‘Yes, and evolutionarily selective too.’ The datahawk’s didactic tone had not shifted. It almost never did; didactic was part of the way Matthew was wired. ‘But this is not the point. Human intuition is deceptive, because it is not always consistent. It is not necessarily a good fit for the environments we now live in, or the mathematics that underlie them. When it does echo mathematical form, it’s clearly indicative of an inherent capacity to detect that underlying mathematics.’
‘But not when they clash.’ Carl leaned his forehead against the glass. They’d had this discussion before, countless times. ‘Right?’
‘Not when they clash,’ Matthew agreed. ‘When they clash, the mathematics remain correct. The intuition merely indicates a mismatch of evolved capacities with a changed or changing environment.’
‘So Norton’s clean?’
‘Norton is clean.’
Carl turned his back on his reflection. Leaned against the window and looked around the room that caged him. He recognised the reflex – seeking exits. Stupid, there was the fucking door, right there.
So use it, fuckwit.
‘Does it ever bother you?’ he asked into the phone.
‘Does what bother me, Carl?’
‘This whole thing.’ He gestured as if Matthew could see him. ‘Jacobsen, the fucking Accords, the Agency and the enforcement. Having to be licensed like some fucking hazardous substance.’
‘To the extent that personal identification records are a form of social licensing, we are all licensed, base humans and variants alike. If the type of licensing reflects certain gradients of social risk, is that a bad thing?’
Carl sighed. ‘Okay, forget it. I’m asking the wrong person.’
‘In what way?’
‘Well, no offence, but you’re a gleech. Your whole profile is post-autistic. This is an emotional thing we’re talking about.’
‘My emotional range has been psycho-chemically rebalanced and extended.’
‘Yeah, by an n-djinn. Sorry, Matthew, I don’t know why I’m fronting you with this stuff. You’re no more normal than I am.’
‘Leaving aside for a moment the question of what exactly you would consider to be a normal human, what makes you think you would receive a more valid answer from one? Are normal humans especially gifted in discovering complex ethical truths?’
Carl thought about that.
‘Not that I’ve noticed,’ he admitted gloomily. ‘No.’
‘So my perception of the post-Jacobsen order is probably no more or less useful than any other rational human’s.’
‘Yeah, but that’s just the big fat point.’ Carl grinned. There was a solid pleasure in catching the datahawk and his hyper-balanced mindset out, mainly because he didn’t get to do it very often. ‘This isn’t about rational humans. The Jacobsen Report wasn’t about a rational response to genetic licensing, it was about a group of rational men trying to broker a deal with the gibbering mass of irrational humanity. The religious lunatics, the race purists, the whole doom-of-civilisation crew.’ For a moment, he stared off blindly into a corner of the room. ‘I mean, don’t you remember all that stuff back in eighty-nine, ninety? The demonstrations? The vitriol in the feeds? The mobs outside the facilities and the army bases, crashing the fences?’
‘Yes. I remember it. But it did not bother me.’
Carl shrugged. ‘Well, you didn’t scare them like we did.’
‘And yet Jacobsen was not a capitulation to the forces you describe. The report is critical of both irrational responses and simplistic thinking.’
‘Yeah. But look who ended up in the tracts anyway.’
Matthew said nothing. Carl saw Stéphane Névant’s lupine grin, rubbed at his eyes to make it go away.
‘Look, Matt, thanks—’
‘Matthew.’
‘Sorry. Matthew. Thanks for the check on Norton, ’kay? Talk to you soon.’
He hung up. Tossed the phone on the bed and got rapidly dressed in the least used and bloodied garments from among his limited wardrobe. He let himself out of the hotel room, paused briefly on his way past Sevgi Ertekin’s door, then made an exasperated noise in his throat and stalked on. He waited ten impatient seconds at the elevator, then stiff-armed the door to the emergency stairwell open instead and went down the steps two at a time. Crossed the lobby at a fast stride, and went out into the city. He walked a single block to get the feel of the evening, then flagged down an autocab.
The interior was low-lit and cosy, an expansive black leatherette womb with slash-narrow views to the passing street. In the gloom on the front panel, an armoured screen blipped into life and showed him a rather idealised female driver interface. Generic Rim beauty, the classic Asia-Hispanic blend. Pinned dark hair, a hint of a curl in it, chic high collar jacket. Something of Carmen Ren in the features and the poise, but machined up to an inhuman perfection. The voice was an Asia Badawi rip-off.
‘Good evening, sir. Welcome to Cable Cars. What will be your choice of destination this evening?’
He hesitated. Sutherland, he knew, would not have been impressed with this.
Sutherland’s on fucking Mars.
‘Just take me somewhere I can get in a fight,’ he said.
Switched off and careless from jet-lag, long sleep and yesterday’s combat, he never noticed the figure on the corner that watched him leave the hotel, or the nondescript teardrop that slid out from parking on the opposite side of the street and dropped into the traffic behind his cab.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Dougie Kwang’s week had been shaping up for shit ever since it started, and tonight didn’t look any better. He was three games down to Valdez already, stalking the angles of the table, pumping violent, crack-bang shots to take his mind off it all. The technique – if you want to call it that, he fumed – mostly just rattled the balls in the jaws, and they sat out more often than he sank them. He knew his anger was the exact reason he was losing, but he couldn’t shake it loose. There was too much else gone to shit around him.
Wundawari’s shipment never made it through MTC in Jakarta, Wundawari herself was now banged up in an Indonesian jail on trumped-up holding charges until some scummy Seattle-based rights lawyer she used could wire across and get her out. The money was gone. Write it off, the Seattle guy advised dryly down the line, what you maybe claw back from the Maritime Transit guys in compensation, you’re going to be paying me in fees. Dougie might have called him on that one, but Wundawari wouldn’t do the time, and both he and Seattle knew it. She was too soft, came from Kuala Lumpur money and a whole creche of spoilt-brat connections down in the Freeport. She’d pay whatever Seattle wanted.
On the street, things were no better. Alcatraz station were coming down hard and heavy all over the fucking place, big-ass RimSec interventions at levels those guys mostly didn’t bother with. He still couldn’t find out why. Some shit about a factory raft bust last night and the fallout, but none of his few bought-and-paid-for touches inside the RimSec machine ranked high enough to know any more than that. More importantly, they were too fucking scared of Alcatraz to risk sniffing around any closer. End result was, he couldn’t move shit anywhere north of Selby or west of the Boulevard, and even in the yards at Hunter Point, he was getting heat he didn’t need. And the border had been sticky for fucking months now. None of the gangs he knew could get more than the odd fence-bunny across, mostly strait-laced white girls out of the Dakotas that took fucking for ever to break in and even then didn’t play too well to popular demand.