Altered Carbon

“Roll on Resolution 653, huh?”

“Yeah.”

We both went back to looking at the ceiling above the couches. The cabin was bottom of the line bubblefab, blown from a single globe of polyfibre like chicle in a child’s mouth, doors and windows lasered out and re-attached with epoxy hinges afterwards. The curved grey ceiling held absolutely nothing of interest.

“Tell me something, Ortega,” I said after a while. “That tail you had on me Tuesday afternoon, when I went shopping. How come he was so much worse than the others? A blind man could have spotted him.”

There was a pause before she spoke. Then, grudgingly. “All we had. It was a snap thing, we had to get you covered quick, after you dumped the clothes.”

“The clothes.” I closed my eyes. “Oh, no. You tagged the suit? That simple?”

“Yep.”

I threw my mind back to my first meeting with Ortega. The justice facility, the ride out to Suntouch House. The total recall ripped through the footage on fast forward. I saw us standing on the sunlit lawn with Miriam Bancroft. Ortega departing …

“Got it!” I snapped my fingers. “You hammered me on the shoulder when you left. I can’t believe I’m this stupid.”

“Enzyme bond bleeper,” said Ortega matter-of-factly. “Not much bigger than a fly’s eye. And we figured, with autumn well set in you wouldn’t be going many places without your jacket. Course, when you offloaded it into that skip we thought you’d tipped us.”

“No. Nothing so bright.”

“That’s it,” a

It was a rougher ride than I’d expected from a government department installation, but no worse than many jury-rigged virtuals I’d done on the World. First the hypnos, pulsing their sonocodes until the dull grey ceiling grew abruptly fascinating with fishtail swirls of light and meaning drained out of the universe like dirty water from a sink. And then I was

Elsewhere.

It spread out around me, racing away from my viewpoint in all directions like nothing so much as a huge magnification of one of the spiral steps we had used to get down from the gantry. Steel grey, stippled every few metres with a nipple-like swelling, receding to infinity. The sky above was a paler shade of the same grey with shiftings that seemed vaguely to suggest bars and antique locks. Nice psychology, assuming any of the felons interrogated had anything but race memory of what an actual lock looked like.

In front of me softly shaped grey furniture was evolving from the floor like a sculpture from a pool of mercury. A plain metal table first, then two chairs this side, one opposite. Their edges and surfaces ran liquidly smooth for the final seconds of their emergence, then snapped solid and geometric as they took on an existence separate to the floor.

Ortega appeared beside me, at first a pale pencil sketch of a woman, all flickering lines and diffident shading. As I watched, pastel colours raced through her and her movements grew more defined. She was turning to speak to me, one hand reaching into the pocket of her jacket. I waited and the final gloss of colour popped out onto her surfaces. She produced her cigarettes.

“Smoke?”

“No thanks, I—” Realising the futility of worrying about virtual health, I accepted the packet and shook one out. Ortega lit us both with her petrol lighter, and the first bite of smoke in my lungs was ecstasy.

I looked up at the geometric sky. “Is this standard?”

“Pretty much.” Ortega squinted into the distance. “Resolution looks a bit higher than usual. Think Micky’s showing off.”

Kadmin scribbled into existence on the other side of the table. Before the virtual program had even coloured him in properly, he became aware of us and folded his arms across his chest. If my appearance in the cell was putting him off balance as hoped, it didn’t show.

“Again, lieutenant?” he said when the programme had rendered him complete. “There is a UN ruling on maximum virtual time for one arrest, you know.”

“That’s right, and we’re still a long way off it,” said Ortega. “Why don’t you sit down, Kadmin.”

“No thank you.”

“I said sit, motherfucker.” There was an abrupt undercurrent of steel in the cop’s voice, and magically Kadmin blinked off and reappeared seated at the table. His face betrayed a momentary flash of rage at the displacement, but then it was gone and he unfolded his arms in an ironic gesture.

“You’re right, it’s so much more comfortable like this. Won’t you both join me?”

We took our seats in the more conventional way, and I stared at Kadmin as we did it. It was the first time I’d seen anything quite like it.

He was the Patchwork Man.

Most virtual systems recreate you from self images held in the memory, with a common-sense sub-routine to prevent your delusions from impinging too much. I generally come out a little taller and thi

The man in front of me was different. His frame was that of a Caucasian Nordic, topping mine by nearly thirty centimetres, but the face was at odds. It began African, broad and deep ebony, but the colour ended like a mask under the eyes and the lower half was divided along the line of the nose, pale copper on the left, corpse white on the right. The nose was both fleshy and aquiline and mediated well between the top and bottom halves of the face, but the mouth was a mismatch of left and right sides that left the lips peculiarly twisted. Long straight black hair was combed mane-like back from the forehead, shot through on one side with pure white. The hands, immobile on the metal table, were equipped with claws similar to the ones I’d seen on the giant freak fighter in Licktown, hut the fingers were long and sensitive. He had breasts, impossibly full on a torso so overmuscled. The eyes, set in jet skin, were a startling pale green. Kadmin had freed himself from conventional perceptions of the physical. In an earlier age, he would have been a shaman; here, the centuries of technology had made him more. An electronic demon, a malignant spirit that dwelled in altered carbon and emerged only to possess flesh and wreak havoc.

He would have made a fine Envoy.

“I take it I don’t have to introduce myself,” I said quietly.

Kadmin gri

“Do you know this man, Kadmin?” asked Ortega.

“Hoping for a confession, lieutenant?” Kadmin threw back his head and laughed musically. “Oh, the crudity! This man? This woman, maybe? Or, yes, even a dog could be trained to say as much as he has said, given the right tranquillisers of course. They do tend to go pitifully insane when you decant them if not. But yes, even a dog. We sit here, three silhouettes carved from electronic sleet in the difference storm, and you talk like a cheap period drama. Limited vision, lieutenant, limited vision. Where is the voice that said altered carbon would free us from the cells of our flesh? The vision that said we would be angels.”

“You tell me, Kadmin. You’re the one with the exalted professional standing.” Ortega’s tone was detached. She system-magicked a long scroll of printout into one hand and glanced idly down it. “Pimp, triad enforcer, virtual interrogator in the corporate wars, it’s all quality work. Me, I’m just some dumb cop can’t see the light.”

“I’m not going to quarrel with you there, lieutenant.”