Cosmos Incorporated (9 page)

The sky is a particularly intense turquoise blue all around the pale aura that rises slowly to the east of the East. The tourist-boat
Noria
operates twenty-four hours a day. He walks toward the quay at the end of a narrow street whose sidewalks are lined with houses made of Recyclo™ particleboard, displaying again and again the motif of survival in all its cruel nakedness—a filthy mattress, a case of local beer, and a cheap Indian television set. By the pier, the blue of the sky is even more vivid, the eastern aura whiter and more luminous. He boards a ferry and waits patiently for its departure on the pearlescent gray water of the river.

At the same time, at the other end of the city, a man starts up his big turbo-hydrogen 4x4, simultaneously detonating a powerful bomb lodged in the van parked in the neighboring spot. The luxury Range Rover and its occupant are blown apart in a fraction of a second, analogous to that nearly indiscernible instant of time when night is no longer night and day not yet quite day. That fragile and sublime instant he is living as the sun begins to rise over Bangkok and the waters of Chao Phraya glimmer with the pink-veined blue iridescence of dawn.

There is, in this dream, the
entire
catalogue of his crimes.

Even the ones that hold a moment of pure beauty in the terrible story of his life.

The moral of the killer Van Halen, and the ethic of Mrs. Kuziwaki, are stretched to infinity.

There is everything that can produce a world, then destroy it.

There is everything that makes him
him.

The terminal dream affects his body like an endless series of white nights. A few minutes after waking, Plotkin finds himself as exhausted as if he has lived an entire lifetime in one night, and he knows that is, in fact, exactly what has happened.

That is why he does not ask the console for some legal amphetamine or another neural accelerator. He takes the time to swallow a bit of breakfast, then goes back to bed and sleeps for almost twenty-four hours.

>
THE CARTOGRAPHY OF NOTABLE INDIVIDUALS

In the morning, the window lets through only a faintly pink gleam of light. The resin/cheap alloy furniture glows gently in the streams of pale sunlight. The list streams past in the air just within his reach as he lies on the helium bed, waiting for the automatic room-service waiter to bring him his breakfast.

The seventeen “special” residents are on the list, and everything about them is there too, down to the three billion sequenced pairs of nucleotides that form each person’s DNA, down to virtually every hour of their lives, down to the memories that even they have forgotten. A second selection kicks into action now. El señor Metatron isn’t just any intelligence agent. He was designed for an elite criminal order by the technological division of the California
yakuza.

These seventeen people must be specially monitored in order for him to avoid them as much as possible during his stay. More importantly, el señor Metatron indicates, there are five that need to be watched even more closely.

For starters, two of them are androids.

The first is a sexed android of the female type, working as a legal prostitute in various autonomous territories analogous to Grand Junction. Like casinos and dope, this is quite a lucrative business in the areas around cosmodromes full of colonists-in-waiting, who knew they won’t have a fuck for months, enclosed in their pressurized cabins, before—maybe—meeting their soul mates in the Ring or on a lunar colony. To put it bluntly, the environs of private cosmodromes are little more than open-air brothels, mass cum repositories, that do as much business or maybe more than the simple space industry. The android-whore is named Sydia Sexydoll Nova 280. Her identification disk is perfectly legal, but two or three details ring false. First, she leaves the hotel only rarely, and el señor Metatron knows of no visits to her room, though he has viewed all the videos recorded on the hotel’s hard drives. Second, her DNA has a bizarre print in addition to the official trademark of her manufacturer—in this case Venux Corp. The strange print indicates the presence of a transgenic operation whose main objective had been to cut all the connections in her nervous system that would stimulate pleasure. It is a legal operation in some cases, but sexed androids do not generally choose total and permanent neurocastration, because their clients can feel it and don’t like it. In this business, more than any other,
the client is king.
El señor Metatron is formal: the operation profoundly altered the basic bio-nano-cybernetic centers of Sydia Nova 280’s pseudocortex; it is irreversible. Never again will she feel even a poor digital simulation of sexual ecstasy in a body initially programmed to give it.

The other is an orbital service android who has fulfilled its time of service and who, legally back on Earth, is “looking for work” in Grand Junction. It has a small pension from the cartels that employed it during the first twenty-five years of its artificial existence. New UHU laws regulating the “android proletariat” have imposed quarter-century limits on “impersonal contract” service by androids to the companies that have bought them. In other words, the legal age of majority for an android is now twenty-five years, and until that point, whether the android is paid for its services or not, it is not considered a legal person. It is no longer a slave, but neither is it a citizen yet. Recent in-orbit attacks by the Android Liberation Front, Flandro, are probably not unrelated to these legal changes in their status promulgated by the Global Governance Bureau.

