Altered Carbon (Takeshi Kovacs, #1)

by Richard K. Morgan

Will you require a weapon?” “Not at the moment, no.” One of Virginia Vidaura’s cardinal rules had always been find out the nature of your task before you choose your tools.

There’s a sameness to streetlife. On every world I’ve ever been, the same underlying patterns play out, flaunt and vaunt, buy and sell, like some distilled essence of human behavior seeping out from under whatever clanking political machine has been dropped on it from above. Bay City, Earth, most ancient of civilized worlds, had won itself no exemptions. From the massive insubstantial holofronts along the antique buildings to the street traders with their catalog broadcast sets nestling on shoulders like clumsy mechanical hawks or outside tumors, everyone was selling something. Cars pulled in and out from the curbside, and supple bodies braced against them, leaning in to negotiate the way they’ve probably been doing as long as there’ve been cars to do it against. Shreds of steam and smoke drifted from food barrows. The limo was sound- and broadcast-proofed, but you could sense the noises through the glass, corner pitch sales chants and modulated music carrying consumer urge subsonics.

The windows, bunker peepholes from the outside, were framed and corniched in Gaudi-style waves on the inside. At one corner we passed a woman cleaning them by hand. I raised an eyebrow. No end to the extravagance. Nyman caught the look. “There are some jobs that robot labor just never gets quite right,” he said. “I’m sure.”

I glanced at Oumou Prescott, wondering if she could sense the frustration coming off me. I thought I’d got most of the external giveaways on this sleeve locked down, but I’d heard of lawyers who got empath conditioning to pick up more subliminal clues to their witnesses’ state of mind when on the stand. And here, on Earth, it wouldn’t surprise me if Oumou Prescott had a full infrared subsonic body-and-voice scan package racked into her beautiful ebony head.

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.

It was like listening to someone tell a surgeon to be careful and not get his hands bloody.

There were no protests—you can’t argue with a robot.

“I like to go places on the ground,” I said. “You get a better sense of distance that way. And on Harlan’s World, we don’t go up in the air much.”

“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 fucking 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.”

Women are the race, Tak. No two ways about it. Male is just a mutation with more muscle and half the nerves. Fighting, fucking machines. My own cross-sleevings had born that theory out. To be a woman was a sensory experience beyond the male. Touch and texture ran deeper, an interface with environment that male flesh seemed to seal out instinctively. To a man, skin was a barrier, a protection. To a woman, it was an organ of contact.

The mind does interesting things under extreme stress. Hallucination, displacement, retreat. Here in the corps, you will learn to use them all, not as blind reactions to adversity, but as moves in a game.

The personal, as everyone’s so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here—it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide out from under with a wink and a grin.

There were five men and women in the theater, and I killed them all while they stared at me. Then I shot the autosurgeon to pieces with the blaster and raked the beam over the rest of the equipment in the room. Alarms sirened into life from every wall. In the storm of their combined shrieking, I went around and inflicted real death on everyone there.

For just a moment that black iron stare bent on me with the full force of Bancroft’s three and a half centuries, and it was like locking gazes with a demon. For that second, the Meth soul was looking out and I saw reflected in those eyes all the myriad ordinary single lives that they had watched die, like the pale flickerings of moths at a flame. It was an experience I’d had only once before, and that was when I’d taken issue with Reileen Kawahara. I could feel the heat on my wings.

“You come from another place,” Bancroft said broodingly. “A brash, young, colonial culture. You can have no concept of how the centuries of tradition have molded us here on Earth. The young of spirit, the adventurous, all left on the ships in droves. They were encouraged to leave. Those who stayed were the stolid, the obedient, the limited. I watched it happen, and at the time I was glad, because it made carving out an empire so much easier. Now I wonder if it was worth the price we paid. Culture fell in on itself, grappled after norms to live by, settled for the old and familiar. Rigid morality, rigid law. The U.N. declarations fossilized into global conformity. There was a—” He gestured. “—a sort of supracultural straitjacket, and with an inherent fear of what might be born from the colonies, the Protectorate arose while the ships were still in flight. When the first of them made planetfall, their stored peoples woke into a prepared tyranny.”

Inside, stained light from a window and a peculiar calm fell on me simultaneously. Subsonics, I guessed, casting a glance around at the human flotsam waiting submissively on the benches.

Ortega’s office had one of the stained-glass windows, or more precisely the bottom half of one, before it was bisected horizontally by the ceiling. Presumably the remainder rose missilelike from the floor of the office above. I began to see some evidence for the original building having been converted to its present use.

“Again, Lieutenant?” he said when the program had rendered him complete. “There is a U.N. ruling on maximum virtual time for one arrest, you know.”

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.

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.”

“And how do we measure the distance from spirit to spirit? And who do we find to blame?”

“That’s very generous, but you’ll remember what Quell said about lackeys.” “Kill them along the way, but count your bullets, for there are more worthy targets.”

Course, with Understanding Day, the whales were suddenly big money for anyone who could talk to them. You know they’ve told us almost as much about the Martians as four centuries of archaeologues on Mars itself. Christ, they remember them coming here. Race memory, that is.”

