Altered Carbon

He was right. Elizabeth Elliott was a beautiful girl, blonde and athletic and only a few years younger than Miriam Bancroft. Whether she had the driving determination and horselike stamina that you needed in Total Body Theatre, the picture didn’t show, but she probably could have given it a shot.

The holoshot showed her sandwiched between Elliott and another woman who was an almost perfect older edition of Elizabeth. The three of them had been taken in bright sunlight somewhere with grass, and the picture was marred by a bar of shadow falling from a tree beyond the cast of the recorder across the older woman’s face. She was frowning, as if she had noticed the flaw in the composition, but it was a small frown, a fractional chiselling of lines between her brows. A palpable shimmer of happiness overwhelmed the detail.

“Gone,” said Elliott, as if he had guessed who my attention was focused on. “Four years ago. You know what Dipping is?”

I shook my head. Local colour, Virginia Vidaura said in my ear. Soak it up.

Elliott looked up, for a moment I thought at the holo of Anchana Salomao, but then I saw that his head was tilted at the sky beyond. “Up there,” he said, and jarred to a halt the way he had when he mentioned his daughter’s youth.

I waited.

“Up there, you got the comsats. Raining data. You can see it on some virtual maps, it looks like someone’s knitting the world a scarf.” He looked down at me again, eyes shiny. “Irene said that. Knitting the world a scarf. Some of that scarf is people. Digitised rich folks, on their way between bodies. Skeins of memory and feeling and thought, packaged up by numbers.”

Now I thought I knew what was coming, but I kept quiet.

“If you’re good, like she was, and you’ve got the equipment, you can sample those signals. They call them mindbites. Moments in the head of a fashion-house princess, the ideas of a particle theorist, memories from a king’s childhood. There’s a market for this stuff. Oh, the society magazines run edited skullwalks of these sorts of people, but it’s all authorised, sanitised. Cut for public consumption. No unguarded moments, nothing that could embarrass anybody or damage popularity, just great big plastic smiles on everything. That ain’t what people really want.”

I had my doubts about that. The skullwalk magazines were big on Harlan’s World as well, and the only time their consumers protested was when one of the notables they portrayed was caught in some moment of human weakness. Infidelity and abusive language were usually the biggest generators of public outcry. It made sense. Anyone pitiful enough to want to spend so much time outside their own head wasn’t going to want to see the same basic human realities reflected in the gilded skulls of those they admired.

“With mindbites, you get everything,” said Elliott with a peculiar enthusiasm I suspected was a graft from his wife’s opinions. “The doubt, the muck, the humanity. People will pay a fortune for it.”

“But it’s illegal?”

Elliott gestured at the shopfront that bore his name. “The data market was down. Too many brokers. Saturated. We had a clone and re-sleeving policy to pay on both of us, plus Elizabeth. My tac pension wasn’t going to be enough. What could we do?”

“How long did she get?” I asked him softly.

Elliott stared out to sea. “Thirty years.”

After a while, stare still fixed on the horizon, he said, “I was OK for six months, then I turn on the screen and see some corporate negotiator wearing Irene’s body.” He half-turned towards me and coughed out something that might have been a laugh. “Corporation bought it direct from the Bay City storage facility. Paid five times what I could have afforded. They say the bitch only wears it alternate months.”

“Elizabeth know that?”

He nodded once, like an axe coming down. “She got it out of me, one night. I was jack-happy. Been cruising the stacks all day, looking for business. No handle on where I was or what was going on. You want to know what she said?”

“No,” I muttered.

He didn’t hear me. His knuckles had whitened on the iron railing. “She said, Don’t worry Daddy, when I’m rich we’ll buy Mummy back.”

This was getting out of hand.

“Look, Elliott, I’m sorry about your daughter, but from what I hear she wasn’t working the kind of places Bancroft goes. Jerry’s Closed Quarters isn’t exactly the Houses, is it?”

The ex-tac spun on me without warning, and there was blind murder in his eyes and his crooked hands. I couldn’t blame him. All he could see in front of him was Bancroft’s man.

But you can’t jump an Envoy—the conditioning won’t let it happen. I saw the attack coming almost before he knew he was going to do it himself, and I had the neurachem of my borrowed sleeve online fragments of a second later. He hit low, driving under the guard he thought I’d put up, looking for the body blows that would break up my ribs. The guard wasn’t there, and neither was I. Instead, I stepped inside the hooks of his punches, took him off balance with my weight and tangled one leg amidst his. He stumbled back against the railing and I drove a cruel elbow uppercut into his solar plexus. His face went grey with the shock. Leaning over, I pi

“That’s enough,” I snapped, a little unsteadily. The sleeve’s neurachem wiring was a rougher piece of work than the Corps systems I’d used in the past and in overdrive the overwhelming impression was of being slung around in a subcutaneous bag of chicken wire.

I looked down at Elliott.

His eyes were a hand’s breadth from mine, and despite the grip I had on his throat they were still burning with rage. Breath whistled in his teeth as he clawed after the strength to break my grip and damage me.

I yanked him off the rail and propped him away from me with a cautionary arm.

“Listen, I’m passing no judgements here. I just want to know. What makes you think she has any co

“Because she told me, motherfucker.” The sentence hissed out of him. “She told me what he’d done.”

“And what was that?”

He blinked rapidly, the undischarged rage condensing into tears. “Dirty tilings,” he said. “She said he needed them. Badly enough to come back. Badly enough to pay.”

Meal ticket. Don’t worry Daddy, when I’m rich we’ll buy Mummy back. Easy enough mistake to make when you’re young. But nothing comes that easy.

“You think that’s why she died?”

He turned his head and looked at me as if I was a particularly poisonous species of spider on his kitchen floor.

“She didn’t die, mister. Someone killed her. Someone took a razor and cut her up.”

“Trial transcript says it was a client. Not Bancroft.”

“How would they know?” he said dully. “They name a body, who knows who’s inside it. Who’s paying for it all.”

“They find him yet?”

“Biocabin whore’s killer? What do you think? It ain’t exactly like she worked for the Houses, right?”

“That’s not what I meant, Elliott. You say she turned Bancroft in Jerry’s, I’ll believe you. But you’ve got to admit it doesn’t sound like Bancroft’s style. I’ve met the man, and slumming?” I shook my head. “He doesn’t read that way to me.”

Elliott turned away.

“Flesh,” he said. “What you going to read in a Meth’s flesh?”

It was nearly full dark. Out across the water on the sloping deck of the warship, the performance had started. We both stared at the lights for a while, heard the bright snatches of music, like transmissions from a world that we were forever locked out of.

“Elizabeth’s still on stack,” I said quietly.

“Yeah, so what? Re-sleeving policy lapsed four years ago, when we sank all the money we had into some lawyer said he could crack Irene’s case.” He gestured back at the dimly lit frontage of his offices. “I look like the kind of guy’s going to come into some money real soon?”