguished it from the ordinary off-the-rack ensembles that most of the building's other occupants wore, but it cost more than some of them made in a half a year. He sighed, wishing for a cigar, and turned back to his desk, sitting down and firing up his computer instead.
The news-windows flickered across the thin, semi-transparent holoscreen. In London, Lambeth Palace was having a grand re-opening as prime retail space. Prime Minister Abd ‘al Husayn al-Waziri and his Islamic Labour Party had already converted Westminster Abbey into a secular museum some years before. What had been St Paul’s Cathedral had--with suitable architectural work--become the Masjid Sayyid Piyale, and the generation that first saw veils required for all British women in public had passed away of old age by now. In what had once been known as Germany, the Alimaniyah Islamic Republic had held elections. Early results from Dusseldorf--now ‘Al Dawsil--Hamburg, renamed Al Hammaburq; Erfurt, that is, Al-Arfur, and bomb-wracked Berlin, which still officially retained its old name as a sop to the native ’ummah al-Kitab, were mixed. The international markets were still closed for the Eid-al-Fitr holiday, marking the end of Ramadan.
In local news, there were price hikes, as always. Queen City--formerly Seattle--was part of a 'North Pacific Coast Economic Cooperative Sphere' which included British Columbia, Washington State, and Oregon, with a portion of Northern California. This was not a State or political entity, but it wielded more authority over everyday life than lawmakers did. Unlike legislators, whose hands were tied by the need for reelection, and whose work was usually undone by bitterly partisan successors of the opposing party, the PACES’ appointed officials stayed in office for decades and had enormous leverage through their close cooperation with the education establishment, and powers over industry—especially with utilities, which provided the all-important electricity and ‘Net access. Local news included another approval of certain price hikes: milk would rise from $6.90 a liter to $7.20, and bux from $11.65 to $13.15 per hundred grams. Gas for your car, if you still owned one—and a surprising number of people did—was no longer priced by the liter at the pump; rather, you bought allotment cards for it, priced strictly according to subsidized schedules. A liter of gas would now propel most passenger vehicles about twenty-five miles, and for a typical household making double the poverty line--about $840,000 a year now--a month’s allotment might be sixty-five to eighty liters, and cost anywhere from $450 to $900.
In Washington DC, the last lawsuit on the Ayers-Pitt Act had been turned away by the Supreme Court. Within the boundaries of the United States section of the North American Entity, it had for years been accepted that machines could not be considered legal employees for most wage and benefit purposes. The prickly part lay in the definition of 'machine.' He himself, as a specialist in cybernetic neurophysiology, had been called to testify before Congressional committees. How much of the body--or brain--could be replaced, or augmented, by technical means before the subject could no longer be considered legally 'human,' and what parts counted for more than others? The whole phenomenon, and debate, had acquired a name: humod, from 'human modification.' Pitt-Ayers, passed by Congress and signed into law by President Tawnisha Jefferson, was the latest attempt to revisit this.
What would become 'humod' had started with War veterans eighty years before, restoring limbs and organs, and salvaging function from brains subjected to trauma head injuries. Out of that had emerged civilian-application goals of enhancing certain physical characteristics such as speed, stamina, and resistance, and controlling neurochemical processes in order to prevent mood disorders and improve concentration and attention. While in theory it was all therapeutic, there were always those ready to push the envelope, and those ready to finance it for the sake of their own goals and--or--those of their shareholders.
At first it had been relatively free-wheeling. Workers were co-opted or bought with promises of high wages, and soon humods of varying degrees of adaptation--some visually noticeable, others not--were working in law enforcement, nuclear power, agriculture, corrections, deep-seabed extraction, and other dangerous or difficult jobs. But public revulsion set in, sparked by unfortunate mishaps exacerbated by yellow journalism, and politicians were quick to sniff the wind. Humod was denounced, excoriated, and put under such tight Federal control that it was effectively criminalized. The existing humods had vanished almost overnight. Some families muttered about ‘vacations’ from which their spouse or son or daughter never returned, or of finding empty beds in the morning. But it had been done. The question had seemed to be settled, and for some years all humod was completely banned. However, it had arisen again with regard to the demographic crisis.
World birthrates had been tanking for many, many years. The earth still hosted over five billion people, even after the disastrous wars of the middle of the last century, but many of them were old. Study after study showed sterility spreading like the legendary plague, unevenly but relentlessly. The age of the average citizen had been rising for nearly a century, and nothing could bring it down. In what was left of Africa, and in the Middle East and Islamic societies it was still under thirty, but outside of those areas it was well above that. Non-Islamic Europeans were, on average, nearing fifty and would essentially be gone in another generation. East Asians and Australians were not far behind; North Americans were closing in on the latter group, and South Americans picking up speed.
Measure after measure had been tried by NAE, Federal, and State governments. Restrictions on immigration had been lifted, but returned again after outcries from Blue Party politicians, whose labor-oriented constituencies had seen immigrants as almost the equal of the machines at depressing wages; from Red Party politicians, who had pointed to an uptick in terrorists and criminals from Islamic-dominated areas, eager to export their unsavory elements as they had once exported oil; and from Green Party politicians as well, who sniffed at the newcomers’ eagerness to endanger the environment with their own retrograde cultural habits and their offspring’s disposable nappies.
Efforts to enhance fertility through traditional science, and to encourage people’s positive views of it by means of handsome tax incentives, coupled with direct cash subsidies, had met with indifferent success. Complaints from parties out of power about how to pay for the former, and from gender lobbies over the insulting and degrading nature of the latter, had combined to see to that. Massive fraud, combined with a short-lived boom in 'baby tourism'--quashed by other countries anxious to preserve their own resources and tainted by the involvement of international crime syndicates--had further degraded the hoped-for results. And then there was the carbon indemnity, about which the big man thought frequently and cynically. Upon each birth, the lucky parents were presented with a tax bill--usually in the hundreds of thousands, sometimes in the millions, depending on their income--designed to pay for carbon offsets for their new greenhouse-gas-spewing arrivals. He had no doubt that a lot of people had themselves sterilized simply to avoid the potential tax liability.
Still, every baby was an increasingly valuable asset. And for those that were born, fitness was indispensable for such an investment. Family and reproductive health exceptions to the laws were set forth in Pitt-Ayers, which had now survived its final court challenge. Influential segments of society had always taken a sanguinary view of work to prevent and correct birth defects, and that had been the big man’s practice: better babies through boutique biotech. A wide range of therapies were still illegal, or licensed only on an experimental basis. But for those with money and influence … well, if they weren’t too finicky about stupid laws and were willing to invest money and patience, much could be done. The big man had done much, and become involved in a very public scandal.
