Keegan’s face cranked into a confused frown. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” He pulled his powerful arm out of my grasp. “She’s out of it. It’s nothin’ to her. What’s it to you?”
A wave of nausea and light-headedness passed. I couldn’t peg the feeling. I averted my gaze and shook my head. “Look, if you expect me to climb into that bio’s head and have a chance of fixing whatever’s wrong, get your jollies some other way. Buy a balloon with tits and a jug of salad oil.”
Keegan’s face became very red. “Look, man, I don’t make it copping feels off andys in the freezer. Got that?” He pointed at the android with his thumb. “What’s it to her anyway? She’s programmed to be a prosti.”
“If she was all that happy being a whore, Keegan, maybe those four jokers she killed would still be alive.”
“Yeah, maybe. Anyway, she’s out now.”
“We’re never out, Keegan. Not us; not the andys. Unless we’re dead, something always remembers. Feelings. Senses. The body. The body remembers.”
“Crap.” He had just waved his hand dismissing the whole thing when I raised my fist as if to punch his jaw straight through his rat’s brain to the back of his head. Immediately he hunched down and put up his own fists as his eyes widened in fright.
“The body remembers, Keegan.” I waved a finger at him as I grinned. “The body always remembers.”
The first android I plugged was the one with the shot up guts. If my ferreting job was successful, Keegan would bring in a shadow cutter to fix the andy’s plumbing. The biodroid’s name was Alex Shields and it was an Akagi Combat Systems Seventeen installed in a cauc male wrap. It had been illegally modified and used as a hitter in one or more murders by the city powder elite. After Shields did in boss Ricky Curtain and a few of his soldiers, the number two hood managed to have his goons do Alex and dump him. The do, however, wasn’t done well enough, so after he was dumped he fell into the hands of Big Blue. After that, the authorities ordered the andy junked. On the way to the death and disposal yard, however, Eddy Keegan dropped a few dollars in the proper hands and bodysnatched Alex hoping to repair and resell the biodroid to a bargain hunter. Alex would be just the thing to watch the children or take Fido out for a walk.
If it had been safe for me to enter Alex Shields’ mind, he wouldn’t’ve been ordered junked. Instead he would’ve been repaired. But then there wouldn’t be any work for me.
To fix a shutdown piece you don’t simply open its lid and replace a couple of boards. They aren’t machines. They’re genetically programmed biological beings. But sometimes, just as with humans, there are problems. To fix one of them you climb into its psychological frame of reference, walk its mental corridors, and deal with whatever it refuses to deal with. I’d gotten a few frights and starts since getting my ticket. In the main, though, android brain boos are feeble things next to the drool dripping monsters that stalk human minds.
I walked down the gleaming steel hallway of Alex Shields’ psychological frame of reference, my eyes searching the darkened doorways, my feet making no sound. The absolute silence heightened my anxiety; brought those shadowy things from my past too close to the light. I needed the silence. It was a place of metal corridors, halls, and passages. Akagi units usually mentate in terms of metal hallways. Infinite conduits to infinite compartments, and the piece was hiding somewhere in one or more of those compartments. If it called, I needed the silence to hear it. It might call. Those who hide from the world or themselves usually want to be found.
The opening to my left was a nothingness. The piece had never driven a thought through there. In the piece’s universe, then, it did not exist. I took a deep breath and listened to the air rushing into my nostrils.
Another opening. Another nothingness. None of these neuron banks had been used. Sector one eleven should’ve shown some use in a unit as old as this one. The piece must’ve jammed early; soon after being modified. I had yet to uncover any sign of the modification.
Another opening, this one leading to another steel corridor lined with more openings leading to more nothings. We weren’t even near the right sector.
“Keegan,” I called, “move me over to the main track, back to sector seventy-one.” My voice sounded tinny in the metal corridor, the echoes close together.
“You ain’t found him yet?” Keegan’s booming voice deafened me.
“No, I ain’t found him yet. How about turning down the audio?”
The feedback yowls decreased and less of Keegan’s amplitude returned with, “Sorry. You gonna be much longer, Shannon?”
“Maybe.”
“If you need to cut and stitch to hurry things up, I got the surgery modules.”
“I’m not qualified to do psych surgery, Keegan.”
“The way I read the rules, Shannon, you’re not qualified to be doing what you’re doing right now.”
“Eat it.”
“How much longer?”
“It depends on where he’s hiding and that depends on where he’s been. Right now I don’t have a clue. Move me over to seventy-one.”
“I have to go take a leak.”
“So go. Just move me to seventy-one first.”
“Okay. Give me a sec.”
The crackle of Keegan’s voice filled the android’s universe. “Seventy-one coming up. Ready?”
“Go ahead.”
Another steel corridor, except the deck of this one writhed with cables; black, glistening, alive. There was a wind blowing so hard that it blinded me. “Keegan!” I hollered. “Keegan, you jerk! Get me out of here! This isn’t seventy-one! Keegan?”
Keegan had gone to relieve himself, leaving me lost in the andy’s mind. The force of the wind blew me back against a doorway. It was part way open, the hinges corroded. I pushed against the door until it was open far enough to see a corridor filled with blood red light.
Blood. That was the color of guilt in the Akagi universe. Guilt was the scent leading to the event that tripped all the circuit breakers. I stepped through the opening, the sounds of the wind dying to low, ghostly moans. Then it was silent. I could hear hissing, something raking its claws across the hot metal deck.
As my guts wrapped into a knot, I whispered to myself, “I am the traveler, I have control, all of this is symbol, none of this is real.” Affirm, affirm, affirm. It was always at such times I remembered my fellow student ferret in psych school, Alisa, who used to say, “I am a cow, I am a cow, I am a cow, doesn’t make me a bloody damned cow!”
“I am the traveler, I have control,” I repeated. A part of me reminded myself that all of the control I had was off somewhere taking a leak.
“Keegan?” No answer. Again the hissing.
I approached the blackness of an open doorway. The hissing, the sounds of the claws, came from it. Flames filled the entrance as the thing roared like a lion. The flames died and I saw eyes reflecting bright green at me. Its great yellow fangs glistening with drool. It came closer, my heart thumping itself against my ribs. As it emerged into the full light, I saw first the lion’s head, the goat’s body, the tail of the dragon.
I laughed. It was the Chimaera. The mythological patron of the android psych techs. It was one of our first exercises back in school.
It blew flames and roared again as I looked in one black doorway after another. Alex Shields had been searched by a ferret before. That particular rendering of a chimaera was to be found in no available memory depository. The image had to have been planted there, or taken from, a previous ferret.