Altered Carbon

The synthetic reached the edge of the cell cover and jumped down. Up close, I saw that it wasn’t only the vocal cords that were crude. This body was so far from the one Trepp had been using when I torched her, it was barely deserving of the same name. I wondered briefly if it was some kind of antique. The black hair was coarse and enamelled-looking, the face slack silicoflesh, the pale blue eyes clearly logo’d across the white. The body looked solid, but a little too solid, and the arms were slightly wrong, reminiscent of snakes rather than limbs. The hands at the ends of the cuffs were smooth and lineless. The synth offered one featureless palm, as if for inspection.

“Well?” he asked gently.

“Routine check, Carnage,” said Ortega, helping me out. “Been some bomb threats on tonight’s fight. We’re here to have a look.”

Carnage laughed, jarringly. “As if you cared.”

“Well, like I said,” Ortega answered evenly, “it’s routine.”

“Oh well, you’d better come along then.” The synthetic sighed and nodded at me. “What’s the matter with him? Did they lose his speech functions in the stack?”

We followed him towards the back of the ship and found ourselves skirting the pit formed by the rolled-back cover of the rearmost cargo cell. I glanced down inside and saw a circular white fighting ring, walled on four sides by slopes of steel and plastic seating. Banks of lighting equipment were strung above but there were none of the spiky spherical units I associated with telemetry. In the centre of the ring, someone was knelt, painting a design on the mat by hand. He looked up as we passed.

“Thematic,” said Carnage, seeing where I was looking. “Means something in Arabic. This season’s fights are all themed around Protectorate police actions. Tonight it’s Sharya. Right Hand of God Martyrs versus Protec Marines. Hand to hand, no blades over ten centimetres.”

“Bloodbath, in other words,” said Ortega.

The synth shrugged. “What the public wants, the public pays for. I understand it is possible to inflict an outright mortal wound with a ten-centimetre blade. Just very difficult. A real test of skill, they say. This way.”

We went down a narrow companionway into the body of the ship, our own footsteps clanging around us in the tight confines.

“Arenas first, I presume,” Carnage shouted above the echoes.

“No, let’s see the tanks first,” suggested Ortega.

“Really?” It was hard to tell with the low-grade synthetic voice, but Carnage seemed to be amused. “Are you quite sure it’s a bomb you’re looking for, lieutenant? It seems to me the arena would be the obvious place to—”

“Got something to hide, Carnage?”

The synthetic turned back to look at me for a moment, quizzically. “No, not at all, detective Ryker. The tanks it is, then. Welcome to the conversation, by the way. Was it cold on stack? Of course, you probably never expected to be there yourself.”

“That’s enough.” Ortega interposed herself. “Just take us to the tanks and save the small talk for tonight.”

“But of course. We aim to co-operate with law enforcement. As a legally incorporated—”

“Yeah, yeah.” Ortega waved the verbiage away with weary patience. “Just take us to the fucking tanks.”

I reverted to my dangerous stare.

We rode to the tank area in a dinky little electromag train that ran along one side of the hull, through two more converted cargo cells equipped with the same fighting rings and banks of seats but this time covered over with plastic sheeting. At the far end, we disembarked and stepped through the customary sonic cleansing lock. A great deal dirtier than PsychaSec’s facilities, ostensibly made of black iron, the heavy door swung outward to reveal a spotlessly white interior.

“At this point we dispense with image,” said Carnage carelessly. “Bare bones low-tech is all very well for the audience, but behind the scenes, well,” he gestured around at the gleaming facilities, “you can’t make an omelette without a little oil in the pan.”

The forward cargo section was huge and chilly, the lighting gloomy, the technology aggressively massive. Where Bancroft’s low-lit womb mausoleum at PsychaSec had spoken in soft, cultured tones of the trappings of wealth, where the re-sleeving room at the Bay City storage facility had groaned minimal funding for minimal deservers, the Panama Rose’s body bank was a brutal growl of power. The storage tubes were racked on heavy chains like torpedoes on either side of us, jacked into a central monitor system at one end of the hold via thick black cables that twisted across the floor like pythons. The monitor unit itself squatted heavily ahead of us like an altar to some unpleasant spider god. We approached it on a metal jetty raised a quarter-metre above the frozen writhings of the data cables. Behind it to left and right, set into the far wall, were the square glass sides of two spacious decanting tanks. The right-hand tank already held a sleeve, floating backlit and tethered cruciform by monitor lines.

It was like walking into the Andric cathedral in New-pest.

Carnage walked to the central monitor, turned and spread his arms rather like the sleeve above and behind him.

“Where would you like to start? I assume you’ve brought sophisticated bomb detection equipment with you.”

Ortega ignored him. She took a couple of steps closer to the decanting tank and looked up into the wash of cool green light it cast down into the gloom. “This one of tonight’s whores?” she asked.

Carnage sniffed. “In not so many words, it is. I do wish you’d understand the difference between what they peddle in those greasy little shops down the coast, and this.”

“So do I,” Ortega told him, eyes still upward on the body. “Where’d you get this one from, then?”

“How should I know?” Carnage made a show of studying the plastic nails on his right hand. “Oh, we have the bill of sale somewhere, if you must look. By the look of him, I’d say this one’s out of Nippon Organics, or one of the Pacific Rim combines. Does it really matter?”

I went to the wall and stared up at the floating sleeve. Slim, hard-looking and brown, with the delicately lifted Japanese eyes on the shelf of unscaleably high cheekbones, a thick, straight drift of impenetrably black hair like seaweed in the tank fluid. Gracefully flexible with the long hands of an artist, but muscled for speed combat. It was the body of a tech ninja, the body I’d dreamed about having at fifteen, on dreary rain-filled days in Newpest. It wasn’t far off the sleeve they’d given me to fight the Sharya war in. It was a variation on the sleeve I’d bought with my first big pay-off in Millsport, the sleeve I’d met Sarah in.

It was like looking at myself under glass. The self I’d built somewhere in the coils of memory that trail all the way back to childhood. Suddenly I stood, exiled into Caucasian flesh, on the wrong side of the mirror.

Carnage came up to me and slapped the glass. “You approve, detective Ryker?” When I said nothing, he went on. “I’m sure you do, someone with your appetite for, well, brawling. The specs are quite remarkable. Reinforced chassis, the bones are all culture-grown marrow alloy jointed with polybond ligamenting, carbon-reinforced tendons, Khumalo neurachem—”

“Got neurachem,” I said, for something to say.

“I know all about your neurachem, detective Ryker.” Even through the poor-quality voice, I thought I could hear a soft, sticky delight. “The fightdrome sca