He’d taken a fall, plea-bargained, rolled with events, and had agreed to place his expertise at the service of the government in a quiet little way, in exchange for being left alone and able to retain the very nice income he had from certain patents and inventions and investments. He was--as he had to keep telling people who found their way to him--retired.
But, as his ambitious wife kept saying, in a time and place where most people could now expect to live well into their nineties, forty-eight was a pretty damn young age for retirement. It certainly wasn’t too old for him to become involved in the pro-child movement in the last option that seemed really, indisputably open: surrogate parenting.
The Government fertility incentives had made surrogacy popular with those able to conceive. Unlike technology, which carried horrifying images from past abuses and mistakes, it was the 'soft' solution. Most everyone favored it in principle, but how to regulate it--it did have to be regulated, of course--was the topic of the time. Senator Pitt and Congressman Ayers would surely have a new task ahead of them.
Why sterility was spreading was still poorly understood. Some speculated about food additives, global climate change, or a change in solar radiation, or chemical and biological weapons possibly unleashed during the past War, which still sputtered on in low-intensity conflicts and occasional terror strikes. Preachers thundered God’s judgment, and others touted the revenge of Gaia for past sins against the earth. Whatever it was, in North America at least, somewhere around thirty percent of all women seemed properly equipped but simply could not conceive. The male sterility rate was much higher--around ninety percent, it was thought.
There was still plenty of sex around, especially with the conquest of the AIDS virus some years before. One could now phone out for a quickie, and an obliging, youthful, healthy Insta-Bang or Dial-A-Gasm person would arrive at home or office to deliver thrills selected from the menu, sold in five-minute units. The military, with free healthcare provided to its young and fit members and their spouses, had become a favored haven for fertiles either to raise their own or rent themselves out from a safe perch. In the interest of raising young people for military service, it had also established what had become the unofficial Government adoption agency: US-DADS, or the United States Defense Adoption Service. A class of professional defense personnel with no families and no ties to anyone save their comrades and officers was in the making.
But however fertiles shared themselves out--via donation, artificial insemination, or just the simple old-fashioned way--it wasn’t enough. Despite the hefty financial incentivization, there were plenty of fertiles who didn’t care to become ‘breeders’ in any way, and were feted by doom-minded progressives as heroes of humanity’s richly-deserved and seemingly imminent exit from the planet. Hundreds of localities had already adopted ‘bug-free’ policies, creating environments in which ‘breeders’ were made very unwelcome, while in other places--stigmatized in the media and on the ‘Net as ‘breeding pens,’ families were invited. That the ‘pens’ were more economically productive and had lower-than-average rates of crime, suicide, and mental problems only added to the outrage of reporters, who categorized their inhabitants with such terms as retrograde, gun-loving, trailer trash, bible-toting, poor, fundamentalist, fascist, and ignorant, and added them to humods and immigrants as job-thieves and parasites on the happy, child-free utopia that North America ought to become. The big man’s home was in one such place, fortunately an island and home to some others of his economic class. The island was picketed from the Queen City ferry dock at which transportation left, but the occasional student protesters who actually went there, wishing to observe the ‘trailer trash’ for themselves, usually returned strangely quiet, and had to undergo some re-education to turn them back into the correct view of things. A few came back pregnant.
A light bar glowed on the top of the big man's holoscreen. He touched a certain spot, and a view of the outer office appeared in a popwindow. A woman was closing the outer door behind her, twenty-something by her looks, on the trim side of average build, with straight blonde hair cut in a businesslike bob, wearing a businesslike navy-blue skirtsuit, and carrying a businesslike morocco satchel.
Louise, his personal assistant, gave it a couple of moments, then laid aside her paperwork “May I help you, Miss?” she asked, looking over her schoolmarmish half-glasses.
“I’m here to see Dr. Macklin,” said the new arrival. Her face was bright-blue-eyed and smooth; cool and professional.
“Do you have an appointment?” asked Louise pointedly; none showed on her schedule.
“No,” admitted the other. “Perhaps I should have called ahead, but this office is not in the normal directory. I was here for a meeting of the Trades Development Committee. I passed by and chanced to see the name on the door. I conjectured that this was the same Dr. G. Rhys Macklin well-known as a forensic science consultant. I am familiar with some of his work … I thought I’d like to meet him. That is, if he is in, and has time to spare.”
Louise’s glance flickered over her again. The reference to 'his work' was common with visitors here, and was understood to mean his past career with humod biotechnology. Getting past her to see him meant saying those words the right way. She punched a few more buttons, windows appeared and disappeared on her screen. But the visitor evidently had a sufficiently respectful tone, and Louise must have approved of her conservative look and demeanor, because she said: "Well, just a moment. I’ll see if he’s in, Miss … ?”
“Trekay,” supplied the other.
The personal assistant punched another couple of buttons. The light bar on top of the big man’s holoscreen changed color, and another popwindow, this one activated by Louise, opened up. Her birdlike face appeared.
“Dr. Macklin?” she asked. “Dr. Macklin, are you in, to see a--Miss Trekay? She has no appointment.”
The big man touched a couple of places. “Trekay … Trekay,” he said thoughtfully. “Umm, yes. Do show her in, Louise.”
Louise scooted out from her desk and got up, automatically straightening her tweedy skirt, and led the way to the inner office. She opened the tall, frost-glassed door and stood aside to let the visitor in. As she passed, the younger woman gave her an elbow in the gut and, dropping her satchel, pivoted, and twisted her head with both hands. Her neck snapped with a dull crack, and Miss Trekay let her lifeless body down in a guided slump.
The big man named Rhys Macklin looked at the pair of them, and especially at the newcomer, standing with her feet planted apart in a combat stance, her face still cool, her arms down and apart, fingers extended. He showed mild concern.
“CeCe. Code nine-nine-three-eight-seven-zeta,” he said carefully. “Stand down.”
“Code acknowledged, sir,” replied the blonde woman. “However, I was not in offensive mode.”
“Come toward me, three steps,” he directed.
She complied, standing easy. He went over and walked around her, slowly, several times, inspecting her intently.
At last he said: “I was planning on having you replace Louise, but not quite so suddenly. I trust you had good reason for doing that?”
“I exist to serve you, sir. I began to do so before I walked in the door. Prior to entering your office, I took the precaution of accessing the building comsys records running back six months, ran a review, and registered a number of communications about you--highly but not completely accurate reports on some of your outside activities--sent to an IP address I cannot yet identify, but which I estimate to be a dummy router to some other conduit. I can provide you with a complete report, but I will communicate now only that she strongly suspected my existence and was anticipating my arrival some time this week.