El señor Metatron points out two or three strange details about this one as well. In order of importance, they are: Several pirated rewrites are on its identification disk. The identity—only the name—has been changed. The rest of the information seems authentic. It gives its name as Ultra-Vector Vega 1024; its true name is Ultra-Vector Vega 2501. Just the series number was changed. Even before the android’s return to Earth, from the looks of it. Then, even more strangely, el señor Metatron realizes that the android’s departure coincides with the day of the last attack committed by Flandro, on the completely automatized Zero-G Industries freight transit station. The company specializes in the repatriation on Earth of used space materials. The attack took place eight weeks ago. The android traveled through Windsor, like Plotkin, and stayed there three weeks before arriving in Grand Junction around a month ago. Like everyone, or almost everyone, it lodged first near the aerostation, at the Hotel Manitoba on Aphrodite’s Child, the town’s red-light street lined with brothels. It then came up to Monolith, where it rented a furnished room near Nova Express before moving here a few days before Plotkin’s arrival.

There is nothing positively linking it to the Android Liberation Front or the orbital attacks, but in view of the fact that its identity is false and also that there is no such thing as coincidence, el señor Metatron was certainly right to inform Plotkin of its presence. Best to file it under “potential problems.”

Then there are the three humans: two men, one woman.

The first man goes by the name Harris Nakashima, but he too has a false identity, one that might possibly make it past the security systems in Grand Junction and the neighboring states, but likely no farther—not, in any case, past el señor Metatron’s detectors. His real name is John Cheyenne Hawkwind. He is an American of Amerindian heritage, as both his real name and the photo on his universal ID indicate, though his mixed blood, a false ID, and probably a bit of cosmetic surgery allow him to pass easily for a Japanese American. He claims to have been born in San Francisco but is really from Montana, has lived in a dozen North American cities, both in Canada and in the Free American States—or at least those that are still members of the Union. He is forty years old. Like his alias, Nakashima.

El señor Metatron is firm: this guy is a dealer. A good one too. He sells prohibited metacortical drugs manufactured in zero gravity and therefore not in compliance with the bioethical laws promulgated by the UHU, which closely monitors the circulation of legal dope throughout the vast human territories it controls. The Governance Bureau has long since banned most orbital psychotropic drugs, citing them as “too dangerous” for the human psyche. The presence of a confirmed, experienced dealer near the cosmodrome, but in an area somewhat outside the city center and with a very reasonable crime rate for the region, suggests that a huge transaction—maybe several—is about to go down. The man has been to prison twice, but never for drug trafficking; he was arrested three times on drug charges, but released each time for lack of evidence. He must be really well protected by one of the mafias that share this territory. El señor Metatron thinks he might even be acting under the aegis of the Mohawk mafia—the one that you have to deal with if you want to deal anything around here.

For Plotkin, this one is immediately a PROBLEM. Not a potential one like the unemployed android. This guy has already had trouble with the cops. He’s been in the cooler. He is also using a false identity undoubtedly crafted by the local mafia. Probably the Mohawks themselves. That last point is the most disturbing one. Especially since he arrived four days ago and will be staying for a month. Just like Plotkin.

Cheyenne Hawkwind,
Plotkin muses, contemplating the man’s face on the wall of images in front of him.
Piss off, Cheyenne Hawkwind.
He points his index finger at a virtual button and the Hawkwind problem disappears, to be instantly replaced by the next file. Somewhere over Plotkin’s head, the bright bulb of el señor Metatron flickers in its spectrum between the visible and the invisible.

The double case Plotkin is now facing raises some questions even stranger and more troubling than the possible problems posed by the presence of a fucking dealer. He feels like he is being confronted with an enigma analogous to the malfunctions his neurolinguistic recombination center has been experiencing since his arrival at the hotel. It is as enigmatic as the words he wrote on the window’s digital notepad.

Something.

Something unknown lives.

“What is it?” He asks the ball of light hovering between him and the various biomedical diagrams superimposed on the wall.

“That is the problem,” el señor Metatron replies. “I have no idea.”

This causes Plotkin no end of grief. For a specialized research agent like Metatron to be placed in a situation where it is forced to admit its incompetence is a kind of miracle. A reverse miracle, an antimiracle. Something completely out of character.

Though his still-limbic personality doesn’t yet really know itself, his current identity—that of a Russo-American mafia killer—knows immediately what to make of this realization.

This is no longer just a PROBLEM, like with the orbital drug dealer.

This is DANGER.

Like the edge of the unknown. Like at the edge of the abyss of death.

There is also a couple.

