As my fingers touched the edge of it, I knew it was the one. I pulled it from beneath an irregular stack of my sister’s other photos and looked at it. It was the same face, the same hair, the same hurt, accusing eyes.
I couldn’t remember him; wouldn’t remember him. He was standing in green grass in front of some bushes next to some trees. There was absolutely no place like that in the entire city. Certainly it hadn’t been taken on my street.
My street.
I frowned as I looked through the window to the street below. The muggers, whores, dealers, and gang toughs were getting started for the day. That wasn’t “my street,” though. “My street” was a representational framework where I could bring andy symbols to find out what they really meant. “My street” was a hateful, cruel, violent, depressing place. To my mind, however, it was “safe.” There I knew where I was, I could protect myself, handle whatever came my way. “My street,” however, was entirely imaginary.
During orientation everyone needed to pick a safe place for home base, and “my street” was the place I’d invented because I couldn’t remember a safe place from my own home; my own childhood. That little boy. I couldn’t remember the house he lived in. I turned the photo over and read what was written there in my sister’s cramped little scrawclass="underline" The Farm, Summer ‘92.
The Farm.
My skin tingled, a pain shot through my eyes, that sensation of being choked. The Farm. The name was a curse, a broken trust, a betrayal. All of that, yet almost nothing of memory.
I turned back to the image of the little boy, the trees, the grass. The chimaera. The monster was mine. I could feel it, smell it, taste it; everything but remember it. Somewhere, hidden beyond those leaves, was my personal horror, the thing I refused to remember.
I put the photo back with the others and tossed the box in the drawer, closing it with the toe of my boot. There were no answers in the old photo. My answer was in work. Either to learn or to bury knowledge, my answer was in work. Activity. Noise.
“Shields,” I barked at the closed bathroom door. “Can you walk?”
He opened the door, stuck out his head, and looked at me. He had cleaned up his body. “I can walk,” he answered.
“Let’s get back to Keegan’s.”
After hooking up Shields to the D-11 and checking to make certain all of his personalities were integrated, he should’ve been a prime cut on the auction block. An Akagi combat model, even with his guts newly stitched, was good for an easy sixty thousand on the legal market. On the illegal market, fifty cents on the dollar should’ve grossed Keegan at least thirty. A couple to me, a couple for overhead, the net would’ve been an easy twenty-five. Except Keegan couldn’t even give Alex Shields away as a gift.
“None of the fences’ll take him.” Keegan stabbed his finger in the air toward the andy. Shields was sitting again in that same plastic chair. “Curtain’s hitters’ve just put out the word. They want him. More than that, they’re not paying a cent on the contract. They want him dead and they want anyone who helped him dead, too. They took it real personal. They want to do the killing. I don’t get it. It’s like taking out a contract against a machine gun.”
“What about a new face on the andy?” I asked. “Give him another name. I can go in and alter his registration codes. He’d just be another Akagi.”
“Plastic?” Keegan thought for a moment, spat a flake of tobacco onto the floor, and slowly shook his head. “Nah. It’d have to be a good job not to be spotted, and a decent plastic man’d cost the whole yard. There wouldn’t be anything left over.” His voice lowered significantly. “Look, Shannon, I can’t pay you today. The cutter’s bill took damn near my whole roll. What I got left I need to fix the other three.” He grimaced back toward Shields. “Man, I can’t even afford to feed the thing. He’s all drain, no gain. Get me?”
“So what’s the plan?”
He shrugged, turned his back toward Shields, and said in an even lower voice. “You know.”
“You don’t have to whisper for my benefit,” interrupted the andy. “I already died once. It’s not hard to do. I can even do the job myself, if you want.”
“All right,” said Keegan to the andy, his voice loud, angry. “Good idea.” He faced me and stabbed a pudgy finger at my shoulder. “Shannon, you get rid of the andy. Right now all he can do for me is drop me behind crowbars on a snatch rap. You take care of that, I up your percentage to twenty, and we go in and fix the other three andys in the cooler. After that, if you like the deal, we’ll do more with the same deal.”
I looked at Alex Shields, valueless being. His face was expressionless. He was no robot; he had feelings. His face, however, showed nothing. Maybe he really didn’t give a damn. Or maybe he was the last of the great pretenders. I looked back at Keegan. “Let me have him.”
“You?” Keegan burst out with a laugh. “What in the hell’re you going with him? You’re flatter’n week old road kill, pal. You can’t afford to feed him and you sure as hell can’t peddle him.”
“He’ll earn his way. I want to make him my operator.”
“Operator?” Keegan grinned as his hairless eyebrows shot up. “You slipped a gear, Shannon? A hitter for an operator? An andy hitter?”
“Why not? He can’t be any worse than you, and his bladder isn’t weak. I’ll keep him out of sight, if you’re worried about Curtain’s number two.” I looked at Shields’s face. It still showed no expression. I faced Keegan. “Look, let me have him and I’ll work for fifteen instead of the twenty.”
Keegan thought for a second, shrugged, and held out his hands. “Okay. It’s your head and it’s less for me to do. Just keep in mind, Shannon, you keep him out of sight, and the andy’s hay comes outta your cut.”
I turned back to Shields. “What about it?” I asked.
“I’m an android. I follow orders. That’s what makes me such a useful, reliable, labor saving convenience.” The sarcasm was thick enough to clog Cleveland.
“Okay,” said Keegan as he stood and walked toward the truck. “Get to work on the whore. There’re a thousand of them on the street that look just like her. She’s guaranteed money on the hoof.”
Operating a psych board isn’t complicated. All you have to do is stay awake, pay attention, and follow the psych tech’s orders. I explained the D-11’s board to Shields and he seemed to pick it up quickly. Keegan had a book on the machine, so while he and I brought up Meyla’s body temp in the bio bay, Shields read the manual and played with the equipment.
Meyla was a Holt pleasure model, and during my examination I found numerous bruises and recent scars on her skin. You never find any old scars on an andy due to their skin’s regenerative ability. Meyla had obviously been subjected to considerable violence, but pleasure models were designed to take it and on a battlefield rougher than anything a combat model had to face. In addition they were designed not to take any offense at abuse, unless a display of suffering was what the customer required to make his sock drip.
Still, the nervous system might have been damaged, and I ran diags on her to make certain there wasn’t any physical damage. She checked out and by early afternoon I was plugged into the meld unit and counting as I prepared to whirl down endless black chimneys toward Meyla Hunter’s universe, beginning with the usual sector sequences. Alex Shields was on the knobs, his face as expressionless as ever. His eyes were watching me as he pulled the fade bringing the blackness around me as though I were passing out.
I was standing on the shore of a small lake in autumn, the smell of wood smoke in my nostrils. The yellows, greens, oranges, and reds from the opposite shore reflected in the smooth water. A fish jumped at a water spider making a tiny splash. Rings from the splash spread until the mirror of the far shore rippled. The rings reached the shore at my feet and did not stop. The image of the pebbled sand, the image of my feet and legs, the image of the universe, rippled. I tried to switch to my street, but I failed, the ripples growing deeper and deeper until there was nothing but a smear of colors, smells, and sensations. Fear filled my throat, choking me, crushing my lungs.