“Once here and within range of her, I ran a standard scan. Her bio-sig was redzone. Pupil dilation, elevated respiration and cardio, alpha and theta waves well above normal parameters. Consistent with intent to initiate hostile action. She activated a security link and initiated a database check on me--and would have found nothing, since you have not updated Persops about me yet. I think you will agree, sir, she could not have been allowed to return to her desk.”
“A security link? Here--help me move her out of the doorway,” he said, turning, but the visitor was there before him. Stooping down, she easily lifted the dead woman and deposited her, as directed, in a corner.
“You are aware, sir, naturally, that your inner office is monitored by a security cam which, as I perceive, is mounted in the corner of the air duct. Is this reaching the attention of personnel who might initiate adverse action?”
The big man smiled slightly. “No. In expectation of your arrival, I arranged for it to encounter an interference problem of the sort generally attributed to defective wiring at the junction box down the hall. We have approximately fifty-two minutes before the problem will be detected, and another hour before repairs can be expected to complete. But let us look at this activated link you speak of.”
She followed him out to Louise’s desk, taking up her satchel. He motioned to her to stand aside, swiftly typed in a code, then another code, and juggled a few windows, studying them intently.
“Sir?” she asked after a few moments.
“Interesting,” he murmured. “This isn’t building security, but goes to the CCO--Compliance Code Office--uptown. You would appear to have been justified in your analysis. I’ll have a few questions to answer, I’m sure, but no one will be bursting in the door waving guns.”
“I would be ready, sir, in any case.” She opened the flap of her satchel, allowing him to see a vicious-looking little PDW machine-pistol inside with a thirty-round magazine insert, and two more mags ready beside it.
He allowed an eyebrow to lift. “And who did you have to scrag to get that in here?” he asked. “Building security is pretty good.”
“After I received rendezvous instructions yesterday morning, I disassembled it, packed the pieces in a suitable manner, and had them couriered or delivered here separately, to separate departments. It was a simple matter to collect them all and reassemble the weapon in the ladies’ room.”
“That was risky of you.”
“Analysis indicated a detection chance of well under one percent. Well-worth the parameters given the fact that my primary task is to serve and protect you under all circumstances, sir. As long as I live and am within range, you are safe.”
He motioned her back to the inner office. “I may just come to believe that. In the meantime, we have a body to dispose of. We are in a secure area--well, pretty secure, anyway. We won’t be getting that out the same way you got your little item in. Do you have a tac plan?”
“I have five of them. The one I recommend is to stage a suicide by throwing the body off the building’s roof into the alleyway. The rooftop is unmonitored and at this hour it should be easy to get it up there without detection. She is a plausible candidate--a lonely widow with a tedious job, no family, and facing an empty old age with retirement a few years off--a textbook-perfect depression victim. With my analysis ability and motor skills I could easily produce a suicide note. All you knew was that she had stepped out for a few minutes.”
“And in the unlikely event we were detected?”
She gave him a look. “Assuming that someone could come upon us without being sensed by me well ahead of time--a vanishingly small probability-- I have this.” She tapped her satchel. “I would assume the identity of a terrorist forcing you to go along with me. I would escape, alter my appearance, and we would rendezvous elsewhere later.”
“You’d escape?” he asked skeptically.
“Yes,” she said, as if removing herself from a tall building’s rooftop while surrounded by SWAT teams was something she did every day before breakfast.
“Alter--by standard means, or were you successfully enabled with biomorph features? I never got clear feedback on that. Kovalevsky seemed to have disappeared--arrested, probably--before he could answer my last ‘mail.”
“Biomorph. Your design was practicable, and in fact the engineers were able even to exceed the standards you specified in certain respects. If I may demonstrate briefly? Without risking damage to the only change of clothing I now have … and do not concentrate on me too closely if you wish to experience the full effect.” She undid the straps on her shoes and slipped them off, then stood upright, closing her eyes and assuming a neutral stance.
He cooperated with her request and focused on his desk. Over the course of about forty-five seconds, as he could sense with peripheral vision, her suit appeared to change its fit slightly; its fabric loosened, the skirt’s hemline rising from just above her knees to about an inch higher, the sleeve cuffs receding a like amount, and the collar of her blouse settling as her neck appeared to lengthen and narrow. Her facial bones became more sculpted, and her hair took on a wave which gave it a shorter look, darkening to become chestnut brown. Then she opened her eyes, which had gone from blue to green.
“Mass must be conserved, of course,” she said in a voice with a tone a bit higher than it had been. “It is not all my own physical component … part of it deals with light diffraction technology which has some effect on your unaided vision. If I alter this much, though, I should be wearing a complete set of garments with sufficient elasticity. This can be a consideration with nonelastic appurtenances such as body armor and jewelry, as well as with shoes, since my feet must alter to preserve my ability to move with balance.”
“Excellent,” he said, clapping his hands four times, now with a really pleased smile.
“It is temporary. While I always perform optimally in default appearance, I retain full function at near-optimal capacity while in biomorph for an hour or so. To maintain it for more than a few hours starts to drain my energy and requires rest in default mode for recovery afterward. Of course, there’s no question of resetting my default appearance through biomorphic means, but you will be aware that the traditional techniques available to nonhumods, such as bodybuilding and diet, as well as hair dye, cosmetics, and--to some extent--surgery, can be employed for that. And I cannot do anything about clothing except change it, naturally. After all, this is not science-fiction.”
“Naturally. Very well, CeCe, you may default.”
She went and sat down in a conference chair, and relaxed for a few moments; she spinning the swivel seat once or twice slowly … she stopped, facing him, and nothing remained of her change except a slight waviness still in her blonde-again hair. “That will require a little spray and brushing to restore,” she said, running a hand over it.
“Well done. Your plan seems a good one to me. There’s a wheelchair in a closet down the hall. We can transport her to the lift in that to the top floor, up the stairs--I assume you can disable the security lock on the roof-access door, it’s of the simplest sort--between us, and then off we go. Or rather, off she goes.”
With a nod, CeCe indicated a small light that had begun flashing, and Rhys took the call from his desk. “Macklin here. Hello, Bernie. Sorry--Louise stepped out for a few minutes so I’m on my own. Yeah … hey, you’re welcome. Who was on that case--? Oh, yes. Yeah, was everything clear for the jury?” By this time CeCe had her shoes on and was removing Louise’s PA-style cordless headset. He nodded for her to listen in.
