“They aren’t involved.”
“That’s not possible,” I said with the sinking feeling that I was dealing with a loony rather than a client. “It’s a crime to conceal a murder from the authorities.” What I thought was: Are you the murderer, Johnny?
He smiled and shook his head. “Not in this case.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, M. Lamia, that a murder was committed but that the police—local and Hegemony—have neither knowledge of it nor jurisdiction over it.”
“Not possible,” I said again. Outside, sparks from an industrial welder’s torch cascaded into the trench along with the rusty drizzle. “Explain.”
“A murder was committed outside of the Web. Outside of the Protectorate. There were no local authorities.”
That made sense. Sort of. For the life of me, though, I couldn’t figure where he was talking about. Even the Outback settlements and colonial worlds have cops. On board some sort of spaceship? Uh-uh. The Interstellar Transit Authority has jurisdiction there.
“I see,” I said. It’d been some weeks since I’d had a case. “All right, tell me the details.”
“And the conversation will be confidential even if you do not take the case?”
“Absolutely.”
“And if you do take the case, you will report only to me?”
“Of course.”
My prospective client hesitated, rubbing his fingers against his chin. His hands were exquisite. “All right,” he said at last.
“Start at the beginning,” I said. “Who was murdered?”
Johnny sat up straight, an attentive schoolboy. There was no doubting his sincerity. He said, “I was.”
It took ten minutes to get the story out of him. When he was finished, I no longer thought he was crazy. I was. Or I would be if I took the job.
Johnny—his real name was a code of digits, letters, and cipher bands longer than my arm—was a cybrid.
I’d heard about cybrids. Who hasn’t? I once accused my first husband of being one. But I never expected to be sitting in the same room with one. Or to find it so damned attractive.
Johnny was an AI. His consciousness or ego or whatever you want to call it floated somewhere in the megadatasphere dataumplane of the TechnoCore. Like everyone else except maybe the current Senate CEO or the AIs’ garbage removers, I had no idea where the TechnoCore was. The AIs had peacefully seceded from human control more than three centuries ago—before my time—and while they continued to serve the Hegemony as allies by advising the All Thing, monitoring the dataspheres, occasionally using their predictive abilities to help us avoid major mistakes or natural disasters, the TechnoCore generally went about its own indecipherable and distinctly nonhuman business in privacy.
Fair enough, it seemed to me.
Usually AIs do business with humans and human machines via the datasphere. They can manufacture an interactive holo if they need to—I remember during the Maui-Covenant incorporation, the TechnoCore ambassadors at the treaty signing looked suspiciously like the old holo star Tyrone Bathwaite.
Cybrids are a whole different matter. Tailored from human genetic stock, they are far more human in appearance and outward behavior than androids are allowed to be. Agreements between the TechnoCore and the Hegemony allow only a handful of cybrids to be in existence.
I looked at Johnny. From an AI’s perspective, the beautiful body and intriguing personality sitting across the desk from me must be merely another appendage, a remote, somewhat more complex but otherwise no more important than any one of ten thousand such sensors, manipulators, autonomous units, or other remotes that an AI might use in a day’s work. Discarding “Johnny” probably would create no more concern in an AI than clipping a fingernail would bother me.
What a waste, I thought.
“A cybrid,” I said.
“Yes. Licensed. I have a Worldweb user’s visa.”
“Good,” I heard myself say. “And someone … murdered your cybrid and you want me to find out who?”
“No,” said the young man. He had brownish-red curls. Like his accent, the hairstyle eluded me. It seemed archaic somehow, but I had seen it somewhere. “It was not merely this body that was murdered. My assailant murdered me.”
“You?”
“Yes.”
“You as in the … ah … AI itself?”
“Precisely.”
I didn’t get it. AIs can’t die. Not as far as anyone in the Web knew. “I don’t get it,” I said.
Johnny nodded, “Unlike a human personality which can … I believe the consensus is … be destroyed at death, my own consciousness cannot be terminated. There was, however, as a result of the assault, an … interruption. Although I possessed … ah … shall we say duplicate recordings of memories, personality, et cetera, there was a loss. Some data were destroyed in the attack. In that sense, the assailant committed murder.”
“I see,” I lied. I took a breath. “What about the AI authorities … if there are such things … or the Hegemony cybercops? Wouldn’t they be the ones to go to?”
“For personal reasons,” said the attractive young man whom I was trying to see as a cybrid, “it is important—even necessary—that I do not consult these sources.”
I raised an eyebrow. This sounded more like one of my regular clients.
“I assure you,” he said, “it is nothing illegal. Nor unethical. Merely … embarrassing to me on a level which I cannot explain.”
I folded my arms across my chest. “Look, Johnny. This is a pretty half-assed story. I mean, I only have your word that you’re a cybrid. You might be a scam artist for all I know.”
He looked surprised. “I had not thought of that. How would you like me to show you that I am what I say I am?”
I did not hesitate a second. “Transfer a million marks to my checking account in TransWeb,” I said.
Johnny smiled. At the same instant my phone rang and the image of a harried man with the TransWeb code block floating behind him said, “Excuse me, M. Lamia, but we wondered with a … ah … deposit of this size if you would be interested in investigating our long-term savings options or our mutual assured market possibilities?”
“Later,” I said.
The bank manager nodded and vanished.
“That could’ve been a simulation,” I said.
Johnny’s smile was pleasant. “Yes, but even that would be a satisfactory demonstration, would it not?”
“Not necessarily.”
He shrugged. “Assuming I am what I say I am, will you take the case?”
“Yeah.” I sighed. “One thing though. My fee isn’t a million marks. I get five hundred a day plus expenses.”
The cybrid nodded. “Does that mean you will take the case?”
I stood up, put on my hat, and pulled an old coat from a rack by the window. I bent over the lower desk drawer, smoothly sliding my father’s pistol into a coat pocket. “Let’s go,” I said.
“Yes,” said Johnny. “Go where?”
“I want to see where you were murdered.”
Stereotype has it that someone born on Lusus hates to leave the Hive and suffers from instant agoraphobia if we visit anything more open to the elements than a shopping mall. The truth of it is, most of my business comes from … and leads to … offworld. Skip-tracing deadbeats who use the farcaster system and a change of identity to try to start over. Finding philandering spouses who think rendezvousing on a different planet will keep them safe from discovery. Tracking down missing kids and absent parents.
Still, I was surprised to the point of hesitating a second when we stepped through the Iron Pig Concourse farcaster onto an empty stone plateau which seemed to stretch to infinity. Except for the bronze rectangle of the farcaster portal behind us, there was no sign of civilization anywhere. The air smelled like rotten eggs. The sky was a yellow-brown cauldron of sick-looking clouds. The ground around us was gray and scaled and held no visible life, not even lichen. I had no idea how far away the horizon really was, but we felt high and it looked far, and there was no hint of trees, shrubs, or animal life in the distance either.