Johnny scratched his cheek with one finger. “I was lucky to lose only five days’ worth of data,” he said.
I waved over the human waiter and ordered another beer. “Look,” I said, “Johnny … whoever you are, I’ll never be able to get an angle on this case unless I know more about you and your situation. Why would someone want to kill you if they know you’ll be reconstituted or whatever the hell it is?”
“I see two possible motives,” said Johnny over his beer.
I nodded. “One would be to create just the memory loss they succeeded in getting,” I said. “That would suggest that, whatever it was they wanted you to forget, it’d occurred or come to your attention in the past week or so. What’s the second motive?”
“To send me a message,” said Johnny. “I just don’t know what it is. Or from who.”
“Do you know who would want to kill you?”
“No.”
“No guesses at all?”
“None.”
“Most murders,” I said, “are acts of sudden, mindless rage committed by someone the victim knows well. Family. A friend or lover. A majority of the premeditated ones are usually carried out by someone close to the victim.”
Johnny said nothing. There was something about his face that I found incredibly attractive—a sort of masculine strength combined with a feminine sense of awareness. Perhaps it was the eyes.
“Do AIs have families?” I asked. “Feuds? Squabbles? Lovers’ spats?”
“No.” He smiled slightly. “There are quasi-family arrangements, but they share none of the requirements of emotion or responsibility that human families exhibit. AI ‘families’ are primarily convenient code groups for showing where certain processing trends originated.”
“So you don’t think another AI attacked you?”
“It’s possible.” Johnny rotated his glass in his hands. “I just do not see why they would attack me through my cybrid.”
“Easier access?”
“Perhaps. But it complicates things for the assailant. An attack in datumplane would have been infinitely more lethal. Also, I do fail to see any motive for another AI. It makes no sense. I’m a threat to no one.”
“Why do you have a cybrid, Johnny? Maybe if I understand your role in things, I could get at a motive.”
He picked up a pretzel and played with it. “I have a cybrid … in some ways I am a cybrid, because my … function … is to observe and react to human beings. In a sense, I was human once myself.”
I frowned and shook my head. So far nothing he’d said had made sense.
“You’ve heard of personality retrieval projects?” he asked.
“No.”
“A standard year ago, when the FORCE sims recreated the personality of General Horace Glennon-Height to see what made him such a brilliant general? It was in all the news.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I am … or was … an earlier and much more complicated retrieval project. My core persona was based on a pre-Hegira Old Earth poet. Ancient. Born late eighteenth century Old Calendar.”
“How the hell can they reconstruct a personality that lost in time?”
“Writings,” said Johnny. “His letters. Diaries. Critical biographies. Testimony of friends. But mostly through his verse. The sim recreates the environment, plugs in the known factors, and works backward from the creative products. Voilà—a persona core. Crude at first but, by the time I came into being, relatively refined. Our first attempt was a twentieth-century poet named Ezra Pound. Our persona was opinionated to the point of absurdity, prejudiced beyond rationality, and functionally insane. It took a year of tinkering before we discovered that the persona was accurate; it was the man who had been nuts. A genius but nuts.”
“And then what?” I said. “They build your personality around a dead poet. Then what?”
“This becomes the template upon which the AI is grown,” said Johnny. “The cybrid allows me to carry out my role in the datumplane community.”
“As poet?”
Johnny smiled again. “More as poem,” he said.
“A poem?”
“An ongoing work of art … but not in the human sense. A puzzle perhaps. A variable enigma which occasionally offers unusual insights into more serious lines of analysis.”
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“It probably does not matter. I very much doubt if my … purpose … was the cause of the assault.”
“What do you think was the cause?”
“I have no idea.”
I felt us closing a circle. “All right,” I said. “I’ll try to find out what you were doing and who you were with during these lost five days. Is there anything besides the credit flimsy that you can think of to help?”
Johnny shook his head. “You know, of course, why it is important for me to know the identity and motive of my assailant?”
“Sure,” I said, “they might try it again.”
“Precisely.”
“How can I get hold of you if I need to?”
Johnny passed me an access chip.
“A secure line?” I said.
“Very.”
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll get back to you if and when I get some information.”
We moved out of the bar and toward the terminex. He was moving away when I took three quick steps and grabbed his arm. It was the first time that I had touched him. “Johnny. What’s the name of the Old Earth poet they resurrected …”
“Retrieved.”
“Whatever. The one they built your AI persona on?”
The attractive cybrid hesitated. I noticed that his eyelashes were very long. “How can it be important?” he asked.
“Who knows what’s important?”
He nodded. “Keats,” he said. “Born in A.D. 1795. Died of tuberculosis in 1821. John Keats.”
Following someone through a series of farcaster changes is damn near impossible. Especially if you want to remain undetected. The Web cops can do it, given about fifty agents assigned to the task, plus some exotic and damned expensive high-tech toys, not to mention the cooperation of the Transit Authority. For a solo, the task is almost impossible.
Still, it was fairly important for me to see where my new client was headed.
Johnny did not look back as he crossed the terminex plaza. I moved to a nearby kiosk and watched through my pocket-sized imager as he punched codes on a manual diskey, inserted his card, and stepped through the glowing rectangle.
The use of the manual diskey probably meant that he was headed for a general access portal since private ’caster codes are usually imprinted on eyes-only chips. Great. I’d narrowed his destination down to approximately two million portals on a hundred and fifty-some Web worlds and half that many moons.
With one hand I pulled the red “lining” out of my overcoat while I hit replay on the imager, watching through the eyepiece as it magnified the diskey sequence. I tugged out a red cap to go with my new red jacket and pulled the brim low over my face. Moving quickly across the plaza, I queried my comlog about the nine-digit transfer code I’d seen on the imager. I knew the first three digits meant the world of Tsingtao-Hsishuang Panna—I’d memorized all the planetary prefixes—and was told an instant later that the portal code led to a residential district in the First Expansion city of Wansiehn.
I hurried to the first open booth and ’cast there, stepping out onto a small terminex plaza paved in worn brick. Ancient oriental shops leaned against one another, eaves of their pagoda roofs hanging over narrow side streets. People thronged the plaza and stood in doorways and, while most of those in sight were obviously descendants of the Long Flight exiles who settled THP, many were offworlders. The air smelled of alien vegetation, sewage, and cooking rice.