“Sure,” he continued. “Yes, Chandra is good … she’ll be going places. I hope she gets the conviction, I really do. No, that’s fine. Sure, I’ll say hey to Louise for you. Sure … love ya too, Bernie,” he said, rolling his eyes a bit. “See you next Tuesday.” He ended the call and turned to CeCe. “You sampled his voice, right?”
“Yes. Bernie--” her eyes seemed to glaze for a fraction of a second--”Bernard Young, staff attorney in the DA’s office six years next month. I have data.”
“Really?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. In preparation for rendezvous today I spent the last five days loading available data on various citizens that seemed likely to be of significance to you. I exist to serve, and that means knowing everyone you know. I have fifty-six thousand, three hundred and nine personal datafiles in various sizes depending on available data and calculated significance to you.”
He looked again at her, directly into her eyes. “Damn,” he muttered under his breath. “Woman or machine--machine or woman?”
“Humod, sir,” she said levelly. “Created to your custom design, rebuilt by you out of human bioremains, sent off to be tested and modified and remodified and retested by various hands around the world over the last three years--to your specifications, in consultation with you, bought and paid for by you--all completely illegal under Federal and State law, NAE and PACES regulations, and UN conventions. There are things I am not designed for and things I will never be able to process. But I can see remains of the salata Caprese you had for lunch on your teeth. I have already scanned your fingerprints and retinal patterns, and filed them in my memory cache and can bioreplicate them given a little time. By the veins in your eyes I can see that your blood pressure is currently exceeding recommended standards. I can run a mile in three minutes, upload any kind of data at the rate of one gigabyte per second with total recall, speak two hundred ninety-three languages and dialects, and kill a great white shark in the water with my bare hands. Anything I cannot do, you do not want done. Trust me, sir. I am yours now--delivery is complete. One thing. Do not fuck me.”
“I know about that,” he said. “I haven't forgotten our previous meeting in Dubai. Miles down the road since--you're much more than you were then. But that--I designed that into your root code. They said I was insane."
“‘Insane?’ Sanity and insanity are not my departments, sir,” she replied. “Tasks; function, conformity, and optimization--storage, retrieval, and execution--analysis, configuration, parameters, standards, and probabilities. Those I understand. Those I do, and do very well. The rest is yours to deal with.”
“Yes. Well, we have a task here,” he said.
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It proved very easy. This structure was an older City building, dating from the twentieth century, used as an annex for minor offices, meeting space, and storage for the newer City Hall located uptown; while security at the doors--as the big man had said--was ‘pretty good,’ it didn’t have the thorough hard-wired surveillance that had become standard in the last hundred years. The upper hallways in particular, home to offices such as that of Conservation Education Standards, the Sister Cities relations councils, the Trades Development Committee--as CeCe had mentioned--and the Reuse/Recycle Monitoring Board, were always quiet, and it was well-known that the occasional ‘cam one might see was powered-down most of the time for energy economy purposes. He had specifically asked for an office in this unglamorous corner, though he rated one in police headquarters.
They first donned plastic aprons and gloves from the cleaning closet, which he obtained while CeCe scanned samples of the dead woman’s handwriting from memos on her desk. Then she took her satchel. They got Louise’s coat on, seated her body in the wheelchair, and took it down the hall to the lift and up to the top floor--all dusty storage space for boxes of documents for which there was no room in the City archive--and then over to the stairwell door. It was protected by no more than an ordinary motion sensor keyed by a simple maintenance bypass, whose code CeCe had already acquired; for story purposes he did not know for sure that Louise knew it, but as a veteran employee it was quite plausible that she did. Up the stairs was no problem, as the body was quite light.
Outside, the wind was still fitful, but the rain squalls had ceased for the moment. There were surrounding buildings from which it was possible rooftop activity might be observed, so on her advice he stayed back, watching as she effortlessly took up the body. She carried it no great distance to the east parapet, lowered it carefully, and after scuffing Louise’s shoes to put some roof traces on them, peered down for a minute or so, no doubt evaluating conditions and awaiting a propitious moment. Then she set it; extracting a brush from her pocket, she ran over certain places on body’s coat, apparently to remove any stray hairs or fibers that might have adhered from their clothing despite their precautions.
Finally, with a light push from CeCe, Louise’s corpse disappeared downward. The humod watched its trajectory critically for a second, and then walked swiftly back to the upper doorway where he had already removed his gloves and apron. She glanced behind her at the path she had taken, but the cool weather had permitted little softness in the tarry surface for definite footprints to be left.
“Done,” he said.
“Done, sir,” she echoed, “but for producing the note.” She removed her own apron and gloves and took his; they started down. “We only need to return the wheelchair--I will take care of the gloves and aprons--and the note. I brought a pen and a sheet of your office scrap paper, and I advise that you dictate the contents to me yourself. However, if there is an investigation, it’s possible they may do a complete sweep, and we will have left some traces of our own. To cover that possibility, you may need to say that you found the note, suspected where she was going and followed her in an attempt to dissuade her from her purpose. I estimate that we have a few minutes before the body is discovered and identified, and you are contacted.”
“What if they find female traces, too? We can’t have them questioning you.”
“Who said it was necessarily me? Remember--do not reset the door, sir--it could have been some other person you met in the hallway. I suggest you let me leave for now by another way, and that you dictate the note to me while we are on the lift to another floor. You have the protocols to contact me from your residence, and I have yours.” That he knew. She was checked in at a certain hotel--under biomorph appearance, he had no doubt--as a business traveler with a Chilean passport. He had specified, and received confirmation, that she had at least twenty separate identities built into her personality parameters.
They stepped in. CeCe flipped out the top of her satchel and used it as a writing surface while he dictated a few lines, adding a personal thought or two. It took no more time than was needed to traverse six floors, with a brief stop at one, and he had to admit that it looked perfect; the humod’s analysis and motor skills were flawless. On the twenty-eighth floor, after a quick look, she walked out and down the hall, leaving him to return to his office and plant the note.
Sure enough, within a few minutes of arriving back at his office, his call indicator lit up. He had a few shocked and breathless protestations to make, and he had to await the arrival of a security team; but his statement was taken sympathetically, and he was only one ferry late from his usual time of departure for home, on Alder Island.
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Tuesday, 6 October 2116
It was blowing hard that afternoon, grey clouds scudding across the sky bringing rain gusts in from the south, and the big man standing looking out the little office's window at the building opposite didn’t need an executive view to show him the whitecaps on Elliott Bay. The weather in Queen City was notorious at this season. A slow day, he thought. Slow seemed to pervade everything nowadays. The faster machines got, the slower people became. As a former medical scientist and inventor, he knew something about both.
