Kiln People

Vile thing? I tried to meet the fellow’s eye. He refused contact.

Pal chuckled. “This is Mr. James Gadarene. He thinks you might recognize him. Do?”

I looked the man up and down. “No recollection … sir.” Adding some formality might be a good idea.

Both strangers grunted, as if half-expecting this. I hurried on.

“Of course that’s no guarantee. Albert himself forgets faces. Even some guys he knew in college. Depends how long ago we met. Anyway, I’m a frank—”

“This memory would be less than twenty hours old,” Gadarene interrupted without actually looking at me. “Late last night, one of your grays rang my doorbell, flashed some private eye credentials and demanded an urgent meeting. The ruckus even woke some of my colleagues in our compound next door. I agreed — reluctantly — to meet the gray, alone. But in private the damned thing only paced around, blathering nonsense that I couldn’t even begin to comprehend. Finally, my assistant came in from the next room with news. The gray wore a static generator. It was deliberately jamming my interview recorder!”

“So you have no chronicle of the meeting?”

“Nothing useful. That’s when I got fed up and tossed the cursed thing out.”

“I … don’t recall anything remotely like that. Which means the real Albert Morris doesn’t either. Or he didn’t, as of ten this morn. Before that, all of our dittos have been accounted for, stretching back at least a month. Every one brought home a complete inload … though some were pretty banged up.” I winced, recalling last night’s awful trek under the river. “Heck, I don’t even know what ‘offices’ you’re talking about.”

“Mr. Gadarene heads an organization called Defenders of Life,” Pallie explained.

At once I grasped the fellow’s hostility. His group fiercely opposes dittotech on purely moral grounds — a stance requiring great tenacity nowadays, when realfolks live surrounded and outnumbered by countless creatures of servile clay. If one of Albert’s copies had behaved in the ma

From Gadarene’s bitter expression, I guessed a special ire toward me. As a frankie I had declared independence, professing to be a free, self-motivated life form … though a pseudobeing with few rights and fewer prospects. At least other dittos could be viewed as extensions or appendages of some real person. But I’d seem the worst kind of insult toward heavenly authority. A soul-less construct who dares to say I am.

At a best guess, I’d wager his people never donate to the Temple of the Ephemerals.

“Same thing happened to us, early this morning,” the other fellow said — the tall man who looked vaguely familiar.

“I think I do recognize you,” I mused. “Yes … the greenie I ran into, picketing at Moonlight Beach. Its face copied yours.”

From his wry smile, I could tell the man already knew about my encounter with his cheap demonstrator-ditto. The green may have already inloaded. Or perhaps it phoned home to report my resemblance to their wee-hours visitor.

“Mr. Farshid Lum,” said Pal, finishing introductions.

“Friends of the Unreal?” I guessed. The biggest organization of mancies I’d heard of.

“Tolerance Unlimited,” he corrected with a frown. “The FOTU manifesto doesn’t go far enough in demanding emancipation for synthetic beings. We think short-lived people are just as real as anyone else who thinks and feels.”

That drew a snort from the blond. And yet, despite a philosophical chasm that gaped between them, I sensed common purpose. For now.

“You say a Morris copy also barged into your place—”

“—ranted for a while and then left, yeah,” Pallie inserted. “Only this time we got some clear images through the static. It was one of your brodits, or sure looked like one.”

He handed me a flat pix. Though blurry, it resembled Albert, as close as any gray takes after its rig.

“Appearances can be faked. So can credentials. The static indicates that someone didn’t want too close an inspection—”

“I agree,” interrupted Gadarene. “Moreover, when we phoned Mr. Morris this morning for an explanation, his house computer—”

“—Nell—”

“—dismissed the whole event as impossible, since you didn’t have any duplicates active at the time we were being harassed. The house refused even to wake Albert Morris for comment.”

“Curious,” I comment.

“In fact, your rig has both of our groups listed as crank organizations,” said Lum, with a wry expression, as if he wore the moniker with pride. “Since the house filtered and refused my queries, I went to the public Albert Morris net profile, looking for one of his friends. Someone who would talk to us.”

“Me,” Pal said. “I’m not bothered by cranks. I like ’em!”

“Likes attract,” I muttered, wi

“Yeah, well, my cup ra

“Me? I already said, these stories don’t fit anything I remember.”

“And I believe you. But do you have any ideas? What comes to mind?”

“Why ask me? I’m just a green, not exactly equipped for analytical thought.”

“Oh, but you won’t let that stop you!” Pallie laughed.

I frowned at him, knowing he was right. I couldn’t refuse to poke away at this, even if I’m made of the cheap stuff.

I turned to Gadarene and Lum.

“Looking at it from your point of view, several possibilities arise.”

I held up one finger. “First, I might be standing here lying. Al could have some valid reason for wanting to poke two irate public advocacy groups in the eye, stir them up, then claim it wasn’t him that done it.”

“Please,” Pallie shook his head. “It’s the sort of thing I might try. But Albert’s about as much fun as a judge.”

For some reason, the insult made me smile. Yeah, poor Sober Albert.

“Well, then, maybe someone’s trying to set him up.”

Once upon a time, crime and prosecution revolved around establishing or demolishing alibis. If you could prove that you were somewhere else at the time of a crime, it meant you didn’t do it. Simple as that.

The alibi excuse started vanishing back in the cyber age, a time when countless big and little heists redistributed cash by the billions while perpetrators hunched over remote computer screens slurping caffeine, dispatching electronic minions to rob in supposed anonymity. For a while, it looked as if society would bleed a death of a myriad cuts … till accountability was restored and most of the surviving cyberfarts either went to jail or grew up.

Today, the whereabouts of your protoplasmic self hardly matters. Culpability is a matter of opportunity and will. Effective alibis are hard to come by.

“Interesting you should come up with that idea,” Pallie commented. “The same thing occurred to me as I watched this morning’s raid on Beta’s hideout — that was good work, by the way. I saw Albert meet Ritu Maharal … and later heard about her father’s death. But what really got me going is the maestra.”

“Gineen Wammaker? What about her?”

“Well, for one thing, I know that Al’s second gray dropped out to do a closed-cognito job for her.”

I hesitated. It wouldn’t be kosher for me to confirm that such a contract existed. I owed Albert some loyalty, since he hadn’t made me an outlaw. The sap.

“All right, both women asked Al to send a gray over. And both grays vanished. So? It’s probably a coincidence. Anyway, those grays were baked and imprinted hours after mystery dittos barged in to bother you two gentlemen. What’s the co

“That puzzled me, too. So I called Wammaker.”