‘You fuck.’ She started to cry, a small hopeless sound in the stillness.
I kept my eyes fixed on the ocean. ‘I don’t work for Bancroft any more,’ I said carefully. ‘I’ve swapped sides on that piece of shit. I’m giving you the chance to hit Bancroft where it hurts, to hit him with the guilt that fucking your daughter never gave him. Plus, now you’re out of the store maybe you’ll be able to get the money together and re-sleeve Elizabeth. Or at least get her off stack, rent her some space in a virtual condo or something. The point is, you’re off the ice, you can do something. You’ve got options. That’s what I’m offering you. I’m dealing you back into the game. Don’t throw that away.’
Beside me, I heard her struggling to force down the tears. I waited.
‘You’re pretty impressed with yourself, aren’t you?’ she said finally. ‘You think you’re doing me this big favour, but you’re no fucking Good Samaritan. I mean, you got me out of the store, but it all comes at a price, right?’
‘Of course it does,’ I said quietly.
‘I do what you want, this virus run. I break the law for you, or I go back on stack. And if I squeal, or screw up, I’ve got more to lose than you. That’s the deal, isn’t it? Nothing for free.’
I watched the waves. ‘That’s the deal,’ I agreed.
More silence. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her look down at the body she was wearing, as if she’d spilled something down herself. ‘Do you know how I feel?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘I slept with my husband, and I feel like he’s been unfaithful to me.’ A choked laugh. She smeared angrily at her eyes. ‘I feel like I’ve been unfaithful. To something. You know, when they put me away I left a body and a family behind. Now I don’t have either.’
She looked down at herself again. She lifted her hands and turned them, fingers spread.
‘I don’t know what I feel,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what to feel.’
There was a lot I could have said. A lot that has been said, written, researched and disputed on the subject. Trite little magazine-length summings-up of the problems inherent in re-sleeving – How to make your partner love you again, in any body – trite, interminable psychological tracts – Some observations of secondary trauma in civil re-sleeving – even the sanctified manuals of the fucking Envoy Corps itself had something trite to say on the matter. Quotes, informed opinion, the ravings of the religious and the lunatic fringe. I could have thrown it all at her. I could have told her that what she was going through was quite normal for an unconditioned human. I could have told her that it would pass with time. That there were psychodynamic disciplines for dealing with it. That millions of other people survived it. I could even have told her that whichever God she owed nominal allegiance to was watching over her. I could have lied, I could have reasoned. It all would have meant about the same, because the reality was pain, and right now there was nothing anyone could do to take it away.
I said nothing.
The dawn gained on us, light strengthening on the closed-up frontages behind us. I glanced at the windows of Elliott’s Data Linkage.
‘Victor?’ I asked.
‘Sleeping.’ She wiped an arm across her face and snorted her tears back under control like badly cut amphetamine. ‘You say this is going to hurt Bancroft?’
‘Yeah. In a subtle way, but yeah, it’ll hurt.’
‘Installation run on an AI,’ said Irene Elliott to me. ‘Installing an erasure penalty virus. Fucking over a known Meth. You know what the risks are? You know what you’re asking me to do?’
I turned to look her in the eye.
‘Yes. I know.’
Her mouth clamped down on a tremor.
‘Good. Then let’s do it.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The run took less than three days to set up. Irene Elliott turned stone-cold pro and made it happen that way.
In the limo back to Bay City, I laid it out for her. At first she was still crying inside, but as the detail mounted she clicked in, nodding, grunting, stopping me and backing me up on minor points I hadn’t made clear enough. I showed her Reileen Kawahara’s suggested hardware list and she OK’d about two thirds of it. The rest was just corporate padding and Kawahara’s advisors, in her opinion, didn’t know shit.
By the end of the journey she had it down. I could see the run already unfolding behind her eyes. The tears had dried on her face, forgotten, and her expression was clean purpose, locked-down hate for the man who had used her daughter, and an embodied will to revenge.
Irene Elliott was sold.
I rented an apartment in Oakland on the JacSol account. Elliott moved in and I left her there to catch up on some sleep. I stayed at the Hendrix, tried to do some sleeping of my own without much success and went back six hours later to find Elliott already prowling about the apartment.
I called the names and numbers Kawahara had given me and ordered the stuff Elliott had ticked. The crates arrived in hours. Elliott cracked them open and laid out the hardware across the floor of the apartment.
Together we went through Ortega’s list of virtual forums and worked it down to a shortlist of seven.
(Ortega had not turned up, or called me at the Hendrix.)
Mid afternoon on the second day, Elliott kicked on the primary modules and cruised each of the shortlist options. The list fell to three, and Elliott gave me a couple more items to go shopping for. Refinement software for the big kill.
By early evening the list was down to two, with Elliott writing up preliminary intrusion procedures for both. Whenever she hit a glitch, we backed up and compared relative merits.
By midnight we had our target. Elliott went to bed and slept eight solid hours. I went back to the Hendrix and brooded.
(Nothing from Ortega.)
I bought breakfast in the street and took it back to the apartment. Neither of us felt much like eating.
10.15 local time. Irene Elliott calibrated her equipment for the last time.
We did it.
Twenty-seven-and-a-half minutes.
A piece of piss, said Elliott.
I left her dismantling equipment and flew out to see Bancroft that afternoon.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
‘I find this exceptionally difficult to believe,’ said Bancroft sharply. ‘Are you quite sure I went to this establishment?’
Below the balcony on the lawns of Suntouch House, Miriam Bancroft appeared to be constructing an enormous paper glider from instructions in a moving holoprojection. The white of the wings was so bright it hurt to look directly at them. As I leaned on the balcony rail, she shaded her eyes from the sun and looked up at me.
‘The mall has security monitors,’ I said, affecting disinterest.
‘Automated system, still operational after all these years. They’ve got footage of you walking right up to the door. You do know the name, don’t you?’
‘Jack It Up? Of course, I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never actually used the place.’
I looked round without leaving the rail. ‘Really. You have something against virtual sex, then? You’re a reality purist?’
‘No.’ I could hear the smile in his voice. ‘I have no problem with virtual formats, and as I believe I’ve told you already, I have used them on occasion. But this place Jack It Up is, how can I put it, hardly the elegant end of the market.’