He picked up his cup of bux, as most people called it, which wasn't coffee exactly, but it had coffee in it. He could afford the real thing, and indulged at home--but not here, where the scent would drift down the hall and remind the other minor City bureaucrats that he only acted like one of them. He stood well over six feet, built like a football linebacker, with grey starting to show in his hair; and his suit, open now at the front, was a study in designer modesty. Nothing but its perfect fit and its slightly old-fashioned cuffs distinguished it from the ordinary off-the-rack ensembles that most of the building's other occupants wore, but it cost more than some of them made in a half a year. He sighed, wishing for a cigar, and turned back to his desk, sitting down and firing up his computer instead.
The news-windows flickered across the thin, semi-transparent holoscreen. In London, Lambeth Palace was having a grand re-opening as prime retail space. Prime Minister Abd ‘al Husayn al-Waziri and his Islamic Labour Party had already converted Westminster Abbey into a secular museum some years before. What had been St Paul’s Cathedral had--with suitable architectural work--become the Masjid Sayyid Piyale, and the generation that first saw veils required for all British women in public had passed away of old age by now. In what had once been known as Germany, the Alimaniyah Islamic Republic had held elections. Early results from Dusseldorf--now ‘Al Dawsil--Hamburg, renamed Al Hammaburq; Erfurt, that is, Al-Arfur, and bomb-wracked Berlin, which still officially retained its old name as a sop to the native ’ummah al-Kitab, were mixed. The international markets were still closed for the Eid-al-Fitr holiday, marking the end of Ramadan.
In local news, there were price hikes, as always. Queen City--formerly Seattle--was part of a 'North Pacific Coast Economic Cooperative Sphere' which included British Columbia, Washington State, and Oregon, with a portion of Northern California. This was not a State or political entity, but it wielded more authority over everyday life than lawmakers did. Unlike legislators, whose hands were tied by the need for reelection, and whose work was usually undone by bitterly partisan successors of the opposing party, the PACES’ appointed officials stayed in office for decades and had enormous leverage through their close cooperation with the education establishment, and powers over industry—especially with utilities, which provided the all-important electricity and ‘Net access. Local news included another approval of certain price hikes: milk would rise from $6.90 a liter to $7.20, and bux from $11.65 to $13.15 per hundred grams. Gas for your car, if you still owned one—and a surprising number of people did—was no longer priced by the liter at the pump; rather, you bought allotment cards for it, priced strictly according to subsidized schedules. A liter of gas would now propel most passenger vehicles about twenty-five miles, and for a typical household making double the poverty line--about $840,000 a year now--a month’s allotment might be sixty-five to eighty liters, and cost anywhere from $450 to $900.
In Washington DC, the last lawsuit on the Ayers-Pitt Act had been turned away by the Supreme Court. Within the boundaries of the United States section of the North American Entity, it had for years been accepted that machines could not be considered legal employees for most wage and benefit purposes. The prickly part lay in the definition of 'machine.' He himself, as a specialist in cybernetic neurophysiology, had been called to testify before Congressional committees. How much of the body--or brain--could be replaced, or augmented, by technical means before the subject could no longer be considered legally 'human,' and what parts counted for more than others? The whole phenomenon, and debate, had acquired a name: humod, from 'human modification.' Pitt-Ayers, passed by Congress and signed into law by President Tawnisha Jefferson, was the latest attempt to revisit this.
What would become 'humod' had started with War veterans eighty years before, restoring limbs and organs, and salvaging function from brains subjected to trauma head injuries. Out of that had emerged civilian-application goals of enhancing certain physical characteristics such as speed, stamina, and resistance, and controlling neurochemical processes in order to prevent mood disorders and improve concentration and attention. While in theory it was all therapeutic, there were always those ready to push the envelope, and those ready to finance it for the sake of their own goals and--or--those of their shareholders.
At first it had been relatively free-wheeling. Workers were co-opted or bought with promises of high wages, and soon humods of varying degrees of adaptation--some visually noticeable, others not--were working in law enforcement, nuclear power, agriculture, corrections, deep-seabed extraction, and other dangerous or difficult jobs. But public revulsion set in, sparked by unfortunate mishaps exacerbated by yellow journalism, and politicians were quick to sniff the wind. Humod was denounced, excoriated, and put under such tight Federal control that it was effectively criminalized. The existing humods had vanished almost overnight. Some families muttered about ‘vacations’ from which their spouse or son or daughter never returned, or of finding empty beds in the morning. But it had been done. The question had seemed to be settled, and for some years all humod was completely banned. However, it had arisen again with regard to the demographic crisis.
World birthrates had been tanking for many, many years. The earth still hosted over five billion people, even after the disastrous wars of the middle of the last century, but many of them were old. Study after study showed sterility spreading like the legendary plague, unevenly but relentlessly. The age of the average citizen had been rising for nearly a century, and nothing could bring it down. In what was left of Africa, and in the Middle East and Islamic societies it was still under thirty, but outside of those areas it was well above that. Non-Islamic Europeans were, on average, nearing fifty and would essentially be gone in another generation. East Asians and Australians were not far behind; North Americans were closing in on the latter group, and South Americans picking up speed.
Measure after measure had been tried by NAE, Federal, and State governments. Restrictions on immigration had been lifted, but returned again after outcries from Blue Party politicians, whose labor-oriented constituencies had seen immigrants as almost the equal of the machines at depressing wages; from Red Party politicians, who had pointed to an uptick in terrorists and criminals from Islamic-dominated areas, eager to export their unsavory elements as they had once exported oil; and from Green Party politicians as well, who sniffed at the newcomers’ eagerness to endanger the environment with their own retrograde cultural habits and their offspring’s disposable nappies.
Efforts to enhance fertility through traditional science, and to encourage people’s positive views of it by means of handsome tax incentives, coupled with direct cash subsidies, had met with indifferent success. Complaints from parties out of power about how to pay for the former, and from gender lobbies over the insulting and degrading nature of the latter, had combined to see to that. Massive fraud, combined with a short-lived boom in 'baby tourism'--quashed by other countries anxious to preserve their own resources and tainted by the involvement of international crime syndicates--had further degraded the hoped-for results. And then there was the carbon indemnity, about which the big man thought frequently and cynically. Upon each birth, the lucky parents were presented with a tax bill--usually in the hundreds of thousands, sometimes in the millions, depending on their income--designed to pay for carbon offsets for their new greenhouse-gas-spewing arrivals. He had no doubt that a lot of people had themselves sterilized simply to avoid the potential tax liability.