Where Bancroft’s low-lit womb mausoleum at Psycha-Sec had spoken in soft, cultured tones of the trappings of wealth, where the resleeving room at Bay City Storage Facility had groaned minimal funding for minimal deservers, the Panama Rose’s body bank was a brutal growl of power.

“This is about two different species. What did they teach you in the provincial marines? Hand-to-hand combat? Twenty-seven ways to kill a man with your hands? Underneath it all you’re still a man. I’m an Envoy, Curtis. It’s not the same.”

When they make an Envoy, do you want to know what they do? They burn out every evolved violence limitation instinct in the human psyche. Submission signal recognition, pecking-order dynamics, pack loyalties. It all goes, tuned out a neuron at a time; and they replace it with a conscious will to harm.”

Have you ever been seven months pregnant?” I shook my head. “No.” “That is too bad. It’s an experience we should all be required to go through at least once.” “Kind of hard to legislate.”

Leaning on me, she turned to stare, eyes centimeters away. I deadpanned it, and the laughter broke across her face like a sunrise.

She passed me the pack wordlessly. I shook one out, fitted it into the corner of my mouth, touched the ignition patch to the end, and drew deeply. The movements happened as one, reflex conditioned over years like a macro of need. I didn’t have to consciously do anything. The smoke curling into my lungs was like a breath of the perfume you remember an old lover wearing.

In systems evasion, you must scramble the enemy’s assumptions, Virginia said in my ear. Run as much interference as you can without breaking pace.

“The human eye is a wonderful device,” I quoted from Poems and Other Prevarications absently. “With a little effort, it can fail to see even the most glaring injustice.”

Pull on the new flesh like borrowed gloves And burn your fingers once again.

Say what now?

“Warden Sullivan, you’re not taking this in the spirit it’s intended. I am very concerned to know who you sold me to. I’m not going to go away, just because you have some residual scruples about client confidentiality. Believe me, they didn’t pay you enough to hold out on me.”

“But if there’s a single thing that I like about you, Kovacs, it is your endless capacity to be surprised. For all your war-veteran posturing, you remain at core an innocent. And in these times, that is no mean achievement. How do you do it?” “Trade secret. You’d have to be a human being to understand it.”

The essence of control is to remain hidden from view, is it not?”

Kawahara shrugged. “Petty tyrant with delusions of religion. Catholics get on well with tyranny. It’s in the culture.”

“Always the same, Kovacs. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Romantic nihilism. Haven’t you learned anything since New Beijing?” “There are some arenas so corrupt that the only clean acts possible are nihilistic.” “Oh, that’s Quell, isn’t it? Mine was Shakespeare, but then I don’t expect colonial culture goes back that far, does it?”

What we thought of as personality was no more than the passing shape of one of the waves in front of me. Or, slowing it down to more human speed, the shape of a sand dune. Form in response to stimulus. Wind, gravity, upbringing. Gene blueprinting. All subject to erosion and change.

Just as a primitive sextant functions on the illusion that the sun and stars rotate around the planet we are standing on, our senses give us the illusion of stability in the universe, and we accept it, because without that acceptance, nothing can be done.

For all that we have done, as a civilization, as individuals, the universe is not stable, nor is any single thing within it. Stars consume themselves, the universe itself rushes apart, and we ourselves are composed of matter in constant flux. Colonies of cells in temporary alliance, replicating and decaying, and housed within, an incandescent cloud of electrical impulse and precariously stacked carbon code memory. This is reality, this is self-knowledge, and the perception of it will, of course, make you dizzy.

A good lie should shadow the truth closely enough to draw substance from it,

Take what is offered, and that must sometimes be enough.

“Earth?” His grinning blackout-striped face is flashlit by laser fire from outside the tank. “It’s a shit hole, man. Fucking frozen society, like stepping back in time half a millennium. Nothing happens there; historical events aren’t allowed.”

“You tell me. You’re the one who’s going up against Kawahara. I’m just the whore around here. Incidentally, I don’t reckon Ortega’s exactly overjoyed about that part of the deal. I mean, she was confused before, but now—” “She’s confused! How do you think I feel?” “I know how you feel, idiot. I am you.” “Are you?” I sipped at my drink and gestured with the glass. “How long do you think it takes before we stop being exactly the same person?”

With the betathanatine to protect me from the hatred, my reaction to that voice was a muted horizon event, like the flare and crash of gunfire at a great distance.

“The value of it. The value of a human life.” Kawahara shook her head like a teacher with an exasperating student. “You are still young and stupid. Human life has no value. Haven’t you learned that yet, Takeshi, with all you’ve seen? It has no value, intrinsic to itself. Machines cost money to build. Raw materials cost money to extract. But people?” She made a tiny spitting sound. “You can always get some more people. They reproduce like cancer cells, whether you want them or not. They are abundant, Takeshi. Why should they be valuable? Do you know that it costs us less to recruit and use up a real snuff whore than it does to set up and run the virtual equivalent format? Real human flesh is cheaper than a machine. It’s the axiomatic truth of our times.”

My nose broke with a sensation like biting into celery, and blood flooded down over my mouth.