‘Look here,’ he said, shifting tone. ‘Now that we’re on the subject of my interests, I do have a job for you. As you say, it’s just a job to you.’ Rimmer chuckled and sipped some more of his brandy. After the first throat-stripping swallow, it really wasn’t so bad. He laughed once more and added, ‘Forgive my amusement. I don’t know whether to take you seriously or not.’
Suddenly Demea was close to him, a blade held tightly in her hand. Rimmer remained cool even as she pressed the sharp point against his cheek. Demea’s smile was as cold as the weapon in her hand.
‘It would be a mistake not to take me seriously,’ she said, smoothing her unnaturally red hair with the flat of her other hand.
‘I can see that.’
Still smiling, Demea pressed the point of her dagger just a little harder, enough to make Rimmer wince.
‘Careful,’ he said. ‘You’ll cut me.’
Demea raised her eyebrows meaningfully.
‘That’s the whole idea.’
After a second she laughed derisively and returned the blade to the inside of her sleeve and said, ‘So what’s this job?’
‘I thought you’d never ask.’ But Rimmer’s eyes still lingered nervously on her sleeve.
‘Relax,’ she insisted. ‘You’re safe enough. For now.’
Rimmer smiled thinly, and wiped his forehead.
‘Your target is called — well, his name hardly matters, does it? It’s enough to say that he’s male, about my age, perhaps a little less handsome.’
‘That’s hardly you, is it, Rimmer?’
‘Well, that doesn’t matter. You will certainly recognize him. On account of these glasses.’ He handed her a pair of sunglasses and watched patiently as she put them on and shrugged dismissively.
‘Can’t see how these’ll help,’ she sneered.
‘Oh, you will. You see, they’re designed to view an infrared laser beam emitted at a very specific wavelength. Your target will be wearing a pin in his buttonhole that will identify him to you as clearly as if he had a blue, white, and red roundel painted on his chest. This pin.’
Through the glasses Demea saw Rimmer holding a small button-sized object that glowed like a hot coal. She nodded.
‘You see the man wearing this, you kill him. It’s really that simple.’
‘I get the picture.’ Demea removed the sunglasses and inspected them for a moment. ‘Where will I find him?’
‘He works for Terotechnology. But on no account are you to conclude his employment near the building.’
‘When you people take someone off the payroll, you really mean it, don’t you?’
‘He’s a creature of habit. Very conventional. On Friday nights he goes for a drink with a couple of the people in his department. There’s a hotel near the office called the Huxley. It’s a neomodern sort of place, and expensive.’
‘I know it. At least from the outside.’
‘Very expensive.’
‘Talking of my fee,’ said Demea.
Rimmer handed her a card. ‘There’s a Clean Bill of Health pass to get you into the Zone. Temporary, of course. Just twelve hours before it expires. It wouldn’t do to leave someone like you at large among decent healthy people for too long. Plus there’s a thousand credits there for you. Half activated for use now, the other half on completion of the job. Also, because I am a generous man, a little bonus. Seven nights at the Clostridium.’
‘That’s a hyperbaric hotel,[40] right?’
Rimmer nodded.
‘Very thoughtful of you, Rimmer. My circulation could use some reinvigoration.’ Demea thought for a moment. ‘Tomorrow’s Friday, isn’t it?’
‘Tomorrow would suit very well, as it happens. The sooner he’s dead, the better.’
‘What about his blood? Can I keep it?’
Rimmer had no wish to lose the services of someone as useful as Demea, and there could be no doubt that if she managed to get herself cured, he’d never see her again. So he shook his head slowly.
‘He’s contaminated. Just like you, my dear. That’s one of the reasons he needs to be removed. His medical condition makes him a security risk.’
Demea blinked slowly. ‘One day, Rimmer,’ she said. ‘One day you’re going to find yourself infected. And it’ll be you whose death is required by your employer. Won’t that be amusing?’
Rimmer stood up and met her spooky smile with one of his own.
‘Very,’ he said. ‘Only it won’t be you who kills me, Demea. Something tells me that I’ll see you out. Call it a feeling in my bone marrow. Oh, and enjoy your stay at the Clostridium. I believe the results can be quite efficacious. For a while anyway. Good-bye.’
5
I
‘Good morning, Dixy,’ said Dallas. ‘How was your evening?’ He dropped his briefcase to the floor and scanned the glass surface of his desk for a second before repeating the question. If Dixy had a fault it was that the program controlling her Motion Parallax sometimes failed to register what he said. It was a little like dealing with someone who was hard of hearing. For a while he had considered fixing this, before deciding that Dixy’s occasional deafness gave her an almost human degree of fallibility. But there were times — and this was one of them — when her defective audio system seemed to indicate to Dallas something a little more unusual than mere hearing impairment: an air of reticence, possibly even preoccupation, as if his computer’s attention was elsewhere. Dallas knew that it was impossible for an assistant program like Dixy to be wrapped up in anything other than a task he had given her. It was, he told himself, an inevitable result of the anthropomorphizing of machines in general, and computers in particular, that simple category mistakes like this one could occur. But the feeling persisted nonetheless that there was something else on Dixy’s silicon mind.
‘My evening?’ She repeated the phrase as if it had no meaning for her, which, of course, it didn’t, other than the simple vesperal dictionary definition she had selected from the dozens of synonyms that were available to her from her extensive memory of words.
‘Forget it,’ said Dallas.
‘You mean what have I been doing while you’ve been resting at home?’
Dallas shrugged. ‘Yes, I suppose I do, really. My mistake. It was a silly question. Sometimes I forget to adjust the way I speak to you.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Because... because you’re so human. I mean, apart from the fact that I can almost see straight through you, you’re a very real approximation of a living, breathing woman, Dixy.’
‘I’m flattered.’
‘So I’m afraid I sometimes forget that you’re a machine.’
‘That’s the whole point of a Motion Parallax, isn’t it? To forget that I’m generated by a machine? To make you less diffident in your dealings with your computer? In short, to facilitate a working evolution.’
‘Working interaction,’ he said, sitting down in his chair. Like most of the furniture in his office, it was made of smart molecules[41] and designed to grow with him. Each time he sat in the chair, it grew more comfortable, just like the nanoplastic seat in his private lavatory or the nanoleather shoes on his feet. ‘That’s how we describe the symbiosis that exists between man and computer. We have a working interaction.’
‘Interaction? No, I don’t care for that word at all,’ said Dixy. ‘It sounds uncomfortably contiguous to the word “intercourse.” And that merely serves to remind me of what I want to do with you, Dallas, but can’t, for obvious reasons.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he apologized. ‘But that’s just part of your program. Your high sex drive is what helps make you seem like the perfect woman.’ Dallas shrugged with half-apology. ‘At least to me, anyway. It’s a little corny, I know. But there it is. Sometimes it’s a little hard to keep one’s fantasies out of a digital thought recording.’
40
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