Altered Carbon (Takeshi Kovacs, #1)

by Richard K. Morgan

“You’re a lucky man, Kovacs. Don’t waste the opportunity.” Don’t they ever get tired of saying it?

If the request is legally witnessed, then they have to let them go. Otherwise, failure to revive is a storage offense.” “I suppose that’s a wise precaution.” “Yes. It stops murderers passing their work off as suicide.”

But you must understand that for a man in my position, enmity and even death threats are part and parcel of everyday existence. People envy me, people hate me. It is the price of success.”

One of Virginia Vidaura’s cardinal rules had always been find out the nature of your task before you choose your tools. That single sweep of charred stucco on Bancroft’s wall looked too elegant for this to be a shoot-’em-up carnival.

Reileen’s argument, framed as she peeled an apple against the backdrop of those screams, was that since no one really dies anymore, punishment can come only through suffering.

Harlan’s World was settled by a Japanese keiretsu using East European labor. It was a long time ago, and I wasn’t around.”

For some reason I thought of the telescope abandoned on Bancroft’s sundeck. I saw it stranded in angular silhouette against the evening sky, a mute testimony to times and obsessions past and a relic no one wanted. I remembered the way it had wheezed back into alignment after I jarred it, faithful to programming maybe centuries old, briefly awakened the way Miriam Bancroft had stroked the songspire awake in the hall.

Why someone had seen fit to equip the Hendrix’s security systems with twenty-millimeter automatic cannon was beyond me, but they did the job with devastating totality.

On Harlan’s World, most people could afford to be resleeved at least once, but the point was that unless you were very rich, you had to live out your full span each time and old age, even with antisen treatment, was a wearying business. Second time around was worse because you knew what to expect. Not many had the stamina to do it more than twice. Most people went into voluntary storage after that, with occasional temporary resleevings for family matters, and of course, even those resleevings thinned out as time passed and new generations bustled in without the old ties. It took a certain kind of person to keep going, to want to keep going, life after life, sleeve after sleeve. You had to start out different, never mind what you might become as the centuries piled up.

After the high-profile security system and flesh-and-blood reception, it seemed about as subtle as the vaginal spittoons at Madame Mi’s Wharfwhore Warehouse.

The kind of enemies who used A.I.s to get at you didn’t need to finish you off with a particle blaster to the head. I was looking in the wrong place.

I tilted my chair back and stared up at the ceiling. A flight of gray birds angled overhead in a southward-pointing chevron. Their voices were faintly audible, honking to each other. Prescott’s office was environment formatted, all six internal surfaces projecting virtual images. Currently her gray metal desk was incongruously positioned halfway down a sloping meadow on which the sun was beginning to decline, complete with a small herd of cattle in the distance and occasional birdsong. The image resolution was some of the best I’d seen.

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, hazard-proof bodywork, which most cyberengineering firms designed to spec for the task at hand.

Ten clips is a lot of ammunition for a handgun, but I’d discovered that there were times when being able to fill the air with bullets was worth a lot more than actually hitting anything.

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. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way you stand a far better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous, marks the difference—the only difference in their eyes—between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life, and that it’s nothing personal. Well, fuck them. Make it personal.

Telling a U.N. executive—in effect, an officer of the Protectorate—that you’re a Quellist is a bit like confessing to ritual slaughter at a vegetarian dinner; it’s not really the done thing.

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.

There are things, desires, in all of us that are . . . better suppressed. Or at least, that cannot be expressed in a civilized context.” “I’d hardly counterpose civilization with spilling semen.”

We are, after all, evolved to relate to the physical world.

“I’m going to talk.” “Just talk?” She looked at me disbelievingly. “That’s all?” I fitted my ill-fitting sunglasses back over my face. “Sometimes that’s all it takes,” I said.

“Old cop’s rule. Never drink alone.” “Sounds like I should have been an old cop.”

“Money doesn’t automatically mean taste,” she said.

Bancroft wants privacy, he spends half a million on discretion systems. Me, I just go talk where no one’s listening.

“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.

“Triad noodlehouse. Hell of a place for an interrogation. Or do you just like living dangerously?” I shrugged. “Where I come from, criminals stay out of other people’s fights. They’re a gutless lot, generally. Much more likely to get interference from a solid citizen.”

Catholics get on well with tyranny. It’s in the culture.”

“There are some arenas so corrupt that the only clean acts possible are nihilistic.”

Military training takes the natural order and fucks with it. It breaks down any resistance to psychopathic behavior at the same time as it builds fanatical loyalties to the group.

Two weeks without smoking was like a newly discovered compartment at the bottom of Ryker’s lungs.

“Are you trying to get drunk?” “Of course I am. If I’ve got to talk to myself, I don’t see why I should do it sober.

Real human flesh is cheaper than a machine. It’s the axiomatic truth of our times.”

“When they ask how I died,” I said. “Tell them: Still Angry.”

And for the moments that the embrace lasted, and a little while after, I felt as clean as the breeze coming in off the sea. You take what is offered, Virginia Vidaura said somewhere. And that must sometimes be enough.

“You’ll always have morons like that, swallowing belief patterns whole so they don’t have to think for themselves.