Still, every baby was an increasingly valuable asset. And for those that were born, fitness was indispensable for such an investment. Family and reproductive health exceptions to the laws were set forth in Pitt-Ayers, which had now survived its final court challenge. Influential segments of society had always taken a sanguinary view of work to prevent and correct birth defects, and that had been the big man’s practice: better babies through boutique biotech. A wide range of therapies were still illegal, or licensed only on an experimental basis. But for those with money and influence … well, if they weren’t too finicky about stupid laws and were willing to invest money and patience, much could be done. The big man had done much, and become involved in a very public scandal.
He’d taken a fall, plea-bargained, rolled with events, and had agreed to place his expertise at the service of the government in a quiet little way, in exchange for being left alone and able to retain the very nice income he had from certain patents and inventions and investments. He was--as he had to keep telling people who found their way to him--retired.
But, as his ambitious wife kept saying, in a time and place where most people could now expect to live well into their nineties, forty-eight was a pretty damn young age for retirement. It certainly wasn’t too old for him to become involved in the pro-child movement in the last option that seemed really, indisputably open: surrogate parenting.
The Government fertility incentives had made surrogacy popular with those able to conceive. Unlike technology, which carried horrifying images from past abuses and mistakes, it was the 'soft' solution. Most everyone favored it in principle, but how to regulate it--it did have to be regulated, of course--was the topic of the time. Senator Pitt and Congressman Ayers would surely have a new task ahead of them.
Why sterility was spreading was still poorly understood. Some speculated about food additives, global climate change, or a change in solar radiation, or chemical and biological weapons possibly unleashed during the past War, which still sputtered on in low-intensity conflicts and occasional terror strikes. Preachers thundered God’s judgment, and others touted the revenge of Gaia for past sins against the earth. Whatever it was, in North America at least, somewhere around thirty percent of all women seemed properly equipped but simply could not conceive. The male sterility rate was much higher--around ninety percent, it was thought.
There was still plenty of sex around, especially with the conquest of the AIDS virus some years before. One could now phone out for a quickie, and an obliging, youthful, healthy Insta-Bang or Dial-A-Gasm person would arrive at home or office to deliver thrills selected from the menu, sold in five-minute units. The military, with free healthcare provided to its young and fit members and their spouses, had become a favored haven for fertiles either to raise their own or rent themselves out from a safe perch. In the interest of raising young people for military service, it had also established what had become the unofficial Government adoption agency: US-DADS, or the United States Defense Adoption Service. A class of professional defense personnel with no families and no ties to anyone save their comrades and officers was in the making.
But however fertiles shared themselves out--via donation, artificial insemination, or just the simple old-fashioned way--it wasn’t enough. Despite the hefty financial incentivization, there were plenty of fertiles who didn’t care to become ‘breeders’ in any way, and were feted by doom-minded progressives as heroes of humanity’s richly-deserved and seemingly imminent exit from the planet. Hundreds of localities had already adopted ‘bug-free’ policies, creating environments in which ‘breeders’ were made very unwelcome, while in other places--stigmatized in the media and on the ‘Net as ‘breeding pens,’ families were invited. That the ‘pens’ were more economically productive and had lower-than-average rates of crime, suicide, and mental problems only added to the outrage of reporters, who categorized their inhabitants with such terms as retrograde, gun-loving, trailer trash, bible-toting, poor, fundamentalist, fascist, and ignorant, and added them to humods and immigrants as job-thieves and parasites on the happy, child-free utopia that North America ought to become. The big man’s home was in one such place, fortunately an island and home to some others of his economic class. The island was picketed from the Queen City ferry dock at which transportation left, but the occasional student protesters who actually went there, wishing to observe the ‘trailer trash’ for themselves, usually returned strangely quiet, and had to undergo some re-education to turn them back into the correct view of things. A few came back pregnant.
A light bar glowed on the top of the big man's holoscreen. He touched a certain spot, and a view of the outer office appeared in a popwindow. A woman was closing the outer door behind her, twenty-something by her looks, on the trim side of average build, with straight blonde hair cut in a businesslike bob, wearing a businesslike navy-blue skirtsuit, and carrying a businesslike morocco satchel.
Louise, his personal assistant, gave it a couple of moments, then laid aside her paperwork “May I help you, Miss?” she asked, looking over her schoolmarmish half-glasses.
“I’m here to see Dr. Macklin,” said the new arrival. Her face was bright-blue-eyed and smooth; cool and professional.
“Do you have an appointment?” asked Louise pointedly; none showed on her schedule.
“No,” admitted the other. “Perhaps I should have called ahead, but this office is not in the normal directory. I was here for a meeting of the Trades Development Committee. I passed by and chanced to see the name on the door. I conjectured that this was the same Dr. G. Rhys Macklin well-known as a forensic science consultant. I am familiar with some of his work … I thought I’d like to meet him. That is, if he is in, and has time to spare.”
Louise’s glance flickered over her again. The reference to 'his work' was common with visitors here, and was understood to mean his past career with humod biotechnology. Getting past her to see him meant saying those words the right way. She punched a few more buttons, windows appeared and disappeared on her screen. But the visitor evidently had a sufficiently respectful tone, and Louise must have approved of her conservative look and demeanor, because she said: "Well, just a moment. I’ll see if he’s in, Miss … ?”
“Trekay,” supplied the other.
The personal assistant punched another couple of buttons. The light bar on top of the big man’s holoscreen changed color, and another popwindow, this one activated by Louise, opened up. Her birdlike face appeared.
“Dr. Macklin?” she asked. “Dr. Macklin, are you in, to see a--Miss Trekay? She has no appointment.”
The big man touched a couple of places. “Trekay … Trekay,” he said thoughtfully. “Umm, yes. Do show her in, Louise.”
Louise scooted out from her desk and got up, automatically straightening her tweedy skirt, and led the way to the inner office. She opened the tall, frost-glassed door and stood aside to let the visitor in. As she passed, the younger woman gave her an elbow in the gut and, dropping her satchel, pivoted, and twisted her head with both hands. Her neck snapped with a dull crack, and Miss Trekay let her lifeless body down in a guided slump.
The big man named Rhys Macklin looked at the pair of them, and especially at the newcomer, standing with her feet planted apart in a combat stance, her face still cool, her arms down and apart, fingers extended. He showed mild concern.
“CeCe. Code nine-nine-three-eight-seven-zeta,” he said carefully. “Stand down.”
“Code acknowledged, sir,” replied the blonde woman. “However, I was not in offensive mode.”
“Come toward me, three steps,” he directed.
She complied, standing easy. He went over and walked around her, slowly, several times, inspecting her intently.
