Altered Carbon

At twenty-two years old, a marine corps grunt via the street gangs of Newpest, it told me nothing. Carlyle took in my blank look and sighed.

“It tells you that people like shopping. That it satisfies a basic, acquisitive need at a genetic level. Something we inherited from our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Oh, you’ve got automated convenience shopping for basic household items, mechanical food distribution systems for the marginalised poor. But you’ve also got a massive proliferation of commercial hives and speciality markets in food and crafts which people physically have to go to. Now why would they do that, if they didn’t enjoy it?”

I probably shrugged, maintaining my youthful cool.

“Shopping is physical interaction, exercise of decision-making capacity, sating of the desire to acquire, and an impulse to more acquisition, a scouting urge. It’s so basically flicking human when you think about it. You’ve got to learn to love it, Tak. I mean you can cross the whole archipelago on a hover, you never even need to get wet. But that doesn’t take the basic pleasure out of swimming, does it? Learn to shop well, Tak. Get flexible. Enjoy the uncertainty.”

Enjoyment wasn’t exactly what I was feeling at the moment, but I stuck with it and I stayed flexible, true to Serenity Carlyle’s creed. I started out vaguely looking for a heavy-duty waterproof jacket, but the thing that finally pulled me into a shop was a pair of all-terrain walking boots.

The boots were followed by loose black trousers and a crossover insulated top with enzyme seals that ran all the way from waist to a tight crew neck. I’d seen variations on the outfit a hundred times on the streets of Bay City so far. Surface assimilation. It would do. After brief hungover reflection, I added a defiant red silk banda

Before I left it, I searched through the jacket pockets and came up with two cards: the doctor at Bay City Central and Bancroft’s armourer.

Larkin and Green proved to be the names not of two gunsmiths, but of two streets that intersected on a leafy slope called Russian Hill. The autocab had some visitors blurb about the area, but I skipped it. Larkin & Green, Armourers since 2203 was a discreet corner façade, extending less than a half dozen metres along each street, but bordered by blinded units that looked as if they had probably been a

Inside, the place reminded me of the chart room at Suntouch House. There was space, and light flooding in from two storeys of tall windows. The first floor had been removed and replaced with a wide gallery on four sides overlooking the ground level. The walls were hung with flat display cases and the space under the gallery overhang hosted heavy glass-topped trolleys that performed the same function. There was the faint tang of an ambient modifier in the air, scent of old trees under the gun oil, and the floor under my newly booted feet was carpeted.

A black steel face appeared over the gallery rail. Green photo-receptors burned in place of eyes. “May I be of assistance, sir?”

“I’m Takeshi Kovacs. I’m here from Laurens Bancroft,” I said, tipping my head back to meet the mandroid’s gaze. “I’m looking for some hardware.”

“Of course, sir.” The voice was smoothly male and devoid of any sales subsonics I could detect. “Mr. Bancroft told us to expect you. I am with a client, but I shall be down presently. Please make yourself at home. There are chairs to your left and a refreshments cabinet. Please help yourself.”

The head disappeared and a murmured conversation I had vaguely registered when I came in was resumed. I located the refreshments cabinet, found it stocked with alcohol and cigars and closed it hurriedly. The painkillers had taken the edge off the Merge Nine hangover, but I was in no fit state for further abuse. With a light shock, I realised I’d gone through the day so far without a cigarette. I wandered over to the nearest display case and looked in at a selection of samurai swords. There were date tickets attached to the scabbards. Some of them were older than me.

The next case held a rack of brown and grey projectile weapons that seemed to have been grown rather than machined. The barrels sprouted from organically curved wrappings that flared gently back to the stock. These too were dated back into the last century. I was trying to decipher the curled engraving on a barrel when I heard a metallic tread on the staircase behind me.

“Has sir found anything to his liking?”

I turned to face the approaching mandroid. Its entire body was the same polished gunmetal, moulded into the muscle configuration of an archetypal human male. Only the genitals were absent. The face was long and thin, fine-featured enough to hold attention despite its immobility. The head was carved into furrows to represent thick backcombed hair. Stamped across the chest was the almost eroded legend Mars Expo 2076.

“Just looking.” I said and gestured back at the guns. “Are these made of wood?”

The green photo-receptor gaze regarded me gravely. “That is correct, sir. The stocks are a beech hybrid. They are all handmade weapons. Kalashnikov, Purdey and Beretta. We stock all the European houses here. Which was sir interested in?”

I looked back. There was a curious poetry to the forms, something slung part way between functional bluntness and organic grace, something that cried out to be cradled. To be used.

“They’re a bit ornate for me. I had in mind something a little more practical.”

“Certainly, sir. Can we assume sir is not a novice in this field?”

I gri

“Then perhaps sir would care to tell me what his preferences in the past have been.”

“Smith & Wesson 11mm Magnum. Ingram 40 flechette gun. Sunjet particle thrower. But that wasn’t in this sleeve.”

The green receptors glowed. No comment. Perhaps it hadn’t been programmed for light conversation with Envoys.

“And what exactly is sir looking for in this sleeve?”

I shrugged. “Something subtle. Something not. Projectile weapons. And a blade. The heavy one needs to be something like the Smith.”

The mandroid became quite still. I could almost hear the whirring of data retrieval. I wondered briefly how a machine like this had come to wind up here. It had clearly not been designed for the job. On Harlan’s World, you don’t see many mandroids. They’re expensive to build, compared to a synthetic, or even a clone, and most jobs that require a human form are better done by those organic alternatives. The truth is that a robot human is a pointless collision of two disparate functions. Artificial intelligence, which really works better strung out on a mainframe, and hard-wearing, hazardproof bodywork which most cyber-engineering firms designed to spec for the task in hand. The last robot I’d seen on the World was a gardening crab.

The photo-receptors brightened slightly and the thing’s posture unlocked. “If sir would care to come this way, I believe I have the right combination.”

I followed the machine through a door that blended so well with the décor of the back wall that I hadn’t seen it and down a short corridor. Beyond was a long, low room whose unpainted plaster walls were lined with raw fibre-glass packing cases. There were a number of people working quietly at points up and down the room. The air carried the businesslike rattle of hardware in practised hands. The mandroid led me to a small grey-haired man dressed in grease-streaked coveralls who was stripping down an electromag bolt-thrower as if it were a roast chicken. He looked up as we approached.