Capsule 081. One of the motel’s forty “double” rooms, corner suites on each of the ten floors. Jordan June McNellis and Vivian Velvet McNellis. Born in Auckland, New Zealand. Aged twenty-nine and twenty-seven years, respectively.

Legal papers? Yes, but part of their personal disks had been rewritten. Like with Nakashima, the work is shoddy; it seems temporary. The section of their file that has been rewritten covers a considerable part of their biomedical data. It seems that they suffer from a benign neurogenetic disease—these have become very common over the last half century—called retinitis pigmentosa, but Plotkin instinctively knows that this disease is more than just a trompe l’oeil.

Retinitis pigmentosa, version 2.0, to be exact, is a mutant strain that appeared shortly after the decryption of the gene responsible for the disease, the software agent tells him. The technical description provided by NeuroNet reads as follows:

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/001029.htm#Definition
:
Retinitis pigmentosa is a progressive degeneration of the retina that affects night vision and peripheral vision. Retinitis pigmentosa commonly runs in families. The disorder can be caused by defects in a number of different genes that have been identified. The cells controlling night vision, called rods, are most likely to be affected. However, in some cases, retinal cone cells are most damaged. The hallmark of the disease is the presence of dark pigmented spots in the retina. As the disease progresses, peripheral vision is gradually lost. The condition may eventually lead to blindness, but usually not complete blindness. Signs and symptoms often first appear in childhood, but severe visual problems do not usually develop until early adulthood. The main risk factor is a family history of retinitis pigmentosa. It is an uncommon condition affecting about 4,000 people in the U.S. Symptoms: Vision decreased at night or in reduced light. Loss of peripheral vision. Loss of central vision (in advanced cases).

A disease of the vision. A congenital deformation of the retina, sometimes leading to blindness. An alteration of neuroptic cells, the presence of dark spots, loss of peripheral and then central vision…

This disease is a sign. A signal. A
code.
It is there to hide something else. It is there to mask the existence of some other disease, some other anomaly. It is evidence.

However, el señor Metatron is firm: there is nothing in their genetic codes that indicates anything other than this defective gene, and Metatron can discern nothing suggesting that they are carrying highly sophisticated countermeasure systems. However, their biodisks were rewritten with the obvious goal of hiding something.

Now here is an enigma. Something is not normal, that’s for sure.

Here is a danger zone that needs to be contained, and fast.

Plotkin gets up, eats breakfast, showers, dresses, and decides it is time to go down into the city and conduct an initial reconnaissance of what will be his operating theater.

El señor Metatron has just brought up a detailed diagram of the hotel and its residents. “We have enough bandwidth on one of the Order satellites to be able to place the seventeen long-term residents under GPS surveillance,” it informs him. They will all be traceable almost to the millisecond and millimeter.

While the bathroom gently collapses and withdraws and he gulps a scorching cup of tea in front of the window, he watches the city beyond the glass stirring and going about its business at the cosmodrome. In fact this too is a city that never sleeps. A decayed H-4 rocket prepares to launch a Soyuz recovery capsule—quite a high-risk endeavor.

As he prepares to leave the capsule via its exit airlock, el señor Metatron generates a wide operating window for his eyes only, a neuroencrypted display of a three-dimensional plan of the hotel, with graphics showing its occupants and their exact locations. Of the 135 residents, 98 are in their rooms and, given their relative states of immobility, are probably still sleeping. This means that 37 people spent the night elsewhere, most likely in some brothel or bar somewhere.

The nacelle elevator takes him directly to the first floor; the lobby is deserted. There is no noise from the direction of the patio. Only the surveillance cameras whir softly above his head. He knows that they don’t really matter, that something in the plan will make sure they don’t interfere. The only thing that counts is being seen by as few people as possible.

The patio is deserted—but, unluckily, the manager pokes his nose out from behind the counter.

“A little business trip, eh, Mr. Plotkin?” he smarms in an oily voice, a filthy smile crossing his visage.

Plotkin barely breaks his stride, throwing what he hopes is a friendly wave at the man, and tries to look like a Russo-American insurance agent. He only just manages to murmur a reply: “Just a little walk to stretch my legs, Mr. Drummond. Good morning to you.”

He is already on the median strip between the motel and the street, walking toward the scaffolding of metal pipes above which the words
Hotel Laika
are scripted in twentieth-century neon tubing; a few of the letters have obviously been changed or replaced. He sees an orange shape coming up the street from the south; it is the robotaxi he ordered while waiting for the elevator. Turning his head in the other direction, toward the autobridge spanning the North Junction road, Plotkin makes out a black shadow that glides toward him over the asphalt. It’s the dog, Balthazar. He has just come from the access ramp. By all indications, he is coming from the northwest—from Heavy Metal Valley.