At last he said: “I was planning on having you replace Louise, but not quite so suddenly. I trust you had good reason for doing that?”
“I exist to serve you, sir. I began to do so before I walked in the door. Prior to entering your office, I took the precaution of accessing the building comsys records running back six months, ran a review, and registered a number of communications about you--highly but not completely accurate reports on some of your outside activities--sent to an IP address I cannot yet identify, but which I estimate to be a dummy router to some other conduit. I can provide you with a complete report, but I will communicate now only that she strongly suspected my existence and was anticipating my arrival some time this week.
“Once here and within range of her, I ran a standard scan. Her bio-sig was redzone. Pupil dilation, elevated respiration and cardio, alpha and theta waves well above normal parameters. Consistent with intent to initiate hostile action. She activated a security link and initiated a database check on me--and would have found nothing, since you have not updated Persops about me yet. I think you will agree, sir, she could not have been allowed to return to her desk.”
“A security link? Here--help me move her out of the doorway,” he said, turning, but the visitor was there before him. Stooping down, she easily lifted the dead woman and deposited her, as directed, in a corner.
“You are aware, sir, naturally, that your inner office is monitored by a security cam which, as I perceive, is mounted in the corner of the air duct. Is this reaching the attention of personnel who might initiate adverse action?”
The big man smiled slightly. “No. In expectation of your arrival, I arranged for it to encounter an interference problem of the sort generally attributed to defective wiring at the junction box down the hall. We have approximately fifty-two minutes before the problem will be detected, and another hour before repairs can be expected to complete. But let us look at this activated link you speak of.”
She followed him out to Louise’s desk, taking up her satchel. He motioned to her to stand aside, swiftly typed in a code, then another code, and juggled a few windows, studying them intently.
“Sir?” she asked after a few moments.
“Interesting,” he murmured. “This isn’t building security, but goes to the CCO--Compliance Code Office--uptown. You would appear to have been justified in your analysis. I’ll have a few questions to answer, I’m sure, but no one will be bursting in the door waving guns.”
“I would be ready, sir, in any case.” She opened the flap of her satchel, allowing him to see a vicious-looking little PDW machine-pistol inside with a thirty-round magazine insert, and two more mags ready beside it.
He allowed an eyebrow to lift. “And who did you have to scrag to get that in here?” he asked. “Building security is pretty good.”
“After I received rendezvous instructions yesterday morning, I disassembled it, packed the pieces in a suitable manner, and had them couriered or delivered here separately, to separate departments. It was a simple matter to collect them all and reassemble the weapon in the ladies’ room.”
“That was risky of you.”
“Analysis indicated a detection chance of well under one percent. Well-worth the parameters given the fact that my primary task is to serve and protect you under all circumstances, sir. As long as I live and am within range, you are safe.”
He motioned her back to the inner office. “I may just come to believe that. In the meantime, we have a body to dispose of. We are in a secure area--well, pretty secure, anyway. We won’t be getting that out the same way you got your little item in. Do you have a tac plan?”
“I have five of them. The one I recommend is to stage a suicide by throwing the body off the building’s roof into the alleyway. The rooftop is unmonitored and at this hour it should be easy to get it up there without detection. She is a plausible candidate--a lonely widow with a tedious job, no family, and facing an empty old age with retirement a few years off--a textbook-perfect depression victim. With my analysis ability and motor skills I could easily produce a suicide note. All you knew was that she had stepped out for a few minutes.”
“And in the unlikely event we were detected?”
She gave him a look. “Assuming that someone could come upon us without being sensed by me well ahead of time--a vanishingly small probability-- I have this.” She tapped her satchel. “I would assume the identity of a terrorist forcing you to go along with me. I would escape, alter my appearance, and we would rendezvous elsewhere later.”
“You’d escape?” he asked skeptically.
“Yes,” she said, as if removing herself from a tall building’s rooftop while surrounded by SWAT teams was something she did every day before breakfast.
“Alter--by standard means, or were you successfully enabled with biomorph features? I never got clear feedback on that. Kovalevsky seemed to have disappeared--arrested, probably--before he could answer my last ‘mail.”
“Biomorph. Your design was practicable, and in fact the engineers were able even to exceed the standards you specified in certain respects. If I may demonstrate briefly? Without risking damage to the only change of clothing I now have … and do not concentrate on me too closely if you wish to experience the full effect.” She undid the straps on her shoes and slipped them off, then stood upright, closing her eyes and assuming a neutral stance.
He cooperated with her request and focused on his desk. Over the course of about forty-five seconds, as he could sense with peripheral vision, her suit appeared to change its fit slightly; its fabric loosened, the skirt’s hemline rising from just above her knees to about an inch higher, the sleeve cuffs receding a like amount, and the collar of her blouse settling as her neck appeared to lengthen and narrow. Her facial bones became more sculpted, and her hair took on a wave which gave it a shorter look, darkening to become chestnut brown. Then she opened her eyes, which had gone from blue to green.
“Mass must be conserved, of course,” she said in a voice with a tone a bit higher than it had been. “It is not all my own physical component … part of it deals with light diffraction technology which has some effect on your unaided vision. If I alter this much, though, I should be wearing a complete set of garments with sufficient elasticity. This can be a consideration with nonelastic appurtenances such as body armor and jewelry, as well as with shoes, since my feet must alter to preserve my ability to move with balance.”
“Excellent,” he said, clapping his hands four times, now with a really pleased smile.
“It is temporary. While I always perform optimally in default appearance, I retain full function at near-optimal capacity while in biomorph for an hour or so. To maintain it for more than a few hours starts to drain my energy and requires rest in default mode for recovery afterward. Of course, there’s no question of resetting my default appearance through biomorphic means, but you will be aware that the traditional techniques available to nonhumods, such as bodybuilding and diet, as well as hair dye, cosmetics, and--to some extent--surgery, can be employed for that. And I cannot do anything about clothing except change it, naturally. After all, this is not science-fiction.”
“Naturally. Very well, CeCe, you may default.”
She went and sat down in a conference chair, and relaxed for a few moments; she spinning the swivel seat once or twice slowly … she stopped, facing him, and nothing remained of her change except a slight waviness still in her blonde-again hair. “That will require a little spray and brushing to restore,” she said, running a hand over it.
“Well done. Your plan seems a good one to me. There’s a wheelchair in a closet down the hall. We can transport her to the lift in that to the top floor, up the stairs--I assume you can disable the security lock on the roof-access door, it’s of the simplest sort--between us, and then off we go. Or rather, off she goes.”
With a nod, CeCe indicated a small light that had begun flashing, and Rhys took the call from his desk. “Macklin here. Hello, Bernie. Sorry--Louise stepped out for a few minutes so I’m on my own. Yeah … hey, you’re welcome. Who was on that case--? Oh, yes. Yeah, was everything clear for the jury?” By this time CeCe had her shoes on and was removing Louise’s PA-style cordless headset. He nodded for her to listen in.
“Sure,” he continued. “Yes, Chandra is good … she’ll be going places. I hope she gets the conviction, I really do. No, that’s fine. Sure, I’ll say hey to Louise for you. Sure … love ya too, Bernie,” he said, rolling his eyes a bit. “See you next Tuesday.” He ended the call and turned to CeCe. “You sampled his voice, right?”
“Yes. Bernie--” her eyes seemed to glaze for a fraction of a second--”Bernard Young, staff attorney in the DA’s office six years next month. I have data.”
“Really?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. In preparation for rendezvous today I spent the last five days loading available data on various citizens that seemed likely to be of significance to you. I exist to serve, and that means knowing everyone you know. I have fifty-six thousand, three hundred and nine personal datafiles in various sizes depending on available data and calculated significance to you.”
He looked again at her, directly into her eyes. “Damn,” he muttered under his breath. “Woman or machine--machine or woman?”
“Humod, sir,” she said levelly. “Created to your custom design, rebuilt by you out of human bioremains, sent off to be tested and modified and remodified and retested by various hands around the world over the last three years--to your specifications, in consultation with you, bought and paid for by you--all completely illegal under Federal and State law, NAE and PACES regulations, and UN conventions. There are things I am not designed for and things I will never be able to process. But I can see remains of the salata Caprese you had for lunch on your teeth. I have already scanned your fingerprints and retinal patterns, and filed them in my memory cache and can bioreplicate them given a little time. By the veins in your eyes I can see that your blood pressure is currently exceeding recommended standards. I can run a mile in three minutes, upload any kind of data at the rate of one gigabyte per second with total recall, speak two hundred ninety-three languages and dialects, and kill a great white shark in the water with my bare hands. Anything I cannot do, you do not want done. Trust me, sir. I am yours now--delivery is complete. One thing. Do not fuck me.”
“I know about that,” he said. “I haven't forgotten our previous meeting in Dubai. Miles down the road since--you're much more than you were then. But that--I designed that into your root code. They said I was insane."
“‘Insane?’ Sanity and insanity are not my departments, sir,” she replied. “Tasks; function, conformity, and optimization--storage, retrieval, and execution--analysis, configuration, parameters, standards, and probabilities. Those I understand. Those I do, and do very well. The rest is yours to deal with.”
“Yes. Well, we have a task here,” he said.
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It proved very easy. This structure was an older City building, dating from the twentieth century, used as an annex for minor offices, meeting space, and storage for the newer City Hall located uptown; while security at the doors--as the big man had said--was ‘pretty good,’ it didn’t have the thorough hard-wired surveillance that had become standard in the last hundred years. The upper hallways in particular, home to offices such as that of Conservation Education Standards, the Sister Cities relations councils, the Trades Development Committee--as CeCe had mentioned--and the Reuse/Recycle Monitoring Board, were always quiet, and it was well-known that the occasional ‘cam one might see was powered-down most of the time for energy economy purposes. He had specifically asked for an office in this unglamorous corner, though he rated one in police headquarters.
They first donned plastic aprons and gloves from the cleaning closet, which he obtained while CeCe scanned samples of the dead woman’s handwriting from memos on her desk. Then she took her satchel. They got Louise’s coat on, seated her body in the wheelchair, and took it down the hall to the lift and up to the top floor--all dusty storage space for boxes of documents for which there was no room in the City archive--and then over to the stairwell door. It was protected by no more than an ordinary motion sensor keyed by a simple maintenance bypass, whose code CeCe had already acquired; for story purposes he did not know for sure that Louise knew it, but as a veteran employee it was quite plausible that she did. Up the stairs was no problem, as the body was quite light.
Outside, the wind was still fitful, but the rain squalls had ceased for the moment. There were surrounding buildings from which it was possible rooftop activity might be observed, so on her advice he stayed back, watching as she effortlessly took up the body. She carried it no great distance to the east parapet, lowered it carefully, and after scuffing Louise’s shoes to put some roof traces on them, peered down for a minute or so, no doubt evaluating conditions and awaiting a propitious moment. Then she set it; extracting a brush from her pocket, she ran over certain places on body’s coat, apparently to remove any stray hairs or fibers that might have adhered from their clothing despite their precautions.
Finally, with a light push from CeCe, Louise’s corpse disappeared downward. The humod watched its trajectory critically for a second, and then walked swiftly back to the upper doorway where he had already removed his gloves and apron. She glanced behind her at the path she had taken, but the cool weather had permitted little softness in the tarry surface for definite footprints to be left.
“Done,” he said.
“Done, sir,” she echoed, “but for producing the note.” She removed her own apron and gloves and took his; they started down. “We only need to return the wheelchair--I will take care of the gloves and aprons--and the note. I brought a pen and a sheet of your office scrap paper, and I advise that you dictate the contents to me yourself. However, if there is an investigation, it’s possible they may do a complete sweep, and we will have left some traces of our own. To cover that possibility, you may need to say that you found the note, suspected where she was going and followed her in an attempt to dissuade her from her purpose. I estimate that we have a few minutes before the body is discovered and identified, and you are contacted.”
“What if they find female traces, too? We can’t have them questioning you.”
“Who said it was necessarily me? Remember--do not reset the door, sir--it could have been some other person you met in the hallway. I suggest you let me leave for now by another way, and that you dictate the note to me while we are on the lift to another floor. You have the protocols to contact me from your residence, and I have yours.” That he knew. She was checked in at a certain hotel--under biomorph appearance, he had no doubt--as a business traveler with a Chilean passport. He had specified, and received confirmation, that she had at least twenty separate identities built into her personality parameters.
They stepped in. CeCe flipped out the top of her satchel and used it as a writing surface while he dictated a few lines, adding a personal thought or two. It took no more time than was needed to traverse six floors, with a brief stop at one, and he had to admit that it looked perfect; the humod’s analysis and motor skills were flawless. On the twenty-eighth floor, after a quick look, she walked out and down the hall, leaving him to return to his office and plant the note.
Sure enough, within a few minutes of arriving back at his office, his call indicator lit up. He had a few shocked and breathless protestations to make, and he had to await the arrival of a security team; but his statement was taken sympathetically, and he was only one ferry late from his usual time of departure for home, on Alder Island.
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